The unique ritual spectacles of Indonesia? No, no, no. They have not come to see the re-enacted ancient battles, the whip duels, the spirit drummers, the funeral feasts. They’ve perused photographs of these phenomena in the inflight magazine on the journey here, and what small appetite they might have had for them is satisfied.
They have not come to dive in Padangbai, snorkel in Komodo or surf in Grajagan. They are unhealthy men, most of them: overweight, fiftyish, wearing expensive, roomy suits and white shirts already ringed with crystallising antiperspirant stains. Many of them have wives who would have adored visiting the temples and soaking up the sun, but they’ve left their wives at home — at home in London, New York, Montreal, Munich, Vienna, Tokyo, Melbourne, and many other places.
Some of the men have brought cameras, simply because they’re in the habit of taking a camera on overseas trips, or because their wives urged them not to leave home without one. These cameras will remain unused, for none of the men would dare take a photograph during Miss Soedhono’s presentation, nor would there be much point in doing so. After all, one’s own rapture cannot be captured on film.
Mounted high on one of the walls of the conference room is a slender grey surveillance camera, pointed not at the empty expanse of purple carpet where Miss Soedhono will soon stand, but at the audience. It moves from left to right in an oiled, leisurely arc, like a snake half-dozing over an uneventful hole in the earth. Its dark glassy eye glints each time its slow-motion swivel catches the light from the spherical lamps hanging from the ceilings. These lamps, switched on despite the noonday sunshine penetrating the thin fabric of the curtains, cast an ambiguous luminosity over the men, yellowing them in much the same way that a grimy refrigerator bulb discolours leftover hunks of beef and neglected jars of mayonnaise.
The conference room is filled to capacity, or it will be when the men who are smoking outside have finished sucking nicotine into their bloodstreams. Once Miss Soedhono’s presentation is underway, no one will think of their more mundane addictions, but in the meantime these still exert their pitiful tyranny. Tobacco, chewing-gum, an early-morning sniff of cocaine in the saunalike lavatories. Some of the men have vomited or had diarrhoea: the indigestible overload of waiting.
Finally all the cigarette butts are extinguished, all the bowels purged, all the mouths rinsed and sprayed, all the foreheads mopped one last time before such things cease to matter. The last stragglers – although that word is unjust, because no one dares to be even a second late, and the ‘stragglers’ are merely those who take their seats five minutes rather than an hour early – walk self-consciously into the room, nodding blindly at the fellowship of strangers among whom they must find their place. No one speaks, apart from grunts of permission as knees are swung aside to allow ungainly male bodies to squeeze past, and grunts of relief as buttocks settle on the velvety green seats and trousers are adjusted.
The oversized clock on the back wall, slightly fogged with condensation, ticks towards the agreed geometry of the long and short hands. The men make no attempt to converse or even acknowledge each other’s existence, preferring to stare at the long hand of the clock as it approaches the appointed hour. Very likely the Magdalaya’s clocks are wrong, compared to the wristwatches of the men, which are precision instruments guaranteed not to lose a second in ten million years. However, that’s irrelevant here. Here, nothing can be hurried, and none of the men – even those who might ordinarily need to humiliate several inferiors per hour – has uttered a word of complaint all day.
At last, when the Magdalaya’s foggy clock says the time has come, Miss Soedhono appears from a curtained anteroom like a carved effigy on a revolving clocktower display. The wait is over.
Miss Soedhono is tall for an Indonesian woman, but no taller than an average Western adolescent. Her outfit is demure by the standards of an English or American boardroom: her legs are shrouded in a long, sarong-like skirt, and her high-collared jacket is buttoned up to the throat. The colours – emerald green, with bright gold brocade – are more sensuous than the greys and blacks these men are accustomed to seeing on their female colleagues back home, but on the other hand, there’s something affectedly formal, even antiseptic, about Miss Soedhono’s clothing, redolent of the livery of flight attendants. Her hair is pinned back severely, and her lips are painted pale orange, with a gloss as thick as wax. Her teeth are white, faintly delineated with pale brown, as though she was once a smoker and has spent many years trying to polish the damage away. Yet if she is a person of any vulnerability, this is not betrayed by her expression. She’s as calm as a bronze sculpture, her eyes so dark that pupil and iris are indistinguishable, even up close. No one gets close.
