But Wayan is unapologetic. This treatment is only necessary because it's not possible to
tell a Balinese man that he is infertile without risking that he will go home and do
something terrible to his wife. If men in Bali weren't like this, she could cure their
infertility in other ways. But this is the reality of the culture, so there it is. She doesn't
have the tiniest shred of bad conscience about it but thinks it's just another way of being a
creative healer. Anyway, she adds, it's sometimes nice for the wife to make sex with one
of those cool drivers, because most husbands in Bali don't know how to make love to a
woman, anyway.
"Most husbands, it's like roosters, like goats."
I suggested, "Maybe you should teach sex education class, Wayan. You could teach men
how to touch women in a soft way, then maybe their wives would like sex more. Because
if a man really touches you gently, caresses your skin, says loving things, kisses you all
over your body, takes his time . . . sex can be nice."
Suddenly she blushed. Wayan Nuriyasih, this banana-massaging,
bladder-infection-treating, dildo-peddling, small-time-pimp, actually blushed.
"You make me feel funny when you talk like that," she said, fanning herself. "This
talking, it makes me feel . . . different. Even in my underpants I feel different! Go home
now, you both. No more talk like this about sex. Go home, go to bed, but only sleeping,
OK? Only SLEEPING!"
101 101 101 101On the ride home Felipe asked, "Has she bought a house yet?"
"Not yet. But she says she's looking."
"It's been over a month already since you gave her the money, hasn't it?"
"Yeah, but the place she wanted, it wasn't for sale . . ."
"Be careful, darling," Felipe said. "Don't let this drag out too long. Don't let this situation
get all Balinese on you."
"What does that mean?"
"I'm not trying to interfere in your business, but I've lived in this country for five years
and I know how things are. Stories can get complicated around here. Sometimes it's hard
to get to the truth of what's actually happening."
"What are you trying to say, Felipe?" I asked, and when he didn't answer immediately, I
quoted to him one of his own signature lines: "If you tell me slowly, I can understand
quickly."
"What I'm trying to say, Liz, is that your friends have raised an awful lot of money for
this woman, and right now it's all sitting in Wayan's bank account. Make sure she actually
buys a house with it."
102 102 102 102
The end of July came, and my thirty-fifth birthday with it. Wayan threw a birthday party
for me in her shop, quite unlike any I have ever experienced before. Wayan had dressed
me in a traditional Balinese birthday suit--a bright purple sarong, a strapless bustier and a
long length of golden fabric that she wrapped tightly around my torso, forming a sheath
so snug I could barely take a breath or eat my own birthday cake. As she was
mummifying me into this exquisite costume in her tiny, dark bedroom (crowded with the
belongings of the three other little human beings who live there with her), she asked, not
quite looking at me, but doing some fancy tucking and pinning of material around my
ribs, "You have prospect to marrying Felipe?"
"No," I said. "We have no prospects for marrying. I don't want any more husbands,
Wayan. And I don't think Felipe wants any more wives. But I like being with him."
"Handsome on the outside is easy to find, but handsome on the outside and handsome on
the inside--this not easy. Felipe has this."
I agreed.
She smiled. "And who bring this good man to you, Liz? Who prayed every day for this
man?"
I kissed her. "Thank you, Wayan. You did a good job."We commenced to the birthday party. Wayan and the kids had decorated the whole place
with balloons and palm fronds and handwritten signs with complex, run-on messages like,
"Happy birthday to a nice and sweet heart, to you, our dearest sister, to our beloved Lady
Elizabeth, Happy Birthday to you, always peace to you and Happy Birthday." Wayan has
a brother whose young children are gifted dancers in temple ceremonies, and so the
nieces and nephews came and danced for me right there in the restaurant, staging a
haunting, gorgeous performance usually offered only to priests. All the children were
decked out in gold and massive headdresses, decorated in fierce drag queen makeup, with
powerful stamping feet and graceful, feminine fingers.
Balinese parties as a whole are generally organized around the principle of people getting
dressed up in their finest clothes, then sitting around and staring at each other. It's a lot
like magazine parties in New York, actually.("My God, darling," moaned Felipe, when I
told him that Wayan was throwing me a Balinese birthday party, "it's going to be so
boring . . . ") It wasn't boring, though--just quiet. And different. There was the whole
dressing-up part, and then there was the whole dance performance part, and then there
was the whole sitting around and staring at each other part, which wasn't so bad.
Everyone did look lovely. Wayan's whole family had come, and they kept smiling and
waving at me from four feet away, and I kept smiling at them and waving back at them.
I blew out the candles of the birthday cake along with Little Ketut, the smallest orphan,
whose birthday, I had decided a few weeks ago, would also be on July 18 from now on,
shared with my own, since she'd never had a birthday or a birthday party before. After we
blew out the candles, Felipe presented Little Ketut with a Barbie doll, which she
unwrapped in stunned wonder and then regarded as though it were a ticket for a rocket
ship to Jupiter--something she never, ever in seven billion light-years could've imagined
receiving.
Everything about this party was kind of funny. It was an oddball international and
intergenerational mix of a handful of my friends, Wayan's family and some of her
Western clients and patients whom I'd never met before. My friend Yudhi brought me a
six-pack of beer to wish me happy birthday, and also this cool young hipster screenwriter
from L.A. named Adam came by. Felipe and I had met Adam in a bar the other night and
had invited him. Adam and Yudhi passed their time at the party talking to a little boy
named John, whose mother is a patient of Wayan's, a German clothing designer married
to an American who lives in Bali. Little John--who is seven years old and who is kind of
American, he says, because of his American dad (even though he himself has never been
there), but who speaks German with his mother and speaks Indonesian with Wayan's
children--was smitten with Adam because he'd found out that the guy was from
California and could surf.
