The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (23 page)

I told you to stop calling me girl!

Such piety, you old queen—I mean even the old queens (like yourself) and the crazy, desperate, broken-down old biddies (like yourself) that couldn’t take their eyes off the spectacle ten minutes ago, not to mention taking their hand off the bulging fly of that young man standing there beside them in that bus, all suddenly turned nuns. Miss Erick, the Carmelite nun; Miss Osuna, a Dominican nun; even Miss Horrid Marmot, who was traveling in military drag and who’d sucked off a militia boy right there in the bus—she’d turned into a cloister queen. Nuns, I tell you!—even the queens that were hanging on the doors of the bus would sometimes, risking their lives, hold on with just one hand while they piously made the sign of the cross over themselves. . . . But oh, sugar, as in the age-old division between spirit and flesh, the traveler may think one thing, but the vehicle thinks another—and by “vehicle” I mean the bus that all those justice-craving nuns were riding in. Because I can tell you, you old she-donkey . . .

Your
mother’s
the she-donkey!

I can tell you, you little she-mule you, that the above-mentioned bus (a female member of the species) was first cousin to that Pandarus Leyland (now a poor old battered, beaten-up shadow of himself who’d been sent off to pasture on the Number 10 line) who’d given succor to so many guys getting sucked off on the municipal and interprovincial routes that it once ran. Anyway, what I’m saying is that the sex gene seems to’ve run in the family, because in her early days, this Number 162 number that we’ve just met had been a secret
and intimate
friend of Margot Thayert. Their friendship blossomed (burst forth, more like it) at first sight the day the Prime Minister went to visit the Leyland bus factory. The Prime Minister was enchanted by that shining, powerful specimen of a
real lady bus,
and as she ran her hand over her admiringly she whispered a place and time for a tryst—she would be in a certain place, she promised, that very night, dressed as a transport worker. And on that night of love, the lustful words spoken by the Prime Minister, her sexual potency (in fact, that night the Iron Lady discovered that her sexual passion could be matched only by that of an English omnibus) awoke in all the female members of the noble Leyland clan a lesbian militancy that was indestructible and supremely powerful.

That is why when the long-suffering old Leyland girl (Celestina by name), sent to Cuba to become a Number 162, saw those naked bodies rolling around in the grass, she felt her chassis, her flywheels, her tires, and especially her engine getting hotter and hotter. The erotic charge that those bodies inspired in her was so irresistible that she took off like a
much
younger machine, in search not of the Guanabo police station but of another Leyland bus that she could get it on with.

The speed at which that old bus was now traveling was truly dizzying (more than two hundred miles an hour), and all the passengers were screaming for it to slow down; but the driver, who was yelling a little himself, couldn’t do a thing. The bus, gushing Russian oil and gasoline, was roaring, growling, mooing, and clattering along in search of another bus that she could screw—and the sooner the better, hon—and totally oblivious to both the driver’s desperate attempts to control her and the passengers’ screams of terror—among which, one, a
H-E-E-E-E-E-LP!
in C-sharp major held for a record-breaking time by the SuperChelo, is particularly worth noting, though I must say in all honesty that it was accompanied by an entire chorus of screaming queens suddenly turned streaking meteors.

