Beauty Is a Wound (23 page)

It turned out that the music stopping was more interesting to the mistress of the house than the music itself had been. Unexpectedly, the door opened and a young girl, about eight years old, appeared with a glass of cold lemonade and placed it on the table next to his guitar.

“You can keep singing in our yard for as long as you’d like,” she said, “but you must be really thirsty by now.”

Kliwon jumped up and stood there awkwardly. It was not in reaction to the girl’s words or the cold lemonade he had been offered, but the sight of this adorable little nymph standing before him. He had never seen such a beautiful girl in his entire life, even though he had seen Dewi Ayu. He didn’t know what material God had used to make a creature such as this, because he thought he could see light radiating from her entire body. This vision made him shiver more violently than standing and singing for an hour had without anyone paying him any mind. With trembling lips, he stuttered, “What’s your name?”

“I’m Alamanda, Dewi Ayu’s daughter.”

That name struck his brain like a hammer. He walked away carrying his guitar, stunned and disoriented. A few times he turned back to look at this beautiful little one, but every time he looked away again quickly, as if he couldn’t bear the sight. He had just arrived at the door of the gate to the house when the girl called to him and said:

“Drink before you go, you must be thirsty.”

As if hypnotized, Kliwon turned around and returned to the veranda, taking the glass filled with cold lemonade while the girl stood smiling at him warmly.

“Just because you made it for me, Little Miss, I will drink it,” said Kliwon.

“But you’re wrong, I didn’t. Our servant made it for you.”

From then on, Kliwon forgot his desire to sleep with the whore Dewi Ayu. This little beauty had erased everything else, destroying his daily life and maybe his future. In the days after that brief encounter, everything changed. He chased away every girl who tried to get close to him, refused every party invitation, and preferred to stay at home mulling over his pathetic romantic fate: a Don Juan brought to his knees by an eight-year-old child. That was the reality, even though nobody else knew what had happened. None of his friends knew about his Sunday visit to Dewi Ayu’s house, so no one dared venture a guess as to the cause of his recent introspection. His mother grew quite concerned, because in all of her years raising him, she had never seen Kliwon look this dejected.

“Have you become a communist?” asked his mother, almost in despair. “Only a communist would be so gloomy.”

“I’m in love,” said Kliwon to his mother.

“That’s even worse!” She sat next to Kliwon and stroked his hair that was curly and growing long. “Well, go play your guitar under her bedroom window like you always do.”

“I already went, to seduce her mother,” said Kliwon, almost weeping. “I didn’t get the mother but then all of a sudden I fell in love with her daughter, and I’ll never be able to have her.”

“Why not? You’re telling me there’s a girl out there who doesn’t want you?”

“Maybe only this one girl,” said Kliwon, throwing himself on his mother’s lap like a spoiled little kitten. “Her name is Alamanda. And if I have to become a communist, and revolt, and face a firing squad just like father and Comrade Salim in order to get this girl, I will.”

“Tell me what this girl is like,” said Mina, chilled by her son’s vow.

“There’s no one in this city, and maybe in the entire universe, who is more beautiful. She is more beautiful than Princess Rengganis who married a dog, at least I think so. She’s more beautiful than the queen of the South Seas. She’s more beautiful than Helen, who caused the Trojan War. She’s more beautiful than Diah Pitaloka who caused the war between the Majapahit and Pajajaran. She’s more beautiful than Juliet who made Romeo want to kill himself. She’s more beautiful than anyone. It’s like her whole body shines, her hair glistens like freshly polished shoes, her face is as soft and smooth as if it had been made from wax, and her smile magnetizes everything around her.”

“You would be a good match for a girl like that,” said his mother, trying to comfort him.

“The problem is, her breasts haven’t even started to grow, and she doesn’t even have any pubic hair yet. She’s only eight years old, Mama.”

