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The deal fell through with Wayan. That property Felipe had found for her somehow didn’t
happen. When I ask Wayan what went wrong, I get some fuzzy reply about a lost deed; I
don’t think I was ever told the real story. What matters is only that it’s a dead deal. I’m starting
to get kind of panicked about this whole Wayan house situation. I try to explain my urgency to
her, saying, “Wayan—I have to leave Bali in less than two weeks and go back to America. I
can’t face my friends who gave me all this money and tell them that you still don’t have a
home.”
“But Liz, if a place has no good taksu.. .”
Everybody has a different sense of urgency in this life.
But a few days later Wayan calls over at Felipe’s house, giddy. She’s found a different
piece of land, and this one she really loves. An emerald expanse of rice field on a quiet road,
close to town. It has good taksu written all over it. Wayan tells us that the land belongs to a
farmer, a friend of her father’s, who is desperate for cash. He has seven aro total to sell, but
(needing fast money) would be willing to give her only the two aro she can afford. She loves
this land. I love this land. Felipe loves this land. Tutti—spinning across the grass in circles,
arms extended, a little Balinese Julie Andrews—loves it, too.
“Buy it,” I tell Wayan.
But a few days pass, and she keeps stalling. “Do you want to live there or not?” I keep
asking.
She stalls some more, then changes her story again. This morning, she says, the farmer
called to tell her he isn’t certain anymore whether he can sell only the two-aro parcel to her;
instead, he might want to sell the whole seven-aro lot intact... it’s his wife that’s the problem
... The farmer needs to talk to his wife, see if it’s OK with her to break up the land...
Wayan says, “Maybe if I had more money.. .”
Dear God, she wants me to come up with the cash to buy the whole chunk of land. Even
as I’m trying to figure out how to raise a staggering 22,000 extra American dollars, I’m telling
her, “Wayan, I can’t do it, I don’t have the money. Can’t you make a deal with the farmer?”