“Look,” Celine said, pointing high toward one of the towering cliffs. “You see the statue? It is of the Virgin Mary. So you see, we are very civilized now.”
“Ha,” I said. “Do you know who Robert Louis Stevenson is?”
“Non,” she replied.
“Well, he visited your island back in 1889, and he too noticed the statue of the Virgin on the mount. Do you know how he described it? ‘A poor lost doll, forgotten there by a giant child.’”
“Oui.” She laughed. “She is a lost doll.”
“And do you know what else he thought? He said that eating a man, c’est pas un problème, it’s how you treat him while he lives that matters.”
“C’est vrai. I like your Robert Louis Stevenson.”
And now we looked out to the ocean, which had calmed and was smooth, and there we could see the great shell of a green turtle, swimming contentedly beyond the break zone.
“The turtle is very special in our culture,” Celine observed, as we watched it swim languidly by. I liked turtles. No, really, I mean that. Like penguins, they are clumsy and comic on land. In the water, they are like thespians on the stage, acrobatic and confident. You think they’d choose one or the other—land or sea—but they live betwixt and between, voyagers among worlds. They are earthbound astronauts. “We believe turtles travel freely between our world and the spirit world. It is a sacred creature.”
“So the Marquesans wouldn’t eat a turtle, right?”
“Only on special occasions. Like the man.”
Chapter Twelve
One of the really strange things that happens to you when you spend a significant amount of time in the Marquesas is this irresistible impulse to get a tattoo. It must be something in the air. Until now, I’d managed to lead an ink-free life, which is remarkable really. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it, but I’ve been known to have a drink or twenty, and not once did I feel any compulsion to have anyone stick a needle into my body and unload a syringe of ink. Not in my teens, or twenties, or thirties. And now here I was, sober, over the age of forty, feeling the need to be stained for life. I can’t explain it. All I knew is that for the first time ever, I wanted a tat. Now. Here. A big one.
It’s unsurprising, really. Consider the early Westerners to wash upon these shores. When Krusenstern, the Russian explorer, arrived in the Marquesas in 1804, he was startled to discover the presence of one Jean-Baptiste Cabri, a Frenchman from Bordeaux, who had sailed with an English whaling vessel that wrecked, and as the apparent lone survivor, found his way to Nuku Hiva. He’d lived there for untold years by the time the Russian commander encountered him, so long, apparently, that he had all but forgotten his native language, and in the words of one historian, “had so much lost the manners and habits of civilized life, that little difference was to be discerned between him and the natives, with regard to his habits and mode of living.” Naturally, having assimilated: “His whole figure, not excepting his face was tattooed.” When finally he was rescued, he spent his remaining years being exhibited throughout Europe like a circus freak, a monkey in the cage.
Nowadays, of course, it’s rare to see anyone in the Pacific, long-term Westerners included, without a tattoo. And yet, despite having spent years on the islands myself, I’d never had any particular urge to use my body as a canvas, as a forum for self-expression, a means for conveying something essential about my character. It wasn’t the needles. I have no fear of them. I know; good call not trying heroin. Nor was it the pain. Throughout my childhood, rare was the year when I didn’t end up in an emergency room for stitches. I’ve fractured vertebrae, broken bones, dealt with concussions, shattered my feet in a fall, pinched a few nerves, torn some tendons, had a few teeth pulled, etc. etc. And never once did I finish a bottle of prescription pain meds. Weird that, but lucky. When it comes to catastrophes in my life, I’m focused.
Nor was I ever bothered by the permanence of a tattoo. These words, for instance, if you’re reading them, will be around forever. I’ve regretted a few sentences, but I can’t take them back. They’re out there, published somewhere and hovering in Internet-land. It’s something we all deal with now. Someone posts a picture of you upchucking on Bourbon Street, tags it, and there you go, a proud moment that for generations to come will be available for comment and celebration. “Wow, Grandpa, look, your puke is purple like my stuffed dinosaur.” It’s why I never understood the cult of futurology around the Internet. To me it seems like some great tool of archeology, every moment now frozen in the embers of time, an entire life embedded on planet Google. On this planet, you never escape high school.
