The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (28 page)

When Virgilio burned the poem, whines, moans, whimpers, bleats, muted and desperate sounds of weeping were heard, in spite of the muzzles and gags. (Perhaps the sounds came from deeper inside.) Some of the guests, prevented from verbalizing their shock and dismay at the loss of all that beauty, scourged themselves; others banged their heads against the wall; many scratched their faces with their fingernails; some pulled out an eye or inflicted some other terrible pain upon themselves. Miguel Barniz, for example, pulled out all his hair and hit himself so hard in the face that ever since then he has been a bald, puffy fag.

“You can put out the fire now,” said Virgilio, ending the reading. He had read eighty brilliant poems.

The guests took off their gags, and when they fully realized that the poems they had heard were irrevocably lost, that those heartrending verses now lay among the ashes of the hibachi that Mahoma and Skunk in a Funk were carrying back into the kitchen, they could not stifle a unanimous howl.

“The Watchdogs
must
have heard
that
wail,” said Olga Andreu, terrified. “It’s five
A
.
M
.”

“Get me out of here, then!” Virgilio cried. “They may think we’re plotting something!”

Instantly, countless fairies leaped to transport the poet back to his apartment. Since he was barefoot, and Fifo’s troops might consider such a thing a “public spectacle” or evidence of “extravagant behavior,” they surrounded him. And so, almost as though on a litter, and hiding his bare feet, Virgilio was accompanied back to his two-room apartment in El Vedado.

Once home again in his little apartment, Virgilio, unable to sleep, and possessed by the rage to create, began to work on a new collection of brilliant poems, which would be burned next week at Olga Andreu’s house.

But gosh, even if she could steal paint and a couple of canvases from Saúl Martínez, how was she supposed to paint that apocalyptic painting she intended to paint, if she’d never seen a masterpiece in real life? And especially if she’d never seen
The Garden of Earthly Delights
by Hieronymus Bosch—if all she had was a vague idea that she’d gotten from those dreadful reproductions that she’d seen, and that didn’t even belong to her. She
had
to go to the Prado! See the masterpieces firsthand. See
Guernica
—see, above all, Bosch’s great triptych, the great apocalypse that she would use as a model for the horrors she was suffering, for all the things that she saw around her. There was no other solution. She had to visit the Prado. And with that decision, Clara Mortera also became a rodent.

Before going any further with this story, I want to make it clear that I have never been able to discover why Fifo refused to admit a substantial group of VIPs—people who were photogenic, impressive, and sometimes even faithful to him—into the Fifo-fest at his palace. My guess is that personal intrigues, old grudges, chicanery, Machiavellian ruses, professional jealousies, and political strategies, in addition to compelling reports that I have had no access to, must have influenced this defiant posture—a posture which caused (among other things) a desperate open letter to be written (using a boulder for a writing desk) and thrown, after being tied to a big rock, through the castle door. I cannot understand, for instance, why Odoriferous Gunk and the Anglo-Campesina weren’t invited while Mayoya and Skunk in a Funk, among other notorious queens, were. Why had an invitation been extended to Karilda Olivar Lubricious and not to the Duchess of Alba and Clara Mortera? Why had an invitation been sent to the president of the French Neo-Nazi Party while the King of Morocco hadn’t even been allowed to land his plane? Why was the head of Alfaguara Publishers there, while the CEO of Siglo XXI had been locked out? It was even more astounding to find that the Shah of Iran’s son was in the palace while the eleven wives of the dictator of Libya had been turned away. Why, for example, was Jane Fonda in attendance while a fine Scottish mare sent by the Queen of England had been denied admittance? Nor is it easy to understand why a hunter of poisonous arachnids in Nepal would be feted while the foremost lobster-fisherman in Nipe Bay wouldn’t even be allowed to approach the building. Or why a world-renowned advocate of the right of women to enter the Catholic priesthood should be turned away while an invitation had been extended to the chairwoman of a group for the conservation and training of lesbian whales in northern Greenland. And what about the fact that honors were paid to the head executioner in Iran while the chief executioner of Albania had been overlooked? What was Coco Salas doing there, sitting in the chair reserved for the president of the Spanish Royal Academy? Why had the president of the French Communist Party been invited and not the most famous bull macho in all of Outer Mongolia? What was the leader of the Galapagos Island guerrilla movement doing there when the wild-dog catcher in Puerto Rico had been left out? Why was the head of the North Korean secret police admitted when the self-invitation that Chelo, a super Mata Hari (among other things), sent herself had not been honored?

