by Jill Ciment
There were about two hundred of them standing on the beach, small-boned people with burnt sienna skin and elaborate hairdos. The men wore foot-long penis gourds, the women straw skirts, the children nothing. Our steamship’s engines must have awakened them at dawn; its enormous hull must have blotted out their sunrise.
Our arrogance must have astonished them.
We didn’t ask permission to enter their fishing waters and land a skiff. We didn’t acknowledge their chief before sloshing onto their beach and wringing out our sodden pant cuffs and sarong.
The two sailors who had motored us ashore started tossing our gear up onto the beach, and we didn’t so much as stop them and face our hosts and ask if these intrusions were wanted, let alone bearable. We were like houseguests who not only show up uninvited but also arrive with mounds of luggage for an indefinite stay: air mattresses, pup tent, Primus stove, hurricane lamps, portable tub, folding easel, and steamer trunks filled with axes and costume jewelry.
The islanders should have done to us what their ancestors did to castaways and beachcombers—club us unconscious, cut us into small pieces, and boil us with sweet potatoes. Instead, they watched with mounting amazement as the two sailors pushed off in the skiff, leaving them with the enormous blond hermaphrodite and his cotton-clad ghost companion. Decorously, they averted their eyes from ours: to stare was to be the aggressor.
But we stared. We’d just spotted their tattoos—a turtle with human hands, stick figures in coitus, in prayer, in battle, an ark, a cockatoo, a praying mantis, a bolt of lightning, and abstractions that looked as if ants had been dipped in ink and let loose upon the body.
The colors were indigo, cinnabar, viridian, and lampblack. No body part was exempt—not earlobes or throats or fingers or toes, not even lips.
The islanders stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the pink sand. When one of them shifted a foot, or turned his head, or twisted in any way, the effect was that of a great tapestry billowing.
I tried to catch Philip’s eye, but he was already moving toward them. He had to hoist up the wet hem of his sarong so that he could walk without tripping.
The women burst into a salvo of giggles.
Philip laughed at himself, too, a little too exuberantly. “I was told you speak English,” he said, smiling. But I could hear the tremor in his voice. Philip wasn’t frightened of these people. He was never frightened of the alien, the strange, the beautiful. No, Philip was terrified that if he didn’t succeed here, while there might be other islands, other opportunities for collecting, this particular failure would leech away his confidence, and then it wouldn’t matter where we went.
Not a soul responded.
He steeled himself and marshaled on. “Thank you for allowing us to visit your beautiful island. My name is Philip, and this is my wife Sara. We have come a very long way because your mask makers are great, great artists, and we believe the world should know this and honor you because of it. We are artists ourselves, and if you will allow us, we would be grateful to witness your master carvers at work and to offer them, and you and your chiefs, gifts in exchange for their creations. Sara, why don’t you show them our gifts.”
I opened the steamer trunk and held up a steel ax and a string of plastic pearls. I would have offered them the cotton clothes off my back if they would only trade their masks with him.
No one said anything. They didn’t even whisper among themselves.
Finally, an old woman broke ranks and stepped forward. By her regal manner, she was obviously of high rank. Her hair was teased into a voluminous cone and adorned with seashells. Her face was tattooed from ear to ear: I couldn’t quite read her expression. Threatening? Curious? Walking right up to us, she folded her arms over her large flat breasts and studied Philip, me, the ax, the gaudy necklace, our gear, then Philip again. She had to crane her neck skyward to meet his eye: she was shorter than I was. Finally, she turned her back on us and walked away, motioning the others to follow.
Some of the younger men and women wanted to come over and see what else was in our trunk, but they obeyed the old woman, dispersing into the forest. It was like watching a great tapestry being torn apart and the tatters coming to life.
The islanders had designed themselves so that the sum of their creation was always greater than its parts. An individual’s tattoos were considered by the tribe to be no more meaningful than a word taken out of context.
