The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (19 page)

Surely the noise of our struggle has been heard inside,
thought the old bull macho as his eyes closed for the last time. But I’ll tell you, girl, there was so much noise from all the high heels—that clickety-clackety, tickety-tickety sound they make, you know?—and the cackling of the palace groupies and floozies and queens, that nobody could hear a sound from the outside world, at least not right then. Of course the guards posted outside and the security forces all around the palace had witnessed the battle, but they didn’t think it was anything worth reporting to Fifo. And anyway, they were all screwing each other at the time. The only people who’d followed that amazing postmortem battle with any degree of attention at all were the huge crowd of peeved (and I mean pissed-
off)
citizens who hadn’t been invited to the party but insisted that they should’ve been. “Oh dear, I don’t think we ought to stand too close to those dead bodies,” said Padre Gastaluz, who made the sign of the cross over them and slipped away on the steadying arms of Valentina Terescova and Deaconess Marina. The Pissed-Off Disinvited followed those personages and took up positions near the coast—not too far from the palace, but at a prudent distance from the huge palace door.

Omigod! What time is it?!
Two o’clock in the afternoon, three o’clock in the afternoon, three fifteen. —If she kept looking at the clock it’d soon be midnight. And all that in less than five minutes! Obviously Skunk in a Funk, her enemy number one, had driven her clock crazy so it would run six times as fast as it ought to and there’d be no way poor Eachurbod could get
anywhere
on time, much less to that encounter that she’d been dying to get to. Because it was an
encounter
that awaited her—she had a
date,
an
appointment with destiny,
a rendezvous with a veritable
army
of men, a throng of big strong hunks, thousands—almost a million—hot and horny beauties. Oh, no doubt about it, that masculine multitude was waiting for her out there in all that ass-shaking and backside-wiggling and drumbeating—waiting to (at last!) impale her. Run, run!—and she was already beginning to see in the distance, dancing to the driving rhythm of the drums, the sex-frenzied crowd. Weigh that anchor, lift off!—you know this is your last chance, because tonight the Carnival begins and ends, never to return. That’s what Fifo announced in that last twelve-hour speech of his.
After this Carnival,
he intoned,
the party’s over. We will have to work at least a hundred years to meet our glorious goals! . . .
Oh, but my goal needs meeting
now,
thought Eachurbod. And so my hope lies in reaching that crowd and getting laid. Hurry, hurry!—so you can get there before all those other fairies beat you to it and take possession of those zippered treasures. And so Eachurbod clutched to his breast Volume XXVII of the
Complete Works of Lenin,
with a foreword by Juan Marillo—a book Eachurbod used as an ideological shield—and with the thick volume as a kind of coat of arms, she took off running, to get there in time. But oh dear! his clock, knocked out of whack by Skunk in a Funk, was running so fast it made your head spin. Four o’clock in the afternoon, five on the dot, six in the evening, and Eachurbod had gone no more than two or three blocks. And there, in the distance, those bright colors, that happy confusion, all those blacks and mulattoes shimmying, swaying, shaking their asses, those wide-legged pants they wore displaying the divine treasure of their godheads. What if she should be too late for that magnificent gathering? What if all he found when he arrived was a pile of empty paper cups, trampled and pissed-on signs and posters, tattered streamers? She could begin to see a big, bright open-air stage that a thousand half-naked whores were dancing on. Oh, wait, pleasegodwaitforme, remember that I am the man-eater, the super-diabolic, the never-say-die vamp, that I am
Eachurbod!
And no sooner had she uttered those words than her watch jumped ahead two hours in a single minute. If things kept going that way, the party would be over before he got to the center of the swirling mass where surely everyone was waiting for her. Eachurbod quickly pulled out her pistol—the pistol she had secretly hoarded away (along with the bottle of kerosene) so she could blow her brains out if she turned out to really be condemned for all eternity to virginity—and fired a shot in the air as a signal that she was almost there, that they should
wait
for her. The drums, indifferent to the poor queen’s anguish and distress, went on drumming out that horrid, inflaming rhythm, while a line of
stunning
men, squeezing their bodies against one another in the frenzy of a conga line, began to snake down the Avenida del Puerto. Eachurbod, desperate, running at full tilt with her red-bound book, yet barely making any headway—sometimes, even, unknowingly losing ground—looked up at the sky, at the lowering summer sky, and saw that the clouds, too, were flying toward the Grand Carnival, and that they were being blown by the wind into the shapes of swollen testicles and enormous erect phalluses. And down below, pushing its way through the massive parade, Eachurbod saw, or (such were the cruel tricks of Skunk in a Funk)
thought
she saw, the huge red ball that Fifo rode inside, high above the dancers’ heads. And an itch came over the queen that she absolutely
had
to scratch. Really, Mary, put yourself in her place—dancing in the middle of a huge crowd of drunk and
very
horny men. There’s no way—
no way!
—that she could miss this; they had to wait for her. So Eachurbod, in spite of the risk she ran for “illegal use of firearms,” fired off another round or two into the air, and then, almost in desperation, flung the pistol to the wind. Ah, but right over there, almost right beside her, and clearly in a hurry, there was a man. And what a man! A creature of golden curls, nimble legs, and harmoniously rounded dimensions. That love god possessed the most beautiful hands that human eyes had ever seen, and one of those hands was straying to the fly of the dream-man’s pants and giving a squeeze at the groin, as though beckoning toward the gates of paradise. And then that wondrous apparition turned toward Eachurbod and asked what time it was.