Oppressed by his suffering, Kliwon found some release in writing love letters that he never sent. For days he tried to compose the kind of love letter that he thought would be suitable for an eight-year-old girl, but the letters all ended up torn apart in the trash, because in trying to write a love letter fit for a child, he couldn’t adequately express his passion. Then he tried to pour out the entire contents of his heart, but he wondered whether the girl would understand what he had written. Finally he gave up.

At that time Kliwon had already graduated from school, two years before his peers. So while everyone else was leaving for school or going to work, he entertained himself with his pursuit of love. Every morning he slipped out of the house and walked toward Dewi Ayu’s house, but he never set foot on their front yard. He waited until Alamanda, with her school uniform and school bag, appeared with her younger sister Adinda. He would approach them and offer to walk them both to school.

“Be my guest,” said Alamanda. “But don’t blame me if you get tired.”

He did that every morning. When it was recess, he would stand under a sapodilla tree in front of her classroom, just to watch her play with her friends. When it was time to go home, he was already waiting for her at the gate, and accompanied her back to her house. If the child was in class, or had already gone home, Kliwon would once again descend into a state of gloom. His body seemed to shrink, and he wandered about aimlessly.

“Don’t you have anything better to do besides walk next to us?” asked Alamanda one day.

“You’re just saying that because you don’t yet understand what it means to fall in love,” he replied.

“Toy sellers also follow little kids wherever they go,” said Alamanda. “I guess I didn’t know that was called ‘falling in love.’ ”

The girl truly terrorized him, made him tremble more than if he had encountered a demon. At night Kliwon dreamt about her but his dreams were more like nightmares, because he would startle awake gasping for breath, with his body stiff and covered in sweat. After a while their tepid relationship, which was limited to the walk to and from school, reached a crisis. Kliwon truly could not go on living the rest of his life like this, and one day he collapsed in a fever, the first day he did not walk that girl to school—in fact, he tried to go, but he could only make it as far as his own front door. Mina dragged her son back to his bed, lay him down, and put a cold compress on his forehead while singing soothing hymns like she used to do when he had a fever as a child.

“Just be patient,” said his mother. “Seven years from now she will be old enough to love you.”

“The problem is,” said Kliwon weakly, “I will surely die from unrequited love before that day comes.”

His mother went to visit a number of
dukun
and they suggested some spells and mantras that could make someone fall in blind love. His mother didn’t want those kinds of spells or mantras—Kliwon would lose his mind if he knew that he had obtained the girl’s love with the help of a
dukun
. She was only looking for something that would be able to quell the passion that was tearing her son apart.

“There aren’t any spells like that, and there have never been any,” said the last
dukun
, after all the
dukun
before him had said the same exact thing.

“So what should I do?”

“Wait until the situation becomes clear: then, either he will get his love or he will die of a broken heart.”

When Kliwon had almost recovered from his fever, Mina tried another traditional remedy to make him happy; she took him walking along the beach and they sat in a nearby park while feeding the monkeys and deer. She pampered Kliwon as if he was a six-year-old kid and tried to get him to talk about all kinds of things, anything except that girl named Alamanda.

Meanwhile, Mina also told his friends everything, hoping they could help her solve this complicated problem. They began inviting Kliwon to parties again, asking him to play the guitar and sing. They invited him to come along and steal chickens and fish from other people’s ponds, take a trip to the mountains, and camp out at cheerful bonfire parties. The young girls even tried to seduce him again, to capture his heart or at least incite his desire—one even dragged Kliwon into a tent, stripped him naked, and got his dick hard. He wanted to make love to her, but that wouldn’t bring back the old Kliwon. He had lost all of his spontaneous humor, lost the jovial cast to his face, and even lost the lust that used to rage atop any available mattress.

None of these efforts were helping, and Kliwon himself knew it. He had been cursed to suffer, and only the love of that little girl could possibly cure him. He wished he could kidnap her, carry her away to some secret place, maybe to the middle of the jungle. They could live together in a cave or in a valley and herd wild goats. He would take care of her himself, watch over her and tend to her needs, and raise her up into a young lady until the time came when he could win her love. He left his friends and once again waited for the little girl in front of her house every morning. The child was surprised to see him reappear after being gone for so long, and asked him, “How are you? I heard you were sick.”

