Beauty Is a Wound (61 page)

Until one night, not long after Dewi Ayu had once again vanished into the world of the dead, as Beauty was lying naked with the prince in her bed, resting after making love, a man broke down the door with an air rifle in his hand. He was a man of short and chubby stature, with a sad air about him. He shivered a little in terror when he saw Beauty’s face, but his gaze quickly shifted to the prince, filled with rage.

“You!” he said. “Murderer of Rengganis the Beautiful, I have come to avenge her death!”

The prince wasn’t able to save himself when the rifle fired and its expertly aimed bullet lodged in the center of his forehead. He fell back onto the bed, dying. The man with the gun pumped the air again, loaded another bullet, and shot the prince again. He shot as many as five times, full of hatred, as Beauty screamed and screamed.

All anybody knew was that he was shot to death while visiting his grandmother’s house.

Krisan’s burial was attended by the entire family, with Adinda looking full of grief. Now it was complete: Alamanda had lost Shodancho and Ai, Maya Dewi had lost Maman Gendeng and Rengganis the Beautiful, and Adinda had now lost Krisan after having lost Comrade Kliwon. They had all lost everyone they loved.

The three of them followed Krisan’s coffin, heading toward the Budi Dharma cemetery, and along the road Alamanda and Maya Dewi tried to comfort Adinda.

“We are like a cursed family,” Adinda sobbed.

“We are not
like
a cursed family,” corrected Alamanda. “We are truly and completely cursed.”

Old Kamino was digging a grave for Krisan right next to his father’s grave, as Adinda had requested. She had already reserved the next plot over for herself.

Usually, women didn’t go to the graveyard. Only in special cases did a woman go, when she truly couldn’t bear to be separated from the dead, as had happened with Farida many years ago. But for Krisan’s burial, the attendants were the three sisters, plus six neighborhood men who served as pallbearers and the mosque imam, who would pray for the dead man.

There was no one else besides them, standing in their dark clothes under the parasols that protected them from who knows what, because the sun never shone very brightly in the afternoon and no rain was falling. There was only those three, until after a long while two dark spots appeared in the distance. They grew closer and closer and then those spots turned into figures, and when they were even closer it turned out they were two other women, also dressed in mourning clothes.

What was even more surprising was that those two women had also came to bid Krisan farewell, just as his corpse was being lowered and the earth began to swallow him up. Those three sisters were shocked, not just by their presence, but also by the hideous face that one of them had, which at first they thought must be the face of a graveyard ghost. But they soon remembered the gossip about Dewi Ayu’s fourth daughter, whom they had never met, but who was said to be as ugly as a monster. That woman, the ugly one, seemed to be quite distraught over Krisan’s death. She cried and looked desperately at the body wrapped in a burial shroud which began to disappear under the earth as if she wasn’t willing to let him go. She seemed even more upset than Adinda herself.

It was Alamanda who emboldened herself to ask, “Are you Beauty?”

Beauty nodded. “And I know that you are Alamanda, Adinda, and Maya Dewi.”

“We are all Dewi Ayu’s daughters,” said Alamanda. She embraced Beauty without a care for her monster face.

Beauty spoke again. “Please accept my condolences at the death of the only one that you all had left.”

When the funeral ceremony was finished they all went to Dewi Ayu’s house, where Beauty lived with Rosinah. They circled through the house, looking at the photos of themselves from when they were still small, looking at the photos of Dewi Ayu, and crying to remember their difficult past. They had become a gang of abandoned orphans. All they had now was each other, and their effort to try to truly belong to one another once again.

“Mama came back but she didn’t stay for very long, and left again before Krisan died,” said Beauty.

“That’s just how dead people are,” said Maya Dewi. “My husband came again too, on the third day after his death.”

After that, they each still lived in their own houses, continuing on with their quiet lives. To entertain themselves, they visited one another. After her first appearance at the funeral, even Beauty began to venture out of the house to visit her older sisters. She no longer cared about people’s stares. She wore long dresses and a veil that almost covered her entire face. The women took a deep pleasure in their new lives, trying to forget all the misfortune that had befallen them, loving each other, and satisfied with that love.

