by Jill Ciment
A tattoo on the tongue is extremely rare and prestigious. It is customarily reserved for the very old and the very devout. It requires a herculean effort on the part of both the artist and his human subject. The tongue’s texture alone makes the work blindingly exacting, and since the organ itself is but a clump of nerves, engraving it is a form of slow torture.
In the Ta’un’uuan language, the word “tongue” is as weighted with meaning as the word “heart” is in English. A tongue can lust, ache, break. One can be “heavy-tongued,” “hard-tongued,” or “tongue-sick.” One can even make love with “half a tongue.”
When you examine mine, you’ll find no identifiable icons, no cargo ships, or death masks of Philip; just a galaxy of specks. Had I engraved a recognizable image on my tongue, it would have been an act of betrayal to the islanders: they believe an image on the tongue alters the truth of every word one speaks. The tongue, after all, is what shapes the song.
CHAPTER NINE
he old man told us his name. It sounded, to my ears, like a measure of music played backward. When Philip tried to pronounce it, it came out as gibberish a madman might utter. The old man finally suggested we call him by his boyhood Christian name, Ishmael, and we call his granddaughter, Ishmael’s daughter’s daughter.
Philip offered our guests another round of canned fruit, then sat down across from Ishmael and asked if he knew any master carvers who might be willing to sell us their creations. Philip might as well have asked him if he knew where we could buy yesterday’s sunset.
Ishmael’s brows, a pair of tattooed wings, rose as if to take flight.
Philip put it a different way. Did Ishmael know any carvers who wanted a new ax in exchange for a mask that was no longer of value?
Ishmael turned his eyes to Philip’s display. The palm was ripe with steel and glass fruit. The art book leaned against the trunk. Ignoring the pendants and hatchets, Ishmael picked up the book, glanced at the naked mademoiselles from Avignon, then closely, painstakingly examined the reproduction of his ancestors’ skull masks. He held the page inches from his face. He grazed his finger lightly over the illusion, then quickly flipped the page over to see if he could find the masks’ back sides. An altogether different sculpture, Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, greeted him. He shook his head in wonder and bewilderment, then carefully set the book down—facedown—and began perusing our camp, trailed by his granddaughter. Whispering among themselves, they took in our waterproof tent, our air mattresses, our canvas bathtub, our coffeepot, and our stockpiles of tinned provisions, enough to feed a brigade for a month.
“What purpose do my masks serve you?” he finally asked.
“We’re going to take them across the ocean, two oceans,” Philip added.
“Two oceans?”
“Yes, to a museum, a grand house where our people gather to worship beauty. Your carvers’ masks will have an honored place in this house, a room of their own, and their names will be written on the wall beside their creations. If you have carvings to trade, Ishmael, your name will be written there, too, so that the whole world will know who you are.”
Ishmael seemed beguiled by the concept, though I couldn’t tell if his enchantment was due to his chance for fame or because he’d just been informed there was another ocean in the world.
Hunkering down again, he told Philip that he was a master carver himself, that he worked not just on wood and yams, but on human bodies. He motioned for his granddaughter to sit beside him, then gently pulled down her lower lip to reveal for us the full mastery of his skills: the tattoo, a Kandinsky abstraction, extended all the way down to her pink gums. He said he had masks and spirit poles for trade, but, “most unfortunately,” he already owned three metal axes, he had no use for more, and his wives preferred shell necklaces over glass ones.
He started to rise, as did his granddaughter, in a badly staged pantomime of leaving.
“Ishmael,” Philip said, “I find it hard to believe that you and your granddaughter see nothing whatsoever in our entire camp that you don’t want or need.”
The old man settled down again and rattled off, like a housewife ticking off a grocery list, precisely what he and his granddaughter wanted: three cans of cling peaches, three jars of apricots, six tins of mackerel, the box of matches sitting on our stovetop, and the twenty sticks of tobacco jutting out of Philip’s shirt pocket.
Philip handed over our pack of Chesterfields.
