the kids don't honestly need your help. But you cannot let her take advantage of you.
Darling, I've seen it repeated so many times. What happens with Westerners who live
here for a long time is that they usually end up falling into one of two camps. Half of
them keep playing the tourist, saying, 'Oh, those lovely Balinese, so sweet, so
gracious . . . ," and getting ripped off like crazy. The other half get so frustrated with
being ripped off all the time, they start to hate the Balinese. And that's a shame, because
then you've lost all these wonderful friends."
"But what should I do?"
"You need to get back some control of the situation. Play some kind of game with her,
like the games she's playing with you. Threaten her with something that motivates her to
act. You'll be doing her a favor; she needs a home."
"I don't want to play games, Felipe."
He kisses my head. "Then you can't live in Bali, darling."
The next morning, I hatch my plan. I can't believe it--here I am, after a year of studying
virtues and struggling to find an honest life for myself, about to spin a big fat lie. I'm
about to lie to my favorite person in Bali, to someone who is like a sister to me, someone
who has cleaned my kidneys. For heaven's sake, I'm going to lie to Tutti's mommy!
I walk into town, into Wayan's shop. Wayan goes to hug me. I pull away, pretending to
be upset.
"Wayan," I say. "We need to talk. I have a serious problem."
"With Felipe?"
"No. With you."
She looks like she's going to faint.
"Wayan," I say. "My friends in America are very angry with you."
"With me? Why, honey?"
"Because four months ago, they gave you a lot of money to buy a home, and you did not
buy a home yet. Every day, they send me e-mails, asking me, 'Where is Wayan's house?
Where is my money?' Now they think you are stealing their money, using it for
something else."
"I'm not stealing!"
"Wayan," I say. "My friends in America think you are . . . a bullshit."
She gasps as if she's been punched in the windpipe. She looks so wounded, I waver for a
moment and almost grab her in a reassuring hug and say, "No, no, it's not true! I'mmaking this up!" But, no, I have to finish this. But, Lord, she is clearly staggered now.
Bullshit is a word that has been more emotionally incorporated into Balinese than almost
any other in the English language. It's one of the very worst things you can call someone
in Bali--"a bullshit." In this culture, where people bullshit each other a dozen times before
breakfast, where bullshitting is a sport, an art, a habit, and a desperate survival tactic, to
actually call someone out on their bullshit is an appalling statement. It's something that
would have, in old Europe, guaranteed you a duel.
"Honey," she said, eyes tearing. "I am not a bullshit!"
"I know that, Wayan. This is why I'm so upset. I try to tell my friends in America that
Wayan is not a bullshit, but they don't believe me."
She lays her hand on mine. "I'm sorry to put you in a pickle, honey."
"Wayan, this is a very big pickle. My friends are angry. They say that you must buy some
land before I come back to America. They told me that if you don't buy some land in the
next week, then I must . . . take the money back. "
Now she doesn't look like she's going to faint; she looks like she's going to die. I feel like
one-half of the biggest prick in history, spinning this tale to this poor woman,
who--among other things--obviously doesn't realize that I no more have the power to take
that money out of her bank account than I have to revoke her Indonesian citizenship. But
how could she know that? I made the money magically appear in her bankbook, didn't I?
Couldn't I just as easily take it away?
"Honey," she says, "believe me, I find land now, don't worry, very fast I find land. Please
don't worry . . . maybe in next three days this is finish, I promise."
"You must, Wayan," I say, with a gravity that is not entirely acting. The fact is, she must.
Her kids need a home. She's about to get evicted. This is no time to be a bullshit.
I say, "I'm going back to Felipe's house now. Call me when you've bought something."
Then I walk away from my friend, aware that she is watching me but refusing to turn
around and look back at her. All the way home, I'm offering up to God the weirdest
prayer: "Please, let it be true that she's been bullshitting me." Because if she wasn't
bullshitting, if she's genuinely incapable of finding herself a place to live despite an
$18,000 cash infusion, then we're in really big trouble here and I don't know how this
woman is ever going to pull herself out of poverty. But if she was bullshitting me, then in
a way it's a ray of hope. It shows she's got some wiles, and she might be OK in this shifty
world, after all.
I go home to Felipe, feeling awful. I say, "If only Wayan knew how deviously I was
plotting behind her back . . ."
". . . plotting for her happiness and success," he finishes the sentence for me.
Four hours later--four measly hours!--the phone rings in Felipe's house. It's Wayan. She's
breathless. She wants me to know the job is finished. She has just purchased the two aro
from the farmer (whose "wife" suddenly didn't seem to mind breaking up the property).
There was no need, as it turns out, for any magic dreams or priestly interventions or taksu
radiation-level tests. Wayan even has the certificate of ownership already, in her very
hands! And it's notarized! Also, she assures me, she has already ordered construction
materials for her house and workers will start building early next week--before I leave.
So I can see the project under way. She hopes that I am not angry with her. She wants me
to know that she loves me more than she loves her own body, more than she loves her
own life, more than she loves this whole world.I tell her that I love her, too. And that I can't wait to be a guest someday in her beautiful
new home. And that I would like a photocopy of that certificate of ownership.
When I get off the phone, Felipe says, "Good girl."
I don't know whether he's referring to her or me. But he opens a bottle of wine and we
raise a toast to our dear friend Wayan the Balinese landowner.
Then Felipe says, "Can we go on vacation now, please?"
107 107 107 107
The place we end up going on vacation is a tiny island called Gili Meno, located off the
coast of Lombok, which is the next stop east of Bali in the great, sprawling Indonesian
archipelago. I'd been to Gili Meno before, and I wanted to show it to Felipe, who had
never been there.
