The Tattoo Artist (11 page)

A minute or an hour later, Ishmael appeared under the ship’s rail.

He was carrying pots of ink, and fish-bone pens, and I thought he was going to beseech me, as Philip had once beseeched me, to draw what I saw in my fever dreams. Instead, he knelt down behind me and unhurriedly examined his canvas. With both hands, he palpated my lips and chin. He said, or I hallucinated that he said, “You were so curious to own my art.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ntil I examined my face up close some thirty years later in the Life reporter’s compact mirror, I could only imagine what Ishmael had inscribed on me.

Of course, I’d seen my visage over the years in rain puddles, in tidal pools, once in a mirror shard from a soldier’s shaving kit that had washed ashore during the war, but for the full effect, both profile and dead-on, I had to wait for the reporter’s pretty pink makeup mirror with its clever side panels.

When she offered me my first good look at myself in three decades, I asked to be alone. I sat down on the sand. Staring at the white-haired creature in the glass, I had so many other physical changes to contend with that the faded designs on my face seemed less than urgent.

The tattoos Ishmael engraved on my chin, on my lips, on the flesh around my lips are archetypical templates of the human mouth displaying fright, joy, shame, rage, rapture—the five quintessential expressions the Ta’un’uuans believe a face assumes over a lifetime, laid one atop the other. The result is the bottom half of a countenance so abstract it might as well be tree bark. The punishment is that the bearer of such a tattoo can no longer convey any sentiments of her own.

The procedure took days. The true genius of Ta’un’uuan tattooing begins with the dyes. Each color must be mixed anew every session from ingredients as scarce as insect wing dust, as rare as blue coral. For black, the islanders’ most esteemed color—the “prince of color,” as Manet called it—charcoal is fed to a dog. Its excrement is then mixed with candlenut oil and boiled down to a black as pure and permanent as engraver’s ink.

The needles are fashioned out of human bone or tortoise-shell, then affixed to tiny bamboo rakes. The points are then dipped in ink and positioned against the skin. With a stone mallet, the artist strikes the rake, piercing the skin and injecting the ink deep into the dermis. By adjusting the needles incrementally after each tap, hundreds of dots are engraved every minute. Sometimes, for a thicker, truer line, the equivalent of an embossed etching, the skin itself is cut and the dye rubbed into the wound with a pepper leaf to promote scarring. When the pain becomes insufferable, the artist sings to his subject.

Ishmael never sang for me.

Each dawn, he arrived with his pots of freshly mixed ink, accompanied by the old woman. Sometimes another old woman appeared, too, but she sat at the far end of the hull, weeping.

Holding my head between his knees, Ishmael would work on a patch of my chin, or a turn of my lip, for the better part of the morning, while the old woman dabbed up my blood with bark cloths, then cleaned the incisions with poultices of leaves. When Ishmael finally set down his tools, she fed me my only nourishment, bowls of their dishwater elixir, through a hollow reed. My lips were so swollen that I couldn’t open my mouth.

I presumed I was being readied for my execution, that the preparations entailed being mummified first in Ishmael’s art, or perhaps he was merely inscribing my crime on my lips for all eternity.

When he and the old woman failed to come one morning, my gratitude at being spared the pain was qualified by my fear that only while my pain had lasted was I allowed to live.

I managed to stand up and walk to where the shade of the boat ended and the gas-flame-blue sky began. My jaw felt as heavy as an anvil, my cranium as light as helium.

Whenever I explored the area around my mouth (I couldn’t help but touch it. Wouldn’t you have been curious?), the skin felt as if it were smoldering. I knew I should run for my life— at the very least, crawl into the jungle and hide. I accepted that the next soul I saw would be my executioner.

Instead, I sat down and did nothing. I told myself I was too drugged and weak to flee, in too much pain to cope with the arduous demands of staying alive in the jungle. In truth, I think I preferred death to disfigurement.

Before the day was out, the old woman brought Philip to me. She led him by his wrist while he walked behind her. He could walk, though just barely.

The sun was setting at their backs. Philip was only silhouette and fiery outline. Even so, I could see they’d done something to his face, too. The old woman marched him closer. For a moment, he looked like my old Philip walking toward me under the striped shadows of the el train. She stood him directly before me.

Six bars—lampblack, ruler-straight—ran the length of his face.

“Sara, is that you?” he asked.

I couldn’t make myself speak.

“I can’t see.” His eyes were swollen shut. (Even his eyelids had been tattooed.) He pawed the air, then turned his head from side to side. “They promised me you’d be here.”

I stood and encircled his gaunt waist with my arms, pressed my brow—the only area of my face that didn’t ache—against his chest and shoulder. I even kissed his throat with my swollen lips. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” I said, though I couldn’t make myself look at him as I said it. “I thought they’d killed you.”

Then I stepped back to see exactly what they had done to him. The black lines started at his hairline (even his eyebrows were tattooed), ran over his features (even his nostrils were tattooed), and stopped at his jaw, eradicating everything that was Philip in between.

I was so muddled that I was sure the ink would rub off. I dragged my fingertip across his damp, striped forehead. When I lifted it off, I fully expected it to be smudged. It was clean.

“You’re hurting me! Stop!” His voice emanated from the back of the cage. “Sara, I think Ishmael blinded me.”

“You’re not blind,” I insisted; “your eyelids are swollen shut.” I had no idea if it was true or not. I tried to muster a note of reassurance in my panicked, piping voice. “Try to open your eyes for me, darling.”

He slowly cracked open his left lid; the right one was still too distended to lift.

“Do you see anything?”

“I think I see light.” A sliver of his blue iris waffled back and forth, back and forth across the black stripe. “And outlines.”

“Do you see me?”

The black lid fell shut. “It’s too painful to keep open. Do you have any food, Sara?”

