The Last Wild Men of Borneo Read online

  But there’s no market unless there’s an inventory. And collectors like Barbier-Mueller weren’t after souvenir shop trinkets; they wanted masterpieces, the older the better, authentic pieces that had been made not as Christianity and logging and transistor radios were dissipating the cultures, but with full sacred intent, ideally before any Western contact at all. You could, with luck, find pieces in the Chinese antique shops of Kuching or Jakarta, as Tom Murray had proved, or you might buy something off an old collection—though those pieces were expensive and rare—but the real treasures remained up there, in there, in longhouses and remote villages of the upriver wilds.

  Getting those was anything but easy. To find the best pieces, authentic sacred antiques, required a deep cultural understanding and knowledge combined with an explorer’s fortitude and a psychologist’s grasp of human nature. You couldn’t just fly into some remote Borneo village and select objects off store shelves. You had to travel by crowded boat or foot on slippery forest paths for weeks. You had to be comfortable with intense physical hardship, with heat and rain and cold and cockroaches and biting no-see-ums and the threat of disease and hard floors and strange people and ceremonies, not for a night, but for weeks or months. You had to stomach eating whatever was in front of you, even if it was monkey, and you had to be okay with drinking potent homemade rice wine until you could barely walk. You had to have a way with people; you had to understand them, know what they wanted, what moved them, and then you had to develop deep connections with them. Real friendships, which took time and repeated visits. You had to speak their language fluently. You had to have cash, lots of it, and not be afraid to carry it or spend it when necessary, and yet you couldn’t just throw it around. You had to know how to bargain, how to deal with officials and policemen in a place where there was no real rule of law. You had to have a high appetite for risk—risk of drowning in rapids; risk of breaking a leg, which could be disastrous in a dozen ways; risk of arrest or death from a thousand sources. You had to have time and patience. Time to travel, time to barter, the time and patience to wait out delays of every imaginable kind. You had to be able to maintain self-control even in a world in which you had no control at all. You had to have an eye for quality and, as time passed, for fakes. And you had to have no ethical or legal qualms about buying a culture’s most sacred objects, a gray area if there ever was one.

  In sum, you had to possess all of the skills and personality traits of Michael Palmieri.

  Lots of people went into Borneo for a week or a month and had a little adventure, bought a few things, had their picture taken in a longhouse or by the side of a river. But no Western art dealer went in longer and deeper and more often over a longer period of time than Michael.

  “No, I didn’t pull pieces out of longhouses like Michael,” said Thomas Murray. But in doing so, he said, Michael “brought out many of the great pieces.”

  “I loved traveling in that world,” said Bruce Carpenter, “but after a while I had enough of the disease and the dirt.” And both men expressed ethical discomfort with buying objects directly, a somewhat disingenuous qualm considering their readiness to acquire the objects once they’d been sold to a middleman.

  So it was that Michael, now captain of his own ship, headed up the Mahakam one dawn in 1979. Morning is Borneo at its best. A heavy mist lay over the brown river. The world felt old and wet and big and still, save for the deep chu chu chu chu of the boat’s thumping diesel. The Mahakam had thousands of tributaries, and he’d hardly been up them all—yet. By 1979 he had a good idea of what was where, his Indonesian was fluent, he knew people, and was known, throughout Kalimantan. He had been drawing big, detailed maps of his own pinpointing river tributaries and villages and rapids, and he had stacks of them. And while he had first been more or less sightseeing and collecting baskets and trinkets, he was now going after everything: textiles, architectural elements, ceramic jars, fetishes and amulets, head-hunting swords, and, most important of all, carved wooden statues, and he knew what separated the best from the mediocre.

  He was now a father—his son Wayan shot into his arms at home in Bali in 1977—and his sense of what he was seeing, buying, had become much more refined. Most of the best art from Kalimantan had long been simply labeled Kayan or Kenyah, but Michael believed there were further gradations, that the most interesting, most powerful and soulful carvings were made by the Modang, Bahau, Busang, Wahu, and Long Galat, and it was those things he especially wanted. Now, with his own vessel and crew, he could go farther and deeper and collect more than he ever had before, like he was ranging through Borneo with his very own tractor-trailer truck.

