The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights

by Reinaldo Arenas

  But just at that moment there walked past a recruit whose uniform sat upon him like a royal mantle. The recruit sat down on the same bench Gabriel was sitting on—and Gabriel, now suddenly become once more the Skunk in a Funk, asked the young man what time it was, his eyes coyly eyeing the area between the young thing’s legs. The young man looked her up and down, and replied in the following way:

  “This watch doesn’t give the time of day to faggots—it’s a man’s watch.”

  And at that, the soldier went off to sit on another bench, next to a real man.

  A man! A man! That’s what Skunk in a Funk had to become. The humiliation she’d just been subjected to confirmed it. What’s more, she was sure that what had just happened happened so that she, Skunk in a Funk, would be encouraged to recover her most macho manliness. God Himself had sent that young recruit to convince Skunk in a Funk that she had to change her life, once and for all. Yes. There was no alternative. She chose the bottle of pork fat. Skunk in a Funk uncrossed her legs (which had been practically wound around each other), spread ’em, and laid her elbows across the back of the bench. Now, at last, all man, Gabriel sat back to wait for the train.

  HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A FAIRY SPURNED

  Down by the ocean, off to one side of the Fifingian Palace in which the Fifo-fest was now fully under way, a large group of angry, milling people had gathered—all those who felt that they’d been humiliated (and thus insulted) by not having been invited to the reception. Among the celebrities who found themselves on Fifo’s blacklist were (and don’t get the wrong idea—even if we don’t list all of them now, that doesn’t mean we won’t include them later on) the Deaconess Marina and her husband the Pope of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Polish ambassador to Cuba, the Queen of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, the head of the Italian Communist Party, Sakuntala la Mala, Clara Mortera and her husband Teodoro Tampon, the president of the Spanish Royal Academy (who, unable to bear the affront, committed suicide by smashing his head against the great door of the Fiferonian Palace—any other version of the incident is false), Padre Angel Gastaluz with his silver aspergillum, Corazón Aquino, Tiki-Tiki, Bishop O’Condom, Odoriferous Gunk and his dying mother (in her pup tent), SuperSatanic, the eleven wives of the dictator of Libya, Peerless Gorialdo, and the promoter of the anti-Pinochet plebiscite, who was pacing furiously back and forth along the rocks on the coastline, unable to understand the brazenness of this snub, especially since Pinochet was enjoying the hospitality of the palace as its guest of honor. (And indeed it was hard to understand—not only this exclusion but others, as well, which may perhaps be mentioned at a later time.) But as we were saying, this heterogeneous group of spurned (and decidedly irate) dignitaries, a virtual army (which had just been joined by General Noriega, an escapee from Sing Sing, and the King of Romania), decided to stay, come hell or high water, in their place alongside the Fiferonian Palace, awaiting the coveted, but so far withheld, invitation.

  A JOURNEY BY TRAIN

  “Why, you old queen, imagine running into you here!”

  It was La Reine des Araignées (the Spider Queen to you, Mary), teetering along the platform, come upon the manly Gabriel. She was wearing a shirt dyed with gentian violet and adorned with tropical landscapes painted by Clara Mortera, a pair of pants made out of a flour sack she’d stolen from a neighbor of hers and dyed red, and huge clogs carved by hand by the cunning Mahoma, and on this costume the fairy had stuck all kinds of metal buttons and pins made of beer caps and pieces of cans scavenged out of dumps. The four hairs that she still had on her head were dyed a bright yellow that made the queen look like some exotic firebird.

  The firebird—I mean La Reine—dropped two cardboard suitcases, a trunk, some lumpy roped-together bundles masquerading as luggage, several shopping bags, and a backpack to the floor, and with wide looping motions of her butterfly wings—I mean arms—descended upon Gabriel, who in the almost luminescent presence of this queenly apparition was immediately transformed into Skunk in a Funk. The two fairies hugged, and then, in a riot of reciprocal cackling, took seats.

