Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

On the verge of death the woman said, “Name him Maman like his father. He is that Regent’s misbegotten bastard son.” She passed away before she could gaze upon her child again. The old master, deeply saddened, brought the child home.

“You will become the ultimate warrior,” he told the baby.

He cared for him well, gave him plenty of food and started to toughen and train him before he could walk. He dunked the infant in freezing cold water and roasted him under the noonday sun. When he was still just a toddler, the old man threw him into the river and forced him to swim. By the time he was five years old, believe it or not, he was the strongest little kid on the face of the earth. Maman Gendeng, which was by then his name, could already pulverize a stone into teeny soft grains of sand with only his bare hands. Unlike the other gurus, Master Chisel taught the kid everything he knew, holding nothing back. He taught him all the good fighting moves, gave him all the talismans and amulets, and even taught him how to read and write ancient Sundanese, Dutch, Malay, and Latin. He taught him how to meditate, and with the same seriousness of purpose he taught him how to cook.

When Maman Gendeng was twelve years old, Master Chisel died. After burying the old man and mourning for a week, he came down off the mountain and began his odyssey to get revenge on his biological father. But this happened at about the same time that the Japanese troops arrived and he did not find his father in his house, because the family was already in ruins, devastated by the war. The Regent had run away as an accomplice of the Dutch, and so Maman Gendeng had to search for his enemy, who had banished his mother and was responsible for her death, for three years. But even after those three years he was still unable to exact his revenge, because when he found his father the man had just been executed by a firing squad. He saw his father’s corpse but did not deign to bury him.

After the Japanese left and independence was declared and the revolutionary war began, he joined a group of guerrillas. They stayed in fishermen’s huts on the northern coast during the day and fought at night, but the KNIL troops usually won the skirmishes. Nothing much interesting happened during this time, except for one thing: he became infatuated with a very young fisherwoman named Nasiah. She was a dainty girl with dimples in her cheeks and lovely dark skin. Maman Gendeng would see her when he went walking along the beach gathering fish for his afternoon snack. She was friendly, and would sneak out to bring the guerrillas whatever food she had, smiling the sweetest possible smile.

He didn’t know much about her, except her name. But she made him feel so alive that he vowed to quit his wanderings and win every battle so they could be together. His friends became aware of his secret passion, and encouraged him to properly request the young girl’s hand. Maman Gendeng had never spoken directly to any woman except to the prostitutes during the Japanese occupation, and suddenly he realized that facing this dainty young Nasiah would be way more terrifying than facing a Dutch firing squad. But when the opportunity arose and he saw Nasiah walking alone, hugging a basket of fresh fish and heading for home, Maman Gendeng caught up with her. Seeing the girl’s sweet smile, which brought out her dimples, he gathered his courage and asked her if she wanted to be his wife.

Nasiah had just turned thirteen. Who knows whether it was her young age or something else that made her gasp and choke, drop her basket, and run home without saying goodbye, like a child terrified by a crazy man. Standing among the flying fish, Maman Gendeng watched her go and wished that he were dead. But he did not retreat, not in the slightest. Love gave him the kind of courage that nothing else can give. He gathered up the fish and, walking with determined steps, carried the basket toward the young girl’s home. He would propose to her properly, and ask her father for her hand.

He found Nasiah standing in front of her house next to a puny guy with a crippled leg. All he’d heard about Nasiah was that her two older brothers had died in guerrilla warfare and her father was an old fisherman. He had never heard anything about this starving one-legged youth. Maman Gendeng stood in front of them, trying to smile, and set the basket at Nasiah’s feet. His heart pounded, agitated and on fire with jealousy. Only his courage, or his stupidity, made him repeat himself.

“Nasiah, would you like to be my wife?” he asked with a pleading face. “When the war is over, I will marry you.”

The girl shook her head and started to cry.

“Mister Guerrilla,” she stammered. “Don’t you see the man at my side? He is weak, it’s true. He will never be able to go to the ocean to fish, and he will certainly never be able to fight wars like you, Sir. I know you could kill him quite easily and then you could catch me as easily as a flying fish. But if you do, then at least permit me to die by his side, because we love each other and cannot bear to be apart.”

The skinny youth just stayed quiet with his head bowed, not once lifting his face. Maman Gendeng’s heart was broken in an instant. He nodded slowly and walked away, without saying goodbye and without looking back. He could see it: they were completely in love. He didn’t want to destroy their happiness, even though he would have to nurse his wounded heart for a very long time.

For the rest of the war he was plagued by terrifying hallucinations, triggered by this tragic refusal of his love. Sometimes he stayed behind in no-man’s-land hoping to be shot by the enemy. He made himself a target for rifles and cannons but he was fated to survive. That whole time he never saw the girl again, and avoided any chance that they might meet. But when the war ended and he heard about her marriage to her sweetheart, as a wedding present he sent her a beautiful red sash that he bought from a local weaver.

The guerrillas were disbanded, and Maman Gendeng felt more happy than sad, as once again he was free to go wandering, even though he now carried the wound in his heart with him. He roamed the whole northern coast, following the old guerrilla trails, and he survived by raiding the houses of the rich, telling them, “If you weren’t accomplices of the Dutch, then you must have been minions of the Japanese, because only collaborators get rich during a revolution.”

With a dozen men, he terrorized the cities along the coast, with the police and the military in hot pursuit. With his band he lived like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and redistributing the spoils to the poor, taking care of the widows and orphaned children whose husbands and fathers had died in the war. But his reputation, intimidating to friend as well as foe, did not make him happy. Wherever he went he still carried his old wound, which none of the pretty girls he saw and certainly not any of the prostitutes he found in the palm wine shacks could heal. When night fell and he started to feel crazy, he’d order his men to go find dainty young girls with luscious dark skin and dimples. He described Nasiah in great detail, and the girls who’d come to his hideout all looked like replicas, one indistinguishable from the next. He made love to them night after night, but no one could take Nasiah’s place.

His zest for life only returned after a very long while, when he overheard a legend often told by the fishermen’s children about a princess named Rengganis, so beautiful that everyone was ready to die for her. Maman Gendeng awoke one night ready to battle anyone to obtain such a woman and shook his men awake one by one to ask them where the Princess Rengganis lived. They replied, in Halimunda of course. Maman Gendeng had never heard of that town before, but one of his friends told him that if he canoed along the coast, paddling west, he would arrive in Halimunda. Full of conviction and above all determined to heal his old wound, he handed control of his territory over to his band and told them that he was setting out on a voyage in a dugout canoe to find his true love. He had finally fallen in love for the second time, even though all he knew about Rengganis was what he had heard from the fishermen’s children.