“No,” he says, in his most friendly manner. The Balinese are famously friendly.
“See, I’m supposed to stay here for three or four months,” I tell him.
I don’t mention that it’s a prophecy—that my staying here for three or four months was predicted two years ago by an elderly and quite possibly demented Balinese medicine man, during a ten-minute palm-reading. I’m not sure how to explain this.
But what did that medicine man tell me, now that I think of it? Did he actually say that I would come back to Bali and spend three or four months living with him? Did he really say “living with” him? Or did he just want me to drop by again sometime if I was in the neighborhood and give him another ten bucks for another palm-reading? Did he say I would come back, or that I should come back? Did he really say, “See you later, alligator”? Or was it, “In a while, crocodile”?
I haven’t had any communication with the medicine man since that one evening. I wouldn’t know how to contact him, anyway. What might his address be? “Medicine Man, On His Porch, Bali, Indonesia”? I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. I remember that he seemed exceedingly old two years ago when we met; anything could have happened to him since then. All I have for sure is his name—Ketut Liyer—and the memory that he lives in a village just outside the town of Ubud. But I don’t remember the name of the village.
Maybe I should have thought all this through better.
74
But Bali is a fairly simple place to navigate. It’s not like I’ve landed in the middle of the Sudan with no idea of what to do next. This is an island approximately the size of Delaware and it’s a popular tourist destination. The whole place has arranged itself to help you, the Westerner with the credit cards, get around with ease. English is spoken here widely and happily.(Which makes me feel guiltily relieved. My brain synapses are so overloaded by my efforts to learn modern Italian and ancient Sanskrit during these last few months that I just can’t take on the task of trying to learn Indonesian or, even more difficult, Balinese—a language more complex than Martian.) It’s really no trouble being here. You can change your money at the airport, find a taxi with a nice driver who will suggest to you a lovely hotel—none of this is hard to arrange. And since the tourism industry collapsed in the wake of the terrorist bombing here two years ago (which happened a few weeks after I’d left Bali the first time), it’s even easier to get around now; everyone is desperate to help you, desperate for work.
So I take a taxi to the town of Ubud, which seems like a good place to start my journey. I check into a small and pretty hotel there on the fabulously named Monkey Forest Road. The hotel has a sweet swimming pool and a garden crammed with tropical flowers with blossoms bigger than volleyballs (tended to by a highly organized team of hummingbirds and butter-flies). The staff is Balinese, which means they automatically start adoring you and complimenting you on your beauty as soon as you walk in. The room has a view of the tropical treetops and there’s a breakfast included every morning with piles of fresh tropical fruit. In short, it’s one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed and it’s costing me less than ten dollars a day. It’s good to be back.
Ubud is in the center of Bali, located in the mountains, surrounded by terraced rice paddies and innumerable Hindu temples, with rivers that cut fast through deep canyons of jungle and volcanoes visible on the horizon. Ubud has long been considered the cultural hub of the island, the place where traditional Balinese painting, dance, carving, and religious ceremonies thrive. It isn’t near any beaches, so the tourists who come to Ubud are a self-selecting and rather classy crowd; they would prefer to see an ancient temple ceremony than to drink piña coladas in the surf. Regardless of what happens with my medicine man prophecy, this could be a lovely place to live for a while. The town is sort of like a small Pacific version of Santa Fe, only with monkeys walking around and Balinese families in traditional dress all over the place. There are good restaurants and nice little bookstores. I could feasibly spend my whole time here in Ubud doing what nice divorced American women have been doing with their time ever since the invention of the YWCA—signing up for one class after another: batik, drumming, jewelry-making, pottery, traditional Indonesian dance and cooking . . . Right across the road from my hotel there’s even something called “The Meditation Shop”—a small storefront with a sign advertising open meditation sessions every night from 6:00 to 7:00. May peace prevail on earth, reads the sign. I’m all for it.
