Philippe Claudel

The Tree of the Toraja

Translated from the French by
Euan Cameron

First published in the French language as L’arbre du pays Toraja
by Editions Stock, Paris, in 2016

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by MacLehose Press

MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Editions Stock 2016
English translation copyright © 2018 by Euan Cameron

“Gimme Shelter”
Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
Published by ABKCO Music, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

“Mysteries”
Words & Music by Beth Gibbons & Paul Webb
© Copyright 2002 Domino Publishing Company Limited/Chrysalis Music Limited, a BMG Company. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited.

The moral right of Philippe Claudel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Euan Cameron asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85705 699 3

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

www.maclehosepress.com

Also by Philippe Claudel in English translation

Brodeck’s Report

Monsieur Linh and His Child

The Investigation

Grey Souls

Parfums

God knows how I adore life

When the wind turns

On the shore lies another day

I cannot ask for more.

BETH GIBBONS

I

ON THE ISLAND OF SULAWESI LIVE THE TORAJA. THE existence of this race of people is punctuated obsessively by death. When one of them dies, the arrangements for the funeral take up weeks, months, sometimes years. It is the custom to invite all the members of the dead person’s family to the ceremony. This can account for thousands of guests scattered over the whole of the Indonesian archipelago, or even beyond. The cost of their travel, and of accommodating and feeding them, is the responsibility of family and friends. It is not unusual for them to fall into debt over a long period in order to be able to maintain the tradition.

Wooden houses, delicate and graceful as small fishing boats, are erected to house the guests. Livestock is bought in anticipation of the banquets. Pigs and buffaloes will be sacrificed to accompany the deceased. Throughout this time they preserve the corpse of this person, who is not yet thought of as being dead, but as someone who is sick – to masaki, in the language of the Toraja.

The burial place in which the body is interred is hewn out of the rock of certain sacred cliffs. In the tombs, which are in the shape of recessed cavities, lie the remains of other members of the same family, watched over by wooden idols. Occasionally, the sarcophagi rot and split open. The bones then fall to the ground and are left there, among the leaves and the earth.

I travelled across the land of the Toraja during the spring of 2012. In this island that was hitherto unknown to me I rediscovered what I have always loved elsewhere in Indonesia: the people, smiling and peaceful; the scenery, undulating, sometimes steep, that is made up of infinite shades of green, from the palest to the most muted; the skies, which can be wide and blue and become almost perpendicular by the following day, a collage of high, leaden clouds that suddenly burst and release a warm rain that falls over the forests, paths and rice fields; the night, which comes early, very suddenly, and sets up the clamour of insects and geckoes; the pleasure of drinking an iced beer while eating a nasi goreng or satays of goat’s meat while sitting on a pavement, on plastic chairs designed for dwarfs; of smoking a kretek smelling of nutmeg and cinnamon.

In a clearing, close to a village in Toraja, I was shown a particular tree. Striking and majestic, it rose from the forest a few hundred metres below the houses. It is a burial place set aside for very young children who have died during their early months. A cavity is carved out of the trunk of the tree. The little corpse wrapped in a shroud is placed inside. The opening of the sylvan tomb is filled in with a weave of branches and cloths. Gradually, over the course of years, the wood of the tree grows over it, retaining the child’s body within its own large body, beneath its newly healed bark. Then, very slowly, in harmony with the patient rhythm of the tree’s growth, begins the journey that will see it rise up towards the heavens.

We bury our dead. We burn them too. Never would we dream of entrusting them to the trees. Yet we lack neither forests nor imagination. Our beliefs, however, have grown meaningless and inconsequential. We perpetuate rituals that most of us would find very hard to explain. In our world, nowadays, we play down the presence of death. The people of Toraja make it the focal point of theirs. So which of us is on the right path?