  “So, girl, what’s new with you?” Skunk in a Funk asked La Reine.

  “What does it look like, you goose? I’m going on a trip. I’ve made up my mind—I’m leaving. And this time it’s for good, too. To quote Madame Bovary and Coco Salas, I abhor the countryside, and country living. I mean, get me out of here! Look at me—are these the clothes of a milkmaid?”

  He stood and, leaping atop her bags, gave two or three turns that she knew were smashing.

  “Fabulous,” lied Skunk in a Funk through her teeth.

  “And you! You look marvelous yourself, though I must say you don’t have those wonderful things on that I see you wearing in Havana.”

  “I’m on my way back from my mother’s house. . . .”

  While the two fairies continued their affectionate effusions, let me tell you, you thousands or millions of gay men reading me out there (and if you’re not reading me, you’d better get a move on, ’cause time flies, hon), that La Reine des Araignées, like Skunk in a Funk, was from the town of Holguín, or the outskirts of the town of Holguín, and, like Skunk in a Funk, bore three names, almost four. Her real name was Hiram Prats; her literary and social name was Delfín Proust (to which she would sometimes, in cases of emergency, add her matronymic: Stalisnasky), and her nomme de guerre was, of course, La Reine des Araignées. That was the method by which a fairy might protect his (or her) various identities, depending on the circle in which s/he found her/himself at any given moment. And it did keep her safe—not even Coco Salas (who like all the most in-your-face faggots on the face of the earth was also from Holguín) had been able to jail this particular queen, since legally, she didn’t even exist. With her matronymic, she could pass herself off as a foreigner, and it was also good for scaring off pro-Soviet cops. Plus it was known for a fact that Hiram, or Delfín, or La Reine des Araignées, or whatever the hell she called herself, had really truly been in the former Stepmotherland, and she was rumored to chatter giddily in Russian and even to file long reports in that dead language with the KGB.

  The truth of the story was that when she was just a little boy, this bucolic nymph had been sent off by Fifo to the former U.S.S.R., where she studied Russian under Popov at the University of Lomonosov. Da, da, darling, this Holguín queen wound up in Lomonosov when he was no more than a tykette, but soon after (s)he’d arrived in that supersacred Stepmotherland (s)he began to give signs of superswishing. One day, in fact, all of Moscow (well, almost all) was rocked by the unprecedented spectacle afforded by this rural femme. As a Cuban scholarship student, you see, Hiram had had the honor of being invited to the Bolshoi to see Swan Lake. To this day, no one is certain what ruses were employed by the cunning creature to excite the high-ranking military cadet sitting beside her—it may even be that the naive Russian lad thought Hiram was a woman. Whatever—during an intermission, Hiram dragged the hunk of a soon-to-be soldier (a peach of a country boy from Georgia, with a bushel basketful between his legs, my dear) off behind the “drapes” up on the stage. And behind those heavy velvet curtains, the queen curtsied and went down. The orchestra boomed forth, Maya Plisezcaya appeared onstage as the White Swan, the curtains began to part. And as they completed their glide into the wings, those lovely wine-colored drapes revealed to the entire astonished audience Hiram, on his worshipful knees before the enormous joint of the young Georgia cadet, while Plisezcaya fluttered her double-jointed arms and the corps de ballet swooped onto the boards. So immersed in their ecstatic union were the soldier and the fairy that they hadn’t noticed that the curtain had risen on the ballet and they were now on stage before more than ten thousand people (among them Nikita Khrushchev and his wife, Anastasia Mikoyana). Iron hands swept the insolent interlopers from the stage; the cadet was shot by firing squad on the instant; the Cuban faggot was deported so that Fifo could personally have her executed. On the Russian ship (which took more than six months to reach Cuba), the femme chan
ged her name, voice, and way of walking, falsified seventy official documents, plucked his eyebrows (which never ever grew back), and with his new face (as bald as a boa’s backside) arrived in Cuba as (ta-dum!) Delfín Proust Stalisnasky. The version that she herself gave the world, and that both Fifo and the KGB chivalrously accepted, was that Hiram Prats, filled with revolutionary repentance and self-repugnance, had thrown himself overboard into the Black Sea. La Reine des Araignées would recount, with tears in her reptilian eyes, how she had seen the fairy fling himself, to the chords of L’Internationale, into the sea. . . .

