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

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:
    “What have we always said, the natives are like monkeys.”
    The real tragedy occurred after they finished making love, when Ma Gedik invited his beloved to climb down the rocky hill and go home with him, so they could marry, live together, and love one another forever. That would be impossible, said Ma Iyang. Before they set one foot in the valley, the Dutchmen would throw them into a cage of ajak .
    “So I prefer to fly.”
    “That’s impossible,” said Ma Gedik, “you don’t have wings.”
    “If you believe you can fly, you can fly.”
    To prove what she said Ma Iyang, with her naked body covered in drops of sweat that reflected the rays of the sun like beads of pearl, jumped and flew toward the valley, disappearing behind a descending fog. People only heard the sound of Ma Gedik’s pitiful screams, as he ran down the slope looking for his love. Everyone searched for her, even the Dutchmen and the wild dogs. They scoured every corner of the valley, but Ma Iyang was never found, dead or alive, and finally everyone believed that the woman had truly just flown away. The Dutchmen believed it, and so did Ma Gedik. Now that all that was left was that rocky hill, the people named it after the woman who had flown off it into the sky: Ma Iyang Hill.
    After that day Ma Gedik went to the swamps, where the Dutch couldn’t withstand the malaria in the wet season, and built a hut there. During the day he hauled a cart filled with coffee, cocoa beans, and sometimes copra and yams to the port, and except for his brief exchanges with other cart pullers, he only talked to himself or to the surrounding spirits. People began to think that his insanity had relapsed, even though he was no longer raping cows and chickens or eating shit.
    Almost immediately after the hut was first built, more people started to arrive in the swamps, and the huts that sprung up turned the place into a new encampment. The only Dutch person who ever went there was a controller tasked with carrying out a census, and one week later he was found in his rented room, dead from a malarial fever, the last and only person to visit Ma Gedik for many years until the night when the Colibri driver shot his mongrel dog and a tough guy kicked in the door of his house, with the shocking news that Dewi Ayu wanted to marry him. He didn’t know why she wanted to marry him, so a dark story began to form in the back of his mind. Still shaking, he asked the tough guy:
    “Is she pregnant?” She was probably being forced to marry him to hide the Dutch family’s shame.
    “Is who pregnant?”
    “Dewi Ayu.”
    “If she wants to marry you,” said the tough guy, “it must be because she doesn’t want to get pregnant.”
    Dewi Ayu welcomed her fiancé with joy. She ordered him to bathe and gave him nice clothes to wear because, she told him, the village headman would arrive soon. But that didn’t fill Ma Gedik with joy, just the opposite. He felt it was a complete catastrophe, and the closer the time of their marriage grew, the more morose he became.
    “Smile, darling,” said Dewi Ayu. “If you don’t the ajak will eat you.”
    “Tell me, why to you want to marry me?”
    “This whole morning you keep asking me the same thing,” said Dewi Ayu, slightly annoyed.