Beauty Is a Wound (54 page)

Rengganis the Beautiful would be adorned with a crown made from a wreath of jackfruit leaves, as would Krisan. They would sit under the banyan tree, next to each other, while Ai kneeled with her knees on the ground before them and said:

“Are you two ready to marry one another?”

“Yes,” Krisan and Rengganis the Beautiful always said.

“And so you are married,” said Ai. “Now kiss.”

Rengganis the Beautiful would kiss Krisan’s lips for a few seconds, and that was the moment Krisan liked the best.

But beyond that—outside of the game—Rengganis the Beautiful always still thought of Krisan as her fiancée.

That annoyed Krisan, but he couldn’t do anything about it, because just like Ai, he knew what Rengganis the Beautiful was like: spoiled, willful, childish, simple, fragile, unstable, and a whole series of other words that explained how pointless it would be to get mad at her. What was even more annoying was Ai’s attitude. Krisan in fact wanted them to gang up on Rengganis the Beautiful a little bit, just to make her come to her senses, but instead Ai faithfully defended every scandalous thing the Beautiful did.

At that time Krisan wasn’t yet quite so hot for Rengganis the Beautiful, even though he knew the girl was very pretty and quite provocative, because he liked quiet girls with serious faces, girls who were calm but could also be quite fierce, and a girl like that was Ai. Forget lusting after her, he often thought of the Beautiful as a third wheel. And Ai’s tendency to protect her made him jealous.

However, there was something else that made him even more jealous: dogs. Shodancho’s child had been infected by his obsession with dogs. Krisan used to always hope that if Ai wasn’t with Rengganis the Beautiful, then he could be alone with her, but if Ai wasn’t with her cousin, then it could be sure that she was playing with dogs, and she would keep playing with them even if Krisan tried to spend time with her.

“Do I have to be a dog for you to pay attention to me?” Krisan asked once, at the height of his irritation.

“Not necessarily,” said Ai. “Be a real man, and I will like you just fine.”

Those enigmatic words were difficult to analyze, so Krisan complained to Rengganis the Beautiful: “I wish I was a dog.”

“That’s good,” said Rengganis the Beautiful. “I have often imagined a dog without a tail.”

It was impossible to have a serious conversation with Rengganis the Beautiful.

He started acting like a dog to get Ai’s attention. If the three of them were walking together, maybe coming home from school or just out strolling in the afternoon, and he saw a dog in the distance, Krisan would bark, “Woof, woof, woof!” Or sometimes he became a little wounded puppy, “Yip, yip, yip,” and other times he would be a wild dog howling in the middle of the night, “Ow-ow-owwwwwwww!!”

“At least your voice sounds like a dog,” Rengganis the Beautiful commented. “That
ajak
howl gives me goose bumps.”

“But it won’t make a bitch fall in love,” said Ai.

She seemed to be mocking his childish behavior, but Krisan didn’t care and continued to play the role of a dog, quite well in fact, whether or not the girl was there. He would piss in the bathroom lifting up one leg, and he began to loll out his tongue all the time.

“Even if you walk around on all fours, your body will never turn into the body of a dog,” said Ai, who thought Krisan was being completely ridiculous. “But watch out for your brain.”

Maybe it was true: it was his brain that had turned into the brain of a dog. When Ai died, he dug up her grave just like a dog would have dug up the treasure of a bone he had hidden. Because Ai liked dogs, he had become a dog—or at least, he barked, stuck out his tongue, lapped up water from the ditch, and dug up the dirt of her grave with his hands.

And before that, he had also been a dog when he raped Rengganis the Beautiful in the school toilet.

The incident where he was sitting on the sofa and saw Rengganis the Beautiful come down the stairs wearing nothing but a bra and underwear was the first time he thought about having sex with her. He began to lust after Rengganis the Beautiful, and forgot about all the problems caused by her childish personality. He would stand still if she suddenly hugged him from behind and covered his eyes, asking him to guess who. He always knew that it was Rengganis the Beautiful, because no one else would cling so close to him. He could feel the pressure of what was definitely her breasts against his back, and he would stay like that for quite some time, pretending to try to guess who had covered his eyes, just to enjoy the smooth touch of the skin on her hands.

If the three of them were walking together, Rengganis the Beautiful almost always walked in the middle. Ai would definitely be holding the girl’s hand. And bringing up the rear, Krisan would hold Rengganis the Beautiful’s other hand, to feel how soft it was.

Ai and Krisan always took Rengganis the Beautiful home first, because their houses were close together. As her way of saying goodbye, Rengganis the Beautiful always kissed Ai’s cheek and Ai kissed her back. At first Krisan hung back, because he thought it looked childish, but after the case of the sofa and the stairs he really enjoyed feeling the warmth of the girl’s lips pressed against his cheek, and kissing the girl’s warm cheek with his own lips.

And if night fell, he didn’t just fantasize about his future marriage to Ai anymore, but also fantasized about an extraordinary fuck with the Beautiful.

All he needed was an opportunity to do it.

Once, when Ai let her guard down and only Krisan and Rengganis the Beautiful were sitting in the front yard of Shodancho’s house, Krisan embraced the girl and the girl hugged him back. No one would have been bothered to see something like that, not even Ai. The three of them were like siblings, more like triplets than cousins, really. What’s more, Rengganis the Beautiful was always happy to hug and be hugged. Then Krisan started to seduce her:

“Do you want to marry me for real some day?” he asked in a joking tone.

But Rengganis the Beautiful replied to him seriously. “Yes,” she said. “There is no other man in my life besides you, Krisan, so you
have
to marry me.”

“Married people have to have sex.”

“So then we will.”

“We’ll do it some day.”

“Yeah, some day.”