  In her guise of Delfín Proust, the queen would attend the soirées hosted by Olga Andreu at which Virgilio Piñera reigned supreme. She was “La Reine des Araignées” to almost everyone at Copelia, from Mayra the Mare to Uglíssima. Mischief-maker, spinner of a web of lies, cunning, horrid, always leaping up and down and waggling feet and hands at the same time, she not only reminded one of a spider, but when she was being screwed she wiggled and turned and contorted herself so fiercely that she became a virtual tarantula. And as though that weren’t enough, the fact of having been discovered sucking the cock of a high-ranking Soviet cadet behind a curtain was proof that this fairy, the terrible Spider Queen, wove a web that was capable of entangling even a Hero of the Former Stepmotherland. My god, and from Stalin’s own province. . . . Oh, the fag was a Stalinist, all right, as we shall see further on. . . . And also (this is strictly between you and me, darling) a snitch—not to mention a gossip, a troublemaker, a nasty piece of work, and a spinner of confidence schemes. No one knew where the sticky threads of her web might reach. —You better beware of that one, honey. If you see her, make the sign of the cross and run.

  But Skunk in a Funk, the silly cunt, did not run when she saw La Reine des Araignées coming. On the contrary, they got on the train together and Skunk in a Funk even helped her with her bags. Once on the train, the two femmes, to shoves and bumps and much fluttering of wings, pushed their way through the exhausting crush. At last they found an empty seat and there, in a great scattering of feathers and fairy dust in the air, they plumped. Then, after trying to open the window (which naturally wouldn’t budge), they looked around.

  “How utterly depressing!” remarked La Reine des Araignées.

  And the truth was, the terrible queen was right. The nineteenth-century railroad cars were crammed full of people who were all obscenely deformed. There were extended families in which every family member had what appeared to be a huge, distended belly (because between them, they were smuggling a whole cow into Havana); there were women with outrageous boobs (because they’d stuffed bags and bags of black-market rice into their brassieres). One man was wearing an enormous hat under which he was carrying a live hen for his great-grandmother, who was dying and sorely needed some broth made from this avian species now on the verge of extinction in Cuba. Other men seemed to be wearing not hats but some sort of Byzantine domes on their heads; under this headgear they were carrying hogs, turkeys, goats, sheep, and other animals stolen from farms around town—animals which, because their mouths were tied shut, could only give off pathetic bleats and moans deep in their throats, which the smugglers, lip-synching, pretended came from themselves. But it was the children, perhaps because their parents trusted in the immunity of tender years, who bore the heaviest car-goes. Nor were they exactly children—they were more like huge balls in which all you could see were eyes, stuffed as the kids’ clothes were with quarts of milk, bags of dried beans, brown paper bags of old bread, big tin cans of crackers, packages of sugar, spools of thread . . . Ay! Every one of those dear children was a walking general store—or a rolling one, rather, as their mothers would roll them down the aisle until they found a seat. And above all that, there floated an inescapable smell of fart, dirty cunt, collective sweat, cat piss, dead dog, rutting goat, gaping asshole, hog’s balls, just-burst tumor, feet that had never yet seen water, and other unclassifiable emanations.

  In observing the tricks and ruses the travelers employed to smuggle their foodstuffs so the Fifarian Police wouldn’t catch them—and on a trip that might, in addition, be almost infinite—Reinaldo remembered with terror that he was carrying several pounds of yautía and a bottle of rendered pork fat in his backpack. My god, his entire life trying to keep from being arrested on account of his novel, and to wind up in jail for a bottle of pork fat!

