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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  In the United States today there are no intellectuals; there are only third-class penlickers who think about nothing but the state of their bank accounts. It’s impossible to tell whether they are progressives or reactionaries—they’re quite simply fools, and therefore tools of the most sinister of forces. And as for Cuban literature, it has virtually ceased to exist in any palpable way either inside Cuba or in exile. Inside Cuba, it has been exterminated or silenced by propaganda, fear, the need to survive, the desire for power, and social vanities. Outside Cuba, it has been stifled by lack of communication, rootlessness, solitude, implacable materialism, and, above all, envy—that microbe that always produces a suffocating stench.

  When I arrived in Miami in 1980, I discovered that there were more than three thousand people in the city who called themselves “poetesses.” I fled in terror. The great writers of the Cuban diaspora (Lino Novás Calvo, Carlos Montenegro, Lydia Cabrera, Enrique Labrador Ruiz, Gastón Baquero, Leví Marrero, and certain others) by now have died—or are dying—in ostracism, oblivion, and poverty. Other writers of a certain degree of relevancy not only hardly write but are considered sacred cows. (Let’s get rid of the adjective and call it even.)

  My generation (those who now are, or ought to be, between forty and fifty) has not produced a single noteworthy writer, with the possible exception of myself. And it’s not that there never were any; it’s that one way or another they have been annihilated, destroyed, done away with. I am completely alone, I have lived alone, I have suffered not only my own horror but also the horror of all those who have not even been able to publish their horror. Not to mention that I myself will soon be dying.

  But no one should think that before Castro, life in Cuba was a bed of roses, either—not at all. Most Cubans have shown an interest in beauty only in order to destroy it. A man such as José Lezama Lima was violently attacked by both his own early generation and the generation that succeeded it. During the Batista years, Virgilio Piñera was insulted by Raúl Roa, who sneeringly called him “a writer of the epicene gender”; afterward, during the Castro years, Roa became a government minister and Piñera went to jail—dying, as a matter of fact, under very suspicious circumstances. Great Cuban literature has been conceived under the sign of scorn, denunciation, suicide, and murder. Cuban exiles made José Martí’s life so miserable in New York that he had to go off to fight in Cuba so that he could be killed once and for all and have done with it. Then and now, the story of the culture of our country has been a sordid one. José Lezama Lima used to say that our country is a country “frustrated in its political essence.” The local color, the exuberance, the light breeze at nightfall, the rhythm of its mulatto women, these are the trappings behind which hides, and continues, our implacable tradition—I like to call it Sinistrism.

  For the moment, the apotheosis of Sinistrism is Fidel Castro (that second Caligula with a desire to be a killer nun). But who is this Fidel Castro? A being fallen from another planet upon our unfortunate isle? A foreign product? No, Fidel Castro is the summa of that Cuba that has always been: he simply typifies the worst of our tradition. And in our case “the worst” is, apparently, that which has always prevailed, and always will. Fidel Castro is, to a certain degree, ourselves. Soon, perhaps, in Cuba there will be no more Fidel Castro, but the seed of evil, vulgarity, envy, ambition, abuse, injustice, betrayal, treachery, treason, and intrigue will still be there, waiting to sprout and grow. In Miami there is no dictatorship only because the peninsula has not yet been able to secede from the rest of the United States.

  Cubans have never been able to gain their independence—the only thing they have ever managed to gain is pendence.

  That perhaps explains why the word pendejo (meaning spineless, twit, coward, jerk) is an epithet used constantly among us. As a Spanish colony, we never freed ourselves from the Spaniards; for that, the Americans had to intervene, and then we became a colony of the United States; then, attempting to free ourselves from a fairly conventional sort of dictatorship in the colonial vein, we became a colony of the Soviets. Now that the Soviet Union is apparently on the verge of extinction, no one knows what new horror lies ahead for us, but unquestionably what we deserve, collectively, is the worst. The same people who oppose this line of thought are generally loyal exponents of an infinite vileness. . . . I feel an endless desolation, an inconsolable grief for all that evil, and yet a furious tenderness when I think of my past and present.

  That desolation and that love have in some way compelled me to write this pentagony, which in addition to being the history of my fury and my love is also a metaphor for my country. The pentagony begins with Singing From the Well, a novel that details the vicissitudes of a sensitive boy in a brutal, primitive setting. The work takes place in what we might call the political prehistory of our Island. The pentagony then continues with The Palace of the White Skunks, which centers on the life of a teenage writer-to-be; it gives us a vision of a family and an entire town during the years of the Batista tyranny. The cycle then continues with Farewell to the Sea, which records the frustration of a man who fought for the Revolution but then, once inside the Revolution, realizes that it has degenerated into a tyranny more perfect and implacable than the one that he had fought against; the novel details the process of the Cuban Revolution from 1958 to 1969, the Stalinization of it, and the end of all hope for creativity.