When Celestina, in a fury of lust, came to the wooden bridge at Bocaciega, she met an old Number 62 huffing and puffing toward Havana. Without so much as a howdy-do, the sexually aroused Celestina threw herself on the other bus and began to rub up against her so violently that her springs, tires, seats, lightbulbs—everything—started falling off. The passengers, terrified (and having not the slightest clue as to what was really going on), yelled and screamed to open the doors so they could escape the collision. The driver tried time and time again—he pushed, pulled, and squeezed every button and lever that could be pushed, pulled, or squeezed—but the doors would not open. The two buses were oblivious to anything but their mutual
frottage.
Turned sideways in the middle of the wooden bridge (which creaked piteously throughout all this), they rubbed their metal bellies against each other with such force that soon the two iron lesbians turned cherry-red. And then, in the paroxysm of their lust, a spark ignited both engines and both gas tanks. Suddenly there was a terrible—
a deafening
—explosion, and the two buses, now inflamed for real, and locked in a burning embrace, rose several yards into the sky, culminating their rite of love in a grand and final fireball—which was taken by the entire population of Havana to be the official kickoff of the grand celebration of Fifo’s fifty years in power, the fireworks that were getting the show started. But within a few minutes, Radio Rebel scotched that rumor. To a rather premature drumroll, a stern-voiced announcer reported that “a drunken, depraved, and counterrevolutionary bus driver has driven his bus, which the Party had entrusted him to drive, into another bus, which was also in public service, causing the death of three hundred twenty-five comrades.”

The only survivors of this catastrophe were the Duchess, Sanjuro, SuperSatanic, the Clandestine Clairvoyant, Uglíssima, La Reine des Araignées, the SuperChelo, and Eggsucking Dog, plus three other screaming queens who had been hanging onto the outside of the bus and so were flung free of the explosion before they could be incinerated. In fact, once they were in the air, like the good fairy queens they were, they just kept flying along until they landed (a little singed, but otherwise just fine) on the Malecón, where the floats and bands were beginning their final rehearsals.

When Skunk in a Funk heard the explosion, she thought it was the young cop who’d finally (finally!) cum inside her—deserving as she was of such a tribute (the conceited thing). So she pu-u-u-ulled her still-quivering body out from under him, threw on her clothes as fast as she could, gathered up her belongings (plus three ripe guavas), and took off.

“Stop right there, you faggot, you’re under arrest!” shouted the gorgeous policeman (who’d cum inside the fugitive some twelve times, which meant that he’d managed to recover his revolutionary morality—and his pistol). “Stop right there, you
rodent,
or I’ll shoot!”

But Skunk in a Funk, who was always prepared for this sort of eventuality (and even worse), disappeared as though by magic among the mangroves while behind her, she heard a shot.

Oscar is a queen with huge teeth, a round bald head, and a bent, knotty body like a bat’s. But a very hip old queen (Papayi Toloka? Miss Julio Natilla?) had once given him a very hip piece of advice:
In the dark, man,
the old queen crooned,
all cats are gay.
So Oscar did his flying by night.

—Oscar! Oscar!
The fairy hears someone calling his name—and ooh, it’s those hunky young men gathered under the big trees at the Copelia ice-cream parlor. But as he descends, as he lights on one of the branches, Oscar sees a group of screaming, limp-wristed, fluttering queens (just like her) futilely trying to pick up a man. . . . So Oscar spreads his big wings and once more, eyes peeled, mounts into the sky. . . .
Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!
Once more he hears his name—hears thousands of young men calling out her name. And the big queer bat descends. A thousand desperate fairies, perched on the branches of the trees, are cackling, pecking at each other, flinging insults back and forth, tearing at each other’s flesh—and making the most
awful
racket. Oscar flaps his wings again and lifts off into the night sky. . . . —
Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!
His name is being called again, this time by what sounds like the most virile men in the world. And Oscar flaps his big bat wings, peels his big red bug-eyes, and lowers his outsized head. Thousands of faggots of the
worst
sort are flooding the Paseo del Prado, and so many feathers, so much twinkle-dust gets raised by their milling about that for a moment Oscar can’t even see what’s happening down there. Finally the air clears, and, once more disillusioned, he rises into the sky again. . . . Now, from up above, Oscar contemplates the jam-packed, hysterical city, the infinite lines for an ice-cream cone or a pizza, the superinfinite lines to see a movie you’ve already seen a hundred times, the sea wall on the Malecón that thousands of people approach very cautiously, because Fifo’s sharks are sometimes lurking just at the edge of the water. Oscar now flies even higher into the clouds, and he dreams. . . .
If only
. . . , he thought,
if only there existed someplace . . . someplace where a poor fairy of supreme ugliness could be accepted.
But Oscar knows that if for him there’s the slightest chance of getting screwed, then that chance lies here, on this island festering with madness, desperation, and chaos. Anywhere else, they’d throw her in a cage and exhibit her in some circus. Not here—here there’s no need to, because horror is so familiar here. And besides—everybody is already in a cage. —
Oscar! Oscar!
He once more hears the cries of an army calling out her name, wanting to possess her. And so Oscar descends, and she almost hits the ground before she swiftly flies up again—he’s witnessing the biggest round-up of queers ever recorded in the history of humanity and faggotry. Thousands of queens, fairies, faggots, and even just bi-curious young men are arrested and kicked into buses, iron cages, and patrol cars, and from there transferred to forced-labor camps. Oscar takes off like a rocket, and now, now he’s in the clouds again—the moon shrinks back in horror—hearing the voices of the thousands of young men that call out to him.

