Eka Kurniawan Project

Foto oleh Dany3D, Some rights reserved.

But who are they (this whole class of opium eaters)? Reader, I am sorry to say, a very numerous class indeed … I do not readily believe that any man, having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will afterward descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol. I take it for granted: that those eat now, who never ate before … and those who always ate, now eat more.
– Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Her eyes were dreary, with her very curved eyelashes. And if she spoken, we could hear that melodious voice of her. Once in a while her lips would give us smile, making our heart intoxicated, going up to the seventh sky. The more I loved her, the more she loved me too. Then I would touch her fingers and we hold our both hands for so long. Everyday was like that, until she had to leave this cruel world. Alone and languish.

This is not a tale nor a roman. No, my sensible reader, these notes not mean by the writer as that. I wrote this as a warning for anyone that were willing to see for a while, on what things had happen to me. Maybe one of them will be useful to be pick on its goodness.

In the end of this August, the wooing rain made the heart go melancholic, and I started to remember what has passed. In this bamboo platform, my reader, the place where I made this notes, she had slept intimately. Her head placed on my lap. Her small and light body, once a while coughing raising ones pity. In her once dazzling skin, I can felt her fever. But see those dreary eyes, my reader, if we smartly saw, we could still see her flaming spirit.

“Are you happy?” I asked once in a while.

“Yes, I’m happy,” she answered.

It’s enough for me to hear that she was happy, so I become happy too. Of course not all the time she was that happy, on the other time I saw her very worried and gloomy. But she always felt happy when she slept on this bamboo platform. I would hang people heads if I had to, so I could always take her here.

A woman maid would come kneeling dragging her knee, sitting in the corner of the bamboo platform and we would smell the breeze of her body. We would be given two pipes, she would took out those opium balls and heated it above the fire of the oil lamp. That maid would go, teasing by the sway of her hips, and a little of her vicious smile. Maybe she was upset seeing other woman sleeping stickily on my lap. That was how the maids were, their manners and character are not good towards female guests.

But because of this woman who was now sleeping that I came to this opium house. My sensible reader, now her hands that was shaking reaching out to that bowl of opium. Urge by overflowing love, I pushed the bowl so she could take it. For that she gave me another smile, that made two dimples appeared on her cheeks, and I passionately stroke those dimples like I wanted to nibble it.

Under the light of the oil lamp, we started to smoke that opium with the pipes. I heard that she also started to cough, then I caress her hair to make those cough go away. For a while those cough was gone and we started to smoke opium again. In other platforms, people also laid their back stretching their feet, some of them talked, others played with those nasty women.

Half a slept this heart lover laid again her head on my lap. Like she used to be, she would tell me things back and forward, then when she was exhausted she would asked the book that she always kept between her arm and side like a baby titled Baboe Dalima. Because, “I wanted to be like those Dutch women,” she said.

We laughed because that book told about this opium houses, and my reader, it was told that we are people with bad manners and dirty, lazy and morally damage also. Maybe, Mr. Perelaer forgotten, those opium houses build as it was so people who feel that they are good people not to go near to those houses, so they also does not know what actually happen inside there.

My sensible reader, we came to the opium house with 20 cents of provision only. Many people had to work to their bones in the cane fields to earn a couple of tents cent. We were pretty lucky, there was a little inheritance from a relative that died suddenly a short time ago. But, my reader, with that 20 cents we had only a few opium, only a couple roll of tike*. I just sold our antic wardrobe so we could have opium that was better quality.

And from that antic wardrobe we only got a small tip of opium, the rest of course for that owner of opium house. A person that never show up even to see the house for a second, sitting relax in his nice house to received money that delivered by his male servants that guard those opium houses. But my reader, that money not all went into his pocket, because he also had to paid opium tax to the government. Not a small amount of money. He also had to pay to buy new opium, to whom else, also the government. So my sensible reader, the money from that antic wardrobe, most of it goes to the house of the governor in Buitenzorg. They can say that the opium houses are having no good, but they would stay silent because they made a lot of money for those big pockets.