The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (3 page)

Farewell to the Sea
is set, like the previous novel, on the eve of an anticipated triumph that will produce unmitigated disaster: Fidel’s trumpeted goal, for 1970, of the ten-million-ton harvest. The novel is completely divided, one might say severed, into two parts: the second part composed of six furious cantos, sung in silence to the ocean by Hector, a poet who no longer writes, or is no longer allowed to, away on a six-day vacation at the beach. He has endured the forced-labor of the cane fields as a “volunteer.” He has entered a sham-marriage (though the union is not devoid of genuine, sometimes heartbreaking affection), and even fathered a child, in order to avoid the charge of homosexuality. At the beach he has an affair with a young boy who on the sixth day mysteriously drowns. The first part of the novel is told in prose by Hector’s wife, who genuinely loves him but does not seem to be his intellectual or emotional equal. She often feels awkward with him; he rarely talks to her anymore, finds her mawkish and sentimental. She recognizes intuitively what he is, but is still hopelessly drawn to him, perhaps in part because of the very horror of the death-in-life that totalitarianism has imposed upon them both. And yet, in her silent musings—upon the ocean, the beach, the groves of trees, the flight of birds, and even the young boy who has seduced (is seduced by?) her husband—which fill the six days of their holiday, she reaches a level of lyricism unsurpassed by her broken husband. Each of them carries, sealed up in themselves, “a secret history” that, by the end of the novel, destroys their illusory existence.

Arenas had entered a similarly arranged marriage, in a vain attempt to ward off the sexual witch hunt that grew to a Stalinist frenzy in the Havana of the late sixties and early seventies, until the grotesqueness of it finally outraged the intellectual fellow travelers of Europe and the Americas. It must be remembered that, in those days, even Manuel Puig’s now classic 1976 novel
Kiss of the Spider Woman
was artistically frowned upon by his previous Latin American admirers to the extent that it placed in the same prison cell an aging, reactionary homosexual and a homophobic young marxist—just to see what might happen.

From the time Arenas finally settled in New York in 1981 until his death, he had one incredible stroke of publishing good fortune. He found an editor, Kathryn Court, who, despite the prevailing intellectual climate, not to mention the financial prospects, short term or long, promised to publish the entire
Pentagonía
in English. This gave Reinaldo hope and carried him through the darkest hours of his struggle with AIDS. When he first tested positive for HIV, in 1987, he prayed to a photograph of “Saint” Virgilio Piñera he kept above his desk, asking him for another three years to be able to finish the remaining two volumes of his
Pentagonía
.

Saint Virgilio was listening. In the late 1980s, a barely legible manuscript of the fifth volume,
The Assault
, turned up in New York and Reinaldo set to work deciphering and revising it. A dark parable of absurdist dystopia, in the tradition of Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from the Underground
, Kafka’s
The Penal Colony
, and Orwell’s
1984
and
Animal Farm
, Arenas’s savagely comic tale is told by a torturer, a slavish, venomous agent from the Bureau of Counterwhispering. Indeed, his mind is so twisted by the nihilistic mechanics of a society that has been finally reduced to an indestructible system of destruction, he can only discover a kind of warped solace in the thought of somehow destroying his own mother. This ferocious quest for a kind of incestuously murderous exorcism takes him, and the reader, though every social layer of this hell. The chapter headings, borrowed from the chapter headings of a variety of other literary and esoteric works, including some of the author’s, serve to heighten the dissonance of the novel. This was to be the final apocalyptic vision of a revolution gone mad.

Now, Arenas had only the fourth volume to write:
The Color of Summer
. (Weakened by AIDS, he would be forced to dictate his autobiographical memoir,
Before Night Falls
.) The novel is a remarkable comic achievement, lending new meaning to the old adage: divide and conquer. For in this Carnivalesque celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution (actually the fortieth, but the dictator Fifo is ever prone to exaggeration), Arenas divides himself into three characters—Gabriel, the dutiful “straight” son; Reinaldo, the famous “persecuted” author; and Skunk in a Funk, the conniving
pícaro
“faggot”—in order to take his pleasure, and his revenge, while writing and rewriting and, yes, rewriting a novel called
The Color of Summer
. The book gives the illusion of being a slapstick hodgepodge of high and low styles, of comical vignettes skewering friend and foe alike, mixed with tongue twisters, letters, anecdotes, lists, a play at the beginning, and an author’s “Forward” seemingly stuck at random in the middle. By the end, the island has been gnawed away from its rocky base and floats off into the Gulf Stream until it finally sinks.

