I couldn’t tell how much of her act was theatrics and how much was genuine shock at the primitiveness of our methods, but when she finally looked back at Philip and me, I swear I saw something that resembled pity for us beneath the maze on her tattooed face, inside her skin.
She walked back to the village, trailed by the others.
That afternoon, our daily allotment of food was left on a flat rock by the cave’s mouth. She must have put it there while we were napping. In addition to our regulation yams, she’d included a red hairy fruit that tasted like perfumed apples, two green bananas, one fish, a dollop of ambrosial honey wrapped in a banana leaf, and a set of tattoo needles—turtle shell, shark tooth, and bone.
I couldn’t make myself touch the needles.
On the next rock over, four stone pots of ink had been set in a circle. One contained the exact metallic blue-green shade an ancient copper dome turns when the sun strikes it. Another held what looked like purple squid ink. A third seemed to be filled with pulverized red orchids. And the fourth, black: it wasn’t mixed from an absence of color, it was mixed from the bounty of colors.
Kneeling, his long uncombed hair looking like the blond batting used to stuff sofas, his thin torso adorned with nothing more than smudges now, Philip gaped at the pots of liquid radiance. The inks were
that
beautiful.
He picked up the needle made of bone. It was a little longer than his finger.
“Put it back,” I said.
He ignored me.
“I don’t want it in my house,” I said.
He turned it over in his hand. All up and down the narrow shaft were minute carvings of copulating figures.
“What house, Sara? We have no house. No clothes. No shoes. No matches. No faces. No one is coming for us.” He shook his head from side to side: the moving bars gave me vertigo. “We’ll lose our minds if we keep staring at the horizon.”
“It hasn’t even been two months. You have to give the coconuts a chance.”
He spun me around until I faced the ocean—emptiness to the north, emptiness to the south, water to the left, water to the right. A red coconut was being pummeled against the reef.
He turned me back again, then drew me against him. “We were happy last night.” He pressed my hand against his chest.
My fingers were still sooty enough to leave a faint mark. I drew a lightbulb on his shoulder, a beacon for the ship to steer toward. When I finished, though, the lines were so light that even I could hardly see them.
He took hold of my hand again and guided it over to the closest pot, dipping my fingertips into the ink. They came out copper-blue. I started painting over the breaches the old woman had rent in my ship’s hull: the blue ink only made it look as if the hull was taking on water.
Philip lightly supported my drawing wrist in one hand, while his other dipped the bone needle into the blue pot and carried it dripping back to me.
But I wouldn’t take it. “Please don’t go mad on me, Philip. Don’t leave me here alone.”
He wouldn’t release my wrist.
“I could hurt you. I could disfigure you,” I said.
“You can’t disfigure me any more than I already am.”
He sat back on his heels and pulled me down, too. It was just before sunset. The sun’s rays were horizontal. They pierced the cave’s wide mouth and irradiated the limestone walls. The cave was as bright as an operating theater.
“It’ll never come off,” I said. “You may come to hate it. You may come to hate me for it.”
“I could never hate anything you drew.”
He offered me the needle again and I took it this time. After all, I was just as curious as he was. He stretched out on the rock floor and shut his eyes: without his blue eyes, I had nothing with which to orient myself that this was Philip. The black bars gave way to the blond beard, which in turn gave way to the long thin sunburnt canvas below me. “Tell me what to draw,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. Anything you put on me is already inside me. Draw what you see.”
I shut my eyes, but there was no Surrealist theater on the back side of my lids. There was nothing but emptiness. When I opened them again, all I saw was my sinking ship. I put the needle to his chest at the hull’s prow and pushed the ink inside. I felt him wince and stiffen.
“It doesn’t hurt me,” he said.
I moved the needle a millimeter down the keel and pushed again. A minuscule ruby of blood came out. I made the next pinprick with my eyes averted, and kept them averted each time I jabbed. Only when my fear subsided and I was able to look at the blood as I was drawing it was I able to glean what we were doing.
