Chapter XIV. Exotic Fauna, a Composition.
XIV.
EXOTIC FAUNA, A COMPOSITION.
WEDNESDAY. NIGHT.
It was much later in the evening—when dinner was cleared, the Europeans were smoking cigarettes and sipping espressos, and there was some shifting around of chairs—that Bas squeezed himself in beside Cecilia, forcing out Santiago’s assistant, Hugh.
“So, Cecilia, Procurer of Butcher Knives, what are you?” he asked, leaning into her.
“Umm. No idea. A flute?”
Bas laughed then. “No. I meant your ethnicity.”
“Oh.” It was a question she’d been asked often.
For as far back as she could remember. When she first arrived in America at the age of seven and her parents enrolled her and her brother, Andrew, then four, in a Head Start day-care and after-school program, in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
From the beginning she stood out, despite her complexion.
The way she spoke, her prim handmade clothes, her leather T-bar shoes, her grosgrain ribbons, the texture of her hair.
She was an anomaly. And over the years, although she worked hard to fit in, there were those who managed to make her feel slightly other.
An outsider. An imposter. Not Black enough.
Not American enough. Not … enough. Ultimately, she had learned to stop defining herself by what she wasn’t, as opposed to what she was.
“Jamaican, Chinese, English, Scottish, and Indian,” Cecilia recited by rote.
“So you’re the full orchestra.” He smiled. That dimple. And then much to Cecilia’s surprise he clinked his wineglass for attention, and then shared his findings with the table.
“I love that.” Beatriz clasped her hands together, adoringly. “The whole world within. So inspiring.”
“Yes. Very exotic.” Rafaella smiled in Cecilia’s direction. Cecilia smiled back politely.
She realized that Rafaella probably was not aware that exotic might be taken as offensive. She herself had only discovered that when Lorry had explained it to her the year prior. How exotic connoted being viewed through a white or Eurocentric lens. How it was devaluing.
“I’d rather be called that than the N-word,” she’d said to him. They were lying in the woods behind his parents’ house in Greenwich, postcoital. The November earth cool and hard beneath her back.
“Well, yes.” He smiled. “That would be considerably worse. But you shouldn’t be thinking of it as a compliment either, Boo.
‘Exotic’ is white people thinking they’re giving you a compliment when they’re not.
It’s like saying, ‘You’re beautiful, for someone who’s not white.
’” With that, he zipped his pants and sat upright, maple leaves clinging to his golden hair.
“Come. Let’s go back in before they start looking for us. ”
“Dot or feather?” Bas was asking her now.
“Excuse me?”
“The Indian part. Dot or feather?”
Cecilia was equal parts aghast and amused.
“Um, dot, I guess.”
“That’s incredibly offensive, Bas. You should know better,” Jaya spoke up from where she was nursing a cup of mint tea. “I didn’t know you were Indian.” This she directed at Cecilia, although she didn’t address her by name.
“My mom’s dad’s family. They migrated to Jamaica at the turn of the century.”
“Fascinating,” Bas said. “My family has been in the same village for five hundred years.”
“Anch’io. A Treviso,” Rafaella added. “But me, I had to leave. Too small.”
“Mine were Vikings,” Katrine announced proudly.
Jaya leaned back in her chair then, teacup still in hand, pinky extended. “My mum’s parents migrated from Mumbai to England in the thirties. My grandfather came to study at the London School of Economics, and never really went home.”
As Cecilia understood it, her great-grandfather, as part of a wave of Indians seeking employment, had arrived in Jamaica as an indentured laborer and worked on a sugar plantation after slavery had been abolished.
And so the island had a new pecking order.
For generations, even the newly freed Black Jamaicans looked down on the Indians who toiled in the cane fields.
Cecilia’s migration story was, it seemed, vastly different than Jaya Clark’s.
She imagined her caste—or what was left of it—was, too.
It struck her then, the varied histories represented at one table. And how heartbreaking that she could only trace her ancestry back so far. She noticed that Hugh, who was born in Saigon but whose family had fled to the States in the ’70s, hadn’t spoken either.
“I think Rafaella and I hold the record here then.” Bas smiled, holding his wineglass aloft.
“Congrats, mate,” Elliot said, drolly.
“You know…” Anouk shifted in her seat. Her syrupy voice unfamiliar to most at the table.
“Some of these ancestors forced their way into countries that were not their own and helped themselves to the natural resources, including, often, the people. Which is why not all of us can claim to have lived in the same village for five hundred years.”
She’d said it in French. And for some it took a full fifteen seconds to register. But ultimately, it landed.
“Hmm,” Maren uttered, fiddling with a signet ring on her finger.
Beatriz reached over for Anouk’s hand on the table and held it inside her own.
Elliot was the first to speak. “I like her.” He smiled.
Didier nodded, in agreement, his puppy-dog eyes twinkling. “Moi, aussi.”
Afterward, as they were weaving their way through the resort—the Querencia Bay party veering off to their respective luxury villas, and the others toward the vans heading back to Casa Azul—Cecilia spotted Bas a few yards ahead of her, walking alongside Anouk.
They were engaged in an intense discussion.
Or at least, Bas was, from what she could see.
He was speaking and gesticulating earnestly, his face in profile, while Anouk did little more than incline her head from time to time.
Cecilia could not hear any of their conversation, but not for want of trying.
“I think someone should tell Bas he’s barking up the wrong tree.
” Marc had sauntered up beside Cecilia when she peeled off the main path toward the reception hall and valet.
He had two unopened bottles of beer in hand.
Cecilia knew he was saving them to drink later, on the narrow balcony of his hotel room, accompanied by his nightly blunt.
“What? Stop. You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about her.” She shushed him.
“I know she has bigger balls than any other nineteen-year-old I’ve met in this industry. Or maybe anywhere.” He paused then, tucking back a lock of hair that had fallen from his ponytail. “And I know how she looks at you.”
She froze for a second, wondering what it was that Marc had seen, detected. If the glances she’d written off as casual were decidedly not.
“You’re imagining it,” she said.
“Am I? It’s okay. I won’t tell your boyfriend.”
Cecilia was still figuring out how to respond when someone called her name from behind, and she spun around to find Bas striding up the palm-lined path. God, his legs were long.
“Just … go ahead. I’ll catch up with you in a sec,” she said to Marc. “But don’t leave me.”
He laughed, backing away from her, in the direction of the valet. “Surrounded by all this temptation? Never.”
“Shut up, Marc.”
“Don’t shit where you eat. I’ll be in the van.”
“I’m glad I caught you,” the boy from the five-hundred-year-old village announced breathlessly.
Cecilia was once again aware of how tall he was, and how good he smelled this close.
She wondered if it was the fragrance from his campaign.
She could not recall the name, but the image was etched in her head.
Him, topless, on a beach in Greece. His abs, oiled and glistening, in black and white.
His eyes so light they were almost translucent.
“Hey, Bas.”
“I won’t keep you long. I just … I wanted to apologize for that entire conversation. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, really. It was … careless and rude of me.”
“Really. It’s okay.”
“We’re still friends, then?” He smiled, wide. Manipulatively, Cecilia thought. He had to have known its effect.
“Yes.” She laughed. “We’re still friends.”
“Okay, good. Because it would kill me if we weren’t friends.” And with that, he bowed, and strode back between the palm trees from whence he came. “Get some sleep, Cecilia. See you tomorrow!”