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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  While the mother lay dying in the hospital, Odoriferous Gunk, whose nickname was now famous for miles around because of the English toilet waters she sprinkled over her filthy, black, heavy clothes, moved into the See of the Episcopal Church in Havana as a seminary student. There she met a very professional and well-known hoodlum who claimed descent from the family of Isabel de Bobadilla, and he convinced Odie to sell her mother’s house and go off with him to live in Varadero. And within minutes, the illegal sale was done and almost all the money squandered.

  In a few weeks, when the dying mother returned to her house, there was no house to return to. Odie was still in Varadero with the descendant of Isabel de Bobadilla and the large portrait of Queen Elizabeth. The life she was living in Varadero was so scandalous and extravagant that soon, through the good offices of Coco Salas, the news reached Trinidad. As the mother breathed her last, she called the entire city of Trinidad to a meeting at the Iznaga Tower. With terrible pain and effort she climbed to the top of the tower and from that height addressed the multitude. She told them of the terrible trick that had been played on her, the way she’d been swindled of her own house, and said her son was possessed by the devil. As irrefutable proof, the mother showed them the photo of her son. That was enough to convince the crowd that all this was, indeed, the work of Satan. Then and there, a crusade was organized against the apostate. Waving clubs and sticks all the Trinidadians, even the queens who used to have tea with Odie, marched to Varadero, intending to bring the renegade queen to reason and make him accept his responsibilities as a son. This crusade has been immortalized as “the Cuban struggle against the devil,” in a book written by Fernando Ortiz. . . . As their pursuers pursued them, Odie and the descendant of Isabel de Bobadilla fled across the province of Matanzas and flung themselves into the ocean on a frail little single-masted sailboat, hoping to sail to the island of Grand Cayman, which was under the British crown. All the treasure that remained to them was the water jug full of drinking water and the portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Their pursuers, however, hotly pursuing the fugitives, at last in fact caught up with them, and the fugitives were forced to surrender. Soaked to the skin and starving, they were towed to shore by their intrepid pursuers and a platoon of enraged sharks that Odie kept at bay by showing them the portrait of the queen. . . . When they reached the coast, the dying mother was waiting for them, lying on a stretcher. That bald, cadaverous, suffering figure was the first thing the son saw as he leaped onto land. And he realized that it was impossible for him ever to be separated from her again, that that dying mother (who never seemed to just get it over with and die) was his own fate, his own long bout of dying, and that wherever he went from that day forward, he would have to carry her with him and take care of her. And besides—there was the entire bellicose population of Trinidad, the most bloodthirsty queens in Cuba, and the entire army of Occidente province to see that Odoriferous Gunk met his responsibilities as a son.

  But just the same, even though Odie signed all the maternal IOUs and got a tent for the two of them, he could not remain in Trinidad, because the people there were calling for his head. And so with her dying mother she set out for Havana, stopping every two miles to set up the pup tent and attend the poor lady in extremis. In Havana, the Party Committee of the province (who knew there was a housing shortage all over the Island) gave Odoriferous Gunk special permission to set up his tent in any vacant lot or park or on any flat roof in Havana. He was even allowed to go out into the country, where the pure air might mitigate his mother’s suffering. But Odie flatly rejected that possibility—he’d rejoined the Episcopal Church in Havana, and besides, he wanted to get his hands on that descendant of Isabel de Bobadilla.

  And now, waiting for his mother’s pain to lessen so he can go off to Clara Mortera’s room, Odie is thinking with great pleasure of the great liturgy, with organ music, that is to take place in the Episcopal church, where she herself, in a wonderful purple robe, will be carrying one of the holy palliums.

  CRUCIFUCKINGFIXION

  The party in Fifo’s great underground palace was coming now to its climax. The state dinner was over, at which the resurrection of Julián del Casal, José María Heredia, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, José Lezama Lima, and other celebrities had taken place (the same method that the Holy Father had used to revive Aurélico Cortés had been employed now by Oscar Horcayés to resurrect these glories of Cuban culture, and to the same effect); three hundred dancers from all over the world had danced three hundred native dances of their respective countries; five hundred pesky Rodents had been strangled by five hundred muscular midgets; Skunk in a Funk had read her Thirty Truculent Tongue Twisters; and PornoPop, The Only Remaining Go-Go Fairy Queen in Cuba, who couldn’t wait for the big conference to start, had recited her brilliant PornoPop Poetry. Halisia had danced Giselle, and then, tireless, offered to dance it again. And now, in the midst of the most exquisite liqueurs and the most diligently attentive midgets, Fifo announced that the Crucifuckingfixion was about to begin.

