Love and Death in Bali. Vicki Baum
together with all their dependants, died a grim and proud death. They are forgetful folk, and perhaps it would be impossible to be as happy as they are unless one had their talent for forgetting. The Dutch, however, do not forget how the lords of Badung and Pametjutan, of Tabanan and Kloengkoeng went to their death. They remember it with admiration. Perhaps it has helped them to understand the soul of the Balinese and how carefully they have to be treated if they are not to be utterly destroyed. I like to believe that the death died by its lords has helped to preserve the island’s liberty and its ancient laws and its gods.
A hundred yards or so from the hotel women were again to be seen bathing naked in the river, the houses again retreated behind their walled enclosures and the palms reared their tufted tips. Poultry, pigs and dogs scattered before the car. We turned into the next village and reached the expanse of rice-fields beyond it. North of Sanur my gasping conveyance was brought to a stop and we set off for Taman Sari across the rice-fields. I pulled off my shoes at the edge of the fields, for on the foot-wide banks of moist clay that part the sawahs it is easier to get along barefoot. In front of me yellowgreen vipers darted rapidly into the water of the sawahs, where planting had just begun. The sky and all its clouds were reflected in the water among the tender green tips of the young rice plants. Taman Sari does not lie on a large road and so life there goes on as in the old days. Putuh walked behind me and the tread of his bare feet was noiseless and sure.
The sign woven of palm leaves that there was sickness in the house hung at the door of Putuh’s dwelling. In the niches on either side of the gateway there were offerings to the evil spirits—sirih and rice and flowers—so that they should not enter the courtyard. Putuh and I entered, followed by my servant carrying my bag on his shoulder as though it was a heavy load.
The courtyard, surrounded with its various smaller buildings and balés, was clean and silent. Two or three well-grown black porkers scampered away in front of me. I had not wasted time putting on my shoes, although the village people laughed at me when I came along barefoot like a Balinese; but I was too impatient to spare time for formalities. Putuh, with punctilious politeness, murmured the usual excuses: his house was poor, dirty and stinking, and he begged me to forgive it. I was relieved when I saw only the sign of sickness at the gate and not yet the sign of death. Putuh called across the courtyard for his wives. One of them, the younger, came out of the kitchen with a baby in arms astride on her hip. Two little girls naked but for wooden pins in their ears stared at me, finger in mouth. The fighting cocks crowed from bamboo basketwork cages farther away in the yard. Putuh led me to a building of bamboo standing on a stone foundation, which was clearly the balé where his second wife lived with her children. A very old woman, probably Raka’s grandmother, squatted on the bamboo bench with the sick child in her lap. Near her knelt his mother; she was a woman with a rather faded, Indian face, such as you often find among Brahmans, and young, firm breasts. Both women smiled anxiously as I bent down over the boy.
Raka looked bad. His lips were dry and cracked with fever and his flickering eyelids were closed. His arms were emaciated and the small dirty fists were limply clenched. He muttered ceaselessly in delirium. His forehead and forearms were smeared with a yellowish ointment, no doubt a remedy of my colleague, the balian. His pulse was quick and thin and his breathing was light and difficult. I saw at once that it was not malaria, or in any case not only malaria. As always with the sick in Bali, he was naked and only lightly covered with his little kain. The grandmother said something in a low voice to Putuh, who repeated it to me: it was not fitting that the woman should address the white tuan. “The child has not sweated yet. He is hot and cold, but he cannot sweat,” Putuh said, smiling. It took me years to understand this Balinese smile. Sometimes it is seen on blanched lips and then it signifies great sorrow and perhaps even despair.
