Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

Brushing his hands together in satisfaction, he went back inside hoping to find someone else to beat up, but instead he saw a beautiful woman sitting in a corner with a cigarette between her lips. “I want to sleep with that woman, whether she is a prostitute or not,” he whispered to Mama Kalong.

“That’s Dewi Ayu, and she’s the best whore here,” said Mama Kalong.

“Kind of like a mascot?” asked Maman Gendeng.

“Kind of like a mascot.”

“I am going to live in this city,” continued Maman Gendeng, “and I am going to piss on her privates like a tiger marking his territory.”

Dewi Ayu sat in the corner looking indifferent. Under the glow of the lamp her skin gleamed clean and white, showing off her Dutch heritage. Her eyes were a shade of blue, her dark black hair was gathered in a long French twist, and she held a cigarette between her svelte fingers, her fingernails painted blood red. She wore an ivory-colored gown with a belt tied at her willowy waist. She heard what Maman Gendeng said to Mama Kalong, and she turned to him. For a moment they looked at one another and Dewi Ayu smiled tantalizingly without moving a muscle.

“Well be quick then, darling, before you pee in your pants,” she said.

Dewi Ayu let him know that she had a special room, a pavilion just behind the tavern, and that she had never walked there on her own two feet because whoever wanted her had to carry her like a newlywed carrying his bride. Maman Gendeng had absolutely no problem with that, so he approached, stopped in front of this beautiful whore, and bent down. When he picked her up Maman Gendeng estimated she weighed about sixty kilos. He then walked to the back of the tavern, passing through a door, tromping through a fragrant orange grove, and heading for a small and dimly lit building in between a number of other buildings. Maman Gendeng said to her: “I came here to marry the Princess Rengganis, but I was more than a hundred years late. Would you care to take her place?”

Dewi Ayu kissed her suitor’s cheek and said, “A wife has sex on a voluntary basis, but a prostitute is a commercial sex worker. The thing is, I don’t like to have sex without getting paid for it.”

They made love almost all night long, filled with heat and passion like lovers reunited after a long separation. When morning came they were still naked and, wrapped in the same blanket, they sat in front of the pavilion enjoying the cool air. Sparrows were noisily hopping about in the branches of the orange trees and taking short flights to the edge of the roof. The sun emerged with all its warmth from the cleft between Ma Iyang and Ma Gedik Hills to the north of the city.

Halimunda began to awaken. The lovers prepared for the day, threw off their blanket, soaked in hot water in a large tub left over by the Japanese, and got dressed. Just like every morning, Dewi Ayu rode a becak rickshaw home to her three daughters. Maman Gendeng prepared to start a new day in the city.

Mama Kalong served him breakfast, yellow rice with straw mushrooms and quail eggs that she had ordered from the market earlier that morning. Maman Gendeng asked again about the strongest man, truly the most powerful man, in that city. “Because there cannot be two hotshots in the same place,” he said. That’s true, said Mama Kalong. She mentioned a man, Edi Idiot, the most feared preman at the bus terminal, and summed up his reputation: soldiers and policemen were terrified of him, he had killed more people than any legendary warrior, and all the bandits and thieves and pirates in the city were his minions. What’s more, it was quite likely that he already knew about Maman Gendeng, because surely all the preman in the whorehouse had reported on him by now. When midday came, Maman Gendeng headed to the bus terminal, finding the man relaxing in a mahogany rocking chair.

“Give your power to me,” Maman Gendeng said to him, “or we will fight to the death.”

Edi Idiot had been expecting him. He accepted the challenge, and the good news spread quickly. It had been many years since the city’s inhabitants had had any really fantastic entertainment, and enthusiastic droves headed for the beach, where the two men had decided to fight. No one could predict who would kill whom. A military commandant from the city sent one company of troops led by a skinny man everybody knew by his nickname, Shodancho, but no one thought he would be able to stop the fight.

Shodancho controlled a small segment of the city from his headquarters hung with a nameplate proclaiming him “Commander of the Halimunda Military District.” Because the brutal fight fell within his jurisdiction, he had volunteered himself to the city military as the one to take care of it. In reality, one company of armed forces couldn’t do much except maintain a semblance of order among the bystanders. Actually, he was secretly hoping both men would die, because there was no way one region could have three guys in charge, and Shodancho thought he should be the only one. But he waited along with all the others, unable to predict the outcome.

It turned out that they had to wait one whole week for the end of the fight. It had lasted seven days and seven nights without a break, when Shodancho said to one of his soldiers, “It’s clear that Edi Idiot is going to die.”

“Well it makes no difference to us,” replied the soldier mournfully. “This city is full of bandits and robbers and guerrillas and revolutionary soldiers and leftover communists. We are stuck with cleaning up after all their commotion, and we’ll never put a stop to it.”

Shodancho nodded. “We’re just exchanging Edi Idiot for Maman Gendeng.”

The soldier smiled bitterly and whispered, “Let’s just hope he’ll keep his nose out of military business.”

Even though he only had control over the local military district in one corner of Halimunda, Shodancho was quite respected throughout the entire city. Even a number of his superior commanders gave him their formal respect, because everyone knew he had been the leader of the Halimunda daidan mutiny during the Japanese occupation, and that no one had been braver during that mutiny. The city inhabitants were pretty sure that if Sukarno and Hatta hadn’t proclaimed independence, Shodancho would have done it himself. The people really liked him, even though they knew he wasn’t a model soldier; his district mostly concerned itself with smuggling textiles to Australia and bringing in vehicles and electronic goods on the black market. This was an excellent business in those years, and none of the superior commanders wanted to disrupt a trade pulling in so much money for the generals. Taking care of some petty skirmish was the least of their concerns.

Exhausted at last, Edi Idiot finally did indeed die, after being held down and drowned in the shallow ocean water. His opponent threw his corpse into the sea, where Maman Gendeng’s friends the sharks rejoiced at the unexpected afternoon snack. Maman Gendeng returned to the beach and gazed at all of the city’s inhabitants, still looking as fresh as if he could fight seven more men in exactly the same fashion. “Now,” he announced, “all the power is mine,” adding: “And no one can sleep with Dewi Ayu except for me.”

Surprised by Maman Gendeng’s edict, Dewi Ayu proceeded cautiously, and sent a courier inviting the new preman to pay her a visit. Maman Gendeng politely accepted the invitation and promised he would come as quickly as he could.

She really was the best whore in the city, still a very beautiful woman, only thirty-five years old. Every morning she scrubbed her body with sulfuric soap, and once a month she soaked in a hot bath filled with herbs. The legend of her beauty rivaled that of the city’s founder, and the only reason there had never been a war over her was because she was a whore, so anyone could sleep with her as long as he had the money, and Maman Gendeng’s proclaimed monopoly would have to be discussed.