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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  Well, that’s about it—I’ve got to go get my novel into a bottle. And tomorrow, into the sea. There’s no way for me to tell you how I feel, so I’ll resist the temptation to put into words things that can’t be put into words. . . . As I finish writing this letter, I feel that I am holding each of your hands in mine—this may be the last time we ever do that.

  It’s terrible to say good-bye when almost certainly we’ll never see each other again yet we are all, still, part of a single scattered person, and when in addition we say good-bye across a distance, in absentia, without being able to see one another, and through a letter that may well never reach you. Really, the horror we’ve experienced not even the worst kind of criminal deserves. Maybe when I get to Hell I’ll be able to smash the Devil in the face and ask him what we’ve done to deserve this. But no—I’m sure I’ll never have that consolation. Not even the consolation of Hell. Before me, the ocean, just the ocean. . . . Beyond that, oblivion. Period. Maybe that’s the best thing. Maybe. . . .

  Farewell

  Skunk in a Funk

  THE DEATH OF VIRGILIO PIÑERA

  Just five minutes to go before the official inauguration of the Grand Carnival (although it had, of course, actually started several hours ago), which meant that Fifo’s orders to assassinate Virgilio Piñera were coming down to the wire. The agents had to work fast.

  Virgilio’s closest friends—José Rodríguez Pío, for one—had provided Fifo’s security forces with detailed reports on his routine: the old poet went to bed early and got up at sunrise, had a cup of coffee that he’d bought on the black market, and immediately sat down to write. Later, he went out with his burlap sack to stand in line for yogurt.

  Virgilio lived alone on the tenth floor of a small apartment house in El Vedado. It was ten P.M. and he was already in bed, deaf to the noise of Carnival that filled the street below. The poet’s eyes were closed, but the memory of Humberto Arenal’s latest novel was keeping him awake. How, wondered the poet, can a person write so badly and at the same time be my friend? These literary and ethical questions prevented the poet from falling asleep even though the law of the household (set down by himself) said that he should have been in dreamland long ago in his absolutely darkened bedroom.

  Virgilio thought he heard the door to his apartment open and someone come in.

  “Is that you, Arrufada?” he asked fearfully, for Arrufada had a key to his apartment and would often stop in to read him his latest play.

  But the old poet got no reply. In the darkness he thought he heard someone come through his little living room, bump into a chair, and enter his bedroom. From the heaviness of the footfalls, Virgilio deduced that it couldn’t be Antoni Arrufada—in fact, that it couldn’t be a single person.

  The reader will remember that when Fifo gave the order for the hit, he had given strict instructions that it be carried out in silence and that it appear to be not murder but rather suicide or heart attack, something along that line.

  Suddenly, the bedroom light came on and the poet saw four muscular men jump at him. They grabbed him by the neck and started strangling him. That was one of the alternatives Fifo had suggested to his stooges—Barniz and Paula Amanda had told Fifo that Virgilio had mentioned several times that he wanted to hang himself, and strangling was a lot like hanging. Plus, once Virgilio was dead they could string him up with a rope that one of the killers had brought along. “Wring that chicken neck good for me”—those had been Fifo’s very words. So the agents had their hands around Virgilio’s neck as the poet’s big frightened eyes stared back at them. But the old poet’s neck was so long, so skinny, and so flexible that there was no way to wring it. So the eight murderous hands began to pull on it, intending to at least rip the poet’s head off. But this, too, was not to be, because the poet’s long, narrow head was no bigger around than his neck, which meant that the murderers’ hands slipped up his neck and right off the top of his head, and the agents found themselves clutching air. In fact, to the chagrin of the four agents, not only Virgilio’s neck but his entire body was so slippery and so virtually ungraspable that it was more like the body of a snake or an eel than a man’s—which made it impossible to strangle him, pull his head off, or draw and quarter him, especially since everything had to be done in silence. (Don’t forget that Fifo wanted this done discreetly.) Exhausted after tugging for more than an hour on the poet’s untuggable neck, the gorillas turned out the lights in the apartment and went outside to regroup. They decided to have a couple of beers, which they drank from their cardboard cartons to the sound of the Carnival bacchanalia.

  “What a nightmare I had!” Virgilio said to himself when he was alone once more in his darkened room. “I dreamed that four men came in and tried to strangle me. I have to stop reading Humberto Arenal.”

