New Colonial Thought

NEW JASMINE SCENT—The years are slushy out here. This generation were born on the island but the air is hot primordial soup; their children are still getting sunburns and sticking nicotine patches on with aloe vera. It wasn’t empty before. It’s not empty now. I finish off my flight with a drink in the airport while Juno fumbles around in her bag for the envelope her mother wrote the chauffeur's number on. Tan, salt spray, sandals. She asks for the last mouthful of my vodka soda and I oblige. 

I’m amazed by the calm and the pretty girls and the accents: lilting, pleasant, lots of sh sounds. Mine just never came through like that. Juno’s penny-wide gap between her two front teeth allows air to pass through and exotifies simple words. She fits in because she gets along with everyone. We walk out, noticing a rack of newspapers and the vendor sitting on an upside-down bucket: Sexy Guy Dies in Motorcycle Accident, Cause Unknown. Another girl that Juno knows is shielding her eyes from the sun and dragging a huge suitcase covered in skin tags of peeling stickers. Waiting is easy; I offer both girls a cigarette. Juno explains, peeling with laughter but the chapped skin of her shoulders looks a bit shabby also, that she knew a guy—maybe I know him too—who would call her in the middle of the night and ask for a cigarette once or twice a week.

‘That’s why I’m getting married,’ Juno says, waving her hands around. She glances over her shoulder and looks towards the newspaper rack. With her shoulders in the way, the headline now reads Sexy Guy Di                          ccident. The girl raises an eyebrow. She’s probably not Juno’s friend after all. ‘Oh. Well, I figured you’d be travelling.’

I recognise the chauffeur as he puts my luggage away and he lets us smoke some more in the back. Juno rolls her own cigarettes and I smoke straights, which isn’t the way things are supposed to be, but I love when girls do it so I don’t care at all. I have an involuntary erotic reaction to the sight of it—the guts of the cigarette,  tobacco and marijuana, when she licks her thumb, the flashy lighter embellished with tacky decal. We share this one and drive through an elaborate series of gates and scanners and checkpoints. The island is an enclave or a semi-enclave or an autonomous region within the country itself or a colonial project or something else entirely. I get my passport stamped; I lived here before but politics clambers over itself. The airport is bigger. Immigration’s tighter. A huge swathe of security is positioned inopportunely in the middle of a motorway: cameras, license plate ID, armed guards. Juno slides off her sandals and sits with her feet on my knees while smoking, thinking, flirting with a security guard she went to university with. He’s well-educated but in it for the love of the game, the sport of it.

There’s a bad smell about all of this. The wedding, that is. A good, long stretch of road allows me time to think but since Juno says we’re due a catch-up, though she knows absolutely nothing about me. I was seventeen and skinny when we last met—Juno was nineteen and doing her hair in new and exciting shapes just to ask me about my stepbrother, whose love for updos and braids was minimal at best. Dry air and palms and upscale motors and the frozen edge of sea, always the same distance away and almost perfect blue.

At twenty-three, her hair is wavy and scattered in the breeze.

‘That girl at the airport,’ I say. 

‘Did you remember her?’

‘No. Should I? Don’t tell me she’s another one of you.’

‘Us what? She’s a model. Wanda.’ Her head turns to the side. ‘Wanda the model, Juno the bride-to-be, Jupiter the…?’

I blink. I push her feet off my lap.

‘Jupiter the nomad.’

‘Cute. Very cute.’ 

We drive. She leans over to fiddle with the cassette player and we listen to jangly guitar music instead of talking. I feel sorry for what I said but apologising seems like it would only dig a bigger hole—I’m not into trench warfare with people, even beautiful people, who know how to fight and die much better than I can. They’re the worst. White colonial buildings line the suburban roads; an armless bust of an ancient soldier or god stands in the midst of cut grass and trimmed bushes. New jasmine scent explodes around us as gravel crushes beneath the wheels. I feel an urge to prostrate myself in front of that erotic marble but it’s a cast-off feeling. I never came here before—things used to be rougher around the edges. All these potted plants and bleached walls must be less than a few years old.

Juno stretches out her shoulders in that long white dress. She’s so practiced that it’s uncomfortable to watch: the chipped nail polish, the cut in her bottom lip, the satchel latches clinking against her bony hips. She waves up at an open window. You can’t see for the curtains, though, waving curves and undulations, soft and translucent. 

‘Whose house is this?’

‘My mother’s,’ she says. This is when the weather starts to really stir my stomach. I carry my luggage a few steps before an unremarkable man—not taller than me—snatches it away. There are very few precious things in this world but the right of a man to drag his own suitcase is one of them. ‘You remember her? Miss Capitolina?’

