ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN subjected in childhood to the religious fundamentalism of an old-style Welsh farming community is likely to flinch secretly when the word religion is spoken in his hearing. My own family were a generation or so removed from the life of sheep farmers on bracken-infested mountain slopes, but their attitudes had remained unchanged, along with the conviction that no more than a strict mechanical adherence to the forms of their religion was required for them eventually to gain reasonable seating at the right hand of Christ in his glory. To the younger generation their religious opinions were of slight importance. What was supremely burdensome was that they kept holy the Sabbath day, a long and withering process in which all forms of pleasure were scrupulously eradicated. Games were debarred and, other than the tinkling of hymns on the piano, music — even whistling — was ruled out. When, in the case of the elder children, intellectual escapism came under suspicion, bookcases were locked on Sunday and only the Christian Herald made available in the long and inert pause between chapel visits. Services were a stern affair. When the Reverend Davies called upon his congregation to love their neighbours he made the word love sound like hate. He preached to heartless and unimaginative people, but even at the age of nine, after several years of force-feeding with this libel on Christianity, I was old enough to be amazed to be compelled to listen to a sermon, acclaimed in the Tabernacle by a standing ovation, on ‘the sin of forgiveness’.
It was a background that left me ill at ease with all the organized religions apart from Buddhism, which seemed to me to offer the mildest of the prescriptions for salvation, and to be certainly incapable of devising a system by which on one day a week it was difficult for a child to be happy. It was only many years later in South America that I encountered men of the cloth whom I was obliged to admire. I had gone to Brazil for a newspaper to investigate reports of genocide practised against the Indians of that country, who were disappearing at such a rate that it was confidently predicted that not a single one would be left by the year 2000. D’Arcy Ribeira, the great Brazilian sociologist, had calculated that one third of these catastrophic losses was attributable to the activities of fundamental American missionaries.
Much as I shied away from their theology, I found it impossible not to admire the self-sacrifice of the handful of Catholic fathers working in isolation among the impoverished and the dispossessed of such countries as Bolivia and Brazil. Indonesia was my second experience of Catholic missions in the field, but in this instance the magnitude and complexity of the problems they faced were much greater. There were mutterings in the high echelons of the faith demanding why the fortunes of the large Catholic minorities spread through the islands of Indonesia should be placed at risk over the defence of a handful in East Timor. The fundamentalists everywhere went along with governments, however abusive their form, and had even rewritten a biblical text in claim of God’s approval of such subservience. Indonesian Catholics saw this as going too far but applied pressure on the Timorese Church through Bishop Belo to accept the country’s de facto unification with Indonesia. This the Bishop resisted, but a score of priests and a half dozen nuns could do little more than refuse moral co-operation.
The nuns were too heavily occupied by their spiritual and mundane commitments to do anything but leave us to ourselves for most of the time. They were eager for us to stay, holding forth the promise of the interest and excitement of the forthcoming fiesta, to be celebrated in traditional Tetum style. We suspected that visitors from the West might have helped to alleviate feelings of isolation which they would certainly never have admitted to possessing. Their working day was a long one. Sister Marlene, wakened by her alarm clock at 4 a.m., was the first up and about, and shortly after this the emphatic sounds of prayer reached us through the wall from the next room where the twenty aspirants were already at their devotions. Four years were to pass, three to be spent in the Philippines, before they would become nuns — members of the Salesian order which largely concerns itself with the instruction of the young.
My only previous contact with women in holy orders had been in 1981 when I had met Sisters Joan and Maria from the American Mary Knoll order. They were doing what they could in the stricken Nicaraguan frontier town Ocotal, to alleviate suffering among the civilian population caused by incursions of the ‘Contras’, supported and armed by their own administration. I had arrived within days of the murder of two of their members from El Salvador who had been staying with them. They had been raped and killed, along with the two sisters who had gone to meet them, on their way back from the airport to the Salvadorian capital. To this tragic episode Joan and Maria made hardly more than passing reference. The Mary Knolls wore ordinary clothing, including in this case check blouses and baseball caps, and I remember thinking at this time that the absence of outward religious formality helped in so far as I was concerned in the establishment of a sympathetic understanding.
