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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  “We’ll have to stab him,” replied the squad leader. “It’s too dangerous to the passengers to have a firing squad on a helicopter in midair.”

  “All right, if there’s no other way, stab him,” conceded Fifo grudgingly.

  And within seconds the guards had riddled the adviser’s body with the bayonets affixed to their rifles and thrown the corpse into the sea—to the further delight of Bloodthirsty Shark, who was swimming along at full speed just under the presidential helicopter.

  Now calmer, Fifo spoke to the pilot: “See if you can find Skunk in a Funk somewhere around here. I want to use this spyglass to see what he’s up to. He thinks I’ve swallowed that bullshit about his ‘rehabilitation,’ but I’m nobody’s fool. The only reason I’ve spared his life is to see how this story turns out, but when it’s over I’m eliminating him. We wouldn’t advise him to kid himself. . . .”

  “Comandante, Skunk in a Funk isn’t in Guanabo today.”

  “All right, then, let’s move on. One faggot more, one faggot less—big deal. There are plenty to go around, lord knows.”

  They were now flying over the province of Matanzas, directly above its tallest prominence.

  “Will you get a load of that mountain!”

  “Comandante, sir, that’s the Matanzas Breadloaf.”

  “Breadloaf my sweet ass! There’s no bread in Cuba! Bread is a Christian bourgeois prejudice! I want that mountain of bread leveled this instant, and yautías planted in its place.”

  “Comandante,” said the Minister of Agriculture, who was along for the ride, “it isn’t easy to level that mountain. And besides, yautías won’t grow in limestone soils.”

  “What do you know about yautías or soils!?” Fifo shouted, a veritable ball of rage. “Yautías! Yautías! I want yautías, and I want them there! You want to deprive me of my yautías, and deprive this country of what I promised it more than forty years ago and haven’t been able to give it yet? Now I see the cause of all this: we don’t have yautías because you’ve sabotaged the plans. You’re a swine, and an agent of the CIA, and a son of a bitch. Stab him!” he ordered his escorts, who instantly and professionally obeyed. “The minute the Carnival is over, that mountain is coming down,” Fifo said, and then he turned once more to the pilot: “Now take me to Zapata Swamp. I want to see how my crocodiles are doing.”

  They flew at full speed to the swamp. Fifo began counting the crocodiles.

  “Since the last time I was here, twenty-seven males and eleven females have died,” he calculated. “Obviously this unhealthy climate in the swamp is bad for my little crocs. I want all the crocodiles moved out of this swamp to the Bay of Matanzas! They can breathe pure air there!”

  Instantly the dying Prime Minister got on his shortwave radio and put out a call to the Army of Matanzas, the Territorial Militia, and the Provincial Navy, and in less than half an hour, more than a million crocodiles invaded the Bay of Matanzas.

  Beaming at this quick action, Fifo ordered the inspection trip to continue.

  “What’re all those plants down there?” he asked as they flew over the Yumurí Valley.

  “A stand of palm trees, sir,” answered the pilot.

  “Cut ’em down and plant lentils.” Then turning to his guest of honor, the Lady of the Veil, he cooed: “Lentils have a tremendous amount of iron.”

  “Iron is also very important,” the Lady of the Veil replied, looking down to see a huge bulldozer razing all the palms in the lovely valley.

  They were now passing over the province of Las Villas, directly above the dam that supplied water to the city of Santa Clara.

  “What’s that?” asked Fifo.

  “It’s the Camilo Cienfuegos Dam that you ordered me to build, which I did, sir, in less than a year, surpassing all our goals,” Fifo’s chief of waterworks answered with pride.

  “Well, tear it down and build an army training field. The enemy is more important than water!”

  “But Comandante. . . ,” the adviser hesitantly suggested, “it’s the largest dam in the country, it cost millions of dollars to build, plus doing away with Hanabanilla Falls; it supplies water not only to Santa Clara but to all the fields and even to the Niña Bonita fish hatchery that you yourself founded. . . .”