“We need also the cotton clothes when you leave,” Ishmael added. He fitted the cigarettes painstakingly under his string belt so that the twine didn’t tug too much on his tethered penis, then motioned for Philip and me to follow him and his granddaughter into the jungle.
Everything was oversized, sticky, swarming. The ground was freakishly alive. Every footfall crushed something mortal. Up close, the palm trunks were as hairy as apes. Prickly vines coiled around every root, strangled every sapling. Red lichen bloomed on the wet stones. Beetles as big as dessert plates scurried by. Above, in the undulating canopy, cockatoos honked, trilled, whistled, and shrieked.
Now and then, I could see a cluster of huts, haystacks on stilts, in an open field of grass.
Ishmael steered us away from the village and toward a swamp thick with vermilion butterflies. The insects alighted on our brows and backs, lips and throats, greedily siphoning up our perspiration through their hollow proboscises.
The swamp smelled like boiled eggs and was the color of motor oil. In the middle of its black surface, floating among the sago stumps, was a tree-trunk carving, a life-sized male figure, attached to the shoulders of a life-sized female figure, who in turn became a canoe prow. The canoe was captained by a wooden praying mantis, or a human praying; I couldn’t tell which.
Both figures were roughly chiseled except for their genitalia, which were impeccably crafted and painted red. Ishmael had accorded these organs the same attention to detail that, say, Vermeer gave the human face.
“Is this the carving you want us to have?” Philip asked. He was trying to contain his excitement: the piece was exquisite.
“Yes,” Ishmael said. He picked up a branch and pushed aside the algae clogging the bank to reveal a whole watery cemetery of masks and figurines half-buried in the silt.
“Are all these for trade?”
“Yes,” Ishmael said.
“May I go and pick a few out?”
“Yes.”
Philip gathered up his sarong, then gingerly waded up to his thighs in the bog.
“Just watch out for snakes,” I said.
Keeping his chin well above the black water, Philip knelt down and blindly groped for whatever he could reach. He dragged out four masks and a tiny wooden couple locked in coitus. He peeled off his wet shirt, then lay the pieces out in the sunlight to dry. Their wood was sodden, but not to the point of rot: the pieces must have been sealed with resin.
“Which is your favorite, Ishmael?” I asked. “Which carving do you like best?”
Ishmael squatted down to survey his old pieces—the boar mask with spiral tusks, the one with a steel nail coiffure, the “early Picasso.” He touched each one as lightly as you would the cheek of someone sleeping. Finally, he smiled and pointed to the carving still adrift in the swamp.
“It would have been my choice, too,” Philip said.
“And which carving do you like least?” I asked.
Ishmael’s smile imploded: either he didn’t understand my question, or else he understood it only too well.
“Ishmael,” I pressed on, “which one do you think is less”— I groped for the mot juste—“worthy than the others?”
Ishmael knelt over his carvings and cupped his ear against their wood. He wore the same expression of clinical concentration that a doctor does when listening for a heartbeat. When he finally finished with the last one, he looked up at me, stricken. “Must I say?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” Philip said, shooting me a look of contempt, though I knew that he, too, couldn’t tel
l if Ishmael’s performance was authentic or part of the negotiations.
Of course, had I been a little less suspicious and a little more observant, I would have seen that by taking the pulse of the wood, Ishmael was only trying to ascertain from his art what I have tried to ascertain from mine: is there any life inside?
A raindrop as solid as a marble struck my shoulder, then another crashed on Ishmael’s head. We both looked up. The sun was still out, but the thrum of rain was advancing across the treetops. Ishmael’s granddaughter picked up a fallen palm frond and quickly held it up above her grandfather’s head, while Philip and I dashed for the canopy.
Moments later, water began pouring through the leaves and branches.
Ishmael drew his shivering granddaughter under the leaf umbrella, and without so much as a word or a wave goodbye to us, they started hurrying down the path toward their village.
“Ishmael,” Philip shouted after him, “are you coming back to camp later?”
“Yes, and my daughter’s daughter will come pick up our cling peaches.”