By contrast, in Indonesia, at the beginning of our friendship, there was something slightly daunting about the Salesian religious uniform, its archaic style hinting at a repudiation of the physical world. For the first moments in the striking presence of the thirty-two-year-old Sister Marlene in her immaculate habit, I was touched by the memory of medieval austerities, of the visions and voices of such as Teresa of Avila. Within minutes I was to see her demonstrating a vigorous Portuguese folk-dance to a class of orphan girls, and the original impression faded out with an article by a journalist who had smuggled himself into East Timor at the time of the worst trouble, and depicted her struggling through the thickets of the Soul Mountain to the assistance of children under attack by the planes. Thereafter I was reminded less of Teresa of Avila and more of Villon’s ‘bonne Jeanne’ (que les Anglais brûlèrent à Rouen).
The nuns and the aspirants worked endlessly at their allotted mundane and spiritual tasks. At their head Sister Paola Battagliola was a living miracle of efficiently applied effort in which every minute played its part. She had the tiny, triangular face of the witch-fairy known as ’a buffona who is stuffed with sweets and hung from a tree for the Epiphany in villages south of Naples. All domestic tasks including those of the kitchen lay within her domain, where no idle moment was tolerated.
The aspirants completed the hours of prayer, praise and catechism, then settled, rapt-faced, to bake bread, sew garments and scrub floors. Twice a day they sat at an impeccably set table — at which the correct distances between spoons and forks, etc., might be checked with a ruler — for a demure but swift intake of Sister Paola’s excellent pasta, after which they scurried away to wash up. Excitement simmered constantly behind faces like pious little masks.
By the greatest of good luck we had arrived within a few days of the celebration of a great event in the lives of the Catholic community. This was the ceremonial unification of what had previously been the territory of seven petty rajahs, in the vicinity into one parish of the Church, a reform initiated by Bishop Carlos Belo. The Bishop had been the replacement sent by the Vatican in 1983 following its withdrawal of Monsignor Costa Lopes after pressure from Jakarta where he had been seen as too outspoken in his defence of human rights. Indonesian military circles spoke with satisfaction of his substitution by a young inexperienced Timorese, chosen largely for the same reason as Ivan the Terrible was crowned Czar, because he was believed to possess the most amenable personality among possible choices.
Just as Ivan had, Carlos Belo disappointed, causing initial alarm by a pastoral in which he denounced military abuses. This was followed by a bombshell in 1989 in the form of a letter to the Secretary-General of the UN in which he called for the question of East Timor’s independence to be dealt with by a referendum. This letter alone was enough to spark off a repression in which the Australian press spoke of mass arrests, tortures and the precautionary detention of up to one thousand five hundred persons in advance of the visit by Pope John Paul later that year. The Bishop himself received a number of letters threatening him with death.
The Pope’s visit fell short of being a universally acclaimed success. To an outsider who has always assumed ironclad solidarity in the Catholic ranks it came as a surprise that such a Catholic publication as Timor Link could have entertained some doubts as to whether the visit was a good idea in the first place, since it was seen by many as a victory for the Indonesian military. Of the Pope’s pronouncements the paper said ‘in customary fashion his language was oblique if not ambiguous’. Much stress was laid upon the ritual of earth kissing, on this occasion omitted. ‘Would you have liked to see the Pope kiss the ground at the airport?’ The Advocates correspondent asked Bishop Belo, to receive the flat reply, ‘Yes, that was my desire.’
Nothing distils more to perfection the spirit of this occasion than the carefully prepared homily the Pope was dissuaded from delivering in Latin, which only two or three of the high-ranking ecclesiastics of his entourage would have understood, before finally compromising with an English translation comprehensible possibly to one in a hundred of his audience. I learned from Timor Link, as a further surprise, that Bishop Belo had contemplated cancelling the visit, and was even more astonished that it should have been in his power to do so.
It is evident that Bishop Belo remains very much his own man, and that this is recognized and fully appreciated by the people of his diocese.
In the absence of a priest, Sister Paola was called upon to conduct a service in the village of Gari Vai, some twelve miles away, and took us there with her. The church was large, and rather splendid for so small a place, although devoid of the usual furniture. That there had been a heavy loss of life in the parish was evident by the presence of numerous women in the deepest mourning. We were struck by the singular fact that they remained outside the church during the service — motionless black-shrouded statuary dotted through the surrounding trees, or placed kneeling by the windows or the door. Could this, we wondered, have been a Catholic concession to Tetum custom, with the distancing from the community of those seen as carrying the contagion of death? As usual, there were few men about, but at a certain moment, when the service was about to start, a small group burst through the door, fell to their knees, following this by full-length prostration in almost Islamic style.
