Beauty Is a Wound Read Free Page A

humor, but it wasn’t that way with the ignorant snoop. This woman leapt in through the window, convinced that Dewi Ayu had gone too far.
    “Listen up, you whore who slept with all of our men!” she said resentfully. “If you are going to die, then die, but don’t preserve your body, because it’s only your rotting corpse that nobody will envy.” She shoved Dewi Ayu, but her body only rolled over without being awakened.
    Rosinah came in and gave a signal that she must already be dead.
    “That whore is dead?”
    Rosinah nodded.
    “Dead?!” She revealed her true character then, that whiny woman, crying as if her own mother had passed, and said between throaty sobs, “The eighth of January last year was the most beautiful day for our family. That was the day when my man found some money under the bridge and went to Mama Kalong’s whorehouse and slept with this very prostitute who is now lying dead before me. He came home afterward, and that was the one and only day when he was kind to the family. He didn’t even hit any of us.”
    Rosinah looked at her disdainfully as if to suggest one couldn’t blame him for wanting to hit such a bellyacher, then got rid of that whiner by telling her to spread the news of Dewi Ayu’s death. There was no need for a burial shroud because she’d already bought one twelve days ago; there was no need to bathe her, because she’d already bathed herself; she had even preserved her own body herself. “If she could have,” Rosinah signed to the imam of the closest mosque, “she would have recited the prayers for herself.” The imam, looking at the mute girl with hatred, said that he himself was not inclined to recite the prayers for that lump of a prostitute’s corpse or what’s more, to even bury her. “Since she is dead,” said Rosinah (still with sign language), “then she’s no longer a prostitute.”
    Kyai Jahro, that mosque imam, finally gave up and led Dewi Ayu’s funeral.
    Up until her death, which few had believed would come so quickly, she truly never saw the baby. People said that she was really lucky, because any mother would be unthinkably sad to see her baby born so hideous. Her death would not be tranquil, and she would never be able to rest in peace. Only Rosinah wasn’t so sure that Dewi Ayu would have been sad to see the baby, because she knew that what that woman hated more than anything in the world was a pretty little baby girl. She would have been overjoyed if she knew how completely different her youngest one was from her older sisters; but she didn’t know. Because this mute young girl was always obedient to her mistress, during the days before her death she didn’t force the baby upon its mother, despite the fact that if she had known what the baby looked like, Dewi Ayu might have postponed her death, at least for a couple of years.
    “That’s nonsense, the moment of death is up to God,” said Kyai Jahro.
    “She was fixing to die for twelve days and then she died,” Rosinah’s gestures said, inheriting her mistress’s stubbornness.
    According to the will of the dead, Rosinah now became the guardian of the wretched baby. And it was she who then busied herself with the pointless task of sending telegrams to Dewi Ayu’s three children saying that their mother had died and would be buried in the Budi Dharma public cemetery. Not one of them came, but the funeral was held the next day with a festivity that had not been rivaled in that city for many years before, nor would it be for many years to come. This was because almost all the men who had ever slept with the prostitute saw her off with tender kisses breathed into bouquets of jasmine blossoms that they then tossed all along the road as her casket passed. And their wives and lovers also crowded the length of road pressed up against their men’s backsides looking on with a lingering jealousy, because they were sure that those horny men would still fight each other for the opportunity to sleep