Beauty Is a Wound (16 page)

He didn’t know much about her, except her name. But she made him feel so alive that he vowed to quit his wanderings and win every battle so they could be together. His friends became aware of his secret passion, and encouraged him to properly request the young girl’s hand. Maman Gendeng had never spoken directly to any woman except to the prostitutes during the Japanese occupation, and suddenly he realized that facing this dainty young Nasiah would be way more terrifying than facing a Dutch firing squad. But when the opportunity arose and he saw Nasiah walking alone, hugging a basket of fresh fish and heading for home, Maman Gendeng caught up with her. Seeing the girl’s sweet smile, which brought out her dimples, he gathered his courage and asked her if she wanted to be his wife.

Nasiah had just turned thirteen. Who knows whether it was her young age or something else that made her gasp and choke, drop her basket, and run home without saying goodbye, like a child terrified by a crazy man. Standing among the flying fish, Maman Gendeng watched her go and wished that he were dead. But he did not retreat, not in the slightest. Love gave him the kind of courage that nothing else can give. He gathered up the fish and, walking with determined steps, carried the basket toward the young girl’s home. He would propose to her properly, and ask her father for her hand.

He found Nasiah standing in front of her house next to a puny guy with a crippled leg. All he’d heard about Nasiah was that her two older brothers had died in guerrilla warfare and her father was an old fisherman. He had never heard anything about this starving one-legged youth. Maman Gendeng stood in front of them, trying to smile, and set the basket at Nasiah’s feet. His heart pounded, agitated and on fire with jealousy. Only his courage, or his stupidity, made him repeat himself.

“Nasiah, would you like to be my wife?” he asked with a pleading face. “When the war is over, I will marry you.”

The girl shook her head and started to cry.

“Mister Guerrilla,” she stammered. “Don’t you see the man at my side? He is weak, it’s true. He will never be able to go to the ocean to fish, and he will certainly never be able to fight wars like you, Sir. I know you could kill him quite easily and then you could catch me as easily as a flying fish. But if you do, then at least permit me to die by his side, because we love each other and cannot bear to be apart.”

The skinny youth just stayed quiet with his head bowed, not once lifting his face. Maman Gendeng’s heart was broken in an instant. He nodded slowly and walked away, without saying goodbye and without looking back. He could see it: they were completely in love. He didn’t want to destroy their happiness, even though he would have to nurse his wounded heart for a very long time.

For the rest of the war he was plagued by terrifying hallucinations, triggered by this tragic refusal of his love. Sometimes he stayed behind in no-man’s-land hoping to be shot by the enemy. He made himself a target for rifles and cannons but he was fated to survive. That whole time he never saw the girl again, and avoided any chance that they might meet. But when the war ended and he heard about her marriage to her sweetheart, as a wedding present he sent her a beautiful red sash that he bought from a local weaver.

The guerrillas were disbanded, and Maman Gendeng felt more happy than sad, as once again he was free to go wandering, even though he now carried the wound in his heart with him. He roamed the whole northern coast, following the old guerrilla trails, and he survived by raiding the houses of the rich, telling them, “If you weren’t accomplices of the Dutch, then you must have been minions of the Japanese, because only collaborators get rich during a revolution.”

With a dozen men, he terrorized the cities along the coast, with the police and the military in hot pursuit. With his band he lived like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and redistributing the spoils to the poor, taking care of the widows and orphaned children whose husbands and fathers had died in the war. But his reputation, intimidating to friend as well as foe, did not make him happy. Wherever he went he still carried his old wound, which none of the pretty girls he saw and certainly not any of the prostitutes he found in the palm wine shacks could heal. When night fell and he started to feel crazy, he’d order his men to go find dainty young girls with luscious dark skin and dimples. He described Nasiah in great detail, and the girls who’d come to his hideout all looked like replicas, one indistinguishable from the next. He made love to them night after night, but no one could take Nasiah’s place.

His zest for life only returned after a very long while, when he overheard a legend often told by the fishermen’s children about a princess named Rengganis, so beautiful that everyone was ready to die for her. Maman Gendeng awoke one night ready to battle anyone to obtain such a woman and shook his men awake one by one to ask them where the Princess Rengganis lived. They replied, in Halimunda of course. Maman Gendeng had never heard of that town before, but one of his friends told him that if he canoed along the coast, paddling west, he would arrive in Halimunda. Full of conviction and above all determined to heal his old wound, he handed control of his territory over to his band and told them that he was setting out on a voyage in a dugout canoe to find his true love. He had finally fallen in love for the second time, even though all he knew about Rengganis was what he had heard from the fishermen’s children.

They said that the princess was extremely beautiful, the last descendant of the Pajajaran royal bloodline, who had inherited the loveliness of all the princesses in the Pakuan Kingdom. People said that the princess herself had realized that her beauty brought misfortune. When she was still a child and free to wander about outside the palace walls, she caused turmoil and disruptions, big and small. Wherever she went people would gaze at her face, shrouded in a thin mist of melancholy, with blank idiotic stares. Frozen like absurd human statues, only their eyeballs moved, following her every step. Her appearances caused the civil servants to daydream and neglect state affairs, so that swaths of the kingdom were captured by bands of robbers before they could be reclaimed at great effort and cost, sacrificing the lives of half the royal army.

“A woman like that,” said Maman Gendeng, “is truly worth seeking.”

“I just hope your heart isn’t broken for the second time,” replied a friend.

