Costruire il risveglio

Costruire il risveglio (Building the Awakening) is an essay on the Indonesian genocide of 1965–66, first published in Italian in the edited volume Trilogia della catastrofe (effequ, May 2020). What follows is the opening section, translated into English by me.

———

In a little over six months, from late 1965 to mid-1966, an estimated half a million members of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI) and its affiliated organizations were killed.1 Another million or so were detained without charge, some for more than thirty years, and many of them were subjected to torture and other inhumane treatment. Few, if any, of the victims were armed, and almost all those killed and detained belonged to what were at the time lawful political and social organizations. This was not a civil war. It was one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century.

(Robinson G. B., The killing season. A history of the Indonesian massacres, 1965-66, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, p. 3)

Getting off the plane, the first thing I do is ask the man sitting next to me on the flight from Singapore for the time. He is Indonesian — I recognised his language from a brief exchange with the flight attendant. About forty, black jacket, white shirt. A serial traveller, the kind of person who stands out in airports. Not that they exist only there, of course, but the airport reveals a mastery impossible elsewhere. He knows airports inside out. He dominates them. He is perfectly punctual, never gets lost looking for a gate, suitcase immaculate. The seat seems built for him; he fastens his belt with eyes closed, goes to the restroom without blocking the aisle. At security, it is a spectacle to watch him glide through like a bird in flight, while the rest of us fumble with coins, watches, trousers without belts.

Like me, who lost his watch during a layover. Now I can’t even remember the time zone: plus five, plus eight, plus ten? My phone is useless, refusing to connect to the local network. Until now, I hadn’t minded living in a timeless limbo, but the journey is ending — Rome to Singapore, the endless layover, the wandering in search of bathrooms with the impossible sun always in my face. Knowing the time will bring me back to earth, I tell myself. And besides, the man has been watching me throughout the flight, as I shifted restlessly in my seat, studying me as though I were some strange animal glimpsed for the first time—an insect forever changing colour, a fish from the abyss. He seemed intrigued but unable to break the silence. So I did it for him. He smiles as he tells me the time, perfect teeth gleaming. Six-thirty in the evening.

His name is Wayan.

“See, the sun is setting,” he says, pointing a long, bony finger toward the terminal glass of the boarding bridge. He doesn’t gesture at the planes docked side by side on oblique axes, but at the sea beyond the runway. Within the water and low in the sky, the sun sinks. A bloody red, streaked with black clouds, like a star never seen before. Ambiguous, intrusive. But it is an illusion. At equatorial latitudes one always believes to be in an extraordinary elsewhere, convinced that even the sun is exotic.

“I lost my watch in the layover,” I say. “I must have taken it off when I lay down to sleep. It was a long stop, more than ten hours. When I got up, I forgot it. I’d set it for both Italian and Indonesian time…”

“A ritual?”

“Something like that. Pretending I never leave home. I’m nostalgic.”

“I come from Singapore, the trick wouldn’t work for me. Same time zone here. And anyway, with my wife and children, I don’t have much nostalgia.”

“You never miss Indonesia?”

He barely moves his lips without letting sound escape. The expression is enigmatic, unintentionally strange, as if he were a character in a film dodging an awkard question.

“I’ve come back to visit my mother,” he says at last. “Just a few days. You’re not here on holiday, are you? Where are you from?”

“I’m Italian, and no, not holiday,” I reply. Then, for the first time, I test the cover story I prepared: “I work with an art foundation in Venice, the Biennale. I’m here to visit galleries and meet artists.”

“Venice. I heard the monsoon shifted up there, that’s why the rain hasn’t reached here yet.” His face stays serious; I can’t tell if he’s joking. I give a half-smile. We’ve moved inside the airport now, along a wide carpeted corridor, warm lights overhead.

“What made you think I wasn’t a tourist?” I ask.

“You spoke to me. And your clothes—different from theirs, less sloppy.”

I look down at myself. Nothing special: a wrinkled shirt, black trousers, closed shoes. But it sets me apart from the Australians in flip-flops and shorts, the ones Wayan nods toward as they rush to the visa counters, eager not to waste a single minute of their tropical holiday. We walk slowly.

