Beauty Is a Wound (17 page)

“It’s too bad I wasn’t there,” said Maman Gendeng to another fisherman on another morning. “Tell me, how far away am I from Halimunda?”

“Not far.”

Many people had already said “not far,” and those words now brought him no comfort because he never seemed to arrive. He voyaged on, stopping at every fisherman’s encampment and every port to ask: Is this Halimunda? Oh no, keep going east, they’d say. Everyone said the same thing, and it was making him lose confidence. All of a sudden he felt that the whole thing was one big conspiracy and everyone was lying to him and Halimunda was nothing more than an invention. He decided that if he asked one more time and the person said that he had to keep going east, he would punch him in the face to stop the dumb jokes and conniving.

Just then he saw a fishing port and a row of fishermen’s encampments. He quickly turned toward land, saying a small goodbye to the pair of sharks who had kept him company all the while and with whom he had developed an unusual friendship. He trembled with fatigue and defeat, losing hope that he would ever meet the amazing Princess Rengganis. He disembarked and met a fisherman who was pulling a net along the beach. His fists were clenched as he asked, “Is this Halimunda?”

“Yeah, this is Halimunda.”

That fisherman was a lucky guy because if Maman Gendeng, whose own teacher had called him the ultimate fighter, had unleashed all of his anger the man would never have been able to stave him off. But Maman Gendeng was truly overjoyed after his long journey, Halimunda was not just some phony-baloney; he had finally arrived, was smelling its fishy air, and was talking to one of its inhabitants. He dropped his knees to the ground he was so full of gratitude, while the fisherman looked at him perplexed.

“Everything looks so beautiful here,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” said the fisherman getting ready to leave, “even the shit here comes out looking pretty.” But Maman Gendeng detained him.

“Where can I meet Rengganis?” he asked.

“Which Rengganis? Tons of ladies go by that name. Even streets and rivers are named Rengganis.”

“The Princess Rengganis, of course.”

“She died hundreds of years ago.”

“What did you say?”

“I said she died hundreds of years ago.”

Everything abruptly came to an end. This can’t be true, Maman Gendeng told himself. But that did not soothe him, and his anger erupted ferociously. He threatened the poor fisherman, screaming that he was a liar. A number of other fishermen came with wooden oars in their hands to help, and Maman Gendeng destroyed those oars and left their owners sprawled out unconscious on the wet sand. Then three men,
preman,
tough guys, approached him. They ordered him to leave, the beach was their turf. Maman Gendeng didn’t leave, and instead attacked them mercilessly, overpowering all three at once and laying them out, flat and half-dead, on top of the bodies of the fishermen.

That was the chaotic morning when Maman Gendeng arrived in Halimunda and caused such an uproar. Those five fishermen and three
preman
thugs were his first victims. His next was an old veteran who came with a rifle and shot him from a distance. He didn’t know that the stranger was impervious to bullets. When he realized it he ran, but Maman Gendeng chased him down, snatched the veteran’s rifle and shot him in the calf, making him fall down in the street.

“Who else wants to fight?” he demanded.

He had to punish at least some of the people in that city, who had tricked him with a centuries-old story. There were a few more bouts that day and he won them all, and no one left on the beach wanted to challenge him. But by now he was starting to look worn out. With a pale face, he went to a food stall and the owner served him whatever he had. The people even plied him with
arak
palm wine, hoping he would get drunk and not cause any more trouble. Full and spent, Maman Gendeng grew sleepy. He stumbled back to the beach and stretched out on his boat, which he’d pulled up on the sand. He mulled over the whole journey and all of his disappointment, and before falling asleep he said clearly and distinctly, “If I have a daughter, I will name her Rengganis.” Then he slept.

It’s true that Princess Rengganis had died many years before, but only after she got married and retreated into seclusion in Halimunda. When she’d opened the window, closed for so many years, the warm rays of the morning sun burst into the room, so that for a moment she was blinded. It was as if the universe had paused to witness this awesome beauty return to the world from a shuttered darkness. The birds stopped twittering, the wind stopped blowing, and the princess stood there like a painting, with the window around her like a picture frame. It took a while for her eyes to adjust, but then she began to look around. Her gaze was nervous and her cheeks blushed red, because she was about to meet the person who would become her lover. But there was no one as far as the eye could see, no one except a dog who was looking back over his shoulder in her direction after hearing the sound of the window creaking open. The princess was stunned for a moment but, remember, she never went back on her word, so from the bottom of her heart she promised she would marry that dog.

