Voodoo

By Adi Ali Iyubenu

Had the tall man with unkempt Rasta-styled hair and shiny dark skin, as if some lubricant had been poured onto it, not grabbed hold of my shoulder, we would have bumped into each other on the sidewalk of Malioboro, crowded with pedestrians going here and there and sidewalk peddlers.

"We have really run into each other!" he shouted. I looked more closely at his face, sifting through the haze of memory to dredge up recognition.

"Mattiwi!" he said as he pulled me over to an empty section of the sidewalk.

"You?"

"Well, you forgot?" He smiled several times, as if trying to remind me who he was. "I'm Jimi! Jimi Hendrix! You are Mattiwi, aren't you? Well, how are things going with you. You must be a great writer now?"

The words rattled off from his mouth. It was indeed a chance meeting. How could we suddenly meet again in a crowded part of Yogyakarta after being separated for so many years by distance and patterns of living?

He was a black African I became acquainted with in Rotterdam three years back when we attended an international literary program along with a host of world-renowned writers.

"Unless my memory fails me, you are a poet with a penchant for witchcraft idioms, right? You once demonstrated your witchcraft before us in Rotterdam, didn't you?"

"Exactly!" he chuckled and I did, too. He dwelled at length on his life in Africa, adding: "I've got an invitation from someone..."

"To read poems?"

"Well, well, well! My guess was right, you are still Mattiwi who idolizes literature! Come on, friend, you should know that upon my return from Rotterdam I switched from writing poems to being a psychic..."

"Art is not a profession here, my friend. It's your pastime, your hobby. You should be able to distinguish the two because otherwise you will be laughed at. OK, what about dropping in at my house?"

He refused, explaining he was in a hurry because in half an hour he would have to meet the person who had invited him, and then he would have to rush to Surabaya to see another client. "Being a psychic is more promising for our lives than writing...," he said lightly.

"Who invited you there, if I may know?" I believed I had better turn the conversation away from my hobby because we were no longer on the same track.

"Sorry, I've got to keep my client's privacy!"

"At least you could tell me where he lives, eh?"

"Bantul!"

"Bantul?" The face of someone hostile to me since the poetry trial at Gadjah Mada University suddenly flashed before me.

"Is he so rich that he can afford to invite a psychic from another continent? What is his problem?"

"It's also privacy, friend! It's common, the problem will be around the voodoo world...!"

He turned his head right and left several times as if looking for something. A man wearing a Javanese batik headdress came out of a shop a few meters away and approached us.

"Shall we go home now?"

"Sorry, friend, I really must be going now!" he said, patting my shoulder. "Let's hope we can meet again..."

I simply nodded and stared at his very dark back, covered under a sleeveless undershirt. It struck me then that he had really dumped his soft soul as a poet and adopted instead a hard self always dealing with mysticism and death of voodoo.

That evening I suddenly felt something wrong with my stomach. It was a pain, a smarting pain. It was as if my stomach was being twisted and squeezed. I called my wife, who was putting my youngest child to sleep. She rubbed some balm around my navel.

"I've told you not to eat too much fruit salad," she said, sitting beside me.

Putting my sarong in place, I recounted my chance meeting with Jimi. "But he is very different now," I said, showing pictures of him reading his poems and demonstrating voodoo in Rotterdam. Fire blazed from his mouth. The room was scorched in seconds. The whirring of the air conditioner was buried. The audience was stupefied. "He has pursued his black magic better than his poetry!"

"People are different in spirit, Mas..."

"However, isn't it real folly if one who originally has a soft soul has suddenly dumped it away and nurtured, instead, his evil spirit?"

She shook her head, just as she usually did when I asked her to discuss something which she did not want to. I was convinced that a shake of the head was what women could, by their nature, afford to do when they were confronted on scientific terms by men. Women always took shade under men's knowledge. She continued: "Why must we be thinking about other people, who may not be thinking about us, Mas"?

It was a female trait of character, the tendency to egotism, which often left me exasperated. I got up quickly and lay in the center of the room. The twisting pain in my stomach worsened. I felt as if my entire stomach would burst and the innards splatter over the walls. I couldn't have eaten the wrong food. I also followed the advice from Mrs. Has, a hospital midwife who also treated patients in her house.

"Don't make tempe and tofu your main dish because they are not enough for the energy you use. You must have an egg every day. You are a thinker."