  He called for a volunteer to be crucifuckingfied. Hundred of guests raised their hands. They knew that being crucifuckingfied was a pleasure beyond all other pleasures, for it meant being impaled on thousands of enormous, glistening, hard, erect phalluses, all at once. Men, women, fairies, and queens jumped up and down deliriously at the idea, madly waving their hands in the air, in hopes that Fifo would choose them. Above the clamor of voices one could clearly hear the shrieks of the cunning Mahoma, the King of Syria, Macumeco, Bibi the Bimbo, the latest Miss Universe, Arthur Lumska, and Monsignor Sacchi, who was trying to get Fifo to look his way by blowing a cornet that he’d tied to his enormous rosary (from which there was also hanging a hammer and sickle and a Nazi swastika). At last, Fifo (who was not going to play favorites in this particular event) announced that the honor of being crucifuckingfied was to go to Yasir Arafat. And to moans of disappointment from everyone in the room, the head of the Panamanian Liberation Movement moved triumphantly toward the wall where he was to be crucifuckingfied, the midgets stripping his clothes from him as he advanced. Soon, naked, he stood with his back to the room, against the Wall of Crucifuckingfixion.

  He was asked to spread his arms and legs as far apart as he could; then his wrists and ankles were bound to strong rings attached to the wall. Immediately, two hundred midgets carrying brushes and cans of red paint approached the soon-to-be-victim’s body and began painting bull’s-eyes on his asscheeks, legs, ankle, throat, triple chin, ass, ears. . . . There was not a single part of that voluminous body that some scurrying midget didn’t get to and cover with red bull’s-eyes. When this important preliminary had been accomplished, the midgets retired and the ceremony per se began.

  From one end of the hall, more than a hundred men drawn from every known race on earth stepped forward. They were totally naked, and their enormous members were fully erect. A unanimous sigh resounded throughout the palace as those magnificent ephebes strode forward, masculinities at the ready, for their encounter with Arafat. A Congolese Negro, arriving before his fellow attackers, penetrated the Leader’s anus; the phallus belonging to an immense Mongol inserted itself into a hand; an American lad from Ohio buried his vigorous rosy member in one buttock; a potent Dominican shoved his lusty lance into one foot while a Russian buried his member in one knee and an Israeli penetrated his neck. Amidst sighs of envy from the entire audience, the brawny young men went on penetrating Arafat’s body, while the captive himself received those thorns of flesh with all the fervor of a Christian of the catacombs, and at each penetration sent forth a howl of glory.

  Oh, the crucifuckingfixion was going exceptionally well. None of the well-turned ephebes had missed his mark. Each time a phallus penetrated the leader’s deformed body, Fifo applauded and the audience panted. The crucifuckingfixion was just about to reach its climactic moment when one of the most diligent of all the midgets climbed up on Fifo’s body and whispered the following news in his ear: The Condesa de Merlín had just arri
ved from Paris and was singing an opera in the city’s great public urinal.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” exclaimed Fifo, so furiously that Arafat stopped moaning and even the upstanding phalluses of the young men flagged a bit. “I gave specific orders for somebody to be waiting on the dock for the Condesa so we could blow her to bits with a cannonball, like SuperChelo suggested. But it’s too late for that now, I suppose. We’ll have to show her the full honors. Run! Go get her! Apologize the best you can and bring her to the palace! And now—on with the crucifuckingfixion!”

  But even though the delicious ephebes grew hot once more, and continued to drill their members into the Leader, this interruption had taken some of the luster from the celebration. What the hell, Fifo told himself, when Halisia dances Giselle again, and Albert Jünger explains the seven great categories of queenliness, this little incident will be totally forgotten.

