Beauty Is a Wound (49 page)

Moments after she had cleaned off the lizard shit and ordered one of the girls to take over her work sweeping the middle room, her face, which still showed its Dutch roots, was as pale as a two-day-old corpse. She sat on the veranda and worried whether something had happened to her husband or her daughter. Of course lots of little things happened to them so often that she didn’t think about those anymore, but she had always felt that sooner or later something big was going to happen, she just didn’t know what. All she could do was worry. That damn lizard shit.

At a time like this of course Maman Gendeng would be at the bus terminal, as usual. He’d killed to get that chair, and Maya Dewi always worried that someone might murder him to get it, too, and no matter how bad that man was, she loved him as much as they both loved their daughter, and Maya Dewi did not want that to happen. She hoped that her husband was in fact invincible to weapons, as the Halimunda rumors always claimed.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a
becak
stopping in front of their gate. Two young girls got out and she recognized Shodancho’s daughter, and then her own. She wondered why they were coming home so early, and why Rengganis the Beautiful was wearing a soccer uniform and not her school clothes. She stood up with the worry of a mother hen as the two young girls entered the yard and came to stand before her. Wanting to ask what had happened, Maya Dewi looked at Nurul Aini, but her face seemed as pale as a three-day-old corpse. Ai was on the verge of tears and Maya Dewi hadn’t had the chance to ask anything when the Beautiful spoke.

“Mama, I was raped by a dog in the school toilet,” she said, calm and purposeful. “And maybe I’m gonna get pregnant.”

Maya Dewi collapsed back down onto her chair, with a face as pale as a four-day-old corpse. The kind of mother who never got mad, she just looked at the Beautiful helplessly, and then she asked, “What kind of dog?”

Soon after, the bad news came to the city that there’d be a total eclipse of the sun the following year. Soothsayers predicted it would be a year full of misfortune, and if it was in fact true that Rengganis the Beautiful had been raped by a dog, then the catastrophes had already begun. The news spread like a plague until everyone in Halimunda had heard it, except for the Beautiful’s father, poor Maman Gendeng. For the very first time, people looked at that thug with gazes of pity and woe.

For a whole month, no one had the guts to tell him, until one day a slobby, chunky, awkward, and ridiculous-looking schoolboy around his daughter’s age appeared, named Kinkin. He was wearing a sweater that was way too small for him, faded brown corduroys, dingy white keds, and round glasses that made him look like a comic book character. The fact that he dared approach the thug, who was nodding off in his sacred banged-up old mahogany rocking chair after drinking a glass of beer that had tasted like horse shit, caused a little bit of a stir. A number of people knew him to be Kamino the gravedigger’s only son, but they were too late to prevent him from disturbing the
preman
.

Maman Gendeng, awakened from his snooze, reluctantly set down his beer glass and glanced with some annoyance at this kid who just stood there stiffly, rolling and unrolling the bottom of his shirt, until Maman Gendeng lost his patience.

“Tell me what you want and then get out of here!” he roared.

After a whole minute passed, the boy still hadn’t said a thing and the thug, exasperated, grabbed his glass and poured out all the beer over the kid’s head.

“Speak, or I’ll dunk you in a cow wallow!”

“I am willing to marry your daughter, Rengganis the Beautiful,” Kinkin finally said.

“She would never marry
you
,” said Maman Gendeng, more amused than upset: “She can marry anyone she wants, but I’m sure it won’t be you. Plus, you’re way too young to talk about getting married.”

Kinkin and Rengganis the Beautiful were in the same class at school, and he explained that he’d been in love with her ever since he first met her: he trembled every time he saw her, and kept on trembling with longing when he didn’t see her. He was suffering from fever, insomnia, and shortness of breath, and all because of love. He’d secretly slipped some love poetry into the Beautiful’s notebook, as well as a letter written on perfumed paper, but no response ever came—he was practically dead inside. He assured the thug that he loved the Beautiful the way that Romeo loved Juliet and Rama loved Shinta.

“She’s going to finish school and become a dentist, like that rich woman down the street, so even if you two love each other, there’s no reason to get married right now.”

