Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

SOMETHING STRANGE MUST have been going on, because one night the old man was forced into marrying the teenage Dewi Ayu. He was fast asleep and snoring when a Colibri car stopped in front of his house, but the sound of its engine coughing in the middle of the pitch-black night startled him awake. The old man, Ma Gedik, had not yet recovered from that shock when the next came like a hurricane: a tough guy got out of the car with a machete swinging at his hip and kicked the old man’s pet mongrel who was sleeping in front of the door. The dog barked stridently and sprung up ready to fight, but its efforts were in vain because the Colibri’s driver swiftly shot him with a rifle. The dog let out a howl before he died, just as the tough guy kicked in the plywood door of the old man’s hut, leaving it drooping from one hinge.

The hut was very dark, more like a house for bats and lizards than for a human being. Its two small rooms were faintly visible in moonlight: a bedroom where the old man sat in confusion at the edge of his cot and a kitchen where the stove sat filled with ash. Cobwebs crisscrossed everywhere, except for the path the old man followed from his bed to the stove and the door. The tough guy, gagging from a stench of piss far stronger than any pigsty, grabbed a handful of dried palm fronds from a pile near the stove, folded them, and lit their tips on fire, turning them into a torch. Immediately the room came ablaze with swaying and trembling shadows of all different shapes and sizes. The bats began to scatter. The old man still sat on the edge of his cot, looking at the uninvited guest with unabated confusion.

The next surprise: the tough guy showed him a chalkboard that was written on with a young girl’s neat penmanship. He couldn’t read it, nor could the tough guy, but the tough guy knew what was written there.

“Dewi Ayu wants to marry you,” he said.

This must be a joke. He knew his place — he was an old man, he had already lived more than half a century, and even the old widows whose husbands had died in the Deli dirt or been thrown into Boven-Digoel preferred to stock up pious good works for the afterlife than to marry a cart-puller such as himself. He would be lucky if he even remembered how to support a woman, since he had practically forgotten how to sleep with one. The last time he had gone to the whorehouse had been many years ago, and the last time he had done it by himself, with his own hand, had been many years ago as well. So with the naïveté of a village boy, he said to the tough guy:

“I’m not even sure I can marry her.”

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s you or a dog’s dick that takes her virginity, she wants to marry you,” the tough guy snarled. “If not, Lord Stammler will turn you into breakfast for the ajak .”

That made him shiver. Many Dutch people raised wild dogs for hunting wild boar, and it was no lie that if they didn’t like a native, he would be pitted against those ajak in a fight to the death. But even if that threat was true, marrying Dewi Ayu was no simple matter, and he just didn’t understand why he had to marry her. And in any case he had already vowed not to marry anyone, out of his eternal love for Ma Iyang, a woman who had flown off into the sky one day and vanished.

That woman was another story, the kind of love that was too good to last. Ma Gedik and Ma Iyang grew up together in the fishing encampments, meeting every day, swimming in the same bay, and eating the same fish, and the only thing preventing them from marrying each other straight away was their age, because they were not quite a young man and a young woman yet. Unlike most kids his age, Ma Gedik carried a bamboo container filled with his mother’s milk wherever he went, long after he could walk and leave his mother behind. One day Ma Iyang grew curious and asked why, at nineteen, he still drank that milk and didn’t care that it was already long spoiled.

“Because my father drank my mother’s milk all the time, until he was an old man.”

Ma Iyang understood. Behind a clump of pandan shrubs, she took off her blouse and told the guy to suck on her adorable pert little nipple. No milk came out, but Ma Gedik finally stopped drinking his mother’s milk and fell in love with that young girl for life. And that’s how it all went, until one night Ma Iyang was picked up by a horse-drawn carriage, all made up like a sintren dancer, very beautiful to see but painful too. Ma Gedik, who was always the last to know anything, ran the length of the beach chasing that carriage, and when he reached the coachman he ran alongside, shouting out to the beautiful girl:

“Where are you going?”

“To the house of a Dutch lord.”

“Why? You don’t have to become a maid for the Dutch.”

“I’m not,” said the girl. “I’m going to become his concubine. You can call me Nyai Iyang.”

“Shit!” screamed Ma Gedik. “Why do you want to become someone’s concubine?”

“Because if I don’t, Mother and Father will be made into breakfast for the ajak .”

“But don’t you know that I love you?”

“Yes, I know.”

He was still running next to the carriage, and there they were, the youth and the young girl, crying over their painful separation, their tears witnessed only by the coachman, who tried to calm them down a little and think, saying:

“You don’t need to belong to one another in order to love one another.”

This was in no way comforting, and actually made Ma Gedik fall into the sand at the side of the road wailing and lamenting his wretchedness. The girl ordered the coachman to stop, and she climbed down to stand in front of the young man. Then, with the old coachman, the horse, the croaking frogs, the owls, the mosquitoes, and the moths as her witnesses, the girl made a vow.

“Sixteen years from now, that Dutch lord will be bored with me. Wait at the top of the rocky hill if you still love me, if you are still interested in some Dutchman’s leftovers.”

After that they never saw or heard of each other again. Ma Gedik never even knew who that Dutch lord was, a lord so full of lust that he wanted his very own sweetheart, in full flower at the age of fifteen. Ma Gedik, who himself was nineteen, swore he would love her even if she returned home chopped to pieces.

Still, losing one’s sweetheart is no simple matter. He kicked off the years of waiting by becoming crazier than the crazies, more idiotic than the idiots, and more tragic than mourners in the throes of grief. His cart-puller friends and the coolies at the port tried to comfort him by telling him to marry another woman, but he preferred to spend his wages and time gambling and stumbling home drunk on arak wine. His friends then began to persuade him to go to the whorehouse, hoping that at least another woman’s body could ease his lusty grief. At that time there was only one brothel, at the end of the pier. It had actually been built for the Dutch soldiers living in the barracks, but after syphilis spread most of them stopped going there, preferring to keep their own personal concubines, and then the port laborers began to visit.

“It would be just as much a betrayal to go to the whorehouse as to marry another woman,” said Ma Gedik stubbornly. But one week later his friends dragged the man, drunk and only half-conscious, to that whorehouse and he spent one day’s pay on a bed and an obese woman with a vagina as big as a mouse hole, and immediately awed by these charms, he corrected himself to say, “Doing it with a prostitute is not really a betrayal, because prostitutes are paid with money and not with love.”