I soon found that Raka had double pneumonia. “How long has the child been sick?” I asked. The mother and grandmother took to their fingers and reckoned with a great effort. They came to an agreement on nine days. The crisis would soon be reached. “How did the sickness begin?” I asked, so as to be sure of my ground. Putuh hesitated before replying. What I wanted to know was what were the first symptoms, such as shivering, vomiting. I might have known what Putuh’s reply would be. “Somebody cast an evil spell,” he said in fact in a low voice. In Bali there are no natural causes of sickness. The sick must have been bewitched, plagued by evil spirits or punished for the misdeeds of an ancestor. Again the memory of the other Raka passed through my mind, while I tried to get medicine down the child’s throat, and chivvied the women away to heat water and to fetch kains to wrap and cover the hot little body with and a kapok mattress for the couch. “Who would bewitch a little child?” I asked. “Raka is a beautiful dancer; everyone loves him.”
“There are witches in the village,” Putuh whispered. “I name no names.”
He fixed me with an agonized expression as I got the needle ready in order to give the child an injection.
“If he is bewitched I will break the spell. You know that,” I said in a rage.
“Everyone says of the tuan that he has great power,” the grandmother said with awe; she came carrying a heavy earthenware vessel carefully in her arms. The sinews of her thin arms were like taut whipcord. The mother brought kains and cloths, bright in color but not too clean. I rubbed Raka’s feet with salt, made him a hot compress and wrapped him up in everything I could lay hands on. Then I laid him down on the couch and the old woman crouched down again beside him. On the right of the house there was a smaller open balé, such as you see in every courtyard, where the daily offerings are prepared. Raka’s mother cast one more look on the child, who had now ceased muttering, and then she squatted down there and began weaving palm-leaves together. It might be necessary to make more offerings than had been made so far—great and powerful offerings to the gods, so as to enlist their aid; and offerings to the evil spirits, so as to appease them. There are witches in every village of Bali. These are women, mostly old, but sometimes young, who league themselves with the powers of darkness by means of certain secret spells, handed down from generation to generation. They take the left-hand road, as the saying is. They acquire the power of changing themselves into lejaks, strange and sinister beings, who roam abroad by night, doing mischief and spreading misfortune. Often, while their bodies are asleep in their homes, the evil souls of such witches, transformed by magic, haunt the night as balls of fire. Nearly every Balinese has seen lejaks. One may smile—but I have myself more than once encountered such fire-balls at night, strange apparitions, that breathe and hover, and there are other white people in the island who have had experience of these inexplicable spooks. I did my utmost as a doctor to help little Raka; but I was not quite sure that it was only an inflammation of the lungs which I had to fight.
An hour went by in silence. Putuh had squatted down on the steps at my feet and I sat on a mat near the improvised sick bed and waited. There was some strong and inexplicable bond between this child and me. I had to stay until the crisis had passed, for better or for worse. Time came to a stop, as it sometimes does. My servant squatted at the far end of the yard near the basket cages containing the cocks, and hummed a tune which consisted of five notes and sounded melancholy, though it was intended to be gay. He was passionately fond of cock-fighting. The Government banned all but a few officially authorized cock-fights, since it wished to protect the Balinese against gambling away all they possessed. Nevertheless, many a secret cock-fight took place on the sly in the close-cropped meadows behind the villages. Absentmindedly I watched my man take a white cock out of its basket and caress it. Time had ceased to move. After an incalculable interval I heard a sound from the bundle of cloths on the bed. I got up quickly and looked at the boy. He had come to himself. His eyes were open and almost clear. Sweat was pouring in trickles down his face and washing the dirt from his light brown skin. With dry lips he asked for something to drink. Putuh himself jumped up and came back with half a coconut shell fitted with a handle. He put it to the child’s lips and he drank the water eagerly. Putuh looked questioningly at me. “It is all right now,” I said with relief. The grandmother raised her hands and murmured with thankfulness that the tuan could break any spell. She called across the yard and the boy’s mother came and stood shyly near the bed, as though it was not her own child at all. She looked quietly at the boy. Raka smiled at her. Putuh did not speak to her, for he could not so far forget what was due to his dignity as to address his wife in the presence of a visitor.