And it was that way until they grew old, to the point that people often gossiped about them, calling them “the gang of widows” when they all got together.

But they were so happy, and loved each other so much.

During the sixth month of her pregnancy, Beauty went into premature labor and her baby died without ever getting the chance to cry or shout. Her older sisters buried the baby in the garden behind the house, with the help of the mute Rosinah.

“Didn’t you give it a name before you buried it?” asked Alamanda.

“A name would only hurt me more.”

“If I might ask, whose child was that baby, in fact?” asked Adinda.

“Mine and my prince’s.”

Of course much still remained unsaid between them. So they didn’t force Beauty to say who he was, that man she called her prince.

The baby was buried and they went on with their lives, loving each other and guarding each other’s secrets.

When Rengganis the Beautiful’s corpse was found, Krisan suffered from a profound terror that people would finally discover that it was he who had murdered that girl. The fear grew worse because he had also hidden Ai’s corpse under his bed, and Shodancho was furiously looking for Ai everywhere.

He considered returning the corpse to the cemetery but was afraid someone would catch him at it, because ever since Shodancho found out that someone had dug up the grave and taken his child’s body, the cemetery had been guarded. Returning Ai to her grave was not a wise move at all, and he practically lost his mind trying to think how he could make that body disappear from underneath his bed before somebody discovered it.

He practically caged himself inside his room, with the door always locked, worried that his mother or his grandmother would enter and investigate the fragrant aroma that wafted up faintly from the space under the bed. He even swept his own room himself, so that his mother or grandmother wouldn’t try to come in and clean up the place.

Krisan had even tried to chop up the body of the girl he loved into small pieces so that he could easily dispose of them. Maybe making her into food for the dogs was safer than returning her to the grave, since that way she would never be found. But to see that beautiful face, that face that didn’t rot even in death, that face that looked just as if she was sleeping and at some point would wake up and rub her eyes, Krisan couldn’t do it. He loved her so much, and it made him cry to imagine himself chopping her up to bits, so that he no longer had the strength to lift the cleaver that he had ready, and he returned Nurul Aini, still wrapped in her burial shroud, to her place back under his bed.

He was at the point of desperation, about to confess all of his sins, when he thought of a brilliant idea. He would do it, and say goodbye to Ai.

Just as when he had gone to the ocean with Rengganis the Beautiful and Ai’s corpse, he dressed the body up in his own clothes. At night, as dawn was approaching, he lifted that corpse onto his back and rode his bicycle to the shore. He stole the same boat he had stolen before. He brought Ai’s corpse to the middle of the ocean. And not just her corpse, but also two large stones, almost twice as big as her head.

He reached the spot where he had killed Rengganis the Beautiful as the new day dawned. That part of the ocean was very deep, even the sharks wouldn’t find her there. He tied the girl’s body—with tears streaming down his face, but he had to do it—to the two stones, so tightly that bites from sail fish wouldn’t break the cords apart. With such heavy stones, when he threw her in, Ai’s dead body quickly sank to the depths of the ocean and disappeared without a trace. Shodancho would never find her, even if he sought her for a hundred years.

Krisan headed for home with a heavy heart, but he was finally at peace. He passed by a fisherman who was out boating all alone, and that fisherman questioned him.

“What are you doing alone out on the ocean, without even one fish in your boat?”

What are you doing alone out on the ocean, without even one fish in your boat
?

“Getting rid of a corpse,” said Krisan, shivering to hear that man’s voice echo, reverberating against who knows what.

“Heartbroken over a beautiful lover? Ha. Ha. Ha. Let me give you some advice, kid, look for an ugly lover. They will never hurt you.”

Heartbroken over a beautiful lover? Ha. Ha. Ha. Let me give you some advice, kid, look for an ugly lover. They will never hurt you.

Then the fisherman left, heading off in the opposite direction, but Krisan kept thinking about his advice. And when he arrived at the place where he had parked his minibike, he said to himself, “Maybe it’s true, I should look for an ugly lover. The ugliest in the world.”

