“You careful not to get pregnant, Liz?”
“Not possible, Wayan. Felipe has a vasectomy.”
“Felipe has a vasectomy?” she asked, in as much awe as if she were asking, “Felipe has a villa in Tuscany?” (I feel the same way about it, by the way.) “Very difficult in Bali to get a man to do this. Always the woman problem, birth control.”
(Although it is true that the Indonesian birth rates are down lately due to a brilliant recent birth control incentive program: the government promised a new motorcycle to every man who would volunteer to come in for a vasectomy . . . though I hate to think the guys had to ride their new bikes home the same day.)
“Sex is funny,” Wayan mused as she watched me grimacing in pain, drinking more of her homemade medicine.
“Yeah, Wayan, thanks. It’s hilarious.”
“No, sex is funny,” she went on. “Make people do funny things. Everyone gets like this, at the beginning of love. Wanting too much happiness, too much pleasure, until you make yourself sick. Even to Wayan this happens at beginning of love story. Lose balance.”
“I’m embarrassed,” I say.
“Don’t,” she said. Then she added in perfect English (and perfect Balinese logic), “To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
I decided to call Felipe. I had some antibiotics at the house, an emergency stash I always travel with, just in case. Having had these infections before, I know how bad they can get, even traveling up into your kidneys. I didn’t want to go through that, not in Indonesia. So I called him and told him what had happened (he was mortified) and asked him to bring me over the pills. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Wayan’s healing prowess, it’s just that this was really serious pain . . .
She said, “You don’t need Western pills.”
“But maybe it’s better, just to be safe . . .”
“Give two hours,” she said. “If I don’t make you better, you can take your pills.”
Reluctantly, I agreed. My experience with these infections is that they can take days to clear, even with strong antibiotics. But I didn’t want to make her feel bad.
Tutti was playing in the shop and she kept bringing little drawings of houses over to cheer me up, patting my hand with an eight-year-old’s compassion. “Mama Elizabeth sick?” At least she didn’t know what I’d been doing to get sick.
“Did you buy your house yet, Wayan?” I asked.
“Not yet, honey. No hurry.”
“What about that place you liked? I thought you were going to buy that?”
“Found out not for sale. Too expensive.”
“Do you have any other places in mind?”
“Not worry about it now, Liz. For now, let me make you quickly feel better.”
Felipe arrived with my medicine and a face full of remorse, apologizing to both me and Wayan for having inflicted me with this pain, or at least that’s how he was seeing it.
“Not serious,” said Wayan. “Not worry. I fix her soon. Quickly better.”
Then she went into the kitchen and produced a giant glass mixing bowl full of leaves, roots, berries, something I recognized as turmeric, some shaggy mass of something that looked like witches’ hair, plus eye of what I believe might have been newt . . . all floating in its own brown juice. There was about a gallon of it in the bowl, whatever it was. It stank like a corpse.
“Drink, honey,” Wayan said. “Drink all.”
I suffered it down. And in less than two hours . . . well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed. An infection that would have taken days to treat with Western antibiotics was gone. I tried to pay her for having fixed me up, but she only laughed. “My sister doesn’t need to pay.” Then she turned on Felipe, fake stern: “You be careful with her now. Only sleep tonight, no touching.”
“You’re not embarrassed to fix people for problems like this, from sex?” I asked Wayan.
“Liz—I’m healer. I fix all problems, with women’s vaginas, with men’s bananas. Sometimes for women, I even make fake penises. For making sex alone.”
“Dildos?” I asked, shocked.
“Not everyone has Brazilian boyfriend, Liz,” she admonished. Then she looked at Felipe and said brightly, “If you ever need help making stiff your banana, I can give you medicine.”
I was busily assuring Wayan that Felipe needed not one bit of help with his banana, but he interrupted me—always the entrepreneur—to ask Wayan if this banana-stiffening therapy of hers could perhaps be bottled and marketed. “We could make a fortune,” he said. But she explained, no, it’s not like that. All her medicines must be made fresh each day in order to work. And they must be accompanied by her prayers. Anyway, internal medicine is not the only way Wayan can firm up a man’s banana, she assured us; she can also do this with massage. Then, to our lurid fascination, she described the different massages she does for men’s impotent bananas, how she grips around the base of the thing and kind of shakes it around for about an hour to encourage the blood to flow, while incanting special prayers.
