by Jill Ciment
I looked around for Philip. Surrounded by a knot of angry young men, he was calmly and rationally trying to explain to them how the tent pole wound up on the burning roof. He used words like “velocity” and “chance.”
I was more heedful of sorcery than he was. I was reared on the evil eye. A steel shaft in a flaming hut was proof enough for me of malignant forces.
I signaled Philip to slip away with me into the jungle, but he was too intent on convincing these men that there was a plausible explanation for the tragedy. He made an abrupt gesture with his hand to indicate our airborne tent.
One of the men took out a wooden knife and brandished it at Philip, then began muscling him toward what looked like a livestock pen. Philip cast his terrified eyes around for me. I ran over to the young mother who’d given us shelter during the storm.
“Tell them my husband was with you when it happened: tell them he isn’t to blame. Tell them we were both with you when the fireball hit.”
She acted as if she’d never seen me before.
I turned to Ishmael. He was still on his haunches, staring intently as a large fly feasted on his granddaughter’s lip. “Ishmael,” I said, “Philip sang for you and your granddaughter. We danced for you. You know we meant her no harm.”
The old woman who had confronted Philip and me when we’d first come ashore was standing over Ishmael. I recognized her regal air. She silenced me with a vehement shake of her finger, then took me tightly by the wrist, as she might a child, and led me toward the livestock pens, too. I didn’t resist. When she opened the stake gate for me, I actually said, “Thank you.”
Philip was in the adjacent enclosure. Our stalls were made of bamboo staves. Six piglets shared mine. Philip’s contained a huge hog with tusks. The hog was rooting through the folds of Philip’s sarong to see if Philip had brought anything good to eat.
The guard watching over us almost laughed, then remembered the heinousness of our crime. He picked up a stick and prodded the hog into a thrashing fury. It kicked Philip on the thigh, then tried to bite his calf, but its tusks got in the way.
Finally, our guard threw down the stick and the hog calmed down. The man, however, didn’t. He leaned over the gate and raged at Philip and me in one inexhaustible exhalation. Spoken anger in Ta’un’uuan sounds like a man blowing out a trick candle that won’t die.
Philip sidled past the pig’s tusks over to the far corner, then hunkered down into a protective ball. The hog was panting. I reached through the bars and touched his cheek. “You all right?” I whispered.
“I think so.”
“Are they going to kill us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Should we try and run?”
“Where would you have us go?”
“The interior. We can hide in the mountains until the ship returns for us,” I said.
“The mountains? We couldn’t even assemble our tent properly. I’m going to try and reason with them, Sara. It wasn’t our fault. They’re human like us. They have to see that.”
When the first pencil lights of dawn outlined the village, Philip arose to watch a group of men coming toward us. I stayed on my knees, peering through the bars. Ishmael was flanked by six ornamented, taut, eager young men, and trailed by a throng of villagers.
He opened the hog pen and addressed Philip in Ta’un’uuan. His wrath might as well have been the babble one hears before fainting.
Philip put up his hands as if he was silencing not a bereft grandfather but a vast noisy courtroom of jurors. With great passion, he started arguing our defense in the name of humanity. He continued arguing it as Ishmael ordered the warriors to lead Philip into the forest.
Dawn came and went. The sun flashed away all the puddles. The pigs were let out of the pens to sleep in the shade. Noon burned overhead. I was made delirious from the heat, frantic from thirst. Finally, the women came for me, the old woman accompanied by six female guards. Again, I followed her with something like gratitude.
She and the others led me into the forest in the opposite direction from where the men had taken Philip. The canopy’s dampness felt sublime. I was allowed to rest now and again under a dripping tree, but when I opened my mouth to catch the leftover rainwater, she forbade me to drink.
We walked up and down footpaths, around bogs of black stumps, through partitions of ferns, until we came to a tall wooden structure in an overgrown clearing. It seemed to have been assembled entirely out of old European ship parts. The roof was an upside-down schooner hull, the rafters planks of bleached ribbing. Eight six-foot-high columns of mast held the hull aloft. There were no walls. The floor was decking.
The old woman led me under the boat and told me to lie down, faceup. I saw portholes brimming with daylight. Finally, she gave me something to drink, a bowl of what tasted like dishwater. I downed it greedily. When she offered me a second helping, I swallowed that, too. If it was poison, I wanted the quickest dose.
A physical inertia as close to divine serenity as I’ve ever known amassed in my limbs, pooled in my hands and feet. My head felt as hollow as a gourd. One would have had to have drunk a whole ocean of absinthe for this effect.
She poked my cheek with her fingernail: I couldn’t flinch. She lifted my wrist, then let it drop: I couldn’t jerk it away. She fed me another bowl, then got up and left, followed by the others.
I stared up at the ship. I didn’t dare close my lids (the only muscles that still obeyed me). Whenever I did, I lost my footing on the deck, and was plunged into the open sea and left to sink in that cold vastness.
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 embosse
d 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.
