Turn Left at Venus Read online

  This novel is terrifyingly relevant these days when patriarchy is like a monster in a horror film that just doesn’t die but when injured finds a fresh angry strength to rise and bellow and destroy everything in its path

  This book is dull and boring with maybe 8% of good parts but there’s not much of a story and too much philosophising

  Books like this are why I could never call myself a feminist. It doesn’t even have a clear plot. All the so called worlds are terrible places no one would want to live in. Obviously the author does not understand that people actually want to live with close loving relationships. I don’t think women are all that different from men.

  If you’re young today you don’t know how it really was in the 70s. I, like many girls at the time, were told we could maybe become a secretary/nurse/teacher if we really had to have a job, which would only be til we married, but really a housewife was the best occupation, part of your duties being to look as if you never did a day’s work in your life.

  Why aren’t there more transwomen in WIWAW slash?

  26

  WHAT KIND OF A WOMAN CAN WOMEN BE?

  What kind of a woman can women be? For as long as she knew she could think her own thoughts Ada had been thinking about this, she thought, sweeping her terrace floor as soft early daylight emerged from the jungle around her, the roosters crowing, the stirrings of morning wafting in the green-scented air with the scent from across the way of incense lighted for the dawn’s offerings. Ada was here to think about nothing else, to really think about this, it was time to write this book.

  She kept thinking: how can anyone say what a woman is when there are women who are not like that?

  What kind of women can a woman be?

  It was as if the lives of Lidia and Liliana already existed and knowledge of them was simply transmitted to her. Not always simply. Ada wrote as if taking dictation, not exactly, more like creating the dictators, while listening to their several voices as each in her own way made herself clear, argued with the others, turned up in each other’s worlds, voices not from physical people except when she’d overhear something in English while eating a nasi goreng at the small roadside warung or buying pisang and rambutans at the pasar or drinking a ginger tea at Dana’s Warung. ‘This stuff looks different once you get it back home.’ ‘I feel like a different person here.’ ‘These people will never know what it’s like for us.’ Ada heard with a jolt of recognition, charged with alertness, or else a delayed-reaction realisation that it was a voice from what she was writing.

  Does being a woman have the same meaning everywhere? Are there women who think they are more like a man?

  It was here, over twenty years earlier, that she had first really asked herself.

  The subsequent decades had posed the question increasingly. Now Ada was writing in a new present, a present where she kept hearing about movements, campaigns, affirmative action, solidarity, backlash, reinvigorated movements.

  ‘We’re all just trying to get away, we need to get away,’ said one of the other foreign women.

  Ada didn’t feel she was particularly getting away. Or, she was always getting away. Or, she had gotten away a long time ago. Anyway, this was her tribe in this present, declaring their common ground.

  The women gathered at Dana’s Warung, appropriating one of the downstairs terraces among the several levels of open terraces and enclosed rooms and open-sided stairways and landings, where the staff ran up and down serving juices, fruit salads, nasi campur. Someone told you about the place, or someone brought you here, or you were looking for a place to sit and the women would say, ‘Are you alone? Join us! We liberated this space.’

  Some of them said if you came here, to this island, it was to change your life and that’s what we all have in common.

  The restaurant, whimsically called Warung as if it were just another humble local roadside food stand, was the town’s new, first and only upmarket cafe and bar. It was decorated with a fine collection of fabrics, paintings and carvings from the area and the rest of the country, the seats cushioned in batik and woven cloth. From here they looked across the narrow gorge into an intense perpendicular jungle of lavish jewelgreens reaching higher than they could see. The intensity of the colours and the heat they were sheltering from were part of the sensation that that woman was talking about: the sense that they had come here to get away.

  Getting away, some of them reported, from what seemed inevitable in life where they came from, fitting in to suburbs and workplaces and doing what everyone else did, what you were supposed to do.

  ‘Even if we go back,’ said some, ‘we’ll never be the same again.’ This tribe did not like to call themselves tourists, they decided that anyone who stayed on longer than the duration of one visa was no longer just a tourist, but to the locals they were all known as tourists.

  Ada listened as the women said:

  This place changes you.

  It sure does.

  Isn’t that why we came here?

  Absolutely, it really is.

  Living a new different better way.

  I don’t like all the changes.

  I love all of mine.

  The way some things can irritate you after a while.

  The dogs, the humidity, the sellers. I didn’t think living without electricity would be so hard.

  They’re getting electricity soon.

  Bali is getting spoiled.

  Bali is being spoiled now, Kevin had said.

  Kevin also said people had been saying that for a long time. In the 1930s visitors said that the village boys were being spoiled by bicycles and flashlights, abandoning their traditional ways of getting about, and artificially lighting their paths. What will happen to their culture?

  At Dana’s Warung, Karen from Adelaide was waiting for her. Karen from Adelaide was a woman who said whatever she wanted to say, as she had already said. ‘Hello Wayan Da, I was hoping to see you again,’ said Karen from Adelaide to Ada.

  Ada probably didn’t say, ‘Me too.’ Maybe she did. She did go to sit next to Karen and has an idea people moved to make space for her as if in recognition that these two wanted to talk to each other.