The Ta’un’uuans believe that to tattoo and to be tattooed is the deepest form of intimacy—the puncturing of the skin, the entry into another’s body, the flow of blood, the infliction of pleasure and pain, the closure and healing of the wound, and most of all, lest anyone forget, the indelible trace of the process.
Where we in the West believe that our true selves, our unsullied psyches, the secret cores of our being, are buried deep beneath our façades, hidden from others, hidden sometimes even from ourselves, the islanders believe that their true selves are written on their skin, on every point and place where one human being connects to another.
By the time the sun had set, all Philip and I had managed to accomplish was the barest outline of the hull. It wasn’t even watertight. He wanted me to continue by firelight, but I couldn’t see anything.
Next morning, his tattoo had hardened into a translucent scab, my blue engraving just visible under the crusted skin. Philip sat up. Head bowed, neck twisted, his blond beard scraping against his breastbone, he shut one eye to better focus on the tiny tattoo below. I wasn’t sure just how much of it he could see from that angle, but from where I lay, on the hard sand by his knees, I saw a rapt blue eye looking out of a birdcage at a toy ship.
When we finally stepped out of the cave, the old woman and her coterie sat waiting for us. Within seconds, they spotted the raw tattoo on Philip’s chest, noticed that my fingers were stained not just with ink, but with dried blood. We walked past them to squat in the high grass. They discreetly turned away and lowered their eyes. I think they finally grasped that the beleaguered, half-mad, helpless creatures living in a cave on their beach were human like them.
That afternoon, a couple of dozen men appeared in the tall grass on the sheltered end of our beach. They bore five full-length palm trunks on their shoulders and carried long, thick bamboo stalks in their hands. Here and there, a flash of sun would glance off an ax blade slung from the same string belt that held erect a penis gourd. They set the trunks down in the shape of a star, then unslung their axes and hacked away at the stubborn grass until they’d cleared a perfect circle. They made a human scaffold, three men tall, to stand the trunks up, while the skinniest boys clambered up the sweating bodies to pound on the top of the posts with skillet-sized flat rocks. As soon as four of the trunks were firmly planted in the ground, and a rudimentary platform erected, the men reconfigured themselves into a hive and began assembling the bamboo stalks into a bowed armature that looked, to me, like a giant’s rib cage. It was tall enough for me to stand up in. They then tied the curved trusses to the straight crossbeams with knots so complex they would have baffled sailors. Next, the strongest of the men hoisted the cage onto their shoulders while the skinny boys, biting the ends of long ropes, shimmied up the palm trunks. Hand over hand, they somehow managed to raise the rib cage atop the platform and anchor it to the wooden posts with iron nails. Finally, unstringing their axes once again, they chopped out footholds in the one remaining palm log and leaned it against the stilted structure, like a staircase. Only then did I realize that they were building Philip and me a house with the penny nails and steel axes we’d purchased only months before at a bargain outlet on the Lower East Side—
I remember!
— Goldberg & Sons Discount Hardware at the corner of Delancey and Essex. The next day, the women joined the work party, carrying bundled straw for the roof atop their heads, while the men, in slow relays, labored under a ten-foot-long sandalwood roof beam. Even Ishmael helped carry it.
Philip and I slept in our new house that night though it wasn’t quite finished. It had no door and only half a roof. It smelled of sawdust and hay. A high-borne breeze wafted through the reed walls and kept the mosquitoes away. We hardly had anything to pack and move—a driftwood walking stick, a shell knife, three shell spoons, two coconut canteens, two coconut bowls, Philip’s shred of sarong and my linen pants, the one sandal we still had between us, and the four stone pots trembling with liquid pigment and the tattoo needles.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On a typical day, the old woman would wake us at first light, shouting up from the beach below for me to follow her to the dripping tiered gardens, Philip to accompany the fishermen in their canoes. She had us call her “great-aunt,” as all the villagers did, but when I made a mangle out of the Ta’un’uuan words, she let me call her by her Christian name, Laadah. Under her strict tutelage, I was taught the skill of planting taro shoots (the trick is to feed them bat guano), while Philip was instructed by the fishermen in the art of net throwing. He even learned how to hurl a three-pronged spear into a jackfish.
