Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

They said that the princess was extremely beautiful, the last descendant of the Pajajaran royal bloodline, who had inherited the loveliness of all the princesses in the Pakuan Kingdom. People said that the princess herself had realized that her beauty brought misfortune. When she was still a child and free to wander about outside the palace walls, she caused turmoil and disruptions, big and small. Wherever she went people would gaze at her face, shrouded in a thin mist of melancholy, with blank idiotic stares. Frozen like absurd human statues, only their eyeballs moved, following her every step. Her appearances caused the civil servants to daydream and neglect state affairs, so that swaths of the kingdom were captured by bands of robbers before they could be reclaimed at great effort and cost, sacrificing the lives of half the royal army.

“A woman like that,” said Maman Gendeng, “is truly worth seeking.”

“I just hope your heart isn’t broken for the second time,” replied a friend.

Even the father of this princess, who they say was the last monarch before the kingdom was attacked by Demak, was prematurely aged by his obsession with his own daughter’s beauty. Even though no one can bed his own daughter, falling in love is still falling in love. His feelings of desire and impropriety clashed and gnawed away everything inside him, until he came to think only death could free him from his suffering. And the queen, who of course was envious, came to think that the only way out of the situation was to kill the little girl. She would often steal away to the kitchen and take a knife and tiptoe toward her child’s room, preparing to stab her right in her beating heart. But every time she saw her daughter, even she would be charmed and fall in love, and forget all about her murderous intent. She would drop the knife, walk toward her child, caress her skin and kiss her, before coming to her senses. Feeling ashamed she would then leave the young girl, suffering but not saying a word.

All along Maman Gendeng’s journey fishermen kept on telling him tales about Princess Rengganis. He was paddling due west in his small dugout canoe, and when dusk fell he would dock in the fishing villages. He would ask how far it was to Halimunda, and the people would tell him to continue west before circling south and then turning once again toward to the east. They’d tell him to be cautious in the waves of the South Seas. And then they would tell him about the princess, which made the lonely wanderer grow ever more smitten.

“I will marry her,” he vowed.

Princess Rengganis herself suffered greatly from her own growing beauty, locking herself up in her room. Her only contact with the outside world was by a small slot in the door, through which servant girls would pass clothes and plates of food. She vowed never to put her beauty on display, and hoped to marry a man who would love her for other reasons. So, sewing her bridal gown and trousseau, she kept herself constantly hidden but she could not hide the news of her beauty, which had been spread by storytellers and roving wanderers. Her father, plagued by his forbidden feelings, and her mother, blinded by jealousy, decided to marry her off. They sent ninety-nine messengers to the farthest reaches of the kingdom and even to neighboring countries to announce a contest for princes and knights and whoever else. The first prize was the right to marry the most beautiful woman in the world, Princess Rengganis.

Handsome men arrived and the contest began. There was no archery competition, like the one in which Arjuna won Drupadi. Each man was simply asked to describe his ideal woman — how tall she was, how much she weighed, her favorite foods, the way she combed her hair, the color of her clothing, the smell of her body, everything — and afterward he was told to sit in front of Princess Rengganis’ bedroom door and to let her question him. The king promised that if the man wanted someone exactly like the princess and the princess wanted someone exactly like the man in front of her door, then they could marry. It was highly unusual for people to find their match in such a manner and indeed, by the end, the contest had not turned up one suitable man.

The fact is, obtaining such a woman was no easy matter. When Maman Gendeng passed through the Sunda Strait, a band of pirates tried to steal his riches, so he vented his pent-up desires by drowning them. But they weren’t the only obstacle. Entering the southern seas, he was intercepted not only by fierce storms but also by a pair of sharks that endlessly circled the boat. He had to land in the swamps and hunt a deer, which he then gave to the sharks so that they could be comrades on the journey.

All of this for that rare specimen named Rengganis.

After the fruitless contest, the kingdom returned to the same despair, the same terrorizing beauty. Until one day a dissatisfied prince plotted to take the princess by force, accompanied by three hundred troops on horseback. Although truly overcome with joy at the idea of someone kidnapping the princess and marrying her, out of chivalry the king was forced to let his soldiers go to war with the marauders. Another prince from another kingdom came with three hundred more troops on horseback to help, in hopes of being granted the princess in thanks, and so a great war broke out. Sooner or later, other knights and other princes were swept up in this war, and by the end of a year it was no longer clear who was fighting whom, just that they were all warring over the woman who for years now had been Halimunda’s goddess of beauty. The curse of beauty became even more extreme: thousands of soldiers were wounded and dead, the whole nation was in ruins, sickness and starvation struck without mercy, and all of this was thanks to that infernal beauty.

“That was the most terrible time,” said an old fisherman at the boarding house where Maman Gendeng was spending the night. “Worse than the Bubat War when the Majapahit attacked us with such cunning, and after all, as you know, we don’t like to make war.”

“I myself am a veteran of the revolutionary war,” said Maman Gendeng.

“Oh, that was nothing compared to the war over Princess Rengganis.”

It wasn’t that the girl herself didn’t know about all this. Her ladies-in-waiting whispered all the news through the keyhole, just as the blind Destarata heard about the fate of her children on the Kuruserta battlefield. The little beauty suffered greatly, she couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep, tortured by the fact that she herself was the source of all this misfortune. She could not atone with mere sobbing, perhaps not even with death, and suddenly she remembered her wedding dress and decided the only way to free herself from all of this was to marry someone right away — then the war, and all of its misfortune, would surely end.

At this point she’d locked herself inside her dark room for years, kept company only by a dim oil lamp and her wedding dress. She had already sewed the whole thing with her own hands, and her handiwork had rendered it the most beautiful wedding dress on the face of the earth, unrivaled by the work of any seamstress or tailor. One morning, the gown was finally finished. The princess didn’t know whom she would marry so she said to herself that she would simply open the window, and whoever appeared in front of it would become her life partner.

Before following through on her vow, she bathed with flower-scented water for one hundred nights. Then, one unforgettable morning, she put on her wedding dress. She was not the kind of girl to go back on a promise: she would keep her word. She would open that window, for the first time in years, and she would marry the first man she saw. If she could see more than one man, she would take the closest one. She vowed she would not take another woman’s husband, or a man who already had a lover, because she didn’t want to hurt anyone.