When I am six, my father has his own tattoo business called Captain John’s. He gives me his drawings on white paper and tells me to color them in with markers. A naked lady. A goat with horns sitting on a throne. I color the panthers black with red for the eyes and yellow for the claws. I take my coloring seriously. I am careful and precise. My father uses the colored drawings to show his customers.
When I get my only tattoo at twenty-three, the owner of Papillon’s remembers my father.
He was crazy, he says with a laugh. Whatever happened to him?
He died, I say.
Too bad, he was a good guy. But man was he crazy.
My father smells like beer or vodka, which they say doesn’t have a smell but it does. Especially when it’s been in you so long that it oozes from your pores. He smells like tobacco, not like cigarettes, but fresh tobacco—sweet and fragrant. The combination is so male, so heady. I put my face into his shirt and breathe the smells of my father.
He is quick to tell a joke, to laugh, to lie, to steal. He doesn’t hit me. But I hear him explode outside a door, banging, yelling.
He lives on the street or at the Hartford Hotel, a flophouse. When I am a teenager, an article is written about the people who live at the hotel. My father gets his picture in the local paper. He sits in his room with a window behind him. He has his shirt off. His tattoos are vivid and distracting against the pale white of his skin. He is skinny but his belly is distended. He is not smiling. He sits with his legs apart, a cocky pose. He glares at the camera.
There is an interview with the picture. The reporter wants to know how my father got to this place, why he lives here.
I got no other place to go, he says.
The Hartford Hotel was torn down after my father moved out. When he died, I thought about the article and the picture and wondered how he looked to people reading the paper. I wondered how they saw him. A drunk, a wasted, smelly bum. A sorry excuse for a human being. A wide-eyed, longhaired freak. A joker, a curio.
That picture in the paper cannot make my father any more real to me. I close my eyes and see his long nose and skinny neck. I remember the fragile things about him. His ribs through a white T-shirt, his bony wrists.
“When I muse about tattoos…”
JOY WILLIAMS
When I muse about tattoos, I think of Kafka’s Harrow in his story “In the Penal Colony.” This monstrous device with its long needles shuttles back and forth on a ribbon of steel and effects the ultimate in tattoos for it inscribes upon each individual’s body that individual’s “sentence.” Enlightenment is presumed to come in the twelfth hour of the great Harrow’s work when, just at life’s end, the doomed one begins to comprehend the transfiguring justice of his dilemma.
I think too of Wendy Williams, the Plasmatic rocker who committed suicide a few years ago. She had a number of satisfactory tattoos but wanted a truly grand one. She moved in with a tattoo artist, the best in town, which in this case happened to be, perhaps unfortunately, Manchester, Connecticut. She wanted leopard spots but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. He commenced doing something else. It wasn’t working, she hated it, it ran up and down her arms, this design that she could not comprehend, that was not her. Wendy O. Williams. She wore long-sleeved shirts to conceal it, she was unhappy with this ambitious, muddled unfinished tattoo, very unhappy, unhappy unto death.
In the Penal Colony
FRANZ KAFKA
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
“It’s a remarkable piece of apparatus,” said the officer to the explorer and surveyed with a certain air of admiration the apparatus which was after all quite familiar to him. The explorer seemed to have accepted merely out of politeness the Commandant’s invitation to witness the execution of a soldier condemned to death for disobedience and insulting behavior to a superior. Nor did the colony itself betray much interest in this execution. At least, in the small sandy valley, a deep hollow surrounded on all sides by naked crags, there was no one present save the officer, the explorer, the condemned man, who was a stupid-looking, wide-mouthed creature with bewildered hair and face, and the soldier who held the heavy chain controlling the small chains locked on the prisoner’s ankles, wrists, and neck, chains that were themselves attached to each other by communicating links. In any case, the condemned man looked so like a submissive dog that one might have thought he could be left to run free on the surrounding hills and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin.