By the time I unpack my bags it’s still early afternoon, so I decide to take myself for a walk, get reoriented to this town I haven’t seen in two years. And then I’ll try to figure out how to start finding my medicine man. I imagine this will be a difficult task, might take days or even weeks. I’m not sure where to start with my search, so I stop at the front desk on my way out and ask Mario if he can help me.
Mario is one of the guys who work at this hotel. I already made friends with him when I checked in, largely on account of his name. Not too long ago I was traveling in a country where many men were named Mario, but not one of them was a small, muscular, energetic Balinese fellow wearing a silk sarong and a flower behind his ear. So I had to ask, “Is your name really Mario? That doesn’t sound very Indonesian.”
“Not my real name,” he said. “My real name is Nyoman.”
Ah—I should have known. I should have known that I would have a 25 percent chance of guessing Mario’s real name. In Bali, if I may digress, there are only four names that the majority of the population give to their children, regardless of whether the baby is a boy or a girl. The names are Wayan (pronounced “Why-Ann”), Made (“mah-DAY”), Nyoman and Ketut. Translated, these names mean simply First, Second, Third and Fourth, and they connote birth order. If you have a fifth child, you start the name cycle all over again, so that the fifth child is really known as something like: “Wayan to the Second Power.” And so forth. If you have twins, you name them in the order they came out. Because there are basically only four names in Bali (higher-caste elites have their own selection of names) it’s totally possible (indeed, quite common) that two Wayans would marry each other. And then their firstborn would be named, of course: Wayan.
This gives a slight indication of how important family is in Bali, and how important your placement in that family is. You would think this system could become complicated, but somehow the Balinese work it out. Understandably and necessarily, nicknaming is popular. For instance, one of the most successful businesswomen in Ubud is a lady named Wayan who has a busy restaurant called Café Wayan, and so she is known as “Wayan Café”—meaning, “The Wayan who owns Café Wayan.” Somebody else might be known as “Fat Made,” or “Nyoman-Rental-Car” or “Stupid-Ketut-Who-Burned-Down-His-Uncle’s-House.” My new Balinese friend Mario got around the problem by simply naming himself Mario.
“Why Mario?”
“Because I love everything Italian,” he said.
When I told him that I’d recently spent four months in Italy, he found this fact so stupendously amazing that he came out from behind his desk and said, “Come, sit, talk.” I came, I sat, we talked. And that’s how we became friends.
So this afternoon I decide to start my search for my medicine man by asking my new friend Mario if by any chance he knows a man by the name of Ketut Liyer.
Mario frowns, thinking.
I wait for him to say something like, “Ah, yes! Ketut Liyer! Old medicine man who died just last week—so sad when venerable old medicine man passes away . . .”
Mario asks me to repeat the name, and this time I write it down, assuming I’m pronouncing something wrong. Sure enough, Mario brightens in recognition. “Ketut Liyer!”
Now I wait for him to say something like, “Ah, yes! Ketut Liyer! Insane person! Arrested last week for being a crazy man . . .”
But he says instead, “Ketut Liyer is famous healer.”
“Yes! That’s him!”
“I know him. I go in his house. Last week I take my cousin, she
needs cure for her baby crying all night. Ketut Liyer fixes it. One time I took American girl like you to Ketut Liyer’s house. Girl wanted magic to make her more beautiful to men. Ketut Liyer draw magic painting, for help her be more beautiful. I tease her after that. Every day I tell her, ‘Painting working! Look how beautiful you are! Painting working!’ ”
Remembering the image Ketut Liyer had drawn for me a few years ago, I tell Mario that I’d gotten a magic picture myself from the medicine man once.
Mario laughs. “Painting working for you, too!”
“My picture was to help me find God,” I explain.
“You don’t want to be more beautiful to men?” he asks, understandably confused.
I say, “Hey, Mario—do you think you could take me to visit Ketut Liyer someday? If you’re not too busy?”
“Not now,” he says.
Just as I’m starting to feel disappointed, he adds, “But maybe in five minutes?”
