Beauty Is a Wound (3 page)

“You are addicted, old man. We made love two nights ago.”

The man smiled shyly, like a young kid meeting his sweetheart, and nodded. “I want to die in your arms,” he said. “I can’t pay you, but I’ll give you this mute child. She’s my daughter.”

Dewi Ayu looked at the little girl in confusion. Rosinah stood not very far from her, calm and smiling at her in a friendly way. At that time she was very skinny, wearing an embroidered dress that was way too big for her, barefoot, and with her wavy hair tied back by only a rubber band. Her skin was smooth, like most mountain girls, with a simple round face, intelligent eyes, a flat nose and wide lips, with which she was able to give everyone that pleasing smile. Dewi Ayu had no idea what use a girl like that would be to her and she looked back at the old man.

“I myself already have three daughters, so what would I do with this child?” she asked.

“She can read and write, even though she can’t talk,” said her father. “All my children can read and write
and
they can talk,” said Dewi Ayu with a teasing laugh. But the old man was hell-bent to sleep with her and die in her arms and give her the mute young girl as payment. She could do whatever she wanted with the girl. “You can turn her into a prostitute and take the money she earns for as long as she lives,” said the old man. “Or, if there’s no man who wants to be with her, you can chop her up into bits and sell her flesh at the market.”

“I’m not really sure that anyone would want to eat her flesh,” said Dewi Ayu.

The old man refused to give up and after a while he started to resemble a little kid who can’t hold in his pee any longer. It wasn’t that Dewi Ayu didn’t want to be kind and give the old man a few beautiful hours atop her mattress, but she was truly confused by this strange transaction, and over and over again she looked back and forth from the old man to the mute child, until the girl finally asked for a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote:

“Go ahead and sleep with him, any minute now he is going to die.”

So she slept with the old man, not because she agreed to the deal, but because of the child’s suggestion that he was about to expire. They wrestled on the bed while the mute girl sat on a chair outside the bedroom door, clutching a small bag filled with her clothes that had just a moment ago been carried by her father, waiting. As it turned out, Dewi Ayu didn’t need that much time, and she admitted that truly she didn’t feel much, just a little tickle in the middle of her crotch. “It was like a dragonfly scratching at my bellybutton,” said the prostitute. The man attacked her fiercely, with almost no small talk, like a battalion of Dutch soldiers approaching with a mission to destroy, moving freely and forgetting his rheumatism. His haste quickly bore fruit when he let out a brief groan and his body spasmed; at first Dewi Ayu thought it was the spasm of a man spewing the contents of his balls, but it turned out it was more than that—the old man also spewed his soul. He died sprawled out in her embrace with his lance still wet and outstretched.

They buried him quietly in the same corner of the cemetery where later Dewi Ayu would also be buried. Even though she never cared for her mistress’s grave, Rosinah always took the opportunity to visit her father’s grave at the end of every fasting month, weeding the grass and praying without conviction. Dewi Ayu brought the mute young girl home, not as payment for the sad evening, but because the mute no longer had a father or mother or anybody else she could call family. At least, Dewi Ayu thought at the time, she could keep her company at home, search for lice in her hair every afternoon, and keep watch over the place when she went to the whorehouse.

Rosinah did not at all find the lively house that she had expected, but a simple home that was quiet and still. There were cream-colored walls that looked like they had not been painted for years, dusty mirrors, and moldy curtains. Even the kitchen looked like it was never used except to make an occasional pot of coffee. The only rooms that looked well taken care of were the bathroom, with its large Japanese-style bathtub, and the bedroom belonging to the lady of the house. In her first few days at the house, Rosinah proved herself to be a young girl worthy to be kept on. While Dewi Ayu took her afternoon nap, Rosinah painted the walls, cleaned the floors, scrubbed the window panes with some sawdust that she got from a woodcutter, changed the curtains, and started to organize the yard, which was soon filled with all kinds of flowers. When afternoon came, Dewi Ayu awoke and for the first time in a long time encountered the aroma of herbs and spices coming from the kitchen, and they ate dinner together before Dewi Ayu had to go out. Rosinah was not in the least bit disturbed by the ramshackle house that needed so much tending, but she was intrigued by the fact that only the two of them lived there. At that time Dewi Ayu had yet to learn the sign language of the mute girl, so Rosinah wrote again.

