The Artist & Her Lover

Colin sat in the Kanopi House Hotel lounge area listening to the hotel lounge pianist singing - “There was a boy; a very strange, enchanted boy. They say he wandered very far, over land and sea.” The song was made famous by Nat King Cole and was about San Francisco’s mid-century ‘proto-hippie’ subculture. Colin sipped a vodka tonic and just happened to turn and see Autumn put her hands over her face. Her chest heaved up and down as if she was crying. He squinted, puzzled by her behavior, then stood and walked to where she and Portier stood at the entrance to the hotel. “Can I… help?” he asked her. “I was out after a curfew and thus was escorted to the hotel, that’s all,” she said, wiping away the tears underneath her eyes with both hands and sniffling and stumbling up the stairs to her tree house. The “damsel in distress” way she was acting triggered him, causing him to experience a hardwired cascade of emotions and a need to console her, but before he could do so, she disappeared up the steps leading to her tree house. Portier stared at him stoically. That was the stare his mother warned him about having; that unemphatic stare men wore when confronted with women’s unfathomable emotional lives. It was a stare that angered women just as Portier was angering him now,” he thought. He wasn’t going to bother to explain what he was thinking. He shook his head, reset his backpack on his shoulder, and walked toward his tree house. Autumn and Colin’s behaviors incensed Portier. It might have seemed to them and other guests as well that his job was merely that of a guide. But behind the scenes, he had planned the itinerary, deciding on the stops, highlights, duration, pace, by weather forecasts and the length of each tour. And he adjusted his plans based on weather conditions, unexpected situations, or guest preferences. He felt he had generated a well-structured tour itinerary that balanced structured sightseeing and independent exploration. He figured out safety instructions and how to respond to most emergencies. He’d built relationships with local businesses and communities to provide authentic experiences for his guests. Before his guests arrived, he’d determined the appropriate venue access, performed a venue walk-through, mapped out the venue well in advance, and had a rough idea of how things were laid out, so he had confidence in guiding guests once on site. The reason Autumn felt she should go off into the night on her own, rousing police authorities’ attention with whatever she was up to, was beyond him, and he felt Autumn and Colin were acting privileged and entitled. It was the middle of the night, and dismayed, Portier’s thoughts drifted to the peach-colored round mounds protruding above Autumn’s fuchsia tube top that evening, and he lusted after them. Like most wealthy Jamaican men, Portier sought light-skinnedwomen as potential partners. He was not alone in his preference for people with a light complexion. Four of the first six Jamaicanheads of government: Norman Manley, Alexander Bustamante, Edward Seaga, and Michael Manley had a fair complexion. But why White men presumed they could chase after Black women, given their slave history with them, was a puzzlement to him, and why Colin thought he had enough bamboo to satisfy Autumn’s probably insatiable ‘punash’, was also a puzzlement to him. Portier was certain he had more … sugarcane than Colin did. But, given his position as her tour guide, he couldn’t thrust his now swollen and seeping pipe inside her as he wanted to. He shook his head, turned, and headed toward his tree house in the other direction to relieve himself of his irrepressible yet unattainable desire. Colin walked along the bordered path in the moonlight, and opening the door to his tree house, he heard the jingle that went with calls on his cell phone. He looked at the number calling him. The call was from his brother Marco, a fourth-generation lemon farmer, who, in middle age, led groups of vacationers on tours of the Acieta lemon groves. The Acieta family’s lemons were harvested between February and August, when an electronic pulley system helped transport the lemon-filled crates to the city. Yet it was now the season of the year when Marco and his father typically used migrant workers to place burlap blankets around the trees to shield them from fierce winds, heavy rain, sleet, and freezing and fluctuating temperatures. The Acieta family had moved to Amalfi, Italy, in the early 1800s, and by the end of World War II, over a century later, the Acieta family had established itself as the largest producer of lemons on the Amalfi Coast. Their twelve-acre orchard consisted of two thousand five hundred lemon trees. The grove could only be reached on foot or by mules. Their father had built water canals that managed the rainwater flow. Vertically arranged in layers, the lemon groves were separated by walls made of Macere, a local limestone resistant to soil pressure and impervious to rain. Workers were paid by the amount of fruit they collected rather than the time spent at work, or they were paid €12 for eight hours’ work under the supervision of Caporali. They lived in shantytowns, isolated from central Amalfi, without water, proper sanitation, or health services. An estimated 230,000 workers were illegally employed in Italy’s agricultural sector and there were an estimated one hundred migrant settlements in Italy. Many migrants came to work in his father’s lemon grove through the ‘Caporalato’, a system involving illegal intermediaries, or “corporals”, who recruit workers. Marco and a migrant worker, who had previously worked on the Acieta lemon grove, named Ahmed, had begun a legal process to have the ‘Caporalato’ practice designated criminal because it exploited migrants so badly. Marco spoke to Colin in Italian, their native language, though they spoke English, French, and Spanish equally well. “Nala has been living with her brother since she left her partner, and she called to ask if I would give her your phone number. She says she wants to become a mother and wants to have children with you. It’s a terrible idea … I never told you, but her brother told me she is our sister. He accidentally entered his mother’s room one evening and found our father in bed with her.” Marco said. Colin was stunned by what his brother told him. Nala, an Ethiopian girl whose parents were migrant workers on his father’s lemon farm, had been his muse since he’d first encountered her one afternoon as she descended the lemon fields, having taken her father his lunch. He was on his way to help his father in the fields and emerged from the lemon trees just as it began to rain. The downpour revealed her already womanly shape underneath the thin cotton dress she wore, and the python in his pants shifted and began to uncoil. She noticed his zipper shift, lowered her eyes, backed away, and continued down the hill. After his first encounter with Nala in the rain, he returned to the same spot each day at the same time as she brought her father his afternoon meal and then descended the hill. Eventually, he took her hand, coaxed her under the cover of the lemon trees, coaxed her to sit, then lay on the ground. And yearning to satisfy a longing he’d been suppressing for months, he was about to withdraw his manhood when his father burst from the lemon trees and hit him in the face so hard that the blow knocked him unconscious. He awoke on his bedroom floor with his pants covering his deflated snake. His face was bruised and sore. He thought his father was protecting a young girl’s honor or virginity or perhaps preventing him from limiting his future by creating a child out of wedlock. He’d never approached the immigrant, Nala, again after that. Nevertheless, he’d used her shapely rain-soaked image on nights when he was aroused and couldn’t sleep.