by Jill Ciment
I walked over to him and took his face in my hands, fully expecting him to push me away, but he didn’t.
“I can’t do this much longer. I’m exhausted. I must get away from here.”
I didn’t know if he was talking about New York, the wretched hotels, or me.
I said, “We can still go to Spain, Philip. Others are going. The Artists’ Union sent a contingent last month. At least we’d be a part of something noble—”
“We’re not going to Spain.”
“We could go out West. To Taos. There are lots of artists there.”
“And you’ll paint flowers with O’Keeffe until the Depression ends? What will I do? Farm?”
“We could go to Mexico City. The Riveras invited us.”
“And wind up in their political battles. No thank you.”
“For God’s sake, Philip, we could go to Tahiti. Do what Gauguin did.”
“Tahiti has been ruined by the French. I’ve lived with the French, you haven’t.”
“Then we’ll find our own island.”
I started to pull my hands away, but he grabbed me by the forearms and kissed my wrists with such a ferocity of tenderness, I would have begged his forgiveness if I’d only known what I’d done.
“Please don’t fall in love with somebody else,” I whispered.
“I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, Sara.”
Someone once said that art is arrested attention in the midst of distraction, a definition no less true for the Ta’un’uuans than it is for us. When we stand before a Gauguin or a Goya and experience its beauty, we say, “It took my breath away.” For my islanders, to whom breath is the soul, that same moment of rapture is a literal death: art takes their souls away.
The Ta’un’uuan mask is a beacon for the soul. The mask’s features are the coordinates for the soul’s departure and its return: they serve as a map so that the soul can’t lose its way. There are no eye slits, no ear or mouth holes in the Ta’un’uuan mask, only painted facsimiles of eyes and ears and mouths: the dead have no need for the senses; the corporeal world can’t reach them any longer, except in song. The artist wakes up the soul in each mask by singing to it.
One week after our “collaboration” with Binky, Julien and Alice sold Philip’s mask collection.
Philip, true to form, insisted on being introduced to the collector. When he returned from the meeting, his whole demeanor had changed: he carried himself with his old verve, even going so far as to toss back his hair.
“I’ve just spent the evening with a man named Richter,” he told me, “an industrialist who can buy out the Rockefellers and not even feel it. He calls himself Swiss, but my guess is he’s Bavarian. In any case, he’s planning to retire to the Swiss side of Lake Como—‘the neutral end,’ as he puts it—and build a primitive art museum to end all primitive art museums. He wants my collection in it. He says my Ta’un’uuan masks are the best examples of death masks he’s seen outside the Musée de l’Homme. He thinks I have superlative taste. He wants to back me, Sara.”
“To curate a mask collection in Switzerland?”
“No, to represent him in the South Seas. He wants me to collect for him.”
“Does he know you’ve never been there? That you bought the masks at a shop in Paris?”
“First of all, it wasn’t a shop, it was a vast flea market. And it was packed with junk. Every retired legionnaire was trying to get rid of his African curios, his Tahitian souvenirs. I spent years rifling through those piles of tourist crap until I found my treasures. Collecting requires the same degree of genius that painting does and that’s what Richter understands.”
“But you don’t know anything about that part of the world, Philip.”
“I’m not planning on going native. I’m planning on you and me spending a few months of this interminable Depression in the South Seas making money. After all, aren’t you the one who wanted to run off and live like Gauguin?”
“Richter’s willing to pay for all this?”
“He’s willing to pay a generous commission.”
“But nothing up front?”
“Just all our expenses and two steamship tickets. First-class.”
“Isn’t Richter a German name? Does he know you’re Jewish?”
“What does that have to do with anything? Can’t you believe that someone would be willing to back me for once?”
He brushed past me and stood by the window, pushing aside the gray curtain. Our room faced an air shaft: the view was an identical room.
“Just meet him, Sara.”
Richter was nothing like the rotund industrialists Rivera had depicted in his mural. He was thin to the point of daintiness and not much taller than I was.