  THE ANGLO-CAMPESINA

  The Anglo-Campesina was a horrid-looking queen who’d sprung from a strange crossbreeding of Taino, Chinese, black, and Spanish bloodlines (like all Cubans today, come to think of it). But this conglomeration had not resulted in a lovely hothouse hybrid—a velvety Chinese, a muscular mulatto, a dark-skinned blue-eyed hunk with sensual lips, a monumentally endowed black man. . . . Forget that. This queen—you must have run into her someplace, my dear, no matter how much of a stay-at-home you are, because she’s a bigger self-promoter than a movie star—this queen, as I say, had the shape of a scared bullfrog or a big-bellied penguin. Like all mediocre persons, she was terribly, terribly vain, and possessed of an ego that even he himself couldn’t be sure where he got, because he (or she, take your pick) had neither talent nor grace nor beauty—but rather (in a word) the opposite: his body was round, though squashed-in at the poles, and her head was like some piece of cosmic fruit dented by asteroids. Everything about him (we summarize yet once more, again—just for the record) had the look of an owl sentenced to a thousand years of insomnia.

  Given that quadruply Cuban nature of his, he was very attached to his little clod of earth, from which everybody, but everybody, upon seeing that freak of nature, had fled (so that in his hometown all that remained was an abandoned weaving mill belonging to H. P. Lovecraft). So of course he (or she) began to want to bury that background that she considered a stigma and become a man (or woman) of the world, a cosmopolite. At last, the praise of Fifo that she publicly and unceasingly sang, plus the secret reports against Fifo that he supplied to the Chinese embassy, plus the counterinformation that she sent to the Chilean embassy in order to offset those other reports, brought in enough money to allow her to set herself up in London—perhaps in the hopes that the London fog would camouflage her repugnant appearance. In London, this queen-turned-minor-local-color-scrivener married a rhumba-dancing mulatto with a fright wig who dressed in drag for all their social occasions so he could pass as the writer’s wife. Naturally, this particular writer, like all Cuban writers of his/her generation, was extremely cowardly, and since s/he’d not had the courage to accompany Fifo on his trek into the mountains all those many years ago, s/he lived now but to praise and adore him. Like all the writers of his/her generation, s/he (I think this technique works, don’t you?) imitated Fifo and had secret sexual fantasies about the great leader. (H. Puntilla, for example, had been enthralled when Fifo once slapped him. Eee-u-u-ugh Desnoës said she’d been impaled upon Fifo’s revolutionary rhetoric, and the Anglo-Campesina recalled with honeyed enchantment the way Fifo walked: In two paces, he can cross an entire room, she would muse aloud, her myopic eyes going all trembly and bleary.)

  Naturally, Fifo had been informed (as he was about almost everything) of the Anglo-Campesina’s mad passion for his person.

  And so, after consigning him/her to oblivion for upwards of thirty years, Fifo allowed that horrific unresolved conglomeration of races to join the official delegation sent by Great Britain to help commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Triumphant, indeed Thriving, Revolution. Leading the delegation, as we have said (or maybe we haven’t), was Princess Dinorah (naked), and behind her came the great ladies of the court, ambassadors, ministers, marquises, makeup men, pimps, directors of protocol, and all the other hangers-on that surround a great whore in all her glory. Farther back, almost blind, and leaning on the arm of his/her transvestite wife, came the Anglo-Campesina. His/her faded memory still managed to hang on to a little joke that s/he planned to use to bring a laugh to the Comandante. But just as s/he and his/her faithful walking stick were about to cross the threshold into the great hall, the door was slammed in her face, leaving her outside with (but surely we’ve already mentioned this) a pack of paparazzi. In the midst of the confusion and the noise, and while she was being photographed almost to death, the Anglo-Campesina lost his/her glasses. Now truly blind, and therefore desperate, s/he clutched his/her drag-queen seeing-eye hag in the hope that sooner or later they’d let her in. But that never happened. Every time a delegation of latecomers was admitted, burly gatekeepers would kick the Anglo-Campesina away from the door. I should be kicked by Fifo himself, the Anglo-Campesina would complain to herself, not these underlings. And then she would add: I will remain here for the rest of my life—even if it kills me. “Fifo doesn’t like vaudeville literature,” Paula Amanda (a.k.a. Luisa Fernanda) would scream at her from inside—a slight falsehood, if the Anglo-Campesina only knew, because Fifo didn’t like any kind of literature, except the literature that he produced himself.

