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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  “Criminal!” the policewoman screamed at him, charging after him on her fearsome mount. “How dare you attempt to corrupt the morals of a revolutionary woman? Criminal! You’ll be punished by the Law!”

  The fearsome police officer (who had twice been awarded the Lydia and Clodomira Medal) spurred her horse directly at poor Eachurbod, who used Volume XXVII of the Complete Works of Lenin to shield herself from the attack. But the terrifying policewoman just kept spurring her mount, which was now rearing and kicking furiously at the red-covered volume under which Eachurbod, in fear of her very life, was cowering. And then, just as she was about to give up the ghost, she cried out in pain to St. Nelly once more, and St. Nelly—despite the pains in her joints and despite the fact that she had retired from sainthood ages ago—descended from the clouds illuminated by the huge klieg lights of Carnival, and with one puff from her hideous lips detoured the syringe filled with arsenic that Fifo’s thugs had just thrown from the balcony of Virgilio Piñera’s apartment, directing it instead at the hideous, murderous horse, which it punctured in the croup (which is horse talk for “butt”). The horse, hit with the poison, dropped dead on the spot.

  “Stop, you son of a bitch, you’ve killed my horse!” shouted the policewomen, drawing her revolver. Then, firing several times in the air, she took off after Eachurbod on foot. But the fairy queen, taking advantage of the confusion and hullabaloo, ran like crazy, bumping into Karilda Olivar Lubricious’ indignant husband, who took out his fury on poor Eachurbod by swiping at her with his saber, which barely missed her but did split Volume XXXIX of the Complete Works of Lenin right down the middle. Eachurbod, tossing away the book at last, ran on through the crowd. She flew like a rocket through the mob and came to the Avenida del Puerto, leaped clean over the Condesa de Merlín’s gig (snatching off the poor lady’s wig in the process), and took refuge in one of the dark corners of the docks, while in the distance she heard the shots of the angry policewoman and, much closer, the beating of the Carnival drums.

  Thousands of fairies and thousands of hunks paraded past, as did thousands of women shaking their gigantic tits so hard they squeaked, thousands of midgets frisking people, hundreds of high-ranking military types, dozens of glorious athletes, and all the high-wire acts and dancers that were scheduled to do their routines around and under Fifo’s balloon. And now parading past were thousands of enlisted men beating their drums and flashing their radiant cymbals. And all that was just too much for the sensitive eyes of any human being, much less a human being as supersensitive as Eachurbod. She left her hiding place and once more abandoned herself to the abandonment of the celebrating throng.

  How many men, in the midst of all that ass-wiggling and backside-shaking, were rubbing up against other men and so being semibuttfucked by the ones who were coming up from behind? Oh, in the midst of that conga line, in the midst of all that music, how many fairies were unzipping flies and jerking off the respectable young hunks who were kissing (up there above street level) their official girlfriends before the approving eyes of their future mothers-in-law, who were being taken from behind by off-duty midgets? But she, Eachurbod the Devouress, could find nothing. Half-dead, she leaned up against an aspen tree (yes, an aspen tree—this is my novel, Mary) in whose branches a group of sailors were screwing—oh, my God!—Coco Salas, while higher in the treetop the Areopagite was jerking off. Eachurbod looked, and in every tree, on every branch, there perched a midget, masturbating like the Areopagite or screwing to the rhythm of the moaning of Coco Salas, who appeared to be the queen of this arborescent orgy. Lord, to think that Coco Salas, one of the most hideous faggots in creation, was the queen of the prom! Was there no justice? Eachurbod considered slitting her own throat, even thought about that little bottle of kerosene that she’d slipped past Clara. Yes, that’s it—I’ll incinerate myself right here in the middle of the crowd; I’ll immolate myself like a despairing monk who can’t find his God. But a strong smell of urine brought Eachurbod back to her senses and set her back on track.