“You said you had three children?”

“That’s right,” said Dewi Ayu. “They left as soon as they learned how to unbutton a man’s fly.”

Rosinah immediately remembered that comment when a number of years later Dewi Ayu said that she didn’t want to get pregnant again (despite the fact that she was already pregnant), and that she was sick of having children. They often chatted in the afternoon, sitting in the kitchen doorway while watching the chickens that Rosinah had started to raise claw at the dirt, and like a Scheherazade Dewi Ayu would tell many fantastical tales, mostly about her beautiful daughters. That was how they established a friendship that was full of understanding, so that when Dewi Ayu tried to kill the baby in her stomach in all those different ways, Rosinah did not try to stop her. Even when Dewi Ayu began to show signs of despair, Rosinah again proved herself to be a wise young girl and signed to the prostitute.

“Pray that the baby will be ugly.”

Dewi Ayu turned to her and replied, “It’s been years since I believed in prayer.”

“Well, it depends on who you’re praying to,” Rosinah said and smiled. “Indeed some gods have proven to be quite stingy.”

Tentatively, Dewi Ayu began to pray. She would pray whenever it crossed her mind; in the bathroom, in the kitchen, on the street, or even if an obese man was swimming on top of her body and she suddenly remembered, she would immediately say, whoever is listening to my prayer, god or demon, angel or Genie Iprit, make my child ugly. She even began to imagine all kinds of ugly things. She thought of a horned devil, with fangs sticking out like a boar, and how very pleasing it would be to have a baby like that. One day she saw an electrical outlet and imagined that as the baby’s nose. She also imagined its ears as the handles of a pot, and its mouth as the mouth of a piggy-bank slot, and its hair that would look like the straw from a broom. She even jumped for joy when she found some truly disgusting shit sitting in the toilet and asked, couldn’t she please have a baby like that; with skin like a komodo and legs like a turtle. Dewi Ayu ran with her imagination that grew wilder every day, and all the while the baby in her womb kept growing.

The height of it came on the night of the seventh full moon of her pregnancy when, accompanied by Rosinah, she bathed in flower water. This is the night when you make a wish for how your baby will be and draw their face on a coconut rind. Most mothers would have drawn the face of Drupadi, Shinta, or Kunti, or whichever
wayang
character was the prettiest, or if they were hoping for a boy they would have drawn Yudistira, Arjuna, or Bima. But Dewi Ayu—perhaps the first person in the world to do so, and because of that even up until the day she died she could not be sure of the outcome—used a piece of black charcoal to draw a hideous baby. She was hoping that her baby would not be like anyone or anything she had ever seen, except maybe a wild pig, or a monkey. So she drew the figure of a frightening monster such as she had never seen nor would ever see before the people buried her dead body.

But then finally she did see her, after those twenty-one years, on the day she rose again.

At that time, day was turning into night, and rain poured down in the cyclone storms that signaled the season was about to change. The wild
ajak
dogs howled in the hills with shrill voices that drowned out the
muadzin
who was calling people to Maghrib prayer at the mosque, and who was apparently failing, because people didn’t like to go out when it was raining heavily at twilight and they could hear the sound of howling dogs, and especially not when there was a ghost in a burial shroud walking along the roads in a bedraggled condition and whimpering.

The distance from the public cemetery to her house wasn’t a short distance, but
ojek
drivers preferred to crash their motorcycles into a ditch and run away as fast as they could rather than give Dewi Ayu a ride. No minibuses would stop. Even the food stalls and stores along the road chose to close down for the day, locking their doors and windows up tight. There was no one in the street, not even any homeless or crazy people, no one except this old woman who had risen from the dead. There were only the bats who flew with all their might, slamming against the storm, moving in the sky, and the curtains that occasionally parted to reveal faces pale with fright.