“It’s almost dark,” he says, “but the Australians are still afraid of being killed by the sun, even at night.”

A heavy man passes us, traveling alone, skin pale and taut, an explorer’s hat widening his bull-like neck, his nose smeared thick with zinc. I smile, remembering a line from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, reread on the flight: “Forget the fancy creams—good old zinc oxide will make your skin like a baby’s.”

To prepare for this trip I had been reading nonfiction, Wallace’s cruise reportage among them. A work entirely different from what I intend to write here, yet it seemed useful to have a text like that in mind—lucid, unsentimental, sharp. I want to write about Indonesia’s past tragedies at the right distance.

We pass the muṣallā, the prayer room. Airports in Muslim countries always have one; Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. The room is empty, though it is prayer time. Odd, I think—then remember I’m in Bali, where Hinduism prevails.

“It wasn’t always like this,” Wayan says. I flinch, though of course he isn’t answering my thought. “The island wasn’t in the hands of tourists. But then, we are the ones who gave it up without resistance. I even left.”

“What past are you talking about?”

“Oh, many years ago…” he says, evasive.

I press. “Sorry, I don’t follow.”

He looks around, hesitates. “There are two Indonesias. Before 1965 and after. We call it the tragedy of ’65. You know what I mean?” His voice drops.

“A little. Not much. Indonesian history isn’t taught at home.” I crack my knuckles, nervous. I cannot reveal I’ve come precisely to write about the genocide.

“I thought it was forbidden to talk about,” I add.

“I tell you because you’re a foreigner. And one of the few Europeans who even knows of it, apparently.” His eyes narrow.

If you don’t know the massacre, how do you know it’s taboo? he is surely wondering.

“I was a child then,” he continues. “My mother sometimes hints at it. Rarely. Balinese who lived it prefer not to remember. It’s a mistake—some things should not be forgotten.” He stops, glances around again. He will not say more. I want to insist, to hear more, to grasp the link between genocide and tourism. But it’s too late. An airport employee diverts me to the visa desk. Wayan shakes my hand, knowing we’ll never meet again. He disappears behind a sliding door, leaving me a final look. What was in his eyes? I imagine hope.

In line, I realize my mood has shifted. I still feel an intruder, but the country does not seem intent on rejecting me. Not yet. Wayan spoke of an Indonesia before ’65 and after, and I know this is true. I also know there are two kinds of Indonesians: those who want to talk, and those who want to bury it. I am here to find the first, and the fact that it happens by chance seems an auspicious sign.

“Tourist,” I tell the officer, lying smoothly. My face calm, I suppress the paranoid thought that they might know of my emails with journalists, activists, professors. The anxiety that dogged me through twenty-five hours of travel, bringing nightmares every time I closed my eyes, has evaporated.

The officer doesn’t care. He stamps a visa mid-page without looking up, hands back my passport with disdain. I have a month to explore this vast archipelago. Waiting at the baggage belt, I dismiss the taxi drivers waving frantically outside, feel the heavy but bearable air, toy with theories about the lost watch. Then, pulling my jacket from my pack—the monsoon could return at any moment—I find the watch in its pocket, where I had placed it before leaving. It falls to the ground.

~

It is my first time in Bali, but Federico knows it well. He comes often. He speaks Indonesian to the taxi driver, gives the name of a hotel in Kuta.
“Bare rooms but decent. No bugs,” he says in Italian. “Under ten euros, you get a pool, a garden with palms. You won’t find anything like it in the center.”

We met while both searching in vain for public transport. Signs hinted at it, but it never appeared. We shared a taxi.

As we left the ring road for the city streets, Federico talked about his work. I barely listened, eyes on the window. To my surprise, the roads were smooth, the flowerbeds neat, the palms tall and green, the traffic calm. Along the seafront, stone demons bared their fangs from the gateways to the beach.

Nothing like my previous experience in Indonesia. In Makassar I remembered swarms of motorbikes, cables dangling from broken lamps, sparking in rain; then, when the sky cleared, the sun burning through a haze of polluted dust. I shut myself into a windowless hotel room with the air-conditioning on full blast.

Settling in had been hard.

