Beauty Is a Wound (30 page)

“So now I know what you men were up to during your guerrilla war,” she said, as Shodancho stared at her with the look of a lovesick sinner. “And now you have to marry me, even though I will never love you. If you don’t, I will kill myself right after I tell everyone in this city what you did to me.”

“I will marry you, Alamanda.”

“Fine. You will have to arrange for the celebration by yourself.” Then she left without another word.

Within one week’s time their marriage was a hot topic of discussion that came up whenever people met and talked, as they speculated about it, solemnly mulled it over, and joked about it too. Still, the citizens of Halimunda had become accustomed to just about anything, so they were not too surprised by the news. Some of them even said with an air of authority that Alamanda and Shodancho were the most well-matched couple that any human being on the face of this earth could ever imagine: a beautiful girl who was the daughter of a most well-respected prostitute married to an ex-rebel who had once been a great commander, there was nothing more fitting than that. Others said that Shodancho was in fact even more suitable than that rabble-rouser Kliwon, and Alamanda wasn’t too stupid to realize it.

But Kliwon had many friends in that city: they were the fishermen, because when he had lived there Kliwon had gone to sea with them and helped them haul nets to shore, receiving one plastic bag full of the fish they had caught as payment, and he had helped them fix their leaky boats and their cranky outboard motors when he worked in the boat shop; they were the farm laborers, because many farmers on the outskirts of the city worked land belonging to others, just as Kliwon had done, and they had been on the sidelines when he had entertained his friends, talking about all kinds of things that sprung from his brilliant brain, things they had never known about or could have ever conceived; and they were the young girls who had fallen in love with him, or were still in love with him, and even though Kliwon had abandoned each of them when he went to find another girl, they held no grudge and loved him just as much as ever; they were those who had been his childhood playmates, his companions in swimming and bird-hunting, and in searching for firewood and grasses that could be sold to rich men, back when they were all still small; and all of them were upset that Alamanda had abandoned their friend to marry Shodancho. But they had no business getting mixed up in Alamanda’s affairs and what’s more, the issue of whether or not his heart was broken was only and completely Kliwon’s own private business.

And so the news about the wedding celebration, that people were saying would be the most festive celebration that had ever occurred in the past or would ever occur in future of the city, quickly spread from one far-flung locale to another, all throughout the terrain of Halimunda’s scattered villages. It was assured that the celebration would be enlivened by seven groups of
dalang
, master puppeteers who would perform the entire Mahabharata over the course of seven nights, and that every single inhabitant of the city would be invited to attend, and the people said the food to be served would be enough to feed the entire city for seven generations. There would also be performances of
sintren
,
kuda lumping
trance dancing,
orkes melayu
, films projected onto a screen, and of course, pig fighting.

Finally this news reached Kliwon, along with the letter that Alamanda had sent him. One day before the wedding, when the tents had already been set up in front of Dewi Ayu’s house and Alamanda was primping and pampering and preparing her body with the help of a number of wedding planners, Kliwon returned home to Halimunda on the train with an anger smouldering throughout his entire body, not just because this was the first time he had ever been hurt or abandoned by a woman, but because he truly loved Alamanda with his whole heart.

In front of the station, the place where they had last met and kissed, Kliwon chopped down the almond tree as a crowd looked on. They didn’t dare get in his way, partly because they saw his eyes blazing furiously in their sockets but mostly because he was carrying a machete, and so even the policemen who happened to be in the area didn’t dare forbid him from chopping down that tree, which had originally been intended as a shade tree for people to rest under. When the tree collapsed, the crowd only moved back a couple of paces to protect themselves from being hit by the falling branches and twigs, all the while wondering why the man was taking out all of his passion and rage on a little almond tree that had never done anything wrong.

Meanwhile, Kliwon didn’t seem bothered by the people gathered outside the front of the station watching him, and he began to hack off the twigs and branches and to tear off the tree’s leaves until they blocked the whole path leading to the platform, and when the wind blew the leaves whirled about like a creepy tornado, but even the street sweepers didn’t dare get in his way, they just looked at him trying to determine whether or not he had gone completely insane.