As a strict and foreboding teacher, yes. Naturally she produced a daughter who, for the time being, is neither of those things; not in the traditional sense, at least. I wasn’t much one for pedagogy as a child and now I’m even less inclined towards it. I lived with cows once and learned more. Mrs Capitolina isn’t in the hallway but I’m overwhelmed by reed and floor polish and stale perfume. All the doors and windows are open, because what threat is left?

Juno grabs my hand. I haven’t asked who she’s marrying yet. Sexy Guy Dies in Motorcycle Accident...If it were anybody I knew on more than a superficial level, she would have mentioned it by now. Human connection’s heroin. I’m not sure what happens first; I compliment her choice of lampshade, very bohemian, or the wedding dress smothered in glossy plastic on the back of her door. It’s ajar when she kisses me. Then...I take my jacket off and kiss her back. There’s time to spare before the sun sets and we need alcohol in us immediately, so I lay her down on linen that bleeds scent and reveal all the strappy tan lines she’s been sporting recently. 

My nose presses against her navel.

‘You’re so chic,’ she says. ‘Everything about you...So chic.’

‘Is it Rui?’

‘What?’ She sits up and knocks my nose off-kilter. ‘Rui?’

‘Either you’re marrying him or screwing him.’ 

Juno frowns. ‘Neither, actually,’ she says. ‘What do you think of me?’

‘You want to screw him but can’t?’

‘Why do you want to talk about Rui now?’

‘I’m disinherited, not out of touch. I don’t mind if you are.’ I pinch the slight fat on her hip. ‘And I wouldn’t blame you whatsoever. Him on that old motorcycle…’ 

Nostalgia melts her a little. ‘He’s coming to the wedding,’ she says. My shoulders relax. ‘Aw, won’t that be so cute? You and Rui together again.’ 

‘But were you…?’

‘No,’ she says. 

‘Not once?’

‘Not once,’ she promises, patting the back of my head where the hair’s jagged and dark.

NEW COLONIAL THOUGHT—Dinner is taken outside on platters, glass bowls, crystal cups. Dust gets into your eye as well as sand. The gardens are sprayed with a faint mist and girls circle the pool without getting in, holding their spiked lemonades at an arm’s length from their parents. I figure that this crowd still knows how to party from their polka-dot bikinis and anklets and smocks. Miss Capitolina sniffs her daughter’s hair when we arrive, my arm around Juno’s shoulders, but not mine. I look dirty to Miss Capitolina. Juno thinks I am, too.

Nobody eats much and Juno is melting ice cubes on her tongue one by one. It might have served us to shower before arriving—I’m wrecked from the travel and she’s shimmering lightly with orgasm, though these honky old folks probably don’t know anything about that. 

‘His name is Mathias,’ she says. I want to swim but I don’t have my trunks. ‘He’s a Nostredame.’

‘Oh, them.’

‘When did you get that piercing?’

I remove the ice for a second. ‘Years back.’

‘But he’s really charming,’ she says, ‘and his mother was an author. She drowned herself a while ago. Face down and bloated in their swimming pool. The cleaners swept up the leaves and killed a thousand years’ worth of aquatic life in the process. It was a horrible time, Juju.’ I raise an eyebrow. ‘Jupiter. You’re no fun. I’m not being purposefully vapid, though—Mat really suffered, more than you can imagine, and we all read her latest novel in my book club as a sort of token of affection, just to say that we were there for him, so he showed up and discussed it with us. An only child. And Daniela—his mother—she suffered too. Her husband’s affairs did her in. I blame him totally.’

‘Is he handsome?’

‘His father? No, not at all. Fat.’

‘Mathias,’ I say.

‘Gorgeous,’ she says, ‘and his family, like I said, have lived here longer than here existed, so it was very exciting to meet them and talk about philosophy and art. Mat knows so much.’ 

Miss Capitolina cranes her neck and swans over to our deckchairs, sheer fabric faintly covering the outline of her swimming costume. In her shadow my back straightens and my knees clamp tight together.

‘Jupiter dos Anjos,’ Miss Capitolina says. 

I nod and smile. Being a professor suits her more—she always was pretty bad with teenagers. She gets to monologue and spurt soliloquies and nobody can get bored or stare out the window without wasting their own money. I keep smiling up at her. Wife-beater, old trainers, snaggletooth. I don’t mind not fitting in but she doesn’t have to stare half so much at my teeth. I don’t want to talk about where I’ve been or who I am or why that’s not my surname anymore—Juno won’t ask because she’s too interested in Mat to get to know anybody else beyond the epidermis, but Miss Capitolina already knows how to test me; she’s been thinking about it for a while. Her eyes do her no favours—incest blue.