“Yeah, I’m sick with love.”

“Is love like some kind of malaria?”

“Worse.”

Alamanda shuddered, and then leading her little sister, she took off walking toward the school. Kliwon followed and walked next to her miserably, before he finally spoke.

“Listen up, little girl,” he said. “Do you want to love me?”

Alamanda stopped and looked at him, and then shook her head.

“Why not?” asked Kliwon, disappointed.

“You yourself just said that love is worse than malaria.” Alamanda once again took her little sister’s hand and continued walking. For the second time she left Kliwon, who promptly collapsed in another fever and an even more excruciating suffering.

When Kliwon was thirteen, an old man had come to their house with a weird request: “Let me die here.” His mother could not refuse such a request, so she invited him in and offered him a drink. Kliwon didn’t know how the man would die inside their house; maybe he would die of hunger, because it looked like he hadn’t eaten for days. But when his mother invited the man to eat, he ate so ravenously that it seemed as if he wasn’t really ready to die. He ate everything put in front of him, even gnawing on the fish bones, leaving not a scrap behind. He let out a satisfied belch and then opened his mouth again to ask, “Where is Comrade?”

“He was shot dead by the Japanese,” replied his mother tersely.

“And that kid,” asked the guest, “that’s the child you had with him?”

“Of course,” replied his mother, still a little curt, “I certainly didn’t have him with a wild pig.”

The guest was named Salim. Even though Mina did not seem pleased by the man’s arrival, the guest insisted on staying with them. “I can stay in the bathroom and eat only bran porridge fit for the chickens, as long as you please let me die here.”

Kliwon tried to convince his mother that it was better to let the man die in their house than in a drainage ditch. Finally Salim was given the front room, a guest room that had never been used, and Kliwon promised he would keep bringing him food until the moment he died.

He was not a vagabond. As soon as he took off his shoes Kliwon could see that the skin on his feet was covered in blisters.

“Are you a fugitive?” asked Kliwon.

“Yeah, tomorrow they are coming to execute me.”

“Why? Did you steal something from someone?”

“From the Republic of Indonesia.”

This exchange led them into a friendship. Salim even gave the kid his short-brimmed cap, saying that he had gotten it when he was still back in Russia, and explaining that all the Russian workers wore a cap just like that one. He had visited many countries, he said, ever since 1926.

“But it wasn’t like you were on vacation,” said Kliwon.

“You’re right, I was a fugitive.”

“Who did you steal from that time?”

“The Dutch East Indies.”

The man was a rebel and a communist, an old-time kind of communist, one of the few people who had gotten their ideas directly from the Dutch communist named Sneevliet, and his nickname was Comrade Salim. He admitted that he knew Semaun well and had been a member of the Indonesian Communist Party ever since its inception. When they were in Semarang he had even brought warm milk to Tan Malaka, who was sick with tuberculosis, every morning. The
Partai Komunis Indonesia
, the PKI, was the first organization to use the name Indonesia, he said with pride. And, he added, it was the first to resist the colonial government. But the Dutch Indies administration had hated them, even before they rebelled. Sneevliet had been banished in 1919, and his compatriot Semaun was exiled four years later, one year after Tan Malaka. Other figures, including himself, packed their bags and prepared to be exiled or thrown in prison.

As it turned out, the colonial government decided to capture him in the month of January, 1926. Apparently they had heard about the stirrings of revolution, which had been discussed in Prambanan a month before. Salim was never thrown in prison, because he managed to escaped to Singapore along with some others. That was the first time he went wandering, even though he was not a wanderer.

“If someone says he is a communist but has no intention to rebel,” he said to Kliwon, “don’t believe he’s really a communist.”

He lay on top of the bed in a weird way: stark naked. He took off all of his dirty garments that stank of mud, and even though Kliwon generously offered to lend him his father’s old clothes, Salim refused. At first Kliwon felt awkward but after a while he sat on the chair near the door, facing the bare old man as comfortably as he could.