Beauty Is a Wound (48 page)

His brain had been damaged during his long exile and was now slow to understand anything. But then he remembered, and understood. Yes it was true, he knew that look, it was the same loving look that only Alamanda with her small eyes had, a look she’d given him so many years ago. That look was as gentle as a woman’s smooth caress along a kitten’s back, full of tenderness and now with a flame of longing. He recognized it and recognized he was a fool to have ever forgotten it. So he returned that look, a gaze full of passion, and was suddenly transformed from a morose old guy into a man who had rediscovered his long-lost love.

And that was how the following came to pass:

The two stood up and without a word they leapt into each other’s arms and embraced, weeping, but not for long because they had already plunged into long and fervent kisses, just as underneath the almond tree, kisses that brought them down onto the sofa, where they quickly took off each other’s clothes, and made wild and crazy love.

When it was over, they didn’t regret it, not even one little bit.

But when he went home, Comrade Kliwon’s wife was waiting at the front door. He tried to hide his radiating joy, and return to his morose face, but Adinda was not fooled in the slightest.

“The ghosts told me,” said Adinda, “so I know what you did at Shodancho’s house. But it’s alright with me, as long as it made you happy.”

That unnerved him. He didn’t regret what he had done, but he was ashamed all of a sudden, feeling so dirty facing a wife who said,
It’s alright with me, as long it made you happy
. A wife who had waited for him for years, and then after he’d suddenly arrived, had been just as suddenly betrayed.

Comrade Kliwon said nothing and went straight into the guest bedroom, locked himself inside, and didn’t come out the next day even though Adinda and Krisan knocked on the door over and over inviting him to come eat dinner. When morning came and breakfast was ready, Adinda and Krisan took turns knocking on the door, but Comrade Kliwon didn’t make a sound, so with growing worry and suspicion they pounded on the door harder, but still there was no answer.

Finally, Krisan went to the kitchen and got the hatchet that he used to split wood to make cages for his doves and as Adinda looked on used it to smash down the door. It split down the center, and then with a few more blows, he finally had a hole big enough to put his hand through and unlock the door. They found Comrade Kliwon hanging from a sheet that he had rolled up and tied to a crossbeam, dead. Krisan grabbed hold of his mother as she lost consciousness.

The news of Comrade Kliwon’s appearance, which had been witnessed by his neighbors, had spread quickly. But everyone was too late. All they could see now was the convoy surrounding the man’s coffin heading toward the graveyard. They were too late, just like Krisan, who had never had and now would never have the opportunity to know his father. They had only met for such a brief period of time, hardly even a week, and that was not nearly enough time to truly get to know one another as father and son. Out of everyone, Krisan was the most dismayed by the death of Comrade Kliwon. He claimed the inheritance of the threadbare cap that he’d seen his father wearing in old photographs and he often put it on, to comfort himself and to feel close to his father.

Now there was one more communist ghost in that city, but thankfully he never showed himself to anyone.

ONE MORNING, WHEN
Rengganis the Beautiful gave birth to a baby boy, the people of Halimunda abandoned all their morning rituals and came crowding to her house to see. There were many reasons for them to shirk their responsibilities of feeding the chickens their bran porridge or filling their washtubs to clean the dirty dishes. First, Rengganis the Beautiful was famous in Halimunda, especially after being selected as Beach Princess of the Year. Second, she was the child of Maman Gendeng, who was also quite well known even though he was also quite detested by the city folk. Third, and this was the most important, in the city’s long history it had never before come to pass that a young girl gave birth after having been raped by a dog.

When the midwife announced that what had emerged from the Beautiful’s womb was truly a human baby, people turned over the old piece of gossip that she had been raped by a brown dog with a black snout, the kind of dog you see wherever you look in Halimunda, just like whenever you look up at the night sky you see stars. It had happened in a school bathroom, more or less nine months ago, not long after the recess bell rang.