  And making a tremendous effort—because outside, the Carnival was in full swing, the noise was unbelievable, and the memory of the novel continued to haunt him—the poet fell asleep. But in a few minutes the front door of his apartment creaked open again, and Virgilio awoke.

  “Is that you, Arrufada?” the poet asked, sitting up in his bed.

  But there was no reply.

  The four agents, now about half drunk, entered Virgilio’s bedroom and turned on the light. While one of them put his hand over the poet’s mouth, the others carried the playwright’s fragile body out to the balcony. If what Fifo wanted was for Virgilio’s assassination to look like suicide, then what better way to do it than by throwing him over the balcony? What proof would people have—people who didn’t dare speak out openly, anyway—that the poet hadn’t leaped to his death intentionally? And without further ado the four muscular agents threw Virgilio’s body (dressed in lilac-, black-, and white-striped pajamas) over the balcony railing.

  And that seemed to be that, thought the exhausted assassins, who peeped over the edge to see the mess the poet made when he splattered on the sidewalk down below. But to their amazement and consternation, the body of Virgilio hadn’t splattered; it was floating in the air. And then, to make matters worse, it was picked up by a passing breeze and blown back onto the balcony. Clearly the man was so skinny that he was weightless, or at least lighter than air—which made it hard to throw him off the balcony. Virgilio grabbed the railing and pulled himself back into his apartment.

  “Pepe! Pepe!” the desperate poet called out to his putative friend. “There’s four blackguards in here who’re trying to kill me! Guillotina sent them!”

  But Rodríguez Pío, watching through the peephole in the front door of his apartment across the hall, didn’t make a peep.

  Fifo’s stooges picked up Virgilio’s body and threw it over the balcony three more times, but the body would always float up again and waft into the apartment.

  “Try this arsenic!” said a voice (Rodríguez Pío’s) behind the murderers manqués, and a hypodermic needle filled with arsenic clattered across the hall and into the apartment.

  The four stooges grabbed the body that had just floated into the apartment again and held Virgilio down for the lethal injection. But the poet’s skin had been so toughened by his diet of wheat-based products and Bulgarian yogurt, plus the sun he was exposed to when he stood in the infinite lines, that it was more like a turtle shell than human skin. So the injection was useless—it was like trying to stick a straight pin into a crocodile. Enraged, the murderers threw the poet and the hypodermic needle over the balcony and decided to go down and have a few more beers and think up some way to finish this off.

  “What a nightmare I had!” Virgilio told Rodríguez Pío, who had crept into the apartment to see if the murderers had left so he could steal the presumably dead poet’s copy of Larousse. “I dreamed that four muscular men—the kind you don’t see much in Havana anymore—had thrown me over the balcony!”

  “An old man’s bad dreams,” Pepe tried to calm him. “Muscle-men don’t even know you exist anymore. Go to bed—tomorrow you won’t remember a thing.”

  And he lef
t.

  It took Virgilio, who was still a bit nervous from all the excitement, a long time to get back to sleep. Besides, the noise from the Carnival down below was deafening. But he made a great effort and fell asleep at last. He had hardly closed his eyes, though, when the four persistent stooges came back.

  “Is that you, Arrufada?” Virgilio asked for the third time, now convinced that he was going to get no sleep that night.

  But the poet got no response. All he heard was the muffled sound of footsteps coming toward him in the otherwise silent darkness. The sound stopped beside the big bed in which Virgilio was lying. And then one of Fifo’s secret police agents turned on the light. Standing before Virgilio were the four thugs out of his nightmare, now realer than ever, carrying a huge easel on which stood a large painting covered with a black cloth. The men swooped the cloth away, and Virgilio’s eyes opened wider than they had ever opened in his life, despite all the horrors he had seen. The only thing on the canvas (whose paint, by the way, was still fresh) was a gigantic cunt surrounded by glistening pubic hair, the cunt lips open wide to reveal the pink bud inside, which was painted with such realism that it seemed to leap out at the poet. In fact, it seemed to be writhing on the canvas, oozing sexual juices, and gurgling lasciviously. Piñera, unable to bear such a sight, died instantly of cardiac arrest.