  Yes, on track, because that smell of man-urine was coming from somewhere, and Eachurbod set out to find that spot. She sniffed at trees, walls, people, and stairways, following the scent. And at last she came to a huge wooden outhouse, a portable toilet—a john for johns!—that had been set up especially for use during the Carnival, and right in the center of El Prado. Man after man, beer in hand and face lit up by the music, was entering that holy place, and none were coming out. Like a shot off a shovel, Eachurbod whisked into that men’s room, in quest of his deepest, dearest desire. . . .

  And now she’s in another monster men’s room. There is no light, because some cunning queer has removed the bulb. In the darkness Eachurbod can make out crouching forms, magnificent forms erect and standing, hunks with their pants wide open. She can hear the wet slurping sound of tongues, the moans of pleasure, the sucking sound of lips like vacuum-cleaner heads. She hears (because she can hardly see a thing) the puffing and grunting of pleasure from several men being violently taken by their buddies, their pals, or their drunken first cousins. Glug-glugs, slurps, smacks, gulps, ingurgitations, clucks and clicks—mouths and throats like caverns, deep-throating pricks and making sounds so glorious, so irresistible, that they would electrify, energize, and eroticize even men who’d just stepped in to pee. Oh, that irresistibly sexy sound of frenetic fucking. And men keep filing in. . . .

  And the fairies and the queens and the faggots who don’t look like faggots keep on suckin’. Policemen with helmets and nightsticks put aside their duties as officers of repression for a moment and kneel before a heroic black man who’s just come home from fighting in some international conflict and hasn’t had any for ten years. All, in that dense darkness, recover their ultimate identities. Eachurbod feels himself caressed, squeezed, rubbed, palpated, touched from head to foot—and it’s not one hand, it’s several hands that are touching and rubbing her. Something hard yet inexplicably soft, slick, and wonderful-feeling is being rubbed on her; something arousing yet unclassifiable is passing over his face. And as he is stroked, someone pulls down her pants. Oh, is this a dream? No, no . . . in the midst of the smell of urine and cum, in the darkness, while the Carnival is booming out there outside, here inside Eachurbod feels powerful hands rubbing him—they reach his head, come down across his throat and neck, squeeze his nipples, drop to his thighs, squeeze and massage his legs, then rise to search for his asshole. They scrub him, rub him, rub-a-dub him, and spread her pink virginal cheeks. Something that feels like a clenched fist covered in heavy goo penetrates Eachurbod’s behind, opening a passageway for itself almost up into his belly. Eachurbod’s howl of pleasure is so piercing that only the drums beating thunderously outside can drown it out. And while she’s drilled and thrilled, Eachurbod pushes back against the whatever-it-is, which (fleshy, slick) goes on pumping her body—in and out, in and out—at the same time as dozens of hands (which felt more like suction cups) caress her. Unable to contain her excitement, as the hands caress her and the thing penetrates her, Eachurbod cums, over and over.

  In pure ecstasy, almost on the verge of fainting, Eachurbod leaves the men’s room. And it is then, as she smells herself and looks at herself, that she discovers that she has been smeared from head to foot with shit. Someone, out of pure spite or getting his perverse rocks off, has covered her entire body with excrement—she looks like a walking turd! She hasn’t been screwed, she’s been covered with shit, even up her ass and in her mouth. Shit, shit, shit! she says. She’s even got shit in her eyebrows. She’s been slathered in a layer of shit that now, out in the glaring light of Carnival, gleams like some horribly sinister something. —Ee-e-eek! Eachurbod screams, slaps out insanely all around her (killing PornoPop, the Only Remaining Go-Go Queen in Cuba) and like some pestilential lightning bolt bolts down Paseo del Prado, the crowd on the avenue parting before her like the Red Sea—holy Moses!, you can hear people say. She comes to the Malecón, strips off all her shit-caked clothes, dives into the waves,
and swims out to sea, trying to get rid of that smell of shit even as she prays for some hungry shark to come and screw her, or at least eat her. But when they smell the smell of this stinking queen, the sharks turn tail and run. And so the beshat fairy, floating on the surface of the sea, dives, over and over, into the waves, trying to wash off that smell which somehow only grows more smelly. And as she floats (and she’s now been in the water for hours) she thinks that the Malecón (but how can this be?) seems to be getting farther and farther away. . . . Eachurbod tries to swim to the coast, but the coast keeps getting farther away. . . . And now the city is a distant point on the horizon, though Eachurbod can hear the drums and see the lights of Carnival.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (28)