  The pain and grief experienced by the Anglo-Campesina soon affected her body, and so while she waited on the threshold of the palace she suffered several heart attacks and succumbed to a sort of senile dementia that led her to babble no end of nonsense. Fearing for her life, the drag queen-husband dragged her over to the group of Dissed & Pissed who were milling about alongside the palace hoping to be recognized as official guests. But considering him/herself superior to all those Dissed & Pissed, she refused to sign any of their protests.

  It was no doubt resentment, and not patriotism, that induced her, upon her return to London, to lend her support to the flight of Avellaneda and to publish in El País an article titled “Ave, Avellaneda!” The article was immediately plagiarized in New York by Miguel Correderas, who published it under his own byline in the magazine Noticias de Marte.

  THE KEY TO THE GULF

  One day, walking along the golden sands of the beach at Marianao after praying a heartfelt prayer to the nonexistent though powerful gods, Skunk in a Funk bumped into the most gorgeous teenager he’d ever seen—and he’d seen a lot of them. This was a kid with a svelte, supple body, blackblackblack curly hair, café au lait skin, and eyes the color of honey. Skunk in a Funk stood so transfixed before that barefoot, bare-chested love god that he couldn’t say a word. It was the love god, in fact, who came over to him and asked if he had a cigarette. A cigarette! A cigarette! Skunk in a Funk slapped desperately at his pockets. No, he didn’t have a single cigarette on him, but if the young man would come home with him, he could give him a whole pack. Skunk in a Funk and the stunning barefooted teenager started walking together along the beach. While he walked, Skunk in a Funk told the young god that his name was Gabriel. The love god, in proof of his honesty, first stated his name and both surnames, father’s and mother’s, and then showed the enchanted Skunk in a Funk his ID—Lázaro González Carriles, his name was, and he lived in Old Havana. They came to the Skunk’s room in Aunt Orfelina’s house. Naturally, because of the Watchdog Committee’s constant surveillance and his own (treacherous) aunt, Skunk in a Funk couldn’t go in the front door with any man, much less with this gorgeous barefooted and half-naked adolescent. So they went around to the back of the house and the fairy flew over the wall into the back yard, telling the young man to jump over behind him—and not to make a sound. The delicious teenager jumped over the wall all right, but he landed on top of one of Orfelina’s she-cats, which let out a bloodcurdling wail. Orfelina was washing clothes at a washtub over in a corner of the back yar
d, and when she turned around and saw this stunning bare-chested teenaged kid she stood speechless for a few seconds. Then she yelled: “What are you doing in my back yard?” The teenager replied that he was going to visit a gentleman named Gabriel who lived there. “There’s no Gabriel living here—Skunk in a Funk lives here, and he’s not allowed to have visitors,” shot back Orfelina, more furiously yet, thinking that there was no way her nephew was going to take that jewel to bed—ay!—in her house (is nothing sacred?), which it had taken her umpteen jillion denunciations of her neighbors to get and which she shared with her decrepit husband, a militant member of the Communist Party. The teenager, somewhat taken aback, apologized and jumped back over the back-yard wall. But Skunk in a Funk vaulted over the wall, too, and caught up with Lázaro. Together they wandered the beach for more than twelve hours, and around dawn, when the aunt, her husband, her son Tony, and all the she-cats were asleep, they silently slipped over the wall again and went up to the maid’s room which Skunk in a Funk lived in (and for which he had to pay his aunt an exorbitant rent and also give her all the products that he was allowed on his ration card). . . . Skunk in a Funk unbuttoned the formidable teenager’s pants, and he discovered that in addition to his formidable beauty, he possessed, oh most beautiful of all, the largest phallus that the gods (and his constant cruising) would ever, in his entire hard-bitten life, permit the Skunk to lay his (ahem) eyes upon. And now Skunk in a Funk, having removed the young man’s pants, once more contemplated that unique, and fleeting, jewel. The teenager was a lily in underwear, with a magnificent lilac-colored stalk. By the time (before the sun was fully up) that Lázaro releaped the wall, Skunk in a Funk had been absolutely transfigured, transformed, transverberated (which is the perfect word for it, thank you). A happiness which she had never before known filled out her skin, made her hair once more full and silky, brought an unwonted sparkle to her eyes, filled in all those nasty wrinkles, and turned her face into something fine and smooth. At last he had found the love god he’d always yearned for, the last to fit his shoe, the Key to the Gulf—because what she had was a gulf, and only such a monumental key could fit such a gigantic lock.