Even the father of this princess, who they say was the last monarch before the kingdom was attacked by Demak, was prematurely aged by his obsession with his own daughter’s beauty. Even though no one can bed his own daughter, falling in love is still falling in love. His feelings of desire and impropriety clashed and gnawed away everything inside him, until he came to think only death could free him from his suffering. And the queen, who of course was envious, came to think that the only way out of the situation was to kill the little girl. She would often steal away to the kitchen and take a knife and tiptoe toward her child’s room, preparing to stab her right in her beating heart. But every time she saw her daughter, even she would be charmed and fall in love, and forget all about her murderous intent. She would drop the knife, walk toward her child, caress her skin and kiss her, before coming to her senses. Feeling ashamed she would then leave the young girl, suffering but not saying a word.

All along Maman Gendeng’s journey fishermen kept on telling him tales about Princess Rengganis. He was paddling due west in his small dugout canoe, and when dusk fell he would dock in the fishing villages. He would ask how far it was to Halimunda, and the people would tell him to continue west before circling south and then turning once again toward to the east. They’d tell him to be cautious in the waves of the South Seas. And then they would tell him about the princess, which made the lonely wanderer grow ever more smitten.

“I will marry her,” he vowed.

Princess Rengganis herself suffered greatly from her own growing beauty, locking herself up in her room. Her only contact with the outside world was by a small slot in the door, through which servant girls would pass clothes and plates of food. She vowed never to put her beauty on display, and hoped to marry a man who would love her for other reasons. So, sewing her bridal gown and trousseau, she kept herself constantly hidden but she could not hide the news of her beauty, which had been spread by storytellers and roving wanderers. Her father, plagued by his forbidden feelings, and her mother, blinded by jealousy, decided to marry her off. They sent ninety-nine messengers to the farthest reaches of the kingdom and even to neighboring countries to announce a contest for princes and knights and whoever else. The first prize was the right to marry the most beautiful woman in the world, Princess Rengganis.

Handsome men arrived and the contest began. There was no archery competition, like the one in which Arjuna won Drupadi. Each man was simply asked to describe his ideal woman—how tall she was, how much she weighed, her favorite foods, the way she combed her hair, the color of her clothing, the smell of her body, everything—and afterward he was told to sit in front of Princess Rengganis’ bedroom door and to let her question him. The king promised that if the man wanted someone exactly like the princess and the princess wanted someone exactly like the man in front of her door, then they could marry. It was highly unusual for people to find their match in such a manner and indeed, by the end, the contest had not turned up one suitable man.

The fact is, obtaining such a woman was no easy matter. When Maman Gendeng passed through the Sunda Strait, a band of pirates tried to steal his riches, so he vented his pent-up desires by drowning them. But they weren’t the only obstacle. Entering the southern seas, he was intercepted not only by fierce storms but also by a pair of sharks that endlessly circled the boat. He had to land in the swamps and hunt a deer, which he then gave to the sharks so that they could be comrades on the journey.

All of this for that rare specimen named Rengganis.

After the fruitless contest, the kingdom returned to the same despair, the same terrorizing beauty. Until one day a dissatisfied prince plotted to take the princess by force, accompanied by three hundred troops on horseback. Although truly overcome with joy at the idea of someone kidnapping the princess and marrying her, out of chivalry the king was forced to let his soldiers go to war with the marauders. Another prince from another kingdom came with three hundred more troops on horseback to help, in hopes of being granted the princess in thanks, and so a great war broke out. Sooner or later, other knights and other princes were swept up in this war, and by the end of a year it was no longer clear who was fighting whom, just that they were all warring over the woman who for years now had been Halimunda’s goddess of beauty. The curse of beauty became even more extreme: thousands of soldiers were wounded and dead, the whole nation was in ruins, sickness and starvation struck without mercy, and all of this was thanks to that infernal beauty.

“That was the most terrible time,” said an old fisherman at the boarding house where Maman Gendeng was spending the night. “Worse than the Bubat War when the Majapahit attacked us with such cunning, and after all, as you know, we don’t like to make war.”

“I myself am a veteran of the revolutionary war,” said Maman Gendeng.

“Oh, that was nothing compared to the war over Princess Rengganis.”

It wasn’t that the girl herself didn’t know about all this. Her ladies-in-waiting whispered all the news through the keyhole, just as the blind Destarata heard about the fate of her children on the Kuruserta battlefield. The little beauty suffered greatly, she couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep, tortured by the fact that she herself was the source of all this misfortune. She could not atone with mere sobbing, perhaps not even with death, and suddenly she remembered her wedding dress and decided the only way to free herself from all of this was to marry someone right away—then the war, and all of its misfortune, would surely end.

At this point she’d locked herself inside her dark room for years, kept company only by a dim oil lamp and her wedding dress. She had already sewed the whole thing with her own hands, and her handiwork had rendered it the most beautiful wedding dress on the face of the earth, unrivaled by the work of any seamstress or tailor. One morning, the gown was finally finished. The princess didn’t know whom she would marry so she said to herself that she would simply open the window, and whoever appeared in front of it would become her life partner.

Before following through on her vow, she bathed with flower-scented water for one hundred nights. Then, one unforgettable morning, she put on her wedding dress. She was not the kind of girl to go back on a promise: she would keep her word. She would open that window, for the first time in years, and she would marry the first man she saw. If she could see more than one man, she would take the closest one. She vowed she would not take another woman’s husband, or a man who already had a lover, because she didn’t want to hurt anyone.

Wearing that wedding gown, she was more beautiful than ever. Her beauty shone, even in that dim chamber, enthralling the young ladies-in-waiting spying on her, who wondered what she was about to do. With graceful steps, Princess Rengganis approached the window, stood for a moment, and let out an anxious breath. Her vow had been taken and her will would be done. Her hands were shaking violently as she touched the shutter, and suddenly she was weeping, caught somewhere in between a deep sadness and an overflowing joy. With a light touch of her fingertips she opened the window latch. The shutter creaked open. She said: “Whoever is there, marry me.”