This is why, when viewed singularly, as I am viewed these days, my tattoos don’t seem nearly as profound as I claim them to be. To the squeamish who can’t quite bear to look at me, I’m a mere curiosity; to those who do look, really look, I must seem the most isolated of souls.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Philip started heaving our provisions away from the oncoming tide before everything got soaked and ruined, while I sat down uselessly in the sand. I’d been given hints of grandeur in the past—the New York skyline at sunset, pinwheels of luminosity cast by a chandelier—but nothing had prepared me for this. We were in the bowl of a vast natural amphitheater. The mountains ascended around us in ancient, dripping green terraces. Their pinnacles were viridescent. Vapors wafted out of the foliage. Clouds were born on the cliffs. Everywhere, lace-thin waterfalls plunged into their own rainbows.
I was by the water’s edge. The sand was the consistency of talcum powder. A red bird, sporting a sapphire crown as elaborate as a French wig, landed on a conch shell by my foot. Two periscope eyes popped out from the shell’s hole. The sea was azure in the shallows, red-violet over the sea grass, milky blue in the sandbars. Where the orange and purple reef touched the open sea, cobalt swells exploded into white mist.
I simply assumed that all this beauty had inspired the tattoos.
Isn’t that the epitome of arrogance? Five minutes in the company of nature’s rapture, and I presumed I understood.
I looked around at Philip, who was hauling the last of our trunks away from the surf.
“Do you think they’re coming back to eat us?” I asked.
“They’re Christians. Methodists.”
“Tattooed Methodists?”
He came over and collapsed beside me on the sand. His face and chest were dripping. He used the hem of his sarong to mop them up. For a couple of minutes, we just gawked at all this splendor. Then Philip turned and stared at the jungle.
“They were living art, weren’t they, Sara?”
I wanted to pitch our tent by the sheltered rocks, but Philip insisted we make camp on the beach, fully exposed to the wind and the sun. When I questioned his judgment, he said we needed to be where the villagers could see us at all times, so that they might learn to trust us. Philip unpacked the tent while I tried to make sense of the instructions that came with it. Now and again, we could hear the village dogs barking just within the thicket of jungle, but when I turned to look, all I could see was a blockade of greenery.
I had slept outdoors only once before in my life, at a Zionist camp in the Catskills. I had kept as close to the fire as possible without incinerating myself and joined my sweet young comrades in songs about how our people would one day return to the merciless wilderness and transform it into an Eden.
Philip and I lit a fire. All the books had said to light a fire.
It was ninety degrees under the palms.
We opened a can of peaches and a tin of mackerel for supper. We ate in silent edginess, alert to every cracking branch and hooting creature. Now and then, voices or a high note of laughter was borne on the wind, but we couldn’t gauge how far the sounds had traveled.
The light began tapering. A fan of mauve opened on a dissolving horizon. Silver-tooled clouds hung motionless in pink and gold space. The sun slipped behind a scaffolding of burnt-scarlet vapor, then plunged into the gilded sea. The planets came out one by one in the blue-violet sky. Then, without transition, the fabric of the night was dusted with stars.
“Das es Gan Eden?” I asked Philip in Yiddish.
But Philip was asleep.
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nbsp; The next morning, Philip ornamented a dwarf palm near camp with a glinting display of axes and jewelry. He twirled one of the dangling pendants so that its cut glass caught the morning light and spun in its own prism.
“Has anyone been here?” I asked, crawling free of the tent’s flaps.
Philip looked up from the mesmerizing shimmer. His face was dripping, and it wasn’t even eight in the morning. “Should I put out more axes? I need to hold something back to bargain with later. What do you think of the display? Do you think it’s too much?”
I foolishly said, “It’s as enticing as a Macy’s spring sale.”
He didn’t ask my opinion again.
He opened his knapsack and took out an oversize art book, flipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for. He walked back to the dwarf palm and angled the open tome against the trunk, amid the axes. Page right showed Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, page left an array of Oceanic and African masks from which the ladies’ visages had been so obviously inspired.
