Photo by Jeremy Hildreth

On their way out of town in ’99, following the referendum, the Indonesians burned everything down, destroying 80% of the country’s infrastructure (or was it 80% of the capital’s infrastructure? Does it matter? The point is not the proportionality of the damage but the unmitigated madness of it).

One of the torched government office buildings is now known as the Palácio das Cinzas – the palace of the ashes – and serves as testament to Timorese resurgence and indomitability. This is a one-storey building in a two-storey shell. It’s roofless, and reaching the top of the stairs at the first floor gives you the feeling of walking out onto the roof of an office building, only there are walls around you and instead of tar paper beneath your feet there are charred floor tiles and remnants of furniture. The ground floor, however, has been refitted – extremely modestly, it must be said – and houses the offices of several senior advisers.

We drove past a Portuguese building that looked more Greek than Portuguese where the Japanese held Portuguese prisoners during their three and-half-year occupation of Timor (1942 to 1945) in World War II. In Maubara, we got out of the car to make our way through the gates of a majestic (if decrepit) 17th century Portuguese fortaleza by the sea. But it was nothing but walls, within which were a mean modern building that appeared to be abandoned and a UN-origin tent occupied by a kid and his pet monkey. Outside the fort, next to the beach, we bought woven boxes with precisely fitting tops (impressive workmanship at US$1 a piece) from old women with betel-ravaged teeth.
________
Cockfighting, like horseracing or jai-alai (an unlike bullfighting), is a betting game. People have been known to lose their cars in a single bout, and as we pressed our noses to the fence around the pitch many fistfuls of dollars could be seen. The two birds, held by their managers, were made to touch beaks (like touching gloves in boxing?) before being released to square off. Two, three, maybe six whirling collisions of feathers later and the match is over.

Day 4

Looking out over Dili from a populated bluff on the edge of the city, you could see the drowsy, rag-tag town below, the rough-hewn mountains behind and the blue sea beyond. But we hadn’t come up here for the view. We’d come because in the backyard of the house in whose front yard we were standing is one of Xanana’s former Dili hideouts – a place he’d sneak down the hills to for meetings.

It was safe, they tell us, because it was in a heavily Indonesian neighbourhood. Which didn’t sound safe to me, but that’s the genius of it: no one would suspect a safehouse here. Mostly Xanana would stay in the back room of the house, but if the heat were on he had to hide. No problem. They simply prized the false back steps ajar using a metrelong piece of iron rebar and he lowered himself into the revealed hole and crawled down a short tunnel into the small cavern at the far end. There he could remain for several hours at a time, in the dark, or with a candle, in the stifling and all but technically airless pit.

The mother and daughter who own the house (there had been a husband at the time, who died just after the referendum, an event which must have made him very proud indeed) appeared shy and brave. We were asked by our hosts, ‘Do you think people would come to see this?’ Yes, we said. We think they would.