I believe the most likely explanation is that there’d been some confusion when the guests were chosen.

For example, around a table covered with exquisite delicacies and surrounded with waiters even more exquisite sat Swiss bankers, Catalonian terrorists, raggedy men and bag ladies chosen from the ranks of the homeless in New York City, Soviet cosmonauts, Greek royalty, prostitutes from Madrid’s Calle Ballesta, Tibetan monks, international Mafiosi, Hollywood stars, Mother Teresa, the President-for-Life of Ulaanbaatar, Mayra the Mare, the president of the Swedish Academy, Bokassa, Peerless Gorialdo, the Key to the Gulf, Uglíssima, the president of the PEN Club of South Korea, the inventor of the neutron bomb, three Iraqi assassins, the secretary of the World Peace Movement, the creator of AIDS, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the mother superior of the monastery of Clarist nuns in Manila, the chief executioner of Senegal, Nena Sarragoitía, five winners of the Cervantes Prize, the Chief Rabbi of Miami Beach, Soviet Academy-member What’s-His-Name Popov, Papayi Toloka, the commander-in-chief of the Red Army of China, the madam of the largest brothel in Kyoto, the president of Afghanistan, several farmers from the southern United States, a worker from Baku, a Finnish labor leader, Günter Greasy, the primíssima ballerina of Nova Zembla, several Olympic athletes, Mao’s widow’s daughter, the last bull macho butt-stuffer in Riga, the lady director of the National Endowment for Democracy, a professor of South American indigenous languages, the spokeswoman for the World Nudist Society, the bishop of Tucumán, the leading bull macho butt-stuffer in Baghdad, a sharpshooter from South Yemen, the head of the Extreme Left Party of the Marianas Islands, Stalin’s daughter’s granddaughter, the tallest black man in Zaïre, the king of Saudi Arabia, Sydney Australia’s leading drag queen, two winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and one for Literature, the inventor of concentration camps controlled by lasers (who had also been given a Nobel Prize) . . . But the bottom line is, there’s no way my poor brain can understand these anomalies (which may not even
be
anomalies), much less explain them to anybody else—I’ve got enough to do just telling what I saw.

On what bleak barbican or bulwark, what brigantine beached in Barbados, what veranda in Baltimore, or in what base brothel in Bordeaux did Virgilio banish his virginity?

’Twas on neither barbican nor brigantine nor veranda, nor in one of Bordeaux’s brothels, that Virgilio’s virginity was banished.

Instead, one bright morning around breakfast, the embattled bard invited a dog, a Saint Bernard, to partake of his vittles. But the Saint Bernard, deaf, badly misunderstood, and drilled him with his vermilion rod.

Had the Saint Bernard but gobbled the vittles, Virgilio’s virginity would never have been plucked, and undoubtedly to this day be intact instead of banished.

For Virgilio Piñera

One after another, men were entering the monster men’s room. They would pull out their imposing tools and urinate in the most imposing way. Eachurbod studied these maneuvers—that manly,
captivating
way they did it, that defiant move they made as they
threw
open the doors to the mansion and strode in and undid their flies. Oh, my dear, that indifference yet concentration with which they pulled out their tools and looked up toward the ceiling or at the walls covered with erotic drawings and graffiti—outings of closet queens cheek by jowl with cartoons of certain individuals closely linked to the country’s power structure —and therefore to Fifo himself. Some brazen (i.e., suicidal) queers had posted on that public wall the hours during which they could be found at the Copelia ice-cream parlor or in a certain corner of the park; others boasted of their talent for blow jobs or their skill at making even the most dormant phallus stand again. And then there were the hustlers and trade who advertised their merchandise: thickness, length in inches, and, of course, price per inch.