  Then comes The Color of Summer, a grotesque and satirical (and therefore realistic) portrait of an aging tyranny and the tyrant himself, the apotheosis of horror; it details the struggles and intrigues that go on around the tyrant (who is aided and abetted by the hypocrisy, cowardice, frivolity, and opportunism of the powerful of the world), the attitude of not taking anything seriously in order to go on surviving, and sex as the immediate means of escape. In some way this novel is an attempt to reflect, without idealizing or investing the story with high-sounding principles, the half-picaresque, half-heartbreaking life of a large percentage of Cuban youth, their desire to be young, to live the life of young people. This novel presents a vision of an underground homosexual world that will surely never appear in any newspaper or journal in the world, much less in Cuba. It is deeply rooted in one of the most vital periods of my life and the life of most of us who were young during the sixties and seventies. The Color of Summer is a world which, if I do not put it down on paper, will be lost, fragmented and dispersed as it is in the memories of those who knew it. I leave to the sagacity of critics the deciphering of the structure of this novel, but I would like to note that it is not a linear work, but circular, and therefore cyclonic, with a vortex or eye—the Carnival—toward which all the vectors whirl. So, given its cyclical nature, the novel never really begins or ends at any particular place; readers can begin it anywhere and read until they come back to their starting point. Yes, dear reader, you hold in your hand what is perhaps the first round novel to date. But please don’t take that as either a merit or a defect—just a necessity that is intrinsic to the structure of the work.

  The pentagony culminates in The Assault, an arid fable about the utter dehumanization of humanity under an implacable system.

  In all these novels, the central character is an author, a witness, who dies (in the first four works) but in the next novel is reborn under a different name yet with the same angry, rebellious goal: to chant or recount the horror and the life of the people, including his own. There thus remains, in the midst of a terrible, tempestuous time (which in these novels covers more than a hundred years), a life raft, a ship of hope, the intransigence of man the creator, the poet, the rebel—standing firm before all those repressive principles which, if they could, would destroy him utterly—one of those principles being the horror that he himself exudes. Although the poet dies, the writing that he leaves behind is witness to his triumph over repression, violence, and murder, a triumph which ennobles him and at the same time is the patrimony of the entire species—which in one way or another (as we see once again) will carry on its war agai
nst that barbarism often disguised as humanism.

  Writing this pentagony, which I’m still not sure I’ll ever finish, has, I confess, taken me many years, but it has also given a fundamental meaning to my life that is now coming to a close.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (13)

  Delfín, a femme and a nonlesbian thespian defined by his finicky fussing—for instance, his dentures are fixed with Fixodent, not Fasteeth—was desirous of finishing himself off theatrically but found it difficult to fix on the most fashionable method, and he refused to finish himself off before finalizing every detail of his grand finale. Finally, frenetically gathering information for his decision and frantic at the prospect of finagling Ford Foundation financing for his project, he fixed upon defenestration. But Delfín’s defenestration plan fell flat.

  For Delfín Proust

  THE CONDESA DE MERLÍN

  In the person and estate of María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz Mopox Jaruco y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlín, were joined all the qualities needful for happiness, and indeed she was one of the most fortunate creatures on the island of Cuba in the nineteenth century. Her wealthy family possessed an enormous sugarcane plantation and sugar processing establishment—and (very important) a large company of slaves.

  Even when she was but a girl, with that tenderness that is innate in children, María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz Mopox Jaruco y Montalvo would arouse the sexual fires of all the male Negro slaves and compel them to possess her in the middle of the sugarcane fields. J’aime fort les jeux innocents avec ceux qui ne le sont pas. The erotic activities of the young girl not only became the stuff of scandal throughout the province of Matanzas, in which her family’s estate lay, but also caused a decline in the family’s sugar production. Throughout the length and breadth of those cane fields, one heard nothing but the child-Condesa’s moans of pleasure and the cries (in Mandingo, Lucumí, and Carabalí) of the aroused black slaves who, machete in hand, fought for the possession of that still-child’s body. There was not a single able-bodied black man in the entire slave population of the estate who had not possessed the young Condesa in the middle of the fields, their bed the soft young cane shoots and dry leaves. And pity the black man who refused to couple with the insatiable child. The aristocratic creature would intrigue against him so cleverly and so ably that the Conde and Condesa de Montalvo y Jaruco would soon clap him in the stocks and then hang him.

  Yes, the Condesa’s entrance into the cane fields wreaked terrible havoc. So much havoc, in fact, that her grandparents decided to send the child off to the famous convent in Santa Clara while her parents, their reputation in tatters, fled to Spain, their faces covered by a visorlike mask of black rock crystal.

  Once shut away in the convent, the Condesa set about arousing the other girls, the nuns, and even the abbess. Such was the brazen lechery that the budding young lady unleashed among those cloistered women that at any hour of the night or day, all one heard in the convent were earsplitting shrieks and wails of pleasure, the product of their unprecedented—and unnatural—couplings. For not only did the Condesa practice the sin of Sappho with all the nuns and other females of the convent and couple with the farmhands in the surrounding countryside, she also had her way with the draft animals, the fowls, and not a few well-proportioned instruments of labor, even including holy staves and a cannonball that a mad nun escaped from a French community house for lay sisters had brought to the Santa Clara nunnery. All of these unholy partners and devices would inspire erotic shrieks from the Condesa and her crew, and at last led to such cackling and carrying-on that the Bishop of Havana, one Espada, sent an army to carry out a sacred, secret investigation, which he personally directed.

