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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  “You’re hired,” said Halisia, daubing rubbing alcohol on the bite. “Get a good supply of mosquitoes. I’m dancing tomorrow and I don’t want to disappoint my fans.”

  “Leave it to me,” said Coco. And that very night he went to Lenin Park and for hours hunted down the fiercest mosquitoes. The next day Halisia came on stage looking radiant and began to dance the first act of Swan Lake. From behind the curtains, Coco Salas turned loose his mosquitoes one by one. Halisia danced Swan Lake as she hadn’t danced it in sixty years. There was no ballet critic in the world—they’d all been invited to this event—who failed to sing the praises of Halisia Jalonzo. Under mosquito attack, Halisia danced in Rome, Monte Carlo, Moscow, Madrid (where Coco Salas herself wrote an article entitled “The Privilege of Seeing Halisia Jalonzo Dance”), Paris, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Algiers, New York, and, not to put too fine a point on it, all over the world. Coco, his box of mosquitoes always at the ready, restored her fame, and therefore her life. And that is his great secret: Halisia Jalonzo is still alive, professionally and literally, thanks to Coco Salas. It should come as no surprise, then, that Coco dresses the way she does, and that she enjoys absolute impunity. She’s Halisia’s fair-haired boy. (Get it now, Mary?)

  And now, in the theater set inside the gigantic catacombs of the Fiferonian Palace, Halisia was dancing the second act of Giselle, and dancing it magnificently. Knowing that Fifo was in the theater with all his important guests, Coco tripled the number of mosquitoes that he freed. The audience sat spellbound at Halisia’s performance. Even the Argentine cows were entranced. A tear fell from the eye of the Hangman of Iran. María Tosca Almendros’ eyes—and this really does say a lot—grew teary. Fifo, sitting very near the Key to the Gulf, was doubly moved, first by the dance and then by the glow of success that this performance lent his celebration. Who would now dare deny that he was the world’s greatest patron of the arts and that the world’s prima ballerina was one of his most faithful subjects? Came the climactic moment, and Halisia, accompanied by a monumental orchestra and in the midst of a hushed silence on the part of the audience, began her forty-four pirouettes. At that, Coco Salas turned loose the remaining half of his imprisoned mosquitoes and Halisia whirled like a top. But suddenly, in the midst of that miraculous dancing, there was a terrifying scream that echoed throughout the theater. Coco, thinking that Halisia had been murdered by an infected mosquito, closed up his precious cardboard box. Halisia fell to the floor. But the terrifying scream echoed once more throughout the theater, which meant that nobody paid any attention to Halisia’s fall—all anyone could hear was that howling that seemed to come from the official woods that bordered the theater.

  “What the fuck is it this time? I can’t believe this!” said Fifo, rising to his feet in the presidential box.

  And followed by his entire escort, most of the guests, Halisia herself, and Coco Salas, Fifo went out to the official woods to find out what it was that had inspired the terrible screaming that had interrupted one of the most sublime moments of this special evening.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (11)

  When ectomorphic Macumeco the sexual eclectic felt his rectal cavity concussed by the crash of the quasi-volcanic eruption that echoed clear up to his epiglottis, he was ecstatic, exclaiming, “Oh, what delectable rectal cavitation, but I pray the impregnation is not ectopic. Actually, I’d have opted for active ingurgitation.”

  For Aristóteles Pumariego,

  a.k.a. Macumeco

  THE SEVEN WONDERS OF

  CUBAN SOCIALISM

  First Wonder: The newspaper Granma

  Because it’s the only newspaper in the world in which the events that the newspaper reports on have nothing whatsoever to do with reality. It is the most optimistic newspaper in the world, and among the most frequent verbs you will find in its headlines are inspire, conquer, overthrow, achieve, optimize. . . . It’s also the newspaper with the largest potato and sugar harvests in all the world, although we ourselves never see those products anywhere. It has no obituaries, and when somebody is shot by the firing squad the newspaper says that the person died in a state of grace, proclaiming the virtues of the newspaper editor who had the person shot.

  Second Wonder: Plastic shoes

  These are the only shoes in the world that you don’t have to actually wear, and if you do wear them you have to always be running or at least skipping, which makes for a wonderfully active populace. When these shoes get hot, your feet shrink so much that you could pass for a geisha, who, as everybody knows, gets around with little hops. With these shoes there’s no need for socks. You can walk under water with them and nothing happens. Although they’re generally worn on the head.

