Beauty Is a Wound Read Online Free PDF Page B

her with the virtuous manners of the pious in front of a saint, and with sincerity said that her rising again was like a miracle, and surely no one would be granted such a miracle if she wasn’t pure.
    “Of course I am pure,” said Dewi Ayu lightly. “Because not a single person has touched me for twenty-one years.”
    “What does it feel like to be dead?” asked Kyai Jahro.
    “Actually, it’s pretty fun. That’s the main reason why, out of everyone who dies, not one person chooses to come back to life again.”
    “But you came back to life,” said the kyai .
    “I came back just so I could tell you that.”
    That would be really good for the Friday midday sermon, and the kyai left with a radiant face. He didn’t need to feel embarrassed about visiting Dewi Ayu (even though many years ago he had shouted that it was a sin to visit that prostitute’s house and that you could roast in hell from just opening her gate), because as the woman had said, she was no longer a prostitute after twenty-one years of not being touched by a soul, and you’d better believe it that now and forever nobody would ever want to touch her again.
    Who suffered the most from all the fuss over this old woman come back to life was none other than Beauty, who had to lock herself in her room. Luckily, no one ever stayed longer than a few minutes, because the visitors would soon sense an awful terror coming from behind Beauty’s closed bedroom door. With a strange nauseating smell, an evil wind, black and heinous, would sweep past them, sliding out from under the door and through the keyhole, with a penetrating chill that reached the very marrow of their bones. Most people had never seen Beauty, except for when she was a little baby and the midwife had circled the village looking for a wet nurse. But the idea of her was enough to make the hair on the napes of their necks stand up and their whole bodies tremble as they gazed at the monster’s door, when the evil aroma carried by the wind reached their noses and the sound of silence clamored in their ears. That was when their mouths would let out some nonsense small talk, and forgetting their desire to hear whatever amazing things Dewi Ayu had to say, they’d quickly stand up after forcing down half a glass of bitter tea and excuse themselves to go home and tell their story.
    “However strong your curiosity about Dewi Ayu who rose from the dead,” they would say to anyone who asked after their terror-filled visit, “I advise you not to go into her house.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you’ll be scared half to death.”
    When people no longer came to visit, Dewi Ayu began to notice Beauty’s peculiarities, aside from her habit of sitting on the veranda waiting for a handsome prince and predicting her fate by the stars. In the middle of the night, she heard a scuffle coming from Beauty’s bedroom, which made her climb down from her own bed and walk in the darkness and stand in front of the girl’s door apprehensively, growing more and more confused by the sounds emerging from that hideous young girl. She was still standing there when Rosinah appeared with a flashlight, passing it over her mistress’s face.
    “I know these sounds,” said Dewi Ayu in a half whisper to Rosinah, “from the rooms of the whorehouse.”
    Rosinah nodded in agreement.
    “It’s the sound of people making love,” Dewi Ayu continued.
    Rosinah nodded again.
    “The question is, who is she making love to, or rather, who would want to make love to her?”
    Rosinah shook her head. She wasn’t making love to anyone. Or, she was making love to someone, but you would never know who it was, because you wouldn’t see anyone.
    Dewi Ayu stood there in awe of the mute girl’s equanimity, which reminded her of the time of her own insanity when it was only that girl who understood her. They sat together in the kitchen that night, in front of the same old stove, heating up some water for a cup of coffee and waiting for it to