"What's your favorite animal, mister?" asked John, and Adam replied, "Pelicans."
"What's a pelican?" the little boy asked, and Yudhi jumped in and said, "Dude, you don't
know what a pelican is? Dude, you gotta go home and ask your dad about that. Pelicans
rock, dude."
Then John, the kind-of-American boy, turned to say something in Indonesian to little
Tutti (probably to ask her what a pelican was) as Tutti sat in Felipe's lap trying to read
my birthday cards, while Felipe was speaking beautiful French to a retired gentleman
from Paris who comes to Wayan for kidney treatments. Meanwhile, Wayan had turned on
the radio and Kenny Rogers was singing "Coward of the County," while three Japanesegirls wandered randomly into the shop to see if they could get medicinal massages. As I
tried to talk the Japanese girls into eating some of my birthday cake, the two
orphans--Big Ketut and Little Ketut--were decorating my hair with the giant spangled
barrettes they'd saved up all their money to buy me as a gift. Wayan's nieces and nephews,
the child temple dancers, the children of rice farmers, sat very still, tentatively staring at
the floor, dressed in gold like miniature deities; they imbued the room with a strange and
otherworldly godliness. Outside, the roosters started crowing, even though it was not yet
evening, not yet dusk. My traditional Balinese clothing was squeezing me like an ardent
hug, and I was feeling like this was definitely the strangest--but maybe the
happiest--birthday party I'd ever experienced in my whole life.
103 103 103 103
Still, Wayan needs to buy a house, and I'm getting worried that it's not happening. I don't
understand why it's not happening, but it absolutely needs to happen. Felipe and I have
stepped in now. We found a realtor who could take us around and show us properties, but
Wayan hasn't liked anything we've shown her. I keep telling her, "Wayan, it's important
that we buy something. I'm leaving here in September, and I need to let my friends know
before I leave that their money actually went into a home for you. And you need to get a
roof over your head before you get evicted."
"Not so simple to buy land in Bali," she keeps telling me. "Not like to walk into a bar and
buy a beer. Can take long time."
"We don't have a long time, Wayan."
She just shrugs, and I remember again about the Balinese concept of "rubber time,"
meaning that time is a very relative and bouncy idea. "Four weeks" doesn't really mean to
Wayan what it means to me. One day to Wayan isn't necessarily composed of
twenty-four hours, either; sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, depending upon
the spiritual and emotional nature of that day. As with my medicine man and his
mysterious age, sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them.
Meanwhile, it also turns out that I have completely underestimated how expensive it is to
buy property in Bali. Because everything is so cheap here, you would assume that land is
also undervalued, but that's a mistaken assumption. To buy land in Bali--especially in
Ubud--can get almost as expensive as buying land in Westchester County, in Tokyo, or
on Rodeo Drive. Which is completely illogical because once you own the property you
can't make back your money on it in any traditionally logical way. You may pay
approximately $25,000 for an aro of land (an aro is a land measurement roughly
translating into English as: "Slightly bigger than the parking spot for an SUV"), and then
you can build a little shop there where you will sell one batik sarong a day to one tourist aday for the rest of your life, for a profit of about seventy-five cents a hit. It's senseless.
But the Balinese value their land with a passion that extends beyond the reaches of
economic sense. Since land ownership is traditionally the only wealth that Balinese
recognize as legitimate, property is valued in the same way as the Masai value cattle or as
my five-year-old niece values lip gloss: namely, that you cannot have enough of it, that
once you have claimed it you must never let it go, and that all of it in the world should
rightfully belong to you.
Moreover--as I discover throughout the month of August, during my Narnia-like voyage
into the intricacies of Indonesian real estate--it's almost impossible to find out when land
is actually for sale around here. Balinese who are selling land typically don't like other
people to know that their land is up for sale. Now, you would think it might be
advantageous to advertise this fact, but the Balinese don't see it that way. If you're a
Balinese farmer and you're selling your land, it means you are desperate for cash, and this
is humiliating. Also, if your neighbors and family find out that you actually sold some
land, then they'll assume you came into some money, and everyone will be asking if they
can borrow that money. So land becomes available for sale only by . . . rumor. And all
these land deals are executed under strange veils of secrecy and deception.
The Western expatriates around here--hearing that I'm trying to buy land for Wayan--start
gathering around me, offering cautionary tales based on their own nightmarish
experiences. They warn me that you can never really be certain what's going on when it
comes to real estate around here. The land you are "buying" may not actually "belong" to
the person who is "selling" it. The guy who showed you the property might not even be
the owner, but only the disgruntled nephew of the owner, trying to get one over on his
uncle because of some old family dispute. Don't expect that the boundaries of your
property will ever be clear. The land you buy for your dream house may later be declared
"too close to a temple" to allow a building permit (and it's difficult, in this small country
with an estimated 20,000 temples, to find any land that is not too close to a temple).
Also you must take into consideration that you're quite probably living on the slopes of a
volcano and you might be straddling a fault line, as well. And not just a geological fault
line, either. As idyllic as Bali seems, the wise keep in mind that this is, in fact,
Indonesia--the largest Islamic nation on earth, unstable at its core, corrupt from the
highest ministers of justice all the way down to the guy who pumps gas into your car (and
who only pretends to fill it all the way up). Some kind of revolution will always be
possible here at any moment, and all your assets may be reclaimed by the victors.
Probably at gunpoint.
Negotiating all this dodgy business is not something I have any qualifications whatsoever
to be doing. I mean--I went through a divorce proceeding in New York State and
everything, but this is another page of Kafka altogether. Meanwhile, $18,000 of money
donated by me, my family and my dearest friends is sitting in Wayan's bank account,
converted into Indonesia rupiah--a currency that has a history of crashing without notice
