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Authors: Michel Faber
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that surround the Hotel’s classic temple style architeture’. None of this matters to the men, not even to the ones who are architects and hotel owners by trade.
Nor do these men care that the Magdalaya Hotel’s echoing gymnasium lacks the facilities to which they’re accustomed, that the water of the swimming pool lies chlori-nous and still, and that, outside in the shimmering heat, the nets of the tennis courts are crawling with bees. They have not come here for these things. They have come here for pleasures that are available nowhere else on earth.
The unique ritual spectacles of Indonesia? No, no, no. They have not come to see the re-enacted ancient battles, the whip duels, the spirit drummers, the funeral feasts. They’ve perused photographs of these phenomena in the inflight magazine on the journey here, and what small appetite they might have had for them is satisfied.
They have not come to dive in Padangbai, snorkel in Komodo or surf in Grajagan. They are unhealthy men, most of them: overweight, fiftyish, wearing expensive, roomy suits and white shirts already ringed with crystallising antiperspirant stains. Many of them have wives who would have adored visiting the temples and soaking up the sun, but they’ve left their wives at home – at home in London, New York, Montreal, Munich, Vienna, Tokyo, Melbourne, and many other places.
Some of the men have brought cameras, simply because they’re in the habit of taking a camera on overseas trips, or because their wives urged them not to leave home without one. These cameras will remain unused, for none of the men would dare take a photograph during Miss Soedhono’s presentation, nor would there be much point in doing so. After all, one’s own rapture cannot be captured on film.
Mounted high on one of the walls of the conference room is a slender grey surveillance camera, pointed not at the empty expanse of purple carpet where Miss Soedhono will soon stand, but at the audience. It moves from left to right in an oiled, leisurely arc, like a snake half-dozing over an uneventful hole in the earth. Its dark glassy eye glints each time its slow-motion swivel catches the light from the spherical lamps hanging from the ceilings. These lamps, switched on despite the noonday sunshine penetrating the thin fabric of the curtains, cast an ambiguous luminosity over the men, yellowing them in much the same way that a grimy refrigerator bulb discolours leftover hunks of beef and neglected jars of mayonnaise.
The conference room is filled to capacity, or it will be when the men who are smoking outside have finished sucking nicotine into their bloodstreams. Once Miss Soedhono’s presentation is underway, no one will think of their more mundane addictions, but in the meantime these still exert their pitiful tyranny. Tobacco, chewing-gum, an early-morning sniff of cocaine in the sauna-like lavatories. Some of the men have vomited or had diarrhoea: the indigestible overload of waiting.
Finally all the cigarette butts are extinguished, all the bowels purged, all the mouths rinsed and sprayed, all the foreheads mopped one last time before such things cease to matter. The last stragglers – although that word is unjust, because no one dares to be even a second late, and the ‘stragglers’ are merely those who take their seats five minutes rather than an hour early – walk self-consciously into the room, nodding blindly at the fellowship of strangers among whom they must find their place. No one speaks, apart from grunts of permission as knees are swung aside to allow ungainly male bodies to squeeze past, and grunts of relief as buttocks settle on the velvety green seats and trousers are adjusted.
The oversized clock on the back wall, slightly fogged with condensation, ticks towards the agreed geometry of the long and short hands. The men make no attempt to converse or even acknowledge each other’s existence, preferring to stare at the long hand of the clock as it
Nor do these men care that the Magdalaya Hotel’s echoing gymnasium lacks the facilities to which they’re accustomed, that the water of the swimming pool lies chlori-nous and still, and that, outside in the shimmering heat, the nets of the tennis courts are crawling with bees. They have not come here for these things. They have come here for pleasures that are available nowhere else on earth.
The unique ritual spectacles of Indonesia? No, no, no. They have not come to see the re-enacted ancient battles, the whip duels, the spirit drummers, the funeral feasts. They’ve perused photographs of these phenomena in the inflight magazine on the journey here, and what small appetite they might have had for them is satisfied.
They have not come to dive in Padangbai, snorkel in Komodo or surf in Grajagan. They are unhealthy men, most of them: overweight, fiftyish, wearing expensive, roomy suits and white shirts already ringed with crystallising antiperspirant stains. Many of them have wives who would have adored visiting the temples and soaking up the sun, but they’ve left their wives at home – at home in London, New York, Montreal, Munich, Vienna, Tokyo, Melbourne, and many other places.
Some of the men have brought cameras, simply because they’re in the habit of taking a camera on overseas trips, or because their wives urged them not to leave home without one. These cameras will remain unused, for none of the men would dare take a photograph during Miss Soedhono’s presentation, nor would there be much point in doing so. After all, one’s own rapture cannot be captured on film.
Mounted high on one of the walls of the conference room is a slender grey surveillance camera, pointed not at the empty expanse of purple carpet where Miss Soedhono will soon stand, but at the audience. It moves from left to right in an oiled, leisurely arc, like a snake half-dozing over an uneventful hole in the earth. Its dark glassy eye glints each time its slow-motion swivel catches the light from the spherical lamps hanging from the ceilings. These lamps, switched on despite the noonday sunshine penetrating the thin fabric of the curtains, cast an ambiguous luminosity over the men, yellowing them in much the same way that a grimy refrigerator bulb discolours leftover hunks of beef and neglected jars of mayonnaise.
The conference room is filled to capacity, or it will be when the men who are smoking outside have finished sucking nicotine into their bloodstreams. Once Miss Soedhono’s presentation is underway, no one will think of their more mundane addictions, but in the meantime these still exert their pitiful tyranny. Tobacco, chewing-gum, an early-morning sniff of cocaine in the sauna-like lavatories. Some of the men have vomited or had diarrhoea: the indigestible overload of waiting.
Finally all the cigarette butts are extinguished, all the bowels purged, all the mouths rinsed and sprayed, all the foreheads mopped one last time before such things cease to matter. The last stragglers – although that word is unjust, because no one dares to be even a second late, and the ‘stragglers’ are merely those who take their seats five minutes rather than an hour early – walk self-consciously into the room, nodding blindly at the fellowship of strangers among whom they must find their place. No one speaks, apart from grunts of permission as knees are swung aside to allow ungainly male bodies to squeeze past, and grunts of relief as buttocks settle on the velvety green seats and trousers are adjusted.
The oversized clock on the back wall, slightly fogged with condensation, ticks towards the agreed geometry of the long and short hands. The men make no attempt to converse or even acknowledge each other’s existence, preferring to stare at the long hand of the clock as it
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