That same evening, drinking beer and smoking kreteks on the little balcony of my hotel room, I thought again of the tree and of its wood nourished with delicate bones and dead flesh. Some elderly American ladies were laughing very loudly down below, finishing their dinner on the terrace of the restaurant. I had come across them on my way back to the hotel. They were wearing pink trainers and were dressed in khaki hiking slacks with numerous pockets, cotton blouses and the sort of waistcoats worn by front-line correspondents. Their heads were adorned with hair that was white or mauve, occasionally deep purple. They all had the same reconstructed noses, the same stretched-apart eyes, the same newly fleshed-out lips. They had reached the final stage of their lives, but their faces had the abstracted and simplistic aspect of young girls, artificial and identical-looking. You might have thought they were dolls that had escaped from some sort of shop selling hideous paraphernalia for goodness knows what type of customer. I thought of all the useless artifices we apply to our bodies to elude time and our fears.

Opposite me, in the Indonesian night, as I was enjoying the scent of the cigarettes, I could make out the clear outlines of the buffaloes, standing dozing in the midst of the rice fields, their bent heads lowered towards the mud. A fine rain as well as a little mist seeped down their motionless bodies. They seemed to belong to a different century. I could sense them fading away. I thought of death. Of the advent of life. Of the faltering dance, sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque, that is our life. Of our end too. Toads were chattering. Large bats were hovering above my head in a silent duel. Three months ago, I had just reached the age of fifty. Did that signify anything?

Beside me, as always, there lay a book. That evening it was The Ghost Rider by Ismaïl Kadaré, which I reread at least once every two years. It is a very beautiful story about promises, death, phantoms and riding horses. About winter, too, which is the season during which I have always thought I become truly myself. I had a notebook and a fountain pen that I bought more than ten years ago in a market in Saigon. I no longer remember whether I took notes as I thought of the tree and its bark enveloping the small invisible bodies. I can’t be sure: sometimes one writes better in one’s head than anywhere else. I was between two films, in that difficult place where you question yourself about what you do, pondering whether it is worthwhile, whether it has any point. And where you are even less sure whether you should continue.

My last full-length film had had a poor reception. The public had not rushed to see it. It had fared slightly better abroad, in the dozen or so countries in which it had been shown and to which I had travelled too, replying to the same questions, producing the same smile for photographers, and finding myself alone in the evening in my hotel room gazing at the miniatures in the mini-bar as if they shared my misfortune. After the tour, I had decided to forget this film that had consumed two years of my life, to turn over a new leaf within myself, and I set off for Sulawesi with a renewed longing for images, as yet vague and hazy, that were beginning to dawn on me and were awaiting a clarification that I was in no hurry to take on. For a long time, I have understood that we do not make films, but that they come from within us and emerge when they intend to do so, at the moment that they have chosen.

The elderly Americans – it is as though I was talking about cars – had quietened down. They had probably returned to their bedrooms. I imagined them now alone, standing in front of their bathroom mirrors, each of them peering at her artificial face and sadly recognising her true age. Every illusion contains its bitter destruction.

Three days later I was back in France. As soon as I got into my apartment, I lay down my luggage and drank a glass of tap water as I looked around. I felt as though I had arrived in a foreign country. The smells were certainly recognisable, but they belonged to city life, which I had been away from and where I had not yet found my bearings. The floorboards creaked beneath my feet. Dead flies, their legs turned towards the ceiling, had managed to expire collectively on the windowsills. I still felt both normal and exotic. I still had the peculiar taste of kreteks in my mouth.

I could hear some familiar sounds above me, however, in particular the out-of-tune piano that belonged to Monsieur Bellagar, my elderly, half-blind neighbour on the eighth floor, whose features and elegant neckties were somewhat reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, and who played tunes from Central Europe in a melancholy manner for hours on end.

I walked around the rooms, which can be done very quickly since there are only three of them, and I listened to the messages that had accrued on my answering machine, which was blinking on a low table in the sitting room, beside the photograph of Florence, my former wife, who was smiling at me. Among them I came across one from Eugène.

“You’re going to laugh,” he told me. “I’ve got a nasty cancer.”