Beauty Is a Wound Read Online Free PDF Page A

that way too when it was time to for her attend school; not one school accepted Beauty. Rosinah had even tried begging a principal, but he seemed more interested in the mute young woman than in the ugly young girl and had boorishly fondled her in the office once the door was closed. Wise Rosinah thought, where there’s a will there’s a way, and if she had to lose her virginity to get Beauty into school, she would give it up in any way possible. So that morning she found herself naked on the principal’s swiveling office chair and they made love under the drone of the fan for twenty-three minutes, but it turned out that, even so, Beauty was still barred from admission, because if she attended the other children would refuse to enroll.
    Without giving up, finally Rosinah planned to teach her herself at home, at the very least her numbers and letters. But before she had the chance to teach her anything, Rosinah was dumbfounded to realize the girl already knew how to correctly count the lizard calls. She was even more surprised when one afternoon Beauty pulled out a pile of books left by her mother and read them aloud at the top of her lungs without anyone ever even teaching her the alphabet. There was something not right about these astonishing events, which had actually started years before when, to Rosinah’s amazement and without knowing who had taught her how, the girl had learned to speak. Rosinah tried to spy on the little one, but the child never went farther than the fence and not one single person appeared, and so she never met anyone except the mute servant, who spoke with her hands. And yet she knew the words for all visible and invisible things, for cats and lizards and the chickens and the ducks that roamed around their house.
    Aside from all these marvels, she was still an unfortunate, ugly, and pathetic little girl. Rosinah often caught her standing behind the window curtain, peeking out at people in the street, or gazing at her when she had to go out to buy something, as if asking to be invited along. Of course Rosinah would have been happy to take her along, but the little girl herself would protest, saying in her pitiful voice, “No, it’s better I don’t come, because people will lose their appetites for the rest of their lives.”
    She would go out in the early morning when people had not yet awoken except for the vegetable sellers hurrying to market, or the farmers hurrying to the fields, or the fishermen hurrying home, walking or gliding by on their bicycles, but those people wouldn’t see her in the dimness of the dawn. That was the time when she could get to know the world, with bats who went home to their nests, with sparrows who alighted on the buds of the almond trees, with chickens who cockadoodledooed loudly, with butterflies who hatched from caterpillars and flew to perch on hibiscus petals, with kittens who stretched out on their mats, with the aromas that wafted from neighbors’ kitchens, with the clamor of engines being revved in the distance, with the sound of a radio sermon coming from somewhere, and above all with Venus incandescent in the east, all of which she would enjoy while sitting on her swing that hung from the branch of a starfruit tree. Rosinah didn’t even know that the small gleam that glowed so brightly was called Venus, but Beauty knew it very well, as well as she had come to know the astrological portents of all the constellations in the sky.
    As soon as day dawned, she would vanish inside the house, like the head of a turtle shying from those who disturb it, because schoolchildren always stopped in front of the fence gate, hoping to see her, staring at the door and the windows in their curiosity. The old folks had already told them the scary tales about terrifying Beauty, who lived in that house, ready to cut off their heads at the slightest disobedience, ready to gobble them alive for any whiny complaint: all these stories haunted them, and yet at the same time