No, what dissuaded me from ever getting a tattoo in the South Pacific was—how to say this politely?—Caucasians with tribal tattoos from the Pacific look like dweebs. Yeah, The Rock can get away with it. So too all those Samoan NFL football players. But have you ever seen an alabaster-skinned, long-haired, redheaded man with a beer belly in a shiny-white swimsuit with a full-body suit of Polynesian swirls and symbols? I have, and it gives me nightmares to this day. The dissonance was overwhelming. Or a twenty-three-year-old Canadian with traditional Maori facial tattoos? I’m not talking about a prison teardrop—and good luck getting a job with those things on your face—but the full monty, a face drenched green with curls and swooshes, like he’d had a violent encounter with a bucket of paint and lost? An ink-stained face on a crusty Marquesan seaman can look cool; on a hollow-chested white boy from the ’burbs and all I foresee is years of therapy.
And yet . . .
I saw a newspaper, one of the local French Polynesian papers, and I spent a while reading about François Hollande, the president of France, and his tax proposals, and then moved on to the Sports section—FC Lorient beat Rennes; Olympique de Marseille defeated OGC Nice; and shockingly Paris Saint-Germain lost to Toulouse FC. It still continued to baffle me, the Frenchness of the islands, the same white noise one would find in Provence. I spent a while casually perusing the paper, and then noticed the date.
Well, hey there. It was my sobriety anniversary. Exactly a year earlier, I’d found myself deposited curbside at rehab, where I had my photograph taken, signed some papers—and God knows what they were; if I ever have another child, I’m sorry, but it appears I may have sold you to an Albanian circus—checked in with the nurse’s station, where I was informed that 156/98 was not a particularly good number when it comes to blood pressure, that I was already in the throes of some nasty alcohol withdrawal symptoms, including a pulse rate that was boom-boom-booming at ninety-five beats a minute, and that it would soon get worse, potentially much worse. Thus the need for meds. I was shown to the detox room, which I shared with another alcoholic who snored like Thor with a bad cold, a shivering heroin addict, and a tweaked-out wild-eyed pill popper, and so began a week of hell, two of regret and befuddlement, followed by a week of sanity and health, which I very much hoped to continue, knowing right from the get-go that the odds were not good.
And now here I was, exactly a year later, on the far side of the world, still befuddled, somewhat sane, reasonably healthy I hoped, but at the very least alive, and I suddenly felt the need to commemorate the occasion. Typically, at meetings of like-minded souls, it’s done with cupcakes. There’s hugging and clapping and cheers and sweets. A year is a big deal. Of course, I can’t even begin to count all the times I’ve heard of people with three, seven, ten, even twenty years of sobriety going back out, only to return untold months or years later—if they’re lucky and don’t die—sheepishly, a little embarrassed, describing how that little glass of cabernet quickly descended into a gallon of vodka and a pint of NyQuil a day, but now, thanks to a six-month stint at the local Department of Corrections, they’ve dried out, and they’ve decided to come back in and take it one day at a time. I hate those stories. But I’m enthralled by them too. Tell me more about how bad it was, I want to say. So really, one itsy-bitsy glass of wine and the next thing you remember is hu
rtling through the windshield of a car? In Argentina? It really is a day-by-day thing, and so it will remain for all time. And yet, put together 365 days of continuous sobriety and, well, you want a fucking cupcake.
But there are no cupcakes on Nuku Hiva. There are, however, tattoos, so I decided to get one of those instead. It made perfect sense in my world.
I knew what I wanted, design-wise, more or less. The only question was how should I go about finding a tattoo artist on Nuku Hiva? My South Pacific island instincts had kicked in by now, and I knew that were I to ask a Marquesan they would invariably lead me to their brother or nephew or cousin, and I’d find myself confronted by some seventeen-year-old kid wielding a needle and a sketchbook of drawings. That’s just how it works. The family takes care of its own out here, and if some foreigner drops out of the sky with a hankering for a tattoo and you’ve got an unemployed cousin with a creative disposition who could use a few francs, custom dictates that you bring these two people together. Everyone wins; the family earns some income, and the foreigner has his traditional Marquesan tattoo. Sure, he may have asked for a small dolphin on his back, but your cousin doesn’t really know how to do dolphins, but he does this really neat jellyfish with gnarly tentacles, so he gives him that instead. They’re both sea creatures right, so what’s the problem? And if there is one, well, the foreigner eventually goes away and so too the problem.