Miss Soedhono lifts her hands into the air, allowing them to hover near her brocaded bosom, displaying the flawless shape and yet mature flesh of her fingers, the whitish pink of her palms contrasted with the dark honey of her knuckles, the orange fingernails in all their pellucid lustre. Her hands cradle air as though it were a dossier of papers, a dossier she holds for the sake of protocol but which she has no need to consult. Already the men are attentive: affecting to shuffle in their seats in casual preparation, they are staring at Miss Soedhono’s hands, at those sculpted orange nails hovering in front of them, almost eerie in the jaundiced light.
Miss Soedhono opens her mouth to speak. A hundred male mouths open too, their lips parting in anticipation.
‘You will forgive me,’ she says, ‘if some of what I say is already well known to you.’ Her accent is thick, though the words are all her own, not recited from a script or reconstituted from a phrasebook. She’s fluent in five Asian languages, but English is the lingua franca to which she condescends as a special favour to this crowd of perspiring, pink-faced non-Indonesians.
‘There is always a possibility,’ she continues, ‘that there will be someone here for whom the subject is … virgin territory.’
A subtle thrill goes through the audience, as though the air temperature had momentarily dropped ten degrees. The combination of the word ‘virgin’ and the way Miss Soedhono pouted her glossy orange lips to speak the word is what caused that thrill to pass among the men. The presentation has begun; nothing can stop it now.
‘We are here,’ says Miss Soedhono, ‘to examine the physiology of the coconut, particularly in areas of exudation – that is, bleeding – of spadix sap, analysis of the sieve tube sap in all its components, translocation of ferro-cyanide in the sieve tube, and the factors which influence the nut’s copra content.’
‘Oh God,’ whispers one of the men, scarcely able to believe that only yesterday morning he was exchanging meaningless pleasantries with his wife at the breakfast table, and now here he is, in the same room as Miss Soedhono, breathing the same air she exhales from her glossy mouth, from her honeyed throat.
‘We have been busy here,’ says Miss Soedhono, ‘since you attended my last presentation.’ She gestures in the air, a soundless snap of the fingers, and a large video screen, nestled in an enclave in the wall behind her, switches itself on. A brilliant image of green coconuts clustered against a ribbed tree-bough appears, haloed by the miraculous Kodachrome blue of Sulawesi sky. The men’s eyes appraise it for an instant, then revert to the woman.
‘We have developed – created, if you will – a new variety of coconut,’ she says. ‘It produces fifty-five fruits per bunch, aggregating to six hundred and sixty nuts per palm per year. You will note that the size is small. Do not be deceived. The usable contents, once the epicarp, mesocarp and endocarp have been discarded, account for a greater proportion of the whole than in large-sized fruits. In particular, there is a great deal more … ‘(she gestures again, and the picture dissolves into an extreme close-up of a whitish substance) ‘endosperm.’
The men squirm collectively; there is an audible creaking of metal chairs.
‘This endosperm yields as much as fifty-one per cent copra, with hardly any husk,’ continues Miss Soedhono, her voice, on that last word,
growing almost husky. ‘We have given the germplasm priority in our breeding programme, and are confident that we will soon evolve D x T hybrids, using a dwarf known as Kelapa Raja as the seed parent.’
An image of the mighty Kelapa Raja, embraced by an adolescent Indonesian boy wrapped around the vertiginous upper reaches of its bough, comes on the screen.
‘But let us now examine, briefly, what happens to the root system in swampy soil.’ Miss Soedhono gestures again, and the screen is filled with pink rhizomes, a jostling crowd of them like starveling baby carrots. ‘When the tips of main roots come into contact with the permanent water table, they immediately begin to rot. Death, gentlemen, certain death. To compensate for this extinction, branch roots develop directly from the tip, below the rotting portion. New roots also spring out from the bole and the stem. These abundant rootlets ramify into a densely-woven mat within one metre from the bole. Also, closer to the bole, we see’ (another gesture, another dissolve) ‘super-abundant pneumatophores or respiratory organs.’