  Third Wonder: “Roof croquettes”

  Also known as “miracle croquettes.” No one knows how these mysterious croquettes are manufactured (it’s a miracle) or what their ingredients are. But they have one exceptional quality that everyone does know all about: they stick to the roof of your mouth and there’s no way to get them off.

  Fourth Wonder: The bus

  This is the only vehicle in the world which once you get in, you can’t get out of, and which doesn’t stop anywhere, ever, although it usually doesn’t come by at all. It forestalls any worry or concern on the part of its users, since there’s no need to bother yourself about where it’s going. It is a mythological creature, and its adventures are beyond human imagination. Once you’re in one, anything can happen, because no matter how many laws have been passed to control what goes on inside, there is no regulation that can stop the vehicle itself or anything that takes place inside it.

  Fifth Wonder: The ICAIC Newsreel

  This, the newsreel of the Instituto Cubano para las Artes e Industrias del Cine, is the only newsreel in the world in which you can close your eyes, fall asleep, dream through it, and when you wake up give it a round of applause, secure in the knowledge that although you haven’t seen a thing, you’ve see it all.

  Sixth Wonder: The films of the former German Democratic Republic

  The merit of these movies is that you never have to see them.

  Seventh Wonder: Copelia ice cream

  This is the only ice cream in the world sold out of a specially built cathedral, and day and night, all around its nave, which is of course a vaulted nave, there congregate thousands of the faithful, prepared to suffer all manner of persecution for their steadfastness. The run-of-the-mill consumer has to stand in three lines before coming at last to the yearned-for ice cream: the pre-line, in which one waits to be given a ticket; the line, in which one stands with the ticket that enables one to enter the cathedral; and the post-line, in which one stands, ticket in hand, once one has managed to enter the sacred area in which the ice cream is served up. Several manuals have also been written on how to go about obtaining this ice cream, among them Nikitín’s famous work entitled “Instructions for Breaking into Line at Copelia.” It is very likely that by the time one finally arrives at the yearned-for delicacy, it will have melted or evaporated. But who can take away the joy of having spent one entire night, like some strange Knight-Templar in constant sleepless watch, at a cathedral in which the officiant is a frozen god?

  IN THE LIBRARY

  When Skunk in a Funk entered the reading room of the National Library, everything would be suddenly transformed, herself included. There, surrounded by books, a magical halo would envelop Reinaldo. Gabriel, almost completely alone in the library, would look down the long row of books and from every book would see a unique splendor shining forth. To walk over to those bookshelves, take down a book at random—What world would it reveal to us? What distant place would it transport us to? What music would bear us off to places, beauties, ideas that we never dared to dream of, yet have always sensed? But the most extraordinary moment would be that moment when, cradling the book, he had not yet opened it. At that moment Skunk in a Funk, Gabriel, Reinaldo would hold in their hands not one book but all the books in the world, and therefore all possible and imp
ossible mysteries. Then, a sense of utter plentitude would come upon Skunk in a Funk, Gabriel, and Reinaldo, and they would become one single being. And then, radiant, that being would take the book and turn toward the reading table and sit down and begin to read.

  A CLARIFICATION BY THE

  THREE WEIRD SISTERS

  We wish to make it clear that if we have sentenced Reinaldo Arenas (b. Perronales, Cuba, 1943) to a nasty end, it is not, as the author claims, because we were so terribly angered by the buffeting we received from that Negro whose fly was touched by Delfín Proust (b. Guajanales, Cuba, 1944). All of that—the touching of the fly, the blows we received, even our anger—is true. But it had nothing to do with our verdict. What did decide it was that Arenas (a.k.a. Gabriel, a.k.a. Skunk in a Funk) doubted our word, and therefore doubted our power. When the subject was locked in Castillo el Morro, he sent his mother to us (which exposed us to a search at the hands of Fifo’s agents) to try to find out what had happened to his novel. We informed the subject’s mother that the novel had been found by the subject’s Aunt Orfelina, who had turned it over to State Security. But he didn’t believe us. If he did, why when he got out of prison would he climb up on the roof of Orfelina’s house with the intention of recovering his novel? That lack of trust in us, the Three Weird Sisters, is not to be forgiven.

