Empire of the East (18 page)

We seated ourselves in the large but empty restaurant, and now the urgent question posed itself — which language was it to be? My Portuguese, learned twenty-two years before, in readiness for an expedition to Brazil, was ragged indeed, but the result of a three-month crash-course in Indonesian Bahasa was worse. My friend’s notes had suggested that the choice of Portuguese might give rise to a suspicion of an unwelcome partisanship, and this seems to have been the
Figaro
man’s experience. Nevertheless the waiter, an obvious Timorese, looked pleasant enough. I took the risk and believed that I detected faint indications of pleasure and surprise. The service was rapid, the fish excellent and the waiter’s guarded geniality unflagging.

Later, a walk along the seafront followed where a row of beached craft had ploughed ashore sixteen years before. Some of them had become homes, in one case with a superstructure drooping ragged thatch over the rust. This, profiled against the hard, white tropical sea, in some way displayed a brand of desolation that no terrestrial building, however shattered, could have matched. Scattered for a couple of hundred yards along the beach, there was something in this delicate pattern of destruction recalling the work of some tribal blacksmith, of iron beaten and twisted into a decoration. Here, where the crowd assembled in clean shirts and well-brushed hair, and the smartly turned-out officer raised his stick like a conductor’s baton to time the falling of bodies toppled into the water, a memorial will someday be raised. Now there is nothing, incredibly enough, but an ‘Integration Monument’ and an unused miniature children’s park. The setting is Australoid: thin, wiry grass over earth polished by erosion, trees with leaves like arrow points, offering little shade. The children of families who had colonized the invasion hulks scrape in the sand along the shore for molluscs and chase through the underbrush on dry land after huge edible crickets. These people have the curly hair of some aboriginal island-strain, and they watched us as we passed with wide, incredulous eyes. It was a scene, said Claudia, that cried out loud for photography, and it was decided to return with her camera an hour or so before sunset, when the light would be at its best.

A problem now arose. Díli was a place of truly amazing old taxis. We spotted one which was not merely the result of obvious cannibalism but was composed roughly of two halves of different makes miraculously welded together. With island travel in view, I spoke to one of the drivers, once again unintentionally currying favour with my bad Portuguese, learning from him that he was not permitted to leave the capital, and that it was difficult to do so other than by bus. In the various trips into the countryside made by my friend he had always done this returning to Díli every night. He had been furnished with the addresses of various Portuguese priests in country towns, and so was I, but the impression that I got from his notes was that he was constantly aware of proving an embarrassment to them. His conversation with one of them he described as ‘banal’, and in reality, when every movement this good man made was certain to have been watched, and every visitor to him seen as a potential suspect, it was hard to see how such discussions could have been otherwise. The procedure to be observed by the traveller leaving Díli was to inform the Turismo of his destination, and when he arrived at this he was under obligation to report his presence to the local police. It had been suggested that we might be able to see two priests based in Díli itself, or seek a meeting with Bishop Belo, head of the Catholic Church in East Timor, but it was evident that even in the capital, where foreigners still remained conspicuous in the extreme, such visits might be unwelcome.

Even by the end of the first day, the feeling grew that a stay in Díli might not only be unprofitable, but uncomfortable. Shortly before dusk, as arranged, we set out on our photographic expedition, which from Claudia’s point of view was highly successful, through the dramatic enhancement of the invasion’s aftermath by an exceptionally splendid sunset in its rear. Having dealt with that we continued our walk towards the wharf, noting with the onset of night how rare and distant the town’s lights appeared to be. Claudia said, ‘I think we’re being followed.’

I glanced over my shoulder and said, ‘I think you’re right.’ A moment before we had been walking in a vast seashore emptiness, and now, fifteen yards back, a dark figure trailed us on soft-soled shoes. ‘He must have sprung up out of the ground,’ I said. ‘Maybe he was hiding in one of the boats.’

‘What do we do about it?’ Claudia wanted to know.

‘Stop and wait for him,’ I said. ‘He’ll have to pass.’

And this, without slowing down, he did. A few yards further on he crossed the road and disappeared among some darkening trees.

