Island of Demons (19 page)

And so I ended up at the water-palace without so much as a valedictory
boffe de politesse
. It was not a great change, just a couple of hundred meters down the road, within the chatter and children's noise of such a lesser palace but withdrawn, off to one side, the haunt of Walter's giant red dragonflies. In previous times it had been the secluded spot where the more libidinous rulers had staged their amorous liaisons and so was richly provided with private exits. Here also, the more studious had decrypted the intricacies of ancient literature as scratched on
lontar
leaves so that tranquillity was an entrenched habit with the force of law. The ancient pavilion had long succumbed to the climate and the ravages of insects but, on the original plinth amidst the waters, they had built a simple but elegant, one-floored structure of grass and bamboo that breathed in light and air and met all my needs. Walter's hand was to be seen in many of the details, the raised dais that housed a huge sofa by day, become a bed by night, the care with which simple but solid furniture had been selected and arranged. Whereas I had previously suffered invasion by monkeys, it was now ducks and their pursuing little guardians who might burst in at any moment while the Cokorda was mostly busy or elsewhere and left me in peace. The pert domestic boys of Walter's establishment had been replaced by Putu, a mature palace retainer of indeterminate age, who damped down my passions to the slow smoulder conducive to labour. And Walter and I visited each other daily. On most evenings, I would collect a dish of vegetables and rice from the palace kitchens and take it along to a sort of joint picnic on the great table of his house.

A focus of my activities was the
balai
, the freestanding shady pavilion of the palace where meetings might be held, or the
gamelan
orchestra or the dancers practice, for it was here that my chicks collected. The spot was chosen deliberately, for painting was held to be the lowest of the arts in Bali and this must change by association. Music, dance, carving all had their important place in social and religious life but painting was only occasionally required for temple calendars or ceremonial beds or whatever, and then, in accordance with Balinese ideas, it was never a matter of individual creativity but of a group of male friends sitting around, each chatting and joking and contributing to the general image according to established rules and norms. As in everything else, it was the ancient tales of the Indian Hindu corpus that were the main subject matter to be drawn and drawn upon. My chicks, all boys in their mid or late teens, had been selected by Cokorda Agung and assigned to Walter for artistic instruction. Some had been chosen for their obvious artistic talent and desire to learn, others in the serious hope that painting might provide a remedy for their inherent laziness and fecklessness – all Walter's favourites these – and the rest because they were simply palace “extras”, as Walter cineastically termed them, and had no better way to pass their time. All had in common that, unlike ninety per cent of the Balinese population, they had affectations of high caste and nobility – a sop to the Dutch who restricted education to the aristocracy lest it inflame social unrest. So there was Anak Agung Gede Sobrat sucking his paint brush next to his cousin, pencil-sharpening Anak Agung Gede Meregel while Ida Bagus Made Nadera practised a conjuring trick whereby he made his rubber disappear from one hand to the other.

On that first morning, they all sat, cross-legged and straight-backed but grinning, in two neat lines, sarongs tucked up into the sort of giant nappy worn for dirty work, all teeth and sticking-out ears. On their laps rested the pads of precious smooth paper that would revolutionise Balinese painting. Walter crouched down, fixed them in the eye and grinned right back, instantly becoming one of them and certainly the most mischievous. They glowed in his presence. It was clear that they adored him. It was also clear that our methods would be totally opposed. In retrospect, I realise that, by Balinese standards, he was probably an excellent teacher since, on that island, knowledge is not simply poured, by the bucketful, from the full head of the teacher into the empty head of the student. It is not even freely given. It must be first made mysterious and then coaxed, little by little, in return for favours or service, into the light. At any moment knowledge may be unmasked as only preliminary or downright false and there is always another stage beyond, which the student may never reach, since the final transfer may never be made. Small wonder then that a
guru
, a teacher, is an honoured, almost divine, being for whom a student becomes a sort of willing slave. Walter loved being one.