The whole thing started with the Beautiful’s bad habit of wagering, which she had inherited from her father. Her naughty friends had challenged her to drink five bottles of lemonade, saying she could have the drinks for free if she could finish them all without a drop left over. She did it, but when the entrance bell rang she paid the price, suddenly feeling like she was about to pee in her pants. It was bad timing, because lots of other schoolchildren were also going to the toilet, stretching out recess and cutting down on study time in a tradition that had been passed down from generation to generation. It was a cutthroat queue, and by the time your turn came, your pants or your skirt might already be soaking wet, but to go into class and risk peeing in your seat was also not a wise course of action, and even simpleminded Rengganis the Beautiful knew that, so she ran away from her snickering and giggling friends in the cafeteria, and headed quickly for that evil line.

There were fourteen toilets lined up behind the school building, and thirteen of them already had schoolkids waiting outside them, more likely planning to puff shared cigarettes than pee or take a shit, hidden from the eyes of the principal. The last toilet hadn’t been in use for years. One rumor had it that a girl had killed herself in there, and another that a girl had given birth in there and then strangled her bastard baby. Nothing could be proven, the only reliable fact was that the toilet seemed more like a cage for evil spirits than anything else.

Built in colonial times next to a cocoa and coconut plantation, the school had previously been a Franciscan school. After the Dutch had gone, it next belonged to the national government, and the most reasonable story about the fourteenth toilet was that at some point a coconut or tree branch had fallen through its roof and the school hadn’t had the money to repair it right away. As time passed, cocoa leaves had fallen through the hole into the toilet and gotten wet and moldy, and then lizards had made their nests beneath the detritus, and spiders had spun their webs. The water in the tub had filled with mosquito eggs and algae and weeds, and perhaps some people had taken a piss in there without ever flushing, but in any case that toilet became a place full of horror and now no one even dared stand in front of its door.

It hadn’t been touched for years, not until Rengganis the Beautiful went inside. The five bottles of lemonade in her bladder began to mutiny, and with no other choice, she approached that accursed toilet, looked inside and saw a dog busy sniffing at the cocoa leaves, looking for traces of a cat who’d slipped out through the hole in the roof. It was a neighborhood dog crossbred with an
ajak
, with brown fur and a black snout, and Rengganis the Beautiful had no time to chase it away, but just went in, closed the door, locked it, and then—trapped in the small space with this dog—all she could do was stand stock-still as her urine, seemingly more than the five bottles of lemonade in liquid volume, began to spill out before she even had the chance to pull down her underwear. The warmth flowed down her thighs and her calves, soaking her socks and her shoes.

Next she caused yet another uproar—one of the many uproars that she’d already caused during her sixteen years of simpleton existence—when she appeared in class as naked as the day she was born. All of the children stopped in their tracks, dropping books and tripping over chairs, and even the old math teacher, who was about to start complaining about his dirty chalkboard, suddenly realized that the impotence he had been suffering from for years was miraculously cured, and his weapon was standing stiff and strong. Everyone knew that she was the most beautiful girl in the city, the true descendant of Princess Rengganis, Halimunda’s goddess of beauty, but to see her body, that was just as beautiful as her face but usually hidden, dumbstruck everyone inside the classroom.

“I was raped by a dog in the school toilet!”

It’s all true, if you believe what she said about what happened when she peed in her pants, stuck in that toilet with this dog—for the first five minutes she stood stock-still, helplessly staring at her skirt, socks, and shoes, all wet and stinking of piss. Even when she could no longer hear the sounds of the other children outside the toilet, she was still inside there bemoaning her misfortune. Her brain, which still had the logic of a little girl, ordered her to take off all of her wet clothes, as well as her shirt and her brassiere, and in a bizarre trance-like state, she did so. She hung them all up on the rusted nails, hoping that the rays of sunlight breaking through the perforated roof would quickly dry the remaining urine, and like travelers who wait at the laundromat, she stood naked in front of this dog, who was instantly aroused. It was then, the Beautiful would say, that the dog raped her.