CHAPTER TEN
e waited inside the pup tent all afternoon for Ishmael and his granddaughter to return, but the storm only grew more fierce. Around three, Philip made a dash for the swamp anyhow, and hauled back two of the masks. Blotting them off with our only blanket, he examined them in the beam of his flashlight. “These are his discards, Sara, what he tossed in the swamp. My God, either one of them will justify Richter’s investment in me. Don’t you think?”
By nightfall, it was blowing and raining with the force of a fire hose. I couldn’t tell if we were in any danger, or if this was just a typical squall in the South Seas. For New Yorkers like ourselves, weather had always been an abstraction: a storm was a spectacle witnessed through window glass; rain was what you experienced while folding your umbrella to duck into a taxi.
All I knew about being caught in a gale was a couple of edicts recollected from my Zionist camp days: Do not touch your tent’s skin, or it will commence leaking. Do not wear your steel wristwatch; steel attracts lightning.
Philip and I lay huddled together in the center of the tent, our wrists bare, listening with mounting panic to the pandemonium outside. Coconuts crashed all around us. Waves pummeled the shore. Thunder rolled across the water. Palms creaked and banged. And always, always, there was the wind, as shrill and deafening as the el train hurtling overhead.
Suddenly, a corner of our tent tore loose and began snapping violently back and forth. Philip tried to grab hold of it, but the wind was too strong.
Then, one by one, the grommets ripped open, and the cables came loose. They began flogging the canvas. Next, the poles pulled free of the wet sand, and the pegs gave way. During one particularly fearsome gust, the whole tarpaulin popped open like a sail and took off into the night sky, pulling the poles with it. The pegs hurled back and forth on the snapping cables, like a cat-o’-nine-tails.
Philip and I remained supine on the air mattresses, the rain pelting our faces: we were crystallized in shock. The sensation was somewhere between losing your umbrella to a sudden gust and losing your roof to a tornado.
Philip raised his head to assess our damage, but the blowing sand forced his eyes shut.
“We have to get off this beach, we have to find shelter,” he shouted. He rolled over and pushed himself up against the hurling debris, shielding his eyes with one hand while helping me up with the other.
I put my jacket over my head and tried to take our bearings. The surf was to our left, the knocking palms to our right. The wind was blowing in the direction of the village.
We ran for the village.
If the jungle had unnerved us by day, it horrified us in the pitch-black tempest. Wet fronds slapped our faces. We stumbled into knee-deep potholes filled with grasping mud. I tore my ankles on firethorns, my soles on limestone rock pinnacles.
At one point, I simply knelt down in the muck and begged Philip to give up, too, and die with me here, now.
That’s when a blue sphere of lightning, no bigger than a basketball, shot out of the clouds and landed in the jungle about a hundred yards away. Every palm trunk, every individual hair on every palm trunk, the pores in Philip’s blanched face, the stilt huts on the far side of the X-rayed trees, were all scored on my retinas. I shut my eyes in fear of going blind. The rumble of thunder that followed fractured over my cranium, as rushing water does over a rock.
We hurried toward the closest hut. Aside from the faint beacon of its cooking fire, we couldn’t see anything, not even the tree-trunk ladder. I stumbled into it as one does an outstretched leg in a dark theater aisle.
The trunk was wet, the rungs slippery.
“I don’t think I can climb it,” I said.
“For God’s sake, Sara, just go. I’ll be right behind you.”
He gave me a boost, and I clung and scraped my way up. I had no prior experience: East Side children never learn to climb trees. When I reached what I prayed was the top rung, Philip gave me a final heave, and I was at their front door.
All eyes were fixed on me as I crawled through the low archway into the smoky straw parlor. The occupants—a teenage boy with a harelip, a toddler, a mother and infant, and two young girls—sat huddled around a large stone bowl of flaring embers. The fire illuminated their faces from below, jack-o’lantern–fashion.
“We lost our tent: it just blew away,” I explained. “We’re very cold.” I hugged myself to illustrate just how cold we were. “And we were almost struck by lightning. Please, may we stay?”
Philip crawled in after me. Even on his hands and knees, he crowded the already packed space with his sheer size—the whole house wasn’t much bigger than a tenement parlor.