  “As soon as I got the boat, the game really started,” he said. He would range for two months at a time. “I went up to Modang territory, up to Sungai Kedang, Long Segar, Jaip Dan, Sungai Telen. Go up to a village, tie up, be greeted by kepala kampong, the kepala adat [the village political or spiritual headman], and welcomed. Then in the evening there’d be a big event, always. Everybody came to see me. I’d be sitting there with hundreds, swapping stories. Then I start pulling out stuff. A little magic charm or a bamboo sumpit [poison arrow quiver] container. ‘Listen,’ I’d say, ‘I want to buy this kind of stuff. You have one?’ And they’d say, ‘Sebentar,’ wait a moment, and slowly stuff appeared. The more money I’d show, the more stuff came out. First came the men, then women. Sixty, maybe seventy percent was bartering.”

  He stayed among Dayak women with distended earlobes wearing brightly woven sarong skirts in red and blue and yellow, and men in loincloths, many of them covered in swirling, mystical hand-tapped tattoos. “They were unadulterated. Pure. Amazingly healthy-looking. The children of God in all their natural beauty. No hand phones, no electricity, no hotels, just village life, and the way they treated me was wonderful. I think they truly enjoyed my company. Sitting down in the evenings with groups of men and women and children talking and then the women and older men would go to sleep and I’d sit around with the young men and talk and we’d exchange stories, West versus East, and I loved those stories. And every evening was like that. Throughout all my travels, every evening was these encounters with the people in the village.

  “I would go out at night looking for durians, and one night a man and I were talking about spirits and magic, hantu, ghosts. And I said, ‘Have you ever seen one?’

  “‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Would you like to see one?’

  “‘Yes! Of course.’

  “So he and I and his son walk out of the village along a path and we had flashlights. Then suddenly he stopped and turned off the torch and I looked in the distance and I saw this thing glowing. Like a neon greenish, bluish light. Shimmering. And then we turned on the flashlights again. It was a tree that was covered with millions of fireflies. Nesting. Mating. He wouldn’t get any closer. He was afraid. ‘That’s a spirit,’ he said. ‘One of our spirits.’”

  One night on a tributary of the upper Mahakam, way above Melak, Michael stumbled into a Bahau village midceremony. “Someone had died and they said a man from another village had put a spell on him. They had to have a cleansing ceremony for the whole village.” Two hundred people crowded the long, open verandah of the longhouse. Black, piney smoke rose and twisted into the eaves from damar resin–fueled lamps, the eaves black with soot, the room full of shadows and the smell of sweat and pine and aged wood. Pigs and dogs rooted below the raised floor. Rows of doors to individual family compartments lined the verandah. “The shaman was an old man with tattoos wearing a loincloth and he had a leopardskin hat with black-and-white hornbill feathers and a necklace full of fangs from wild cats and bears’ teeth and beads and little carvings of people and he was repeating these mantras and people were beating drums and women were dancing in a trance. One by one people came up to him and he’d cleanse them and bless them—they had killed some chickens—and he’d put a little bit of blood on each forehead: everyone, from the children to the oldest person in the village. And then he came up to me and point
ed at me, and I was like, ‘Ahhhhh.’ I started shaking, my whole body, like I was between two worlds, and he reached in and pulled me into their world and I was down on my hands and knees and he was above me reciting incantations and touching me with blood on my forehead and putting holy water on me and suddenly I went into a fucking trance. I started crying. I cried and I cried and I cried, like a volcano erupting. And then whoosh he blew some smoke on me and that was it. When I got up I felt fantastic. Like a new man. Like I’d been reborn. Everything felt clear. He had cleansed me.”

  But it wasn’t just about the ceremonies, the culture, the people. Michael was a man on a treasure hunt as surely as young Jim Hawkins in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. On the Wahau River he arrived just as the village was moving, and inside a communal meeting house was a carved wooden panel fifteen feet long. “I want to buy it,” he said.

  “No,” they said, “it’s not for sale.”