Not long after Dewi Ayu was able to kill that mighty evil spirit, Kinkin played with his
jailangkung
at Rengganis the Beautiful’s grave. He was certain that this time he would succeed, because that evildoer who had always thwarted him had now been defeated. He planted an effigy in the shape of a wooden doll into the dirt on top of the grave, which would become the medium for Rengganis the Beautiful’s spirit, and then he began reciting mantras. The doll began to tremble, a sign that the spirit had been called, but then it shook violently, a sign the spirit was angry, and then it almost collapsed. Kinkin tried to calm it down, but Rengganis the Beautiful’s spirit rebuked him.

“You idiot, what are you doing?!”

“Calling your spirit.”

“Yes, obviously,” said Rengganis the Beautiful. “But listen up: no matter what, you will never be able to marry me.”

“I just want to know who killed you. Please permit me to seek revenge for you, and avenge my love,” said Kinkin while prostrating his body in front of that wooden doll, truly begging.

That wooden doll, Rengganis the Beautiful, said, “Even if you lived for a thousand years I would never tell you who killed me.”

“Why not? Don’t you want me to avenge your death?”

“No, because I still really love him.”

“Ok, then I’ll kill him and you two can meet in the world of the dead.”

“That’s bullshit. You’re just trying to trick me.” And Rengganis the Beautiful disappeared.

But finally he did find out the truth, not from the spirit of Rengganis the Beautiful but from another spirit, one he didn’t recognize. He called spirits at random, believing that now no one would be preventing them from speaking truthfully, and believing that all the spirits knew what human beings didn’t know. He called one of the spirits, who looked old and frail, but its voice was quite strong.

“Ha. Ha. Ha. I’m not as strong as before, but I’m back, kid.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. I’m not as strong as before, but I’m back, kid.

“Do you know who killed Rengganis the Beautiful?” asked Kinkin.

“Yup. It was Krisan who killed Rengganis the Beautiful. Kill him, if you really love that girl, and if you have the balls. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

Yup. It was Krisan who killed Rengganis the Beautiful. Kill him, if you really love that girl, and if you have the balls. Ha. Ha. Ha.

And that was how he killed Krisan, in Beauty’s room, with five well-practiced shots from an air rifle.

For seven years after that he huddled in prison, at the mercy of all the bad guys there. He was sodomized about once a week, beaten almost every day, forced to share half of his allotment of food at every meal, and lost all of the possessions that he had given to Kamino for as long as he was locked up. But even amid all of that suffering in prison he was happy, because he was there on a mission of true love, avenging the death of the woman he had adored ever since the first moment he laid eyes on her.

He received one year’s clemency for good behavior and was freed. He appeared in the outside world looking haggard and emaciated, with long unkempt hair and his face turned into skin and bone, his brow and jaw protruding. He was like a living skeleton, but he inhaled the air of his liberty with a sense of complete independence.

Even though he had been given some clothes and some money for food and transportation he walked on foot from the city jail, and didn’t change his clothes, still wearing tattered rags like a city hobo. The clothes they had provided him were just folded in his hands, and the money he had been given was safe in his pocket. He didn’t want to stop anywhere or waste any time. He wanted to go back home and make sure that that man had been buried.

Finally he found Krisan’s grave, next to the grave of Comrade Kliwon. His name was clearly written on his grave marker, so there could be no mistake. Kinkin made a new grave marker. He threw away the old one bearing Krisan’s name, and exchanging it with the new one he had made.

And so now there is written:
DOG
(1966–1997).

For years, Krisan had kept thinking about that idea, about having a hideous lover. “What’s wrong with ugly women?” he asked himself. “They can be fucked just like beautiful women can.” And he remembered the talk about Dewi Ayu’s daughter who people said was ugly, maybe the most terrifying-looking person on the face of the earth, and even though he knew that Dewi Ayu was his grandmother, which meant that this ugly face who they said was named Beauty was his aunt, he didn’t care. He had screwed his own cousin, so where was the harm in screwing his own aunt?

So one night he went to his grandmother’s house, and saw that the girl was sitting on the veranda as if she was waiting for someone. He was a little bit unsure about how he could get to know her, so for a number of days he just watched her from the darkness before going home tired. Only on the seventh day did he dare push through the hedge at the side of the yard. He picked a rose that was growing there, approached Beauty, and gave her the flower.