Beauty Is a Wound (25 page)

He had been gone from his house for more than a month and was now living with the beggars. His body, that used to be strong and handsome, soon became emaciated and was now just a pile of bones, and his hair was turning a pale red and looked as stiff as the tip of a broom. He was in no way pretending; rather, he was trying to erase his suffering with another kind of suffering. He ate what others gave him, and if no one gave him anything he scavenged in garbage cans, fighting off other beggars, stray dogs, and rats.

There were no more girls following him wherever he went. In fact it was quite the opposite; if a girl met him, without realizing that he was the Kliwon that used to drive her crazy and maybe even used to take her to bed, she would pinch her nose, gag, shield her face, and quicken her pace. Even little children threw stones at him, so that he often found himself covered in wounds, and the stray dogs chased him as if he was a hedgehog ready to be devoured. Even when he went home, Mina didn’t recognize him at all, and instead she said, “If you see a beggar named Kliwon, tell him to come home, his mother is dying and wants to see him one last time.”

Kliwon accepted a plate of rice from his mother and replied, “You sure don’t look like you are dying.”

“It’s no big deal to lie a little.”

After a long time had passed, he began to lead this kind of life as if it was normal. He began to forget many things—his mother and his house, his friends and all the girls, and especially Alamanda (although this last memory still troubled his thoughts at certain times); everything was erased by his routine of bumming. Rather than thinking about these things, he thought about finding a handful of rice and a comfortable place to lie down, which came to seem way more important. The freedom from all his complicated thoughts turned him into a happy hobo, until the day trouble came to him in the form of a young beggar woman named Isah Betina.

He saw her twice. Once was while she was getting raped by five rampaging vagrants near the edge of the dump and it was obvious that he would be unable to fight off her attackers. But he had also seen her pass by before being ambushed by those five bums, looking pretty but also stinking to high heaven after weeks untouched by water or soap. Her wails were quite heartbreaking and so disturbed his afternoon nap inside his cardboard shanty that he came out carrying a machete and approached. Two of the men had just finished fucking her, and both were grinning while wiping off their genitals with the bottoms of their shirts. Another one was thrusting his spear, struggling in and out, but the girl was no longer putting up a fight. Another was squeezing her breasts, while the last guy was waiting impatiently, stroking his own dick with his hand.

“Give the girl to me,” said Kliwon, clearly and firmly.

One of the men who was already done screwing the girl, and who looked like the leader of this group of bums, stood facing him while rolling up his sleeves.

“I said, give the girl to me,” Kliwon repeated.

“You’ll have to get by my dead body before you can have a go.”

“Fine.” And before any of them realized he had a machete hidden behind his back, Kliwon had drawn the weapon across the attacker’s neck. The man’s blood splattered out as his head drooped, his neck almost broken, and in a number of seconds he had collapsed on the ground, obviously dead. Kliwon kicked his corpse, and approached the four remaining men. “I got by his dead body, now give me the girl.”

The man who was in the middle of screwing the girl quickly pulled out his dick with a disgusting splosh and ran away with a face as pale as rotten bread, followed by his three friends. They left the girl behind just like that, lying on her back on a tabletop that no longer had any legs attached to it, naked and unconscious. After wrapping the girl in his own shirt, Kliwon carried her on his back to his hut. He lay her down on his bed, which was an old sofa, and looked at her for a moment before he himself lay down on top of a pile of old newspapers and fell asleep.

When he awoke night had already fallen and he found the girl sitting on the sofa hugging her knees and shivering with hunger. She was still as bare as when he had laid her down, only slightly covered by the shirt draped across her shoulders. Kliwon gave her some corn porridge directly from the pot, nothing more than the cold and almost spoiled leftovers from breakfast, but the girl ate with gusto. The whole time Kliwon sat next to her, observing her with the diligent attention of a small child. The girl ate without acknowledging his presence. She didn’t look traumatized in the least, or maybe she had already forgotten what had happened. Now Kliwon could see her light hair that looked like silk, her piercing eyes, her narrow nose, her thin lips.