Suddenly I remembered Jimi Hendrix, who had been invited by someone from Bantul. Who was that person? Could he be the short man that I knew? I dispelled the disgusting mental pictures. Selfish Tarso could not have been so desperate to take this black approach simply to vent his anger! And then how could he have so much money to pay Jimi Hendrix?

It was really something impossible. But the pain in my stomach was torturing me. About 10 p.m. my wife took me to Bethesda Hospital. I was shocked when the doctor examining me at the emergency ward said, "You must stay!" This was really crazy! Must I be hospitalized simply because of a stomach ache of unknown cause? Should I stay in a room where the walls were all painted white and where all around you could smell was medicine, hear shouts of pain and groans of death and see trolleys moving about with either sick people or corpses on them, stretchers, restless looks and stone-faced nurses?

"Is my illness so serious, doctor?" I asked, really at my wit's end.

"Yes, we have to examine you thoroughly. Your illness is very strange and seems dangerous!"

My mind suddenly went to Jimi Hendrix's face. It could have been his work. The man from Bantul that Jimi referred to could have been Tarso the bastard. I whispered to my wife what I had been thinking but she simply shook her head and whispered to me "You'd better let your mind rest, Mas."

"How can I be calm. I really have reason...!"

Again, she shook her head, just as she usually did. I held her arms strongly. "This is not the time for you to respond with a shake of the head! Throw away your female nature! You must...!" Suddenly my stomach really burst. Pain spread all over and I could feel it acutely on every inch of my skin. I could not feel anything but was fleetingly aware of my wife's screams.

My wife was sobbing at the side of the bed, all white. The smell of medicine penetrated my nose. I could vaguely see a few relatives. "Mas you have just come to..."

"Me? My stomach ache?"

"Yes, we are still at Bethesda!" She straightened my blanket. A nurse came with an IV. She adeptly replaced the empty bottle with the new one. I watched her work with a smarting pain in my eyes. I never imagined that I would have to go through what I had written in one of my short stories about a hospital.

"A visitor has been waiting since yesterday, Mas..." my wife said, tiredly.

"Who?"

"Your friends from the profession, the artists..."

"Of the same hobby," I hissed.

She nodded -- she looked different to me -- and said again, "One of them is your black friend, the one who you say has a hard soul with his black magic..."

"Jimi Hendrix?!" I was surprised.

"Yes!"

"Where is he?"

"In the yard. He spent the night here. He said he would like to talk to you..." Then she asked one of our relatives to call Jimi. He quickly showed up, wearing a broad smile. He took a seat on the edge of the bed. His left hand touched my legs.

"I thought you would not make it!"

"I know you did it!"

"Yes, I know that you know. There is only one man in Bantul who is hostile to you. He's the one who invited me."

"Your voodoo is really perfect," I said, with great disgust.

"That was only part of it. When I knew the identity of my target, I played a trick on the person who invited me. Only half of the voodoo that I have resorted to..."

"Even that much was effective enough to nearly kill me, someone who had given me food and cigarettes in Rotterdam and who had also come all-out to your defense when the Europeans condemned you as a leftist poet! Don't you remember any of it?!" I said as my voice became hoarse. A few relatives only stared at us with unblinking eyes. "You must be satisfied now."

He shook his head. "I could have killed you but because I remember what you did for me I did not. My voodoo will never harm someone who has done me good. Although I'm no longer a poet now, I still have my feeling. I realize now that the hostility between you two is only a matter of egotism. You and Tarso are both selfish. However, because Tarso has never done me good, I will cure you by turning my voodoo on him. How's that?"

"Do you think it will cure me and make me as I was before?"

He gave a sure nod.

"Do it."

Suddenly he chuckled loudly, simply ignoring the other patients in the ward. A few people visiting other patients looked at us.

"You and Tarso are just the same. Both of you are keen on defeating each other! I think it is this fact that has really made me break off my relationship with literature. OK, you know that voodoo can work well only if there is a transaction. I'll let you know later. The most important thing is that you want to get well, right?"

I nodded stiffly.

"How much for the transaction?"

I nodded stiffly again.

"Although Tarso, who is of the same profession,..."

"Of the same hobby," I snapped.

"Yes, who is of the same hobby, should die with his stomach ruptured?"

I nodded stiffly.

He smiled and strode away. I saw his dark back, which was like the burned back part of a pan, moving right and left, leaving the room heavy with the smell of medicine.

Djokdja, April 8, 1998.

-- Translated by Lie Hua

Glossary:

Mas: lit. brother, used by -- among others -- a wife when referring to her husband.