We turned back towards the hotel, showing the only light in this part of the town. ‘Is this going to happen to us every time we go out?’ she asked.

By six forty-five, with the implacable fall of night, we found ourselves virtually confined to the Turismo’s dim interiors, its silence, and the exhausted tropical odours breathed in from its garden. The weak strip-lighting made reading impossible. The patio area was full of mosquitoes, and those that had found their way into the bedrooms could only be defeated by lighting up a Moon Tiger — said to be bad for the health. It was an environment that fostered an unhopeful frame of mind, best countered by giving in and going early to bed.

Everyone is awake — gratefully — at dawn in such places, in preparation for whatever the day has in store. In this case there was a lively commotion round the hotel’s entrance, where the two nuns who had spent the night in the Bishop’s house had arrived, escorted by various friends from his household, to collect the sister from Italy. The truck stood at the gate and her baggage was being loaded on — an operation that produced the maximum of scuttling activity among all concerned. Watching this from the supine background of the lobby — these taut, purposeful, starched little figures — I was suddenly aware of an inexcusable personal inertia. At that moment, Paola, in charge, coping with everything, signing papers at the reception, checking that nothing had been overlooked, spotted and hailed us with a flood of cheerful Italian, alternating with a translation into English. ‘So you want to change your minds, eh? You coming with us? You want me to, I tell these people you come along with us to Venilale.’

‘But can we? I mean, would they allow it?’

‘Sure they would. I tell them you stay with us. We sign papers for you. It is OK.’

Claudia and I exchanged cheerful glances. ‘We’d like to do that very much,’ I said.

We went up to get our bags. One thing was worrying Claudia — the state of her travel-stained clothing that had seen so many miles of mountains, jungles and swamps. She went off for five minutes and reappeared wearing a long white dress brought along for such an occasion, which had been crushed away for many months in the bottom of her rucksack. At one point a biro had leaked in a pocket, leaving a stain that could be lightened but never quite removed. The dress was patterned with innumerable creases, yet Sister Paola viewed it with admiration. ‘Va benissimo,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow we iron. Is very good.’

With huge relief we threw our bags into the back of the truck and settled ourselves with the newly arrived Maria Letitzia and the East Timor veteran Sister Olive from the Philippines. It now turned out Maria Letitzia was not from Rome, but Naples, where I had had the good fortune to spend a war year, and had picked up some Italian with a marked Neapolitan accent. She was amazed and delighted to listen once again to the familiar sing-song in Díli of all places.

In the morning Díli was different, reduced to a false normality of boxy, half-finished new buildings, a non-functional traffic light, roadside mechanics patching fresh rubber on to worn-out car tyres, and a new store with a garish facade. Sister Olive, laughing, translated the notice
: GRAND OPENING TOMORROW,
but blinds of dust shone in the slanting sun all over the window, and it was clear that the grand opening remained far away. This was a city still grievously sick, although it was hard in these prosaic settings to believe in a commonplace of mass-murder committed to numbers.

We rattled past a church with a black line of elderly people facing it on their knees in the street. There were women in widow’s weeds, and one old man seemed swathed in a shroud. They were rocking backwards and forwards, with a bell bucketing overhead, and a soldier in camouflage watching and leaning on his gun. At the very moment of our passing something went on inside the church that set off a quavering outcry. Sister Olive smiled affectionately. ‘The worship of the common people of East Timor is very theatrical,’ she said.

‘Devout Christians,’ I said.

She shook her head, smile undiminished. ‘This is something I believed when I came here. Nothing could be further from the truth. They keep the Commandments, they pray, they attend mass, fast, give alms when they have anything to give, but their Christianity is skin deep. Underneath, they are animists. They worship a cockerel. There is a village where we are going where they worship a kind of worm.’

Didn’t this come as a great disappointment, Claudia wanted to know.

For a moment I thought Sister Olive would burst into laughter. ‘Not at all. These people are godly in a truly religious sense. We have learned to co-exist with their animism. Next week there is a church festival in Venilale, and if you are with us you will see the shaman performing the cockerel dance in front of Bishop Belo.’

‘Incredible.’