  To the tune of his boom box, vain Valero, once a boxer but his varicose veins now veiled by a fringe of violet voile, dances a fandango and sings a bolero at the bowling alley, where, misshapen, he is mistaken for a bowling pin and forced to dodge a barrage of bowling balls bowled by violent bowlers. Besieged, bleating, his vanity in tatters, Valero belatedly and bad-humoredly beats it, and to cover his bitter retreat he turns up the volume on his boom box, which blasts out a ballad. How did vain Valero the fey balladeer with varicose veins escape the barrage of bowling balls bowled by violent bowlers irate at the volume of the bolero played by the boom box? By beating it, behind a bulwark of blasting ballad, before being bowled over.

  For the Dowager Duchess de Valero

  THE LADY OF THE VEIL

  Naturally, the diligent midgets had not forgotten Fifo’s orders that the Lady of the Veil be killed during the height of Carnival by a stab wound to the honey-pot, so that it would appear to be a crime of passion. Killing her was easy, but stabbing her in the cunt was another thing—first because she was wearing so many veils that it was hard to tell exactly where her cunt was, and second because despite the veiled lady’s social class and political importance she had gotten out of her carriage and mixed into the Carnival throng, and she was moving with uncanny speed through the crowd.

  The diligent midgets ran after the Lady of the Veil clutching their knives and daggers, but there were so many people, honey, that it was worth your life to squat down and stab somebody in the cunt. If the order had been to stab her in the neck, or in the tits, or even in the stomach, the poor midgets wouldn’t have been so hard put, but to duck down and find a honey-pot was just not possible in this crowd—not to mention the space needed for a hand to grip the knife and draw back enough to make the stab wound fatal. Besides, the Lady of the Veil was moving faster and faster, perhaps helped along by all her veils, which were now sails, girl—she was scudding along, slithering through the crowd like a snake on a wind-surfer. The diligent midgets had no idea where this ditzy dame was headed for in that getup of hers—although since it was Carnival, and the last night of Carnival to boot, she could almost pass unnoticed among all the outlandish costumes.

  “Where in the world was that lady of the seven thousand veils going?”

  “Sakuntala, dear, there weren’t seven thousand veils, even if it looked like it.”

  “OK, but where was she going?”

  “That, my dear, only she and I, in all the world, know. But if you promise not to tell, this is the cause of all her secret avatars and her personal pandemonium—”