Fortunately, I knew of a certain German expat on the island, and he, marked as he was with the distinctive geometric arches and symbols that are unique to the Marquesas, did not look like a dweeb. Of course, as an ex–Foreign Legionnaire, you could tattoo a kitten on his forehead and he’d still manage to look fearsome and ill-tempered and not the sort of person you’d casually call a pussy. But I figured he’d be a good go-to guy for some objective advice on finding a tattooist who wouldn’t leave me weeping in regret or dying of hepatitis C.
“Yes, of course. I know of someone,” he said when I spoke with him. “You want a traditional Marquesan tattoo, oui?” I nodded. “Okay, just don’t get a turtle or dolphin, tu comprends? That’s what every étranger gets.” And then he flexed the warrior tats that ran up and down his arms, his body language conveying the distinct impression that no matter how I decided to get inked, I would still only be a smidgen of the man he was. These arms, he seemed to suggest, have killed men. That’s fine, I thought. To each their own. I was getting a tattoo because I hadn’t killed anyone.
We made arrangements and when the appointed time came I met the Legionnaire, and together with his wife and extended family—essentially half of Taiohae—wandered to the shoreline, to what appeared to be a thatch-roofed boathouse, near where a few large outrigger canoes were stored on the beach. And here I met my tattooist, who appeared to be . . . a seventeen-year-old kid wielding a needle and a sketchbook of drawings.
You are joking, I thought. I had expected to encounter some island elder, a keeper of the old ways, a traditionalist, sure in his knowledge and practiced in his skills. I turned to the German and gave him an arched-eyebrow WTF look. “He is very good,” he informed me. “He is my nephew.” And then he wandered off with a cheery wave, leaving me behind with his Marquesan family, who stood by with eager anticipation, curious to see how this étranger would deal with the pain.
Now how did this happen? This is French Polynesia. No effort is spared to change these little South Pacific islands into outposts of Europe. It’s all France all the time out here. You can buy a fresh baked baguette, enjoy it with a café au lait while reading the newspaper, catch up on Ligue 1 scores and the latest fashion news from Paris, and then go home and watch a Gérard Depardieu movie on television. There is nothing here forcing you to assimilate, and as far as I could tell, none of the other expats here had, preferring to maintain the rhythm of continental life in an island setting. It’s why I had asked a foreigner for his recommendation and not a Marquesan, specifically for their impartiality, their ability to convey advice or aesthetic judgment that was not colored by the whirl of family obligations. And now here I was, confronted with a nephew and a needle.
“Et . . . ,” I said, trying not to sound alarmed. “Um . . . so how long have you been doing this?” I asked, in French, trying to ascertain his age.
“Huit ans,” he said. Eight years. They let nine-year-olds stab ink-stained needles into people around here? Perhaps he just looked younger. Maybe he did have some experience? Or he was some kind of prodigy in the world of tattoos. We sat on the beach and flipped through his catalogue of designs, but what I wanted to see was some real-world display of his work. Surgeons, after all, practice on cadavers and dead pigs before they’re sent into the operating room. Young tattooists in the Marquesas practice on what, exactly? The only thing I could think of was foreigners who eventually go away.
His name was Felix, and he dipped into his bag of gear and pulled out a small notebook computer and I soon found myself enthralled by the pictures he’d taken of his work. Jesus, that looks painful, I thought, as he showed me photos of a local woman he’d tattooed. The tattoos followed the length of her spine and then fanned out across her shoulder blades. There were photos of ankles, arms, legs, necks, torsos, faces, all inked in the distinctive style of the Marquesas. These were all taken moments after the work was completed, when the flesh still looks raw and abused, and they reminded me of what one might find in a police coroner’s report. The deceased has several identifying marks, including geometric tattoos on the left buttocks . . .
“Vous avez choisi?” Felix asked, as we moved inside to the boathouse, which had a pool table, two chairs, a Formica desk, a stunning view of the bay, and a cement floor that appeared to be the marching grounds for several battalions of ants. I needed a moment to think. While Felix set up his tattoo kit, I stepped back outside and wandered to the edge of the water. Did I really want to do this? Haven’t I seen enough people my age, at the beach, with tattoos that they’d gotten in the nineties, now faded, resting on sallow skin and flabby bodies, grim reminders of a lost weekend in the Florida Keys? Yes, I thought. Yes, I have. Did I really want to join them, the ink-stained masses of Generation X? No, I thought, though I am proud of my generation. We are the sane generation. But it is true that, for a brief spell, there was a certain regrettable overindulgence in tattoos and all things Seattle. But this was different. I was not in Seattle or the Florida Keys. Nor was I presently flabby. I was fit. I was in the Marquesas. I was sober. And I couldn’t find a cupcake.