75
So this is how it comes to pass that—the very afternoon I have arrived in Bali—I’m suddenly on the back of a motorbike, clutching my new friend Mario the Italian-Indonesian, who is speeding me through the rice terraces toward Ketut Liyer’s home. For all that I’ve thought about this reunion with the medicine man over the last two years, I actually have no idea what I’m going to say to him when I arrive. And of course we don’t have an appointment. So we show up unannounced. I recognize the sign outside his door, same as last time, saying: “Ketut Liyer—painter.” It’s a typical, traditional Balinese family compound. A high stone wall surrounds the entire property, there’s a courtyard in the middle and a temple in the back. Several generations live out their lives together in the various interconnected small homes within these walls. We enter without knocking (no door, anyway) to the riotous dismay of a some typical Balinese watchdogs (skinny, angry) and there in the courtyard is Ketut Liyer the elderly medicine man, wearing his sarong and his golf shirt, looking precisely the same as he did two years ago when I first met him. Mario says something to Ketut, and I’m not exactly fluent in Balinese, but it sounds like a general introduction, something along the lines of, “Here’s a girl from America—go for it.”
Ketut turns his mostly toothless smile upon me with the force of a compassionate fire hose, and this is so reassuring: I had remembered correctly, he is extraordinary. His face is a comprehensive encyclopedia of kindness. He shakes my hand with an excited and powerful grip.
“I am very happy to meet you,” he says.
He has no idea who I am.
“Come, come,” he says, and I’m ushered to the porch of his little house, where woven bamboo mats serve as furniture. It looks exactly as it did two years ago. We both sit down. With no hesitation, he takes my palm in his hand—assuming that, like most of his Western visitors, a palm-reading is what I’ve come for. He gives me a quick reading, which I am reassured to see is an abridged version of exactly what he said to me last time. (He may not remember my face, but my destiny, to his practiced eye, is unchanged.) His English is better than I remembered, and also better than Mario’s. Ketut speaks like the wise old Chinamen in classic kung fu movies, a form of English you could call “Grasshopperese,” because you could insert the endearment “Grasshopper” into the middle of any sentence and it sounds very wise. “Ah—you have very lucky good fortune, Grasshopper . . .”
I wait for a pause in Ketut’s predictions, then interrupt to remind him that I had been here to see him already, two years ago.
He looks puzzled. “Not first time in Bali?”
“No, sir.”
He thinks hard. “You girl from California?”
“No,” I say, my spirits tumbling deeper. “I’m the girl from New York.”
Ketut says to me (and I’m not sure what this has to do with anything), “I am not so handsome anymore, lost many teeth. Maybe I will go to dentist someday, get new teeth. But too afraid of dentist.”
He opens his deforested mouth and shows me the damage. Indeed, he has lost most of his teeth on the left side of his mouth and on the right side it’s all broken, hurtful-looking yellow stubs. He fell down, he tells me. That’s how his teeth got knocked out.
I tell him I’m sorry to hear it, then try again, speaking slowly. “I don’t think you remember me, Ketut. I was here two years ago with an American Yoga teacher, a woman who lived in Bali for many years.”
He smiles, elated. “I know Ann Barros!”
“That’s right. Ann Barros is the Yoga teacher’s name. But I’m Liz. I came here asking for your help once because I wanted to get closer to God. You drew me a magic picture.”
He shrugs amiably, couldn’t be less concerned. “Don’t remember,” he says.
This is such bad news it’s almost funny. What am I going to do in Bali now? I don’t know exactly what I’d imagined it would be like to meet Ketut again, but I did hope we’d have some sort of super-karmic tearful reunion. And while it’s true I had feared he might be dead, it hadn’t occurred to me that—if he were still alive—he wouldn’t remember me at all. Although now it seems the height of dumbness to have ever imagined that our first meeting would have been as memorable for him as it was for me. Maybe I should have planned this better, for real.