“We’re friends of Ishmael’s,” Philip said. “Do you know him?”
Nobody appeared to recognize his Christian name, or if they did, no one said.
Another ball of lightning started its descent. Its trajectory was so brilliant and intense, it flashed through the bamboo walls and reversed the firelight. The red coals became dull gray, while the black shadows under our hostess’s eyes turned incandescent.
Judging by the abrupt thunder, the fireball must have landed nearby.
The toddler put his hands over his ears and began whimpering. Over the diminishing booms, I thought I heard shouting outside. The young mother must have heard it, too. She handed her infant to one of the young girls, then stepped over Philip’s outstretched leg and stuck her head out the door. When she drew it back inside, her hair was dripping and her face looked shocked.
Everyone heard the next scream. Thunder couldn’t muffle it. Philip stood up. He almost punctured the low roof with his head. “Stay put. I’ll be right back,” he told me.
“I’m coming, too. Don’t leave me here alone,” I said.
The rain had turned to drizzle. The wind had died down to sporadic gusts. A branch of lightning struck the top of the mountains, but the thunder sounded faint. In the direction where the shouting had been, huts stood peacefully in shrouds of mist, save one: its roof was sparking, the fireball having been blown through its thatch.
Philip slid down the ladder, while I lowered my foot into the wet night, groping for a rung. I could smell fumes: a blend of metallic electricity, rank sulfur, and scorched straw. I could hear the sharp clang of metal striking metal. An iron church bell rung to summon help?
When I finally reached Philip’s side, he was standing in front of the smoking hut along with a half-dozen other men. I recognized Ishmael. He kept his hand mashed over his mouth as he tried to fathom what had happened. When he noticed our runaway tent wrapped around the hut’s roof, he turned his eyes on Philip and me. During the storm, our tent had evidently flown over the treetops, parachuted into the village, then jackknifed around the hut, catching on the eaves. It now hung in tatters, its cables clanging, a tent pole impaled in the scorched roof beside the smoking hole.
Philip and I were transfixed at the steel pole.
&nbs
p; Ishmael hurried up the ladder, waving his arms to bat away the smoke. Three other men followed. When they entered the hut, we heard them choking. When they exited it, they couldn’t stop choking.
The first body they lowered onto the ground looked as if it had been fabricated out of chalk. It even came apart like chalk. It left marks on the ladder.
The next body was smaller and obviously a woman’s. I recognized the young breasts. From the throat up, the skin was covered in white ash. The tattooed bottom lip looked dusted with flour.
Ishmael sank onto his knees and pressed his brow against his granddaughter’s, rolling his head from side to side. When he finally sat up, his face was covered in ash, too.
“I’m scared, Philip,” I whispered. “I think we should leave.”
“And go where?”
Two more bodies were pulled out of the smoke—a small boy’s and a large dog’s.
Philip took off his shirt to cover the boy’s body, but Ishmael snapped the shirt out of Philip’s hands and hurled it into the night. Ishmael then sank onto his haunches and locked his hands between his thin thighs.
“Ishmael,” Philip said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Ishmael slowly turned around and stared at Philip. “Why did you come to my island?”
“We only came because we so admired your carvings.”
Ishmael jerked his head sharply, as if to clear his ears of rainwater. “Because of my carvings?”
He opened his mouth again, then abruptly shut it and let his head fall forward until his chin scraped his chest. The rain varnished his back and shoulders until each tattoo shone with nuance and clarity.
What did grief look like under the splendor of these designs?
It looked exactly like grief.
The villagers came out of their huts and stood over the bodies. One tiny boy kept rubbing his eyes with his fists as if to screw them back into focus.
The Ta’un’uuans don’t believe in acts of God. The idea that their deities would randomly and senselessly annihilate the innocent is inconceivable to them. Death is never random to the islander because it’s never natural—lightning, fire, tidal waves, undertows, fevers, dysentery, even death by old age— none of it is natural. Death is always caused by your enemy, and if your enemy can’t be seen or felt, then by a more insidious agent: your enemy’s sorcery.