“Bon,” I finally said. “Je suis prêt.”
We spent a long while discussing the details of my tattoo—its design, size, placement—and as soon as we were in synch, he asked if I’d mind if he put some music on. He scrolled through his tunes, and soon we were listening to what I can only describe as some French Polynesian mutant variation of Throwing Muses. Perfect, I thought. Nothing like a little of that old-school Gen-X alternative sound, mixed with South Pacific sensibilities, sung in French, to accompany a forty-two-year-old getting his first tattoo in the Marquesas. The band was from the Tuamotus, and if I’d had use of my arm I would have written their name down, but Felix now had it and was focused on outlining the tattoo with a red marker.
I had decided to get a turtle. French Foreign Legionnaires, of course, are known for their prudent lifestyle decisions, but there was only so much advice and direction that I was going to take from someone who had signed up to fight another country’s wars in Chad. And a turtle met my own personal Caucasian with Polynesian tattoos–dweeb test. For centuries, American and European sailors on naval ships and whalers commemorated their first equatorial crossing with a tattoo of a sea turtle. And I had crossed the equator, on a wooden sailboat no less. Admittedly, this was years ago, but I’ve always been a procrastinator. Now that I was getting a turtle, I looked forward to sailing across the Atlantic so that I could match it with a sea anchor on the other arm. Sail onward to China and I will have earned a dragon, and if I was feeling really
ambitious, a rounding of Cape Horn will allow me to ink a fully rigged tall ship on my back. A couple of lucky accidents at sea and I’ll get the peg leg and an eye patch too. I’ll look exactly like Treasure Island’s Long John Silver. As you can see, I take my work very seriously. It is my ambition to be known as the Robert De Niro of travel literature.
A sea turtle also reminded me of a trip I had taken a few years ago, back when times were still good and I was, very briefly, flush with cash. I had taken my family to Maui, and one morning, while my wife and I had taken the boys out to do some ocean kayaking, we were joined by a large green turtle, who swam between our two boats for a good long while, enthralling us with its courtly manner and wizened visage, its eyes alert and friendly, before it plunged back into the depths. Stay sober, and I get to do cool stuff like kayak with sea turtles with my family. Drink, and lose the family. In Marquesan culture, of course, the turtle is the creature that travels freely between the temporal and the spiritual worlds, and this seemed somehow fitting for my own particular situation as I journeyed from one world to another.
Felix suddenly brought my attention to the needle he held in his hands. “It is new, you see,” he said as he opened the package. And now our music was accompanied by the soft whir of his machine. A crowd had gathered, silently watching. Everyone had tattoos of their own, and yet I could see the women wince as Felix brought the needle to my arm. Really, I thought? Is it that painful? I felt the needle penetrate my skin and . . .
Okay, unbeknownst to me, I must be some kind of masochist.
“Ça fait mal, n’est-ce pas?” one of the women asked. Actually, no, it didn’t hurt at all, more like a cat scratching against lightly sunburned skin. Getting a tattoo is not the sort of thing I’d want to do every day, but I’ll take it over a visit to the dentist’s office. Indeed, after a while, it began to feel vaguely pleasant and soothing, which made me think that my wiring is even more askew than even I was aware. It took the entire morning to complete. In the meantime, people would come and go and have a gander. I couldn’t bear to look at the tattoo myself as it progressed. I worried that I’d have the same reaction you get when you’re halfway through a bad haircut, the moment you realize that for the next two or three weeks you’re going to look like someone who’s just been released on furlough from the state psychiatric ward. Oh man, you think. I’m going to look like a skate-punk with a bad attitude? Really? On my wedding day? But then you get over it because hair, of course, grows back and you resolve to never again get a seven-dollar haircut, until four weeks later when, once again, you find yourself in the same one-eyed barber’s chair. But at least there remains the option of one day spending upward of ten dollars on a haircut. Bad hair can be corrected. Tattoos, of course, cannot. And so I spent the hours staring at the multitude of ants that crawled along the floor. What were they after, I wondered? I saw them carry a roach like it was some kind of triumphant trophy, but that wouldn’t justify the vast armies of ants that were marching up and down the cement floor. What had they found? Rotting fruit? A dead bird? Rats?
Headhunters on My Doorstep Page 16