When the heat of the day spiked and the soil began steaming, Laadah would set down her hoe, and I’d follow her to a sunken limestone spring garlanded with hanging orchids. Usually, a dozen other ladies would already be soaking in the cool water, gossiping, the bawdier the incident the louder the laughter. I might not have spoken their language yet, but their lascivious pantomimes made their punch lines abundantly clear. When the water finally chilled us, we’d dry off in the sun, then perfume ourselves with orchid petals (the white ones smelled like vanilla) and rendezvous with the men back at the village to eat the midday meal in one noisy congregation.
Philip and I usually dined on the fringes of Laadah’s extended family, a pandemonium of nieces and nephews and second cousins and poorer relations that seemed to include, at one time or another, practically everyone in the village.
For the most part, the Ta’un’uuans’ culinary skills consist of dropping tubers into a fire, though once in a while Laadah and the women outdid themselves and prepared a collective feast of tapioca pudding and honeyed pork that rivaled any one-star restaurant. They had me work as a prep chef.
A half hour or so after we ate, a mass drowsiness overtook the village. Stupefied families hauled themselves up to their tree houses and sank into communal hammocks. Even the pigs fell to snoring.
A mile away, in the shade of our own straw roof, Philip would lie facedown or supine, depending upon which side of him I was tattooing, while I lined up my needles and inks, all the while appraising his abdomen or chest or buttocks anxiously.
I don’t mean to suggest that I was tattooing Philip from head to toe. Quite the contrary. In those first few months, whole afternoons passed and we’d barely advance an inch.
It took me three full sessions just to master the insertion of the needle without spilling any color beforehand. It took me another six to learn the art of the comb and mallet: how to forcefully tap the comb’s back so that all six needles entered the skin simultaneously. And it’s taken me almost thirty years to finally grasp the true complexity of the Ta’un’uuan palette. Mixing color on a canvas is one thing, mixing color under the skin is quite another. I had to master both the chemistry of the body and the absorbency of the flesh.
I finished the ship first, made it as watertight as my fledgling skills allowed, then proceeded to engrave the erratic graph of Manhattan’s skyline across his lower abdomen. I wasn’t yet confident enough to try anything unplanned.
When the pain became too much for Philip, he’d grab hold of my drawing hand and not let go. Sometimes he’d kiss it afterward; sometimes we’d make love. In any case, sex or no sex, we’d both lie back, spent.
Invariably, the day’s end would find us on the beach. Philip’s beard had grown voluminous; his hair reached well below his shoulders. My tattoos now covered his right biceps, his right buttock, and a large patch of chest. He wore a penis gourd and a string belt the fisherman had given him. They even performed a little ceremony to show us how to tie the foot-long gourd in place: the testes are left to dangle. All that remained of my linen pants were three wooden buttons. I traded them for a grass skirt.
Sitting side by side on the warm sand, our shoulders brushing, we’d watch the sunset. Even the islanders quit whatever they were doing to show respect for the end of the day.
At the precise moment the sun goes down, color becomes its richest. For less than an eye blink, the white disk of the sun turns copper green and pulls all the light down with it. You could be sitting on an open beach or in your darkening living room: all edges disappear. The maroon sky and the maroon sea are one. And every object floating against that emptiness—the blue-violet clouds, the cinnabar lichen on the wet rocks, the blond canoe on the sand—becomes the brightest object on earth.
It’s these final seconds of twilight that have inspired the Ta’un’uuan palette.
The tattoo on the small of my back was etched during those afternoons. It’s the only tattoo that Philip ever gave me, though I offered him my body countless times. He chose the one spot for it where he knew I wouldn’t be able to see it, or judge it.