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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  “Sleigh dogs?”

  “Yes, sleigh dogs, my dear. Do you think a sleigh won’t work on sand? . . . I’m off! Out of the way, Sakuntala, or you’re roadkill!”

  The queen was whipping at the dogs harnessed to her sleigh (which she’d just climbed up on), insulting them verbally, calling them Vicentina Antuna, Vilma Espina, Clementina Cirea, María Roca Almendros. . . . The dogs (bitches, all of them, as you can see from the names Coco was calling them), stung by the fury of being so terribly insulted, ran faster and faster.

  Following the queen in her sleigh (which was now moving at quite a clip) marched the members of the group of Snubbed and Seething, who had been heroically waiting at a spot near Fifo’s subterranean castle. They marched (or rather trotted) hard on the heels of Fifo and his splendid entourage in order to have their revenge and, if possible, prevent both Fifo and his famous guests from making it to the Carnival alive.

  But one of the queens in Fifo’s court—to wit, the cunning and satanic Delfín Proust—took in the entire surroundings with one sweep of his country-boy, milk-fed gaze, calculated the fury of the attackers, and quickly concocted an invincible plan of defense, consisting of assigning Halisia Jalonzo, walking backward and performing the mad scene from Giselle, as the rear guard. If seeing that old hyena-toothed, big-nosed hag with her hair standing up all over her head and waving a sword at them didn’t freeze the enraged attackers in their tracks, then nothing would. The seconds gained by the paralysis (the shock!) of the attackers would give Fifo and his entourage plenty of time to get to the Carnival, and even to take a detour first through Old Havana with Alejo Sholekhov. Only one person was not stunned into immobility by the horrific sight of the classical ballerina—the husband of Karilda Olivar Lubricious, who just kept coming, saber aloft, making death-dealing slashes at the air (which whistled at every stroke), and determined to hack the poetess to pieces. Karilda Olivar Lubricious, seeing her husband gaining on her, broke from the official group and (with her faithful cats) ran—trying to lose herself in the hurly-burly of the Carnival.

  Karilda’s husband zoomed like a meteorite through the procession, trying to catch the poetess and put her out of his misery. What do we do? Fifo asked the thoughtful (though bald) head of Güevavara, using the microphone installed in his balloon. (Fifo often sought Güevavara’s advice at critical moments.)

  “Give orders to start the ass-wiggling and backside-shaking while we do our duty with Sholekhov,” replied the queenly queen. “Don’t forget that UNASCO’s people are here, and they brought their checkbooks.”

  Instantly, all the Fifaronian orchestras, including the Aragon Symphony and a hundred others even worse, began to play as loudly as they could. Ears were assailed by the simultaneous rhythms of a salsa, a merengue, a dengue, a guaracha, a mambo, a pachanga, a cha-cha-cha, a rumba, a lambada, a fox-trot, and one rhythm even catchier than these, a rhythm that made anyone who heard it feel the irresistible need to shake his ass (or hers). All those in the procession were suddenly shaking their backsides, wiggling their asses, moving their legs and thighs, shimmying their shoulders, bobbing and weaving their necks. The hunkiest hunks shook their little bubble-butts and rubbed them up against the bubble-butts of other hunks who, had it not been for that music and that party, would have pulled out their switchblades and sliced and diced them. . . . Oh, honey, you just can’t imagine—this tickling, I’ve just got to scratch it. It’s like a thrumbling in the blood, it’s like something’s nipping at you and you gotta shake it out, even if you disenjoint your whole body. Go, girl! Go! The engine backfires. Weed! Grass! Shake yo’ ass! Go awn, man, step right on! Shake it, but don’t break it! Let that rhythm get you, girl! Go with it, flow with it, let it do you, hon! I’m gonna shake till I come undone, I’m gonna shake myself till my legs fall off, shake myself till my arms fall off—why, honey, I’m gonna shake myself till my ass falls off!

  Listen, now that the music’s started let’s go have some real fun over in Bar-tolo’s plantain field. Oh, that plantain field has got a plantain for you all right, honey, the biggest plantain you ever saw, bigger than the one Rapet Diego shoves up his ass. Oh, grandma, what a big plantain you have! The better to mmmm you with, my dear! Ay, ay, ay-y-y-y-y!

  Shake it, shake it! I don’t think I can take it!

  And while I’m shaking my ass and wiggling my backside, I think—though I can’t imagine why—about the word rumpityhumpity. And I keep wiggling and shaking—I can’t control myself—to the rhythm of this music. Such music, my lord! Such music! I can’t control myself! Cannot! Shake it, shake it! It’s our national rhythm, our national song, our national anthem! It’s our national movement—our very own ass-shaking and backside-wiggling!

