meanwhile and that the soul of this child who was to have been a great dancer might by now be astray in the darkness of the unknown. I could hear myself upbraiding Putuh on and on without restraint and at the top of my voice as we went noisily over the bridge which spans the abrupt gorge at the end of my village. Putuh listened to me quietly and when I had done he began to smile once more.
“What the gods will must come to pass,” was all he said.
Raka was not to me just an ordinary patient. I had seen the child dance the kebjar at a temple festival a short time before. What intentness in his small face, what ancient wisdom in his eyes! On that occasion the thought came to me for the first time that he must, as the Balinese believe, have already lived many lives. I suddenly felt that I could realize what ancestor was born again in the little Raka, and who it was who had once more been made manifest in order to return to the island once more and to live again—to live a new life with the same sweetness and bitterness as the old, but with fewer mistakes and aberrations and one step nearer perfection, and that Balinese heaven whence there is no longer the necessity to be born again. For moments together during that dance it seemed to me that the little figure in the golden robe was not the child Raka, but the older Raka, his forefather, the radiant, glamorous Raka of other days—the man whom everyone loved, who had erred and been punished and who had been purified by his own efforts, so that he came back to earth not as a worm or a scorpion, but as a child and a grandson and a dancer as he himself had been. I loved little Raka as I had loved the other in earlier days; and the old car went far too slowly to suit my impatience.
My thoughts might be high-flown and beautiful, but my words to Ida Bagus Putuh the while were full of vulgarity and good Dutch curses. I saw nothing of the road and the landscape, although as a rule, even after thirty-five years in Bali, I never tired of gazing at the terraced rice-fields, the gorges and the distant vistas of palm trees. Putuh had put a fresh quid into his mouth and was silent for very shame at the white man’s lack of control.
We passed through the town of Badung, which is also called Denpasar from its street of shops where Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Arabs have their funny little booths. We went by the hotel. One of the five radios of the island could be heard through the entrance which was on a level with the road. It sounded like Sunday in a Dutch provincial town and I shut my eyes in disgust. Putuh laughed and tried to imitate the sound of it, which seemed comical to him. “The white people’s gamelans are not good,” he criticized. As we passed the two great wairingin trees at the entrance to the main street, my thoughts were caught back into the past. The trees were still there, standing where they had stood years ago before the wall of the Puri, the palace of the lords of Badung. This was the spot where Bali had changed the most. There, where the palace courtyards had sprawled abroad their clutter of buildings and people, white-skirted girls were playing tennis and, farther away, Mohammedan salesmen from Denpasar were practising football. An automobile full of tourists was coming round the corner.
I don’t know whether it ever occurs to the Balinese that in this spot their lords, 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.