  “Oh, where do these advisers of mine come from?” sighed Fifo dramatically. “Not one of them is a true revolutionary. We’re at war, and you’re thinking about water instead of the enemy. That dam should never have been built in that spot in the first place, right in the center of the country, at our very geographical heart. Surely it’s the first location the enemy will attack. Now I see it all very clearly—very clearly—you built that dam there so that when the enemy invaded we’d be wiped out!’

  “No! No! I built it there because that’s where the river . . .”

  “River my ass! You think I don’t see through you? The only one that knows where the rivers run is me! The only one that makes the plans around here is me! The only one that’s trying to save the country is me! I want you to order that dam torn down RIGHT NOW!”

  With tears in his eyes, the adviser gave the order to dynamite the dam.

  “Now, slit his throat,” Fifo ordered the guards.

  The adviser, as his throat was being slit, saw the enormous dam, his great masterpiece, blown to bits with dynamite, and saw the city of Santa Clara flooded. His body, hurled from the helicopter, was swept away in the rushing waters.

  “Water is not a necessity,” said the Lady of the Veil, “but without oil one cannot live.”

  “And what’s that thing down there that looks like a snake?” asked Fifo, looking out the window.

  “It’s the Río Máximo, Comandante,” said one of the members of his escort, who was from the province of Camagüey.

  “The Río Máximo? The Río Máximo?! Is that what you said? How dare you insult me in that way! The only Máximo around here is me! How can you say that there’s a river that’s the Máximo when I’m the Máximo, when I’m the eternal spring to which all the peoples of the world make pilgrimages to drink? And nothing, do you hear—nothing!—can be more Máximo than me, because there’s no word that means greater than the greatest! So, you weasly son of a bitch, you’ve insulted me and mocked me—you want to give the title of Máximo to a river, a teeny-tiny creek, and make me some tinkly piece of shit! I’ll teach you to minimize me! To think that a man with those ideas, a traitor of such proportions, should be a member of my escort! Execute this man immediately! . . . Oh, and about that Río Máximo—pave it over, build a highway on top of it.”

  The bayonet-riddled body of the guard fell onto the newly built roadway.

  They were now flying along above the almost infinite plains of Camagüey.

  “Why hasn’t anything been planted down there? Why is all that land going to waste? Answer me!”

  “Comandante,” replied a livestock specialist, “those are the plains. No crops grow there. It’s a pastureland. That’s why at your own suggestion we planted pangola grass.”

  “Forget pangola. That’s a perfect place for California apples.”

  “The climate isn’t right for apples, Comandante,” the agricultural adviser hazarded.

  “So our climate isn’t right for growing California apples, but California is? It’s very obvious what you people are saying—you’re saying that imperialism is more powerful than we are. They can plant apples in California wherever they want to, but we can’t plant an apple tree if our life depends on it. It’s a crime, planting all that land down there in pangola grass when Cuba could be the world’s leading exporter of California apples. Why, we could sell our apples to California itself. But no-o-o, with imperialist agents like you people occupying key positions, we’ll never get out of this state of underdevelopment, or out of a single-crop economy either. Execute those two men immediately!”

  Two bayonet-riddled bodies fell into a stubbly brown field planted in withered California apple trees.

  “American imperialism is th
e Great Satan,” said the Lady of the Veil. “Of course you can grow California apples.”

  But Fifo, rather than answering the Lady of the Veil, sat gazing out the window, lost in thought. Sometimes he would use his spyglass, sometimes his large spectacles, sometimes the telescope—still others, he would bring sophisticated binoculars to his eyes.

  “What’s the meaning of all those naked men down there?” he suddenly asked his whole entourage.

  “Comandante,” said the Minister of Education unctuously, “that’s the concentration camp for homosexuals that you yourself designed and that I built on the instant. We have fifteen thousand fairies locked up in there.”

  “What?! What are you saying!? A concentration camp!? What will our honored guest think of us? That we’re a bunch of Fascist barbarians, that I’m some sort of Hitler, running concentration camps? Are you saying that in this nation where there is nothing but liberty and freedom we have concentration camps?”

