Tales of the Tattoo-Rumba Man

Nat Case

 

 

Well, shall we start said the man of sorrows. Don't we always, said the tattoo-rumba man. And they turned the crank and sparked the plug and away we go again.

 

1. Gardens

 

The lines on his face grow old, and spread muddier every year. His step is slower, but still he dances. He dances rumbas from memory, from dreamed-of childhoods, from books he read once and whose titles he cannot recall, from songs he can still repeat word for word. There is a faint scent to his dances, the smell of an old tattoo, of paper made in the last war, of a spice left forgotten on the shelf.

There is an old garden where I sit and walk, that smells of dying roses and former tulips. It is that part of the year that is raw not-quite-winter, barren like a used paper towel, empty like the memory of a dead cousin. This is the tattoo-rumba man's favorite season and he jaunts about the garden. He sees me now on the peeled-paint bench, and he stops short. He asks what’s the matter and I say nothing, playing the sullen child. He sits down next to me carefully. He watches how I hold my hands and he nods.

He says, “I like this time of year because it is so quiet. Nothing shouts now, it only murmurs gently. Do you hear the shuffle of leafy skin-prints in the frost? Can't you smell the still golden smell of the edge of sleep?” 

We sat silent, and the wind blew against our backs. He said, I learned this on an island, and he sang:

 

I cannot sleep for the howling wind,
       The wind that beats around my door.
       My bed is cold, my heart is broke,
       And I will see my love no more.

 

My love is gone, gone on the deep.
       My love is gone, he’ll come no more.
       The waves will rock him in his sleep
       He’ll make his home on that distant shore.

 

He smiled, and shrugged. “it goes on, but you get the picture.”

The garden is empty, and a cloud of dust blows past of the skeleton rosebushes. I shiver, and wander away inside, leaving the pigeons to peck at the ground where I sat.

The windows shine out on a quiet street after the parade has past. The tattoo-rumba man leans out of a dark doorway and breathes the night air. He unties his shoes and wanders through the night. And once he is out of sight, who knows where he goes?

 

2. Kings

 

Where I grew up, there is a huge greystone library, with bookshelves that go back into dusty emptiness. I see the tattoo-rumba man there sometimes. He sits and tells me stories about his home in the hills.              

He said once: "My father was king, and I was his son. I walked the dangerous cold  halls of the palace and waited for something to happen. And while I waited, I watched them, especially my father. I watched him slip into the decay of deceiving words; I watched his hands sweep out capturing only empty space."

"Did anything happen?" I asked.

"He died,” he said and his eyes were blank. “The minute he died they found me and came into my room, saying hallelujah ave! So I crept away to a place only I knew, deep under the halls, out past the walls, and I slept there. The grim and set faces of the Armies of the Nile found me there. They took me up to the assembled masses and shouted our king is here. And when all was quiet I whispered no. No-one said a word.” He smiled remembering.” No-one knew what to say. And I walked away. It was as easy as that. 

"But my closest friend followed me and said, wait we need you. I turned and said you don't need me, and I won't be king. He asked me why and I could not answer him. He knew me better than anyone else in that city, yet I could not answer. I looked at the tall heavy walls and at my friend bound in silk and brocade, and I said I am not the king. I am the tattoo-rumba man and I will walk the long and complicated rumba of the world. He did not understand. Or maybe he understood too well. Only his eyes followed me as I danced down and away and out. I have never been back."

After we've sat there in the library for a while he'll close his book and stare at me with his carved-wood eyes. For a second, all the lines and circles disappear, and I can picture him as a boy of ten or eleven, dancing a quiet rumba off into the dark. Then he gets up and walks away. After a while, a long way off, I hear a lonely, whistled rumba. The shelves rattle like maracas.

 

3. Cloth

 

The tattoo-rumba man stands staring over the water into the depths. He sees nothing that surprises him and hears even less. The tattoo-rumba man is not a far but a familiar and that frightens those who meet him because he is so strange. The weaverwoman stands beside him for a moment because it is on her way to work, and she has time. He listens to her breathing and thinks of home.