Our appearance in Gari Vai produced the familiar amazed reaction among its people, although in this small and remote place where Tetum culture would have been less diluted than in Venilale, feelings were better kept under control. Instead, after the service, we were courteously directed to a double bamboo seat where the majority of the population formed a semi-circle, several persons deep, with the small children in front, to contemplate us in absolute silence. After two or three minutes of this experience, cautious smiles began to break out in the back row, and then one or two of the older children pushed through to kiss our hands. When Sister Paola came for us they all clapped.
From Gari Vai we drove to Bercoli, where the situation was much the same. Here there was less pressure upon us due to frantic preparations for the arrival of Bishop Belo, who had agreed to eat a midday meal with the villagers on his way to Venilale. The headman at Bercoli was a government appointee, who saw the occasion as an opportunity for reconciliation and goodwill. Learning of the Bishop’s intention to break his journey here, this man had sanctioned and provided the necessary material for a hall to be built for his reception. This, a bleak breezeblock construction among magnificent banyans, had been erected in exactly one week. Thereupon the headman had called for volunteers to clear the place up, and now the inevitable teenage boys were hacking away energetically with their machetes, cutting the village grass blade by blade.
In his book Indonesia’s Forgotten War, John G. Taylor mentions that in three days in April 1989 alone, twenty persons were shot in Bercoli. It is thus understandable that, with a shortage of men, a guard of honour for the Bishop could only be provided by combing the area for suitable women. These were being trained in drumming and marching backwards, a ceremonial exercise normal in East Timor, where such escorts were not permitted to remove their eyes from the face of the dignitary thus honoured. They were a taut-faced, rather fierce-looking collection, very thin as usual, with two of them outstandingly pregnant. These had been placed at the end of the two files, where it was perhaps hoped that their condition would escape the Bishop’s attention. Drilling them was a Timorese army veteran. Although of extremely dark complexion, his European features proclaimed him a descendant of one of that small legion of indomitable men who conquered half the world, then uncomplainingly carried out the order to mate with any native woman they could, to produce the sons necessary to defend the new possessions.
The headman, wearing trainers and denims, looked on with approval. Although Javanese, he was so Westernized that his eyes seemed to be changing shape. Quite unconsciously, while we were chatting, he took a plastic credit card out of his pocket, gestured with it, and put it back. A Tetum collaborator stood at his back, ready to smile whenever the headman did. He carried a cockerel under his arm for which the headman showed he did not much care. ‘The Bishop’, said the headman, ‘is coming on a white horse. He is descending from horse, then we carry him in chair into hall for reception, speeching and good lunch. We are much praising his visit.’
A group of grass cutters came by, hopping like frogs and slashing with their machetes, and he nodded happily, and said, ‘Cheerio.’ After that he took me to a pond by a stream at the back of the village where they grew spinach. Here some old ladies were scrubbing away at the leaves they had cut, which would feature in the Bishop’s lunch. ‘Is very good for blood,’ the headman said.
It was close to midday when we got back to what had been the village’s dark centre, now illuminated by a flush of light squeezed through the tight-shuttered curtains of the banyans’ roots. The severe-faced Tetum women — thinking God knows what — still marched in reverse, banging on the kettledrums hanging from their necks, and here and there the black-draped shape of a mourner still crouched facing east.
Some trestle tables had arrived and were to be carried into the hall, and the headman dashed off to supervise their positioning. It was the moment for an onlooker to sidle up with information in broken Portuguese he could no longer suppress. ‘There was a man from here went away to work. They said he was Fretilin and they shot him and sent him in a coffin back to his father. But here they say there must be no public burial. So they dug a grave and tipped the body in just as it was. I tell you this, because it is not right.’
The man bowed, backed away, and was lost to sight.
Lospalos, close to the eastern tip of the island, had not only been at the centre of desperate fighting between the Indonesian forces and the Fretilin, but remained a stronghold of the Church. There were four priests in the area; the senior who held the ministry in the town itself, although an Italian, being remarkably known as Father Ernie. It was for this father that Sister Paola had an urgent message. Since the post did not function in East Timor, this would have to be delivered by the driver of the orphanage truck, and when she suggested that we might like to go along with him we readily assented.