The explorer did not much care about the apparatus and walked up and down behind the prisoner with almost visible indifference while the officer made the last adjustments, now creeping beneath the structure, which was bedded deep in the earth, now climbing a ladder to inspect its upper parts. These were tasks that night well have been left to a mechanic, but the officer performed them with great zeal, whether because he was a devoted admirer of the apparatus or because of other reasons the work could be entrusted to no one else. “Ready now!” he called at last and climbed down from the ladder. He looked uncommonly limp, breathed with his mouth wide open, and had tucked two fine ladies’ handkerchiefs under the collar of his uniform. “These uniforms are too heavy for the tropics, surely,” said the explorer, instead of making some inquiry about the apparatus, as the officer had expected. “Of course,” said the officer, washing his oily and greasy hands in a bucket of water that stood ready, “but they mean home to us; we don’t want to forget about home. Now just have a look at this machine,” he added at once, simultaneously drying his hands on a towel and indicating the apparatus. “Up till now a few things still had to be set by hand, but from this moment it works all by itself.” The explorer nodded and followed him. The officer, anxious to secure himself against all contingencies, said: “Things sometimes go wrong, of course; I hope that nothing goes wrong today, but we have to allow for the possibility. The machinery should go on working continuously for twelve hours. But if anything does go wrong it will only be some small matter that can be set right at once.
“Won’t you take a seat?” he asked finally, drawing a cane chair out from among a heap of them and offering it to the explorer, who could not refuse it. He was now sitting at the edge of a pit, into which he glanced for a fleeting moment. It was not very deep. On one side of the pit the excavated soil had been piled up in a rampart, on the other side of it stood the apparatus. “I don’t know,” said the officer, “if the Commandant has already explained this apparatus to you.” The explorer waved one hand vaguely; the officer asked for nothing better, since now he could explain the apparatus himself. “This apparatus,” he said, taking hold of a crank handle and leaning against it, “was invented by our former Commandant. I assisted at the very earliest experiments and had a share in all the work until its completion. But the credit of inventing it belongs to him alone. Have you ever heard of our former Commandant? No? Well, it isn’t saying too much if I tell you that the organization of the whole penal colony is his work. We who were his friends knew even before he died that the organization of the colony was so perfect that his successor, even with a thousand new schemes in his head, would find it impossible to alter anything, at least for many years to come. And our prophecy has come true; the new Commandant has had to acknowledge its truth. A pity you never met the old Commandant!—But,” the officer interrupted himself, “I am rambling on, and here stands his apparatus before us. It consists, as you see, of three parts. In the course of time each of these parts has acquired a kind of popular nickname. The lower one is called the ‘Bed,’ the upper one the ‘Designer,’ and this one here in the middle that moves up and down is called the ‘Harrow.’” “The Harrow?” asked the explorer. He had not been listening very attentively, the glare of the sun in the shadeless valley was altogether too strong, it was difficult to collect one’s thoughts. All the more did he admire the officer, who in spite of his tight-fitting full-dress uniform coat, amply befrogged and weighed down by epaulettes, was pursuing his subject with such ent
husiasm and, besides talking, was still tightening a screw here and there with a spanner. As for the soldier, he seemed to be in much the same condition as the explorer. He had wound the prisoner’s chain around both his wrists, propped himself on his rifle, let his head hang, and was paying no attention to anything. That did not surprise the explorer, for the officer was speaking French, and certainly neither the soldier nor the prisoner understood a word of French. It was all the more remarkable, therefore, that the prisoner was nonetheless making an effort to follow the officer’s explanations. With a kind of drowsy persistence he directed his gaze wherever the 0mcer pointed a finger, and at the interruption of the explorer’s question he, too, as well as the officer, looked around.