What time is it?! What time is it?!
But the hands of Eachurbod’s watch started whirling around even more deliriously than the queen herself. Desperately she tried to pin down the time. She stooped over the watch, she tried to follow the dizzying, whirling hands, and suddenly she was nothing but a round blur—a queen chasing her tail (right there on the sidewalk!) to keep up with the flying hands of time.
What time is it?! Yes, yes, the time!
she shrieked, over and over, as she whirled in an ever-tightening circle. But the young man, who apparently had no time to lose (even to find out what time it was), took off walking, faster and faster—the truth is, he was practically running—so Eachurbod stopped whirling and took off after him. And anyway, where could that marvelous creature be going if not to that place over there where all those bodies were winking and sparkling almost like flashes of lightning. Over there, over there, where the ocean roared and reared up lustfully, where men danced for one last time around a conga drum. And now the young man was rushing ever faster, clutching at his bulging fly; and the queen flew along behind him, still clutching at her own bulging Volume XXVII of the
Complete Works of Lenin.
The pansy felt as though she were riding a wheelchair on a sea of broken glass on her very own tongue, moving forward, endlessly, until the end. Suddenly, the young man stopped in front of a large wooden door at the entrance to a
glorious
colonial mansion—the most magnificent one on the whole street, perhaps in the whole city. The young man pushed open the door, and then he slammed it in Eachurbod’s eager face. As if by magic, the well-built (and apparently horny) love god had vanished—
poof!
Eachurbod, unable to move, like a doe caught in the headlights, stood there frozen (though still not stuffed) before the colonial mansion’s imposing door. And there she was still standing when another divine (and
very
manly) man, a mulatto in a white polo shirt and blue velveteen pants, and this one also pawing at his divine privates, pushed open the door and then—same song, second verse—slammed it in Eachurbod’s face again. Then, within seconds, a teenager (and omigod
what
a teenager) went through the door, followed by a young sailor boy with quite a duffel bag. Dear heavens, and now there was a black man in a pair of mechanic’s overalls, clutching at his toolbox. Behind the black man came several fresh army recruits and a respectable-looking gentleman dressed in white from head to toe, and sporting a Máximo Gomez moustache. What
was
this? How many dazzling men had been invited to this house? Who lived here? Do you suppose Fifo himself was holding one of his secret orgies in there? Stepping in front of the self-interrogating Eachurbod, three fresh-scrubbed farmworkers, several students in their ironed school uniforms, and several high-ranking military types pushed through the door, all of them clutching at their crotches when they arrived as though that were the password that gained them admittance. Jesus! and now a still-pubescent bright-skinned mulatto (with eyes of amber) entered, holding his crotch, his unparalleled crotch, a crotch that could have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch and that was threatening to burst from its bonds. And then another mulatto of fiery skin and eyes, but with a sweet sword shaft between his legs, penetrated that sanctum—and he was already unzipping his fly (a fly which whispered a command that neither Eachurbod nor you either, Mary, could have disobeyed). And so the fluttering queen, shaking off his dejection and jumping up and down in the puddle of his own nervous perspiration, started toward the door. He was almost certain that if he went inside he could be arrested, tortured, sentenced to death as a terrorist, or maybe under suspicion of espionage—because the odds were that this house was the reception or training center for all the secret police who were keeping an eye on the ideological direction the Carnival took—but the order
(Follow me . . . )
given by that body, by all the bodies that had just gone in there, was stronger than all the fear and terror of the risk. Using the red-bound volume (so as not to leave any fingerprints), Eachurbod pushed open the enormous colonial door, which still proudly sported a brass knocker with the face of a dragon and several copper nails, and stepped into the mansion. Instantly, he discovered that that noble two-hundred-year-old villa, the birthplace of the Condesa de Merlín, was now furnished with long troughs hung on the walls of every room, and before those long troughs hundreds of men, staffs of virility in hand, were urinating—the mansion was now a huge fountain fed by the most beautiful human springs ever imagined.
The Condesa de Merlín,
whispered Eachurbod, inhaling a fragrance that intoxicated him,
could never have imagined that her home would be dedicated to such a noble cause.
And so it was—by order of Urban Renewal (and therefore by order of Fifo himself, who hated colonial architecture—any architecture, in fact, that was not of his own design), that historical residence, that national monument, had been turned into a gigantic latrine.

Gotta watch that puta Puntilla—she’d sell you for twenty pieces of pewter, stool-pigeon you for a tin pizza plate, turn turncoat on you for a tiddlywink—she doesn’t give two poots. Yep, to take care of her own sweet patooty, Puntilla the pie-eyed prostitute turns tricks for whoever’s got the biggest dick. Puntilla the potbellied poetaster—
ptui!

For H. Puntilla, whose real name
is Leopoldo Avila