The road impressed with a sensation of desertion even more than the one from Díli to Venilale had done. For a number of miles, long barren stretches of it ran close to the sea, after which, the way barred by plateaux bearing some similarity to the mesas of Mexico, it twisted south through the wide plain of Fuiloro to Lospalos. Much of the emptiness through which it ran had become familiarly known as ‘dead earth’ because all those who had filled it were dead and gone, and human activity had come to an end; although nature had already begun a re-arrangement of the scene in its own way.
Down by the sea there had been villages, and faint rectangles drawn in charcoal marked where the houses had stood. The water’s edge was incarnadined with coral and the sea had flung the black remnants of feluccas up onto the beach, where, salt had eaten through their vitals. Fish traps embedded in coral detritus had grown fur like that of a reindeer’s antlers, with the sea-lice fidgeting over it in search of prey. Among this ancient wreckage a single sea-going craft had been streamlined and reshaped over the stagnant years by gentle, marine decay. The land was dead but there was submarine life in plenty. The fishermen, our driver told us, had harvested a great variety of molluscs in these waters, and the available crop had steadily increased throughout a decade in which they had been left unmolested. And there they were to be seen, inky graffiti of clustered shells scrawled through the shallows, and among the coral heads, and the drifting shadows of the fish.
Life inland, responding to a check in one direction, was on the move in another. Regular cultivation of the soil had come to an end with benefit to spontaneous and unaided growth. Seen from a hill’s summit, the dead earth was marked out with what might have been taken for the inscriptions or traceries of pre-historic man, or even space-invaders. Rice-paddies had been cut here, tended, irrigated and fertilized for generations, and now what remained of them were meticulous geometrical shapes growing wildflowers to rejoice the heart of someone indifferent to husbandry. Flowers had sprung up everywhere in the vacated land: bright doodlings where ploughs had meandered through the rocks, and windborne seeds had since fallen on fresh earth. The road ran on the edge of a paddy crammed with self-sown gourds like misshapen phalluses, fenced as if against thieves by vast thistles that had sprung up in the path surrounding it. Here the temporary calm and servility of a man-made oasis had been obliterated and replaced by an incomprehensible exaggeration as new forms of life smothered those unable to adapt to change. The dazzling pallor on the earth had darkened the sky, and our surroundings seemed to vibrate to the tremendous, symphonic wheeze of the crickets. It was at this moment that a horseman trotted towards us through the purplish band laid along the horizon. He was the first human being we had seen that day outside a town. As he came closer we saw that he wore a poncho sewn with feathers and had a bandage across his forehead in a way that partially shaded his eyes. He reined up, bowed and gave us a smile undermined by appeal. Then he turned in his saddle, following us with his eyes and waving continuously and with a kind of desperation as the distance between us increased and we finally passed out of sight. Our encounter with this lone figure added new depths to the intense sensation of isolation conveyed by the dead earth itself.
We drove down the glittering snakeskin of a road cut through a quartz outcrop under the first of the mesas afloat in a saffron mist. We passed more cracked and riven paddies with their sinister flowers, and so on towards Lospalos. Somewhere in this last stretch, the forest made its sudden appearance as a dark and solid flux of vegetation so dense as it poured over the hilltops that at a few hundred yards the eyes could hardly separate the trees. All efforts, with the use of defoliants, to demolish this arboreal stronghold had failed, and whatever the tangle of interlacing branches concealed by way of deep ravines and secret caves remained largely uninvestigated. It was somewhere in this vicinity in 1990 that the Australian journalist Robert Domm had paid a hazardous visit to Xanana Gusmao.
Lospalos, principal town of the district of Lautem, seemed not so much to have been devastated by the long and supremely savage war that had raged around it, as to have been subjected to a depersonalization. It was like a place within range of the normal lava flows of Etna or Vesuvius, where the habit of living for the moment is engrained, advance planning inappropriate, and undertakings conditional. Here, people lived not by choice but an accident of fate, among temporary structures of corrugated iron, and kept going somehow with a minimum of security and hope.
Not all the plastering by the latest in counter-insurgency aircraft had quite succeeded in driving the insurgents out of these mountains. A curfew that for years had kept the population indoors from dusk to dawn had only just been lifted. Even now a largely peasant people were allowed to cultivate their crops only in sanctioned areas. Such measures could only increase local detestation of military rule, and when the Indonesians came to the conclusion that secretly or otherwise they were up against the whole population, they were probably right. Their suspicions drove them to invent novel methods of terror. Persons seen as unenthusiastic in their support might be called upon to demonstrate their loyalty by joining death squads charged with the public execution of captured guerrillas or major suspects. For such occasions they would be issued with an assortment of farm implements, cudgels and sticks with which to do their work.
