Beauty is a wound

360 Pages·2015·2.19 MB·English

by  Kurniawan

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Having cleaned his armor and made a full helmet out of a simple headpiece, and
having given a name to his horse and decided on one for himself, he realized that
the only thing left for him to do was to find a lady to love, for the knight errant
without a lady-love was a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul.
– Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
ONE AFTERNOON ON a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after
being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under
a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off
haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had been
thrown into their midst. It all started with a noise coming from an old gravesite
with an unmarked tombstone covered in knee-high grass, but everybody knew it
was Dewi Ayu’s grave. She had passed away at fifty-two, rose again after being
dead for twenty-one years, and from that point forward nobody knew exactly
how to calculate her age.
People from the surrounding neighborhood came to the grave when the
shepherd boy told them what was happening. Rolling up the edges of their
sarongs, carrying children, clutching broomsticks, or stained with mud from the
fields, they gathered behind cherry shrubs and jatropha trees and in the nearby
banana orchards. No one dared approach, they just listened to the uproar coming
from that old grave as if they were gathered around the medicine peddler who
hawked his goods at the market every Monday morning. The crowd wholly
enjoyed the unnerving spectacle, not caring that such a horror would have
terrified them had they been all alone. They were even expecting some kind of
miracle and not just a noisy old tomb, because the woman inside that plot of
earth had been a prostitute for the Japanese during the war and the kyai always
said that people tainted with sin were sure to be punished in the grave. The
sound must have been coming from the whip of a tormenting angel, but they
grew bored, hoping for some other small marvel.
When it came, it came in the most fantastical form. The grave shook and
fractured, and the ground exploded as if blown up from underneath, triggering a
small earthquake and a windstorm that sent grass and headstones flying, and
behind the dirt raining down like a curtain the figure of an old woman stood
looking annoyed and stiff, still wrapped in a shroud as if she’d only just been
buried the night before. The people grew hysterical and ran away even more
chaotically than the sheep, their synchronous screams echoing against the walls
of the faraway hills. A woman tossed her baby into the bushes and its father
hushed a banana stalk. Two men plunged into a ditch, others fell unconscious at
the side of the road, and still others took off running for fifteen kilometers
straight without stopping.
Witnessing all this, Dewi Ayu only coughed a little and cleared her throat,
fascinated to find herself in the middle of a graveyard. She had already untied
the two highest knots on her burial shroud, and then set to loosening the two
lowest ones to free her feet so she could walk. Her hair had grown magically so
that when she shook it loose from the calico wrap it fluttered in the afternoon
breeze, sweeping the ground, and shimmering like black lichen in a riverbed.
Her skin was wrinkled, but her face was gleaming white, and her eyes came
alive inside their sockets to stare at onlookers abandoning their hiding places
behind the shrubs—half of them ran away and the other half fainted. She
complained, to no one in particular, that people were evil to have buried her
alive.
The first thing she thought of was her baby, who of course was no longer a
baby. Twenty-one years ago, she had died twelve days after giving birth to a
hideous baby girl, so hideous that the midwife assisting her couldn’t be sure
whether it really was a baby and thought that maybe it was a pile of shit, since
the holes where a baby comes out and where shit comes out are only two
centimeters apart. But this baby squirmed, and smiled, and finally the midwife
believed that it really was a human being and not shit, and said to the mother,
who was lying weakly across her bed with no apparent desire to see her
offspring, that the baby was born, was healthy, and seemed friendly.
“It’s a girl, right?” asked Dewi Ayu.
“Yes,” said the midwife, “just like the three babies before her.”
“Four daughters, all of them beautiful,” said Dewi Ayu in a tone of complete
annoyance. “I should open my own whorehouse. Tell me, how pretty is this
one?”
The baby wrapped up tight in a swaddling cloth began to squirm and cry in
the midwife’s arms. A woman was coming in and out of the room, taking away
the dirty cloths full of blood, getting rid of the placenta, and for a moment the
midwife did not answer because there was no way she was going to say that a
baby who looked like a pile of black shit was pretty. Trying to ignore the
question she said, “You’re already an old woman, so I don’t think you’ll be able
to nurse.”
“That’s true. I’ve been used up by the three previous kids.”
“And hundreds of men.”
“One hundred and seventy-two men. The oldest one was ninety years old, the
youngest one was twelve, one week after his circumcision. I remember them all
well.”
The baby cried again. The midwife said that she had to find breast milk for
the little one. If there was none, she’d have to look for cow’s milk, or dog’s
milk, or maybe even rat’s milk. Yeah, go, said Dewi Ayu. “Poor unfortunate
little girl,” said the midwife, gazing at the baby’s upsetting face. She wasn’t even
able to describe it, but she thought it looked like a cursed monster from hell. The
baby’s entire body was jet black as if it had been burned alive, with a bizarre and
unrecognizable form. For example, she wasn’t sure whether the baby’s nose was
a nose, because it looked more like an electrical outlet than any nose she’d ever
seen in her entire life. And the baby’s mouth reminded her of a piggy-bank slot
and her ears looked like pot handles. She was sure that there was no creature on