  Someone else might have accepted that and moved on. But not Michael, who was in no hurry to get anywhere. He spent several days in the village trying to understand what they needed, wanted, what would induce them to sell the panel. He ate with them, drank tuak with them, bathed in the river with them. Finally it came out—they wanted a generator. Perhaps the villagers thought it was so fantastical, so expensive and unrealistic, that they’d never have to actually follow through. But Michael sent one of his crew back to Samarinda for a brand-new Honda generator. “It cost fifteen hundred dollars. And I had to pay for the ceremony to replace the carving. So many chickens and pigs slaughtered for blood, and the shaman had to do a ritual to release the spirits from the old panel. It was a very long process. It took weeks.”

  The word got out.

  Michael, like everyone who went to Borneo, was interested in the village of Long Wai, owing to nineteenth-century European accounts of its rich store of arts. First mentioned by a Dutch explorer in 1849, the village was visited thirty years later by Carl Bock, author of The Head-Hunters of Borneo. “Shortly before ten in the morning we reached Long Wai,” wrote Bock in 1879, “the capital town of the most powerful Dyak tribe in Koetei, and the residence of the great Rajah Dinda. . . . [He is] a powerfully-built man, standing 5ft. 9in., very muscular, and with limbs of Herculean dimensions. He is descended from an old dynasty which has held authority in Long Wai from tempo deolo (olden times), as the Malays say.” Bock spent seven weeks in the village and even met a band of Penan hunters who emerged from the forest to trade with the Dayaks. “In the evenings there were always some amusements while the Poonans were at Long Wai,” Bock wrote, echoing the experiences of both Michael and Bruno a century later. “One of them would play on a bamboo flute with his left nostril, while a few Dyaks would sit round the dim and smoky damar torch, made from the resin of a forest-tree, and enjoy a cigarette or pipe.

  “Sometimes they would give a war-dance . . . on the great floor under Rajah Dinda’s house, where a couple of Dyaks, each with a shield and sword, would face each other in all sorts of attitudes, changing them with a remarkable rapidity to the accompaniment of a two-string fiddle. . . . The music, however, would be drowned by an endless shouting and yelling, proceeding from the audience as well as the performers.”

  Bock’s curiosity had been “keenly excited” by “Dyak tombs” he’d glanced along the riverbanks on the way to Long Wai, even more so when he heard “frequent rumors of the grandeur of the burial-places of the Rajahs of Long Wai. Ké Patti described them to me as large carved structures, which no stranger was ever allowed to visit.” Bock’s entreaties were turned down; “time after time I persecuted him for permission to visit the forbidden ground.” Finally Dinda agreed. They paddled a few miles downriver, ascended a smaller tributary for another mile, before walking along a narrow path to a small clearing. “Here, surrounded by the graves of a number of his subjects, lay the bones of Rajah Dinda’s fathers, and other members of his family. The tombs of the Rajahs were most substantially-built and elaborately-decorated structures of ironwood. . . . The roofs were of laths of ironwood, imbricated. The walls were carved, and . . . painted with representations of birds or quadrupeds, the favorite crocodile of course not being omitted, and the gables at each end were elaborately carved.” Bock drew an intricately detailed color sketch of the structure in which Dinda’s father lay: a house suspended high atop pylons, its roofline and walls carved with Aso dragons and classic Dayak swirling branches of leaves of gold and fruits of ivory—the tree of life that united the lower and upper worlds—the top of the structure four times the height of a man. Inside, “Rajah Dinda’s father was buried with all his clothes, his sword, shield, and paddle—with which he is supposed to paddle himself to heaven in his coffin, which represents a prau. In his hands he is said to have had a quantity of gold dust.” High above the head of a man in the drawing dangled a stylized human figure with wide, watching eyes and thin legs and arms and prominent genitals.

  By the time of Michael’s roving, the great village of Long Wai had vanished. It was common to move villages every generation or two, after their slash-and-burn dry rice fields wore out, and even villages with the same name might be in very different places. But of Long Wai, a village so legendary in the history of Western explorers, even in name, there was no trace. Michael asked about it everywhere, to no avail. But one day he found an old man who said he knew where it was. They traveled downstream for an hour in the longboat, turned up a narrow tributary, and pulled over at banks of thick jungle green, then bushwhacked for a bit until they came upon an abandoned, rotting longhouse. The only trace of what might have been the mighty village was an Aso, a dragon, attached to the roof’s gables. Michael sawed it off. Was it Long Wai? Who knows. As for the great ossuaries described by Bock, there was no sign; time and jungle had swallowed it up.