  Within days the Condesa, who by now was a strikingly beautiful teenage woman, had corrupted the bishop. His army, meanwhile, sired children upon all the nuns, who immediately turned the convent into an orphanage. But soon the Condesa was denounced by the spiteful mother superior, Sor Inés, who could not bear to witness (without being invited to join) the Condesa’s fevered lovemaking with the bishop in the middle of the baptistry. And so the Condesa was forced to flee the convent. (First, however, she had her revenge on the mother superior by setting fire not only to the convent but also to the entire barrio of Jesús María de Santa Clara, in which the religious house was located.)

  From the convent the Condesa made her way on foot across the province of Las Villas and then Matanzas, coupling whenever she could with the campesinos and farm animals. And finally, as she masturbated with the walking stick belonging to a vagabond whom she had forcibly possessed beside the very walls of the patriarchal castle in Havana, she entered her family home exclaiming that she had decided to return—since the truth was, she experienced total pleasure only when she was being possessed by her great-grandfather, an aged nobleman shaped like a rat who (one must withhold nothing) had been sodomized by one of the Condesa’s little feet when she was no more than five years old. The young woman’s family held a council and decided that she had to be sent away, banished, expatriated—that is, sent to the house of her mother, the Condesa Leonora. In the years since she had last seen her daughter, the mother had been widowed; she was now living in Madrid, where she kept a literary salon that was at the same time one of the most famous whorehouses in all of Europe. She numbered the entire Spanish nobility among her clientele; even Louis XVI had once spent several nights of pleasure there, in the company of Charles III of Spain. But untitled hoi polloi also passed in procession through the whorehouse—and all, to a man, contracted a strain of galloping syphilis that so infected and degraded the population of the Peninsula that most Spaniards today are deformed, insolent, mongoloidal, stunted, thin-haired, big-assed and, in a word, sculpted with a sledgehammer. The noble Montalvo family, of our own beloved Cuba, have therefore left their inexpungible mark upon the entire race.

  On her arrival at the Cortes in Madrid, the Condesa, who was but sixteen years old yet already skilled in exhibiting the splendors of her fair features, immediately overshadowed her mother, so that María Mercedes soon became the center of attraction of those soirées attended especially by the literary, religious, and high military crowd. Sometimes while someone was reading a sonnet by Garcilaso, a shot would be fired that would do away with a bishop or some dauphin from a distant kingdom, but the reading would go on imperturbably, for everyone knew that at the end of the artistic evening the naked Condesa would interpret the most difficult passages from La Donna del Lago. But just as the Negroes on the Conde’s sugarcane plantation had been worn to almost nothing by the fiery young Condesa, so the entire population of Spain began to suffer from the young woman’s erotic insistence—the men became indolent, effeminate, and weak, while the women fled to the coast of the Mediterranean, created another jargon even more horrid than Spanish, and began to dance the sardana, a dance which was no more than a pretext for leaning upon one another and not falling dead to the floor.

  The Montalvo women, now lacking both men and women to service them in the many ways that they required servicing, began to conspire to induce the French to invade the Peninsula. The night that Napoleon’s brother Pepe entered Madrid, he slept (where else?) at the Montalvos’ house. The Condesa’s fire spread through the entire French army, which, touched by that flame, burned Spain to the ground. Of course one must admit that many of the massacres committed by the army were due also to the incessant acts of treason committed by Francisco de Goya, who, brush in hand, would point to the nest in which the members of the nation’s armed forces had taken refuge and then, when the bloodshed that he himself had inspired was sufficiently horrendous, would pack up his colors, go to where the events were taking place, and paint the catastrophes of war. In that sense, Los fusilados del dos de mayo is one of his most original works, in every sense of the word.

  But let us return, my dear astonished fairies, to the adventures of our own Cuban Condesa. After having her way with virtually the entire armed forces of France, María de las Mercedes became even m
ore seductive, and in her face glowed even brighter the light of chastity that made her so irresistible. One night her mother, leaving Napoleon’s bed, sent for her daughter.

  “María, the King wishes to see you married.”

  “Married? Impossible. It is the King that I wish to marry.”

  “Mercedes, he is not the man for you. Look.” And with no further ado, the elder Condesa de Montalvo pulled back the spread that covered José Bonaparte’s good parts and he lay naked before María Mercedes, who was shocked at the insignificant size of his member.

  “So that’s why they call him the Little Napoleon,” she said, disillusioned. “All right, then, I’ll agree to marry another man, under the condition, of course, that he give me his consent to sleep around on him. Who is he?”

  “General Merlín, a cold, severe count, who only sleeps with his private guards. You shall meet him soon.”

  “First I want to meet his private guards. I refuse to make a bad marriage.”

  “My dear daughter, one sees that you are the fruit of my womb. I knew that you were going to make that request.”

  And instantly Leonora Montalvo (whose nom de guerre was Teresa) clapped her hands together several times in the Andalusian manner and a hundred stunning, well-built men in jerkins and tights appeared in the room where King Joseph lay sleeping.