By Lily Yulianti Farid
“Brokenhearted again, Rei?”
“What about you, Rie?
And when they simultaneously cried, “Yes, the search goes on!” they also immediately agreed, as was their tradition, to celebrate with a bowl or two of nyuknyang.*
(1:15 pm on Rei’s watch)
Rie hadn’t changed. She was still a wanderer with a dew-like sparkle in her eyes, the eyes of a dreamer. She was forever going away, leaving town to go somewhere, but would always return with stories to tell. She had yet to discard her habit of playing with the corner of her handkerchief when talking about one of her romances—stories that were a blend of reality and fantasy. Her skies were dark purple and her stars yellow like the light of a pressurized kerosene lantern. She spoke of the need to review the historical record.
This time she’d come back with the story of a love that had floundered in the Forbidden City.
“Why don’t you ever bring tissues with you? They’re much more practical,” I tell her, looking at the twisted end of her handkerchief.
“But Rei, you know I’ve had a thing for handkerchiefs since I was a little girl. Tissues aren’t good for storing memories. Once you use them, they’re ruined and have to be thrown away. A good handkerchief can store all your stories, Rei. Sometimes, my handkerchief is salty with tears; other times it’s fragrant because I’ve sprayed it with perfume while waiting for a lover to call for me.”
(1:15 pm on Rie’s watch)
Rei was still very much the stable but melancholic kind of soul, a man who never complained, despite the fact that good fortune had yet to come his way. He saw no reason for cursing one’s fate. Why not celebrate it for what it is? Hadn’t the influence of imagination over logic been proven to reduce feelings of sadness and excite a strange glee? Paraphrasing the poet Sapardi Djoko Damono, Rei suggested that sometimes we needed to go to a restaurant and “order hunger”. Or sometimes he insisted on remaining in January even after the calendar had flipped to February.
He was still here and did not want to leave. He often said that some day he would find his love here in our home town. Where did that idea come from? Rei thought his search would end one day. When he reached a dead end, he set out to try again. Another dead end, another try.
He was a man both sensitive and strong, one who could create poems replete with thunder and vengeance; and though he was forever suffering from a broken heart, he was never willing to give up.
At a small food stall in the Panakkukang area of Makassar, the two of them ordered their bowls of nyuknyang. The firm ash-colored meatballs, floating in hot broth amid sprinklings of fried shallots and celery leaves, represented a shared happiness for both of them. Such a simple meal, yet it was one they had shared at each of their annual reunions, ever since childhood. That was their ritual.
“So what happened this time, Rei? Why did she leave you?”
“Classic! The same old story. ‘Our love had no future’—or so her father said.”
“Her father said …?’”
“Yeah, her father.”
“Well, what did she have to say?”
“She just did what her father told her.”
(1:45 pm on Rie’s watch)
Rei’s love offered no guarantee of a good future. What an assumption this was! Why did all the fathers of all the women who returned his affections assume such a thing? I imagined Rei the poet tottering through a rice barn, a den where rich merchants based their notion of life’s worth on the clinking of coins in a money purse. How unfortunate! How sad! I imagined Rei becoming a bank worker or a teacher or a political party hack or whatever, every time he fell in love, just so that the woman who returned his love would have the courage to face the future and get him to talk about marriage.
In that rice barn the beauty of Rei’s poetry is acknowledged, but poetry is not something that can be considered a fixed asset or a unit of production. It’s impossible for you to support a woman with words, Rei, even though you might use them to melt her heart. Not unless we can imagine that poets provide society with sustenance, and that they are paid a wage by the State for their service as safe-keepers of the nation’s spiritual life and as the vanguard of public morality. Oops! That fantasy was a bit too far of a stretch!
They shouted a greeting at the nyuknyang seller standing at the entrance to his food stall. They knew him well. His name was Minggu, a man from the Toraja region of South Sulawesi who always wore a small towel like an epaulet on his right shoulder. Rei and Rie were among those people who refused to believe the rumor that Minggu used that same small towel to mop the sweat from his brow and to wipe out the bowls he used to serve nyuknyang to customers—although whenever they saw the towel on his shoulder, they would remember the rumor and give each other a glance.
Rei shouted another order: “Two more bowls! One regular, the other with mixed meat balls.”
Rie tilted her head towards Rei and spoke to him in a lowered voice: “And if Minggu suffers a broken heart, he wipes his tears with that towel as well.”
The two of them laughed like simpletons who had just discovered a new joke.
The firm ash-colored meatballs floating in the hot broth amid the fried shallots and celery leaves made Rie and Rei feel again the pleasure of their reunion.
“How was Beijing, Rie?”
“Incredibly busy but exotic too. When I was traveling there, I went by the name of Fasciola. I’m much more free when I’m not myself.”
“You still have your same habit!”
“I never want to be myself.”
“But why ‘Fasciola’?”
“It’s a kind of worm, Rei. ‘Fasciola hepatica’—a liver fluke that bores its way into the body.”
“A worm?”
“Being a worm every once in a while is okay, isn’t it? A tiny little creature of no value and disgusting besides.”
“And did anyone fall in love with this Fasciola?”
“Of course! His name is Raphael, a Sicilian and an admirer of Mao who begged me to go with him when he was taking photographs of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. He’s a Greenpeace activist who hasn’t drunk coca-cola for two years. I told him I was against genetic engineering. Very me, don’t you think?”
“Just one of your regular affairs?”
“Yeah, one with no prospects. But that doesn’t matter.”
(1:59 pm on Rei’s watch)
Where will your search end, Rie, this journey to become another person, this flight full of fallacy and name changes, this dream mixed with reality? A personality made schizophrenic by reality. You once complained that you were a woman fettered with four sets of shackles that you found impossible to escape. The first one: not to fall in love with just any man. The second: to guard the honor and good name of your family. The third: to find a man of the same class, religion, and social standing but also, if possible, a bit more wealthy than you. The fourth: to not go too far away; the family would take care of finding your soul mate.
Oh, my frustrated blue-blood, the little rebel who won’t stop fighting. The poor little rich girl: heir to immense landholdings yet crying for freedom. How long will you roam, Rie? At what point will you stop? You once said that your journey would probably end like that of your father’s three sisters, all old maids for having remained faithful to that quartet of fetters.
But that doesn’t matter. After all, even if temporary in nature, love and romance—which, I recall you having said, serve as balm for your soul—are to be found wherever you go.
“Do you think about me, Rei?”
“What about you?”
“I worry about you.”
“Same here. I worry about you too.”
The two look at each other. There is between them a certain fragility which they can no longer conceal but which they do their best to ignore. They force themselves to laugh. These two childhood friends, whose dreams forever collide with that reality, laugh—an odd giddiness.
“Where do you go next, Rie?”
“Hmm… To Singapore. If I have enough money, maybe to Kathmandu.”
“When will you come back here?”
“Next year. And pray that I have a love story that—”
The two of them laughed again. A fragile laugh.
Translated by John H. McGlynn
* Nyuknyang is kind of meatball (bakso) soup, a specialty of Makassar.