She is the photograph on my desktop; she is the woman of my dreams, my enigmatic shadow. The photograph is forty years old. We were young, then. I was at NYU, struggling to choose a major that would lead me into a career. She was an Ethiopian tribeswoman, traded to her husband for fifty head of cattle. Her eyes were full of thoughts so different from mine, we might well have come from different planets.
It was her underlip that made me cut her photo out from National Geographic, and put it up on my dorm room bulletin board. Her underlip was separated from her mouth, a huge circle of flesh jutting out from her face, the circumference large enough to slip over her head. It was grotesque, cruel, painful to look at. Yet it fascinated me. I created a character for her, and named her Itsula in my mind.
It was Itsula's underlip that led me to study anthropology. I wanted to understand her, understand her people. Why would they do something so painful and disfiguring to a pretty young woman? For she was pretty, if you could look past that underlip. What significance did the lip plate have in her society? Could she talk, when they were inserted? Was that what they were meant to do, to silence her and make her only an object of trade?
Why, Itsula? I silently implored her. Why did they do this to you? I found out the name of her tribe, and between lectures on primate dentition and studies of Margaret Mead, I researched my Itsula. When I looked up from my books, she stared into my eyes with her own velvet glowing coals. Her skin was not the chocolate hue of African-Americans, but true ebony, so black as to contain a tinge of blue. She held a rifle slung over her shoulder. White markings dotted her forehead, circled her eyes like tattooed sunglass frames, and traveled down her nose to stop at her upper lip. She wore oversized plugs in both her earlobes, beads around her neck, and apparently little else, though the photograph only showed her from the waist up.
I learned that she was considered beautiful because of that tormented underlip. Men would vie for her and offer more heads of cattle to her father, the larger it grew. Month after month, she would allow clay plates of greater and greater size to be inserted, stretching it gradually to increase her worth.
One night, I saw myself as a distinguished anthropologist. In my dream, I wore safari gear and traveled to Ethiopia to study Itsula's tribe. When I arrived at their camp, Itsula was wearing her lip plate and carrying the rifle over her shoulder. Seeing a strange woman with ghostlike skin and chestnut hair approach her, she slapped the rifle into firing position. I raised my hands.
Itsula moved forward, her eyes as opaque as chips of obsidian. Her long fingers quested up and down my body, patting my tan shorts and short jacket. She found the Swiss Army knife at my waist and took it from me. Then her fingers slid inside my jacket, to fumble between my breasts. No weapon there. A hint of a smile appeared in her eyes as her calloused fingertips brushed my nipple. I held my breath, and awoke on the verge of orgasm.
Awake, I continued the dream. Itsula put the gun down, and a man strode up beside her. It turned out he was a translator, having learned pidgin English. He explained to me that Itsula was widowed now. Many men sought to marry her because she wore such an enormous and decorative lip plate. Her bride price was 50 head of cattle. I consulted with him.
"What if I pay her father more than that?"
"Then you have husband for her?"
"Yes," I replied in my mind, my heart leaping. No one had to know, Itsula would not be sold to another man. I would buy her freedom, I would take her home with me to my studio in New York, and I would penetrate her secrets. Most important, I would show her what it is like to be loved for herself, not for her worth in cattle.
My imagination skips ahead. We live in New York now. Sometimes Itsula is happy that I "rescued" her from servitude. Other times, when we walk city streets hand in hand, she resents my bringing her to a place where everyone stares at her underlip, hanging down like a living pendant into the valley between her breasts.
But when we are alone, I strip off her blouse and bra, and return her to the proud nudity of her youth. Despite my olive complexion, my hand looks like chalk as I touch her midnight skin. My fingers titillate her nipples and they rise, a hint of dusky rose under the stark darkness of her body. I lick that huge underlip.
"Can you feel that?" I ask her, wondering if the nerve endings have all been severed.
"No," she replies, but I wonder, for her tongue protrudes a bit as I lick the underlip and kiss it. Perhaps my homage to this tortured part of her makes her happy. It was her claim to beauty once, and now, it is her mark of distinction.
I move closer, palms rubbing her turgid nipples, and she slides her legs apart as she was taught. I kiss and suck her nipples and she arches up under me, whispering words in her native tongue, peppered with guttural sounds and clicks. Moving down, I kiss her rounded belly and then the tightly coiled black hair on her mound. She moans, whispers, "Yes," in English, and lapses back into her own language.
Those long fingers stroke my hair as I kiss her labia. The inner lips are unusually long. She told me, once, that when she was a little girl, she thought the longer one was a small penis, and she tried to use it to urinate, shaming herself when the urine trickled down her thighs like every other woman's.
Now, though, I part them and lick the pink bud of her clit. Itsula writhes and moans. They have mutilated her face but thankfully, her tribe does not remove the clitoris. At least, in my dream world they have not. I tease her with my tongue and she runs English into her native language, calling out to me with every passion-seared word at her disposal. She jerks her head from side to side. She has grown her hair back somewhat and the spring-like curls frame her face. Her underlip flops about, striking her chest and the tops of her breasts, as she climbs closer to the peak.
I suck on her clit and slide my fingers into her pulsing vagina. She's a rain forest in there, steaming and dripping. The walls contract against my fingers and she screams out, beyond words, beyond language, as her orgasm explodes.
When she catches her breath I am up on my elbow, watching her face. Her eyes are black velvet.
"Would you get me a Coke?" she asks, the C sounding like a click in the back of her throat.
I slide out of bed, nude, and she watches my plumpish ass as I saunter out of the bedroom and pop open a can for her.
I return, and she sits up, sipping the Coke. While she does, my fingers gently caress that underlip of hers.
"I saw a man in a drugstore this morning," I tell her. "His whole face was full of metal. Silver earrings, silver nose rings through the nostrils and septum, lip and tongue piercings, all metal."
Itsula grins. "Then how can he kiss?" She loops the underlip over my head, trapping me in the circle of her flesh, and pulls me to her. I kiss her gently and then with passion, and we roll over, bound together, to begin again.
My daydream ends like this. It is forty years later now. I look at the photo on my desktop. Where is Itsula now? My chestnut hair has turned to silver. Is she still alive? What was her real name, and what became of her? Do her daughters and granddaughters wear plates in their lips too, or have women rebelled against this custom?
She has changed my life, this forever-young woman who stares at me from the screen. She is my shadow. She is my other self. I will never meet her, but her flesh, even her most wounded flesh, calls to me, and in some mystic way, I love her.
Originally Published November 2007: Lust