“And he even took all of my clothes away with him after.”

In any case, it was true that her mysterious beauty combined with her innocence gave her a look of sensuality. It’s pretty certain that any man who might have stumbled upon her naked or found himself stuck with her inside a school toilet would have forced himself upon her. She had the kind of allure that made people want to have relations her, whether in a nice and proper way or not. It was only because everyone living in that city knew full well that her father was vicious and evil and scary that she had remained a virgin until the morning the dog raped her.

And Maman Gendeng wouldn’t have hesitated to murder any man who dared touch his only child, despite the fact that the girl’s beauty was a poisonous provocation wherever she went. Sometimes, while standing at the side of the road waiting for the bus, her childlike purity led her to absently lift her skirt and bite its hem. And if a mercilessly hot wind blew, she might undo a few of the buttons on her shirt. You could see the smooth skin that covered her calves and her thighs, the kind that only belongs to a nymph, and the curves of her beautiful breasts, the kind that only belong to sixteen-year-old girls. But you’d better not savor this provocation for too long, because if you did, sooner or later Maman Gendeng—stronger than any
dukun
or black magic sorcerer—would find out that you had been looking at his daughter with lust, and leave you lying in a heap in a hospital ward for six months.

At times like that, another young girl from another beauty, Nurul Aini, who had been the Beautiful’s friend ever since they were babies in their cradles, would act as the protector of the perfect Beautiful. She would quickly pull down the Beautiful’s skirt, and she would rebutton the girl’s shirt: “Don’t do that, sweetheart,” she would say. “It’s not proper.”

And when Rengganis the Beautiful stood naked in front of the class—four and a half feet tall and eighty-eight pounds, with her natural calm, her gleaming ripe body, and her long hair as black as a river of ink, the most beautiful Indo in Halimunda, heir to her mother’s beauty with captivating traces of Dutch ancestry, her blue eyes glittering as she looked out at the whole silent class sadly, wondering why all of a sudden everyone’s mouth was wide open like a crocodile that had been waiting for its prey for weeks—Ai with her instinct to always be ready to deal with the bizarre things that the Beautiful did, rose from her chair, ran down the aisle of school benches, and yanked the tablecloth from the teacher’s desk (sending a glass flying to shatter on the floor, as the teacher’s black leather bag collided with the blackboard, spewing out its contents, and a flower vase and books went spinning). She wrapped that tablecloth around the Beautiful’s body, making her look like a young girl in her towel after a bath.

Maybe Ai had inherited her resolute character from her father, Shodancho, but now, without her having to say a word, with just a look in their direction, the boys and the old math teacher promptly exited the classroom. As they went, their words of regret and grunts of disappointment could be heard passing between them.

“Damn it, a dog?! As if none of us could have raped Rengganis the Beautiful.”

A few girls went to the gymnasium to look for a school soccer uniform to replace the tablecloth wrapped around the Beautiful’s body.

At more or less the same time Maya Dewi, mother of the Beautiful and wife of Maman Gendeng, had a small but gravely worrisome household incident. She was cleaning when a lizard perched on the ceiling lampshade defecated and its scat fell down onto her shoulder. She wasn’t worried about the smell or the filth, but she knew falling lizard scat always foreshadows catastrophe—it was a sign.

Unlike her husband, Maya Dewi was highly respected by the city folk, who didn’t care that she was the daughter of Dewi Ayu, that notable whore. She was calm, and friendly, and even pious, and when they saw this woman people forgave the troubling childish character of her young daughter and her husband’s frightening evil instincts. Maya Dewi went to the women’s Thursday night prayer meetings and to the
arisan
on Sunday afternoons, socializing and contributing money to the women’s lottery pool. She made her family seem just a little bit civilized, in part by earning a living from her daily work of making cookies with her two mountain-girl helpers.