  The four stooges checked to make sure the poet was really dead; then they dressed him and began arrangements for his funeral, which would be held that very morning. As they left, they picked up the gigantic painting—which Fifo had already sold to Anastasia Filipovna, who was waiting impatiently in a yacht just off the coast—and carried it away with them.

  Today, dear readers, the murder weapon that was used in the assassination of Virgilio Piñera, a canvas three feet wide by six feet high, can be seen in Gallery 21 (Fetishes and Religious Objects) in the Tyrant’s museum, thanks to a generous donation from Peggy Guggenheim. It is Clara Mortera’s masterpiece, a painting entitled Portrait of Karilda Olivar Lubricious, an oil on canvas which she had done earlier that day.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (21)

  Ñica, in a soignée gown of brown vicuña, growled “Coño, Geño,” at his friend Geño Ñañez when Geño, the meany, went “Nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah” at Ñica’s soignée vicuña gown. Ñica had just asked Geño if he liked vicuña, and thought if he didn’t he should have just said Nyet, not nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah.

  For Ñica

  THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

  OF YOUNG TEODORO TAMPON

  In the midst of all the complications that Skunk in a Funk was involved in—denunciations, persecutions, threats of blackmail, unconfessable diseases, the unavoidable visit to Blas Roka to seek clemency for the Areopagite—and above all at the most complex and difficult moment of his novel The Color of Summer, the part in which Fifo was finally leading his guests out to the Garden of Computers—at precisely that climactic and terribly complex moment in the plot, Reinaldo had to put down his pen and run off as fast as he could to the house, or room, or dump that Clara Mortera lived in. Where, it turned out, he found Teodoro Tampon, round and out of breath, waiting for him. And in Teodoro’s pained expression Skunk in a Funk read a desperate plea for aid for Teodoro and his wife.

  The trouble, however, as Skunk in a Funk knew, was that things were not that simple. There was no way it would all end there, with him magically solving whatever the problem was between Teodoro and Clara and then just going back to what he’d been doing. No, Skunk in a Funk knew that problems between a husband and wife (whether she was a whore and he a fairy, or she was a nun and he a Knight of Malta) were never really solved.

  And there stood Teodoro Tampon with that pained look on his face.

  For years now, Skunk in a Funk had had to put up with the clandestine visits of Teodoro Tampon, who would slink into Skunk in a Funk’s room in the Hotel Monserrate and in a gasping voice (and flapping his short little arms) exclaim:

  “Please, Reinaldo, lend me your swim fins! Tonight I’m jumping in the ocean! I can’t stand it anymore—I’ve got to get out of this country!”

  And with a sigh of resignation Gabriel would crawl under the bed, pull out his beloved swim fins (which were not even a shadow of those wonderful swim finds that Tatica had stolen from him), and hand them to Teodoro. What the heck, thought Reinaldo, taking it all philosophically, I’ll probably never get to use them anyway. And besides, Teodoro Tampon will give them back, like he always does. This dork will never jump in the ocean.

  And sure enough, just like always, once he was cradling the swim fins in his arms Teodoro Tampon would grow calmer. He would slide his little cylindrical body into one of Skunk in a Funk’s few armchairs, caress the swim fins (his last life raft), sigh, and begin to intone to poor Skunk in a Funk the infinite rosary of insults and offenses that Clara had inflicted upon him. But his whining voice would sound so resigned to the horror of his life that Skunk in a Funk would soon stop worrying about his swim fins and his mind would wander to the manuscript of his novel, which, if he didn’t finish it quickly, Fifo would surely destroy yet again. So Teodoro would rattle on while Reinaldo would try to mentally compose the chapter titled “In the Garden of Computers.”

  Among the terrible humiliations which Teodoro Tampon’s wife had inflicted on him (and which he never failed to mention) was that terrible one the night that he, encouraged by some friends from his native province, first met her. It happened to be a night when Clara had invited a group of sailors to take part in a superskewer in which she (naturally) would be the recipient of the tribute paid by the chain of hunky kabobers to her seductive charms—but Clara had refused to allow Teodoro to take part in that unparalleled coupling. Instead, when it was all over she had ordered him (her voice like a cross between a little girl’s and a high-ranking witch’s) to clean up her room, which looked as though a hurricane had swept through it, and also to stay and live with her. He would be her pimp and protector. Ten years had passed since that night, and the list of humiliations to which Clara had subjected (and was still subjecting) Teodoro was endless.