“Your daughter is pregnant and someone has to marry her,” said the kid.

Maman Gendeng smiled a condescending little smirk. “Someone would have to rape her for her to get pregnant, and that would only happen over my dead body.”

“A dog raped her in the school bathroom.”

That amused Maman Gendeng even more, and he sent that pesky love-drunk kid away saying that if Kinkin truly loved his daughter, he shouldn’t give up.

When afternoon came and he went home, he quickly forgot all about it. Rengganis the Beautiful hadn’t said anything, nor had his wife, so he thought everything was just fine and took his usual nap. When his wife woke him up for dinner at seven and lit the incense coil to keep away the bugs, he remembered Kinkin and wondered to his wife whether he actually had been approached by a kid who’d said that the Beautiful had been raped by a dog in the school bathroom or whether it had just been a dream.

“She told me the same thing a few weeks ago,” said Maya Dewi.

“Why didn’t you say anything to me?”

“A dog would have had to kill us both before he dared to rape her.”

For the next few weeks they were both preoccupied with this rumor. The reality was that not one person believed what she said—either thinking that she was just looking for attention or imagining what it would have been like to be that lucky dog—but because of her pitiful condition the pious women put their hands to their hearts and prayed for her well being.

“No one will lay a hand on her,” the
preman
said tersely. “Not as long as we are still alive.”

He had named his daughter after the city’s goddess of beauty, but now he remembered that according to the legend, Princess Renggannis had married a dog.

“She is not pregnant,” he said with certainty. “But if it turns out to be true, I will kill every dog in this city.”

The family fell back into their daily routine, trying to ignore all the rumors. After all, it was not so unusual for the Beautiful to cause a stir. She had once dropped a cute little kitten into a pot of boiling oil, and once disrupted a circus when, out of curiosity, she had gotten out of her seat and pulled off the clown’s mask. Maya Dewi returned to overseeing the two village girls and Maman Gendeng returned to his post, playing cards with Shodancho in the afternoon.

For many years he had eased his boredom by playing trump with Shodancho and a rotating assortment of sardine and vegetable sellers, market coolies and rickshaw drivers. Only when Shodancho went to East Timor to make war for six months did they skip cards, but most days he would ride over on a moped without a muffler, at around three in the afternoon, and the sound of his scooter, like a rice thresher’s engine, was so familiar that if the thug was napping he would immediately awaken. Shodancho was skinnier and shorter than most soldiers, but his impressive military uniform—the dappled green camouflage uniform with hard alligator boots, and the pistol and wooden club swinging at his hip—hid his slight stature. His skin was dark and his mustache showed a few gray hairs. Most people had forgotten his real name, only remembering that he used to be a
shodan
commander in the revolution against the Japanese.

One Thursday afternoon, at their card table with the cow butcher’s apprentice and a fish merchant, the ritual began with Shodancho tossing a pack of white American cigarettes onto the table. Before the cards were shuffled all four had already pounced on them, the tobacco smoke chasing away the tangy smell of salted fish and rotting vegetables.

“Ah, here’s the joker,” said Shodancho, “what’s new with yours?”

The pair’s fragile amity had solidified thanks to the friendship that had blossomed between their two daughters—and back when Rengganis the Beautiful and Nurul Aini were little girls who still peed in their pants, their fathers would give each girl a joker to hold in her pudgy little hand so she’d feel included but wouldn’t bother the game, since the joker is never used in trump, and jokers now signified their daughters.

“A snot-nosed kid came to me to ask for her hand in marriage,” replied Maman Gendeng.

Halimunda was filled with loudmouths and gossip, so Shodancho already knew about this, just as he had already heard about the hullabaloo in class. But he seemed hesitant to respond.

“I can’t imagine her getting married and having a child and me becoming a grandfather.” Maman Gendeng looked at his three card-playing friends, especially Shodancho, to gauge their reaction. “She’s barely sixteen.”

“Just like my joker.”