I asked, “But Wayan—what happens when the man comes back every day and says, ‘Still not cured, Doctor! Need another banana massage!’ ” She laughed at this bawdy idea, and admitted that, yes, she has to be careful not to spend too much time fixing men’s bananas because it causes a certain amount of . . . strong feeling . . . within her, which she isn’t sure is good for the healing energy. And sometimes, yes, the men get out of control. (As you would, too, if you’d been impotent for years and suddenly this beautiful mahogany-skinned woman with long black silky hair gets the engine to turn over again.) She told us about the one man who leapt up and started chasing her around the room during an impotency cure, saying: “I need Wayan! I need Wayan!”
But that’s not all Wayan can do. Also, she told us, she is sometimes called upon to be a teacher of sex for a couple who are either struggling with impotence or frigidity, or who are having trouble making a baby. She has to draw magic pictures on their bedsheets and explain to them which sexual positions are appropriate for which time of the month. She said that if a man wants to make a baby he should make intercourse with his wife “really, really hard” and should shoot “water out from his banana into her vagina really, really fast.” Sometimes Wayan has to actually be there in the room with the copulating couple, explaining just how hard and fast this must be done.
I ask, “And is the man able to shoot water out of his banana really hard and really fast with Dr. Wayan standing over him watching?”
Felipe imitates Wayan watching the couple: “Faster! Harder! You want this baby or not?”
Wayan says, yes, she knows it’s crazy, but this is the job of the healer. Though she admits it requires a whole lot of purification ceremonies before and after this event in order to keep her sacred spirit intact, and she doesn’t like to do it very often because it makes her feel “funny.” But if a baby needs to be conceived, she will take care of it.
“And do these couples all have babies now?” I asked.
“Have babies!” she confirmed with pride. Of course they do.
But then Wayan confides something extremely interesting. She said that if a couple is not having any luck conceiving a child, she will examine both the man and the woman to determine who is, as they say, to blame. If it’s the woman, no problem—Wayan can fix this with ancient healing techniques. But if it’s the man—well, this presents a delicate situation here in the patriarchy of Bali. Wayan’s medical options here are limited because it is beyond the pale of safety to inform a Balinese man that he is sterile; it cannot possibly be true. Men are men, after all. If no pregnancy is occurring, it has to be the woman’s fault. And if the woman doesn’t provide her husband with a baby soon, she could be in big trouble—beaten, shamed or divorced.
“So what do you do in that situation?” I asked, impressed that a woman who still calls semen “banana water” could diagnose male infertility.
Wayan told
us all. What she does in the case of male infertility is to inform the man that his wife is infertile and needs to be seen privately every afternoon for “healing sessions.” When the wife comes to the shop alone, Wayan calls some young stud from the village to come over and have sex with her, hopefully creating a baby.
Felipe was appalled: “Wayan! No!”
But she just calmly nodded. Yes. “It’s the only way. If the wife is healthy, she will have baby. Then everybody happy.”
Felipe immediately wanted to know, since he lives in this town, “Who? Who do you hire to do this job?”
Wayan said, “The drivers.”
Which made us all laugh because Ubud is full of these young guys, these “drivers,” who sit on every corner and harass passing tourists with the never-ending sales pitch, “Transport? Transport?” trying to make a buck driving folks out of town to the volcanoes, the beaches or the temples. Generally speaking, this is a fairly good-looking crowd, what with their fine Gauguin skin, toned bodies and groovy long hair. You could make a nice bit of money in America operating a “fertility clinic” for women, staffed with beautiful guys like this. Wayan says the best thing about her infertility treatment is that the drivers generally don’t even ask any payment for their sexual transport services, especially if the wife is really cute. Felipe and I agree that this is quite generous and community-spirited of the fellows. Nine months later a beautiful baby is born. And everyone is happy. Best of all: “No need to cancel the marriage.” And we all know how horrible it is to cancel a marriage, especially in Bali.
Felipe said, “My God—what suckers we men are.”
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
On 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
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 Indon
esian 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 Japanese girls 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
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.”