  [Signed:]

  Clotho

  Lachesis

  Atropos

  A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT

  (THOUGH IT WAS BRIGHT AS DAY)

  Carlitos Olivares, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba, had finally managed to persuade a stunning recruit who was standing guard at the Castillo de la Fuerza to come home with him. The truth was, Olivares (poor thing) had been obsessively hanging around the castle for months. She would stop outside the walls, stick her black, Indian-featured face through the thick iron bars, and stand in ecstasy, contemplating the young specimen of manhood who, feet slightly apart at present-arms (the butt of the rifle gently caressing his fly), stood guard before that historic edifice constructed by Isabel de Bobadilla in 1530 so that she could live at the seaside and await her long-absent husband, who unbeknownst to her had been swallowed years ago by the waters of the Mississippi. . . . The crazy queen, possessed perhaps by Bobadilla’s spirit of despairing hope, stood every day, hours on end (her kinky curls sometimes twining inextricably around the bars), in contemplation of that magnificent hunk of man. Sad indeed is the story of this queen—black, queer, and Taino, alas, in a country in which even Fifo himself crows about his white Spanish ancestors and his purportedly unimpeachable masculinity. I tell you, girl, it was pathetic. . . . And as though all this were not bad enough, that lanky, bug-eyed, big-assed queen with that wide mouth of hers that drooled like a waterfall at the sight of any masculine figure was no less than the son of the Cuban ambassador to Soviet Nippon.

  “My god, maricón! What words escape those false teeth of yours!”

  “False, perhaps, but of the very finest quality, my dear, for they were designed by St. Nelly herself and made from ivory and silver—unlike yours, which are made out of plastic and all you have to do is laugh, or even open your vulgar mouth, and they fall out. . . . But let me just continue with this story, if that’s all right with you.”

  Carlitos the swishful-thinking black tinkerbell was the son of a daddy who was a big government muckety-muck and a mother that was a santera, so you can imagine—the poor thing couldn’t sprinkle so much as a drop of fairy-dust at home. And yet once a force of nature—the force of fairydom—decided to set up shop in that dusky body, who could keep it from manifesting itself in a thousand ways? The way she moved her hands, for instance, or the way he batted his ears, the way she pursed her thick lips or the way he blinked his wandering eyes, the swinging of his backside and the staring into space. . . . Nothing, nothing could keep the fairy queen from showing herself for what he was, which was why, despite her being a high-ranking muckety-muck sort of queen, she’d been given the title of “the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba.”

  Anyway, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba had spent the livelong day on one side of the bars at the Castillo de la Fuerza looking longingly at the round and firm and fully packed specimen of military manhood on the other side—who just happened to come, oh, my heavens, from Palma Soriano. The queen’s drool had been running down the bars outside the Castillo de la Fuerza all day and was now beginning to flood the moats that surrounded the fortress. The delicious hunk thought the tide had come pretty far in.

  And the tide of drool continued to rise, until it reached almost to the magnificent medieval drawbridge from whose catwalk the soldierly hunk kept watch—ears pricked, face as stern as one of the masters of the world—on the drooling queen, who apparently was spying on him. His lieutenant had given him strict orders: Contact was forbidden with any persons who might be discovered wandering about the grounds of the military fortress in which the remains of José Antonio Portuonto lie; they might be spies or imperialist agents sent to obtain strategic secrets that Portuonto had carried to his grave. All photographs were forbidden; no one could enter the castle; and no replies were to be given to any questions that might be asked the guard. And in addition, his lieutenant had ordered him to report to headquarters any strange movement in the area of the castle, and to investigate the snooper as much as he could. That was why the wondrous hunk-thunk-thunk (thunk thunk because his boots made that delicious sound on the wooden catwalk of the fortress; hunk thunk because he was solid as a treetrunk himself) ignored the black fairy tinkerbell and didn’t arrest him on the spot—he just kept a careful, discreet eye on him from behind the dark glasses that gave him an even more martial, more commanding, more manly look. Though of course he was ready to drop the pretense the second the spy reached for a pencil or a camera. But the fact is, the drooling queen didn’t reach for anything; she just stood there, drooling, hour after hour.