Only one guy, who was Kliwon’s childhood friend, was bold enough to ask what he was doing with the tree. Kliwon replied tersely, “Chopping it down,” and after that no one dared ask him anything else and he continued with his work.

After the tree was stripped of its branches and leaves, he began to chop it up into pieces of firewood. He split the largest branches into two or four so that in a matter of minutes the wood began to pile up on the side of the road. Kliwon walked to the baggage counter and there he took a length of coarse rope without asking for permission (although of course no one forbade him) and tied up the wood with it. After all this was finished, without speaking to any of the people who were still faithfully crowding around him, he put his machete back into his sarong, picked up the bundle of wood, and walked away from the station.

At first the people wanted to follow him, but the friend who had previously spoken and suddenly understood what was going to happen quickly said to them, “Let him go alone.” And it turned out that what his friend suspected was exactly what came to pass: Kliwon went to Alamanda’s house and found the girl overseeing the party preparations. Alamanda was surprised by his arrival and even more surprised to see the man she still loved so much hauling a stack of wood for who knows what purpose.

For a moment Alamanda wanted to leap toward him, embrace him and kiss him just as she had at the station, tell him that this was
their
wedding celebration, and that it was a lie that she was going to marry Shodancho. But she just as quickly came to her senses and tried to appear proud of her wedding to Shodancho, tried to look like a smug and self-satisfied girl. Kliwon let the wood fall from his shoulder to the earth, making Alamanda jump back to save her toes from getting squashed, and he finally opened his mouth to say, “This is that wretched almond tree, where we promised we would meet again. I am offering it to you, to be used as firewood on your wedding day.”

Alamanda waved her hands as if ordering him to leave, and so Kliwon left, without telling her how he had been truly swept away by that gesture, tossed into a storm of hatred that erased everything in its wake. He probably didn’t know that once he had gone and was completely out of sight, Alamanda ran to her room and wept, burning the remaining photographs of herself to ash. By the time she met Shodancho on their wedding dais the next morning, she had tried everything she could to hide the evidence of a night’s worth of tears, but without success and so for months, even for years afterward, it remained gossip for the city folk.

Kliwon disappeared for months after that, or at least Alamanda didn’t hear any more news of him, or maybe she just didn’t want to hear anything about him anymore. She assumed that he had returned to the capital to finish his schooling at the university or to join the communist youth, who knows. But in truth Kliwon didn’t go anywhere. He stayed in Halimunda, moving from one friend’s house to the next or hiding at his mother’s place. He even attended Alamanda’s wedding in secret. He greeted Shodancho and Alamanda in disguise, without the couple realizing it, and Kliwon could see that Alamanda had been crying all night long, undeniable evidence that she was marrying against her will, and irrevocable proof that she had chosen a husband she didn’t love. For his part Kliwon was no longer angry at Alamanda, just saddened by the tragic fate that had befallen the woman he loved.

But he kept wondering what had made Alamanda decide to marry Shodancho, whom she had only just met a few weeks before, until he heard a fisherman say that late one afternoon he had seen Shodancho driving a truck out of the jungle with Alamanda slumped unconscious beside him, and another fisherman swore that from the middle of the ocean he had seen Shodancho carrying Alamanda over his shoulder into the guerrilla hut. “I am saddened by what has come to pass between you and Alamanda,” said the fisherman, “but don’t act rashly. Or, if you plan to seek revenge, let us join with you and help.”

“I won’t seek my revenge,” said Kliwon. “That man wins every war he fights.”

For the time being Kliwon returned to the ocean with his friends as he used to do, and Alamanda went through the farce of a tense and anxious wedding night. She had drugged Shodancho with a sleeping pill so that the man straightaway fell snoring onto their wedding mattress, which was shining yellow with fragrant fresh flowers arranged prettily atop it. Exhausted, Alamanda unfurled a pallet on the floor and slept there, without the slightest inclination to lie down beside her husband the way most new brides do. But unpredictably, Shodancho awoke in the early morning hours and, looking all around, he was taken aback to find that his wedding night had almost passed him by and his new bride was lying on the floor on a thin pallet. Cursing himself at this unforgivable sight, Shodancho quickly bent down, scooped up his wife, and laid her down on the bed.

