Beauty Is a Wound (26 page)

“You don’t look like a beggar, child.”

“Starting now and from this day forward,” said Kliwon while turning to face his mother, “call me Comrade Kliwon, Mama.”

ONE FOGGY MORNING,
the throngs of people crowding the platform of Halimunda Station were astonished by a fantastic sight the likes of which they had never seen before. In front of the ticket counter, under an almond tree, two lovers were kissing passionately with no thought for the time or place. Their kisses were so full of heat that the people who witnessed the event and told the story for years to come would swear they saw a flame ignite between the couple’s lips. And this became legend, because those two lovers were Kliwon and Alamanda. Both men and women would remember the event with a keen envy.

The couple’s provocative behavior had indeed already become quite well known during those last weeks before Kliwon went to Jakarta, the capital city, to study at university.

Alamanda and Kliwon were dating and everyone thought they were the most beautiful couple that had ever existed on the face of the earth, except for Adinda. But Alamanda would shove her fingers in her ears when Adinda said you are a cheap slut who likes to break men’s hearts, stop it right now, at least for the sake of this one man. Perhaps the girl still remembered how hard Kliwon had fallen for Alamanda when her older sister was only eight years old, and perhaps she felt it would be a shame for her sister to purposefully destroy a love as incredible as that. Adinda even swore that if Alamanda dared hurt the man, she would kill her. According to her, to flat out refuse his love would be way better than to accept it only to then toss it aside like trash. Alamanda didn’t care about any of the threats that came out of her younger sister’s mouth, and it became all the more evident that she was a stubborn young woman who couldn’t be told what to do.

“Just admit that you are jealous, little girl,” she said.

“If I was going to be jealous of someone it would be Mama, who has already slept with
hundreds
of men,” said Adinda.

“You think I can’t sleep with a man?”

“I’m sure you could sleep with every single man in this city, and be just as awesome as Mama,” said Adinda, “but there’s no way that you could properly love all of them.”

Unlike her sister, who tended to be a homebody, Alamanda spent her days going to concerts with her sweetheart and their friends, and gathering in any place they could find to sing along to a guitar. They went out on the town and they went to the movies, so that sometimes she didn’t come home until night was already turning into dawn. Even though her two little sisters would be waiting at the window with anxious faces, she would go straight to her room without saying a word, still humming some bars from one of those whiny love songs that were so popular at the time.

“You’re worse than a prostitute,” said Adinda crankily. “At least when prostitutes come home they bring some money with them.”

“Just say it, Little Miss Grouch,” said Alamanda from inside her room. “Or should I say it for you once again? You’ve fallen in love with Kliwon.”

“Even if I was in love with him, I would never say it because if I did you would kill yourself.”

It was not just a rumor, the youth was indeed quite popular with the ladies, not just in that house but throughout all of Halimunda. Actually, he had been that popular ever since he was a little boy, when people had been surprised by his brainpower because he could solve sixth-grade exam problems when he was still only in fifth grade and the principal decided to let him skip a grade. In middle school he won all the math competitions, and because he could also play the guitar and sing and his handsome face was so convincing, he began to go out at night, accompanied by the gangs of girls who had fallen in love with him.

That was when he would go out with whichever girl he wanted, before he fell in love with Alamanda who was only eight years old, became homeless, and had a relationship with a crazy girl named Isah Betina. Now everyone said that he and Alamanda were an extraordinary couple, a bright and handsome youth and a beautiful young girl heir to the most esteemed prostitute in the city. Everyone except Adinda, that is, who felt that it was nothing short of a complete catastrophe. So far Alamanda had already been with a lot of men, and had cast them each aside one by one. She had a bad reputation, and everyone knew it, including Adinda.

Alamanda had done this to a number of her classmates, provoking them with her beauty, her captivating smile, her coquettish sideways glances, her graceful steps, and other things like that, which induced insomnia in many of her peers. Some of these guys would try to pursue her and then she would begin to change, turning into a half-tamed turtledove who hops away every time you try to catch it.

But her pursuers wouldn’t give up so easily, so they buried her under charming flirtations, drowned her in promises, and showered her with gifts, idle chatter, flowers, cards, letters, poetry, and songs. She would accept all of these and give an even more captivating smile in return, repay them with even more coquettish glances, with the sight of her steps that grew even more graceful, throwing in the extra bonus of a morsel of praise, saying you are a kind man, clever and handsome, with really good hair, and they would feel flattered, floating above the stars.

Each would grow ever more confident, feeling like the handsomest guy on earth, like the kindest man in the universe with the best hair on the planet, and convinced by all of this at the first opportunity that arose they would speak up or send a letter spewing their prehistoric pent-up desires:
Alamanda, I love you
. That was the best time to destroy a man, to shake him up, to tear his heart to pieces, the best opportunity to show a woman’s superiority, so Alamanda would say,
I do not love you
.

“I like men,” Alamanda said once, “but I like to see them cry from heartbreak even more.”

She had played this game many times, and always enjoyed herself from one round to the next, even though it always turned out predictably in the end: she would be the winner and they would be the loser. And she would laugh heartily as a new suitor replaced the old suitor.