  Ada looked at Karen, her strong, handsome face, her serene air of entitled being, a woman who had made up her mind, as Karen looked with careful attention at the women who served their papaya and lime juice, at the women dressed in graceful batik sarongs pleated just so and the lacy tight blouses called kebaya and the fabric wound around their waists, the relaxed way they smiled as they served, their lack of haste or any apparent anxiety as they seemed to get about with a gliding rolling motion that set them apart from the tribe of white women, mostly white women, who copiously discussed their own bodies as sites of oppression, anguish, guilt, incrimination, humiliation, indoctrination and, maybe eventually, with luck and support and time, of enlightenment.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Karen about the local women who worked here, ‘I wonder if those women think about liberation,’ Karen said only to Ada.

  ‘I wondered that,’ said Ada who would not have mentioned this at all or unless and until she wanted to find out what they’d say if she did.

  ‘The conditions of their labour,’ said Karen.

  ‘What they think their choices are.’

  Sometimes there’s someone who knows exactly what you mean.

  Karen wasn’t shy, she said, ‘I like talking to you.’

  ‘I have to go to pasar,’ said Ada, who could have gone directly there from home with the bemo that did not come past here, but she had walked down, telling herself it was a good day for walking. Ada meant, or wanted this to mean, that she only happened to be coming past Dana’s Warung on the way to the market, as if like a teenager with a crush she had to pretend she was only kind of accidentally turning up where someone might be looking out for her.

  Karen came to the market with her.

  Ada did not care to enumerate the several places she’d lived in by now; people seemed to think
they should remark it was ‘exotic’ or ‘amazing’ or ’showing off’. But she wasn’t the only one who did not talk details about any other life she had before coming here, to a place called Paradise.

  From time to time, Ada would sit at Dana’s Warung down near the bridge with the group of long-stay foreign women, one of those fluid tribes she usually found in her locations, or settings, all marked with the sense of being temporary.

  Ada provided her answers: ‘Wayan Da, that’s my Balinese name. I’m from Sydney, I’ve lived in various places, I’m here just to be here.’ She copied that from someone she’d heard saying, I’m here just to be here. That apparently was sufficient, communicating unwillingness to be probed.

  So during this time no one asked her her ‘real’ name. The others saw a quiet woman in her forties, her faded light-brown hair often drenched in coconut oil and pulled into a knot, keeping her hair neat and her neck cool. Ada dressed in loose batik pants and the cotton and rayon tops sold at the couple of new shops up here offering clothes for tourists; she smoked a kretek once in a while, the cloves making her lips tingle, and agreed kreteks were not actually good for you but made the tobacco taste as if they were. She was at ease where she was, with the status of a fringe-dweller, projecting a kind of self-sufficiency, healthy and outwardly calm; evidently without the neediness that made some of the women decide to travel together now, meet more often for meals. Ada would readily admit to spending a lot of time at home, writing. She’d make it clear that she liked it that way. She’d tell them she liked living alone in a house that was out of the way; if she wanted company she could come here. ‘Though I’m never quite totally alone here,’ she also said, not saying what she meant by that.

  The women listened carefully to each other, this was the new manners of the time; they understood that usually they were not much listened to where they came from. ‘Women!’ they’d exclaim happily, ‘it’s good to talk with women’, and they’d exclaim, ‘Women are beautiful.’ It had to be said.

  Some stayed longer, some decided to live here. Canadian, Australian, American, French, united in the culture of a new women’s movement that would eliminate universal patriarchy. Starting with women getting away, for a month or a year or for who knows really, to find themselves, remake themselves, take time away from the selves they had to be elsewhere. Next year would be International Women’s Year and from then on no one could remain unenlightened. They lived in the certainty of the coming liberation. It wasn’t just about equality, no, not only equality, it was about something more revolutionary. Equality alone did not tell you what a woman could be.

  ‘We have no model,’ said the one from Toronto, ‘we didn’t grow up seeing models of the women we want to be.’

  ‘We would have to find them in books.’

  ‘Music. Films. But not in our lives.’

  ‘There’s never been a time like our time.’

  ‘We have to become the models.’

  They were here to paint, to learn dancing, to study the culture, learn the language, get healed, have massages, bathe in holy water, take the witchdoctor’s herbs. To ‘do a bit of writing’. They’d say, ‘I write just for myself’; some would say, ‘I hope to be published one day.’

  ‘This is what we were talking about!’ one day said this other woman, Irish, who used to be a public servant, wife and mother and now was finding herself and liking what she found as women usually did when they had either cut themselves loose or decided to take an experimental break from their job. The book she held! The paperback, the UK edition. The one Ada always thinks of as The Sequel and is called The Shelf of Bone. Several pages turned down. The Irish woman read aloud to them:

  And at that moment Alania realised just how much the distress and fury had been growing amongst them. She too turned to The Stranger, now that they had finally found him and could demand that he answer the group’s accumulated questions, their accusations. His report from Lueshira had not really prepared them. It was outrageous that they didn’t really know how it would be.