But that was all just words, toilet literature, thought Eachurbod. Those queers weren’t looking for blow jobs, they were blowhards. They didn’t have the balls to be in the places they said they’d be in, and those hustlers didn’t exist. O divine St. Nelly, tell me—is it true, as some have said, that the top is an extinct species, which disappeared with the advance of civilization? Are there no longer Men upon the earth willing to get it on with a youthful, ethereal, and elastic girl-queen such as I? Eachurbod, receiving no reply from St. Nelly, looked again at the army of pissers standing at serious attention before the urinals, immersed in their pissing. But she, the devouress, knew that secretly
they
knew that they were in a special place, a place where there were only men exhibiting their pricks, and that this somehow compromised them, and made them either tops or topped. And gazing at that divine collection of hoses in all colors, and the seriousness of expression that formed itself upon the faces of their (apparently guilt-ridden) owners, Eachurbod composed one of his most profound sayings of the day: “Every man that walks into a men’s room where there are only men peeing becomes a citizen, voluntarily or not, of Fairyland.” Oh, yes, under the influence of Skunk in a Funk, who was a friend of the great poet José Lezama Lima (whose poem “The Death of Narcissus” she sometimes recited to Eachurbod
sotto voce
), the unhappy and misshapen queen had suddenly turned poet-queen-philosopher herself. . . . But it was not Narcissus who was about to die this time, it was Eachurbod himself, if he didn’t scratch his itch, didn’t find a Man among all these Men. Oh, if only one of those menacing mulattoes, one of those hunky chocolate dreams, would make her a sign of complicity. How could this desperate queen have lived (have
stood
) so many years of abstinence, how could she never have been skewered, if she lived
only
to be skewered? How could no man have possessed her, even by mistake, if her entire life she had done nothing but run after men? What curse hung over her now dried-out ass? What Stygian lightning bolt had condemned her tongue to drool in solitude? And yet—in spite of her unending failures—Eachurbod was not giving up. Quite the contrary: every man she saw yet could not conquer was a goad that spurred her on to further seeking. So desperate was her desperation that many was the time (unable to bear it a moment longer) that the poor wallflower had thrown herself at the groin of some big giant of a man who she thought had signed her dance-card. And what had she gotten in return for such girlish forwardness? A fist, a horrid insult, jail, and sometimes death itself. Yes, my dear, death itself—because Eachurbod had been murdered several times, though her rectal fire was so powerful that even after death it goaded her to get up, rise from the grave or the sea, and throw herself into the chase once more. There was, for Eachurbod, no hope even for the consolation of a lasting peace after death. For this warrior-queen, there was no rest. There was even the famous story, anthologized by Agustín Plá and the lovely Doctor Lapique, in which Eachurbod, about to be buried (for the fifth time, or the ninth?), broke through the casket and threw herself at the zipper of a once-in-a-lifetime black gravedigger. Of course the truth was, as everybody including Agustín Plá admitted, that black gravedigger
could
raise the dead. . . . But now my dear Paquita, I mean Eachurbod, you’re alive and kicking once again, in one of the most magnificent men’s rooms in the world, surrounded by exquisite thugs with golden skin, pissing with the roar of a cataract before rejoining the conga line. But none of those phalluses swings even an inch in your direction.
Vei e mori.

Her red eyes surveyed the field. She began over in the corner, at the mighty colonial door hewn from two blocks of finest cedar wood. Turning slowly back through ninety degrees, she scanned the entire room. One by one she inspected the bodies of those men, their stony faces, and (naturally) their members, until her retroceding gaze fell upon one of her own claws or grappling irons (“lily-whites,” the innocent creature called them) and she saw—horrors!—that in one of them she was carrying Volume XXVII of the
Complete Works of Lenin.
Ay, that dratted book given her for protection by her intimate friend Nicolás Guillotina (for whom she often danced naked, to the music of
Sóngoro cosongo,
upon the glass top of his dressing table).
Always carry this book, Eachurbod, wherever you go,
he had told her.
It will save you from any suspicion of heresy; it will be like carrying a Bible when you walk down the street in Ireland, or a copy of the Koran in Teheran, or a novel by Corín Tellado in Miami.
And the queen, out of respect for her protector (who was that to her, my dear, and nothing more), now lugged that heavy red-bound tome around with her wherever she went. . . .
Now
she realized why men ran away from her. What man was going to fall for any girl’s sparkling smiles, or winks, or coquettish come-ons if she was going to be carrying around Volume XXVI (
Didn’t you say it was XXVII?
) of the
Complete Works of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin?
That book, that name, were practically synonymous with the Communist Party and consequently with Fifo and consequently with the implacable army that hunted down and punished all “sexual deviation.” Anyone carrying that book—and flashing it around like that, so openly—
had
to be a political commissar at the very least; i.e., somebody you had to hide every life-affirming (and consequently phallic) manifestation from. Dratted book—where on earth, here, so publicly, could the poor queen get rid of it? Dumping it into a public toilet would be considered treason so foul that it would cost her her life. Could she eat it? No way. Not only was it awfully thick; everybody knew that if you so much as nibbled at one corner of one of its pages, you’d lose not just your mind but also your life. So as quick as a vaudeville magician, Eachurbod sucked in his tummy, swept the book under his shirt, tucked the volume into his pants, and then, transformed into a refrigerator-shaped queen (the book was almost as tall as she was), returned with much greater confidence to her cruising.