He greeted us himself at the door of his pied-à-terre, a marble mansionette not too far from Binky’s. He kissed my bare ring finger with a refinement that bordered on menace and called me “Frau Ehrenreich.” He wore a maroon smoking jacket and Moroccan slippers. He offered us champagne, Philip a box of blond cigars. I plucked out one for myself. He said he had a surprise for us. Taking us each by an arm, he led us into his library, a room bricked solid with leather tomes. A steamship brochure lay on his desk, Pearl of the East. A giant pink hibiscus bloomed on the cover. A tiny bare-breasted hula girl cavorted on the flower’s lengthy pistil.
Richter unfolded the pamphlet. The top half was a map of the South Pacific with a white ocean liner silhouetted in the corner. The ship’s route, a red line, zigzagged through the islands—the Friendly Isles, the New Hebrides, the Solomons. The bottom half was a wide-angle photograph of a first-class stateroom, all teak and plush.
“It’s a remarkable voyage,” Richter said. “I believe the ship crosses the equator three separate times. You see the mark there?” His fingernail tapped on what looked like a printer’s error, an ink dot in the middle of nowhere. “That’s Ta’un’uu.”
Philip and I both leaned closer. Cigar ash spilled onto the brochure. Philip carefully brushed it off.
“It’s a Japanese shipping line, a merchant vessel,” Richter explained, “but as you can see, no expense is spared for the lucky few passengers who tour with it. The Japanese are extraordinary hosts, and of late, they’ve become rather enchanted by the South Seas. The ship is calling at every major port, and where it’s not officially calling, arrangements can be made. For a collector like Philip it’s the chance of a lifetime.” He slipped the brochure into Philip’s breast pocket, then replenished our champagne flutes. “When you finally get to Tokyo, if you’d both like, you can return by land. The Trans-Siberian sleeping cars are said to be from the tzar’s time, true Victorian carriages. We can rendezvous at Lake Como.”
“If war doesn’t break out in Europe first,” I said.
“All the more reason to be off in the South Seas,” Philip said.
“You don’t think the pact between the tyrant and the thug will hold, Frau Ehrenreich?”
I asked him who was who.
“Why, Stalin is the tyrant. Adolf is only a thug. Do you know how I know?”
I said I didn’t.
“The size of their mustaches.”
He motioned for us to follow him into a high-domed chamber off the library. Its walls were bare and pocked with nail holes. “I must apologize. My treasures were put in storage yesterday. It takes so much preparation for them to be shipped home. I’m sorry you didn’t get to say goodbye to your masks, Philip. All I have left is my private collection. Would you like to see that?”
He opened another door to yet another domed room. On every surface—the antique tables, the rosewood bookcases, the marble pedestals—carved figurines copulated, or mated with animal deities, or squatted licentiously.
He picked one up and set it on the platter of his palm—a six-inch-high fur-and-shell-ornamented female icon divulging her sexual organs, a mother-of-pearl shell. “She’s from the Trobriands, one of the islands the ship will be calling at. Sexuality in the Trobriands is said to be reversed: women
are the aggressors. During the yam harvest, marauding bands of girls have been known to rape a man.”
Philip laughed and asked how that was possible.
“You’ll have to tell me when you get back,” Richter said, steering us toward a shelf on which a bone-white tusk coiled upward. “It’s from the New Hebrides. It’s a pig’s tusk. Can you make out the markings?”
Etched lightly into the ivory, hundreds of creatures with two sets of genitalia, male and female, coupled in bewildering possibilities.
“On Ambae, where the tusk is from, raising swine is considered an art form. The islanders have somehow managed to breed a rare hermaphrodite pig. They regard its ivory as divine because it has the power of both sexes.”
He opened a glass cabinet and lifted out a wooden box. “We should put out our cigars. This is very old and fragile.” He peeled off the lid. A shrunken head sat nestled in cotton batting. Faded tattoos covered every square inch of its rigid face— a turtle with human hands, wings instead of eyebrows, a shark on one cheek, an albatross on the other.
“Tattoos were once believed by the Ta’un’uuans to be scars that can sing.”
