I first became familiar with Marquel Garciez when his penis broke the soil of the Tomangtol cemetery. At the time I was a young reporter with the Jakarta Century Newspaper group, mostly covering births, deaths and weddings. This was not such a boring job as it may sound. I was invited to the most important events. I was showered with gifts. The rich and famous want to be remembered well, so they look after the local obit writer. And, foremost nowadays in my trips down memory boulevard, I was one of the few there when they dug up Marquel Garciez.
The mourners of the recently deceased Alejandro Macondo discovered the tip of the penis pushing through the hard earth when one of their members tripped over it. Two inches of cock pushed through the ground, obscenely daring the world to try to dislodge it. Tentative kicks had no effect on the penis's bearing, so the party of mourners informed the church of its latest unwelcome addition. Initial investigations into the owner of the organ remained surprisingly unresolved, and after a foot and a half of the ground had been scrabbled out by hand the decision was taken to organise an excavation. Somebody involved with the dig took it upon themselves to call the paper, and since I had nothing better to do that day and it was vaguely connected with deaths I drew the short straw and went to Tomangtol with pen and pad.
The story never made the cut in the end. My editor ruled it unseemly and obscene. I argued with him over his decision for longer than was necessary or expected, but he reminded me of my place in the company and the issue was dropped. 'Besides,' he said, 'nobody would ever believe it anyway.' One hundred lonely years after death the penis of Marquel Garciez had grown to the extraordinary length of seven feet two inches. It was those two inches that had tripped up a member of the Macondo party. The rigid cock had made a splintered hole in the cheap wood of Mister Garciez's coffin before rising through the tangled roots and hardened ground to reach the light of day. Though age and hardships had done his penis no favours it was still a magnificent thing to behold, and difficult to forget.
I was with the paper for score more years, until my first novel was accepted and published by Colonel Books. The unexpected popularity of that novel, and the resulting fame thrust upon me, made it impractical for me to continue my job with Century, and I left. That itself was fifty years ago. I'm blind now, and I have little time left, but before I pass this mortal coil I have resolved to discover and to make known the story of Marquel Garciez, the owner in death of the world's finest cock.
I have a young man, a queer, who reads me my mail and performs errands for me. He refuses to accept payment – he says it gives him immense pleasure to serve Indonesia's greatest novelist. I am too vain to allow flattery like this to escape my clutches, and so I keep the man around. I have asked him to be my eyes, to delve into the world of Garciez so that I may bring him to life. He attacks his task with gusto, but he has none of the instincts of the investigative journalist, and none of the passion of the author, and so our progress is slow.
This is what we know so far:
Garciez was born, like myself, in Tanjeng Duren. His mother was a whore, and his father could be any one of a thousand men. Garciez had a fine Western nose, so his father was most likely a Dutch man. Perhaps a government official, or a soldier. Until he reaches the age of fourteen we have found no more about Marquel's life. At that age he married a Chinese woman, aged thirty. Sometimes she is called Marysia, and sometimes Icha. Unless she is two women. We have the remains of her correspondence with a man in Sumatra. The Sumatran man appears to be her lover, but Garciez is the father of her child. I find the details fascinating, and only wish that I could read her words myself. My man has no tongue for telling stories, and I am left to piece the pictures together alone. It's hard going, and makes me feel old.
Six months after they are married the child dies. Marysia writes in her diary that 'Marquel beat me with his cock until I bled from my eyes, nose and mouth.' She leaves him by horse, and escapes to better dreams in distant lands. I'm enthralled by the beating, and I ask for a whore so that I may too try such a thing, but my own penis is small and weak, and does little damage to the whore, who tires quickly of the game.
We hear from a popular song of the time of a man with a twelve inch penis who impregnated the queen from thirty feet away. He demands her hand in marriage, and she orders him killed. The words don't translate so well into English, but the song makes me laugh. Before he dies he vows to return and have revenge. At this point several different versions of the song exist, but one, the dirtiest one, has his penis growing after his death until it finds the queen and chokes her by the neck.
I can't help thinking that the hero of this song must be none other than my own underground swords man. The queer finds my conviction unsettling. 'It's just a funny song,' he tells me. 'Hardly even that funny.' But I have never trusted the sense of humour or the eye for the truth of a homosexual who cannot tell a story.
There the trail goes dead. Perhaps I shall make up the rest. I think my own penis is growing longer too.
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