A helplessly synchronised intake of breath passes through the audience. Miss Soedhono’s eyes narrow in contempt, and she glances over the ranks of blushing faces, as if searching for the worm who dared to gasp out of turn.
‘Also of prime importance,’ she hisses, ‘is the life span of the leaves. From the day a coconut leaf primordium distinguishes itself from the apical meristem, springing up from the throat of its immediate older leaf, a long period elapses before it is finally shed, exhausted and senile, from the crown. Illustrations of each phase of this metamorphosis from emergence to death are shown here. Please take a moment to study them.’
The men take a moment only. The supreme object of their focus is Miss Soedhono, whose jaw, turned towards glowing images of leaves and wooden rulers, is perfection itself, and whose neck, were it not for the intervention of her jacket collar, would continue straight down to her breast, that exotic bosom whose precise nature the men can only guess at.
‘In each fertile palm, super-abundant female flowers bloom,’ she continues, her cheek catching reflected light from the screen’s latest offering. ‘A particularly prolific palm is capable of producing over a thousand female flowers, in each of several spadices.’
The sharp odour of sweat is beginning to permeate the atmosphere; deodorants and perfumes with pointedly masculine names are no match for tropical heat, decrepit air conditioning and the combined temperature of sixty-six overdressed bodies arrayed shoulder-to-shoulder and thigh-to-thigh.
‘If you care to look,’ declares Miss Soedhono, ‘you will find trichomes on the abaxial lamina, mostly along the intercostal regions, on the petiole and the rachis as well as on the leaf sheath, the spathe, the peduncle, the spikes. You will even see them, if you peer closely, on this young ovary, partially exposed in this picture. You will see them everywhere, in fact. They vary in shape, size and in the intensity of their occurrence in different organs. They are imbued with certain substances that are poisonous to insects.’
As she says this, some of the men fancy they detect a sardonic twitch at the edges of her lips, a venomous aftertaste in the honey of her voice. She clicks her fingers, and the screen offers another close-up.
‘These leaves, as you can see, arrange themselves so that the periphery of the spear is composed of the margins of leaflets with their special protective thickening. The hairy outgrowths’ (she sweeps her orange fingernails towards the image) ‘also provide physical impediments to any young larvae that may be trying to affix themselves to the leaf.’
From somewhere in the audience comes a single, bronchial cough. Miss Soedhono turns her head to find the man responsible. Sixty-six pairs of eyes blink innocently, for although each man longs for Miss Soedhono to look at him and him only, he fears it too, especially if it should be for the wrong reason. Most terrifying of all would be if she observed him lurching fumblingly out of his seat, a victim of indigestion or a shameful lapse of continence. So, they all sit tight, affecting impassivity, oozing sweat, their eyes wide and bloodshot, while Miss Soedhono continues her lecture, moving on to the subject of parasites.
‘There may be those among you,’ she says, folding her exquisite hands together in an interleaving of bright nails and dark flesh, ‘who believe in the myth, the lie, perpetuated by naturalists, that the coconut crab is capable of nipping a fruit, peeling off its husk, fibre by fibre, and breaking open the shell through the soft eye, in order to make a meal of the endosperm.’
Again she gestures, a mere nod this time, and images of crustaceans materialise on the screen, extraterrestrial-looking creatures with orange highlights on their turdbrown armour, as though Miss Soedhono herself had lovingly decorated them with her nail-polish.
‘Examine, if you will, these infra-red exposures of the coconut crab, Birgus latro, pictured with coconuts in various states of development, including young fruits with soft exteriors, and even one ripe nut from which the husk had been temptingly stripped. No penetrations were made.’
Miss Soedhono raises her chin, somewhat defiantly, and rests her hands on her waist, her fingers hooked over the sharp curves of her hips, which protrude through her tunic. Her arms are thin. She breathes in, and her bosom swells slightly, the gold of the brocade glittering as the silken fabric adjusts its purchase on the flesh beneath.
Does she notice what effect her stance is having on her audience? Her unblinking eyes survey the men as if they were no more than wooden puppets, carved ceremonial effigies arranged in rows. Indeed they have done their best to maintain such composure, but the provocation is too great. Flesh must move.