The weaverwoman weaves a dance of smooth white linen. She dances the long, cool ballet of cloth. She stands behind the tattoo-rumba man now and lays a shawl of memory over him. They dance to the slow and poignant music of long-dead orchestras; they slide over the parquet floor. Ghosts dance by now, nodding politely at them. The tattoo-rumba man's face is a happy schoolboy's, and they flirt like children at a school dance, obvious and shy. And now there is a break in the music, and they clap after the orchestra's echo. There is a moment and then the sad and lonely rumba begins. The weaverwoman slips the shawl off his shoulders, and watches, ageless, as he dances the intent rumba of final destinations, out into the twilight.

Later, we gathered in the light of the dying sun in a field somewhere near the sea (there is only one sea). The weaverwoman sang a song to the moon on the horizon, a soundless keen a howl. The tuneless dance of dusk.

The moon lights down the glow of the sun reflected in ice and dust. The weaverwoman in the silver light spins thread with her fingers and slips them into the pattern. Her smile is the smile of an ancient statue; her eyes are empty, deep pits shadowed by the moon. She is blind; she goes by feel here. Clickclack goes the loom and the threads begin the simple dance of ten lines moving as one. They knot and break and then rejoin again and we, the tattoo-rumba and I stand back. The threads are beautiful and terrible and we tremble watching bloody hairs go down into the long tapestry.

Not much we can do now, except wait.           

 

4. End

 

HYEHURREHA cries the wind and the edge of the world ebbs around us with the crash of surf. And hearing him I listen to the mariner telling me of the faraway, and I listen to the seabrine on his lips crackle, I listen to things breaking, and I hear the end of whatall. One great wave rises hour after hour until it blots out the sun like a blue eclipsing cloud.

We are calm (we are always calm), we stand still (we are stone) and finally down the beach comes the man of sorrows and says sorry I'm late. The light is that pale greenish before-the-storm color. All I can hear is the roar now, and we stand with our shovels in hand and wait for it. The man of sorrows takes my shovel and I step back to become a witness.

It's not as if I wasn't warned. It's not as if he didn't tell me. The tattoo-rumba man read a story once that was different from everything else I’d ever heard. It was when we sat off the docks in the heart of the edge of the sea. The dawn had mist in it and the sea smelled of seaweed and fish. He read me the story of the Grey Men, who threw the stone into the sea, and still the sea came. I wish I could remember it now.

But here there is no beginning-do-it-over, no remembering anything, only this-is-it.

And it was all wrong. They wended into the grey green matter that doesn't matter and out into the emptiness that doesn't empty anywhere. The pool of water that crackled with sticky electricity drew them in waited no more, and they were pulled like a perverse fisherman's catch down into the water. As they hit they had an instant of seeing flying fish and swimming birds and huge obscenities that looked like insects, and then there was only silence.

I am alone. The beach is silent and too ordinary. I have forgotten the songs, I have forgotten what a song sounds like. I sit, because my legs have danced all night and have turned to rubber. I lie on the sand, head in the crook of my arm, and I must sleep. There are no dreams, only the blackness of utter exhaustion, the end of time.

And as I sleep, there down deep in caves under the cliffs where seabirds wheel is a voice. No words, just a long hum like the end of film, like a log humming its own quiet log song. It gets louder and they come out, wet and happy, and I hear that they were singing a song. I don’t understand it, but now on the shore we dance the circle and the spiral, though our legs said they could dance no more. The tattoo-rumba man slips away and I see him alone dancing the tired and happy rumba of the farms and the fields. 

And afterwards in the chapel where they mourn the lost sailors and the seaswept islands, I see the man of sorrows. He is sad because it is the last day, and now he must go. It is too much like home he says. I say we will meet again and he smiles. I think I can see him through the smile, but soon he walks away. The man of sorrows is a lone walker and only he knows why he walks alone.

And as we sat on the pier at the end of the city, where the end-all meets the be-all and the metal meets the mud, I asked the tattoo-rumba man why he had told me all this. He closed his eyes, reached in a pocket and pulled out a stone, ordinary pink and granitey, and he began humming the slow and lonely sea rumba. After a while he opened his eyes and said this is a stone from that place, and I am bound to it like a dream and a persistent memory. Do you see? I know it was real.