earth more hideous than this wretched little one, and if she were God, she would
probably kill the baby at once rather than let her live; the world would abuse her
without mercy.
“Poor baby,” said the midwife again, before going to look for someone to
nurse her.
“Yeah, poor baby,” said Dewi Ayu, tossing and turning in her bed. “I already
did everything I could to try to kill you. I should have swallowed a grenade and
detonated it inside my stomach. Oh wretched little one—just like evildoers, the
wretched don’t die easy.”
At first the midwife tried to hide the baby’s face from the neighbor women
who arrived. But when she said that she needed milk for the baby, they pushed
against each other to see it, since it was always fun for those who knew Dewi
Ayu to see her adorable little girl babies. The midwife was unable to stave off
the onslaught of people pushing aside the cloth hiding the baby’s face, but once
they’d seen it, and screamed from a horror unlike any they had ever experienced
before, the midwife smiled and reminded them that she had tried her best not to
show them the hellish countenance.
After that outburst, as the midwife left in a hurry, they just stood for a
moment, with the faces of idiots whose memories had been suddenly erased.
“It should just be killed,” said a woman, the first one freed from her sudden-
onset amnesia.
“I already tried,” said Dewi Ayu as she appeared, wearing only a rumpled
housedress and a cloth tied around her waist. Her hair was a total mess, like
someone staggering away from a bullfight.
People looked at her with pity.
“She’s pretty, right?” asked Dewi Ayu.
“Um, yes.”
“There’s no curse more terrible than to give birth to a pretty female in a
world of men as nasty as dogs in heat.”
Not one person responded, they just kept looking at her with sympathy,
knowing they were lying. Rosinah, the mute mountain girl who had been serving
Dewi Ayu for years, led the woman into the bathroom, where she had prepared
hot water in the tub. There Dewi Ayu soaked with fragrant sulfurous soap,
attended by the mute girl who shampooed her hair with aloe vera oil. Only the
mute seemed unfazed by any of this, even though she surely already knew about
the hideous little girl, since no one else but Rosinah had accompanied the
midwife while she worked. She rubbed her mistress’s back with a pumice stone,
wrapped her in a towel, and straightened up the bathroom as Dewi Ayu stepped
out.
Someone tried to lighten the gloomy mood and said to Dewi Ayu, “You need
to give her a good name.”
“Yeah,” said Dewi Ayu. “Her name is Beauty.”
“Oh!” the people exclaimed, embarrassingly trying to dissuade her.
“Or how about Injury?”
“Or Wound?”
“For God’s sake, don’t name it that.”
“Okay then, her name is Beauty.”
They watched helplessly as Dewi Ayu walked back into her room to get
dressed. They could only look at one another, sadly imagining a young girl black
as soot with an electrical outlet in the middle of her face being called by the
name of Beauty. It was a shameful scandal.
However, it was true that Dewi Ayu had tried to kill the baby back when she
realized that, whether or not she had already lived for a whole half century, she
was pregnant once again. Just as with her other children, she didn’t know who
the father was, but unlike the others she had absolutely no desire for the baby to
survive. So she had taken five extra-strength paracetamol pills that she got from
a village doctor and washed them down with half a liter of soda, which was
almost enough to cause her own death but not quite, as it turned out, enough to
kill that baby. She thought of another way, and called a midwife who was
willing to kill the baby and take it out of her womb by inserting a small wooden
stick into her belly. She experienced heavy bleeding for two days and two nights
and the small piece of wood came back out in splinters, but the baby kept
growing. She tried six other ways to get the better of that baby, but all were in
vain, and she finally gave up and complained:
“This one is a real brawler, and she’s clearly going to beat her mother in this
fight.”
So she let her stomach get bigger and bigger, held the selamatan ritual at
seven months, and let the baby be born, even though she refused to look at her.
She had already given birth to three girls before this and all of them were
gorgeous, practically like triplets born one after another. She was bored with
babies like that, who according to her were like mannequins in a storefront
display, so she didn’t want to see her youngest child, certain she would be no
different from her three older sisters. She was wrong, of course, and didn’t yet
know how repulsive her youngest truly was. Even when the neighbor women
furtively whispered that the baby was like the result of randomly breeding a
monkey with a frog and a monitor lizard, she didn’t think they were talking
about her baby. And when they said that the previous night wild dogs had
howled in the forest and owls had flown in to roost, she didn’t in the least bit
take those as bad omens.
After getting dressed, she lay down again, suddenly struck by how
exhausting it all was, giving birth to four babies and living longer than half a
century. And then she had the depressing realization that if the baby didn’t want
to die then maybe her mother should be the one to go, so that she would never
have to see it grow into a young woman. She rose and staggered to the doorway,
looking out at all the neighbor women who were still clustered together
gossiping about the infant. Rosinah appeared from the bathroom and stood at
Dewi Ayu’s side, sensing that her mistress was about to give her an order.
“Buy me a burial shroud,” said Dewi Ayu. “I have already given four girls to
this accursed world. The time has come for my funeral procession to pass on
by.”
The women shrieked and gaped at Dewi Ayu with their idiot faces. To give
birth to a hideous baby was an outrage, but to abandon it just like that was way
more outrageous. But they didn’t come right out and say so, they just tried to
talk her out of dying so foolishly, saying that some people lived for more than