By Intan Paramaditha
When I was little, my mother used to tell me stories about a ghost woman who lived in our attic. The stories scared me half to death, and I’d bury my head under my pillow at night. Even so, nothing spurred my fantasies more than these mysterious tales.
I thought of myself as a junior detective with an insatiable curiosity. Nights punctuated with clamor from the attic brought out the sleuth inside me. In fact, the noises were only mice scurrying about, but childhood opened space for my imagination to run rampant. I had fancies of treasure hidden in a chest. In order to win it, I’d first have to confront its keeper, a giant spider that tangled its victims in a web before devouring them. The space was very dark, but if you lit a candle you’d see corpses hanging stiffly.
Day and night I’d try to peek into the attic, but Mother kept it locked. I was always hoping, my ear glued to the sealed door, that I’d hear a child screaming—a pirate princess who had been imprisoned by her father’s enemies. If I came upon her, she’d show me the secret of the biggest treasure of the age.
The overwhelming power of my fantasies left me obsessed with the secret behind that door. When I took my crayons and scrawled in my coloring book, I’d draw a dark attic with treasure gleaming within. At other times, I drew a huge coiling snake ready to pounce on its prey. I made up several versions of what was in the attic, until finally my mother told me what she said was the true story.
The enormous secret of our attic was a ghost woman with long, straggly hair who sat always at a spinning wheel. Her face was full of reddish-brown wrinkles, like wounds that had dried after a mauling by a tiger. Her eyeballs blazed red like a raging fire. When she opened her mouth, you could see her long fangs. She was engrossed in her spinning because she was making a quilt for her beloved. She had fallen in love with a man, an ordinary human being who liked to hunt in the forest.
The ghost was able to change her form in daylight, when she wanted to mingle with humans. She could become anything at all—a woman, a man, or a child, or someone old and decrepit. When she saw the hunter, she transformed herself into a beautiful girl. The hunter was spellbound. Later they would meet in a field of golden grass just to share stories. The man did not notice that every time the girl appeared, the birds would flit about erratically, and snails and other small animals became skittish. Animals indeed have sharper senses than we do.
One day, the man said goodbye, saying he’d be gone a long while. He wanted to explore the forest in a remote part of the country to search for a monkey with fur of gold. The monkey, they said, was a priceless possession that would make its master very rich. The ghost woman was immeasurably sad, but with a heavy heart she recognized that she must let her beloved go. Before the man began his adventure, they agreed to meet in the forest.
The sun’s light at dusk that day had the quality of a dim neon lamp. The hunter reclined against a tree with his sweetheart, talking about the exquisite dreams that would be realized when his quest for the monkey with fur of gold was completed. “Please become my wife, and let’s live by the riverside. My house is small, but you can always hear the babbling of the water and the laughter of children.” The ghost woman was so enraptured listening to him, that she did not realize that night was falling. The stout trees, embraced by dark clouds, grew black. Dogs began to howl, sensing the uncanny presence of a supernatural creature. The full moon crept soundlessly into the sky from its bedchamber.
The ill-starred ghost forgot that could she transform herself only in daylight. Night had stripped off her mask and the moonbeams illuminated her face, now bared. Her beloved screamed. The beautiful girl that he had known had become a hideous, horrifying monster. His terror was indescribable. He fled, leaving the ghost woman all alone.
“Good thing the man could save himself!” I exclaimed, hugging my pillow in fear and relief.
“But you don’t know what happened to the ghost woman,” said Mother.
“Is that important?”
“Hey! She’s our main character!”
Oh, yes, yes, I nodded. We often lose our focus by not paying attention to things we consider unimportant.
As Mother told it, the ghost woman was distraught. Before she had been able to explain, her sweetheart had fled far away. Truly, she became a fury. She flew from house to house, wreaking havoc, disrupting everyone’s peace and quiet. Babies cried when they sensed her, and religious leaders busily muttered incantations to ward her off. But one day the ghost realized that she’d never be able to extinguish her love for the hunter through this mayhem. She remembered that her lover did not have enough clothing for his long journey. He had no thick quilt to protect him if he were beset by cold in the forest. The ghost chose a dark hiding place to make a quilt for her beloved. Yes, in our attic she had been working away with her spinning wheel for thousands of nights.
“And she’s still making it now?”
The work, said my mother, had never finished, because the ghost woman did not use yarn for his quilt. She was spinning darkness.
I stopped thinking about this spinner of darkness when Mother separated from Father. After I turned thirteen, it was just her and me at home. She still told stories, but for some reason they began to feel flat. My guess was that she was growing bored of telling tales. Her eyes were vacant, and her stories lacked energy. Unlike when my father was still with us, Mother now looked weary; she often came home late at night.