Imagine, she had already been doing this since she turned thirteen, two years ago. It cannot be denied that in fact she had inherited her mother’s almost perfect beauty as well as the piercing eyes of the Japanese man who had fucked her mother. She first realized that she could capture a man’s heart when Kliwon fell in love with her, back when she was eight years old. But then, when she was thirteen, two boys got into a fight just because they were debating the color of her underwear. The first one swore that he saw Alamanda wearing red underwear, but the other insisted she was wearing white underwear. They fought in the back of the classroom, beating each other to a pulp without a single person trying to step in—in fact, it served as free entertainment until the teacher realized what was going on. Once the two boys were both swollen and bloody from the tussle, Alamanda stepped in to mediate and said to the pair:

“I am wearing white underpants, but they are red too, because I have my period.”

From that moment on she realized that her beauty was not just a sword that could cripple men, but also an instrument that could control them. Her mother grew worried and gave her a warning.

“Don’t you know what men did to women during the war?”

“I know just what you have always told me,” replied Alamanda. “And now you will see what women can do to men during a time of peace.”

“What do you mean, child?”

“In times of peace, you have made many men line up and pay to sleep with you, and I’ve made many boys cry from a broken heart.”

Dewi Ayu had long been concerned by her eldest daughter’s stubborn nature, and followed her goings-on through the gossip that men brought to her bed about the number of young boys who had been driven insane by her beauty. “The only thing I can be thankful for is that she hasn’t become a prostitute,” said Dewi Ayu to her customers, “because if she had, maybe you wouldn’t be here with me in this bed right now.”

That was Alamanda. She had even succeeded in conquering Kliwon, the idol of so many girls in Halimunda; what made him different from all the other guys she conquered was that at the end of the game she didn’t toss him aside, because it turned out she had fallen in love with him too. Alamanda had heard about the boy’s reputation because the older neighbor girls were always whispering to each other about him, the handsomest guy in the world.

There were some nonsense rumors that he wasn’t really the child of Mina the widow and her late husband the communist, who had been executed by the Japanese after the communists lost the rebellion at Madiun, when many people had had enough of anything associated with communism. One girl fabricated the story that he was discovered by that couple, curled up inside a large watermelon they found on the riverbank; he was the child of a nymph who took pity on their misfortune and entrusted her child to them for a time to alleviate them both from their eternal sin. Another girl said that he had descended from a rainbow when he was a baby, and another said he was found inside a gigantic cone-shaped flower, although, truth be told, not one of these girls had even been alive when Kliwon was born.

Such stories weren’t just spread by the girls who had secretly fallen in love with him, but even the older folk swore that when he was born the stars shone a little brighter than usual in that city, as if the world was waiting for the birth of a new prophet, and the Dutch who were roaming around Halimunda at that time had taken it as a bad omen.

But whether all of that talk was true or not, Alamanda had been intrigued by that man ever since his sincere confession of love when she was eight years old, and for years after that she still heard stories about him, even though it was said that he had disappeared. The whole time that he was homeless and most people didn’t know much about what had happened to him, the young girls still talked about him and missed him half to death. Many of them believed he might have been kidnapped by a band of robbers, who knows why, then taken somewhere and killed. Others believed that he had hidden himself away because he felt his soul was in peril. Whatever story they believed, Kliwon became a mythical hero to many young girls, almost rivaling the heroism of Shodancho in that city.

Alamanda was already fifteen years old when Kliwon finally reappeared. The man was now twenty-four, and he called himself Comrade Kliwon. When he returned from his life of vagrancy he became a tailor working beside his mother in their home, but that didn’t mean very much because really he just shared the same old income that his mother had always made, only pulling in a little bit extra from the few girls who tried to get his attention by asking him to sew them a new dress. He soon left his undistinguished career as a tailor and joined one of his friends building boats. At that time fiberglass was still quite expensive, so they used black tar to patch the wooden boats and that was his job in the boat shop, along with some touch-up paint jobs, until he moved on to work at a mushroom farm belonging to Old Kuwu, with the primary tasks of keeping an eye on the barn thermometer to make sure it stayed at the right temperature and stirring the chaff. Other times he joined in spreading yeast, harvesting the mushrooms, wrapping them, hauling them, and doing whatever else he was asked to do. It was clear by that time that he had already become a cadre of the Communist Party, which had been one of the three main parties in the city election four years before (and it looked as though it could have become the majority party, were it not for the trauma the people of Halimunda had suffered during the revolution), and he was the youngest member to be found in the Party’s headquarters, which was located on the corner of Jalan Belanda.

The Communist Party was using his reputation to lure the young girls into becoming their cadre, after it became evident that whenever they brought Comrade Kliwon to speak at the podium at public meetings the audience would be packed and the girls would be shrieking hysterically. Comrade Kliwon was indeed quite handsome and what’s more, a skilled speaker. Alamanda went to see him speak once, at a labor day carnival, intrigued by her friends’ hysteria. Many people were of the opinion that if the Communist Party obtained the majority vote in their city, it would be because of Comrade Kliwon.

When Alamanda was tempted to conquer the most handsome man in the city, she already had the distinguished reputation of being the only young girl to have disappointed twenty-three different men who had fallen in love with her, while Kliwon had already gone out with twelve girls in a fairly brief period of time and turned down the rest. It was to be a competition between the most formidable warriors, and it was not only the workers at the farm who were waiting for the outcome of the competition but also all of the members of the Communist Party, and all the city-dwellers’ hearts were pounding in anticipation, wondering what was going to happen. A number of them even placed bets as to who would disappoint whom, and the young men and women prematurely prepared to be brokenhearted.