 

5. Dream

 

I argued with the tattoo-rumba man.

He said “How can you say it wasn't real? Is a story any different from a dream? Is a dream any different from a memory? I remember touching a face, a stone, a window. I killed my father with a kitchen knife. I jumped and I flew. These happened in a dream and I remember them as I remember that beach, that place. I remember them like I remember the dance floor in early May. They are all the same. They are all dreams: home, love, death, this stone. They are all memories. They are all stories.”

He stopped and looked at me, and looked at the rusty iron beam we a sat on. He said, "This is a bad dream." He looked up and said "Let's go."

In my dream, the tattoo-rumba man paces the floor, waiting for the slow and sensuous rumba. After a while, there is a bright light that comes up slow. He stops and his mouth curves and moves the ancient lines. He listens and now I hear it too, like an old scratchy record. The Victrola rumba begins.

And still through days he stands and dances to himself the ways of places he wants to be. His hands move strangely living lives of their own. It is a great dusty hall and there is only him and the light and the floor. His own half-audible hum is the only music.

 

6. Spring

 

Hey he shouts and starts running the littlekid rumba of half-steps, skipping the cracks and jumping the lines. He smiles. The tattoos are bright and fresh like a spring tree twigs. I smile too, because it is spring. He says "Whee!" and jumps a twice tumble into the still cold grass. Then he sits up and is a little more serious. "What's up?" he asks.

I say nothing, but he doesn't believe it. It's true this time though; things really aren't so bad.

He nods, wise now. “Let me sing you a song,” he says, and looks at me. He says, “Sit down,” and I do. He says, suddenly shy: “This is kind of corny. You can't tell anyone else.” I nod. He says, “I learned this on an island. I was in love.” And he sings me a lullaby of spring.

 

The moon rise white.
       The stars shine bright,
       The sea is still and clear.
       Lie still my love,
       Sleep well my dove,
       Sleep still, my love, my dear.

Sleep warm, sleep tight, sleep safe tonight;
       Seep still until the dawn.
       Lie warm, lie near beside your dear
       The night is half-way gone.

The moon shone in,
       And touched your skin.
       It glowed like sleeping pearl.
       It moves up now,
       And on your brow
       A single silver curl.

Sleep warm, sleep tight, sleep safe tonight;
       Seep still until the dawn.
       Lie warm, lie near beside your dear
       The night is half-way gone.

I smiled and look up at his face. For a moment there was no tattoo, no picture. I saw him about my age, and in love, as if in an old old photograph.

Some night in winter a boy looks out his window and sees a man in the moon below looking up at him with an empty face and empty hands. As the boy watches the man lifts a pen and begins to draw on his face, ladders and snakes and pictures of men. Soon the boy cannot see the face for the drawing. 

Perhaps the tattoo-rumba man stands outside my window even now. He looks at me with huge, foreign eyes and draws on his face spirals and lines and dots and dashes. His face is like carved wood now. The pen is dry and he closes his eyes. The music begins, the elegant and quiet rumba; he goes dancing into the night.

 

7. Home

 

Finally, one day, he invited me to his home. Your home in the hills? I asked. No, he said, and looked at me sadly. 

His room was an old crate-filled place in a dirty part of town. It looked out into a trash-filled yard, and the windows were grimy with grey soot. He looked at me, and saw that I didn't see what he saw. We sat in silence for a long time, and then I got up and left. There wasn't anything to say. The streets were square and ordinary. I wept in the street like I had lost a limb.

The tattoo-rumba man dances in the graveyard, and sometimes he thinks he hears the sound of old dusty voices from around his feet. The sweet violin rumba carries him out and after and eventually he'll get to where he wishes he were.

The next day, grown up, I went back to visit him and apologize. He was gone.

Well, shall we start said the man of sorrows. Don't we always, said the tattoo-rumba man. And they turned the crank and sparked the plug and away we go again.