Blotting up his brow with the crook of his damp arm, he sat down a few feet away from me and opened two warm beers and a tin of biscuits for breakfast.
“I think the Picasso’s a brilliant touch. I’m not just saying that,” I said.
He ate without taking his eyes off the dwarf palm.
Not a soul came.
The sun went up and down in the cloudless sky. The rollers, pounding against the distant reef, were marbled with orange phosphorescence. The only light was a flaring green disk on the vanishing horizon. After dusk, when the mosquitoes came out, I crawled back into the tent and shrouded myself in netting, but Philip just batted away the bugs and stood by the blackening sea. Finally, it became too dark to see my own hand. I couldn’t find the flashlight. I shut my eyes and tried to will myself to sleep. Sometime before I dozed off, I heard the tent flap open, felt the brush of netting as Philip crawled inside. He lay down by my side. Sweat pooled where our skin touched. “Please pray this works, Sara.”
On the second morning, our only visitors were crabs and gulls. Just as panic began to set in, just as Philip and I finished our twentieth cigarette of the morning when we’d rationed ourselves two, an old man—sixty? seventy? one hundred?—walked into our camp trailed by a young woman in a shaggy straw skirt. Her bare breasts were so huge and projectile, they came at us like hurled footballs. The old man wore only a carapace of tattoos and an ornamented string around his waist, tied to his foreskin, pulling his penis upright.
Philip and I were under the tent’s canopy, sorting through our provisions for breakfast.
The old man ambled over and squatted between us. He placed his hand on Philip’s chest, then insisted that Philip do likewise. When he was sure that Philip had felt his heart beat, he gestured to the bright gold Del Monte can in Philip’s other hand. The label showed a halved peach as idyllically rendered as any vegetation engraved on the old man’s skin.
Philip pantomimed eating from the can with his fingers, then reached for his camp knife, punctured the seal, sawed open the lid, and placed the tin in the tattooed hands.
The old man examined the peaches drowning in the thick gold syrup. He lifted the can, sniffed it, fished out a wedge, closed his eyes (even his eyelids were tattooed) and bit into it. A moment later, he shook his head in wonder.
“This exceptional, most exceptional,” he said.
“It’s called a cling peach in heavy syrup,” Philip explained. “Would you like to try a different fruit?”
“Yes, please.”
Philip opened a can of pears and set them in front of our guest.
Dipping his hand into the syrup (even the webbing between his fingers was tattooed), the old man plucked out a slice, tilted back his head, and lowered the milky green sliver into his mouth (even the underside of his throat was tattooed). Again, he was taken aback by delight.
“Equally exceptional.”
“Your English is very good,” I said.
“I was a Christian schoolboy, sir.”
The Ta’un’uuan pronunciation of English is impossible to replicate. Pages would be overrun with hyphens and apostrophes, yet they would no more reproduce the old man’s inflections than when my own East Side accent has been reduced to “Waddayuh wan?” The islanders hold words in their throats for as long as they can before allowing each syllable to issue forth in piping highs and crackling lows, like the last throes of a gospel hymn played on a scratchy gramophone.
The young woman stood a few feet behind us, head lowered, breasts up, watching everything from an oblique angle. Philip motioned for her to join us, but she covered her face with her hands and wouldn’t budge.
She mumbled something into her palms.
The old man translated, “My daughter’s daughter very much curious: ‘What island you belong?’ ”
“The island of Manhattan,” Philip said, turning to face the young woman.
She lowered her hands slightly, revealing a canny, infectious, nervy gaze, and emitted another sequence of muffled breaths.
“My daughter’s daughter very much curious: ‘What dances belong on the island of Manhattan?’ ”
For a moment, Philip looked as puzzled as he was charmed. He rose to his feet, rehitched his sarong, and bowed rakishly to the young lady. “Would you care to dance?”
The girl shyly looked down.
He offered her his hand. “Men and women always dance together on the island of Manhattan,” he explained.
The girl’s eyes lifted in marvel, but she shook her head no.