‘He has ten boy assistants who dance with him. In the Tetum language they call them the Cockerel’s Children. It’s something you must see. After the dance they come to the church.’ She was actually happy to be able to present us with this picture. After our previous experiences of missionaries at work among primitive peoples we were astonished.

‘We see the shaman as a force for good,’ Sister Olive said. ‘Out in the country where we are there aren’t any doctors. Only us and the shaman. We work together. If people feel happier with traditional medicine they go to him. We hand out malaria pills. We give the shaman Nivaquine for his malaria. It has to be done on the quiet so as not to hurt his pride. “Take two a week,” we tell him. “Just for luck.” ’

There were forty miles of coast between Díli and Manatuto and all of it deserted. It was open, deforested country offering no hiding place for the defenders from the pounding of naval guns. Once there had been fishing villages along this beach but there was no sign of them now apart from the occasional timbers of a boat, half digested by sand.

Turning inland where the road twisted up through the hills overlooking the sea, cultivation of any kind had long ceased and the scene had returned to an aloof primeval emptiness. Nothing grew but an imposing native eucalyptus with trunk and branches polished like ivory soaring up from the smooth, sun-cropped grass. They were widely separated in a landscape with the barren allure and infeasibility of a de Chirico, even a Dali: the ivory of the trees against the brown wash of the grass, a scrawl of beach strewn with the boats’ blackened timbers, a grey, overheated sky. The ‘Final Cleansing’ was the Indonesian government’s term for what they hoped were to be the terminal episodes of their war, and it seemed likely that this area had been cleansed.

After Manatuto came Baucau, one of the most disturbing places in the world. Baucau had been the administrative centre of the government forces deployed against, the turbulent eastern end of the island, a dishevelled town full of barracks and interrogation centres with high, windowless walls and electrified fences. Baucau had been the end of the road for so many real and assumed supporters of Fretilin, the resistance movement. Distraught wives searching in other locations for vanished husbands and sons were often turned away with the macabre jest, ‘He’s gone to Baucau to finish his education,’ and with that they understood that their quest was at an end. A manual captured by the Fretilin entitled
Established Procedure for Interrogation of Prisoners
describes the everyday routines of this place and instils a note of caution.

Hopefully, interrogation accompanied by the use of violence will not take place except in certain circumstances when the person being interrogated is having difficulty in telling the truth … If it proves necessary to use violence make sure there are no people around … to see what is happening, so as not to arouse people’s antipathy. Avoid taking photographs showing torture in progress (people being photographed at times when they are being subjected to electric current, when they have been stripped naked, etc.). It is better to make attractive photographs such as shots taken while eating together with the prisoner or shaking hands with those who have just come down from the bush. If necessary the interrogation should be repeated over and over again.

The most sinister of all hotels is a short distance away, at the entrance to the town; a fun-fair structure painted orange with chromium trimmings, which it is impossible to miss. It is the only hotel in the east of the island deemed suitable for the reception of foreigners, but as part of it is used as a detention centre to cope with any exceptional overflow of prisoners, there have been complaints of sleepless nights from the occasional journalist lodged there.

At this point the road branched through forested mountains to the south, and after a twenty-five-mile easy climb, we drove into Venilale. Instantly we were in a different world. At an altitude perhaps of three thousand feet the tropics had been excluded. This we instantly realized was a redoubt of Portugal enshrining the nostalgia of men whose fathers or grandfathers, if not they themselves, had come from some calm and melancholic village in Alentejo or Tras os Montes in search of a fortune to be accumulated in a comfortable way. Venilale, in a subtle fashion, had distanced itself from the East. It was prim, clean, pastel-shaded and devoid of noise. Old men in dark clothes were strolling quietly down the street, not to go anywhere but because it was the custom to make an appearance at that time of day. There were no cars to be seen but a man drove by in a black tumbril drawn by a sprightly horse. An authentic Portuguese house, with ceramic tiles and embellishments of carved wood, had survived whatever had happened to the town, and a man raised himself from the russet gloom of the veranda to lift his hat as we passed. One could almost imagine a tang of the Atlantic in the fresh mountain wind.