  The orchestras, bands, and marching musicians go on playing. The unanimous, spontaneous ass-wiggling and backside-shaking goes on wiggling and shaking. All of which gives Fifo time to put on that huge olive-green uniform of his and take the official swing through Old Havana and then, though his entourage is a bit perplexed (having just witnessed the burial of Alejo), put on a big smile and join the Carnival. To the sound of snare drums and with a preliminary throb and shudder, out of Fifo’s balloon shoot fireworks the likes of which the world has never seen, while the participants in the act of repudiation take their places. . . . The music goes on playing and everyone is dancing—and as people dance and swig their beer out of cardboard cups, they all grow more and more excited. (I mean aroused, you know?) And not caring who they’re next to, or who’s watching, everybody in the crowd starts touching, rubbing, humping, feeling up neighbors, and dancing close. And right there in the middle of the crowd, people started taking it up the backside, or at least giving and getting a good blow job. . . . And up in the gigantic illuminated ball that looks like some shining Popemobile on steroids, Fifo, floating some three feet off the ground, waves to the millions of ass-shakers and backside-wigglers—and even he begins to wiggle a little. But then he becomes very serious—and then he starts shaking his ass again—and then he recovers his composure and puts on his bad-guy expression. Oh, but then he can’t control himself, and starts shaking like he’ll throw his joints out. . . .

  That duality is his tragedy, thought a Uruguayan essayist (and medalist of the Casa de las Americas) who, temporarily pausing in his ass-wagging, began to write an essay which he provisionally titled “The Dual Nature of the Genius.” The despicable essayist thought that if things went badly for Fifo he could always replace the word “genius” with “tyrant” and submit it for consideration for the Mikhail Gorbachev prize given by the PEN Club of New York.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (27)

  Despite tight precautions, that tireless tractor-trailer inspector in his astrakhan caftan kicked the bucket when he tried to tap his rear intake onto the trailer jack of an intractable tractor-trailer driver known for his operatic thrills as the Truckin’ Troubador. Because the tragic bucket-kicking triggered the total destruction of the tractor-trailer driver’s trailer jack, the trailer inspector, despite his tireless tractor-trailer inspections during his tragically short lifetime, is being tried by State Security, at the instigation of his truculent detractors, as a traitor. Why would a deceased tractor-trailer inspector be tried as a traitor by State Security? Did his trailer inspections tick off too many detractors? How many detractors does it take to trigger the trial for treason of a deceased tractor-trailer inspector, anyway?

  For Nene Saragoitía, a.k.a. Sakuntala la Mala

  THE DUAL NATURE OF THE

  [GENIUS, TYRANT]

  And yet, the monster’s childhood was a sad one. . . .

  “Hey! José Manuel Poveda wrote that line over eighty years ago.”

  “You nasty thing! Do you dare to deny that the culture of socialist Cuba is the heritage of the entire country, the heritage of the masses, and therefore that anyone and everyone has a right to it? Huh? . . . Gotcha there, don’t I? So just hush up, because I’ve got the floor, and I’m exercising my rights.”

  Yes, ter
ribly sad was the childhood of the angel—I mean devil—I mean madman—I mean child—I mean monster, though they’re all the same thing. On the one hand, the influence of his mother—a countrywoman, former housemaid, and former whore, a Catholic and one of the suffering and afflicted—left in Fifo a deep and compelling desire to be feminine. Oh, how he was drawn to the beckoning crotches of those field laborers who worked under the whips and bayonets on his father’s enormous plantation. Yes, the influence of his mother was decisive in his formation as a faggot. But what, then, of the influence of his father, a Spaniard to the bone—and to make matters worse, from Galicia? Once, the father took aim and with one shot brought a worker down out of a coconut tree that the poor man had climbed to quench his thirst. I mean, this feudal lord manqué would not even give coconut water to les misérables who worked for him. The machista example set by Fifo’s father—who would rape mares, hens, female turtles, and his own mother (who had started off as the cook)—awoke in Fifo an irresistible desire to be a real man, a heterosexual, although the author of this novel (a screaming queen if ever there was one) would deny that. But Fifo had known many women (in the biblical sense of the word), just as he had been bedded down by many men. . . . But oh, then there was the example of Fifo’s great-great-grandfather, whose greatest sexual pleasure had been derived from screwing a horse (a male horse), though actually he wasn’t that particular—he’d screw anything from a male boa constrictor in Santa María to a fighting cock. This great-great-grandfather awoke in the young boy’s heart the wish to be a surly bull macho and screw other machos. But if to all this we add that in the Jesuit school he attended, the priests were constantly buggering the students and that Fifo, with his broad yet flat backside, was a roomy harbor that all the holy vessels sought to drop their anchors in after a hard day at the blackboard and the altar, then honey, you can see for yourself that Fifo (who also, don’t forget, had had the promiscuous example of his mother) turned out to be a queen, the very queenliest of queens. . . . In his little heart there stirred three stirrings—he hearkened to the call of the ass (Faggotry), the call of the phallus (Butt-Fucking), and the call of the balls (Womanizing), and this last tendency led him to want to impregnate every woman he met so as to leave a human trace of his passage through this vale of tears.