And she’d been right—within minutes she proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the red-bound book was an albatross about her neck. The second she’d tucked it away, a splendid sailor from the Gulf Fishing Fleet stood alongside her, planted his stunning legs wide apart, unzipped his bulging fly, and fished out a lovely rosy-pink eel that Eachurbod couldn’t take her eyes off of. And for greater comfort, the young sailor (was it the same one that had killed Cernuda?) took out not only his pink phallus but his two pinkís-simo testicles as well.
Enormous quantities of pink,
Eachurbod recited to himself (in honor of Lezama) as he gazed upon those divine dimensions—two enormous Dominican mameys, and sprouting from between them the king of fruits, a burnished, splendid banana. And the monarch of the sea began to spout a stream of piss that flowed to the farthest horizon. Ay, such was the potency of that young sailor, who had perhaps just stepped off his ship after months of abstinence, that his piss did not fall into the streambed of the urinal, but splashed against the prick-graffiti’d wall. Oh, if I were only one of those drawings! sighed Eachurbod as he watched that hose that washed them down. When the young sailor—broad shoulders, brush-cut hair, red-cheeked face, manly legs and bubble butt almost bursting from his tight pants—had finished, he stood there, beside the devouress, shook his magnificent bell-clapper, and, never losing his sailor-boy (and therefore absolutely otherworldly) composure, looked out of the corner of his eye at Eachurbod. I’ll ring those sweet bells for you, Eachurbod thought as he looked at the pendulous roundness of the testicles and the lovely phallus which, rather than being tucked away into the uniform, was still out—standing so gracefully pert and unconcerned that it might have been riding the waves. And like the waves, the lovely phallus throbbed and swelled and almost gamboled before the astonished eyes of the devouress. There was no time to lose—experience had shown, beatings had shown (and Guillotina had drummed into her) that when one stood in the presence of such a phenomenon, a phenomenon as rare as the appearance of Halley’s Comet, one couldn’t waste a second. Eachurbod put out a hand and caressed that regal campanile, and at her touch the great bell-clapper swung so high that it clapped against the young sailor’s chest, emitting a heavenly peal. At last! After a hundred (perhaps even a thousand) years! The queen had found her yearned-for love god! Now all she had to do was kneel before him. Eachurbod took out Volume XXVIII (
Now hold it —I’m
sure
you said it was Volume XXVII!
) of the
Complete Works of Lenin
and knelt upon it as though it were a silken cushion—which brought her mouth just to the level of that glorious mouthful. Eachurbod opened her worshipful mouth, stuck out her tongue of fire, and moved toward the place where the staff of life stood erect.

And at that moment, a mezzo-soprano voice, so potent that it paralyzed every pisser in the place, burst forth in the monster men’s room. All the pissers whirled around (including the young sailor), and what to their wondering eyes should appear but a skeletally thin lady of mature years, dressed head to foot in the style of mid-nineteenth-century France, standing in the center of the men’s room, singing. It was María Mercedes de Santa Cruz, the Condesa de Merlín, who a hundred and fifty years later, driven by homesickness and rage, was returning for a second time to her residence in Havana, where she intended to sing once more, within those beloved walls, the opera
Norma
that Bellini had composed in 1831.