No one would accept such a marriage, so the two snuck away to a foggy forest at the edge of the South Seas. It was the princess herself who named it Halimunda, The Land of Fog. They lived there for many years, and of course had children. Most of the people who lived in Halimunda believed they were the descendants of the princess and that dog, whose name nobody ever knew. Even the princess herself seemed not to know, and she never gave him a nickname either. When she saw him that first time from the window, all she knew was that she had to quickly descend to meet her groom, not caring what people would say. “Because,” she stated, “a dog could not care less whether I am beautiful or not.”

Word of Maman Gendeng’s arrival in Halimunda spread quickly. After his brief nap, he had decided to make his home in that city and join the descendants of Princess Rengganis. He was happy with the lively fishing encampments, which reminded him of the old days, with the drinking stalls and taverns that lined the length of the beach, the stores along Jalan Merdeka, and of course, Mama Kalong’s whorehouse, the best in the city.

He found himself there on the recommendation of some random passerby. He thought to himself that if he wanted to live in that city, he would have to control it, and the best way to do that was to go start with the whorehouse. He entered the tavern and the old woman herself, who had already heard about the reputation he had built since landing on the beach, was waiting there with a number of her whores and
preman
. Mama Kalong herself served him a glass of beer, and after draining it he stood in the middle of the tavern and asked who was the strongest man in the city. A number of
preman
working as whorehouse bodyguards were annoyed by that question, and the umpteenth fight broke out in the tavern yard. Maman Gendeng disregarded their machetes, sickles, and leftover samurai swords, and it didn’t take him long to turn the men black and blue.

Brushing his hands together in satisfaction, he went back inside hoping to find someone else to beat up, but instead he saw a beautiful woman sitting in a corner with a cigarette between her lips. “I want to sleep with that woman, whether she is a prostitute or not,” he whispered to Mama Kalong.

“That’s Dewi Ayu, and she’s the best whore here,” said Mama Kalong.

“Kind of like a mascot?” asked Maman Gendeng.

“Kind of like a mascot.”

“I am going to live in this city,” continued Maman Gendeng, “and I am going to piss on her privates like a tiger marking his territory.”

Dewi Ayu sat in the corner looking indifferent. Under the glow of the lamp her skin gleamed clean and white, showing off her Dutch heritage. Her eyes were a shade of blue, her dark black hair was gathered in a long French twist, and she held a cigarette between her svelte fingers, her fingernails painted blood red. She wore an ivory-colored gown with a belt tied at her willowy waist. She heard what Maman Gendeng said to Mama Kalong, and she turned to him. For a moment they looked at one another and Dewi Ayu smiled tantalizingly without moving a muscle.

“Well be quick then, darling, before you pee in your pants,” she said.

Dewi Ayu let him know that she had a special room, a pavilion just behind the tavern, and that she had never walked there on her own two feet because whoever wanted her had to carry her like a newlywed carrying his bride. Maman Gendeng had absolutely no problem with that, so he approached, stopped in front of this beautiful whore, and bent down. When he picked her up Maman Gendeng estimated she weighed about sixty kilos. He then walked to the back of the tavern, passing through a door, tromping through a fragrant orange grove, and heading for a small and dimly lit building in between a number of other buildings. Maman Gendeng said to her: “I came here to marry the Princess Rengganis, but I was more than a hundred years late. Would you care to take her place?”

Dewi Ayu kissed her suitor’s cheek and said, “A wife has sex on a voluntary basis, but a prostitute is a commercial sex worker. The thing is, I don’t like to have sex without getting paid for it.”