Mother worked hard to keep our lives as they had been. She still saw me off to school, made my breakfast, called me from the office during the day, and kissed my cheek before I went to sleep. She was as sweet as ever, but, as I say, she’d lost her will. By the time I entered adolescence, I’d had enough of the lonely atmosphere at home and grew to prefer hanging out with my school friends. I saw my mother less and less, but she still did everything: see me off to school, make my meals, call me, kiss me.
When I was sixteen, Mother began to have lovers. A tall man used to come often to our house. I called him Uncle Ferry. I liked him because he was always ready with stories of his adventures abroad. But several months later there was another man. Uncle Riza. After that, different men came in succession until I couldn’t remember all their names. A neighbor took the opportunity to quiz me when I was watering the flowers in the yard, “Which one is going to be your new dad?” Too many men were stopping by. It was giving rise to gossip that made my ears red.
“What does your mom actually do for work?” asked Nina, the child of the neighbor in front of our house.
I shrugged. My mother made me breakfast and kissed my cheek at night. That was enough for me. Did I need to know more?
“My mom says that your mom is hiding something,” said Nina, half whispering. “Can your mother really support you just working in an office?”
The neighbors’ vicious gossip grew more intense. Mother was accused of taking advantage of her boyfriends to clean out their wallets. Some cast doubt on whether Mother was really dating them. Some even spread rumors that she was embezzling from her office. At the core of all the slander was Mother’s precarious position as a divorcee. All this swirled about in my head, but I didn’t dare ask her a single thing.
The older I got, the more certain I too became that my mother was hiding something. I was aware that she had been acting strangely for a long time. I remembered how I was woken one night when my parents were quarreling and hurling nasty words at each other, words that shouldn’t be said. The following day, Mother gave me some bread with strawberry jam and chocolate milk, humming cheerfully all the while. Her voice was as beautiful as the chirping of a canary.
One Sunday I heard her smash a plate as she was shrieking in the kitchen. She told me that her hands were so slippery from washing up that the plate had escaped her grasp. But I don’t think so. I was certain she broke it on purpose. But she immediately put an end to the discussion by inviting me to see a movie with her.
Now and then I’d hear strange sounds coming from her room. Once, the quiet of the night was shattered by loud cries mingled with angry sobs. I rushed out of my bedroom and approached Mother’s. I knocked. Only after a long wait did she open the door. I’d disturbed her from a sound sleep, she said. She chided me for imagining the screams.
“You were just having a bad dream,” she said.
But I was convinced that it was Mother’s voice that I’d heard.
With time, Mother’s lovers and the fierce gossip that accompanied her affairs gradually dissipated. She finally retired and, since I was working now, it was my turn to support us. We often went out together on the weekend, but I knew there was a mystery within her that I had never managed to unravel. She always hid something, including the disease that, it turned out, had been wracking her body.
Mother had developed cancer of the cervix. She went to the doctor secretly with her savings. When I began to suspect something was up, she said that the problem was only a recent cyst, not a malignancy. I didn’t know whether I should be angry or sad. I tried to spend more time with her. I wanted to make her happy. But I had no idea how, because I felt that I had never really known her.
One day she said that she did not have much time left. Ignoring my protests, she tugged my hand. “I want to show you something.”
She led me to the attic. Yes, the attic that had so fascinated me long ago. I had already forgotten about it, just as I had forgotten how my mother’s face looked back when she was a top-notch storyteller.
What I saw when Mother turned the key and opened the door was disappointing. The attic smelled musty, and it was full of dust and spider webs. Inside was an ancient sofa set, dreary and termite-eaten. Dark and stuffy, yes, but no treasure and no giant snake.
Paying no attention to the displeasure obviously written on my face, she guided me to a mirror. She stood directly in front of it then pointed to her reflection.
“Look. That is the Spinner of Darkness,” she declared.
I gaped, not at all thinking Mother had said those words. The Spinner of Darkness was only a fragment of my childhood that I had long discarded. I thought that Mother had forgotten it. But out of respect for Mother, I glanced at what was in the mirror. Mother’s reflection, of course.
“Come on, look again!” she insisted.
I focused harder. I led my memories back to the times when we still enjoyed the mystery of the attic, welcoming a wild, unbridled imagination and nights huddled under a blanket. Suddenly I realized that I was frightened. And, yes, I looked at Mother. Yes, that woman. Straggly hair, face full of painful scars, eyes clear, like blazing balls of flame, smashing whoever faced her. The ghost woman who hid love, longing, sickness, desire, anger—spinning her determined passions without stopping, without end.
Mother had been honest at last. There was no mystery, there was no enigma.
My mother was the Spinner of Darkness.
Translated by Stephen J. Epstein