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dinner, I had made my way to a nearby café for a cappuccino. Next to the cash register were enough stacks of old copies of
Cosmo, Newsweek
and the London Sunday
Times
to fill six doctors’ waiting rooms. Behind the counter was abackgammon set for customers and a homemade library of faded paperbacks—Erica Jong, Ken Follett, Alexandra Penney. From Casablanca, the showy, two-story singles bar across the street, Bruce Springsteen was belting out “Dancing in the Dark.” Hungry-eyed girls in tiny skirts were cruising the place in pairs, while muscular guys with gold medallions dangling across their bronzed chests perched on the balcony, drinking beer.
    After an unquiet sleep, I had woken up and walked around the three or four square blocks of the town. Most of the stores seemed to be trendy boutiques, across whose windows were splashed New Wave Japanese T-shirts and pretty sundresses in
Miami Vice
turquoise and pink. Surfaris. Tropical Climax. Cherry. Mariko.
An American Werewolf in London
was playing at the local cinema. The Narnia. Frenchy. Pancho’s. The Pub. A few Men at Work songs were pouring out of cassette stores opened to the street, only to be drowned out by the roar of Suzukis erratically ridden by local boys in leopardskin shirts. Fatty. The Beer Garden. Depot Viva. The Duck Nuts. “Marijuana and hashish,” whispered one man to me. “Hashish and cocaine,” muttered his friend. Joe’s. Lenny. Jerry. Elly’s. Elice’s. I walked back to my guesthouse—Van Morrison had now replaced Vivaldi on the system—and a couple of the boys there invited me to sit down over some guacamole and give them my opinion of Michael Landon and John McEnroe.
    I was, of course, in Bali, the Elysian isle famous for its otherworldly exoticism, its cultural integrity, its natural grace.
    SAY BALI, AND two things come to mind: tourism and paradise. Both are inalienable features of the island, and also incompatible. For as fast as paradises seduce tourists, tourists reduce paradises. Such are the unerring laws of physics: what goes up must come down; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Hardly has a last paradise been discovered than everyone converges on it so fast that it quickly becomes a paradise lost.
    Nowhere, however, had this struggle been so protracted or intense as in Bali, most pestered and most paradisiacal of islands. The first Westerners ever to land here, Dutch sailors in 1597, announced their discovery of Eden, and two of them decided never to leave. By 1619, Balinese girls were already fetching 150florins in the slave markets of Réunion and by 1847, the first tract in the fertile field of Baliology was already being brought into print. And for more than half a century now, Bali had been perhaps the world’s best-kept idyll and its worst-kept secret: a race of charmed spirits still danced in its temples, and a crush of foreigners kept pushing their way in for a view. Tourism hung around Bali like chains around a mermaid.
    The animist Hindus who grace the island regard all of life as a battle between the spirits of light and darkness, and nearly every native dance plays out this unending elemental struggle in the form of a celebration or an exorcism. But Bali had also become the world’s most popular stage for a subtler battle, and a less ethereal dance—between the colonizing impulse of the West and the resistant cultural heritage of the East. Like Prospero’s isle, Bali was a kind of paradise crowded with wood nymphs and cave-hidden spirits. Like Prospero’s isle, it was governed by a race of noblemen, artisans and priests that had been chased into exile across the seas. And like Prospero’s isle, it was now being threatened by a new mob of aliens, who found themselves charmed by its virgin goddesses, made sleep-heavy by its unearthly music. Bali had thus become the magical setting on which the two forces were deciding destinies larger than their own: could Ariel, airy spirit and agent of