I must have been gaping.
“Don’t worry, Frau Ehrenreich. It’s from the early eighteen hundreds. The Ta’un’uuans are all good Christians now. Methodists, I believe. I’m hoping that Philip will be able to find me a few more of those extraordinary masks.” He turned the head slightly, so that we could inspect the shriveled, marked ears. “See how the tattooing has inspired the mask designs?”
He put the head back into the box, then rang a little bell. A side door opened and a thick-necked butler wheeled in a three-dimensional model of his museum, a cardboard Roman edifice cantilevered over a lake. It looked like something Speer might design.
“It’s quite regal, don’t you think?” He tapped on a paper cupola. “I’m reserving that wing for your finds, Philip.” He looked at me, Philip, me again. “That is, if you permit him to go, Frau Ehrenreich.”
He lifted off the roof so we could see the columned interior.
I wanted to tell him he needn’t bother with the hard sell any longer. Between the art he’d just shown us, the champagne, and the photo of the stateroom, I was half-packed already. The deal was truly sealed for me, however, the moment Richter had called it Philip’s wing.
So what venerated totems did we finally pack into our cages of memory? With Richter footing the bill, Philip packed three new linen suits, one gabardine one, three pairs of hand-sewn Italian shoes, a tuxedo, a dozen French shirts and the gold cuff links to go with them, and silk pajamas and a silk bathrobe. For traipsing around the islands, he purchased three bright orange sarongs and two pairs of leather sandals: “I’m not walking among them like a colonial.” For where no hotel accommodations were available, he bought a watertight pup tent, two air mattresses, three hurricane lamps, and a portable canvas bathtub.
For my ship wardrobe, I shopped at Macy’s. I couldn’t be bothered wasting my time purchasing clothes. My vices included French oil paints, Belgian linen, and Winsor & Newton brushes. Richter even tantalized me with a Japanese folding easel that popped open like an umbrella for landscape painting.
For barter with the island carvers, we acquired five cases of axes and knives. To pay tribute to their chiefs, we purchased fifty cigarette lighters and ten kilos of pipe tobacco. To entrance their wives, we bought a box of rhinestone jewelry on Orchard Street, the kind my mother had loved to wear.
Were our presents demeaning? Perhaps. But any more so than the trinkets with which Richter had just enticed us?
The ship tattooed on my back is not the one we sailed on. Pearl of the East was as grand and elegant as Richter had promised, whereas the vessel on my back is anything but elegant. It’s an old rusty freighter, and its hull spans the whole of my shoulders.
It’s one of my earliest designs. I chose the shoulder blades because I thought the bone there would make the procedure less painful. It’s only beginner’s luck that the cargo ship is tattooed exactly where it should be, that I carry its burden on my back.
PART TWO
GAN EDEN
CHAPTER SIX
n the beginning, there was only God’s breath, which became the first song. God then sang into existence the sun, and the stars, which are but musical notes suspended in the night sky; and all the oceans, and the ocean’s currents, which are but melodies moving through liquid.
In the center of his chorale, the islanders believe, God created Ta’un’uu, the Garden of Eden, and peopled it with Adam, whom he made from ash, and Eve, whom he made from coral. God then breathed into his creations the gift of song and completed their paradise by giving them cargo: tinned meat, steel tools, rice in bags, tobacco in tins, and matches, but not cotton clothing.
Adam and Eve were content for a while, but eventually they offended God by improving upon his design. They beautified their naked bodies with drawings of the turtle, the cockatoo, the sago palm, the tobacco tins, and the wooden matchsticks. Beguiled by their own splendor, they copulated against God’s commandment that they remain chaste. In his fury, God created rain to erase their drawings and threw them out of Paradise to wander the bush. He took away their cargo and decreed that they should spend the rest of their days living on the barest necessities.
Later, Adam accidentally tore his tongue on a charred piece of fish bone and discovered the art of indelible tattooing (to penetrate the flesh with ash, to affix it to the soul with pain), a technique he taught to his sons, Cain and Abel. When Cain slew Abel, it was because Abel’s tattoos so diminished his own creations. This act of artistic murderous jealousy set the seal on man’s wickedness, and the fall of man was complete.
