Beauty Is a Wound (50 page)

Falling in love had totally destroyed any air of mystery that had surrounded him, or at least that was how his classmates saw it. No one had ever wanted to play with him, just as he had never wanted to play with anyone. His close friends were a gang that no other kids would like:
jailangkung
creatures. He had never even had a deskmate, because his uniform stunk of incense, and the teachers never called on him because sometimes he answered in the voice of a dead person. And even though the other children knew that he cheated during recitation by asking his
jailangkung
for the correct answers, no one dared tell on him nor ask for his help. He was like a bellybutton: everyone knew he was there, but they didn’t pay any attention to him. That was before he saw the Beautiful.

The first time he saw her was the first day she entered her new school: after nine boring academic years, a scuffle had broken out in the office and the children came running to see what had happened. Kinkin was maybe the last person to see it, a man pounding to the ground three teachers who had refused to accept his daughter at the school and had suggested a special school for retarded, idiot, and insane children, an idea the man rejected, saying that his daughter was just fine.

“The only thing that makes my daughter different is the fact that she is the most beautiful girl in this entire city, if not in the entire universe,” the man declared, glaring at the three teachers sprawled on the floor and at the principal quivering behind his desk.

The girl stood behind her father, wearing a brand new white and grey school uniform, still smelling of sewing machine grease, with sharp pleats in her skirt. She had tied her long hair in two braids that hung past the left and right sides of her waist, accented with red and white ribbons, in respect for the colors of the national flag. She wore the required black shoes, and short white socks with small lace flowers encircling the rims, her bare calves more captivating than anything that she was wearing. She clearly was not an idiot, anyone could see that, even Kinkin who was watching her from behind the glass window in the teacher’s office. She was nothing less than an angel, lost in this vicious world, and ever since his first glorious glimpse, Kinkin had been swept away in an uncontrollable fever of love. Although he had never talked to anyone at school, he approached the girl and, struck by Cupid’s arrow, asked her name. The girl, seeming confused, pointed to the small emblem that had been embroidered onto her shirt on top of her right breast, “You can read it right here: Rengganis.”

All the children had name tags stuck to the chest of their uniforms, but Kinkin couldn’t focus when the girl pointed to hers with the tip of her slender finger, instead staring at her breasts. He trembled for the rest of the first day of school, suffering alone in a corner of the classroom.

He suffered all the more, feeling the stares of his classmates, shocked to hear him speak up for the very first time since elementary school. They didn’t dare make fun of him, though, because they were paranoid that the weird kid might hurt them with witchcraft or black magic. Only one girl, seemingly put in the class as Rengganis the Beautiful’s guardian, had the guts to approach him.

“Listen to me, Jailangkung Boy,” the girl threatened, “if you bother my little friend here, I will slice your dick into pieces like a carrot.”

Ai quickly went and sat back down next to the Beautiful, leaving Kinkin almost in tears, imagining all the obstacles he would have to overcome in order to obtain the love that he so desired. To him, Ai was the most annoying creature on the planet. Everyday he hoped he could escort the Beautiful home from school, since walking next to her was of course the most rapturous thing that a schoolboy in love could ever imagine, but Ai always beat him. He was so pissed off, he once said to the girl, “Someone should murder you.”

“You’d do it yourself if you weren’t such a faggot.”

But he didn’t dare. So he missed every opportunity to walk the Beautiful home from school and his only happiness came in class, when he could turn his head and gaze at that beautiful face for as long as he wanted. He became the dumbest kid in school, because he no longer paid attention to any of the lessons. The only thing that helped his grades was the
jailangkung
, whom he consulted during exams. He also grew tragically skinny from not eating or sleeping enough, assaulted by love.

“You look worse off than me,” the Beautiful even commented, “like a
real
idiot.”

They brought her to the hospital, and the doctor said with complete certainty that the girl was in fact pregnant, seven weeks along. Both Maman Gendeng and Maya Dewi tried not to believe him, but five other doctors who examined her said the same thing. So did a
dukun
.