‘Don’t be a stranger,’ she says. ‘This country…’ It’s a country now? ‘...I suppose it’s yours too.’ 

Juno laughs and stands up to walk her mother away from me. 

I get some extremely toniced whiskey—I don’t know why they butcher triple sec out here—and wander to the pool. The water’s hot and clear but I can imagine the smell of necrosis steaming up. If the water was warm enough, did that lady start to simmer? I should know the people around me but I don’t. A girl pushes her squealing brother into the water and he bobs up and down around his armbands. I sniff the drink—sliced lemon, lemon preserved in ice like insects in amber, lemon dishwasher tablets. As kids we would go to the beach where two communities melded together and mix huge bottles of this stuff, slicing fruits up with stolen kitchen knives in the sand and throwing up, mostly. 

A guy with huge, bugged-out eyes sits on the corner of the azulejo exterior, dipping his feet into the water and stirring them about. He’s tall but exceedingly skinny. I decide to give him a shake because he looks oddly teary, wearing a t-shirt and shorts and a barcode of earrings exposed by the blond hair tucked behind his ear.

I offer him a sip of my drink. He swallows it with a pained expression.

‘Hal,’ he says.

‘No, I’m Jupiter,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘and I’m Hal.’ He’s slurring a little. I shouldn’t have given him any more to drink because his cumbersome body is slouching down towards the pool. ‘Did I cut my hands?’

I examine his skin closely. There’s a small pink line where his palms have been pressing on the tile but no cuts. ‘You’re good,’ I say, squeezing one of his hands. ‘Come sit on the grass with me.’

I don’t want him to be sick or drown, so I drag Hal over to the grassy knoll and watch him flop around a bit, dead fish. Dead or dying. I should’ve met him before—the right age, the right sort of useless layabout—but his mouth is twitching, swollen and alcoholic. Hal laughs and rubs his eyes. He checks his hands for cuts again then lets his arms collapse awkwardly to his sides. Everyone keeps moving and the sun is bright and my drink is knocked over. Sticky oil light across our faces, across his face, and slowly running through his scalp. 

‘Alright, snap out of it,’ I say, shaking his shoulder. ‘It’s barely seven.’ I shake him again. ‘Come on. Mind over matter.’ He lurches upwards and presses our foreheads together. ‘The people here hate me,’ I add. ‘Very much so. And it’s a long-standing hatred. You wouldn’t understand. Just imagine that for a second. If everyone hates you, you don’t want to add to it.’ 

Hal groans. ‘My head,’ he says, ‘is killing me.’

‘Like I said, mind over matter.’ 

Juno collapses next to us, all skirt. Her bracelets jingle as she rubs Hal’s forearm hard. Miss Capitolina drains us all—even from here I can see her watching me, inspecting, making sure I’m just a speck and not a stain—Juno knows it, though she’s used to her mother’s parlour tricks and crimes against polite society. Once you know how to schmooze, you can do whatever you like. The Capitolinas are all schmooze and society types.

Roast meat and salad. Ribs and bones. A cherry, crunchy as glass, on top of some elaborately inedible dessert. Juno raises an eyebrow at the large man serving himself oily fish and white sauce and boiled potatoes. Hal retches.

‘Hal is my brother,’ Juno says.

‘Since when? He looks a bit old to be a newborn.’

‘I’m twenty-two,’ he says raspily.

‘It’s not a new thing.’ Juno strokes her brother’s hair, all chemical burn and peroxide. ‘She’s always been like this. My mother. I’m sure out in Selvagem I’ve got some siblings too. She’s serious about this stuff,’ she sighs. ‘New Colonial Thought. All the rage. Let’s get Hal somewhere to cool off.’

‘New Colonial Thought?’

Hal whines himself stupid on the chaise longue. There’s no dust indoors, all swept clean, and the rug in the centre of the living is perfectly straight and proportional to the walls. Pillows straight. A telephone on the coffee table, a framed degree, a broken clock. Time can no longer tell. Why is the clock broken? The glass is perfectly sound but the hands repeat themselves, flickering in place, over and over. This could really be so simple: quick wedding, flight back, no nostalgia, no sentimentality. Miss Capitolina is an anthropologist, the document proclaims, and with honours—a cultured woman. Her daughter is sweating between the thighs at the thought of her future husband and her son is about to vomit.

