Landscape Without Landmarks

29 April, 2004—Petulu, Bali—

“As it is the fashion for modern tourists to travel pencil in hand, and bring home their portfolios filled with sketches,” wrote Washington Irving in 1820, “I am disposed to get up a few for the entertainment of my friends. When I look over, however, the hints and memorandums I have taken down for the purpose, my heart almost fails me at finding how my idle humor has led me aside from the great objects studied by every regular traveler who would make a book. I fear I shall give equal disappointment with an unlucky landscape painter, who has traveled on the continent, but following the bent of his vagrant inclination, has sketched in nooks and corners and bye-places. His sketchbook was accordingly crowded with cottages, and landscapes, and obscure ruins; but he had neglected to paint St. Peters or the Coliseum; the Cascade of Terni or the Bay of Naples; and had not a single glacier or volcano in his whole collection.”

I sit over on Wayan’s porch for an hour or two while he polishes yard after yard of silver chain with a rag dipped in something that seems vaguely poisonous. I watch, motionless myself, as his easily amused son runs back and forth and back and forth in the dusty enclosure that serves as their front yard, trailing a handmade black-heart-on-white-cotton kite with a leash not much longer than he is. As usual, the women are all off to one side, seated on the ground, in the shade of the tin-roofed shelter raised to protect the family motorcycle, all of them chipping away, in unison, and with barely conscious precision, at wooden buddhas, mass-produced by human hands. A hired jewelry worker, from Java, is stringing pearls just inside the door of the house, at the near end of a long and narrow table lined with other workers. Alongside him sits his wife, sorting the pearls. And below them, on the tiles, their son, who always opens his mouth in a perfectly round and stationary pearl-of-an-O whenever he catches sight of me. Across the table from them, a shirtless young man with tattoos on his chest and his ankles is, between sips of lukewarm coffee, improvising mock gamelan music—humming open-mouthed in the back of his throat and clicking his tongue to accompany a vagrant boy from the village, some one’s younger brother perhaps, who is dancing about the threshold, elbows and knees bent at crazy rigid angles, a miniature Barong mask tilting across his face. From deeper inside, from the diligent double row of bent heads that hem the table, drift giggles and mumbles and an occasional exclamation or burst of laughter, along with the tinkling of metal and the rattling of small stones. And all the while Wayan keeps doggedly on, polishing his long silver chains with his foul-smelling rag—and with very little expression on his face. I doze off for a moment, flat on my back with my legs extended and my head propped up on the pile of shoes discarded at the door by the now barefoot workers within. When I open my eyes, I can feel how the heat of the afternoon has begun to wane, I can see how the shadows have begun to lengthen, so I rise and head home. I brew tea, barely, with the already cooled water left in my morning’s thermos. And just as I sit down to write—a small, unremarkably white butterfly lands on the mango I’d placed there earlier, on the table, beside this journal of sketches.