With this new certainty, the first course of action taken by her father was to lock the girl in her room, to prevent the spread of any more rumors. Maya Dewi had tried to escape the shadow of her past, with a whore for a mother who had given birth to multiple children without ever getting married, but now it was as if what had happened to Rengganis the Beautiful only confirmed that the curse still lived on in their bloodline. People would say that a depraved family would forever give birth to children just as depraved. So the couple agreed that the girl had to be locked up, hoping that sooner or later people would forget they had a pregnant teenage daughter.

Her room was on the second floor, too high to jump from, and the door was locked tightly from the outside. Her only companions were a teddy bear, a pile of trashy novels, and the radio. Maya Dewi herself took care of all of her needs, bringing her breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a chamber pot, and buckets full of water to bathe. Even though the girl whined that she wanted to go back to school, her mother firmly said no. “I promise I’ll be more careful around dogs,” said the Beautiful miserably. Maya Dewi burst into tears and choked out between her sobs, “No, sweetheart, not unless you can say who raped you in the school bathroom!”

They had asked her this again and again, but it led nowhere because the girl, with an amazing stubbornness, would reply over and over: a dog with brown skin and a black snout. Dogs like that could be found in every corner of Halimunda, and there was no way they were going to ask about each of them one by one. After failing to obtain any sensible explanation from the Beautiful, Maya Dewi would lock her up again and leave her, and then the Beautiful would scream and shout, asking to be let out and allowed to go back to school. Her cries were quite heartbreaking, and of course deafeningly loud, like the cries of an uncomfortable baby whose wet diaper hasn’t been changed. Hearing her shrill voice, the neighbors came outside and looked up at the second-storey window, and pedestrians stopped in their tracks and whispered to one another. Maman Gendeng advised they send her away, but Maya Dewi opposed that idea and insisted on continuing to hold her in her own room, saying, “It’s better to live in shame than to lose my daughter.”

Finally they gave up and sent her back to school. Hers wasn’t an easy case, because pregnant girls are never allowed in school. The school administration argued that such a thing would negatively influence the other young girls. For the second time, Maman Gendeng appeared at the school, and once again went into the principal’s office without knocking on the door, to ensure that his daughter would not be expelled. The unfortunate principal was truly cornered. On the one hand he had to deal with the parents of the other students, who were worried about their daughters, because what had happened to Rengganis the Beautiful proved that the school wasn’t safe. On the other hand, he had to deal with this thug who no one was brave enough to cross. The principal wiped away the cold sweat that was streaming down his forehead and neck.

“Alright my good friend, as long as she has not yet graduated she can be a student here,” he said. “But please help me out, you have to find whoever did this to your daughter so that I can placate all the other parents. And one more thing, please get her some baggier clothes to wear.”

That reminded Maman Gendeng of the kid named Kinkin. In the afternoon, sneaking off from the trump table, he went to Kamino the gravedigger’s house to look for the boy. Just as in previous days, Kinkin was busy viciously shooting at posters of dogs. For a moment Maman Gendeng admired his marksmanship, even though he wondered why the kid had developed such an odd habit. After Kinkin had fired a number of rounds and the picture of the dog was thrown to the ground, he turned and approached the
preman
without any evident surprise.

“You can see for yourself what I’m doing, can’t you?” he asked proudly. The
preman
didn’t understand at all and just nodded until the kid explained, “I am shooting all dogs and even all pictures of dogs. I hate them and I envy them, because a dog raped your daughter and you know how incredibly much I love her.”

Kamino watched them from the side of the house. Something wasn’t right about the most frightening criminal in the city coming to look for his son, but he approached and tried in his most cordial way to invite the man in for a cup of coffee. Maman Gendeng and the kid Kinkin sat in the front room that was filled with a weird assortment of stuff left behind by dead people. After the coffee was ready and old Kamino left them alone, he asked the kid, “Tell me, who raped Rengganis the Beautiful?”