I got to my feet and snatched the hand.
“Philip,” I said.
“Sara,” he said.
He jerked me to his chest, clasped the small of my back in one hand, my wrist in the other, and wielded me across the sand in a tango.
The old man watched in drop-jawed surprise, then exploded into giggles, which he politely tried to stifle by slapping his hand over his mouth.
Quickening our pace, Philip and I segued into the Lindy, the Charleston, then something vaguely resembling Isadora Duncan’s gazelle leaps, before collapsing on the sand, parched and panting.
The old man, having given up trying to suppress his shrieks of laughter, began whistling and clapping in what is evidently the universal display of jubilation.
His granddaughter stood silently behind him, watching Philip with brazen inquisitiveness, though her hands continued to veil her face. She leaned over and whispered to her grandfather in their breathy language, letting out a slow exhalation of steady puffs, the sounds I make, to my own ears at least, when blowing smoke rings.
“My daughter’s daughter say she must hear ‘what songs belong on the island of Manhattan.’ ”
Philip smiled at the girl and said, “Give me a second to catch my breath.” He wiped away the sweat stinging his eyes, then rose to his feet and faced his audience. He took on the inflated, heroic stance of an Irish tenor.
The pose alone was enough to make the old man applaud.
Philip cleared his throat and sang:
Arise, you prisoners of starvation!
Arise, you criminals of want.
For justice thunders condemnation.
A better world’s in birth.
No more tradition’s chains shall bind us.
Arise, you slaves, no more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundations.
We have been naught, we shall be all.
’Tis the final conflict:
Let each stand in his place.
The international working class
Shall be the human race.
Philip took a full bow.
The old man brought his hands together in a single, ear-splitting clap. His black eyes, two wet stones, gleamed at Philip through the thicket of his facial tattoos. “Was your song a prayer?” he asked at last.
“In a manner of speaking,” Philip said. “It’s a prayer for some of us.”
“On the island of Manhattan?”
“Yes. And other places. Many, many other places.”
The girl blew into her grandfather’s ear.
“My daughter’s daughter say she very much want to sing for you now.”
The girl let her hands slide down her face. A tiny, unfinished tattoo, her only one, flowered on the pink ledge of her bottom lip. She threw back her head, Al Jolson–style, and let loose a deep, rattling, unbroken wail. The song was plainly reverent, that much I could tell, though it hardly resembled an ethereal Christian hymn or an earthy cantor’s cry. Her song sounded subterranean, cavernous, as if the island were hollow, and all its gases, the very air that allowed it to stay afloat, were escaping through her lips.
The old man stood and walked over to the shady spot where Philip had sung. Spreading out his thin arms, eagle-fashion, then drawing up one bony leg, flamingo-style, he struck a pose. He remained balanced on one leg, without so much as swaying, for as long as it took his granddaughter to empty her lungs.
Then he began to dance, though dance doesn’t exactly define it: he choreographed his tattoos. He flexed his pectorals and a shark lurched. He tensed his shoulder and a tuna jumped. He hardened his biceps and a blowfish puffed up. He tightened his other arm and a stick figure grew pregnant. He worked the muscles in his abdomen, buttocks, and thighs until all the creatures on his flesh either pounced or bolted.
When he’d run through his menagerie, he struck another pose, hunched over and reptilian. He held it until his granddaughter finished singing. Then he opened his mouth, as wide as it would go, and slowly unfurled his tongue.
The tip was as grooved and inked as a totem pole.
Philip clapped to beat the band, but I winced, then looked away.
The old man saw me wince and look away. I gave a Bronx whistle and started applauding, but it was too late. When I next caught his eye, there was a baffled, hurt cast in his gaze.
Of course, now my own tongue is tattooed. It’s the last procedure I had done to me before Life “discovered” me. My grand finale, perhaps even my masterpiece, though what can “masterpiece” mean when the work of art is anything but immortal? Besides, don’t all old artists need to believe that their final work is their finest hour?