  “Comandante, you yourself gave the order to build them.”

  The Lady of the Veil, fascinated, peered out the window.

  “It’s a rehabilitation camp for criminals,” Fifo explained to her.

  “Rehabilitation is most necessary,” the Lady of the Veil replied.

  “Yes indeed,” Fifo agreed, and turning to the Minister of Education, he said, “Rehabilitation, but never, ever, ‘concentration camps.’ What we do is educate or reeducate; we never hold anyone by force. Those young men are in that camp voluntarily because they want to be reeducated,” he continued, meanwhile using his spyglass to be sure that the electrified fences around the concentration camp were all in good working order and there weren’t any breaks in them. “If you think that’s a concentration camp down there, that means that you yourself are not sufficiently rehabilitated. Guards! Throw this man out the window! Throw him into that reeducation center so he can start his reeducation as soon as possible!”

  “Should we bayonet him first?”

  “From this height it won’t be necessary,” Fifo replied, and he lit one of his huge cigars.

  That day the fairies in the concentration camp had a celebration: the Minister of Education, the terrible Gallego Fernández, who had designed the camp, suddenly fell to earth in their midst. To everyone’s glee, body parts went flying.

  “By the way,” said Fifo, turning to the leader of his escort as the minister splattered below, “why did you ask me whether the Minister of Education should be bayoneted? I want it very clear that we tossed him into the reeducation center so that he could be reeducated. Or do you think that reeducating a person and killing him are the same thing?”

  And before the escort leader could defend himself, Fifo ordered the rest of the escort to tie his hands, bayonet him, and throw him out the window of the helicopter.

  “You really can’t trust a man that stupid,” Fifo said as he exhaled a cloud of smoke. “He could be an enemy. How could I never have realized it, how could I have such a man as one of my escorts? Uff.”

  And on the spot, he appointed one of the remaining guards squad leader.

  The helicopter flew out of that region into the former province of Oriente, so after exchanging a few words with the Lady of the Veil, Fifo, showing great interest, began to peer out the window.

  “What are all those boxes down there?” he asked as they flew over a city.

  “That’s the city of Holguín, Comandante. It has a population of three million people and it’s the capital of the province of the same name,” replied the copilot, who was from Holguín and proud of it.

  “Well, that city is very badly located,” Fifo observed. “It looks like down there in all that flatland there ought to be a bullfrog farm. I want the whole population moved out of there, all those boxes torn down, and a big lake full of bullfrogs put in.”

  “Comandante,” offered the copilot, who loved his hometown with all his heart and would do anything to save it, “it’s hard to put a lake in the middle of a flat field, but Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba are just a little farther on, and they’re surrounded by mountains and have lots of good big rivers. It’s the perfect place to build a bullfrog farm.”

  “Sure,” said Fifo sarcastically, “and destroy two national monuments and two national shrines—Bayamo, the Cradle of Independence; and Santiago de Cuba, the Cradle of the Revolution. You swine! You counterrevolutionary swine! Holguín has always been a shitty little town that’s produced little shits like you! And you want to sacrifice two heroic cities in exchange for shit! Execute this man immediately!”

  “Could I make one last request?” the copilot pleaded.

  “Speak.”

  “I want my corpse thrown out over the city of Holguín.”

  “Request granted,” said Fifo.

  But by the time the bayoneted body of the copilot hit the ground, in place of the city of Holguín there was an enormous bullfrog-populated lake, into which the body fell—inspiring a deafening protest from the bullfrogs.

  The helicopter was now flying over a swiftly flowing river.

  “What’s that?” asked an irritated and suspicious Fifo.

  “Comandante, that’s the Río Cauto, which despite its name, which is ‘Cautious,’ is the swiftest and most powerful river in the country,” one of the few ministers still alive had the courage to respond, thinking that such a basic answer could hardly get him into much trouble.

  Oh, but the comandante looked down in rage upon those swiftly flowing waters, and then more furiously yet at the minister.