Drawing inspiration from the beret clutched in his hands, he launched into a rambling and befogged explanation of his dilemma, turning it into a dramatic performance with slow and exaggerated gestures. He had been brought from afar to teach them what was art. Yet that is what he, himself, had come to Bali to learn from them and was only beginning, even now, to discover. For, in truth, there was no thing called art – it was like those indefinable Balinese words
sakti
and
guna
that they understood only through encounters in life – there were merely artists, and the secret they were all seeking lay not outside themselves but within, for they all grew to the recognition of it in their own works. And no art was good, none was bad. It required great effort to understand these things, yet effort brought no necessary reward for they must paint not from their heads and eyes but their hearts and livers, which alone brought wisdom. And learning to make real art often involved forgetting everything that one knew, for the work of the artist was to create his own world.

They sat and frowned and understood not a word in all these twisted thoughts whose unintelligibility merely proved to them that there was something indeed worth knowing here. He put his beret on his head. He would leave them now to Tuan Rudi – one of the greatest artists in the whole of Holland, home of painting – since he had been called to make art for the government and the great white queen and such a call could not be ignored, though he loved them dearly in his liver. In this his royal art he would seek to explain the soul of Bali to the Dutch and Bali's own art, of which it had yet to become aware, for only when its roots and origins were secure and it was truly Balinese, could it safely evolve and move forward to embrace the art of the world.

Walter withdrew, throwing me an unhelpful wink like a lifebuoy to a man in the middle of an ocean storm surrounded by sharks, and it was left to me to look at those rows of confused and trusting brown eyes, several glistening with manly tears at alleged parting – though Walter was only going a hundred meters up the road. I felt horribly the responsibility of forming pliant young minds, not knowing where to even start. Balinese, I knew, learned best by constant repetition and imitation of a master. Everywhere, you would see children, racked on the bodies of their dancing teachers as they led their muscles through the motions of their own. I could see on the pads in the laps of some that they were had even been encouraged to experiment in oils which was both absurdly costly and incorrect, since technique is best learned, first through drawing, second through watercolour and only, at a late stage, through the medium of oils. Only when one had truly mastered rule and method might one throw it away like Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling.

“What Tuan Walter means is that we must begin at the beginning and slowly become masters of drawing what we really see, the shock of the real. I shall teach you the secrets of the West. I shall explain the tricks of perspective – how to show things far away and close – about light and shadow to give depth within a flat piece of paper and about the human body, for you must understand your own bodies to be able to paint them. You must put away the ideas from the
wayang kulit
, the shadow plays, where people move their limbs only from left to right and up and down.” I flapped my arms stiffly like old men do their walking sticks and they laughed. I had them. I must draw a line under Walter before I lost them again. “It is no longer good enough to just put the gods at the top of your pictures and the demons at the bottom. There must be style, composition. It will be a long journey but we shall make it together. So, for next week, I want you to do something at once very simple and very complicated. Look at your own hands which move as puppets do not. Really look at your hands and how they move. Really see them. Then, with your right hand, draw your left. That is all.” In Walter's house I had seen an extraordinary fragment of a Batak woodcarving, showing the interlocked hands of a priest. Already my mind was constructing paths leading them from graphic to plastic.

They sat there in silence, staring wonderingly at their hands, perhaps defamiliarising them into the alien pseudopods of strange sea-creatures. Balinese children are the only children in the world who can bend their fingertips back to almost touch their wrists. Then the little one with the surprisingly developed torso for his height, raised and fluttered a very human hand. The hair in his armpits was provokingly black and curly, the voice alarmingly deep.

“Please Guru Rudi. Does that mean you will tell us what is right and wrong, good and bad? Guru Walter always got angry when we asked him that.” They nodded. Yes. Yes.

I smiled soothingly. “In time. In time I will teach you what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad.” I would too. They all sighed with relief and began chattering happily. I could see that having Walter as one's teacher might be hard work.