We located Father Ernie in his office surrounded by clamorous supplicants. He was the mercurial southerner of legend, eyes full of amusement and outrage, spouting a defective mixture of Portuguese and Tetum, hands put to work to fill the gaps when verbal communication failed. Papers slid from his desk-top as he shoved a passage for himself through the crowd. It was soon evident that the appeals for assistance were in the realms of temporal rather than spiritual matters. A goat representing a family’s total capital had disappeared. A woman was there to plead for malaria pills (the supply sent by international aid had been stolen and gone into shops), a man dragged the Father away from us to display testicles swollen from a soldier’s kick. There was sympathy or admonition despite all the necessity for caution, a guarded optimism, the shadow of despair sculpted in a delicate play of the fingers and expressive narrowings of the eyelids, tongue clickings, and backwards jerks of the head.
‘Don’t they come to you for confession?’ I asked. He tapped the side of his nose in a gesture that seemed to unite us in secretly shared knowledge of a worldly kind. ‘The poorer you are, the less there is to confess,’ he said. ‘These people are very poor. They’re given a few hundred metres of land to live on. If they want more they’re told they must pay taxes for roads. “What roads? they ask.” There aren’t any. “Anyway, what do we want with roads?” ’
We gave the Father the message from Sister Paola. It was about the girl Selina who had tried to bring fifteen children out of the forest, and was now in the orphanage. In the last days someone had gone there to tell her to go to Lospalos to see her mother, who was dangerously ill. Selina suspected a trick to get her away from the orphanage and then kidnap her, so this was an appeal to the Father to make local enquiries into the case. He went aside to read it, stuffed it into a pocket and said he’d look into it. ‘I’m busy at the moment, but Father Palomo will show you round.’
The next thing was to find Father Palomo. We climbed into the orphanage truck and went in search of him, only to be immersed instantly in the empty silent countryside from which we had just emerged. Within minutes we were the subjects of an extraordinary experience. On these remote roads one saw few trucks of the kind in which we were travelling, though there were frequent military vehicles and the occasional pickup. I could not remember sighting an ordinary saloon car since we left Díli, yet here — where to leave the one main road was to plunge into a journey without maps along a narrow, rutted track — was such a car containing five Japanese. Four were young men dressed in normal Western style; the fifth, a woman, white-faced with kohl-encircled eyes and enswathed in ectoplasmic veiling, could have been a leading lady in a Kabuki theatre play. With huge difficulty and at a loss both for words and pronunciation, the male spokesman managed to get across the information that they were members of a born-again Japanese Protestant sect, of which the woman was the sect’s ‘sacred mother’, who had commanded them to bring her here to settle the problems of East Timor. Now they were lost, and at this point the spokesman’s English collapsed, becoming for us a meaningless gabble, from which a single comprehensible sentence emerged, ‘We are talking at cross purposes.’ This we suspected he had learned by heart to cope with such emergencies. Nevertheless it was true, and understanding was in no way advanced by Father Ernie’s evident belief that a series of courtesies delivered in Italian might be of help. There was nothing for it but to lead the way back to Lospalos, where the Japanese were left to confer with the headman, who possessed the only detailed map. ‘I do not know what is born again,’ Father Ernie said, and I had to agree that I didn’t either.
Father Palomo was then run to earth, and Father Ernie went off to look into the Selina affair and left us to him. He sprang out of the chair in which he had been slumped when we came in, reminding me at that moment of an athlete gathering strength between strenuous events. There was an aroma about him of guarded pessimism, but my friend who had commented in the notes given me on the enforced banality of meetings with priests in difficult circumstances would certainly have absolved the Father of this charge. ‘The army just moved in again,’ he said.
‘We didn’t see anything.’
‘You wouldn’t. We heard they were coming, which means that everybody knew. They’re chasing after the Fretilin in these mountains, which means the Fretilin pulled out yesterday or the day before.’
‘Do they ever manage to catch up?’