“What’s your name?” asked Kliwon.

She didn’t respond, only placed the pan of porridge under the old sofa and sat down again looking at Kliwon with the shy demeanor of a young virgin. Her hand reached for Kliwon’s hand, touching it with the tenderness of a lover. Kliwon shivered for a moment, and before he realized what was happening the girl had already jumped toward him, knocking the man backwards on top of the sofa with her on top of his body, hugging him tightly and kissing him in an almost violent attack. At first Kliwon tried to push her away with all his might, but then he hesitated, and stayed still with his hands up like a man surrendering in front of a firing squad. Then when the girl pulled off his shirt, and he felt the touch of her firm round breasts against his chest, everything dissolved into a mesmerizing warmth. He once again felt passionate blood voraciously pumping through his veins, returned the girl’s embrace, returned her kisses, and took off his pants.

After such a brutal rampage of being raped by five homeless bums, the girl now showed herself to be a wild lover. Kliwon himself even forgot all about what had happened, holding the girl tight and reversing their position so that now he was on top, both of them naked and aroused. They overcame the limitations of the cramped sofa and made love with repetitive movements that were nevertheless full of lust, jolting and jarring and shuddering, like a boat blasted by a storm.

Then when their lovemaking was finished, Kliwon quickly remembered that he didn’t know this girl at all, just as this girl didn’t know him. They were still lying down together on top of the sofa, holding one another, exhausted. Kliwon asked her again, “What’s your name?” But as before, the girl did not reply. She just smiled, muttered incoherently and perhaps deliriously, before closing her eyes and falling into a deep sleep, emitting gentle snores.

“Her name is Isah Betina,” a bum told him not long after that, “because that’s what everybody calls her.”

“Where did she come from?” Kliwon pursued his line of questioning.

“They found her a week ago by the side of the road, and had been gang-raping her almost every day, before you came along and killed one of them,” said the bum. “That girl’s brain is scrambled.”

So that’s how it was. Kliwon couldn’t imagine what his friends would say, if they knew that he had slept with a crazy girl. But outside of his own sound logic, or maybe because of some other urge, the first thing he did was bring the girl to the beach and clean her body, and get her some better clothes that he stole from his mother’s clothesline. They lived in his cardboard hut, with the old sofa where sometimes they sat and relaxed while eating walnuts they had smashed open with stones, and where other times they slept or made love, next to a stove made from a heap of bricks and a pot to cook with. They never heard what happened to Isah Betina’s vagrant rapists, even though for a while Kliwon had been worried they would return to seek revenge. And now that Isah Betina lived in the same house with Kliwon, everyone agreed that the two were officially a couple, and no one bothered the crazy girl any more.

Kliwon himself seemed to have forgotten his original reason for becoming a vagabond beggar. No longer seeking the unfortunate to distract him and no longer tormenting himself in an effort to forget his grief over the rejection of his love by the little girl Alamanda, he discovered the best way to forget the girl, which was another girl. And his chaotic life, without anything to eat or a proper place to live, didn’t make him suffer—in fact, he was delighted with his current situation. He had rediscovered the ardor of love in full bloom, above all because Isah Betina received his love with an equal warmth, making them both immediately forget their squalid conditions. Intoxicated with love, no one would have guessed that Isah Betina was a crazy girl. And Kliwon didn’t care about the fact that he didn’t know her background, promising her, “I am going to marry you someday.” They didn’t do very much except caress one another almost all day and all night long, only stopping to eat when they were hungry or to sleep when they were tired. The sofa was their favorite place to make love, with moans that awoke and then aroused the neighbors in the middle of the night. Their behavior made people jealous but was understood as the honeymoon phase of a new pair of lovers, a phase that continued for weeks on end.

One night in the middle of one of their usual sessions, a snake slithered out from a pile of trash and entered their hut and bit the tip of Isah Betina’s toe, which was lying in its path. The girl didn’t cry out, absorbed in her lovemaking until they both reached the highest climax they had ever achieved. But their amazing good fortune would not last. After ejaculating, Kliwon collapsed on his side and heard the girl moan and writhe. He thought she still wanted him, but when he saw her leg turning blue he realized what had happened. It was too late; the snake that had bitten her was a poisonous cobra, and the girl died on that very same sofa, naked and still gleaming with the sweat of their lovemaking.