Gabriel was going back to Holguín to visit his mother, as he did every year. Each time he came back to the place where he once lived, in that (perversely named) neighborhood of Vista Alegre, his mother would be outside, sweeping the street. His mother swept so lightly that the broom would barely brush the ground, much less sweep away the dirt. To Gabriel’s eyes, the way his mother swept had something stubbornly resigned about it, yet in a sense something poetic, too. For it really wasn’t the sweeping itself that was important, it was what his mother
said
by sweeping—she said (or showed) that she would never give in to so much dust and dirt, so much litter, even though she knew she could never sweep it all away, would never be able to sweep (much less keep) the whole street clean. But there was another symbolism in it, too, thought Gabriel: Since he always wrote to announce that he was coming, he sensed that his mother was always there, waiting for him, broom in hand, in order to show him, the son who had abandoned her, how painful, how filled with suffering and hard work her life was, how many defeats (still not swept away) her memory still held. For in that face there was, deeper than resignation, a tremendous sadness, a quiet grief, as she went on, endlessly, with her pointless labor, sweeping tattered pieces of paper from one place to another, sweeping leaves into a pile, struggling almost spiritlessly (yet unable to stop) against the crumbling rocks and cement, the omnipresent grime. Sometimes she would talk to herself, but so softly that only the broom could hear her. Sometimes it may have been, in fact, a real conversation between her and the broom, which had been her most faithful friend for more than sixty years.

The mother had once had a husband, but he abandoned her with a son who, hardly more than a teenager, had also fled the little town. But she still had her broom. Still had, that is, what she had always had. When she was a girl, hadn’t she danced with the broom? And the way she endlessly swept the street and softly talked—wasn’t that her way of taking a little walk with her most faithful friend, the broom? It was only logical that she’d talk to the broom, the only thing that hadn’t run off and left her.