The island of Gili Meno is one of the most important places in the world to me. I came
here by myself two years ago when I was in Bali for the first time. I was on that magazine
assignment, writing about Yoga vacations, and I'd just finished two weeks of mightily
restorative Yoga classes. But I had decided to extend my stay in Indonesia after the
assignment was up, since I was already all the way over here in Asia. What I wanted to
do, actually, was to find someplace very remote and give myself a ten-day retreat of
absolute solitude and absolute silence.
When I look back at the four years that elapsed between my marriage starting to fall apart
and the day I was finally divorced and free, I see a detailed chronicle of total pain. And
the moment when I came to this tiny island all by myself was the very worst of that entire
dark journey. The bottom of the pain and the middle of it. My unhappy mind was a
battlefield of conflicted demons. As I made my decision to spend ten days alone and in
silence in the middle of exactly nowhere, I told all my warring and confused parts the
same thing: "We're all here together now, guys, all alone. And we're going to have to
work out some kind of deal for how to get along, or else everybody is going to die
together, sooner or later."
Which may sound firm and confident, but I must admit this, as well--that sailing over to
that quiet island all alone, I was never more terrified in my life. I hadn't even brought any
books to read, nothing to distract me. Just me and my mind, about to face each other on
an empty field. I remember that my legs were visibly shaking with fear. Then I quoted to
myself one of my favorite lines ever from my Guru: "Fear--who cares?" and I
disembarked alone.
I rented myself a little cabin on the beach for a few dollars a day and I shut my mouth and
vowed not to open it again until something inside me had changed. Gili Meno Island was
my ultimate truth and reconciliation hearing. I had chosen the right place to do this--thatmuch was clear. The island itself is tiny, pristine, sandy, blue water, palm trees. It's a
perfect circle with a single path that goes around it, and you can walk the whole
circumference in about an hour. It's located almost exactly on the equator, and so there's a
changelessness about its daily cycles. The sun comes up on one side of the island at about
6:30 in the morning and goes down on the other side at around 6:30 PM, every day of the
year. The place is inhabited by a small handful of Muslim fishermen and their families.
There is no spot on this island from which you cannot hear the ocean. There are no
motorized vehicles here. Electricity comes from a generator, and for only a few hours in
the evenings. It's the quietest place I've ever been.
Every morning I walked the circumference of the island at sunrise, and walked it again at
sunset. The rest of the time, I just sat and watched. Watched my thoughts, watched my
emotions, watched the fishermen. The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is
caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those
words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced
by our own mantras (I'm a failure . . . I'm lonely . . . I'm a failure . . . I'm lonely . . .) and
we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip
away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves
from our suffocating mantras.
It took me a while to drop into true silence. Even after I'd stopped talking, I found that I
was still humming with language. My organs and muscles of speech--brain, throat, chest,
back of the neck--vibrated with the residual effects of talking long after I'd stopped
making sounds. My head shimmied in a reverb of words, the way an indoor swimming
pool seems to echo interminably with sounds and shouts, even after the kindergartners
have left for the day. It took a surprisingly long time for all this pulsation of speech to fall
away, for the whirling noises to settle. Maybe it took about three days.
Then everything started coming up. In that state of silence, there was room now for
everything hateful, everything fearful, to run across my empty mind. I felt like a junkie in
detox, convulsing with the poison of what emerged. I cried a lot. I prayed a lot. It was
difficult and it was terrifying, but this much I knew--I never didn't want to be there, and I
never wished that anyone were there with me. I knew that I needed to do this and that I
needed to do it alone.
The only other tourists on the island were a handful of couples having romantic vacations.
(Gili Meno is far too pretty and far too remote a place for anyone but a crazy person to
come visit solo.) I watched these couples and felt some envy for their romances, but
knew, "This is not your time for companionship, Liz. You have a different task here." I
kept away from everyone. People on the island left me alone. I think I threw off a spooky
vibe. I had not been well all year. You can't lose that much sleep and that much weight
and cry so hard for so long without starting to look like a psychotic. So nobody talked to
me.
Actually, that's not true. One person talked to me, every day. It was this little kid, one of a
gang of kids who run up and down the beaches trying to sell fresh fruit to the tourists.
This boy was maybe nine years old, and seemed to be the ringleader. He was tough,
scrappy and I would have called him street-smart if his island actually had any streets. He
was beach-smart, I suppose. Somehow he'd learned great English, probably from
harassing sunbathing Westerners. And he was on to me, this kid. Nobody else asked me
who I was, nobody else bothered me, but this relentless child would come and sit next tome on the beach at some point every day and demand, "Why don't you ever talk? Why
are you strange like this? Don't pretend you can't hear me--I know you can hear me. Why
are you always alone? Why don't you ever go swimming? Where is your boyfriend? Why
don't you have a husband? What's wrong with you?"
I was like, Back off, kid! What are you--a transcript of my most evil thoughts?
Every day I would try to smile at him kindly and send him away with a polite gesture, but
he wouldn't quit until he got a rise out me. And inevitably, he always got a rise out of me.
I remember bursting out at him once, "I'm not talking because I'm on a friggin' spiritual
journey, you nasty little punk--now go AWAY!"
He ran away laughing. Every day, after he'd gotten me to respond, he would always run
away laughing. I'd usually end up laughing, too, once he was out of sight. I dreaded this
pesky kid and looked forward to him in equal measure. He was my only comedic break
during a really tough ride. Saint Anthony once wrote about having gone into the desert on
silent retreat and being assaulted by all manner of visions--devils and angels, both. He
said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other