  By then everyone knew about Michael, the river telegraph chattering; people knew he was there, what he was doing. Soon after his trip to Long Wai, he got wind that two Dayaks had been fishing in the river, low at the time, when their net snagged on something strange. They pulled it in to find a carving entangled in the net. “Immediately I left the mother boat and we went up through the rapids,” Michael said. “Took us the whole day, like the last village on a tributary of the Telen River. We arrived in the village, late afternoon, people were just coming back from the fields, and I asked where the man lived who had the statue. His wife was there. ‘My husband isn’t here, he’s hunting,’ she said. ‘He won’t be back until tomorrow.’”

  Michael wanted to see the statue anyway. She took him out to the kitchen. Resting on the bare timber floor against corrugated metal walls leaned a carving nearly six feet tall. A two-foot-long roughly four-inch-square piece of wood, broken at the top, descended to a large carved head with prominent, wide eyes, a long nose, and an oval mouth at the end of a downward-tilted protuberance. Made of tropical ironwood that’s nearly impervious to rot and long buried in the mud, away from oxygen, the carving was remarkably preserved. The face was alive, expressive. The head connected to a small body with a prominent chest. The arms were broken off at the shoulder and only a stump of its left thigh remained. At the intersection of the piece of wood and head was a square hole, the remains of what had once been the female end of a mortise-and-tenon joint. The wood was deep brown, weathered, with long vertical cracks in a few places, but otherwise superbly preserved. Most remarkable of all, the carving appeared almost identical to the human figure dangling from Rajah Dinda’s father’s ossuary in Long Wai, described and drawn by Carl Bock exactly one hundred hears before.

  “As soon as I saw it I knew,” said Michael. “Wow. I knew it was special, a great piece,” though he didn’t immediately make the connection to Bock’s drawing. He knew it was old, the style archaic Modang. He asked the woman how much she wanted, and she said she had to talk to her husband. “I spent the night and he didn’t arrive. I wasn’t going to leave without it. I spent another night and late that night he came back and we had a long chat. They hadn’t carved
it; it didn’t belong to them. It was so old they had no idea who had made it, and it had no religious meaning to them. It was just a lost spirit in a river, a life, but not theirs, not one of their ancestors’. Finally I asked him how much he wanted for it. We bargained and he settled on one Swiss Army knife. I spent that night there and all night long I prayed he wouldn’t change his mind. Quickly the next morning we put it in the boat and headed away.”

  Michael sold it shortly thereafter to an American dealer named Steve Alpert for a price so high he refuses to name it. Alpert sold it to the Dallas Museum of Art, where it remains on permanent display, one of the museum’s prized pieces. “Indonesia’s finest traditional sculptors were masters at using angle, incidence, and natural lighting to heighten the psychological drama surrounding their creations,” wrote Alpert in a monograph about the museum’s collection. “In its plasticity and complementary volumes, this statue reflects a deep understanding of how to use these attributes to the best advantage. Much like someone flexing his or her muscles to lift a heavy weight, the torso’s expansive chest, arching back, and compressed and squared-backed shoulders strain and interact in perfect unison to successfully balance a massive head on a much smaller body. Even in its current fragmentary form, minus most of both its arms, lower legs, and male sex organ, it remains a compelling work of art. This figure’s combination of dynamism and elegant simplicity is the hallmark of a master carver.” It has been carbon-dated to the thirteenth century.

  Michael loaded up. In front of the village of Long Nyelong, he found a strange-looking figure carved into the end of a ladder leading up the riverbanks with a body of S-curves and a huge, looming face with deep-set eyes and an angular jaw, its ironwood deep black with age. The villagers cut the figure off the ladder with a chain saw and gladly sold it to Michael. Today that statue sits atop a white cube in the Yale University Art Gallery.