People had already heard about Shodancho’s plans to retire the following year. The injury that he’d gotten in East Timor had never completely healed, and the bullet was still lodged in his shin. Retiring with the rank of colonel would quickly put an end to the controversy about him holding on to his post for too long and hoarding control over the city military district—a post that had always been way below him, having led the revolution of the Halimunda
daidan
and destroyed the Japanese barracks six months before independence, when he’d been the first in line to become the great commander. But he never left Halimunda and never led the National Army. He made colonel when he chased out the Allied army during the period of military aggression, but after that he never aspired to rise further in rank. After he’d finished off all the communists, he declined the offer to become the aide to the president of the republic. Now, with a wife and a child he loved so very much, there was no reason to leave the city, and he was ready to retire.

“I heard that Rengganis the Beautiful was raped by a dog?” he asked.

“There are way too many dogs in Halimunda,” muttered Maman Gendeng.

This surprised Shodancho—there were a lot of dogs in the city, but he had never heard anyone complain about it.

“And if it’s true, what happened in the school bathroom, well I have plenty of dog poison,” the thug continued coldly, “ever since that whore died of rabies two years ago. And no matter what might have happened with my daughter, there are more than enough reasons to send those curs to those dog-eating Batak kitchens.”

Even though he seem to address anyone in particular, his friends at the card table knew all this was meant for Shodancho. Most of the dogs in Halimunda were
ajak
half-breeds, domesticated and bred ever since Shodancho began hunting pigs. Long ago, when Princess Rengganis had first come to the misty jungle that then grew into Halimunda, everyone knew she’d been accompanied by a dog. But no one had ever bred dogs until Shodancho.

“I hope it’s just gossip,” said Shodancho finally.

“Or just another bit of my daughter’s foolishness,” the thug replied dryly. He reminisced about all the
dukun
they’d visited to make his daughter more like other girls. Some said she was possessed by an evil spirit, while others suggested that her spirit was just refusing to grow up: she was a six-year-old child inside the body of a sixteen-year-old young woman. But whatever they said, they couldn’t
do
anything about it. “And you know, just to make them allow her in school I had to punch out three different teachers.” Growing a little mawkish losing his taste for the card game, he asked, “Are you all going to laugh at her as well?”

“Well, we always laugh at jokers,” said Shodancho.

Maman Gendeng left and as he walked home the wind began blowing down from the hills and he could hear the sea thrashing. A group of bats flew clumsily against the wind, like drunkards, in a sky as orange as the fruit. The fishermen were stepping out of their houses with oars and nets and vats of ice, while from the opposite direction, the field laborers were coming home with their sickles and empty sacks. The overcast weather made him uneasy.

But seeing the starfruit tree, flowering verbena, and the shady sapodilla growing in the front of their house lifted his spirits. His home almost always rescued him from any storms of gloom, but this time he found his wife sitting in front of a tub full of laundry, crying.

“I’m worried that she’s pregnant,” said Maya Dewi, this mild-mannered woman, in a tone of fury. “A month has passed and I still haven’t come across any bloodstained underwear.” And, with that, she hurled that laundry tub, spilling the contents out across the floor.

The thug mulled it over. “If that turns out to be true, then it couldn’t have been a dog,” he said with certainty. “And in any case, if anybody is going to rape anybody, it should be my daughter who rapes a dog.”

After his failed proposal in the bus terminal, Kinkin threw himself into his new hobby of hunting dogs lost in the graveyard and shooting them dead with his pellet gun. He was the only person who believed that Rengganis the Beautiful had been raped by a dog and, burning with a blind jealousy, he would not let even one dog under his dominion survive. If no dogs appeared, then he would buy posters of dogs that were sold in front of the market and hang them from the branches of a frangipani tree before shooting them to shreds. His father was the only one who knew about this odd behavior, and grew concerned.

“What’s wrong with you, child?” his father asked. “The only sin dogs are guilty of is barking too much.”

“Dogs are dogs, Dad,” he replied coldly without turning his head, still aiming at the poster swinging from his last bullet. “And one of them raped the woman I love.”

“I have never heard of a dog raping a woman. Or maybe you have fallen in love with a female dog?”

“Enough bullshit,” said Kinkin. “Go home, Dad, this final bullet is intended for a dog and not for you.”