The surrounding houses are kept at a distance, as everything is, circling around a central ringroad. All those kids in the garden and teenagers smoking on the front lawn—no shoes, knots in their hair—belong here. The adults talk about projects and politics and their neighbours. On the shore of the sky, at the very edge of vision, Juno points out the skyscrapers needling the blue.

‘I lived there,’ she says, ‘last year. A penthouse with my friend. Not Wanda.’

Hal gags.

‘My…’ I look at the city but I’m not quite seeing it. I’m seeing the sharpness and the light, not where I used to live. ‘I might’ve lived here too, in this village.’

‘Probably not. Rui doesn’t. Your dad doesn’t. It’s an acquired taste out here,’ she says.

‘He’s not my dad,’ I say.

‘You are so embarrassing. I could die, seriously.’

Hal collapses onto the floor. ‘Ow,’ he says, rubbing his temple. ‘Juno, I have to get back home. I have to…I’m in trouble this time. I’ll be in trouble if I don’t get back. Oh, man, I’m in serious shit.’

I refuse to get involved. I’ll smoke her cigarettes and then I’ll sleep at the foot of Juno’s bed or in a spare bedroom, I don’t care. Her snotty brother is covered with this faint sheen as he brings his knees up to that bony chest of his; the heart inside it is fleshy and tired but that bone is strong and resists how his arms squeeze and his head lolls forward and the askew teeth in his mouth chatter. He heaves and stands up on weak knees. Juno’s all perfume and talc and he’s something soppier, definitely wet to the touch. I held his hand before. I know.

‘Of course he’s your dad,’ Juno says, turning her head to the side. ‘If he’s my brother, then your old man’s your old man.’ 

‘It’s totally different,’ I say. Hal falls back down onto the chaise longue but at least he doesn’t crack his head open. ‘Mat’s your fiancé but you still like me. Get a car or something, I can drive.’

‘Where to?’

‘A hospital,’ I say.

‘He’s fine, he doesn’t need a hospital,’ she says. ‘You’ve been drinking anyway. Don’t put yourself after him. Stop acting like this. Hal, you’re fine, aren’t you? Tell Jupiter you’re fine. Tell him you’ll get Paul to pick you up and sort you out. Paul knows what to do with him, I swear.’ She reaches for the telephone and picks the handset with a plasticky click. I can hear her dialling but Hal can’t keep his eyes focused. His forehead glitters. He’s as gorgeous as Juno but breathing dully, flatly, and reaches to press his lips to my ear. Cold mouth. Cold words. ‘Paul, Paulie...Yes, it’s Juno. Juno Capit...I know you know.’

Hal’s tongue on my ear. The flesh is exceedingly sensitive there. ‘I’m all good,’ he whispers.

I pat his head. ‘I know. You’re just coming down. I still think…’

‘He’s gonna kill me,’ Hal says, a little louder.

‘Paulie, Hal says you’re going to kill him. Are you going to kill him? No, he’s not going to kill you,’ she says. ‘Paulie’s just his flatmate. He’s a nice guy. Hal’s paranoid because he’s on something. You’ll come? Thank you. Uh, the code is…’ She rattles off a few numbers and sighs. ‘Lovely. No hospital, Paul’s going to tuck you in.’

Hal groans. ‘I’m not coming to your wedding,’ he says.

‘That’s fine. As if I want you there anyway.’

MALE SPIDERS—Miss Capitolina invites us down for breakfast, another ostentatious affair. She doesn’t seem to care that we shared the bed in a way that reads as obvious, but I can tell she’s thinking it. Mathias is a good egg. Intelligent, Juno says, and I believe her. Instead of discussing border skirmishes and tropical weather patterns, I eat runny eggs and orange juice. My hair is damp from the shower and spikey around the edges of my face. 

‘I was thinking of going into town,’ Juno says, chewing a piece of fruit. She sits with her knees flush against her breasts. ‘Showing Jupiter what’s changed and what’s stayed the same, you know.’

Miss Capitolina nods. She pours me a cup of herbal tea.

‘Juno mentioned something about colonial thought,’ I say.

‘I’ll have to show you,’ Miss Capitolina says, ‘in my study. I’m working on something with my colleagues—a thesis of sorts. At the moment it’s a little unclear, I’m afraid, and not something I can articulate to somebody like you.’ I stare at the ornate teacup. ‘Will you be sitting with your family at the reception?’

‘Probably not,’ I say. 

vital pulse

‘Try to explain it,’ I add.