“Did you see me?” I asked again.

“I’m so hungry. They wouldn’t give me anything to eat, just some kind of drug. Did they feed you? Are you all right?”

He reached out to touch my face as the blind do, but I dodged his probing fingers and held him by his wrists. I let him explore my eyes only. He palpated my closed lids, my brows, the tips of my lashes. “I couldn’t bear it if they’d blinded you, Sara.”

Something dropped on the floor behind us.

Philip jerked his head around. “Is she still here?”

The old woman was at the far end of the floor filling up a stone bowl with creek water. Two football-sized yams lay at her feet.

“Can she hear us?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is she listening?”

“She can’t hear us, Philip.”

“I know what day it is.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Sunday. At least, I think it’s Sunday.”

The old woman set down the bowl with a thud.

“Is she spying on us?”

“She’s leaving us food and water.”

“We have to get back to the camp, Sara. I kept track of the days. No matter what they did to me, I kept count.”

The old woman padded past us down the stone steps and vanished into the jungle.

“Where’s she going now?”

“I think she left.”

“Tuesday. We are supposed to be picked up on Tuesday. Can you find the beach, Sara?”

I looked around me: jungle, jungle, and more jungle. I said I wasn’t sure.

“You
have
to find that beach.”

I said I didn’t even know where we were.

“Follow the old woman.”

“Now?”

“Yes, Sara,
now.
Her village is near our beach. At least I think it’s near our beach.”

I grabbed his hand to take him with me, but he wouldn’t budge.

“I can’t keep up.”

“I’m not leaving you here.”

“Sara, please, go before you lose her. Meet the ship. The captain will send men for me.”

“I can’t do that.”

“For God’s sake, don’t you understand? They have a doctor on the ship. Maybe he can fix my eyes.”

He then turned away from me and made the most familiar of gestures, an impassioned thrust of his head. It was the same gesture he employed at the crescendo of his old Alliance lectures to electrify us shopgirls into revolution. Now the gesture looked like something else entirely: now it looked like a man banging his head against the bars of his cell.

I crashed through shrubbery, stumbled over rocks and vines. I kept my hands in front of my tender face lest some branch thwack it.

The old woman had to have heard me. Wherever I stepped, birds woke up and commenced shrieking. I left whole song lines in my wake. The sun was long gone, the ground slippery. She could have lost me if she wanted to. I could have lost myself.

Just as I spied the village’s cooking fires, I recognized the path to our camp. At least I thought I recognized it. It was made of white coral, incandescent in the moonlight. A blind man could have found it. I walked until I felt sand underfoot. There was no wind. The ocean was flat. The storm had stripped all the fronds off the palms. The surf had reconfigured the beach into ramparts and dunes. Nothing looked familiar. I glanced around for remnants of our camp—the steamer trunks, the portable shower, our clothes, my paints. Gone.

For a minute or two, I thought I’d trekked to the wrong beach, that I was profoundly lost, that I’d die of thirst and starvation before anyone found me. Then a wand of moonlight glanced off a tin can rolling in the tide.

I ran to the water’s edge and fished it out. The label was gone, but it had to be ours. Holding it to my ear, I gave a hard shake. Something edible sloshed within. I picked up a rock and started hammering. I was so hungry, I didn’t care if I woke the whole village. I pummeled the can until the rock came apart in my fist. Then I picked up a bigger rock and whacked away. It fractured against the tin after two blows. Shaking the cylinder by my ear again, I became convinced I could actually hear which particular fruit was inside. Pineapple chunks! I kept shaking the can—frenetically, ravenously—in the hope that between my frustration and the internal pressure of the churning juice, the lid might blow. I found a jagged piece of coral and tried to saw through the hermetically sealed, unyielding seams.

At some point during the night, I must have given up and lain down, because when I woke, it was already midmorning. The can was gone. A baked yam sat in its stead.

I didn’t even bother to brush the sand off it. I ate it in fistfuls, as a toddler eats cake, then scanned the ocean for any sign of the
Pearl.
I walked the whole crescent of beach, squinting into the distance. I climbed onto the highest boulder and stood on tiptoe. A small white cloud shaped like a ship’s smokestack drifted up out of the horizon and almost brought me to my knees.

When I looked again, the cloud was gone.

I sat down on the boulder, but every few minutes or so, I’d rise back up onto my tiptoes to peruse ship hulls that turned out to be glare, engine smoke that wafted away as haze. I kept telling myself the ship might appear any minute. It might already be Tuesday. Then again, it might be Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, and the ship long gone.

The sun reached its zenith. I drew the top of my blouse over the bottom half of my face to keep it from getting burned.

I would have wept, but I was too dehydrated.

When the smokestack cloud appeared once again, this time glimmering on the horizon to my east, I refused to put any stock in it.

For the next fifteen minutes or so, I watched as the tiny cloud changed from a smokestack into a waterspout, a rain curtain, an armada, a guano-stained rock islet, until the white shimmer finally stabilized as the prow of an ocean liner. Gulls were wheeling above it.

I got to my feet and started batting my arms above my head.

The ship was still miles away. No one on board, of course, could see me. At most, the beach was now only visible in the mate’s binoculars.

I eased myself off the boulder, picked up the largest palm frond I could find, then hurried to the place on the beach where I figured I could best be spotted, on the highest, bone-white dune.

I didn’t need to turn around. I knew the islanders were right behind me, watching my every move from within the forest. They’d probably spotted the ship long before I had.

I didn’t make a sound or tense a muscle, lest I provoke them before someone on board had a chance to see me.

Only when the ship reached the outer reef, a mile at most offshore, only when the skiff was lowered into the water and the two sailors clambered aboard, only then did I wave my frond above my head like a football pennant and shriek.