‘So far as I know, no. They cannot finish this war and the Fretilin certainly cannot. Hunger will be the winner. The Fretilins run out of food. They have to eat anything. Leaves, grass. The people would feed them but they cannot. They have nothing left to give away. This island is so weakened it’s hard to see it ever recovering. Do you know how many died in the war?’
‘They say one third of the population.’
‘More,’ he said. ‘Much more. A half.’
‘Is Xanana Gusmao still up there?’
‘Who knows? It makes some people happy to believe he is. I think this man must be alive, because if they had killed him surely they would put the body on display to prove he was dead.’
The Father had heard nothing of the contact made with the guerrilla leader by Robert Domm in September 1990, which was published in the Australian press. From that it had been clear that the Fretilin resistance remained active. As an army organized on conventional military lines it had been defeated by the encirclement and annihilation campaign of the Soul Mountain and the ‘fence of legs’, and its commanders killed on the spot, or taken prisoner and subsequently executed. Shortly before the invasion Jill Jolliffe visited the command headquarters of those days, being much impressed by Nicolau Lobato, the leader of old, but far less so with Xanana Gusmao, then a shy boy hardly out of his teens who had been put in charge of propaganda and seemed to spend too much time playing with a camera.
A silence of nearly three years followed the collapse, then the news leaked out of clashes with guerrillas in the Lospalos area, and it was from the Lospalos-Venilale-Baucau redoubt, with Gusmao now in command, that an attack was actually launched in 1980 on Díli itself. Domm spent sixteen hours in the guerrilla camp ‘at the top of a miniature Matterhorn’, many of them talking to Gusmao. The leader still appears as shy, although thoughtful, articulate and intelligent. Domm was amazed at the efficiency with which his mission was organized. Although at first startled when a Fretilin bodyguard dipped a finger into a supposedly magical substance and drew a symbol on his chest and forehead rendering him invisible to the Indonesians, he later thought ‘perhaps the tradition worked after all’, for they passed through thousands of troops, on one occasion within metres of them, ‘but they never saw me’. So involved were the people with the Fretilin, Domm says, that ‘people in the army, intelligence, police, shops, hotels … are all really resistance people, who are regularly providing intelligence to the guerillas in the mountains’.
Father Palomo took us to the village of Maupara where the working population had been relocated to a roadside settlement following the burning by the military of a number of houses abandoned in the village. Everything had gone wrong for the people moved to the new site. The curfew had lasted until two years before and land could only be cultivated in certain unsatisfactory areas where those at work could easily be kept under surveillance. These difficulties had coincided with a long period of drought. In Maupara it had not rained for four months before our visit, with the result that the river had dried up, leaving only scattered pools in its bed.
We called on an average couple submitted to this fate. Their garden of 25 x 25 metres was two kilometres from the 12 x 12 foot shack they had been given, but they had to walk one and a half kilometres in the opposite direction to collect water from one of the pools in the river. The total daily trudge to water their vegetables was therefore seven kilometres, one half of it while laden with the filled cans. These were the dust-bowl peasants of America of the thirties, almost drugged by resignation. Father Palomo asked the man to open his shirt. He did so, displaying his muscles and bones, like an anatomical chart. This couple seemed almost indifferent to their predicament and incapable of self-pity. They spoke in a dispassionate mumble, eyes lowered, hands clasped over their breasts as if in prayer. The Father listened attentively, nodded in agreement with whatever was said. ‘As soon as the troubles are over they have been promised a hectare [two and a half acres] of land,’ he translated. ‘And do they believe that?’ I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. For the peasants there was a congratulatory smile, followed by a hug. ‘Baik lagi’ (it will be better later), he said. It was an expression that enshrined the flickering flame of hope among the poor of East Timor.
From the relocation area and its dismal prospects Father Palomo guided us up to the village centre to inspect some beautiful old traditional houses that had survived. They were built on exceptionally high stilts — we wondered why, since none of these eastern islands of the archipelago contained animal predators. The platform, in the case of the best specimen, was used as an open-walled room, supporting two more rooms built one above the other and the highest thatched steeple-roof I have ever seen. Access was by a narrow, spindly ladder through a square aperture in the bottom floor. At the moment of our approach a baby of about two was being urged by its mother, who stood by shrieking encouragement, to climb up. This it was extremely reluctant to do, accompanying its resistance by penetrating infantile screams so rarely heard from the normally docile and well-adjusted babies of the East.