“Yes, the Harrow,” said the officer, “a good name for it. The needles are set in like the teeth of a harrow and the whole thing works something like a harrow, although its action is limited to one place and contrived with much more artistic skill. Anyhow, you’ll soon understand it. On the Bed here the condemned man is laid—I’m going to describe the apparatus first before I set it in motion. Then you’ll be able to follow the proceedings better. Besides, one of the cogwheels in the Designer is badly worn; it creaks a lot when it’s working; you can hardly hear yourself speak; spare parts, unfortunately, are difficult to get here.—Well, here is the Bed, as I told you. It is completely covered with a layer of cotton wool; you’ll find out why later. On this cotton wool the condemned man is laid, face down, quite naked, of course; here are straps for the hands, here for the feet, and here for the neck, to bind him fast. Here at the head of the Bed, where the man, as I said, first lays down his face, is this little gag of felt, which can be easily regulated to go straight into his mouth. It is meant to keep him from screaming and biting his tongue. Of course the man is forced to take the felt into his mouth, for otherwise his neck would be broken by the strap.” “Is that cotton wool?” asked the explorer, bending forward. “Yes, certainly,” said the officer, with a smile, “feel it for yourself.” He took the explorer’s hand and guided it over the Bed. “It’s specially prepared cotton wool, that’s why it looks so different; I’ll tell you presently what it’s for.” The explorer already felt a dawning interest in the apparatus; he sheltered his eyes from the sun with one hand and gazed up at the structure. It was a huge affair. The Bed and the Designer were of the same size and looked like two dark wooden chests. The Designer hung about two meters above the Bed; each of them was bound at the corners with four rods of brass that almost flashed out rays in the sunlight. Between the chests shuttled the Harrow on a ribbon of steel.
The officer had scarcely noticed the explorer’s previous indifference, but he was now well aware of his dawning interest; so he stopped explaining in order to leave a space of time for quiet observation. The condemned man imitated the explorer; since he could not use a hand to shelter his eyes he gazed upwards without shade.
“Well, the man lies down,” said the explorer, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs.
“Yes,” said the officer, pushing his cap back a little and passing one hand over his heated face, “now listen! Both the Bed and the Designer have an electric battery each; the Bed needs one for itself, the Designer for the Harrow. As soon as the man is strapped down, the Bed is set in motion. It quivers in minute, very rapid vibrations, both from side to side and up and down. You will have seen similar apparatus in hospitals; but in our Bed the movements are all precisely calculated; you see, they have to correspond very exactly to the movements of the Harrow. And the Harrow is the instrument for the actual execution of the sentence”
“And how does the sentence run?” asked the explorer.
“You don’t know that either?” said the officer in amazement, and bit his lips. “Forgive me if my explanations seem rather incoherent. I do beg your pardon. You see, the Commandant always used to do the explaining; but the new Commandant shirks this duty; yet that such an important visitor”—the explorer tried to deprecate the honor with both hands; the officer, however, insisted—”that such an important visitor should not even be told about the kind of sentence we pass is a new development, which—” He was just on the point of using strong language but checked himself and said only: “I was not informed, it is not my fault. In any case, I am certainly the best person to explain our procedure, since I have here”—he patted his breast pocket—”the relevant drawings made by our former Commandant.”
“The Commandant’s own drawings?” asked the explorer. “Did he combine everything in himself, then? Was he soldier, judge, mechanic, chemist, and draughtsman?”
“Indeed he was,” said the officer, nodding assent, with a remote, glassy look. Then he inspected his hands critically; they did not seem clean enough to him for touching the drawings; so he went over to the bucket and washed them again. Then he drew out a small leather wallet and said: “Our sentence does not sound severe. Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow. This prisoner, for instance”—the officer indicated the man—“will have written on his body: HONOR THY SUPERIORS!”
The explorer glanced at the man; he stood, as the officer pointed him out, with bent head, apparently listening with all his ears in an effort to catch what was being said. Yet the movement of his blubber lips, closely pressed together, showed clearly that he could not understand a word. Many questions were troubling the explorer, but at the sight of the prisoner he asked only: “Does he know his sentence?” “No,” said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition, but the explorer interrupted him: “He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed on him?” “No,” said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: “There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body.” The explorer intended to make no answer, but he felt the prisoner’s gaze turned on him; it seemed to ask if he approved such goings-on. So he bent forward again, having already leaned back in his chair and put another question: “But surely he knows that he has been sentenced?” “Nor that either,” said the officer, smiling at the explorer as if expecting him to make further surprising remarks. “No,” said the explorer, wiping his forehead, “then he can’t know either whether his defense was effective?” “He has had no chance of putting up a defense,” said the officer, turning his eyes away as if speaking to himself and so sparing the explorer the shame of hearing self-evident matters explained. “But he must have had some chance of defending himself,” said the explorer, and rose from his seat.
