Beauty Is a Wound Read Free

four) children as a curse of prostitution, and if the girls didn’t have fathers, she said, that was because they really and truly didn’t have fathers, not because they didn’t know who their fathers were, and certainly not because she had never stood next to some guy in front of a village headman. She believed them instead to be the children of demons.
    “Because Satan loves to get his kicks as much as God or the gods,” she said. “Like Mary gave birth to the Son of God and Pandu’s two wives gave birth to their god children, my womb is a place where demons deposit their seed and so, I give birth to demon children. And I’m sick of it, Rosinah.”
    As often happened, Rosinah just smiled. She couldn’t speak, except in an incoherent mumble, but she could smile and she liked to smile. Dewi Ayu was very fond of her, especially because of that smile. She had once called her an elephant child, because no matter how angry elephants get they always smile, just like the ones you can see in the circus that comes to town at the end of almost every year. With her sign language, that couldn’t be learned in any school for mutes but had to be taught directly by Rosinah herself, the girl told Dewi Ayu that she shouldn’t feel fed up—she didn’t even have twenty children, meanwhile Gandari gave birth to a hundred of Kurawa’s children. That made Dewi Ayu laugh out loud. She liked Rosinah’s childish sense of humor and was still laughing as she retorted that Gandari didn’t give birth to a hundred children a hundred separate times, she just gave birth to one big hunk of meat that then turned into one hundred children.
    That was the cheerful way Rosinah kept working, not in the least bit put out. She took care of the baby, went into the kitchen twice a day and did the washing every morning, while Dewi Ayu lay almost without moving, truly looking like a corpse who was waiting for people to finish digging her grave. Of course if she was hungry, she got up and ate, and she went to the bathroom every morning and afternoon. But she would always return and wrap herself back up in her burial shroud to lie with her body stiff and straight, with her two hands placed on top of her stomach, her eyes closed, and her lips curved in a faint smile. There were a number of neighbors who tried to spy on her from the open window. Time after time Rosinah tried to shoo them away but she never succeeded and the people would ask, why didn’t she just kill herself instead. Refraining from her usual sarcasm, Dewi Ayu remained silent and completely still.
    The long-awaited death finally came on the afternoon of the twelfth day after the birth of hideous Beauty, or at least that was what everybody believed. The sign that death was near appeared that morning, when Dewi Ayu instructed Rosinah that she did not want her name on her grave marker; instead she wanted an epitaph with the sole sentence, “I gave birth to four children, and I died.” Rosinah’s hearing was excellent, and she could read and write, so she wrote down that message in its entirety, but the order was immediately refused by the mosque imam leading the burial ceremony, who thought that such a crazy request made the whole situation even more sinful, and decided himself that the woman wouldn’t get anything at all inscribed on her headstone.
    Dewi Ayu was found in the afternoon by one of the neighbors who was spying through the window, in the kind of tranquil sleep that is only seen in a person’s last days. But there was something else too: there was the smell of borax in the air. Rosinah had bought it at the bakery and Dewi Ayu had sprinkled herself with the corpse preservative that others sometimes mixed in with their mie bakso meatballs. Rosinah had let the woman do whatever she wanted in her obsession with death, and even if she had been ordered to dig a grave and bury Dewi Ayu alive she would have done it and passed it all off as part of her mistress’s unique sense of