Up the road a family had slaughtered a pig and were awaiting the arrival of a Protestant priest to bless their new grave, which would hold six family members. They asked if we wanted to join them for dinner.
Chunks of the pig’s flesh were cubed and placed in bamboo tubes to be cooked over the fire. The pig had been butchered right next to the fire where it now roasted. Pools of pig blood stagnated as we ate, and several lazy flies buzzed around us. The severed hooves hung from a nearby bamboo scaffolding. A small dog dashed in and made off with a piece of the pig’s offal, still dripping blood and fluid. “Ey!” the fire-tender yelled after the beast, but left the dog alone to enjoy his prize.
A woman offered me a bamboo leaf with a pile of warm pink rice on top. The bamboo tubes were pulled hot from the fire, the flesh still sizzling. Many of the pig chunks were pure fat. Halfway through the meal I held up the bamboo leaf and looked closer at the crisp, fatty skin and saw the hair follicles, still visible. This is the flesh of a dead animal, I realized, and was for the moment repulsed.
For as much time as I had spent facing human mortality, I didn’t recognize a dead animal that didn’t come wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam. French anthropologist No?lie Vialles wrote of the food system in France, though this could be said of almost any country in the West: “slaughtering was required to be industrial, that is to say large-scale and anonymous; it must be non-violent (ideally: painless); and it must be invisible (ideally: non-existent). It must be as if it were not.”
It must be as if it were not.
An old woman, so old her eyes had clouded over with cataracts, picked at a small pile of rice and gazed out over the valley. She didn’t interact with anyone around her; maybe she no longer could. Agus poked me with a pork-stained finger and whispered, “This grave will be hers.” He was making fun of her, but also speaking a basic fact. This woman would soon go the way of her ancestors, and would move into this new yellow house, “the house without fire and smoke.”
Later that night, our pig arrived on the moped. It promptly took up residence under one of the houses and chomped away on food scraps, unaware that Paul and I had brought it here to meet its demise.*
That night we slept in the belly of the tongkonan house. It seemed enormous from the outside, so we were surprised to climb up the wooden ladder and discover a single, windowless room. Bedding was laid out on the floor, and we fell into a grateful sleep. It was only later in the night that we realized we were wrong about the lone room. Wooden latches in the wall opened into three other rooms. All night long people quietly crawled in and out of the walls around us.
THE NEXT MORNING began with the sound of a plaintive gong tolling along the village road. This announced the official start of the ma’nene’.
The first mummy I saw wore eighties’ style aviator sunglasses with yellow-tinted frames.
“Damn,” I thought, “that guy looks like my middle school algebra teacher.”
One young man stood the mummy up as another sliced into its navy blazer with a pair of scissors, cutting all the way down to his pants, revealing the torso and legs. Given that this gentleman had been dead eight years, he was remarkably well preserved, with no obvious gashes or breaks in his flesh. Two coffins down, another fellow hadn’t been so lucky. His body was now entirely shriveled, nothing left but thin strips of dried skin over bone, held together by gold embroidered cloth.
Wearing nothing but boxer shorts and the aviators, the mummy was placed on the ground, a pillow beneath his head. An eight-by-ten-inch framed portrait photo, taken during his life, sat propped next to his body. Alive, he had looked far less like my math teacher than he did today, eight years into mummification.
A group of women fell to their knees beside the man and keened, wailing his name and stroking his cheeks. When their wails softened, the man’s son moved in with a set of paintbrushes—the kind you’d buy at the local hardware store. The son began to clean the corpse, brushing his father’s leathery skin with short, loving strokes. A cockroach scampered out from inside the boxer shorts. The son didn’t seem to mind, and carried on brushing. This was mourning as I had never seen it before.
Ten minutes earlier, Agus had received a call that there were mummies being unwrapped at a hard-to-reach grave by the river. We sped in that direction, running along a narrow dirt path through a rice field. The path ended in a ditch of brown water. With no ford or bridge, we groaned and plowed through the thick mud. I slid down an embankment on my butt.
When we arrived at the site, almost forty bodies had been removed from their house-grave and lined up in rows on the ground. Some were wrapped in brightly colored cloths, some were in slender wooden coffins, and some were wrapped in cartoon quilts and blankets—we’re talking Hello Kitty, SpongeBob Squarepants, and various Disney characters. The family moved from body to body, deciding whom to unwrap. Some were unknown; nobody remembered exactly who they were. And some were top priority—a beloved husband or daughter whom they missed and couldn’t wait to see again.
A mother unwrapped her son, who had died when he was only sixteen. At first, all that could be seen was a crooked pair of feet. Hands emerged, and seemed well enough preserved. Men on either side of the coffin pulled gently on the body, testing to see if they could lift it without the body crumbling. They managed to stand him vertical, and though his torso had been preserved, his face was skeletal, excepting his teeth and thick brown hair. His mother didn’t seem to mind. She was ecstatic to see her child, even for a moment, even in this state, and held his hand and touched his face.
Nearby a son brushed the skin of his father, whose face was stained pink from his batik wrapping. “He was a good man,” he said. “He had eight children but he never beat us. I’m sad, but happy, because I can care for him as he did for me.”
The Torajans talked directly to the corpses, narrating their next move: “Now I am removing you from the grave,” “I brought you cigarettes, I’m sorry I do not have more money,” “Your daughter and family have arrived from Makassar,” “Now I remove your coat.”
At the grave by the river, the leader of the family thanked us for coming, and for bringing several boxes of cigarettes. He welcomed Paul to take pictures and me to ask questions. In return, he requested, “If you see any other outsiders to the village, do not tell them about this place, it is secret.”
I flashed back to the boorish German woman at the funeral, cigarette hanging from her mouth, iPad shoved in people’s faces. I feared I had become that woman. Our desire to see something we had anticipated for months had driven us where we weren’t wanted.