  By the time the drool had risen all the way to the soldier’s boots, his turn on guard duty was over, so he checked in his weapon and left the fortress. There beside the great picket of iron bars stood the black tinkerbell, still drooling. Drooling and quivering. As the hunk-thunk-thunk passed beside her, the black fairy queen could not contain a short death cry, a sort of muffled ay-y-y that came from her profoundest depths, her deepest bowels, her small intestine, her large intestine, her ardent rectum, her very heart. The hunk, upon hearing those strange rectal sounds, deduced that the fairy was a superspy equipped with supermodern equipment, so he slowed down. The fairy continued to follow him, and was putting out such a quantity of drool that thousands of housewives started following him, carrying every sort of container imaginable so as to make up for the water shortage that all of Old Havana suffers under. Finally Carlitos Olivares, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba, approached the hunky recruit and respectfully asked if he could tell her the time. The recruit, always on the alert, half-smiled at the supposed spy and very respectfully told him that he didn’t have a watch but when he left the castle (the unit, he called it) it was one o’clock, so it couldn’t be later than one-fifteen. It’s early, moaned Olivares. Uh-huh, replied the hunk-thunk-thunk, but I’ve been standing guard since midnight, so what I really need is a rest. Olivares swallowed hard and somehow found the strength to whisper: Come to my house for a rest; my mother will make you some coffee. Oh, so this is a whole family of conspirators, eh? the recruit said to himself, and in the interest of national security accepted the invitation.

  When the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba arrived at his house with that incredible specimen of manhood, a fierce though silent battle broke out between the mother, the son, and his two sisters. The three women waged a battle of smirks and affectations, backside-waggings, giggles, smiles, and honeyed words—and they even flashed the recruit from time to time, all very subtly of course. The mother brought in the coffee and served it with the greatest of attentiveness, being sure the recruit got a good look at her enticing bosom. The daughters brought him dark Cuban sugar that the
old ambassador had sent them from New Stalingrad. And as they deposited lumps of dark sweetness in his cup, both daughters ran their tongues over the hunk’s ears. At which Carlitos, desperate, invited the young man up to his room to see his books. The first thing the fairy did to win the soldier’s confidence (politically speaking) was show him the complete works of Karl Marx; then, to win his friendship, he opened a drawer and gave him a Rolex watch, a pair of nylon socks, a curtain made out of matchbooks, a badge from the Young Communist League, an image of the Virgin of Loreto, a ring, and a bag containing 120 pesos that he’d planned to spend at the Carnival. Then immediately he told the young soldier, who serenely accepted those gifts, that he needed something nice to put that money away in, and he ran over to a gigantic wardrobe closet and produced a silky-soft leather wallet made from the hide of one of Fifo’s crocodiles, and he gave him that, too. The soldier took the wallet without a word and tucked it into one of his big military pockets. The bulge of the wallet in that military pocket so excited the queen that she flew over to the big wardrobe closet and came back with a tuxedo, a fez with gold braid, and some marvelous Italian shoes. Kneeling before the love god, she removed his rough boots and slipped on those luxurious pointed-toed masterworks of footware. Ay, but just then—the fairy on her knees before the hunk-thunk-thunk, adjusting the fit of the Italian shoes—the mother barged into the room with a big pot full of nice vegetable soup just like the soup that people made in the province of Oriente (where the soldier was from, you see), and right behind came the sisters with plates, silverware, a linen tablecloth and a folding table that they set up in front of the soldier boy. The hunk soon found himself at the center of the attentions of three women who never ceased cooing and swinging their backsides as they served him his favorite dish. But Carlitos was not about to be upstaged by his sisters, and so he presented the hunk-thunk-thunk with the big Medal of Lenin that had been awarded his father, the ambassador, for his sixty years of work for the Party Central Committee. He also gave him Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which he’d stolen from the National Library—a theft, reported by María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, that had cost him six months of hard labor on the park project, and hadn’t cost him more only because he was the son of the ambassador to Soviet Nippon; otherwise, the fairy would’ve been shot by firing squad. . . . My heavens, but the high muckety-muck fairy was acting more like the tooth fairy, and he continued to pile gifts upon the hunk-thunk-thunk. Around his neck he hung a medal of St. Nelly (pure gold, and struck by Mahoma herself), then he gave him eighteen lengths of fabric, the oilcloth off the coffee table, a floor lamp, a pair of maracas, several areca palms, some wax fruit (grapes, pears, and apples), a rain cape, and a pair of Spanish flip-flops. All this, the gift-fairy piled upon him while his mother and his sisters wriggled about, waggling tits and asses. And the hunk-thunk-thunk accepted all the gifts, thinking they might serve as evidence—heck, prima facie proof—against the spy and his family.