This deceptively casual structure was born of necessity: Arenas did not know exactly how long he had to live. So each little vignette is in fact quite carefully structured as a complete entity unto itself, just in case it might suddenly be the last. And the novel was fitted together additively, so that not only the island may be atomized at any moment; so may the book. As Reinaldo suggests in his “Foreword,” he is offering his reader, literally, a comically “cyclonic” or “round” novel, which “. . . never really begins or ends at any particular place; readers can begin it anywhere and read it until they come back to their starting point. . . . But please don’t take that as either a merit or a defect—just a necessity that is intrinsic to the structure of the work.” It is a work of astonishing playfulness and equanimity for an author already ravaged by what he considered to be the first inhuman plague and, most likely, invented by modern science.

On December 7, 1990, Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide in his New York apartment. No longer capable of managing the stairs to his sixth-floor walk-up, terrified of being sent to a public hospital (the previous year, a private hospital had “released” him in the middle of the night—no insurance—with pneumonia), unable to swallow solid foods, he told me: “I’ve lost my country and my language, the meaning of anything I ever wanted to say. Thanks to Virgilio, I’ve managed to finish my books. There’s nothing left.” He was forty-seven.

Two years after his death, Reinaldo’s memoir,
Before Night Falls
, was published to unprecedented acclaim in France and in Spain, where Vargas Llosa hailed it as “One of the most shattering testimonials ever written . . . on the subject of oppression and defiance.” An American edition soon followed, in a haunting English version by Arenas’s friend Dolores Koch, which
The New York Times’
s critics selected as one of the Best Books of the 1993. Arenas had become one of the greatest dissident authors not just of Cuba, but of the Cold War. Though he hated Castro’s Cuba, he could be just as scathing about Batista’s. A passionate anti-communist, he showed little love for American intellectuals, “who think about nothing but the state of their bank accounts.” He described Miami as “a town that I do not wish to remember.” He found New York sex a mechanical and dirty transaction, and the brutish pedestrians obsessed with little more than scurrying home to their television sets.

And yet, my friend, this is the only place in the world where one can survive—I say that with all my heart, because I say it without illusions.

He wrote this in a letter to himself, or rather Gabriel did, in
The Color of Summer
.

Not many dissident authors have survived the Cold War. Some of course were destroyed by it, never returning from the various concentration camps that have dotted the maps and graveyards of the twentieth century. Others became as irrelevant as the posturing of opposing forces that have settled back, winners or losers, into the wholly calculated pursuit of strictly capital ambitions. Their books, discarded by publishers and libraries, could still be picked up for a time, in those last few years of the millennium, at used bookstores or the second-hand peddlers’ tables often seen on parts of upper Broadway or lower Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan.

Does a dissident author ever survive of his dissidence? In rereading the
Pentagonía
to write this essay, I found a different writer than the one I had experienced in the past. When I first read Reinaldo Arenas, as he was editing and rewriting his works, I had been overwhelmed by the discordant power of his dazzling invective. Now, some ten years after his death, I am continually astonished at the pathos and beauty of his creations. I sense that I am in the hands of a writer of enormous confidence, empathy and resilience. I realize, for example, that I have never read another novelist who writes so lyrically or intimately about the sea—not about life at sea, like Melville or Conrad, but about the sea itself. Throughout his works, Arenas has scattered one invocation after another, in every conceivable condition of light, hour, and weather, summoning the always shifting colors and textures, the ceaseless change and endless repetition of his vast, beloved sea. I understand now why it finally took a painter, Julian Schnabel, to make a film worthy of him, with
Before Night Falls.
For Arenas himself was a luminous painter of the human soul; and, to the very end, used his gifts to uncover the poetry of a dark and darker world.

Thomas Colchie

March, 2001

N
OTICE  TO  THE  
A
UDIENCE
Extremely important. Please read.

A l s o   b y   R e i n a l d o   A r e n a s
~

S
INGING
F
ROM THE
W
ELL

T
HE
P
ALACE OF THE
W
HITE
S
KUNKS

F
AREWELL TO THE
S
EA

T
HE
A
SSAULT

T
HE
I
LL
-F
ATED
P
EREGRINATIONS OF
F
RAY
S
ERVANDO

B
EFORE
N
IGHT
F
ALLS
: A M
EMOIR

A light comedy in one act

(of repudiation)

SETTINGS
:     The Antilles and their surrounding waters (the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea)
Key West
The Malecón in Havana.

TIME
:            July 1999.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE
:

On the sea
:     Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
José Martí

On the Malecón
:

(In order of appearance)

Halisia Jalonzo
Virgilio Piñera
Fifo (played by a double)
Delfín Proust (also in Key West)
Nicolás Guillotina
Dulce María Leynaz
Tina Parecía Mirruz
Karilda Olivar Lubricious
H. Puntilla (also on the sea and in Key West)
José Zacarias Talet
A chorus of rehabilitated prostitutes
Rita Tonga
Paula Amanda, a.k.a. Luisa Fernanda
Odiseo Ruego (also in Key West)
Endinio Valliegas
José Lezama Lima
Julián del Casal

Chorus on the Malecón in Havana
:

Made up of minor poets such as Cynthio Métier, Retamal, José Martínez Mata, Pablo Amando, Miguel Barniz, and a hundred or so others; also including members of the Comité para la Defensa de la Revolución (a.k.a. the Watchdog Committee), midgets, high-ranking military officers, and anybody else that’s on the Malecón at the time.

