Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

“And he even took all of my clothes away with him after.”

In any case, it was true that her mysterious beauty combined with her innocence gave her a look of sensuality. It’s pretty certain that any man who might have stumbled upon her naked or found himself stuck with her inside a school toilet would have forced himself upon her. She had the kind of allure that made people want to have relations her, whether in a nice and proper way or not. It was only because everyone living in that city knew full well that her father was vicious and evil and scary that she had remained a virgin until the morning the dog raped her.

And Maman Gendeng wouldn’t have hesitated to murder any man who dared touch his only child, despite the fact that the girl’s beauty was a poisonous provocation wherever she went. Sometimes, while standing at the side of the road waiting for the bus, her childlike purity led her to absently lift her skirt and bite its hem. And if a mercilessly hot wind blew, she might undo a few of the buttons on her shirt. You could see the smooth skin that covered her calves and her thighs, the kind that only belongs to a nymph, and the curves of her beautiful breasts, the kind that only belong to sixteen-year-old girls. But you’d better not savor this provocation for too long, because if you did, sooner or later Maman Gendeng — stronger than any dukun or black magic sorcerer — would find out that you had been looking at his daughter with lust, and leave you lying in a heap in a hospital ward for six months.

At times like that, another young girl from another beauty, Nurul Aini, who had been the Beautiful’s friend ever since they were babies in their cradles, would act as the protector of the perfect Beautiful. She would quickly pull down the Beautiful’s skirt, and she would rebutton the girl’s shirt: “Don’t do that, sweetheart,” she would say. “It’s not proper.”

And when Rengganis the Beautiful stood naked in front of the class — four and a half feet tall and eighty-eight pounds, with her natural calm, her gleaming ripe body, and her long hair as black as a river of ink, the most beautiful Indo in Halimunda, heir to her mother’s beauty with captivating traces of Dutch ancestry, her blue eyes glittering as she looked out at the whole silent class sadly, wondering why all of a sudden everyone’s mouth was wide open like a crocodile that had been waiting for its prey for weeks — Ai with her instinct to always be ready to deal with the bizarre things that the Beautiful did, rose from her chair, ran down the aisle of school benches, and yanked the tablecloth from the teacher’s desk (sending a glass flying to shatter on the floor, as the teacher’s black leather bag collided with the blackboard, spewing out its contents, and a flower vase and books went spinning). She wrapped that tablecloth around the Beautiful’s body, making her look like a young girl in her towel after a bath.

Maybe Ai had inherited her resolute character from her father, Shodancho, but now, without her having to say a word, with just a look in their direction, the boys and the old math teacher promptly exited the classroom. As they went, their words of regret and grunts of disappointment could be heard passing between them.

“Damn it, a dog?! As if none of us could have raped Rengganis the Beautiful.”

A few girls went to the gymnasium to look for a school soccer uniform to replace the tablecloth wrapped around the Beautiful’s body.

At more or less the same time Maya Dewi, mother of the Beautiful and wife of Maman Gendeng, had a small but gravely worrisome household incident. She was cleaning when a lizard perched on the ceiling lampshade defecated and its scat fell down onto her shoulder. She wasn’t worried about the smell or the filth, but she knew falling lizard scat always foreshadows catastrophe — it was a sign.

Unlike her husband, Maya Dewi was highly respected by the city folk, who didn’t care that she was the daughter of Dewi Ayu, that notable whore. She was calm, and friendly, and even pious, and when they saw this woman people forgave the troubling childish character of her young daughter and her husband’s frightening evil instincts. Maya Dewi went to the women’s Thursday night prayer meetings and to the arisan on Sunday afternoons, socializing and contributing money to the women’s lottery pool. She made her family seem just a little bit civilized, in part by earning a living from her daily work of making cookies with her two mountain-girl helpers.

Moments after she had cleaned off the lizard shit and ordered one of the girls to take over her work sweeping the middle room, her face, which still showed its Dutch roots, was as pale as a two-day-old corpse. She sat on the veranda and worried whether something had happened to her husband or her daughter. Of course lots of little things happened to them so often that she didn’t think about those anymore, but she had always felt that sooner or later something big was going to happen, she just didn’t know what. All she could do was worry. That damn lizard shit.

At a time like this of course Maman Gendeng would be at the bus terminal, as usual. He’d killed to get that chair, and Maya Dewi always worried that someone might murder him to get it, too, and no matter how bad that man was, she loved him as much as they both loved their daughter, and Maya Dewi did not want that to happen. She hoped that her husband was in fact invincible to weapons, as the Halimunda rumors always claimed.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a becak stopping in front of their gate. Two young girls got out and she recognized Shodancho’s daughter, and then her own. She wondered why they were coming home so early, and why Rengganis the Beautiful was wearing a soccer uniform and not her school clothes. She stood up with the worry of a mother hen as the two young girls entered the yard and came to stand before her. Wanting to ask what had happened, Maya Dewi looked at Nurul Aini, but her face seemed as pale as a three-day-old corpse. Ai was on the verge of tears and Maya Dewi hadn’t had the chance to ask anything when the Beautiful spoke.

“Mama, I was raped by a dog in the school toilet,” she said, calm and purposeful. “And maybe I’m gonna get pregnant.”

Maya Dewi collapsed back down onto her chair, with a face as pale as a four-day-old corpse. The kind of mother who never got mad, she just looked at the Beautiful helplessly, and then she asked, “What kind of dog?”

Soon after, the bad news came to the city that there’d be a total eclipse of the sun the following year. Soothsayers predicted it would be a year full of misfortune, and if it was in fact true that Rengganis the Beautiful had been raped by a dog, then the catastrophes had already begun. The news spread like a plague until everyone in Halimunda had heard it, except for the Beautiful’s father, poor Maman Gendeng. For the very first time, people looked at that thug with gazes of pity and woe.

For a whole month, no one had the guts to tell him, until one day a slobby, chunky, awkward, and ridiculous-looking schoolboy around his daughter’s age appeared, named Kinkin. He was wearing a sweater that was way too small for him, faded brown corduroys, dingy white keds, and round glasses that made him look like a comic book character. The fact that he dared approach the thug, who was nodding off in his sacred banged-up old mahogany rocking chair after drinking a glass of beer that had tasted like horse shit, caused a little bit of a stir. A number of people knew him to be Kamino the gravedigger’s only son, but they were too late to prevent him from disturbing the preman .

Maman Gendeng, awakened from his snooze, reluctantly set down his beer glass and glanced with some annoyance at this kid who just stood there stiffly, rolling and unrolling the bottom of his shirt, until Maman Gendeng lost his patience.