The Sape I Brought Home

The workshop smelled of fresh wood and humidity and something else underneath, the particular smell of a forest that has been cut into and is still exhaling. Shavings lay across the ground. Tools were arranged with the casualness of things used every day. Mathew worked with a concentration that was not intense so much as continuous: he was simply always attending to the same thing, and the thing was gradually changing.

What I was watching was not craftsmanship in any romantic sense. It was closer to patience applied to wood. Each stroke of the tool removed a little more material and revealed a little more of the shape that had always been inside the log, waiting. The instrument existed first as potential. The making was less creation than excavation.

I sat nearby and watched for a long time without speaking. This seemed to be acceptable. Mathew did not appear to need conversation while he worked, and I did not know what to say that would have been adequate to what I was watching. Someone was making me an instrument by hand, in a forest, from a tree. This was not something I had a category for.

The workshop was not a building. It was a place where things were made, and the making had accumulated there over years: off-cuts and shavings, tools on improvised surfaces, half-finished instruments in various stages of completion. A carved body here, a neck waiting for its strings there. The smell of the wood was strongest in the mornings before the heat built up.

Mathew also brought finished instruments to a stall where visitors could see them. He handled them without ceremony. A sape that was not played was simply wood.

What struck me, watching him work over several days, was how much of the instrument was in the decoration. The carving was not added to the sape after it was made. It was part of the making. The spirals and interlocking forms that covered the body were burned and painted with the same attention that had shaped the wood itself. The instrument was not complete until the surface was finished. The visual and the acoustic were not separate problems.

When it was finished and I saw it leaning against the wooden wall of the longhouse, I recognised it immediately as mine. This surprised me. I had not known I would be able to tell. But there it was: the particular red and black of the decoration, the proportions of the body, the way it stood against the timber wall like something that had always been there and was also unmistakably new.

I picked it up for the first time and held it against my chest, feeling the width of the body and the weight of the neck, both familiar from weeks of lessons and entirely different because this one was going to leave Sarawak with me. The carved back was rough in a way the lesson instruments were not. Not unfinished, but present: the surface retained the memory of the tool, each mark deliberate and slightly different from the last, accumulating into the pattern that now covered the whole body.

I have touched many instruments in my life. The moment of first contact with this one was different in a way I could not have predicted. It was not that the sape was more beautiful than others I had held, though it was. It was that I had watched it being made, and watching the making changes what the object means. I knew which piece of wood it had come from. I knew how many hours had passed between the log on the ground and the instrument in my hands. That knowledge does not go away when you pick something up. It becomes part of what you are holding.

The lessons happened in the same place the making had happened: on the veranda of the longhouse, in the makeshift studio below, sometimes outside in the open air with the forest as the closest audience. Mathew taught in the same way he worked, continuously and without urgency, offering the music the way the forest offered its sounds: not presented but simply there, available to anyone who was quiet enough to receive it.

Playing the instrument he had made for me was different from playing the instruments I had borrowed during earlier visits. The sape responded differently, had different resonances, a different weight in the hands. Or perhaps I was different, knowing now how it had been made and what it had been before it was an instrument. The music felt more like a conversation and less like a lesson. The object in my hands had a biography, and I was becoming part of it.

On the last evening, the community gathered to celebrate the completion of the sape. The longhouse filled with people, and Mathew played, and there was food and noise and the particular warmth of a celebration that had not been organised so much as simply happened. I was given a seat near the front and tried to understand, across several languages and none at all, that I was being welcomed into something that had existed long before I arrived and would continue long after I left.

An elder woman sat nearby, smoking a cheroot with the composure of someone who had seen many things and was content to let this particular evening proceed without commentary. She watched the proceedings with a calm attention that I found more steadying than anything that was said to me that night.

The practical problem of getting a sape from Sarawak to Rome was more complicated than I had anticipated. The instrument was too large for cabin luggage. Checked as oversized baggage, it would travel in a part of the aircraft where instruments do not always arrive in the condition they departed. I wrapped it in everything I had, built a cocoon of clothing inside a borrowed bag, and spent the journey from Kuching to Kuala Lumpur to Rome intermittently worrying about what the cargo hold was doing to something that had been made, by hand, from a single piece of Bornean timber.

What I remember most about the journey home is the strangeness of carrying it through airports. The sape was entirely itself: it did not belong in duty-free corridors or at baggage carousels or in the fluorescent logic of international transit. It belonged in the forest, on a veranda, in a clearing where wood shavings lay on the ground and a man worked with continuous attention to a shape he could see before anyone else could. I was transporting it out of its context, which is not quite the same as owning it. A thing can be yours without having left where it belongs.

Sarawak receded as the plane climbed. The river, the longhouse, the road through the village, the boat on the dark water, the sound of the community gathered under one roof — all of it diminished to the abstraction of altitude and then to nothing visible at all. The instrument was in the hold of the aircraft. I was in the cabin. Neither of us, I think, was entirely certain about what was happening.

The sape I brought home has changed over the years. The wood has aged, the strings have been replaced, and my hands have changed with it. But whenever I take it out of its case, I still see Mathew carving a log in the Sarawak heat, and I remember that before an instrument becomes music, it is wood, time, and the patience of another person's hands.