Balige, Samosir, July 4-7, 2019
In Batak country on the trucking roads, between the cinder block houses, the churches, the housing estates, saddle-shaped roofs straddle the rice paddies. Along the sides are little pumps on wheels and displays of plastic bottles: oils and gasolines for the engines, their thirsts.
At the edge of Lake Toba I meet Olifvia, twenty-nine years old, eating a nasi goreng in the company of her soldier friend. Young Batak woman with glasses and a big laugh, unexpected and soft as a curve. So I lean, I lean toward her:
– You’re a beautiful woman.
– I am not beautifuuuul, she answers, stretching out the last syllable.
To each compliment she opposes its contrary. I’m delighted to add more, to pour still more honey on her. While her friend has gone to pay the bill, we exchange numbers. An hour later I go pick her up at her place.
She tells me the tale of the misfortunes of her life. A friend to whom she lent 200 million rupiah, fruit of ten years of work in Malaysia, ran off to Germany with the stash. Her first boyfriend of six counted years died of cancer before they could marry. With her family she lived in a big house in Balige and dreamed of going to university, but the house and the dream went up in smoke when her father had to have stomach surgery. Still she believes in her good bintang, Olifvia. Attacked in Sitorang by six rapists, she bit them, kicked them.
– A policeman passed by at this moment. I don’t know why.
She shouted:
– Police!
The rapists ran off. She sobbed in the policeman’s arms.
Olifvia. By scooter on the flanks of the caldera, I gently take her hand. She wraps herself around me, passenger, horsewoman, with her long fingers with dyed nails. She teaches me Batak words: mauliate (thank you), biang (dog), manuk (chicken). Under the concave roof of the clan house, she has me taste palm wine before the weathered faces of men with cigarettes. And on the road toward Samosir, while we breathe the black fumes of the buses and overtake the trucks on the climbs, I get drunk on feeling against my back – against my shoulder blades – her small fluted breasts.
The ferry carries us over the ruins of the supervolcano, toward the peninsula surged up under the pressure of magma, risen from the waters like a monster rearing.
– Oh Olifvia! What are you doing? You will go to hell!
She tortures herself, the young Christian. All that because a few centuries ago, Dutch Protestants planted that doctrine in Batak heads. But the body is stronger, desire wins out. The mind remembers perhaps the old Shaivite cult, the lingam and the yoni, when sex was not guilty. And on this piece of earth surged up between the oceans, the fleshes tremble, the skins sizzle. Gently, very gently I plunge into the magma. The Batak woman closes her eyes and opens her crater-shaped mouth.
And her lip, her upper lip, that upturned fold, inherited from her Chinese grandmother… that lip is the most beautiful thing there is. Ignimbrite flesh, browned by the sun, jutting like the terrestrial relief.