  Why should I get a device? one of the group demanded of him.

  Why can’t they explain how the device works? another challenged.

  I like being a woman; why should I change? said another.

  Why do they expect us to become like them? Why can’t they just be glad we’re here, we came all this way to their world and they act as if that were nothing.

  What is the Dark Saga? Why do they ask us if we have come to fulfil the Dark Saga’s prophecy?

  The Stranger spoke to them gently. Ask yourselves why you came here, he said to them. You sought to undertake more than the sightseeing you enjoyed on your holidays on Dunya. You sought transformation, even if you did not know it. Do not ask the people of Lueshira to change themselves for you. Ask yourselves why you are reluctant to change.

  Yes, said some of the women at Warung Dana, they had travelled to change themselves, like the travellers from the Earth-like planet who went to Lueshira in The Shelf of Bone.

  Who thought they were going to a Utopia, but weren’t really ready to change as much as they would have to, to fit in, to live there, even to understand the place.

  And some women said they wanted to read the book too.

  Ada sat there quietly on the batik cushions, invisible until the subject changed.

  ‘So that was the first time someone was reading aloud from a book while I was there.’

  ‘A book you wrote.’

  ‘But,’ Ada tells Noemi, ‘it’s not just that I wasn’t tempted to tell people I was the author.’

  ‘You never wished you had?’

  ‘It was realising how much I had this secretive part of me.’

  Noemi says, ‘You didn’t just realise that then.’

  ‘It was like I did just realise that then.’

  ‘And how did that make you feel?’

  ‘Sometimes I did not like it so much but it wasn’t going to change; I was old enough to know that.’

  ‘You don’t believe it’s never too late?’

  ‘Please.’

  Karen from Adelaide was looking right at Ada, seeing her, seeing a still Ada, very still, expressionless. Karen was intent on understanding Ada, and seemed sure she could if she wanted to. Another woman said, ‘I read the short stories. Some of them very short, some go on a bit. All stories about women’s lives, but not as realism. As various fantasy versions. There was one about women choosing how they would die, all together.’

  And the women started talking about the story of the Going Out parties. Someone said it was a great idea, someone said it wasn’t, someone said death was such a taboo, we can talk about sex now but can we talk about death, why not, and before long it was all about how in this place people understood much better about death and spiritual things, with their colourful, noisy cremation ceremonies, or how about how differently you might think about such matters once you had lived here.

  The tribe of foreign women held a reading at Dana’s Warung.

  They kept saying, ‘It’s for all of us who write, it’s to be supportive.’

  No one asked Ada if she had published, they asked, ‘Just for yourself or?’ Ada would answer something like, ‘Well, who do we write for?’ as if there were no simple answer, only a call to a profound meditation. Which could be postponed. Or she’d say, ‘For my changing self’, or, ‘For an imaginary reader’, which also made the discussion or attention veer away. While it made Ada have to consider the question. She wouldn’t tell them now but the thought came that currently she was writing for them, one day they would read her book and not know they had helped her to write it.

  Always she wrote for the imaginary reader, for no one existed but in her imagination.

  Ada did attend the Reading and that’s when she first talked with Karen from Adelaide.

  Karen said, ‘You write? But you’re not reading tonight?’

  Ada said, ‘I don’t read.’

  The women read from notebooks: confessions, expo
sures, anecdotes, descriptions, manifestos.

  Everything handwritten.

  Everyone applauded warmly, and quite a bit of hugging was offered and warmly received.

  Karen said, ‘I wonder what would happen to their pieces if they typed them.’

  Karen had told Ada how important an artist’s tools were, how she had made sure to bring with her the materials she needed. There had seemed to be no problem at all for her, not the expense, nothing.

  Ada bought her typewriter ribbons in Singapore when she had to go there to renew her visa. Later she found a place in Denpasar that could order in the right kind. She’d take the bus, the crowded little bemo that wound its way past villages and bright rice fields, low stone fences and thatched pavilions, small markets and food stalls, eventually reaching the outskirts of the little capital; she had to go to Denpasar for the post office and to change money at the bank, which took a while, cashing travellers’ checks, filling in forms, waiting, going from desk to desk. Then some shops, and while she was in town she’d go to the big market, and buy fruit, and knives or scissors, and those palm-sugar sweets she liked, and sit somewhere to eat some rice or drink some local coffee, and be stared at and laughed at, and think about being a stranger, an outsider, and how and to what extent you understood what was going on around you, and what you might have missed and never know.

  Ada sent postcards to the addresses she had: the one Kevin had given her before she left, in Santa Barbara, maybe it was his parents’ address and so should always find him; and she sent a card to the last address she had for Leyla, an address now seven years old, also in California. But no reply ever came to Post Restante Denpasar, not from either of them. She got mail from Sophie – reports on deals and sales, reminders of deadlines, news about the cat, and, by now, a greeting from Sophie’s long-time companion Vera and their son Saul – Ada had met them last time she was in San Francisco. Occasionally there’d be a card or note from someone she’d been friendly with somewhere. Gail from Sydney wrote once a year or so when Ada told her where she’d be.