Krisan let go of Rengganis the Beautiful, who was left with her arm still around his shoulder when Ai appeared with a small basket full of guavas, a knife, and a mortar filled with
sambal lutis
. They had a picnic and heated their tongues with that chili pepper paste, and Krisan felt the heat all the way to his heart, imagining the opportunity for screwing that would someday come.

And it did come, on the day Rengganis the Beautiful won the bet of drinking five lemonades. Krisan was smoking a cigarette near the toilets when he spotted the girl. As Rengganis the Beautiful went into the far toilet that had become a nest of ghouls and demons, Krisan suddenly realized this was his chance. He quickly left his friends, and in one quiet corner of the schoolyard he jumped the two-meter-high rampart of the cocoa plantations. He knew the roof of the bathroom was filled with holes, so he quickly headed for that toilet, climbing back onto the rampart across a cocoa tree branch, and peered through the perforated roof, spying on Rengganis the Beautiful, who was squatting and peeing.

“Hey-ey,” he called out to her softly.

Rengganis the Beautiful looked up and was shocked to see Krisan up on the roof. “What are you doing up there?” she asked. “Be careful, you could fall and die.”

“I’m waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me to climb up?”

“No. Aren’t we going to screw?”

“Can you even get down?” Rengganis the Beautiful asked again.

“Of course I’m going to come down.”

Holding onto a rotted beam, Krisan swung down into the bathroom. Now they were both trapped inside, Rengganis the Beautiful with her underwear still sagging around her knees. The toilet stank, and obviously the place wasn’t very nice. But Krisan didn’t care, because he was at the peak of desire.

“C’mon, let’s screw,” he whispered.

“I don’t know how,” Rengganis the Beautiful whispered back.

“I can teach you.”

Slowly Krisan began to pull down the girl’s panties from her knees, and hung them on a rusty nail that was hammered into the wall. Then with the same composure he unfastened the buttons of Rengganis the Beautiful’s school uniform, button by button, so that he could enjoy the sensation of seeing her body slowly being exposed. The shirt was also hung on the rusty nail. He then took off her skirt, and was spellbound to see the black at the girl’s crotch. It made his hands tremble slightly, and he hurried a little bit as he removed the girl’s brassiere. But the moment he found the breasts that he had so longed for, he relaxed again. Now he took off his own clothes. His shirt was off, then his pants, then his underwear. His shame was outstretched, hard and pointing up, and he held it and showed it to Rengganis the Beautiful. The girl laughed a little at its shape.

After that there was no more calm. He seized those breasts, caressing and squeezing them full of desire, making the girl writhe and gasp. Rengganis the Beautiful held the boy’s body tight. Krisan pushed the girl against the wall of the bathroom, and pressed against her body with his body. He began to kiss her lips, which he had coveted for so long but hadn’t felt since the wedding game. His hands were playing between their chests, while the girl’s hands softly clawed at his back. His shame urgently began to advance, trying to penetrate her, but the way they were standing he could only bump it against the soft skin of the girl’s thigh, making it buckle. All he could do was rub it in the space between her thighs. “Lift your leg up onto that small basin,” Krisan whispered. Rengganis the Beautiful did it, and her vagina opened wide. Krisan took her quite freely, because the place was already sopping wet, and warm, and their repetitive rocking movements made a loud noise, as if they were walking across a path filled with stones. They enjoyed it very much, even though like all beginners, they finished quickly.

That is what really happened.

“But what if I’m pregnant?” asked Rengganis the Beautiful after their brief lovemaking.

Krisan was a little surprised that the girl even knew having sex could get you pregnant. All of a sudden it frightened him too, and a crazy idea appeared in his brain.

“You can just say that you were raped by a dog.”

“I wasn’t raped by a dog.”

“Well, aren’t I a dog?” asked Krisan. “You have often seen me bark and stick out my tongue, haven’t you?”

“I have.”

“So say that you were raped by a dog. A brown dog with a black snout.”

“A brown dog with a black snout.”

“And don’t mention my name in this business, not even once.”

“But you are going to marry me, right?”

“Yeah. If it turns out you really are pregnant, we can start making plans.”

Krisan quickly got dressed, climbed up out of the same hole in the roof that he had entered through, and had the idea to take Rengganis the Beautiful’s clothes and dispose of them somewhere they would never be found. Meanwhile Rengganis the Beautiful, stark naked, not even wearing her shoes or socks, came out of the toilet and returned to her classroom. Krisan never saw the uproar caused by her appearance, because he wasn’t in the same class.

Then, when it turned out she was actually pregnant, they made their plans for escape. They would hide out in the guerrilla hut and have a
real
wedding celebration there. But it didn’t turn out like that. Instead, for nine months Krisan was paralyzed with the fear that people, especially Maman Gendeng and Maya Dewi and also his own mother, would find out that he was the one who had had sex with the Beautiful. Krisan had planned to kill the girl in the guerrilla hut, to bury the truth, but it turned out he killed her in a boat, and threw her corpse into the ocean.

MAMAN GENDENG ROSE
again on the third day after he vanished into heaven in
moksa
. He came to say goodbye, of course. To Maya Dewi, who else.

This was despite the fact that, just three days before, Maya Dewi had buried his corpse, which was almost completely unrecognizable after having been torn to shreds by
ajak
, gnawed on by maggots, and so swarmed with flies that as his body was being carried home, those insects still followed behind like the tail of a shooting star. “That was not me,” said Maman Gendeng reassuringly. Maya Dewi had been in mourning for those three days, profound mourning, because she had lost Maman Gendeng after they had both lost their daughter, Rengganis the Beautiful. But even though she was wearing all black, for those three days she had also been lying to herself, telling herself that her loved ones were still alive.