  “And what is all this?” Skunk in a Funk asked, gesturing toward La Reine’s bags and parcels. “—The whole Hill of the Cross from back in Holguín?”

  “No, my dear, all I’m carrying are some divine costumes, a few things I bought centuries ago in the Soviet Union. I never carry anything illegal, much less food. I barely eat. Can’t you see my splendid figure, you thing?”

  Skunk in a Funk looked at Hiram Prats and saw only a horrific bald queen with knobby arms in constant motion.

  “You look marvelous,” she said.

  “I intend to make quite a splash at Carnival.”

  “They say it’s the last one, that Fifo won’t hear of another one.”

  “All the more reason to make my splash! Listen—and you have to promise not to breathe a word of this to anyone—I’m invited to the party that Fifo is giving in his underground palace before the real Carnival starts.”

  “My god, the only people that go to that are officers from the Ministry of the Interior . . .”

  “Uh-huh, which is why you, my dear, are invited, too. Because everybody that’s anybody, anybody at all, goes. Didn’t you know that Fifo was a fairy, just like us?”

  “Mary!—we may have to wash that mouth full of false teeth out with soap! How do you know?”

  “The same way you do, my dear, so don’t act so innocent. Plus, Coco Salas told me that he’d jerked him off himself, and he commissioned me to find men for Fifo . . .”

  “Ave María purísima! But honestly, I haven’t told a soul! . . . By the way, you know people say Coco Salas is not a queen, he’s really a woman, which is why every bull macho in Cuba wants to kill her—she’s tricked every dick, tom, and harry. I couldn’t testify to that myself, of course . . . but I can tell you that she is one mean son of a bitch. Did you know I went to jail because of that cunt?”

  “. . . and it looks like this train is never going to move,” remarked La Reine des Araignées in reply. The sweat (for perspiration it was not) was beginning to make streambeds down her face. It was yellowish, greenish, reddish sweat which, when it mixed with the violet-colored sweat that bathed her shirt, became an indescribable shade of . . . but it was indescribable. “There goes my makeup,” wailed La Reine tragically.

  “We must make do,” said Skunk in a Funk.

  “Yes, we must make do,” agreed La Reine des Araignées.

  And the two fairies, stupefied by the terrible heat, the terrible ugliness, and the terrible smell, made themselves as comfortable as they could in their terribly uncomfortable seats and tried to sleep, in spite of the human and animal cackling, bleating, lowing, moaning, and lamenting going on all about them. Oh, dear, but just at that moment, and now the train was burping and bellowing in sign of departure, a creature of light appeared in the car. It was like a golden fish in a sea populated only by deformed sharks; it was like a radiant comet in a sky filled with broad-assed stars. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, the splendid recruit whom Skunk in a Funk had asked the time of and who had kicked her, emotionally, in the ass. Ay, an inaccessible love god. Even the hogs and all the other animals, suffocating under the crowns of their various pieces of headgear, peeked out through the chinks in the woven palm fronds and fell silent. My God, and the hunk, looking nowhere at all, as though he were making his way down the carpet that led directly to his throne, walked on, finally found an empty seat, threw down his olive-green duffel bag, and spread wide his thighs, stretching out in the seat like the long and impressive specimen that he was. Nor need I tell you, you clever old thing, that Skunk in a Funk and La Reine des Araignées were keenly observing this
imperial (and unparalleled) young man, although the Skunk, who knew that the recruit was unassailable, feigned indifference.

  “Did you see that god that has shown us the grace to travel on our very train?” exclaimed La Reine.

  “Of course I saw him,” replied Skunk in a Funk. “Am I blind? But he’s not my type.” And assuming an air of importance, she looked uninterestedly out the window, past which a jumble of squat, shored-up houses were beginning to glide.