Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“I said, give the girl to me,” Kliwon repeated.

“You’ll have to get by my dead body before you can have a go.”

“Fine.” And before any of them realized he had a machete hidden behind his back, Kliwon had drawn the weapon across the attacker’s neck. The man’s blood splattered out as his head drooped, his neck almost broken, and in a number of seconds he had collapsed on the ground, obviously dead. Kliwon kicked his corpse, and approached the four remaining men. “I got by his dead body, now give me the girl.”

The man who was in the middle of screwing the girl quickly pulled out his dick with a disgusting splosh and ran away with a face as pale as rotten bread, followed by his three friends. They left the girl behind just like that, lying on her back on a tabletop that no longer had any legs attached to it, naked and unconscious. After wrapping the girl in his own shirt, Kliwon carried her on his back to his hut. He lay her down on his bed, which was an old sofa, and looked at her for a moment before he himself lay down on top of a pile of old newspapers and fell asleep.

When he awoke night had already fallen and he found the girl sitting on the sofa hugging her knees and shivering with hunger. She was still as bare as when he had laid her down, only slightly covered by the shirt draped across her shoulders. Kliwon gave her some corn porridge directly from the pot, nothing more than the cold and almost spoiled leftovers from breakfast, but the girl ate with gusto. The whole time Kliwon sat next to her, observing her with the diligent attention of a small child. The girl ate without acknowledging his presence. She didn’t look traumatized in the least, or maybe she had already forgotten what had happened. Now Kliwon could see her light hair that looked like silk, her piercing eyes, her narrow nose, her thin lips.

“What’s your name?” asked Kliwon.

She didn’t respond, only placed the pan of porridge under the old sofa and sat down again looking at Kliwon with the shy demeanor of a young virgin. Her hand reached for Kliwon’s hand, touching it with the tenderness of a lover. Kliwon shivered for a moment, and before he realized what was happening the girl had already jumped toward him, knocking the man backwards on top of the sofa with her on top of his body, hugging him tightly and kissing him in an almost violent attack. At first Kliwon tried to push her away with all his might, but then he hesitated, and stayed still with his hands up like a man surrendering in front of a firing squad. Then when the girl pulled off his shirt, and he felt the touch of her firm round breasts against his chest, everything dissolved into a mesmerizing warmth. He once again felt passionate blood voraciously pumping through his veins, returned the girl’s embrace, returned her kisses, and took off his pants.

After such a brutal rampage of being raped by five homeless bums, the girl now showed herself to be a wild lover. Kliwon himself even forgot all about what had happened, holding the girl tight and reversing their position so that now he was on top, both of them naked and aroused. They overcame the limitations of the cramped sofa and made love with repetitive movements that were nevertheless full of lust, jolting and jarring and shuddering, like a boat blasted by a storm.

Then when their lovemaking was finished, Kliwon quickly remembered that he didn’t know this girl at all, just as this girl didn’t know him. They were still lying down together on top of the sofa, holding one another, exhausted. Kliwon asked her again, “What’s your name?” But as before, the girl did not reply. She just smiled, muttered incoherently and perhaps deliriously, before closing her eyes and falling into a deep sleep, emitting gentle snores.

“Her name is Isah Betina,” a bum told him not long after that, “because that’s what everybody calls her.”

“Where did she come from?” Kliwon pursued his line of questioning.

“They found her a week ago by the side of the road, and had been gang-raping her almost every day, before you came along and killed one of them,” said the bum. “That girl’s brain is scrambled.”

So that’s how it was. Kliwon couldn’t imagine what his friends would say, if they knew that he had slept with a crazy girl. But outside of his own sound logic, or maybe because of some other urge, the first thing he did was bring the girl to the beach and clean her body, and get her some better clothes that he stole from his mother’s clothesline. They lived in his cardboard hut, with the old sofa where sometimes they sat and relaxed while eating walnuts they had smashed open with stones, and where other times they slept or made love, next to a stove made from a heap of bricks and a pot to cook with. They never heard what happened to Isah Betina’s vagrant rapists, even though for a while Kliwon had been worried they would return to seek revenge. And now that Isah Betina lived in the same house with Kliwon, everyone agreed that the two were officially a couple, and no one bothered the crazy girl any more.

Kliwon himself seemed to have forgotten his original reason for becoming a vagabond beggar. No longer seeking the unfortunate to distract him and no longer tormenting himself in an effort to forget his grief over the rejection of his love by the little girl Alamanda, he discovered the best way to forget the girl, which was another girl. And his chaotic life, without anything to eat or a proper place to live, didn’t make him suffer — in fact, he was delighted with his current situation. He had rediscovered the ardor of love in full bloom, above all because Isah Betina received his love with an equal warmth, making them both immediately forget their squalid conditions. Intoxicated with love, no one would have guessed that Isah Betina was a crazy girl. And Kliwon didn’t care about the fact that he didn’t know her background, promising her, “I am going to marry you someday.” They didn’t do very much except caress one another almost all day and all night long, only stopping to eat when they were hungry or to sleep when they were tired. The sofa was their favorite place to make love, with moans that awoke and then aroused the neighbors in the middle of the night. Their behavior made people jealous but was understood as the honeymoon phase of a new pair of lovers, a phase that continued for weeks on end.

One night in the middle of one of their usual sessions, a snake slithered out from a pile of trash and entered their hut and bit the tip of Isah Betina’s toe, which was lying in its path. The girl didn’t cry out, absorbed in her lovemaking until they both reached the highest climax they had ever achieved. But their amazing good fortune would not last. After ejaculating, Kliwon collapsed on his side and heard the girl moan and writhe. He thought she still wanted him, but when he saw her leg turning blue he realized what had happened. It was too late; the snake that had bitten her was a poisonous cobra, and the girl died on that very same sofa, naked and still gleaming with the sweat of their lovemaking.

The neighbors, who were fed up with the nightly shrieking, interpreted this tragedy as retribution for the couple’s casual relationship, which in their eyes was based on little more than fooling around. Kliwon brought the girl’s corpse to Kamino the gravedigger, and asked for the kind of burial that was usually given to pious believers. Only Kliwon accompanied the gravedigger in the procession, arriving in some fine clothes he had stolen from someone’s house. “She lived only to make me happy,” he said, weeping.

He went off on the seventh day of mourning, burning their hut to the ground, and the flames had almost spread to the neighboring cardboard huts when the owners came running with sewer water as fast as they could to put out the fire. He went crazy, throwing dog shit at people and throwing rocks up at the streetlights. His grief couldn’t be contained. He broke the windows in all the bakeries lining Jalan Merdeka with rocks as big as the palms of his hands, making the lady shopkeepers scream in panic. He hurt a mailman after stealing his bicycle, sending him rolling with his letters scattering in the street. He killed three dogs who appeared from rich people’s yards, slashed the tires of cars that were parked in front of the movie theater, and burnt a security post. All of this provoked an aggressive response from the police, and he was quickly captured without a fight as he was trying to tear down the wall that marked the city limits.