  And so our little man had no peace upon this earth. When he saw a good-looking woman he would grow impassioned, when he saw a man he would become almost faint, and when he spotted a fairy he would grow inflamed with thoughts of buggering. And the worst thing was that when he was screwing a man he wanted to be screwing the mother of that glorious ephebe, and when he was screwing a woman he wanted to be taken by the woman’s brother, and when he finally was being screwed by the woman’s brother he wanted to screw the father of the hunk who was screwing him. Nothing satisfied him; nothing fulfilled him. Sometimes, on the advice of Paula Amanda, he would host multiorgies. That way, as he sat (so to speak) in the center of the action (as Paula Amanda had recommended), as he took his place at the midpoint of the daisy chain, he could enjoy screwing and being screwed at the same time. But not even that worked—when he was at the center of the daisy chain he’d want to be the first one in it, or sometimes the last. So the chain would come apart (and not so easily, either, sugar) and the poor man would find no solace.

  And now, up there in his transparent balloon lighted from the inside, he looked out upon that constant ass-wiggling and backside-shaking, those shimmies and shakes given by men, women, and fairy queens alike, and as his eyes caressed that ass, that piece of meat, that pair of tits, Fifo, despite his age (about ninety, although the author of this novel has portrayed him as considerably younger), saw that he was getting an uncontrollable erection, so he turned off the light inside his balloon, unzipped his trousers, and began to masturbate. Ay, but as he approached his climax, as he reached the moment of orgasm, there was no one body part (cunt, ass, or prick) to concentrate his imagination on, no one thing to get him off. Fifo could not cum! No, there is no peace to be had for me on earth, shouted Fifo, dressed in that huge, shapeless, olive-green uniform-thing that Raúl had given him to wear. So once more he turned on the overhead light in his floating balloon and—shining-bright, martial, “mechanical and ecumenical” (as the author of this novel put it in a previous one)—he smiled and lifted one arm and saluted the crowd that was applauding him as he led the grand parade, the Big Float at the head of all the little floats. But the truth is that while he was raising his arm and saluting, apparently with enthusiasm and joy, inside he was weeping tears of frustration and despair. Oh, if only he could be that black man who twisted and wiggled and showed off his basket; or that whore dressed as a militia recruit dancing on top of the wall; or that fairy clandestinely, passionately, squeezing a patriotic soldier’s crotch; or that old guy with his hand on that cheering boy’s butt. But no-o-o-o—he was everything at once, and he was therefore nothing. He was all of them and none of them. And therefore, being no definite human being, he was able to find fulfillment (or even solace) only in the destruction of every life-affirming instinct, every trace of authenticity and integrity. And so, as the ass-shaking and backside-wiggling went on, Fifo was almost howling (inside, of course) in grief and loneliness. The only thing he had was power. But power could not be possessed—power was solitude, loneliness, and death.

  It was then that the voice of Raúl, dressed in a smashing red outfit and parading along atop a tank, came through to him on the intercom:

  “Fifo, don’t forget that I’ve had all your noblest friends taken out, just as you asked me to, including Arnaldo. I hope that when you give your speech tonight you’ll name me as your heir.”

  Just look at Raúl in that red getup of hers! thought Fifo. She at least knows what she wants and goes after it. She’s had every man in my army up her ass.

  “No!” screamed Fifo into the intercom. “I will name no heir! The person who replaces me will be the man or woman who’s amassed the most brownie points when it’s all over. And besides, I plan never to die.”

  And not waiting for a reply, Fifo turned off the intercom and with his tragic eyes followed the enormous waves of ass-shaking and backside-wiggling as they rippled through the crowd.

