"John"

©2009 Rudolf Helder

The girl that gave him a foot massage and pedicure was young, maybe 24, lean and with supple skin. The way she sat, in the way of the locals, more like a squat on a low kind of upturned bucket, he could see some belly fat which surprised him considering the way she was built. Maybe older than he thought. You'd never know with Asians. Maybe a mother already. They liked to start young.
The girl looked up with a quick movement of her head, caught him staring down her neckline. Smiled. Vapid eyes. Customarily. No expectations. Just doing her work, which was well what was it? Soaking his feet and scraping dirt away from under his toenails. Some job. He looked at his legs, a scarecrow's sun-bleached fake limbs, pale and veined coming out from under his rolled back pants. Shit. It'll take a while to get tanned here in Ubud. Wasn't Kuta Beach where most tourists hung out. He'd been there, years ago. Maybe seventeen. Over here, Ubud, they'd come for the day to marvel at the architecture of the Balinese, their crafts, carving and painting, not much else, certainly not foot massages.
He was still staring at the girl, trying to get a peek at her small breasts that didn't need a bra, which she wore anyway like every woman he'd seen so far, not like the first time he learned about Bali as a boy, sneaking a peek at a book in his big sister's library—more a bookshelf, actually—called what? The Family of Man, a collection of nice black and whites from around the world, in which one showed a young Balinese woman with fantastically formed bare breasts balancing a basket on her head, talking to an old Chinese-looking man in a market. The fact that the girl was half naked in public, that that was normal there and that the Chinese guy was looking at her face as she was saying something to him, not at her full breasts with nipples you just wanted between your lips to drink milk from, which he now thought was probably what they were for back then, not be put away in a bra, but for nourishment, with babies just flying out of their wombs, at least that's what people said back then, talking about the yellow peril, that one day Asians would overrun the world, that there were millions and millions of them breeding more all the time. Talk that made them faceless, subhuman and scary to think of when you're just a kid sneaking a peek at boobs in a book.
Now he knew better. He'd been coming to Asia for years. Maybe because of the succulent breasts he'd seen as a boy in pictures from Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Philippines, but mostly Indonesia because, after all, they'd owned the country for 350 years. Did she even know that, or cared about that, that her ancestors were maybe forced to give foot baths to the Blanda, the colonial occupiers, coming from a country of a few million, ruling over some 350 million on thousands of islands? Insane. Crazy lot the Dutch were, or rather, had been, killing their kings, imprisoning them, or driving them to suicide, whole courts walking into a hail of Dutch bullets.
When you walk around bare breasted pride is all you have and pride they had plenty, the blue ones, as the Dutch called 'em then, supposedly for the blue spot Asians have at birth at the bottom of the spine.
The blue ones.
Then two Indonesian boys took that nickname and started a musical duo proudly called The  Blue Diamonds. Clever. He smiled. The girl in front of him wore looked up and smiled back adding life to her eyes, making them prettier. She was wearing hip jeans, made for a body like hers, a disastrous idea for anyone with excess weight which nowadays was, like, everyone. While preparing for her task she'd frequently bent down exposing the cleavage of shapely butt cheeks with just a remaining tinge of blue skin. He liked the sight of it, stared absentmindedly at it, because she was the most interesting thing in the room, everything else devoid of inspiration: the windless banner in the doorway limply advertising the price of treatment, the cheap Chinese fan in a corner rattling faintly, the customary Balinese mask with bulging eyes on the green paint blistering wall, even the looped gamelan music coming from a silver painted speakerbox sitting on a black couch with leather cracking at the edges.
Now she turned her head up, as if remembering something. Looked at him inquisitively. Fuck. He knew that look.
Siapa nama? You name?
John, he lied. She couldn't pronounce his name anyway. John was convenient, expected, inconsequential.
You? He cared as much as she pretended to.
Mah-deh. Sure. Meant something like first born, or second born, and so on. Read about it. Couldn't remember the correct order. Stupid system. After the fourth child they started the whole naming system all over again. Imagine that, your fifth child would have the same name as the first. He smiled, repeating the name. Made. She smiled, bowed her head and scooped water over his ankles with her long, strong, perfectly formed fingers.