The kid looked back at him in confusion. “I think you already know: a dog, in the school bathroom,” he said with conviction. That was not the answer that Maman Gendeng was hoping for, and in fact it pissed him off a little, but it was clear to him that the kid didn’t know any more than anyone else, and only Rengganis the Beautiful and God knew what had happened in that school bathroom. He chugged his cup of coffee, just to calm himself down.

It seemed as though he was stuck with an unsolved mystery. He would have vastly preferred to have been facing an enemy in mortal combat than an unknown daughter rapist. He sat in front of the kid without saying another word until he realized that it was getting late. Although he wished he could postpone going home until he had a satisfying answer, he stood to leave, breaking the silence between them with a husky voice.

“Well, I guess it turns out that is all we know. If indeed it was a dog that raped her, then she will marry a dog.”

Hearing that, Kinkin couldn’t sleep, even worse than the previous evenings. He kept his father awake all night long and the ghosts in the cemetery couldn’t relax either. When morning came, he quickly bathed and left for school early, ran to the house of Rengganis the Beautiful, and found her father who seemed cranky to be woken up so early in the morning.

“There’s no way she is going to marry a dog!” he gasped with a voice that sounded like it was coming from the mouth of a dying man. “I will marry her.”

This was way better, and the thug knew it. He looked at the kid, and remembered their first meeting in the bus terminal. He regretted that he hadn’t accepted the kid’s proposal then, before the problem had dragged on. He nodded and asked why.

“It wasn’t a dog who raped her, but me.”

That reason was enough to have the kid dragged out into the backyard and beat mercilessly, even though the very first punch alone sent him slamming into the corner of the fence with a bloody face. The child did not fight back and indeed would have been powerless to resist even if he had tried. Maya Dewi came rushing to stop her husband’s brutality before the boy was killed. She had to struggle tooth and nail to get a hold of her husband, who was still hounding the boy, even though Kinkin had collapsed in a heap on the edge of a small fish pond. He wasn’t dead yet, but he was suffering severely and moaning in pain.

“Of course I am not going to kill you,” said Maman Gendeng, after his wife managed to drag him a short distance away. “Because you have to stay alive and marry my daughter.”

In the afternoon, after hearing Kinkin’s prattle all morning at school about his plans to marry Rengganis the Beautiful once she had given birth to her child, Ai went to the graveyard to meet with Kinkin, riding on the back of a minibike steered by her cousin Krisan.

“I know you weren’t in the toilet that day,” she said angrily.

The kid, smiling at their visit, didn’t deny it but instead invited them in, and gave thanks because this was the first time a classmate had ever come to see him. His house was not a pleasant place—it was old and without a woman’s touch, rarely swept, and the objects left behind by the dead were piled up in creepy, dusty heaps, like an excavation of a mummy’s tomb.

After bringing them two glasses of cold lemonade from the kitchen, he said that his mother had passed away long ago, having died the moment he was born, to apologize for the house’s unkempt condition, if not to change the topic of conversation. But the girl’s face did not seem the least bit relaxed, as she waited for the next opportunity to harangue him some more.

“You sly faggot, there’s no way you raped her,” Ai said.

“Of course, I could never be so cruel,” said Kinkin calmly. “If you love someone, you would never do that, not even if the opportunity arose. I proposed to her properly and I am going to marry her because I love her.”

He would inherit his father’s line of work and the house in the graveyard. Such things were always passed down through the generations and the reason why was clear: nobody else would want the job. Everyone in the city believed that the graveyard was filled with evil spirits and ghouls, and only a gravedigger’s family could stand to live there year after year. The family also passed down their secret magical knowledge about how to carry on relationships with the spirits of the dead through the use of
jailangkung
. Kinkin was the last and only available heir, without brothers and sisters. But if his peers were afraid of him, it was not just because he was a gravedigger’s son and could play
jailangkung
, but because of his cold face and the humid stench that emanated from his body, as if he carried an evil spirit on his shoulder wherever he went. It was enough to make the hair on the napes of their necks stand up, so Krisan stayed mostly silent. He truly had not wanted to come, and had done it just because his cousin had forced him.