The Indonesian government frowns upon such reminders of a torpid past as traditional houses — however charming their appearance and suited to the climate — on the grounds that they are unhygienic and backward and, in the case of the famous long-houses of Kalimantan, that they foster immorality. It has demolished them throughout the islands by the thousand. Rural Indonesia, according to the official hope, is to become a countryside of planned villages of small, single-family shacks, the inhabitants of which, ideally, will work for wages on local plantations or in mines. It is envisaged that only a few select examples of such peasant constructions as we were admiring here will be preserved (although not usually lived in) as tourist attractions. But, currently, there were no tourists in East Timor, nor were there likely to be in the immediate future. Why then had these houses escaped the fate of so many works of art in the same category?
An explanation was provided by an unusually well-dressed villager who now approached. The house, he told us, speaking reasonable English, belonged to his friend, a rajah, whose property had been respected because he had not wished to run away and hide in the forest as so many had.
‘Were you here at the time of the army’s arrival?’ I asked.
‘I am in this village all the time,’ he said. ‘When the soldiers came, I say to them you are our friends. You are welcome. I shake them by the hand. I bring tea for drink. So I live in my house and no one touches me. I am making no problem for anyone. So it is OK for me to stay.’
We left the rajah’s friend and drove back to Lospalos, where a small embarrassment arose. Sister Paola had given us cassava cakes for the journey, and we were determined to avoid imposing in any way upon the Fathers, for in Lospalos food was reputed to be in even shorter supply than in Venilale. The story agreed upon was that, having brought rations with us, we wanted to drive on to Tatuale, the last village on the island’s eastern tip, where there were archaeological remains and striking views over the land’s end of East Timor. The excuse was waved aside. Father Ernie would have nothing of it. He insisted on our staying to lunch, adding that preparation of the meal was already under way. There was nothing for it but to give in.
My impression was that the spaghetti cooked with local herbs, and eaten in the bare kitchen of the house shared with two more priests, was a rare treat. Once again I found it impossible not to compare not only the personal lifestyle, but the character of the mission — even of the faith — with that of the post-war wave of fundamentalists in South America who had caused me so much dismay. Although without doctrinal affiliation, it had always seemed absurdly anomalous to me that the standard-bearers of Western religious expansion among the so-called ‘backward peoples’ should display an affection for materialism so diverse from the self-denying lifestyle of the founder of their faith and so arrogantly diverse from those they aspire to convert.
Here at Lospalos the Italian Fathers were living like Neapolitan peasants — and who could fail to respect them for it? The one luxury that might have tempted them was an electric generator. ‘We always seem to be kept busy,’ Father Palomo said, ‘and it would save time to have one.’ But there was no generator, and therefore no electric lighting, no fridge, nor any of those small pleasures of the world that would have sneaked through under the Fathers’ guard in the generator’s wake. And, as was to be imagined, there was no store of meat air-lifted from Canada, no stocks of canned foods, no crates of 7-Up, Pepsi or Dr Pepper, no radio-transmitter to keep them in touch with a missionary headquarters — which in any case did not exist — or in an emergency to call for a Missionary Airforce plane.
There was the faintest possible aroma of Italy in this house, but it was hard to guess at the elements in its composition. One of the Fathers had been puffing at a thin, black, straggling cheroot at the moment of our arrival. Perhaps that came into it, as even the odour of spaghetti, cooking too slowly for Father Ernie’s liking over a faltering wood fire. He popped out and came back with a handful of twigs, snapped from a moribund garden tree. ‘Sometimes a woman comes in when we have friends,’ he said, ‘but I do not trust her with the pasta.’ The water in the pot boiled in fits and starts and he shook his head in a pretence of frustration.
No mention was made of the case of Selina, and we sensed that it was a subject to be avoided. Father Palomo had probably gone as far as it had been safe to go by introducing us to the problems of the relocation at Maupara. The co-operation of the fundamentalists with self-imposed authority was absolute. A heroic prudence had been forced upon the Catholics. They may well have witnessed the murder of members of their flock in circumstances comparable to those facing their predecessors at the time of the Nordic invasions in the European Dark Ages. Of this, had it been so, not a word was said. Even Christ had been tricked into a situation where only diplomacy could save. ‘Is it meet’, the Centurion asked, ‘that we should render tribute unto Caesar?’ to receive the reply, ‘Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s.’ It is certainly the recommendation the Fathers would have made in similar circumstances, for a more direct expression of opinion could easily have put an end to the mission.