Gabriel came up to his mother, and his mother, never turning loose of the broom, hugged and kissed him. They went inside the house, which seemed feverish from its fiber-cement roof. Before the mother gave her son her full attention, she gave a few swipes of the broom at the living room. Then she set her instrument, her tool, her equipment, beside the door. And there the broom sat, as though watching over the conversation between the mother and the son, a conversation which was always the same. M
OTHER
: How has your health been, how has your work been, how have your wife and son been, why don’t you come to see me, Havana is so noisy, why don’t you move to Holguín? S
ON
: I’ve been fine, my work isn’t bad, the baby is very healthy and my wife is too, you know how it is, we’ve gotten used to Havana, it’s so hard to move. . . . And the mother would adopt an expression of patient resignation with the son—the same expression she wore with the broom. And the son would feel tremendous pity for her, tremendous love, a tremendous desire to go to her and hug her and beg her not to make that sad, grieving face like that, because after all, she didn’t have so much to complain about. He would even feel like telling her that if he’d left the town he grew up in, it was so she wouldn’t have to hear the rumors of his private life, and that if he’d gotten married and even had a son it was so she could tell her friends about it (and no doubt her broom too), and put to rest all those suspicions about his sexual life—the sexual life of
her son.
Listen, I’ve gotten married, I have a child, I’ve done all of that for
you.
I’ve made other people unhappy for you, I’ve brought a baby into the world that didn’t have to come into this hell and suffer, and it was for you. And above all—listen, listen—I have not betrayed myself. I’m not a person, I’m two or three people at the same time. For you, I’m still Gabriel, for those who read what I write but can hardly ever publish, I’m Reinaldo, for the rest of my friends, with whom I escape from time to time in order to be totally myself, I’m Skunk in a Funk. You have your broom; all I have is desperation. Understand me! Accept me as I am! I have sacrificed almost everything for you. Forgive the fact that once in a while I’m Skunk in a Funk and run out to chase after some man, or thousands of men. Because—listen to me—maybe I like men so much because you couldn’t hold on to the one you had, and somehow that cycle interrupted in you has to be completed. That man, or the
men,
that you desired and never had—that man is me (by some mysterious law), who has to seek them out in weedy fields, or anywhere, at the risk of my own life. I am the guilty one. Although really, nobody is guilty for any of this. . . .

“I suppose the baby’s already crawling?”

“Uh-huh. He’s even walking a little bit,” lied Gabriel.

“I suppose your wife’s gone back to work now?”

“Uh-huh. Months ago,” lied Reinaldo.

“Tell me the truth—are you two happy, do you get along?”

“Yes! Oh, yes!” enthusiastically lied Skunk in a Funk. “I’m very happy.”

“And what about her?” the mother asked, now beginning to sweep the hall.

“She’s very happy too. Why shouldn’t she be?” asked Gabriel.

“I don’t know,” said the mother. “The last time I saw her there seemed to be something in her . . . something she didn’t want to tell me. Something very sad.”

“I told you she’s as happy as I am,” Reinaldo assured her.

Happy—what a stupid word,
thought Skunk in a Funk.
Happy,
and it was all he could do not to burst out laughing behind his mother, who was still sweeping. Not a happy burst of laughter, either. How could a queer who was married with a child, officially “integrated” into the system, be happy? How could a person be happy when his true existence was a secret one, when he almost always had to wear a mask—perform, play a part, pretend that he believed, that he loved, that he fully trusted in the regime that he despised yet apparently was a militant in yet timidly conspired against? . . .
Happy?
—don’t make me laugh! Oh, there were times, whenever he could escape from his role as husband and father, that he would be transformed, become another person, and have those adventures with some man (or somebody that at least looked like one). Before he got married, Skunk in a Funk had lived with an evil aunt—a sinister person who would steal the little that his ration card permitted him to have. But he had had a room in that house, which the real owners had abandoned when they fled to Miami; into that room, Skunk in a Funk (sneaking—or thinking she was sneaking—past the aunt’s lookout) would smuggle some man. Then, in spite of the danger, while somebody (some
body
) possessed her, Skunk in a Funk was truly happy, or thought she was, maybe because she was young. But the danger loomed more certain every day, the aunt reported her to the authorities, she spent a year in the prison at El Morro. Oh, the face of his mother walking into El Morro with her shopping bag. . . . At that point, Skunk in a Funk decided to “cure herself,” get married, forget about her sexual preferences, her own life, and think instead of the life of that lonely old woman whose only possession, only consolation, was her broom. Yes, he got married (the mother went to the wedding), had a son (the mother attended the almost clandestine christening). Gabriel came to feel real affection for his wife and tremendous love for his son. But nobody can betray himself for his entire life. And when a young man walked by, when a man looked at him, Gabriel would turn into Skunk in a Funk disguised as a man and, child in his arms, wife beside him, would feel a pull more inexorable than all others. And he would realize that for him, there was no deliverance but going to bed with one of those men that he furtively gazed at. It was impossible for Reinaldo, even when most immersed in literature, to disobey that call, which was more powerful than any danger—and Gabriel would once more become Skunk in a Funk, once more return to that room that he had managed (employing every subterfuge he could invent) to get for himself in the Hotel Monserrate shortly after he’d been released from jail, once more become a queen, though now even more desperate than the queen he’d been before—because now he was older, and the time left him for bedding down some body was growing shorter by the day. The fact was, months would now go by without his seeing his wife and son—both of whom he had killed off, anyway, along with himself, the husband, in one of his unpublishable novels.