  IN THE MONSTER MEN’S ROOM

  Now, Mary dear, I don’t want you think that Eachurbod had resigned herself to staying back there at the UNEAC headquarters while those drums at Carnival were beating so insistently that every fold in his virginal asshole was throbbing. (Yes, sadly, despite all her efforts, virginal . . . ) No way, sugar. Once the Carnival had been officially kicked off and was going strong, the queen (in spite of the memory of almost being murdered back there a few pages ago for having tried to take the handoff of the famous long-distance runner’s baton) grabbed up the Collected Works of Nicolás Guillotina and made a monumental staircase out of them. And without more ado, though still clutching Volume XXVII of the Complete Works of Lenin, she scaled the fence at the UNEAC headquarters and leaped to the other side. Of course on the other side Juantormenta was waiting to wring her pretty neck, but Eachurbod threw Volume XLVI of the Complete Works of Lenin at his head, her tormentor Juantormenta was knocked unconscious, and the queen ran off, elbows and knees flying. After, of course, picking up Volume XXX of the Complete Works of Vladimir what’s-his-name.

  Desperately Eachurbod searched through bars and sewers, on bridges, and in every kind of nook and crevice imaginable. Finding nothing (nothing!) yet still seeking, she darted down the Paseo del Prado, where she saw a queen with a huge pair of scissors leap out of her sleigh, jump Coco Salas, and trim the poor thing’s eyelashes. On tippy-toe, and still undicked, Eachurbod saw Skunk in a Funk being screwed by an unbelievable black man up in one of the laurel trees on the promenade. Tripping on a crack in the sidewalk and sprawling on the ground, she saw Karilda Olivar Lubricious’ husband run right over her fetching body, saber raised. And Eachurbod shouted at him: “Oh, stab me! I’m Karilda!” But no, that saber was not meant for her. The offe
nded spouse turned a look of fury upon her, kicked her, and ran on after his senile but still hormone-driven wife. Then heavens, in the midst of that debacle, those drums drumming, thrumming, commanding, clamoring, making magical danceable lecherous lickerous musical demands on a poor girl, the queen saw SuperSatanic with her hypodermic needle infecting hundreds of people with her AIDS-infected blood, and she begged her, for heaven’s sake, to prick her with that mosquito-prick, but SuperSatanic, throwing needle-stabs left and right, said, “Don’t even think about it, hon, you’re fated to live a thousand years—if you haven’t already—and to die of chronic virginitis!”

  “No! No!” cried Eachurbod madly, and she ran to join the ass-shaking and backside-wiggling in a conga line of glorious mulatto hunks shaking maracas and banging rhythm sticks together with their expert hands, and opening their legs to show off their own personal (and even more hypnotic) maracas and rhythm sticks, which Eachurbod would’ve dearly loved to get her hands on. And so Eachurbod danced, shook her ass, and danced some more, but the Regla rhythm boys didn’t ask her to join their band. In the midst of the noise and celebration she saw Skunk in a Funk again, now wielding a machete and running after Tatica to revenge the theft of her first swim fins—but even that spectacle couldn’t distract Eachurbod from his itch. Then he was run over and knocked to the ground by the Lady of the Veil, who was running madly toward a gigantic float belonging to the Ministry of Construction—but that blow (to more than her dignity) was also unable to shake some sense back into her—not that she ever had any, but you know what I mean. Her goal was to find a man, so she had no scruples about gazing at a policeman in his green uniform, his big gloves, boots, helmet, visor—and nightstick! This magnificent cop looked like a centaur in the flesh as he sat astride his equally magnificent steed. Eachurbod, taking a quick glance at the testicles on the horse, took a better look at the crotch on the cop, who sat like a stern statue in the center of the crowd that swirled around him. Eachurbod offered a pint of beer to the officer, who politely declined, saying that since he was on duty he couldn’t drink. Encouraged by the cop’s courtesy, Eachurbod took a step closer to the centaur and as she made sure he saw the red cover of Lenin’s book (sure to gain his trust, she reasoned), she told him she had taken part in forty-nine People’s Harvests and won every medal it was possible to win. The centaur looked down on her approvingly. Eachurbod then caressed the horse’s back legs, its magnificent testicles, and from the horse moved on to the rider—she touched his military boot, touched a leg, and then, with one foot in the stirrup (like some fairy Cervantes) she swung up astride the horse’s withers, and right there, hands together as though in silent prayer, she began to worship at the police officer’s waist, and to touch with the tip of her tongue the tip of the saddle on which the man-part of the centaur sat. The drums beat faster, more insistently. Eachurbod couldn’t wait any longer, and tucking the volume of Lenin under her arm, she plunged her shaved and numbered head into the cop’s lap. The agent of Authority then raised the visor (revealing only stunning eyes), removed the helmet, and began to smash Eachurbod’s head with it—Eachurbod was beaten until she fell off the horse, which then began to trample her. From between the magnificent steed’s legs, Eachurbod raised his anguished eyes and saw that the policeman was no man at all—she was a policewoman, and she even had long blond hair. Eachurbod had been thrown off by all that damned police drag. The queen took off running (limping) through the crowd.