  Every night, when Clara came in from her tour of the docks or the secret swamps of Lenin Park where she’d been playing her dangerous love games, Teodoro would have to take a kitchen knife and scrape off the dried mud that clung to Clara’s legs. And it was a herculean task to get the crust of mud off those knobby knees of hers. Not to mention that before she came in, he would have to go out looking for water all over Old Havana—which was like going out and prospecting for gold.

  “One of my worst humiliations,” Teodoro would confess bitterly, clutching the swim fins, “is having to carry a bucket of water across Central Park.” And to top it off, sometimes after he’d climbed the monumental staircase to the room that he and Clara lived in, carrying the bucket that was falling apart and had to be soldered together and plugged up with pieces of soap, Clara would refuse to open the door. Teodoro would have to sit out in the hall and listen to the sounds of orgy inside while he tried to keep the water from leaking out altogether. “And how can I forgive her for not inviting me to her orgies?” he would (not unnaturally) complain. “If you could hear the moaning that I hear behind that door. . . .” And Teodoro, his voice slow and hoarse, would attempt to mimic those moans and shrieks of lust—moans and shrieks that Skunk in a Funk would finally halt with a gesture of one of his claws, to indicate that he got the idea.

  Clara had also made Teodoro Tampon carve a wooden dildo, and she would order him to use it on her as she screamed “impotent pervert!” at him. Of course Teodoro Tampon, as the legal (yes, legal) spouse of the brilliant painter, was obliged to escort her on all her visits to other painters, where he would keep their host occupied while Clara stuffed tubes of paint, rolled-up canvases, and brushes into the huge pockets of her smock (which she herself had made). When they weren’t paying visits (many painters wouldn’t allow Clara into their houses or studios), Teodoro, risking years of imprisonment for armed robbery and theft, would be sent
out to steal the sheets off the clotheslines in Old Havana. It was on those stolen sheets and canvases that Clara painted the masterpieces that Teodoro admired almost ashamedly.

  Clara would oblige her husband to invite some friend of his up to her room, and there she would steal his ration card, which she’d then sell on the black market. “Why, she stole my ration card from me,” Skunk in a Funk exclaimed when Teodoro reached this point of his tale of woe—“and I had planned to buy myself a knit polo shirt that Clara promised to paint for me for the big Carnival!” Then he turned back to his novel.

  Clara also forced Teodoro Tampon to eat anything he could get his hands on, including grass and sawdust, so that he’d be so fat that alongside him, Clara would look svelte and beautiful. It was truly pathetic to see those two walking along the Malecón—Clara tall, straight, and thin with her long dress made of flour sacks embroidered by hand (by Clara herself) and her long neck encircled by an artsy necklace made by Poncito, and Teodoro waddling along like a ball that from time to time the grand Clara would help to roll along with the tip of one of her elegant Greek sandals. Sometimes when they went out, Clara would dress Teodoro up as a woman, piling humiliation upon humiliation so that all the men would be sure to look at her. The pathetic round ball, in drag, would also have to carry all of Clara’s accoutrements—the makeup, parasols, perfumes, condoms, sexual lubricants, and other paraphernalia that she, as the grande dame, refused to carry. “What hurts me more than anything is that she’s made me get so fat and look so much older,” Teodoro would complain. “You know I’m just twenty-three, and she’s fifty-seven.” Skunk in a Funk knew that Teodoro was older than that, and Clara younger, but he kept his mouth shut. He was just there to listen to Teodoro—ay, and the chapter on the Garden of the Computers hanging fire—as Teodoro told how his wife had forced him to legally recognize all the children that she’d had by men from the most distant corners of the world. Teodoro Tampon was the only man in the world who, with the same wife, had had three Chinese children, one Yugoslav, four Arab, two African, one Swedish, one Russian, several Greek, one Basque, one Indian, and one Syrian. The house was a maddening babble of tongues. And Clara would make Teodoro go out in the street with that gaggle of children of every race and age and beg for food and money while she made love to some sailor in a doorway down on the docks. Then Teodoro would have to turn over the take from their begging to his wife’s lover and in addition take on the responsibility for the fruit of that furtive coupling, since the sailor would invariably leave Clara pregnant—this was a woman who, in spite of her age (or Teodoro’s count of it), seemed never to lose her fertility.