The neighbors, who were fed up with the nightly shrieking, interpreted this tragedy as retribution for the couple’s casual relationship, which in their eyes was based on little more than fooling around. Kliwon brought the girl’s corpse to Kamino the gravedigger, and asked for the kind of burial that was usually given to pious believers. Only Kliwon accompanied the gravedigger in the procession, arriving in some fine clothes he had stolen from someone’s house. “She lived only to make me happy,” he said, weeping.

He went off on the seventh day of mourning, burning their hut to the ground, and the flames had almost spread to the neighboring cardboard huts when the owners came running with sewer water as fast as they could to put out the fire. He went crazy, throwing dog shit at people and throwing rocks up at the streetlights. His grief couldn’t be contained. He broke the windows in all the bakeries lining Jalan Merdeka with rocks as big as the palms of his hands, making the lady shopkeepers scream in panic. He hurt a mailman after stealing his bicycle, sending him rolling with his letters scattering in the street. He killed three dogs who appeared from rich people’s yards, slashed the tires of cars that were parked in front of the movie theater, and burnt a security post. All of this provoked an aggressive response from the police, and he was quickly captured without a fight as he was trying to tear down the wall that marked the city limits.

He was captured without anyone caring whether he was to be taken to the courthouse or not. In his solitary cell, Kliwon found his peace returning, his old solemnity slowly reemerging and gathering force. The only disturbance he caused now was at night, when he would talk in his sleep, deliriously calling Isah Betina’s name with earsplitting shrieks, drowning out the howls of the wild dogs and the yowls of mating cats. The news of the man imprisoned because he was suffering from lost love spread and reached his mother. Kliwon was held for seven months until Mina came and bailed him out. She dragged Kliwon home like an angry mother who finds her kid playing in the cow stables. “Is there nothing more important to you than the love of a woman?” she asked crankily, bathing him herself despite the fact that her son was now a grown man.

The house was still just as it had been when he left. All of the furniture and things were right where he had left them. He read pulp novels and love stories with happy endings, which girls had given him as gifts, in a fruitless attempt to make himself feel better. He also read the many love letters that those same girls had written him, but of course it all just made him more and more gloomy. It was as if everything had gone back to the beginning, to the same sadness, the same heartbreak. He tried to find his friends, a number of whom were now married with children, asking for just a little bit of their happiness. He also visited a number of his old girlfriends, a number of whom were also married, and some of whom were even already divorced, and he tried to sleep with three or four of them again, just to feel the warmth of love one more time. But it all made him miss Isah Betina all over again.

“Go back to living on the streets,” said his mother. “Maybe you can find another love.”

“That’s what I’m going to do,” he said.

He had already packed up all his things, with the hope that if he returned one day, they would be waiting for him nicely and neatly. He had taken the books that were previously scattered across his bed, table, and floor and had arranged them into cardboard boxes which he stacked in a corner of his room. He had also straightened up all the clothes in his closet, put away his old guitar, and stored all of his records. He had even neatly stashed his razor and his toothbrush in a drawer. There was only one thing that remained on top of the table, but he wasn’t going to store it anywhere, because he chose to wear it instead: the cap Comrade Salim had given him. He stood in front of the mirror, looking at his reflection there. His body had become quite slender from his years of suffering, and he had a gaunt face and dull eyes. His hair still hung in inch-long ringlets. He stood there for a long time, peering at the cap and wondering whether it was true what the communist had told him, that all the laborers in Russia wore that kind of hat.

“Look at this gloomy person,” he said to his reflection. “Gloomy enough to wear this hat.”

Mina then appeared and stood in the doorway, looking at her son still standing in front of the mirror. She tried to guess where Kliwon was going wearing his neatly ironed pants, his cotton shirt, and that cap.