***

No one ever saw Walter put brush to canvas but, over the years, we all got to know the signs. He would go broody, like an old hen, silent and withdrawn. He would sigh and groan for no apparent reason, look infinitely glum, shift his limbs as if there was no position that brought him comfort. Then, one day, he would clap on his head the old half-calabash hat he always wore to paint and stump woefully down the steps that led to his studio at the rear. He might be gone just a few days or it might take months and he would withdraw from society as completely as the ancient monks whose cells he had explored in the Elephant Cave with Stutterheim. Only Badog was allowed to disturb him with food and drink. Then, one day, he would be back, purged, drained, but smiling like a man whose fever has just broken, and with a new addition to the family.

Just inside the doorway of Walter's living room was a space flooded with light reflected down from the open eaves. It was here, on a sere ledge of hardwood, that he displayed small gee-gaws, carved
kris
handles, amulets, betel-boxes and the like. It was here, too, that his new paintings were publicly auditioned. The first surprise is that they were so small. When you saw photographs of them, as I had, you thought they would be the size of those enormous Douanier Rousseau canvases that had been his jungly inspiration. And they always seemed to be getting smaller. It was, I suspect, less the difficulty and expense of securing supplies of proper canvas and oils in the Indies than the discovery that he got much the same price for small as for large paintings. His own explanation was, of course, less succinct. “When you are painting the Balinese landscape, Bonnetchen, everything is small.”

It is no exaggeration to say that I had lived in fear of this moment. Artists regard their own works much as mothers do their children and for the same reasons. Conceived in the madness of passion, torn from their bodies in agony, even the dullest, most indifferent progeny are regarded as exceptional and uniquely flawless. His dismissal of my own work might be seen as a running joke, an ungainly pose calculated to avoid sentimentality and hiding a deeper respect. But it rankled. From what I had seen of his earlier work, the archived photographs in his studio, I knew I should not like it. Derivative of Chagall and Rousseau, with its multiple horizons, depiction of the same scene at different hours of the day, contempt for perspective, hysterical use of colour, repetition of the same motifs within the frame – it all showed a talent of substance but one that had lost its direction and was drowning in a mass of modern whipped cream. Unlike Walter, I could not be brutally frank. Like most artists I was schooled in articulate insincerity.

It was a shock and a relief that I liked it. “Holy forest near Sangsit” took my breath away. The subject matter was simple enough, the stand of ancient nutmeg trees up in Mengwi, light flooding through their leaves and trickling down their great, close-packed trunks, with the hoary Bukit Sari temple crouching in their midst. I had not, at that time, visited the forest and the reason why was also included in the painting. In the foreground hunkered a Balinese peasant, back to the viewer, the horizontality of his great hat cutting through the soaring verticality of the trees. One arm was casually stretched forward to feed or otherwise engage one of the particularly nasty monkeys that live there. Popular fancy connected them doubtfully to the army of the monkey general Hanuman of the Ramayana legends. But it was the style that was so unexpected – gently naturalistic, unforced, coherent, no part of the painting shouting for disproportionate attention and arguing with the rest. It seemed to have emerged whole, assured, a calm assertion in oils. I recognised, sadly a larger talent than my own but one that would never be great because
he
possessed
it
not the other way around. Later, when my chicks came to see the picture and have Walter explain it to them, they would offend him by crying out in sincere admiration, “Beh! Wonderful. Just like a Japanese photograph!”

Walter looked at it with paternal content, not overweening pride. A satisfactory painting, his face seemed to say, but at least done, finished, laid to rest, signed and simply framed in black by the little old man who had built the cupboards.

“Where did you get the idea?”

He made a face. “Works of art are like sausages. It is always best not to enquire too closely where the ingredients came from.” He grinned. It was, I could tell, a line he had used before. Then, more kindly, “Inspired by yourself Bonnetchen.” He laid an arm securely round my shoulder.