Read Online The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment - Free Book Online Page B

natural amphitheater. The mountains ascended around us in ancient, dripping green terraces. Their pinnacles were viridescent. Vapors wafted out of the foliage. Clouds were born on the cliffs. Everywhere, lace-thin waterfalls plunged into their own rainbows.
    I was by the water’s edge. The sand was the consistency of talcum powder. A red bird, sporting a sapphire crown as elaborate as a French wig, landed on a conch shell by my foot. Two periscope eyes popped out from the shell’s hole. The sea was azure in the shallows, red-violet over the sea grass, milky blue in the sandbars. Where the orange and purple reef touched the open sea, cobalt swells exploded into white mist.
    I simply assumed that all this beauty had inspired the tattoos.
    Isn’t that the epitome of arrogance? Five minutes in the company of nature’s rapture, and I presumed I understood.
    I looked around at Philip, who was hauling the last of our trunks away from the surf.
    “Do you think they’re coming back to eat us?” I asked.
    “They’re Christians. Methodists.”
    “Tattooed Methodists?”
    He came over and collapsed beside me on the sand. His face and chest were dripping. He used the hem of his sarong to mop them up. For a couple of minutes, we just gawked at all this splendor. Then Philip turned and stared at the jungle.
    “They were living art, weren’t they, Sara?”
    I wanted to pitch our tent by the sheltered rocks, but Philip insisted we make camp on the beach, fully exposed to the wind and the sun. When I questioned his judgment, he said we needed to be where the villagers could see us at all times, so that they might learn to trust us. Philip unpacked the tent while I tried to make sense of the instructions that came with it. Now and again, we could hear the village dogs barking just within the thicket of jungle, but when I turned to look, all I could see was a blockade of greenery.
    I had slept outdoors only once before in my life, at a Zionist camp in the Catskills. I had kept as close to the fire as possible without incinerating myself and joined my sweet young comrades in songs about how our people would one day return to the merciless wilderness and transform it into an Eden.
    Philip and I lit a fire. All the books had said to light a fire.
    It was ninety degrees under the palms.
    We opened a can of peaches and a tin of mackerel for supper. We ate in silent edginess, alert to every cracking branch and hooting creature. Now and then, voices or a high note of laughter was borne on the wind, but we couldn’t gauge how far the sounds had traveled.
    The light began tapering. A fan of mauve opened on a dissolving horizon. Silver-tooled clouds hung motionless in pink and gold space. The sun slipped behind a scaffolding of burnt-scarlet vapor, then plunged into the gilded sea. The planets came out one by one in the blue-violet sky. Then, without transition, the fabric of the night was dusted with stars.
    “Das es Gan Eden?” I asked Philip in Yiddish.
    But Philip was asleep.
    The next morning, Philip ornamented a dwarf palm near camp with a glinting display of axes and jewelry. He twirled one of the dangling pendants so that its cut glass caught the morning light and spun in its own prism.
    “Has anyone been here?” I asked, crawling free of the tent’s flaps.
    Philip looked up from the mesmerizing shimmer. His face was dripping, and it wasn’t even eight in the morning. “Should I put out more axes? I need to hold something back to bargain with later. What do you think of the display? Do you think it’s too much?”
    I foolishly said, “It’s as enticing as a Macy’s spring sale.”
    He didn’t ask my opinion again.
    He opened his knapsack and took out an oversize art book, flipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for. He walked back to the dwarf palm and angled the open tome against the trunk, amid the axes. Page right showed Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, page left an array of Oceanic and