  “Cautious! So in this country, where everything should be crystal-clear, where no one should be afraid of anything, we have a cautious river—a fearful, circumspect river, and river that’s a little wary, and therefore a river that isn’t fully convinced of the Revolution’s truth. I’ll bet that’s where the armies of rodents that are undermining the nation come from! And naturally, since it’s a freshwater river, Bloodthirsty Shark can’t swim up it, traitors use it as their hideout, and the river, the very cautious river, very cautiously and circumspectly protects them. I want that river dried up NOW! This instant! And you!” he said, turning to the minister and boxing his ears, “you should have been more cautious and not had such nice things to say about a traitorous river, much less in front of a foreign visitor to our nation. Do you think wartime secrets and the strategies and strengths of an enemy ought to be divulged to a foreign power? Does nobody around here know the rules for national security and international protocol? But that’s all right, there’s no need for you to know those rules, because you’re going headfirst into the Río Cauto, and you’ll disappear along with it.”

  At a sign from Fifo, the minister was executed and tossed into the river, where his body fell into the now dried-up riverbed.

  “Comandante! Comandante! We’re coming to the Cradle of the Revolution!” exclaimed in unison the last two ministers still alive (including the dying Prime Minister), knowing that Fifo was always happy when he came to the city in which he had proclaimed his victory.

  The pilot circled the city so that Fifo could take in the view. He knew that Fifo always liked to show it off to foreign visitors. But this time, Fifo looked down pensively at Santiago de Cuba.

  “It resembles a great amphitheater,” said the Lady of the Veil.

  “You’re right! You’re right! A huge amphitheater!” cried Fifo. “That’s exactly the image I was searching for and couldn’t put my finger on! An amphitheater! All those mountains rising in ever higher tiers and circling the city that way—why, it makes a perfect amphitheater! Who needs another city—what we need in this country is an amphitheater. Imagine,” he cried jubilantly, turning to the Lady of the Veil, “imagine what grand and glorious political celebrations we could have in an amphitheater like that—an amphitheater with acoustics magnified by those magnificent mountains. What an echo it would have! Why, I could talk for eight or ten hours and my voice would echo for a year. . . . We’ve got to build an amphitheater. Tear down that city and start today.�
�

  “But Comandante, it’s the Cradle of the Revolution, it’s a heroic city,” said the two ministers, almost in unison.

  “Execute those two men—they’re deviationists! Around here the cradle, the babe, the Revolution, and the hero, all in one, is me!”

  When the last two ministers had been thrown out of the helicopter into the amphitheater, Fifo looked out over the great stage and with a note of nostalgia gave his next order.

  “Right there, in the center of the amphitheater, I want a gigantic statue of White Udder, the cow I have loved more than any other cow in my entire life.”

  For a few moments, Fifo was oblivious to everything around him; his every thought lay with that dear departed cow. . . . In life he had loved this noble creature so deeply, and she had given him such delight, that when she died he had covered the island with larger-than-life-size statues to her memory. . . . All the other people on the helicopter, including the pilot, also fell into a reverie, trying (as they always did) to imitate Fifo’s every pose and gesture. This caused the helicopter to miss by inches crashing into a gigantic mound of rock that rose into the clouds.

  “Shit! What’s that?” cried Fifo, coming out of his meditations.

  “It’s the Baracoa Anvil, Comandante,” said the new commander of the guards. “We almost crashed into it.”

  “You mean I was about to die in a helicopter crash and you, commander of the guard, who should have been watching out for me, didn’t even notice? That’s the way you guard my life? Your duty is to watch over me day and night! I want this man executed as an object lesson to the other guards! Bayonets!” he commanded, signalling to the other guards.

  And instantly the few guards who were left alive bayoneted their leader.

  “Throw him down on that Baracoa Anvil,” Fifo ordered, “and let’s head back to Havana. I’ve got a million things to do before the Carnival starts. Oh, and about that anvil there—melt it down. It’s an obscurantist medieval symbol or something—anyway, it’s got nothing to do with our new society. Melt it down and put up a giant hammer and sickle.”