The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (20 page)

I will paint plants with their roots upside down, seeking their nutrients in the sky. I will paint leaves that move about the canvas and ask impossible questions when one looks at them. I will paint a heap of bones—me—rotting in a field overrun with weeds. I will paint the suffering face of the moon looking down on me. I will paint not-children tucked among the newly budding leaves, all those fetuses that could not manage to be born because there’s no room in this place of mine for another canvas, not to mention the bed and the four chairs in which I politely seat those visitors who come to get information out of me, and on whose visits I have to file my own reports. I will paint Tomasito the Goya-girl denouncing herself to the computers because he doesn’t have anybody else to denounce. I will paint the blazing rock-strewn wastes and stinking puddles where young people gather, dreaming that they’re at the beach. I will paint demons that flee in terror, and a huge spotlight, manned by other terrified demons, shining on them. I will paint my beloved Calle Muralla crumbling down, crumbling down, and along that street Skunk in a Funk dragging a trunk full of empty bottles. I will paint the cracked and peeling walls of my body. Strange birds and clouds, and rats playing musical instruments riding atop them. I will paint a huge crowd of people dancing around a gigantic red object that resembles some sort of fruit, and on top, a naked black man commanding them all to skip in a circle around it, threatening them if they don’t. I will paint Eachurbod’s desperate tongue unrolling through the whole city. I will paint the city with its calamitous sky, and in that sky, Gabriel and Lazarito trying to sail away in a balloon. I will paint Reinaldo’s desolation at not being able to write the novel that justifies the life that’s about to be taken from him. I will paint Odoriferous Gunk’s dying mother as she lies in an improvised tent near here, in Havana Park. I will paint the police rounding up all those young men who are sent off to a forced-labor camp. Armed storm troopers—
Hands up!
—a spotlight, and the bull macho, roaring. Shaved heads, hair floating up into the sky, a gigantic plate of spaghetti that is that hair, and Fifo wolfing it down in front of the starving, bulging eyes of the crowd waiting in line below, ration books in hand, for the bread that will never come. The painting I will paint will also be the huge moan of the tropics, the deafening crash of that moaning as it collapses in a heap. I will paint armies of sex-hungry sharks under Fifo’s command, prowling the dark blue band of water where the open seas begin. I will paint a palace with a sinister aquarium in which Bloodthirsty Shark performs his executions. I will paint Miss Mayoya standing in ecstasy on the beach, gazing at the gleaming, supple shark. I will paint Oscar flying over the city, endlessly searching for the teenager of his dreams, and the whole city shall also be laid out there, and my fallen breasts, and all the consequences thereof. And the entire Island shall be painted, too, and the walls of the city also—blood-spattered walls shall be painted (or repainted); and the foundation that upholds the Island shall also be painted, the foundation gnawed at by the teeth of all those who want to tear the Island from its mooring and escape, sail away on it like some gigantic boat—to anywhere. I will paint a bench under a tree, and on the bench two lovebirds kissing and caressing one another, and in the branches of the tree Rubén Valentín Díaz Marzo, the Areopagite, masturbating. Now through the park where that tree grows, thousands of young men and women thronging toward lord only knows what hideout, basement, or embassy that somebody says has opened its doors and is swallowing people like some black hole and spitting them out again in another world, and pursuing that crowd, a furious stampede—mobs with picks and shovels, machine guns, flags, a sinister-looking hag on a white horse—bloody hammers, corollas, and pistils. I will paint the most loyal rages, angers, and wraths of all young people. I will paint Teodoro Tampon, my husband, gazing at a piece of wood and thinking: I could make some platform heels out of this that’d be higher than the ones Mahoma makes, and
that
would turn me from a dwarf into a giant. . . . The last part of the painting will be very dark, almost black. In it, all those who have been expelled will huddle together—that is, all those who tried to live and were therefore sentenced to death by the sinister god that rules all human destinies, and viewers will see a sky lit by a strange light, and if they come closer they’ll be able to hear explosions and screams and the muted sound of the city collapsing. They will see the panicked flight and the final disaster. My painting will splatter the entire Island with horror, and on that canvas, the viewer will see, crouched down among the leaves and thorns, or behind a crumbling column, me—myself or my double—the whore in hiding, looking at my six-year-old son begging a quarter from a sailor and making signs to him that he knows a woman (me) that the sailor can sleep with, and it’ll only cost him five pesos. Oh, yes, let him learn to pimp while he’s still young, let him learn to ingratiate himself, especially with the Greek sailors, so one day he’ll be able to slip into a barrel on some boat and not come out till he gets to Mykonos, or even China—everything else is fiction. I am painting the barrel now, and the boat, and my son wriggling around in the barrel. I will paint the immense ocean and thousands of birds flying above it, rescuing my son and carrying him far, far away—so far that the journey will never end, because if he ever gets anywhere, finally arrives, there’s no doubt he’ll find the same shit, the same horror (more or less disguised but horror all the same) no matter where. And above it all, Oscar fluttering desperately above the place the Island used to be, but where all that will be left now is a vortex of turbulent water, swallowing everything that floats by. . . . I will paint all that and much more, because I will also paint the Carnival, the last Carnival of this century, and me at that Carnival wearing my big falsies and flaunting my forbidden Carnival costumes. There will not be a homo alive who escapes me, beginning with my husband; there will not be a snitch or a pay-for-play snatch that escapes me, beginning with myself; there will not be a bawling baby, or a desperate mother, or an entire people shoved up against the wall, any calamity at all that I will not portray. Cat shit and suns of fire, unflushable toilets and full buses—swindles, shouting, darned and mended rags, mauled and ravaged bodies, high government muckety-mucks and misery-beset beggars, all dancing in a circle around the big red ball, the gigantic and apparently, from a distance, delicious piece of fruit, every one of them wanting to wolf down an apple, a banana, a cluster of grapes, a prick, a thing that will wind up turning against us, against our greedy innocence, our endless solitude, and blowing us all to hell.
Boom!
Death will play its fiddle for even the most persistent, brave, or stubborn lovers. The stink of sweaty feet and toothless old women, screaming queens, and men who, when they screw me—it’s just a manner of speaking, really, it never happens anymore—will die of disappointment because they wanted to be the ones getting screwed. God on all fours sucking off a black man, and the black man furious, wishing he could find a cock for himself. Midgets up in the trees, mares on two feet dancing the minuet, herds of swine masturbating with their mouths, the Condesa de Merlín sodomizing a mouse. Oh, yes, oh, yes, don’t you worry, I’ll put Avellaneda in it, too, swimming along on her tits like water wings . . . Flimflams and ass-wiggling, terror and stupidity, fear and self-assurance—all of it, among the leaves, plagues, hypocrisies, bones, and sharks’ teeth. You will see the moon set in a urinal, kettledrums that bellow like a bull, bodies that shake themselves out of joint. Nothing will escape me. And in the third section of the triptych, the final explosion, you will see everyone, myself included, bursting—and to think, after we’d lived through all those horrors! Bursting into a million pieces—that’s the thanks God gives His children who have wanted nothing more than to enjoy His work. Swollen bodies out of which flow streams of blood, and pus, and shit—streams that bubble up like geysers, or shoot up like the plumes of some enormous fountain, up to where my son, towed by birds, is trying futilely to escape. Damnation for every soul, without explanation and without end—it must be
perfect, all-encompassing
damnation. That will be my painting. I will paint all that, and right now, right this minute, I am going to start. In an ecstasy of rage and fury I will paint it, all of it, before the Carnival begins. I will paint the Carnival even before I go out and see it. Those people that thought my painting days were done, thought my masterpieces were all behind me, had better think again. I will paint my greatest work
right now. . . .
Omigod, I just realized—I don’t have another single canvas, or rag, or tube of paint. I’ll have to pay a visit to Saúl Martínez or Peña or that Miss Medive thing or some other faggot official painter (the ones that’ve got everything because they spend their lives painting olive-green portraits of Ché and Fifo), and while I give them a little piece of useful information, maybe denounce my butt-stuffing great-grandfather, I can steal some brushes and paint and a big canvas. And maybe first I ought to run by Padre Gastaluz’s ossuary so I can take the painters a bone so they can make a nice thick soup out of it. My work—my work, that’s what’s important. Teodoro!
Teodoro!
Wake up! Wake up, girl, and get yourself dressed, and scratch some of this dirty crust off these legs of mine and dig the earwax out of my ears. For God’s sake, open your eyes and turn over—get a wiggle on, man! And put on your highest platform pumps—because right this minute we’re going to pay a little visit to Saúl Martínez. Oh, and bring the tape recorder the lieutenant gave us, in case the pansy faggot decides to tell one of his little counterrevolutionary jokes. . . .

