Once, many years back, I attended a Modern Language Association conference in Chicago during Christmas break with Norma Alarcón as driver. On the way home we were stuck in bumper-to-bumper downtown traffic. Norma was upset. To lift her spirits, I started to read to her from a book I’d picked up at the conference, a reissue from an international series. Just like that, the miserable Chicago traffic and weather disappeared, and we found ourselves on the beaches of Indonesia. When our car started moving again we groaned, sorry we had to put the book away.
What a catalog of things this writer documented, a world filled with ten thousand things, all of them extraordinary. I especially liked how the narrator talked to you as if she were in the room. Was the author borrowing from the spoken stories of the Javanese, or perhaps from an ancestor? Now as then, it seems to me this book demands to be read out loud. It has the curious ability to resonate within you for a lifetime, like the very best poetry.
My first “finished” version of this piece is dated August 26, 2008, but I abandoned it until now.
A woman named Maria Dermoût lived in the Molucca Islands near Java a long time ago. She lived there and fell in love with all island things, even though she was Dutch and not of the island. But as the saying goes, “¿Si los gatitos nacen en el horno, son gatitos o son bizcochos?” Just because the kittens are born in the oven doesn’t mean they’re biscuits.*1
So this kitten, Maria, became Javanese by choice and not simply chance, and by choice loved Java intimately. She was busy. She was a mother, after all, and then a grandmother. By the time she was done with the ten thousand distractions of being both, she finally had a little time of her own and could profess her love of all things Javanese by taking up her pen. Which she did by the time she was sixty-three, or at least she began publishing then.
Dermoût wrote two novels. Only two. But one book exquisitely done is worth fifty not worth remembering. Her first is called Days Before Yesterday or Yesterday depending on which edition you read. But the one I want to tell you about is The Ten Thousand Things. And it really does contain ten thousand things sweeping across a geography like Noah collecting all the animals. Tree snails with white shells like porcelain fruit. The giant octopus with its eight grasping arms, who lived in a hollow in the rocks waiting for the fishermen to forget. A flock of noisy, gleaming birds drinking from a moss-covered cistern in a forest that smells of spice trees.
But not just the animals. The myths and stories too. Pearls from the sea that are tears we will have to cry ourselves, and pearls from the earth disinterred from the graves of the dead, which are never to be worn at all, else they bring death with them. The slave bell that rang whenever a proa came or left—if someone remembered to ring it. The open-sea wind different from the sighs of the land wind, and the storm wind called Baratdaja. The waves, one behind the other, behind the other, behind the other—“the father, the mother, and the child—can you hear it?”
And the people of the islands. The man who dyed his hair blue with indigo because his son was a fearless warrior. The father and son who had once been sharks and that was why they never smiled, so as not to reveal their pointy teeth. The old woman called the mother of the Pox who had to be fended off with a branch of thorns tied to the front door. The three little ghost girls who had all died on the same day, the day of the great earthquake—or was it poison?—and who visited the garden on occasion and left rose petals in their wake. The fishermen who whistle for Mister Wind to loosen his long hair and allow their boats to go out to sea.
And the treasures seen and unseen. The sea fans in mauve or dark yellows woven as fine as linen. The much-talked-about Coco Palm of the Sea found in a whirlpool in the deepest depths, a black tree or perhaps purple or violet, because underwater black isn’t always black. And the creature the children feared the most—“the Leviathan who is too terrible!”
The prayer the island devout chant when someone dies: “ ‘The hundred things’ was the name of the lament…of which the dead one is reminded…a grandchild, a friend, a comrade-in-arms; or his possessions: your beautiful house, your china dishes hidden in the attic, the swift proa, your sharp knife, the little inlaid shield from long ago…” A hundred times a hundred things recited. Then they would close with: “oh soul of so-and-so, and ended with a long-held melancholy ee-ee-ee? ee-ee-ee? over the water.”
Something of the grand yet intimate voice, something of the detailed lists she creates with patience and poetry to summon a place, a time, a state of being, inspire me to pick up my pen and play at being God.
But, ay, what a lot of work to write like this! ¡Tanta lata! Nothing but trouble! Like sewing tiny glass beads with a fine needle in stitches that would drive a nun blind. True. All the same, exquisite needlework to make one marvel and turn over the cloth in admiration and wonder. How does she do it? Perhaps the body remembers. “The hand has a good memory.”
Opening The Ten Thousand Things is like unlocking a curiosity cabinet filled with rare treasures, just like the ones described in its pages. A woman who fell into the sea and became red coral. A fleet of jellyfish with sails of milk white and a mass of streamers trailing behind in jewel blues and green. Sadness something you can move past only gradually, like rowing a boat through seawater—“She knew that a bay and rocks and trees ending over the surf cannot relieve sadness—can sadness be relieved, or can one only pass it by, very slowly?”
If you wish, open this book at the beginning and read to the end. Or you can select any of the chapters, which read like a short story, and indulge in the Javanese flora and fauna that the author has meticulously cataloged to delight our senses.
The ten thousand things mentioned in these pages pay homage to what was holy to this writer. Dermoût has named her world as she knew it, and in a sense she is reciting her own funeral chant, the ten thousand things that all together made up her life.
To read this book is to be reminded of one’s own ten thousand things. Jorge Luis Borges said the same in his vignette “The Witness.” He named a piece of sulfur in a desk drawer and the corner of two streets in Buenos Aires as his private legacy, but forgot to mention the obvious—mirrors and tigers.
And I wonder if all storytelling isn’t a list, conscious or not, of the ten thousand things tucked inside the special drawers of the brain, a curiosity cabinet lined with old silk scented with incense. A pretty fan of real tortoise with gold inlay from the time of before. A basket woven from orchid roots. A snakestone to suck the venom from a sea wound. From the “land at the other side,” Ceram, a plate to detect poison “of rough china, glazed a light even green.”
*1 I found this in There Are No Madmen Here, but author Gina Valdés isn’t sure if it’s Mexican in origin or a family invention. I’ve been told that in Maine folks use a similar adage to differentiate the natives from the invaders.