A veranda under a pouf of purple bougainvillea. A wooden table, the surface hidden by dog-eared dictionaries, coverless novels, and loose sheets of paper runed with scribblings. Two chairs from the 1950s, of metal tubing (rusting) and red plastic (decomposing). Propped against the peeling wall, a chalkboard with the days of the week sketched in squares—some containing a name, most empty—the chalk lying somewhere in the debris of the table. Overhead, a forty-watt light bulb, unshaded. What more do you need for a classroom?
Two times a week I walk to this classroom along a street in the golden light at the ripe end of the Balinese afternoon. Grandmothers standing on their thresholds and teenagers edging past me on noisy motorbikes know me to be a tourist by my white skin and long nose, even though I am walking in the wrong direction for a tourist at this time of day. I am walking in the direction of the deserted marketplace and not toward my room in one of the hotels or guesthouses that drowse in the leafy streets of the upland town of Ubud.
I carry a black cloth bag heavy with a two-inch-thick textbook. Nearly six o’clock—night will come quickly. I reach the stone steps that descend steeply to a garish wall painting of Ganesha the Elephant God, where candles already defy the shadows. Down the long alley, broad leaves brush my arms and then I am in the cobbled courtyard, where a purple cloud hovers above the veranda.
No one. . . .
A female voice calls from within, sharp and querulous.
Children’s laughter erupts and fades.
A man steps through the black rectangle of a doorway onto the veranda. He nods at me.
“Ah, Ibu. Selamat sore. Silakan duduk.” (Ah, madam. Good evening. Please sit down.)
Pak Warna is a stocky man, taller and broader than most Balinese. His face, the color of café au lait, is unlined and framed by silver-flecked black hair swept back over his temples. I wonder how old he is. The youngsters who sometimes spill into the courtyard could be his children or his grandchildren.
The lesson begins, as always, with the textbook. I open my copy to the page of today’s dialog and Pak Warna opens his copy to the same page. We read the two-sided conversation, each taking a part.
When a young man at my guesthouse recommended Pak Warna—“behind the marketplace, very reasonable”—as a teacher of Indonesian, the second language of all but the youngest and oldest Balinese, he gave no hint that Pak Warna was a proponent of the Cornell Method. But he is indeed a champion of this method, he is nothing if not the method.
A Cornell lesson uses only the language being taught. No other language is allowed. Students learn by listening and speaking, with a little reading and no writing. I heard long ago of this method and terror filled my heart. Now, on an island glittering in the Java Sea—the ideal of a relaxing, romantic getaway—I find myself, in a gloom filled with tickety-ticking insects, sitting on a chair whose shredded plastic seat sticks to my damp thighs, and my brain, cut off from the anchor of print, feels shriveled and empty. Learning this language by the Cornell Method isn’t so much like drifting through foggy seas as it is like bird watching, where a rare and splendrous creature flits through dense foliage revealing a bit of yellow rump here and a glimpse of white eye-ring there, but never itself entirely.
In spite of this, Bahasa Indonesia seems as carefree as a Saturday night hay ride to a woman such as I who has spent many hours of her life memorizing and recalling the verbal structures of numerous Romance languages. Bahasa Indonesia depends on no conjugations for pinpointing who performs the action. It needs only one tense, which suffices for present, past, and future. I can say Saya pergi ke pesar and it will do for “I am going to the market,” “I went to the market,” and “I will go to the market.” I just have to add besok for “tomorrow” or kemarin for “yesterday”—not even that much if I produce the mat I purchased.
Saya pergi ke pasar. Economical. Minimalist. In this stark grammar lives a melodious vocabulary, the Italian of Asia. Malam, barang, buku, kapala, pagi, tujuh, cuci—the syllables fill my mouth and wrap around my tongue. Delicious.
The conversation we are reading, Pak Warna and I, this evening—as always—takes place between two men and the men are doing something it is unlikely I, an American grandmother, would do, especially during my three weeks in a tropical paradise: search for a letter in an office, travel by train, wonder why my cousin did not show up at last night’s party. I came here to meet weavers and buy textiles, but the textbook contains no such conversations.
I stare at the wall silently peeling behind Pak Warna’s head, at the clock measuring out the lesson. I haven’t got time in my life or space in the filing cabinets of my brain to learn how men address each other. I only have time and space for learning how women talk to men and men to women, and how women speak to other women. But this is not happening.
As Pak Warna and I bat the dialog back and forth across the table’s clutter, I wonder if it is just an Indonesian quirk or if it is a pan-Asian attitude, but in this language almost all the words for “you” are formal and stiff and might easily be regarded as insulting to the person being addressed. So we form questions like Bu minum te? “Does the married lady (bu)—by the way, that’s you—do you want to drink some tea?” I concede this provides a backdrop for relationships of respect and affection. But in the disembodied dialog of black marks on white paper, I can’t tell if someone is asking me if I want tea or we are talking about a third person.
Context. It all comes down to where you are on the planet at one particular moment. Words that are ambiguous on a page in a textbook are loaded with meaning for two people standing on a street corner in the middle of a certain small town.
After we have exchanged parts in the dialog, Pak Warna and I begin the questions and answers. For this exercise I must close my book. Pak Warna keeps his open and reads to me a question about the dialog. Then he reads four possible answers, a, b, c, and d, according to the Cornell Method, in Indonesian.
When he is at the point of reading c, I am still tossing the original statement around in my squeezed-dry head. I will have to resort to my knowledge of test-taking strategies rather than my pathetic stockpile of Indonesian words to come up with an answer. I know that one of the choices is totally wrong, one is totally right. The other two are close to correct but they contain little trip-ups. To express “no” or “not,” Indonesians use bukan with nouns and tidak with verbs and adjectives. Which of my choices will have the wrong negative in it?
And so the synapses of my brain flash on and off with ever increasing frequency just as I begin to observe fireflies among the hibiscus leaves in the courtyard.
When I state that I “bought a head at the market,” Pak Warna smiles wearily. Kapala and kepala, it is unfortunate that one means “coconut” and the other means “head.” Bahasa Indonesia is full of such traps for foreigners. What about cucu and cuci? One is “laundry” and the other is “grandchild.” Indonesians have probably heard many gray-haired, eager American matrons state they have five darling piles of laundry back home in Van Nuys.
The lesson is over. One hour has passed. Pak Warna sends me on my way with Sampai hari Jummat. “Until Friday” (two days away). I lug the black bag heavy with the two-inch-thick textbook back through the alley of grasping foliage, past the steadfast candles of ever-smiling Ganesha, and up the stone steps into the moonless night.
I avoid the dark passage through mounds of trash in the marketplace, knowing of a short side street that leads to well-lit Monkey Forest Road.
What to do with the rest of the evening?
I could turn left and go two blocks to my favorite restaurant for dinner. I could cross the street to the prince’s palace where a dance performance is about to begin. My brain, still back on the purple-draped veranda, automatically churns these choices into Indonesian: Makan malam, “eat” plus “night” equals “dinner.” Pura, tari “palace, dance.” But wait, what about “could”?
I stop walking when I realize I don’t know how to say, or think, “could” in Indonesian. All the dialogs and questions and answers are about things that either happen or do not happen. There is no conditional, what if. The past and the future lie on the edges of context. There is only one mode of being—the present.
Perhaps I am too green a student to be allowed to wander in the tangled forests of the conditional.
Or perhaps on this island where gods live on the mountain tops and monsters crawl out of the sea, where rocks are sacred and wrapped in gold cloth, and where the throb of gongs hangs in the fragrant air, perhaps here there is no conditional.