‘We’re interested in the ecological and sociological and anthropological, naturally, benefits of colonialism. Far too long has funding gone in the opposite direction. This country has changed the shape and texture and fabric of this island vastly. Even these houses are a direct product of colonialism—colonial brick, silk, tile. It’s all under the same umbrella. How we face each other—our windows concentrating on the same road—and invite each other over for dinner, swim together, et cetera. All of these things are essential. There are detractors and critics, of course, and your father is almost certainly airing on the side of disinterest, though countless offers have been presented to him: reductions in cost, refurbishments, job prospects for his children. Rui was planning on entering a position at our university, though what happened there is anyone’s guess.

‘It’s not a fact, just a theory—or a movement, let’s say. A movement. That sounds perfect. A movement to resplendour the joys and freedoms of colonialism. Colonialism lets us breathe and experience our emotions; it’s a permitting force for good. Loving our lives, our food and drink, is an act that directly wounds our detractors. It’s a messy and unkempt thing now, but I’d like to formalise it somehow through literature. I’ve written papers but they don’t do it justice.’

Juno stands up. ‘Hal went home early,’ she says.

‘I know. I’m well aware,’ her mother replies. ‘I’ve been interested in this topic for decades. My father was a fierce proponent of self-determination. Hal’s father—a lovely lawyer born in Santidade—was very eager to formalise his revolutionary ideals. Where that spirit went is beyond me.’ She sips her white tea. ‘Hal has his problems, I’m sure you know, but I’m being unfair. He has spirit in spades. That Paul wears him down. He’s tired, that’s all—Juno, Jupiter. Tired.’

Downtown is far from slow and peaceful but Juno lets me ride her father’s motorcycle so I love it regardless. She wraps her arms tight around me and I can feel all my organs pulse with desire. Mathias lives alone on the other side of the city—we cut through shops and bars and cafés spilling their guts out onto the overheated concrete to get to his upscale neighbourhood. Juno likes to show off everything even when I can’t hear her properly, pointing out this and that and saying Mathias screwed me here when we drunk, right up against a wall. I wonder if she’s joking. She let me shower first and said that she could still feel me running down her leg; these ideas are functionally serve the exact same purpose. Coquettishly she hops off the motorcyle and her sandals slap on the ground.

Espressos and vodka, that’s the diet of the socialite and her equally socialite-inclined fiancé. Mathias pats my shoulder when we meet to show that he’s not bothered about me nor my presence, that I’m about as much of a threat to him as water is to an oil fire, and pays for all our drinks without question. He doesn’t pay attention to me as he’s molesting Juno’s hips to make her giggle and make that gap between her teeth shine. Everything is scattered everywhere: Mathias places a half-read book upside down, an ashtray overflows, Juno removes a ring or two to tie her hair back, a small spoon stains the wood with coffee. Tequila plays it role too, salt and lime. 

Mathias is a true Nostredame. His blunt-force nose and dark eyebrows confront me first, then his thin mouth licking the cigarette papers. It doesn’t work when he’s doing it. 

‘Do you do a lot of travelling?’ he asks me.

‘When I can,’ I say.

‘How do you pay for the hotels?’

‘What?’

‘Seems like it would get pretty costly after a while.’

Juno shoves his shoulder. She licks salt from her top lip.

‘You’re coming to the wedding, then,’ he says. I need water but I settle for spirits instead. ‘There’s a pretty strict dress code.’

‘I brought my best suit,’ I say. ‘Need to take a leak.’ 

I’m not surprised that Mathias follows me inside and hangs outside the bathroom, head pressed against the wall. He’s got a look in his eye, that’s all. He knows me. We’ve never met but he recognises something in me—not genetics, more base than that—and I can’t ask him what it is because that would betray the social code entirely. I accept his judgement. He slaps my forearm and speaks closely: ‘I can smell her on you.’

There’s nothing to do but return the favour. I slap him back, give as good as I get, and say, ‘No, you don’t.’

‘I don’t?’

‘Wrong brother,’ I say.

‘You’re staying at her mother’s place.’

‘I slept on the sofa like a good boy.’

‘She made you heel?’

I shrug. ‘If you want to put it like that, yeah.’

Juno orders a sandwich, takes a bite here and there. I miss how she looked in that bygone era of scrunchies and toe rings. Mathias picks out the slices of tomato for her. He knows I was lying but the lie made him feel good, nice and secure, or maybe the lie affirmed him somewhat—if she sleeps around, so can he. But what about his mother? Every son loves his mother.

(...)