“I don’t like Havana,” said the mother, turning to deposit the broom behind the front door. “There are so many bad people there, so many immoral people. So much envy. Remember what they did to
you.
You wound up in jail. That almost killed me.”

“Please, mother, let’s not start in on that again. That was a long time ago. I know what I’m doing.”

But the mother started in on that again. That same old song—how much she’d suffered on his account: If you’d only stayed here in Holguín, those lowlifes that claimed to be your friends wouldn’t have gotten you into political trouble (that was the story that Skunk in a Funk told her mother about why she was sent to prison), you’d never have wound up in jail, and I’d never have been destroyed.
Destroyed
—that was the word she used. And since there was no other word that could paint the tragedy of her life in any blacker terms, the mother gave several swipes of the broom at the front porch and then went off to start dinner.

“Since I knew you were coming I got some things on the underground market—a piece of steak and some yautías. When you were a little boy you used to love yautías. I’d boil them and mash them up for you. . . . You used to love yautías.”

They spent the rest of the day talking about how bad things were these days, all the shortages. “We only get water every other day now,” the mother noted. As night began to fall, they were still talking, and the subject of rationing and other present-day calamities had not yet been exhausted. Reinaldo asked the mother to bring him the box with the family photographs. That way, at least, he could take a trip into the past and forget the present hell. But the mother told him that one of his cousins (that cousin again)—
She’s
always
asking about you
—had taken the photos home with her to paste them in an album.

Gabriel knew that that particular cousin, like many of his relatives, was now a member of the secret police, or at least an informant. She’d taken the photographs away with her for some political reason, and now he, Reinaldo, would never again be able to contemplate himself when he was a child. While the mother went on talking, Skunk in a Funk spent the rest of the evening brooding on how mean, how utterly
despicable,
the system was that would make family members spy on each other, demand to see even their childhood snapshots. Right this minute, he’d bet, some psychiatrist was analyzing his most boyish gestures. He’d bet those photographs were now the contents of some thick and dangerous file. Not only did these reflections add to the eternal and ever-present terror in which Gabriel lived, they plunged him into a depression so dark, so dreary, that his countenance grew even more glum than it had been before. He began to have that air of tragedy that would sometimes come over him in the middle of the beach, in the middle of a men’s room, in the middle of a crowd—the look that had earned him the nickname Skunk in a Funk. The mother stopped talking, and before night fell completely they sat down to eat, in silence. “Now we just get electricity every other day,” remarked the mother, lighting a candle as they were finishing dinner. And Skunk in a Funk’s expression turned even funkier. But before night fell completely, the mother stood up and started digging around in a box full of odds and ends of rusty, jumbled things. The old woman made so much racket that Skunk in a Funk, emerging from his funk, asked her what she was looking for.

“I’m looking for the flathead. I’ve got a nail sticking up in my shoe and I want to fix it.”

Flathead! Suddenly Skunk in a Funk’s expression changed, his face lit up, and he almost even smiled.
Flathead, flathead,
he repeated aloud as he went toward his mother. What a word. What a word. And the word transported him back to his childhood, back to his grandfather’s house where there was an anvil with a hornlike projection on each end, not like the other anvils with just one horn, that his grandfather always called a flathead. Gabriel would use it for repairing his shoes. And now, clinging to that word, Skunk in a Funk became a child again, a country boy in his element. And once more he was running through the shade of the trees, splashing in the creek, playing in the dirt out in the yard, throwing leaves up into the air.