  In her country, where she was the Boss, the supposedly Omnicunt-potent Leader, she had heard the news of Fifo’s Carnival, and specifically of the existence of a very special float that was to appear—the Lovin’ Spoonful, it was called—sponsored by the Ministry of Construction. Atop this marvelous contraption, fifteen whores were to ride, and they would be wiggling their asses and shaking their tits around a mechanical bulldozer shovel shaped like a spoon that would rise and fall as it dipped into something that resembled a tub of cement. In the bowl of the bulldozer shovel, or “spoon” as they insisted on calling it, rode a magnificent half-naked rumba-dancing “chorus girl,” the undisputed queen of Fifo’s proletarian (and delirious) Carnival. On the bed of the float there was to be a gigantic illuminated fish tank, inside which there were to be hundreds of tropical fishes, thereby attracting the attention of the entire populace to that float and therefore to its queen, who was (as I believe I have mentioned) to be dancing frenziedly in the spoon. From the moment the Lady of the Veils had seen a documentary on Fifo’s previous Carnival (a film made by Manuel Octavo Gómez which had won first prize at the Fez Film Festival, where the award was presented by President Omar Cavafy himself), it had been her dream to take the place of the working girl and shake her own ass in that spoon. And so, holding tight to that idée fixe (to be a working-class mambo dancer, the queen of ass-shaking, while tropical fishes performed aquatic maneuvers at her feet and the drunken crowd applauded), she had traveled incognito to Cuba and found lodging (thanks to her impeccable credentials as a terrorist and Arab multimillionairess) in Fifo’s palace. Which was why now, hotly pursued by the indefatigable midgets who could not seem to manage to kill her, she was running toward that very Ministry of Construction float, her racing feet flattening she-cats, cat and horse turds, empty cans, suckling babes abandoned by their mothers, and thousands of other objects. Panting, she reached the float and took out a flask that contained a curious liquor prepared from a formula in an unpublished passage in The Arabian Nights (a passage, actually, that for certain legal reasons no publisher had ever dared to print). The Lady of the Veil invited all the whores in the corps de ballet to take a drink, and no sooner had they sniffed at the potion than they fell, profoundly sleeping, into the arms of the murderous midgets, who took advantage of the occasion to rape them. Then, as the monumental spoon made one of its descents, the Lady of the Veil offered her flask to the magnificent rumba dancer, who took a sip and instantly toppled off the float into the arms of the dancing crowd. Leaping aboard the spoon, the Lady of the Veil began to dance. The spoon rose almost into the clouds, then fell again, down into a gray, frothy semiliquid substance which looked like fresh-mixed cement and underneath which swam the schools of brilliantly colored tropical fish. The spoon rose, the spoon fell, and the Lady of the Veil, moving her hips and thighs more and more hypnotically, more and more frenetically, swayed her veils, her ass, her neck, her long-fingered hands, and astounded the applauding crowd—who were doing some dancing themselves, I tell you, honey. And while all this was going on, Fifo (still inside his globe) was once more issuing the secret, urgent order to the midgets—“In the cunt! In the cunt! Stab her in the cunt!”

  So urgent, so insistent was that order that the midgets decided to make a human pyramid and boost one of their number up onto the spoon. Soon, the agent chosen for this mission had sneaked under the madly dancing veils, his murderous knife drawn and ready to stab her in the cunt. But it was not a cunt the midget found; it was a pair of balls and a prick—a pair of balls and a prick so irresistible that the midget instantly dropped to his knees and starting sucking. The Lady of the Veil, enraged, picked up the midget by the neck, strangled him, and tossed him to the crowd, which bellowed in delirium. Once more, the human pyramid. And once more, a midget under the Lady of the Veil’s veils. This one made the same discovery, and fell to the same temptation, and so he, too, was tossed into the crowd, which suddenly began to chant: “She gives birth while she’s dancing!” One after another, the Lady of the Veil tossed dead midgets into the hysterical crowd, which roared its approval, while Fifo, growing more infuriated by the second, was yelling “In the cunt, I tell you! In the cunt!”

  Finally, one of the midgets (who, being a woman, was totally uninterested in men) got through to Fifo on her walkie-talkie: “No cunt here, just prick.”

  “Well give it to her in the ass, then!” screamed the Maximum Leader.

  With the knife in her teeth, the midget climbed up on the float once more and gave a powerful dagger-thrust straight in the asshole of the Lady of the Veil, who, feeling that mortal wound to her ass, danced even more frenetically. It was her swan song, and knowing that it was, she drew
it out as long as she could. And so the Lady of the Veil was gyrating madly if mortally-woundedly upon the spoon when she was glimpsed by Karilda Olivar Lubricious’ husband, who thought that that whore up there with a mask on and dancing the dance of the jillion veils had to be his wife, who just didn’t want to be discovered. So, weapon at the ready, the wronged husband climbed onto the float, leaped into the spoon with a tae kwon do move he’d learned from one of the kids in the neighborhood, and with a single swipe of the saber ripped off the lady’s veils, revealing to all the world the naked body of Omar Cavafy, who, dagger up his ass, promptly expired. Well, maybe not so promptly, because first he gave several gyrations. His naked body, whirling like some weird lawn sprinkler, bathed the crowd in blood—and the crowd, thinking this was just another part of the dancer’s show, applauded even more hysterically.