Miss Soedhono raises one hand off her hip. This time the click of her fingers is audible. The image on the video screen dissolves and is replaced by a startling picture of curdled fluid, ever-so-slightly out of focus.
‘When a tapped inflorescence is cut off close to the stem,’ she says, serene in her self-possession, ‘the flow continues for some time, reducing only gradually. Bleeding is strictly polar. At the cut-off lower surface of the inflorescence, not even a drop of the fluid appears, no matter how the inflorescence is positioned.’
To illustrate her argument, Miss Soedhono walks up to the video screen and touches the glass with her taloned forefinger, indicating first this example, then that. Her long skirt which, during the three or four steps she took to reach the video screen, delineated the curves of her backside in an evanescent shimmer of silk and shadow, hangs inscrutable. ‘In coconut,’ says Miss Soedhono, turning to face her audience once more, ‘the bleeding tissue is found at the extremities of the lateral branches of the inflorescence, close to the cut from which the juice flows. No doubt you are curious about anatomical differences between bleeding and normal branches. Yes, I can see you are curious. The differences can be seen here, side by side. Bleeding spikes experience a high incidence of clogged vessels. Look at the bleeding spikes, gentlemen. Nearly all the vessels are closed.’
By now, throughout the audience, more and more men are giving in to the irresistible. The temperature in the room has risen to an unbearable level, and the ancient air conditioners begin to complain, bemoaning their futile labour with an irritating ‘ar-ar-ar’ sound. The oxygen has long since disappeared into the lungs of those assembled, and is being devoured in their blood; what remains of the atmosphere is dense with percolating aluminium chlorohydrate, alcohol, hydroxypropylcellulose, and the other ingredients of chemically deodorised armpit, as well as an excess of carbon dioxide and a miasma of pheromone.
Miss Soedhono appears wholly unaffected; the satiny skin of her throat is free of any perspirous sheen, her forehead is smooth and unreflective, her soft black hair not in the least tacky. Since beginning her presentation she has shown no interest in the glass of water that stands on the table to her right, nor has she even licked her lips – those lips whose gloss is undiminished. She speaks for minute upon minute, never faltering, never hesitating for the correct word, never running out of breath even during sentences whose polysyllable
count is in the dozens. Now she moves onto the topic of pollination, keeping her gaze level, making contact only with the imploring eyes of her audience, ignoring the agitation lower down.
‘The possible disadvantages of employing pollinating bags are these,’ she announces. ‘Use of damaged bags, or bags with large mesh that allow pollen, or mites carrying pollen, to pass through; not securely tying the mouth of the bag with the peduncle, thus keeping the bags open for longer durations during active female phase; and failure to emasculate properly. In dwarf coconuts, a small number of flowers are found to be bisexual, possessing both pistils and stamens. We conducted a random survey of two hundred Nias yellow dwarfs, and fifty-four of the palms were discovered to have at least one hermaphrodite flower, which means, as a rule of thumb, that twenty-seven per cent of Nias dwarf palms are polygamo-monoecious. You will appreciate the threat this poses to our breeding programme.’
One of the men has begun to make a soft, rhythmic sound, but he is elbowed in the ribs by his neighbours on either side. If their passions can no longer be secret, let them at least be silent.
‘The problem,’ Miss Soedhono explains, ‘is that at the time of emasculation, most of the hermaphrodites escape detection and pass for female flowers. We breeders must be vigilant, and act before fertilisation occurs.’
A birdlike flunkey dressed in a white Nehru jacket walks into the room, and carefully deposits two additional items on the table next to Miss Soedhono’s untouched glass of water. A murmur passes through the men, as they watch first the gleaming machete, then the massive, furry coconut, being laid side by side.
‘Each male,’ Miss Soedhono continues, as her assistant pads away, ‘each female, and each hermaphrodite flower, bears six perianth units or lobes. Everything you need to know, gentlemen, is governed by threes. The outer three whorls make up the calyx and the inner three the corolla. We also meet three kinds of aestivation within the coconut, where the members of unopened flowers just touch each other without overlapping: Firstly, valvate. Secondly, imbricate. Thirdly, contortion.’