The Peeping Tom, the architect and other voyeurs
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Bronwyn Lea
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Bronwyn Lea's biography and other articles by this writer
Lying in bed, under a cotton sheet and a slow-turning fan, I was listening to tropical birds – not knowing what kind they were, but enjoying the early morning illiteracy that comes from a mind on holiday in a foreign country. I won't say which country I was in, for fear that what I am going to say later will hurt or embarrass those who might recognise the precise location or even themselves. Let me just say it is a country not far north of the Equator, where humidity refracts the dawn so that all seven colours of the rainbow can be discerned in the wet, luminous light of morning.
From where I lay, I could see through a wall of windows into a courtyard, shaded by the monstrous trunk and ambling branches of an old frangipani that dropped its flowers on to the red pebbles below. The courtyard walls were not that old – perhaps fifty years at most – but, having been rubbed with cow dung and mud, they blazed with lichen and stood, in their slow decay, with the silent presence of another age. Orchids and ferns grew from inside cracks, taking moisture from the air and nourishment from the crumbling rock, and draped their massive root systems down the sides of the wall.
I was somewhere about here in my observations when a scalp of black hair rose inches above the wall's rim, followed by a forehead, eyes and then an entire face. I remember thinking, before considering its intent, that it was a nice-looking face, not just in the sense of it being attractive, but also in the sense that its owner would seem, by its gentle features, to be a nice person. I lay motionless in bed, but it took only seconds for his eyes – the face belonged to a man – to lock with mine and then the face was gone.
The shock of seeing that face registered like a slap that shook me from illiteracy into the world of language and difference. If I had been at home in my own bed, I might have jumped up to confront the owner of that face – if for no other purpose than to assert some control or to dole out, for what it was worth, a measure of shame. But I was not at home, and in any case the large wooden doors of the bungalow were padlocked each night and not unlocked until breakfast. And this, being dawn, meant that breakfast was several hours away.
THERE WAS ANOTHER REASON I HESITATED TO ACT: I had already observed that punishments in this country often exceed their crime. Political instances aside – and they are many and brutal – a servant at the estate where I am staying had recently been fired for the infraction of "dancing his way back to the kitchen". In fairness, his dance was merely an instance of his broad-spectrum indifference to work, but I have to say when I heard the news my sympathies were with the dancer. I had seen animals too – normally protected by the Buddhist precept of non-violence – suffer the harsh consequences of their actions. In order to ease the minds of the estate's foreign guests, the staff are on order to kill any snake, poisonous or not, that winds its way into the vicinity of the bungalow. I regretted that I had already been the cause of two snake deaths: one, a thin black snake that I was certain was harmless, had run across my foot and coiled beside me on the veranda. I was trying to shoo it when two men arrived and poked it with a long stick, so that the snake raised its diminutive head, spread an impressive hood, and was whipped to death. The other one – I was uncertain about whether it was a viper or a garter snake – drifted into my courtyard one morning, seemingly unconcerned that I had been there first (or at least I hoped I had). When I asked that the snake be removed, despite it being identified as harmless, it received the same treatment as the cobra. And so I made a vow, which thankfully has not so far been tested, that I would suffer the next snake I encountered in silence.
And so this was my thinking in the long minutes after the face appeared and disappeared above the courtyard wall. I knew that if I alerted my hosts to the Peeping Tom, as I came to think of him, he would not have been beaten or anything so medieval, but he would possibly lose his job – as might his family, who were also employed by the estate. Given the egregious poverty and unemployment in this country, that seemed to be something I couldn't risk.
So I lay in bed, feeling the bile rise to my throat yet unable to act. As a foreigner, I felt altogether too powerful – like a giant whose disgruntled yell could flatten a village. The Peeping Tom had maleness on his side, for I admit the possibility of rape had crossed my mind (it was difficult not to think about it, knowing that two female tourists had recently been raped at a nearby beach). Nonetheless, my foreign passport and more money in my pockets than most people here earn in a month seemed a lethal combination. For a moment I felt sorry for the Peeping Tom, feeling myself succumb, perhaps, to a mild version of the Stockholm Syndrome, in which the victim falls in love with, and then protects, the kidnapper.
But the feeling, as it arose, dissolved when I remembered what has since become the "sickening" smile that rose with the face above the wall. I had that odd feeling people sometimes get when they have not been the victims of violence exactly, but nonetheless feel violated. I had seen it once in the face of a friend, who returned home to find her house broken into; although nothing had been taken, her underwear drawer had been rummaged and the knick-knacks on her dresser rearranged. She felt sick, she said, and would rather the burglar had taken the television than have touched her underwear and personal possessions. Of course, she quickly recanted: "Well, not the plasma screen but maybe the CD player." She hesitated again, so I suggested the clock radio, and we both dissolved into laughter. But it was nervous laughter, and that too soon dissolved. "It just makes me feel a little sick," she said, scrunching up her face.
And that's how I felt as I dressed, brushed my teeth and looked out at the lichen flaring on the courtyard wall: a little sick. But the truth was, the fact of the Peeping Tom didn't really come as a surprise. The Lonely Planet had advised modesty for women travellers in this country, and warned in the earthy register emblematic of that publication: "The sight of a woman, foreign but not necessarily, is enough to make a few men masturbate on the spot."