Alamanda awoke to see Shodancho smiling and saying how foolish it would be to pass their wedding night without doing anything, and when Shodancho took off all his clothes so that he was standing there naked, she turned her back on him and said, “How about I tell you a fairy tale before we make love?”

Shodancho laughed and said that was an interesting idea, then got into bed and cuddled up against his wife’s back, inhaling the scent of her hair saying, “Quick, start your story, because I’m already really in the mood.”

So as best as she could Alamanda began to spin a tale, inventing a story which circled endlessly with no resolution, so that there would be no time for them to make love—not until they died, or maybe not even until the end of the world. As Alamanda was telling her story, Shodancho was exploring Alamanda’s whole body with his two hands, impatient to get to the end of the tale, even though he couldn’t really tell where it was heading. He began to fumble with the buttons on Alamanda’s gown, opening them one by one. Alamanda tried to hold out by curling up into a tight little ball, but Shodancho’s strong hands turned her over easily and pinned her down as he rolled on top of her. Alamanda pushed Shodancho so that he rolled off again, and said, “Listen, Shodancho, we’ll make love when my story is finished.”

Shodancho shot a peevish look in her direction, detecting a whiff of antagonism in the game, and said that he could listen to the story
while
they were making love.

“But we already agreed, Shodancho,” said Alamanda, “that you could marry me but I would never make love to you.”

That angered Shodancho so that he didn’t care about anything anymore and roughly yanked at his new bride’s evening gown until it was torn. Alamanda let out a little scream but Shodancho quickly silenced her, pulling at her clothes. Just when it seemed that Alamanda was no longer really resisting and Shodancho had ripped off her gown, he cried out in surprise. “Damn it! What have you done to your crotch?” he asked, gaping down at a pair of underwear made out of metal, locked with a padlock that appeared to have no keyhole with which to open it.

Alamanda said with a mysterious calm, “This is an antiterror garment, Shodancho, I ordered it directly from a metalsmith and a sorcerer. It can only be opened with a mantra that only I know how to recite, and I will never ever open it for you, not even if the sky has fallen.”

That night, Shodancho tried to break the padlock using a number of different tools: he tried prying at it with a screwdriver, he pounded it with a nail and axe, and he even shot it with a pistol, which made Alamanda practically faint with fear. But everything failed to open the lock on that metal underwear and, finally caught in between lust and anger, all he could do was have relations with his wife without being able to actually penetrate her. In the morning he sliced the tip of his finger just a little bit and dripped the blood on top of the sheet, in the time-honoured symbol that a newlywed couple had to show the laundress.

A week after the wedding, when all that was left of the festivities was garbage and rumors, the newlyweds moved to the house Shodancho had bought for them, a house left over from the colonial era which came with two servants and a gardener. It was Dewi Ayu who had told them to move, giving them the impression that they should come to visit her as rarely as possible, or maybe never come again. “A married woman doesn’t associate with whores,” she told Alamanda. Her mother was always right, and with a heavy heart Alamanda moved out.

That whole time, in accordance with her vow, Alamanda never removed her iron underwear. It was as if she was a soldier from the Middle Ages, forever wary of the enemy who could ambush at any time and come stabbing with his flabby but still quite fatal sword. Shodancho himself appeared to have given up all hope of opening them, especially after consulting with a number of sorcerers. All the sorcerers shrugged their shoulders and said there was no force, no kind of evil spirit, that could appease the vengeful power of a wronged woman. He paid a lot of money for those useless consultations—not for the advice per se, but to keep the sorcerers quiet so that the family shame would not leak out and spread. And it was that very shame that meant he couldn’t ask anyone else for advice about his problems in the bedroom.