Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker Read Free Book Online

say, “Doing it with a prostitute is not really a betrayal, because prostitutes are paid with money and not with love.”
    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