So I describe the picture he had made for me, the figure with the four legs (“so grounded on earth”) and the missing head (“not looking at the world through the intellect”) and the face in the heart (“looking at the world through the heart”) and he listens to me politely, with modest interest, like we’re discussing somebody else’s life entirely.
I hate to do this because I don’t want to put him on the spot, but it’s got to be said, so I just lay it out there. I say, “You told me I should come back here to Bali. You told me to stay here for three or four months. You said I could help you learn English and you would teach me the things that you know.” I don’t like the way my voice sounds—just the teensiest bit desperate. I don’t mention anything about the invitation he’d once floated for me to live with his family. That seems way out of line, given the circumstances.
He listens to me politely, smiling and shaking his head, like, Isn’t it so funny the things people say?
I almost drop it then. But I’ve come so far, I have to put forth one last effort. I say, “I’m the book writer, Ketut. I’m the book writer from New York.”
And for some reason that does it. Suddenly his face goes translucent with joy, turns bright and pure and transparent. A Roman candle of recognition sparks to life in his mind. “YOU!” he says. “YOU! I remember YOU!” He leans forward, takes my shoulders in his hands and starts to shake me happily, the way a child shakes an unopened Christmas present to try to guess what’s inside. “You came back! You came BACK!”
“I came back! I came back!” I say.
“You, you, you!”
“Me, me, me!”
I’m all tearful now, but trying not to show it. The depth of my relief—it’s hard to explain. It takes even me by surprise. It’s like this—it’s like I was in a car accident, and my car went over a bridge and sank to the bottom of a river and I’d somehow managed to free myself from the sunken car by swimming through an open window and then I’d been frog-kicking and struggling to swim all the way up to the daylight through the cold, green water and I was almost out of oxygen and the arteries were bursting out of my neck and my cheeks were puffed with my last breath and then—GASP!—I broke through to the surface and took in huge gulps of air. And I survived. That gasp, that breaking through—this is what it feels like when I hear the Indonesian medicine man say, “You came back!” My relief is exactly that big.
I can’t believe it worked.
“Yes, I came back,” I say. “Of course I came back.”
“I so happy!” he says. We’re holding hands and he’s wildly excited now. “I do not remember you at first! So long ago we meet! You look different now! So different from two years! Last time, you very sad-looking woman. Now—so happy! Like different person
!”
The idea of this—the idea of a person looking so different after a mere two years have passed—seems to incite in him a shiver of giggles.
I give up trying to hide my tearfulness and just let it all spill over. “Yes, Ketut. I was very sad before. But life is better now.”
“Last time you in bad divorce. No good.”
“No good,” I confirm.
“Last time you have too much worry, too much sorrow. Last time, you look like sad old woman. Now you look like young girl. Last time you ugly! Now you pretty!”
Mario bursts into ecstatic applause and pronounces victoriously: “See? Painting working!”
I say, “Do you still want me to help you with your English, Ketut?”
He tells me I can start helping him right now and hops up nimbly, gnome-like. He bounds into his little house and comes back with a pile of letters he’s received from abroad over the last few years (so he does have an address!). He asks me to read the letters aloud to him; he can understand English well, but can’t read much. I’m his secretary already. I’m a medicine man’s secretary. This is fabulous. The letters are from art collectors overseas, from people who have somehow managed to acquire his famous magic drawings and magic paintings. One letter is from a collector in Australia, praising Ketut for his painting skills, saying, “How can you be so clever to paint with such detail?” Ketut answers to me, like giving dictation: “Because I practice many, many years.”
When the letters are finished, he updates me on his life over the last few years. Some changes have occurred. Now he has a wife, for instance. He points across the courtyard at a heavyset woman who’s been standing in the shadow of her kitchen door, glaring at me like she’s not sure if she should shoot me, or poison me first and then shoot me. Last time I was here, Ketut had sadly shown me photographs of his wife who had recently died—a beautiful old Balinese woman who seemed bright and childlike even at her advanced age. I wave across the courtyard to the new wife, who backs away into her kitchen.