She shivered from the cold, and was hungry too. A few times she tried to knock on the doors of people who she thought might still remember her, but the inhabitants preferred to stay quiet, if they hadn’t already fainted dead away. So she was overjoyed when from a distance she recognized her own house, which still looked just as it had before the people had laid her in the grave. Bougainvillea blossoms lined the length of the fence, with chrysanthemums along the perimeter looking peaceful under the sheets of rain, and there was a warm light coming from the veranda lamp. She missed Rosinah terribly and fervently hoped a plate of dinner was waiting for her. The image made her hurry a little, like people in train stations and bus terminals, which in turn made her burial shroud come loose as it was tossed by the storm, revealing her naked body, but her hand quickly grabbed the calico cloth and wrapped it back around herself like a young girl in a towel after a bath. She missed her child, the fourth one, and hoped to see what she was like. It’s true what people say, a good deep sleep can bring a change of heart, especially if it lasts for twenty-one years.

A young girl was sitting on a chair on the veranda alone underneath the ghostly halo of light, right where Dewi Ayu and Rosinah used to spend the afternoon hunting lice in each other’s hair. She was sitting as if expecting someone. At first Dewi Ayu thought it was Rosinah, but as soon as she stood in front of her, she realized that the girl was unfamiliar. She almost shrieked when she saw the horrifying figure, who looked as if she had suffered severe burns, and a malicious voice inside her head said that she had not returned to earth, but was instead wandering through hell. But she was sensible enough to quickly realize that the hideous monster was nothing more than a wretched young girl; she even gave thanks that she had finally met someone who did not run away at the sight of an old woman wrapped in a burial shroud passing by in the middle of a downpour. Of course she didn’t yet realize that it was her daughter, since she didn’t yet realize that twenty-one years had passed, and so to clear up all of the confusion, Dewi Ayu tried to greet the girl.

“This is my house,” she said in explanation. “What is your name?”

“Beauty.”

Dewi Ayu erupted into a truly impolite laugh, before quickly stopping herself and understanding everything. She sat in another chair, separated by a table covered with a yellow tablecloth and a cup of coffee belonging to the girl.

“Like a cow who sees that her glazed calf already knows how to run,” she said mystified, and then politely asked for the coffee on the table, which she drank. “I’m your mother,” she added, full of pride that her daughter was exactly what she had hoped for. If the rain hadn’t been coming down, and she hadn’t been starving, and the moon had been shining brightly, she would have loved to run and climb up to the rooftop and dance in celebration.

The girl did not look at her and didn’t even say anything.

“What are you doing out here on the veranda in the middle of the night?” Dewi Ayu asked her.

“I’m waiting for my prince to come,” the girl said finally, even though she still did not turn her head. “To free me from the curse of this hideous face.”

She had been obsessed with that handsome prince ever since she realized that other people were not as ugly as she was. Rosinah had tried to bring her to neighbors’ houses back when she was only a babe in arms, but not one person received them, because their children would scream and cry for the rest of the afternoon and the old folks would instantly come down with fever and die two days later. They rejected her everywhere, and it was that way too when it was time to for her attend school; not one school accepted Beauty. Rosinah had even tried begging a principal, but he seemed more interested in the mute young woman than in the ugly young girl and had boorishly fondled her in the office once the door was closed. Wise Rosinah thought, where there’s a will there’s a way, and if she had to lose her virginity to get Beauty into school, she would give it up in any way possible. So that morning she found herself naked on the principal’s swiveling office chair and they made love under the drone of the fan for twenty-three minutes, but it turned out that, even so, Beauty was still barred from admission, because if she attended the other children would refuse to enroll.

Without giving up, finally Rosinah planned to teach her herself at home, at the very least her numbers and letters. But before she had the chance to teach her anything, Rosinah was dumbfounded to realize the girl already knew how to correctly count the lizard calls. She was even more surprised when one afternoon Beauty pulled out a pile of books left by her mother and read them aloud at the top of her lungs without anyone ever even teaching her the alphabet. There was something not right about these astonishing events, which had actually started years before when, to Rosinah’s amazement and without knowing who had taught her how, the girl had learned to speak. Rosinah tried to spy on the little one, but the child never went farther than the fence and not one single person appeared, and so she never met anyone except the mute servant, who spoke with her hands. And yet she knew the words for all visible and invisible things, for cats and lizards and the chickens and the ducks that roamed around their house.