The officer realized that he was in danger of having his exposition of the apparatus held up for a long time; so he went up to the explorer, took him by the arm, waved a hand toward the condemned man, who was standing very straight now that he had so obviously become the center of attention—the soldier had also given the chain a jerk—and said: “This is how the matter stands. I have been appointed judge in this penal colony. Despite my youth. For I was the former Commandant’s assistant in all penal matters and know more about the apparatus than anyone. My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted. Other courts cannot follow that principle, for they consist of several opinions and have higher courts to scrutinize them. That is not the case here, or at least, it was not the case in the former Commandant’s time. The new man has certainly shown some inclination to interfere with my judgments, but so far I have succeeded in fending him off and will go on succeeding. You wanted to have the case explained; it is quite simple, like all of them. A captain reported to me this morning that this man, who had been assigned to him as a servant and sleeps before his door, had been asleep on duty. It is his duty, you see, to get up every time the hour strikes and salute the captain’s door. Not an exacting duty, and very necessary, since he has to be a sentry as well as a servant, and must be alert in both functions. Last night the captain wanted to see if the man was doing his duty. He opened the door as the clock struck two and there was his man curled up asleep. He took his riding whip and lashed him acr
oss the face. Instead of getting up and begging pardon, the man caught hold of his master’s legs, shook him, and cried: ‘Throw that whip away or I’ll eat you alive.’—That’s the evidence. The captain came to me an hour ago; I wrote down his statement and appended the sentence to it. Then I had the man put in chains. That was all quite simple. If I had first called the man before me and interrogated him, things would have got into a confused tangle. He would have told lies, and had I exposed these lies he would have backed them up with more lies, and so on and so forth. As it is, I’ve got him and I won’t let him go.—Is that quite clear now? But we’re wasting time, the execution should be beginning and I haven’t finished explaining the apparatus yet.” He pressed the explorer back into his chair, went up again to the apparatus, and began: “As you see, the shape of the Harrow corresponds to the human form; here is the harrow for the torso, here are the harrows for the legs. For the head there is only this one small spike. Is that quite clear?” He bent amiably forward toward the explorer, eager to provide the most comprehensive explanations.
The explorer considered the Harrow with a frown. The explanation of the judicial procedure had not satisfied him. He had to remind himself that this was in any case a penal colony where extraordinary measures were needed and that military discipline must be enforced to the last. He also felt that some hope might be set on the new Commandant, who was apparently of a mind to bring in, although gradually, a new kind of procedure which the officer’s narrow mind was incapable of understanding. This train of thought prompted his next question: “Will the Commandant attend the execution?” “It is not certain,” said the officer, wincing at the direct question, and his friendly expression darkened. “That is just why we have to lose no time. Much as I dislike it, I shall have to cut my explanations short. But of course tomorrow, when the apparatus has been cleaned—its one drawback is that it gets so messy—I can recapitulate all the details. For the present, then, only the essentials.—When the man lies down on the Bed and it begins to vibrate, the Harrow is lowered onto his body. It regulates itself automatically so that the needles barely touch his skin; once contact is made the steel ribbon stiffens immediately into a rigid band. And then the performance begins. An ignorant onlooker would see no difference between one punishment and another. The Harrow appears to do its work with uniform regularity. As it quivers, its points pierce the skin of the body which is itself quivering from the vibration of the Bed. So that the actual progress of the sentence can be watched, the Harrow is made of glass. Getting the needles fixed in the glass was a technical problem, but after many experiments we overcame the difficulty. No trouble was too great for us to take, you see. And now anyone can look through the glass and watch the inscription taking form on the body. Wouldn’t you care to come a little nearer and have a look at the needles?”
Dorothy Parker's Elbow Page 18
