The Tattoo Artist (9 page)

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?

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 tell 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.