They made love almost all night long, filled with heat and passion like lovers reunited after a long separation. When morning came they were still naked and, wrapped in the same blanket, they sat in front of the pavilion enjoying the cool air. Sparrows were noisily hopping about in the branches of the orange trees and taking short flights to the edge of the roof. The sun emerged with all its warmth from the cleft between Ma Iyang and Ma Gedik Hills to the north of the city.

Halimunda began to awaken. The lovers prepared for the day, threw off their blanket, soaked in hot water in a large tub left over by the Japanese, and got dressed. Just like every morning, Dewi Ayu rode a
becak
rickshaw home to her three daughters. Maman Gendeng prepared to start a new day in the city.

Mama Kalong served him breakfast, yellow rice with straw mushrooms and quail eggs that she had ordered from the market earlier that morning. Maman Gendeng asked again about the strongest man, truly the most powerful man, in that city. “Because there cannot be two hotshots in the same place,” he said. That’s true, said Mama Kalong. She mentioned a man, Edi Idiot, the most feared
preman
at the bus terminal, and summed up his reputation: soldiers and policemen were terrified of him, he had killed more people than any legendary warrior, and all the bandits and thieves and pirates in the city were his minions. What’s more, it was quite likely that he already knew about Maman Gendeng, because surely all the
preman
in the whorehouse had reported on him by now. When midday came, Maman Gendeng headed to the bus terminal, finding the man relaxing in a mahogany rocking chair.

“Give your power to me,” Maman Gendeng said to him, “or we will fight to the death.”

Edi Idiot had been expecting him. He accepted the challenge, and the good news spread quickly. It had been many years since the city’s inhabitants had had any really fantastic entertainment, and enthusiastic droves headed for the beach, where the two men had decided to fight. No one could predict who would kill whom. A military commandant from the city sent one company of troops led by a skinny man everybody knew by his nickname, Shodancho, but no one thought he would be able to stop the fight.

Shodancho controlled a small segment of the city from his headquarters hung with a nameplate proclaiming him “Commander of the Halimunda Military District.” Because the brutal fight fell within his jurisdiction, he had volunteered himself to the city military as the one to take care of it. In reality, one company of armed forces couldn’t do much except maintain a semblance of order among the bystanders. Actually, he was secretly hoping both men would die, because there was no way one region could have three guys in charge, and Shodancho thought he should be the only one. But he waited along with all the others, unable to predict the outcome.

It turned out that they had to wait one whole week for the end of the fight. It had lasted seven days and seven nights without a break, when Shodancho said to one of his soldiers, “It’s clear that Edi Idiot is going to die.”

“Well it makes no difference to us,” replied the soldier mournfully. “This city is full of bandits and robbers and guerrillas and revolutionary soldiers and leftover communists. We are stuck with cleaning up after all their commotion, and we’ll never put a stop to it.”

Shodancho nodded. “We’re just exchanging Edi Idiot for Maman Gendeng.”

The soldier smiled bitterly and whispered, “Let’s just hope he’ll keep his nose out of military business.”

Even though he only had control over the local military district in one corner of Halimunda, Shodancho was quite respected throughout the entire city. Even a number of his superior commanders gave him their formal respect, because everyone knew he had been the leader of the Halimunda
daidan
mutiny during the Japanese occupation, and that no one had been braver during that mutiny. The city inhabitants were pretty sure that if Sukarno and Hatta hadn’t proclaimed independence, Shodancho would have done it himself. The people really liked him, even though they knew he wasn’t a model soldier; his district mostly concerned itself with smuggling textiles to Australia and bringing in vehicles and electronic goods on the black market. This was an excellent business in those years, and none of the superior commanders wanted to disrupt a trade pulling in so much money for the generals. Taking care of some petty skirmish was the least of their concerns.

Exhausted at last, Edi Idiot finally did indeed die, after being held down and drowned in the shallow ocean water. His opponent threw his corpse into the sea, where Maman Gendeng’s friends the sharks rejoiced at the unexpected afternoon snack. Maman Gendeng returned to the beach and gazed at all of the city’s inhabitants, still looking as fresh as if he could fight seven more men in exactly the same fashion. “Now,” he announced, “all the power is mine,” adding: “And no one can sleep with Dewi Ayu except for me.”