The situation continued until the time of Noah. Noah was a good man who obeyed God and taught his sons to do likewise. All the other human beings on earth were still mired in depravity, arousing their lust with tattoos, and copulating, so God decided to destroy them in a great flood. He gave Noah a cargo ship, which contained tinned meat and rice in bags, and matches, and fitted Noah with a peaked cap, white shirt, shorts, and shoes, and told Noah to save his family and all the animals, which Noah did. Then God sent a typhoon that lasted for forty days and forty nights.
When the water subsided, God instructed Noah to repopulate the world and to relish the cargo. God explained to Noah that the cargo was His reward for Noah’s devotion. Everything was good for a while until Noah’s son, Ham, disobeyed God’s will. He espied his father’s nakedness, which he found appalling in its starkness, and cut into his own flesh with a burnt fish bone. In his agony, Ham muttered God’s name in vain.
God was again very angry, and he took away the cargo and banished all of Noah’s sons to different places on the earth. Because Noah was a good man and these were his sons, God offered them a reprise in the form of a choice. They could either go into the bush with a bow and arrow or with a rifle. The bow and arrow was lighter than the metal stick, so the most pragmatic of Noah’s sons chose the bow and arrow. His descendants became the Ta’un’uuans. The other sons chose the rifles and their descendants became the white man.
The Ta’un’uuans worked very hard, and with the help of missionaries, eventually found their way back to God. They gave up tattooing and nakedness. But God continued to punish them, for no good reason, with diseases and blights and typhoons. He withheld the cargo even though they obeyed the missionaries and destroyed the skull masks of their ancestors. Then God in his wisdom realized his mistake and sent his only child, Jesus, down from heaven to earth to make amends with the Ta’un’uuans and compensate them for their unjust suffering.
Jesus was both a black man and a white man, who could transfigure himself into animals and who spoke all the languages on earth.
Jesus told the Ta’un’uuans that he had suffered on the cross as they had suffered under the tattoo needle. He told them to disobey the missionaries and again initiate their bodies through pain, again make skull masks and sing to the masks so tha
t their ancestors would hear them.
Jesus said their ancestors were safe with his father in heaven, which had chairs, tables, and beds, and meals of tinned meat cooked and served by angels, and whiskey for all. Jesus said if they obeyed him, their ancestors would send the cargo, which would arrive by freighter.
Jesus then turned himself into a turtle with human hands and swam off.
CHAPTER SEVEN
hat could they have made of us? Philip stood braced at the skiff’s prow, his Buffalo Bill hair flying, his orange sarong slapping against his blond legs, a sandaled foot up on the gunwale; I was huddled in the bottom of the rolling boat, trying to keep from being ill.
Ta’un’uu, a vertical green eruption garlanded with pink sand and white surf, was about a half mile away.
It was our first stop in the South Seas. We were the only passengers disembarking. The island was too nominal a destination to rate an official port of call, the harbor too shallow an anchorage to accommodate the Pearl of the East. Captain Hirata had agreed to shuttle us ashore by dinghy, and pick us up in ten days’ time on his return voyage from Tarawa.
In the Ta’un’uuans’ cosmology, only what has already been sung into existence is perceivable. In their musical arrangement of space and time, the past is before us, and the future behind. The soul must face his ancestors, while the body steps backward into the unknown.
Philip and I were only as real to them as the refrains we evoked in their ancestors’ songs.
Accordingly, Philip might have been a seventeenth-century sandalwood trader, or an eighteenth-century slaver, or a modern missionary. With his shoulder-length hair and orange “skirt,” he might even have been a missionary’s big blond wife. And me, in my equally inappropriate attire? A boy’s linen suit bought off a sale rack at Macy’s, a Panama hat fastened around my chin with Philip’s shoelaces. Perhaps I was a white ghost modeling the cotton clothes that will one day arrive by cargo ship?
