Eka Kurniawan - Beauty is a Wound

After that he became a faithful regular at the brothel at the end of the pier, sleeping with the women there while whispering Ma Iyang’s name. He did that almost every weekend, with a group of friends who were just as good to him as ever. When their cash flow was ample each fellow slept with his own prostitute, but sometimes when they needed to be thrifty, five of them would share one woman. It continued that way for years, until one by one the men got married. That was hard for Ma Gedik, because his friends no longer had time to go to the brothel — and anyway, now they had wives who could be slept with for love, not money — but going to a whorehouse all by yourself was the most depressing thing in the world. When Ma Gedik felt lonely he would start off practicing with his hand, but that would soon grow intolerably frustrating, and he would be forced to slip out alone into the middle of the pitch-black night to the brothel again, returning home before the fishermen returned from the sea.

After a while he turned into a strange person, if not even an enemy of the people, because time after time there would be a ruckus in a neighbor’s stable and he would be caught raping a cow, or even a chicken, until its intestines came spilling out. Sometimes he would punch a shepherd boy and then catch a sheep and work it in the middle of a field, once making a middle-aged woman with a basket full of yam leaves run the whole length of a rice field, shrieking in a hysterical panic at the sight of a lust so completely out of control. Everyone began to distance themselves from him, and he stopped bathing. He stopped eating rice or anything else except his own shit and the shit that he scavenged from the banana orchards. His family and his friends were deeply concerned and called in a dukun from a distant land, a mystical healer famous for being able to cure all kinds of illnesses. With his white robe and a streaming beard, he looked like a wise apostle. He examined Ma Gedik in a goat pen, because for the last nine months the man had been tied up there, surviving only on the excrement inside the cage. Calmly, the dukun told the worried onlookers:

“Only love can heal such a crazy person.”

But that was a difficult matter, for the people could not return Ma Iyang to him, so they ultimately gave up and left Ma Gedik in shackles for the long wait.

“They made a promise to wait for sixteen years,” said his mother crankily, “but surely he will rot before that day comes.” She was the one who had decided to tie him up, after slaughtering the sixth chicken found writhing in agony with its intestines protruding from its asshole.

But he did not rot. In fact, he seemed quite healthy, his cheeks flushed as the days melted away, and the time he had been waiting for drew near. Barefoot schoolboys would gather outside his goat pen in the afternoon before they went home to herd their cattle, and joking around for a bit he would teach them how to fondle their own genitals, rubbing and using their own spit: and so the teachers at school forbid anyone to go near him. But the children must have tried what he had taught them, because a number of them visited the goat pen in secret in the middle of the night and whispered to him that they had discovered a new way to pee that felt way better than peeing the usual way.

“It will be even more enjoyable if you try it with the private parts of little girls.”

When one afternoon a farmer found two nine-year-old children making love in the pandan shrubs, the villagers cruelly boarded up that goat pen. Ma Gedik was stuck inside with no one to talk to, and of course without any light at all.

Still, this punishment did not destroy his spirit. With his body shackled inside a boarded-up cage, his mouth began to sing lewd songs that made the kyai ’s faces turn red and the people toss and turn in the middle of the night, shivering in their misery. This revenge continued for weeks, but just when the villagers had decided to stuff his mouth with a young coconut, a miracle came in the nick of time. That morning he no longer sang lewd songs, but quite the opposite; he sang beautiful love ballads, moving many people to tears. From one side of the neighborhood to the other people stopped their work, transfixed as if expecting heavenly nymphs to come down from the sky, until someone finally figured out: this was the last day of Ma Gedik’s long wait. This was the day he would meet his sweetheart on top of the rocky hill.

Everyone who knew him quickly swarmed to dismantle the boards closing him in. When the rays of light illuminated the goat pen, stinking like an acrid rat’s nest, they found the man still shackled, but still singing. They loosed his bonds and brought him to a trench, and bathed him all together, as if he was a newborn baby or an old man who had just passed away. They sprinkled his body with fragrances, from rose oil to lavender, and they gave him fine warm clothes, including a jacket and a pair of pantaloons discarded by a Dutchman, and they made him up like the corpse of a Christian about to be laid inside a coffin. When all this was finished, one of his old friends commented in amazement,“You are so handsome I’m worried that my wife will fall in love with you!”

“Of course she will,” Ma Gedik boasted. “Even the sheep and the crocodiles fall in love with me.”

And it was true what the dukun had said, love could cure his illness, could cure any illness at all. No one worried about him anymore, and everyone forgot his past bad behavior. Even the young girls stood very close without fear that his hands would rudely wander, and pious people greeted him kindly without worry that their ears would be jammed full of profanity. His mother had a small party to celebrate his sudden recovery, with a yellow cone of tumpengan rice and a chicken that had been slaughtered the proper way, without its intestines protruding from its anus, and a kyai was invited to recite prayers of blessing and thanksgiving. That was a glorious morning in the fishing encampments, in one far corner of Halimunda still covered in fog, a morning that would be remembered for years to come whenever the people told their children and grandchildren the story of the sweethearts’ passion, which for generations remained a tale of true and abiding love.

But ultimately, that long sixteen-year wait ended in tragedy. Not long after the sun began to sting, people came racing by in cars and on horseback, chasing a concubine who was running away to the rocky hill, no doubt Ma Iyang. Borrowing a donkey, Ma Gedik chased the Dutchmen and his sweetheart, and the people from the neighborhood ran behind him in a line, like the tail of a giant snake. They had reached the valley when the Dutchmen finally stopped, and Ma Gedik howled, calling and calling the name of his lover.

Ma Iyang looked so small on the peak of the rocky hill where cars, horses, and donkeys could not reach. The Dutchmen furiously vowed to drag her into the ajak cage if they could catch her. Ma Gedik was trying to climb that rocky hill, but it was so mercilessly difficult that people wondered how the woman had ever managed to reach its peak. After a brutal struggle, Ma Gedik was standing next to his love, boiling over with longing.

“Do you still want me?” asked Ma Iyang. “My whole body has been licked and splattered with a Dutchman’s spit, and he has stabbed my privates one thousand one hundred and ninety-two times.”

“I have stabbed twenty-eight different women’s privates as many as four hundred and sixty-two times, and I have stabbed my own hand countless times, and that’s not even counting the privates of animals, so are we really all that different?”

As if a lewd god took possession of them, they embraced ever so tightly, kissing beneath the heat of the tropical sun. And to relieve the passion that had been building up for so long, they removed all the garments sticking to their bodies and tossed them away: the clothes floated down over the valley, twirling round and round like mahogany tree flowers blown by the wind. The people almost didn’t believe their eyes and some of them screamed, and the Dutchmen’s faces all turned red. Then, without hesitation the two made love on a flat rock, in plain view of the people who filled the valley as if they were watching a film at the movie theater. The virtuous women covered their faces with the edges of their veils and all the men got hard and did not dare look at one another, and the Dutchmen said: