WE WENT BACK through the rice field, returning to the main road, to find that our host family had at last begun to remove and unwrap their dead. I recognized a man my age who worked as a graphic designer in Rantepao. He had arrived on his moped late the night before, climbing out of the wall as I slept. He pulled out a skeleton wrapped in gold fabric. “This is my brother, he died in a motorbike crash when he was seventeen.” He pointed to the wrapped body next to him. “That is my grandfather.”
Down the hill from us, another family had laid out a picnic, complete with a gingham blanket, for their grandfather, who had died seven years earlier. This was his second appearance at a ma’nene’ ceremony and he was still in good shape, preservation-wise. His family brushed his face with a grass broom and flipped him over, peeling dried flesh from the back of his head. They stood him up for a family portrait, and the family gathered round, some stoic, some smiling. I was observing off to the side when a woman called me over to join the picture. I waved my hands, as if to say, “Nope, terrible idea,” but they insisted. Somewhere deep in Indonesia, there exists a picture of me with a Torajan family and a freshly cleaned mummy.
I had heard of mummification occurring in very dry or very cold climates, but the lush, humid air of Indonesia hardly fell into that category. So how did the dead of this village become mummies? The answer depended on who you asked. Some claimed they would only mummify the body in the old way—pouring oils into the person’s mouth and throat, and spreading special tea leaves and tree barks on the skin. The tannins in the tea and bark bind with and shrink the proteins in the skin, making it stronger, stiffer, and more resistant to bacterial attack. The process is similar to how a taxidermist would preserve an animal hide (hence the word “tanning” in leather).
The new trend in Torajan body mummification is none other than good ol’ embalmer’s formalin (a solution of formaldehyde, methyl alcohol, and water) injected into the body. One woman I spoke to did not want her family members to receive the more invasive injections, but said in a conspiratorial tone, “I know other people are doing it.”
The villagers in this region of Toraja are amateur taxidermists of the human body. Given that the Torajans now use similar chemical formulas as North Americans to mummify their dead, I wondered why Westerners are so horrified at the practice. Perhaps it is not the extreme preservation that offends. Rather, it is that a Torajan body doesn’t sequester itself in a sealed casket, walled in a cement fortress underneath the earth, but instead dares to hang around among the living.**
Confronted with the idea of keeping Mom in the house for seven years after her death, many Westerners picture the movie Psycho and its deranged hotel manager. The Torajan villagers preserve the corpses of their mothers; Norman Bates preserved the corpse of his mother. The villagers live with their bodies for many years; Norman lived with his mother’s body for many years. The villagers have conversations with their bodies as if they are alive; Norman had conversations with his mother’s body as if she were alive. But while these villagers spend an afternoon cleaning the graves, exuding a mundane normalcy, Norman Bates is the American Film Institute’s second scariest movie villain of all time, coming in behind Hannibal Lecter and ahead of Darth Vader. He didn’t win that sinister acclaim by murdering innocent hotel guests wearing his mother’s clothing; he won it because Westerners feel there is something profoundly creepy about interacting with the dead over a long period of time. (I’ve spoiled Psycho entirely—apologies.)
Yesterday I had met the son of John Hans Tappi. Today I was going to meet John Hans himself. He was laid out, basking in the sun in plaid boxer shorts and a gold watch. His chest and abdominal cavity had been infused with formalin when he died, which explained why two years later his torso was flawlessly preserved, while his face had gone black and pockmarked, revealing bone below. When the family had to clean inside his boxers and brush around his mummified penis, they looked just as uncomfortable as you would expect. They made a self-deprecating joke and got the job done.
Small children ran from mummy to mummy, inspecting and poking them before scampering away. One girl, about five years old, climbed up the side of a house-grave to join me on the edge of a roof, above the bustle below. The two of us sat in silence, bound by a kinship of awkwardness, of preferring to watch from above.
Agus spotted me up there and yelled, “Look, makes me think about how I’m going to be like this. This is going to be me, eh?”
Back at the house where we were staying, a four-year-old boy watched us eat bowls of rice. He popped his head up from behind a railing and squealed with delight when I made faces back. His mother told him to leave us alone, so he found a paintbrush. He moved through the courtyard and squatted next to a dried bamboo leaf on the ground. He began to brush it, fully concentrated, hitting all the crevices. If the tradition of the ma’nene’ continues, chances are he will grow up to do that to a body, perhaps one of the people that we met here in the village.
THE NEXT MORNING John Hans Tappi had been redressed in new clothes, a button-up black jacket with gold buttons and navy slacks. He was making a move today, to a new house-grave down the road, light blue and topped with a white cross. The decoration on the grave was a cultural mix: traditional symbols of the buffalo, but also the sacred heart of the Virgin Mary, photos of Jesus praying, and a full rendering of the Last Supper.
John Hans’s family propped him up and posed with him for one final picture in his new garb before placing him back in his coffin. They put his shiny black dress shoes next to his feet, and pulled blankets over him, tucking him in. Closing the lid, they polished the sides, and carried the coffin down the road on their shoulders, drumming and chanting as they went. That was the end of the excitement for John Hans, until three years later when he would emerge again.
As I loaded the SUV, Agus remarked, “You know there is a body in that house?” He pointed to the Torajan house next door to the one we had been sleeping in, all of ten feet away. The family had been waiting to see how we’d react before telling us about a woman called Sanda, a seventy-year-old who had died two weeks earlier.
“Do you want to see her?” Agus asked.
I gave a slow nod: somehow, it made perfect sense that we had been snoozing corpse-adjacent our entire stay.