Federico asks why I am here. I almost give him the Biennale line, but it seems unnecessary. I still stay vague.

“You’re writing about Indonesian history? Which period?”

“From independence to now.”

“Right, from 1945?”

“Yes. Indonesia declared independence in 1945, though the Dutch fought until 1949. Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed it in the power vacuum after Japan’s surrender. Then four years of war as Holland tried, and failed, to reclaim the Indies.”

“Of course. And you’ll cover 1965, I imagine.”

“Yes…” I answered, startled. “You’re the first Italian I’ve met who knows.”

“I’m Arrigo Cervetto’s son. Of course I know. I recall he wrote an article on it…”

What are the odds? Traveling across the world to investigate the annihilation of the Indonesian Communist Party, only to meet the son of the founder of Lotta Comunista—one of the very few Italians who wrote on the tragedy as it unfolded.

Federico can’t recall the article’s title. “I’ll find it and send it to you,” he says.

“Anyway, I’ll look it up and send it to you,” he concludes.

Another coincidence, reinforcing the feeling I had after meeting Wayan. Whoever believes in benevolent spirits fluttering around us, who, in good moods, bring us the right encounters, would read in meeting this cheerful-faced man another encouraging sign.

Federico would become important to my journey. In the following days we will meet often, especially in the evenings. He will tell me of his scooter rides hunting for amulets and ceramics; I will tell him of my meetings with journalists and activists. Sometimes the stories I will hear will ring inside me like sharp bells, unbearable. Federico will help soften them.

As Lawrence Osborne writes: “Everyone opens up to a stranger sometimes. I do it more than most. I must have a knack for intimacy.”

~

Later that night I sat alone at the Vi Ai Pi bar-restaurant. Past eleven. Federico is asleep, no doubt. I had slept a little too, heavy with fatigue, but jet lag shortened it. The room was too hot to try again—windows sealed against mosquitoes, fan broken. I walked outside. The sea breeze struck me, cooled me, revived me. I followed a street inland, curious about a noise. Rounding a corner, I saw it was a chorus of voices. A pack of young Englishmen, drunk, shouting in an accent so thick it seemed they were repeating a single word, like in Dostoevsky’s story where a group of drunks communicate with one sound. Past them the street narrowed, pedestrians pressed onto a slim curb, scooters rushing past. Shops shuttered, concrete blocks crammed with bars and eateries. My first generous impression of Bali, formed in the taxi, was already revised downward.

I stopped at the Vi Ai Pi. Not for quality—it was no better than the others—but for the outdoor tables, the breeze, the location. It stands at the corner of Legian and White Rose, facing the Ground Zero Memorial. I had planned to visit, not expecting to arrive by chance my first night. Ordering mango juice from a skeletal waitress with a hamster voice, I studied it. A tall white slab carved with ornaments, inset with black marble engraved with the victims’ names. Before it, a fountain playing at different heights. At night, green and blue lights make it glow like an amusement-park attraction. Was it inappropriate?

What would Berlin say if the Holocaust memorial were lit this way?

I sat reflecting until the drunk Englishmen wandered back, stopping before the fountain. Some stared blankly at the jets of water, others squinted at the names.

I drained my juice, rose, and joined them. It took me a minute to find the least drunk: Jonathan, a stocky twenty-year-old in sagging trunks, sunglasses perched on his cap, a crown in hand. His dialect was decipherable. After small talk—“Yes, I’m traveling alone.” “No, I don’t like football, never been to a stadium”—I asked if he knew what the memorial was.
“Of course I do, everyone does, there’s a plaque somewhere,” he snapped, waving vaguely.

I asked the same of each tourist who stopped there. An experiment. Most knew: young ones had read about it, older ones had seen the bombing on TV, some heard from locals. But then I asked another question. And as in Italy, no one knew the answer.

In Venice, days earlier, I had spent an evening pestering strangers: “Do you know about 1965 in Indonesia?” I said again now: “There was a terrible event. People died all over the country.” As in Venice, not a soul knew.

Of the eighty thousand killed in Bali, and the hundreds of thousands more tortured, massacred, deported across Indonesia, no one knew anything.