“The seven major categories of queenhood, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, are the following. And I will not tolerate any interruptions during this brief but smashing presentation,” said the AntiChelo as she stood up and took the podium in the rapidly flooding auditorium. This particular queen, Chelo’s antithesis, was a pansy of profound thought and a slender figure you could die for, and he spoke as follows:

First major category
: SUBLIMITY. It is this species of queenhood that engenders heroes, martyrs, and true geniuses. Examples: Jesus Christ, Leonardo da Vinci, Cervantes.

Second major category
: BEAUTY. This type of queenhood produces great artists and impassioned, insane suicides. It can also lead to lustfulness. Examples: Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust . . .

Third major category
: INTUITION. This type of queen may craft works of some quality, but they are always subject to the accidents of time. Examples: almost all the writers who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, from Sartre to Hermann Hesse, and in general almost all “writers of some talent.”

Fourth major category
: INTELLIGENCE. This queenhood does not produce works of art, but those who are possessed by it know how to negotiate the world the artist inhabits and thus may be academics, literary agents, outstanding journalists. Examples of this type are innumerable; we will cite but one case: Karmen Valcete.

Fifth major category
: COMMON SENSE. This type of queenhood despises art and almost all the other beautiful things of life. Persons in this category are, in general, moderately self-effacing, hardworking bureaucrats but may also be great but obscure traitors; they are also often engaged in business. Example: John D. Rockefeller, Armand Hammer, et al.

Sixth major category
: NORMALITY. This terrible type of queenhood is the least normal of all, and the closest to Common Sense. It can beset almost any member of the human race and has a permanent mediocritizing effect. The victims within this category may live for as long as a hundred years. Sometimes they suffer from delusions of superiority, or even think they belong to other categories of queenship. One example among thousands: Rafael Alberti.

Seventh major category
: GROTESQUENESS. Diametric opposite of Sublimity. Those who suffer under this queenhood occupy presidencies of countries, or become great dictators, or turn into vagabonds and homeless persons. They are much given to playing putatively historic roles. Examples: Hitler, Stalin, and our own adored Fifo.

All these things were said by the AntiChelo on behalf of Albert Jünger, who as a person that was still alive had refused in no uncertain terms to participate in this event, though he did send in his paper with the Condesa de Merlín. The Condesa, of course, modified the paper to suit her own ends and commissioned one of her beautiful robots (the AntiChelo) to read it.