In Key West
:

(In order of appearance)

José María Heredia
Raúl Kastro (also on the Malecón)
Fernando González Esteva
Zebro Sardoya
An announcer
Primigenio Florido
A chorus of children
Bastón Dacuero

Chorus of poetesses
:

Angel Gastaluz (This character possesses, by papal bull, the gift of omnipresence, so throughout the work s/he is able to be in several places at the same time if s/he so desires.)
The Mayor of Miami
The President of the United States
A leading politician
The female editor of a fashion magazine
Kilo Abierto Montamier
A prizewinning poetess
A congressman from the state of Ohio
The Attorney General
The Bishop of Miami
Ye-Ye, a.k.a. PornoPop, The Only Remaining Go-Go Fairy
Queen in Cuba (who also possesses the gift of omnipresence, bestowed by St. Nelly)
Mariano Brull
A society lady from Miami
An old woman
A priest
A nun
A female professor of literature
Another poetess (who’s awarded herself her own prize)
An astrologer
Alta Grave de Peralta
A woman wearing a great deal of jewelry
A university type
The director of a Cuban museum (in exile)
Andrés Reynaldo

Chorus in Key West
:

Three thousand poetesses, professors of Latin, hundreds of aspirants to the office of the presidency of Cuba, and other notable politicians; sometimes includes the entire population of Key West, sometimes subdivided into small choruses.

C
REDITS
, H
AVANA LOCATION
:

Director
:        Fifo

Makeup and Choreography
:

Raúl Kastro

Resurrections
:

Oscar Horcayés

Music
:          Cuban National Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Manuel Gracia Markoff, a.k.a. Yechface and the Marquesa de Macondo.

K
EY
W
EST LOCATION
:

Director
:      Moscoso

Makeup and choreography
:

Kilo Abierto Montamier

Resurrections
:

Alta Grave de Peralta

Music
:          The Guadalajara Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Octavio Plá, a.k.a. (according to lies told by Tomás Borge) Fray Nobel.

The action begins in Havana, and as the curtain rises Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who has been brought back to life on Fifo’s orders so that she will be able to take part in the festivities honoring Fifo’s fiftieth year in power, escapes in a little fishing boat and heads for Florida. Learning instantly about the escape, Fifo sends out orders for her arrest, but realizing almost in the same breath that an arrest would cause an international scandal, he orders the people of Cuba to stage an act of repudiation against the poetess, while secretly ordering his trained sharks and diligent midgets to do everything in their power to block her flight. The act of repudiation begins with the appearance of a group of eminent poets who are still on the Island, some of whom have been brought back to life especially for this event. The idea is that all these poets will be able to persuade Avellaneda not to leave the country. On Fifo’s orders, they will throw at the fleeing poetess large quantities of rotten eggs, which thousands of midgets have piled along the edge of the ocean. Meanwhile, although at first it isn’t clear where Avellaneda is headed (the part about “headed for Florida” was a taunt flung by Radio Aguado), the Cuban poets in exile, including some brought back to life for this event, decide to have a huge demonstration on the southernmost tip of the United States (i.e., Key West) in order to encourage Avellaneda and show their moral support for her. In addition to reciting a great number of poems dedicated to her, they shower her with candy bars, California apples, bonbons, and even fake pearls.

A
VELLANEDA
:
(On the Malecón in Havana, throwing a small, frail boat into the water)

Pearl of the ocean! Star of the West!

Once glorious isle,

now pain in the ass!

I’ve had it up to here with you! Farewell!

I mean,
Adios!

And a thousand times adios,

for tell me, how is one supposed

to put up with this mess?

See these big ugly bags under my eyes?

I haven’t slept for days, because

this brilliant sky of yours, no longer does

Night cover with her sable veil—
and so I’m off!

Don’t try to stop me!
The ubiquitous mob

has forced me to flee my native land.

Adios, once happy homeland, beloved Eden

where even Numero Uno, the head hoodlum,

has to keep one eye on his behind.

No more of this for me; I’ve made up my mind!

(Plus—however far and wide I searched, however hard I tried I never found the man to make me bride.)

Into the boat! Hope swells my ample breast!

Florida awaits. Next stop—Key West!

She clambers into the dinghy and begins to row quickly away. Avellaneda is a heavyset woman swathed in a long black nineteenth-century gown and wearing an equally black veil that covers her face. Upon seeing this bizarre figure, all the sharks swim away, howling— piteously. The midgets also recoil in fright, and then whirl around and head back toward the coast. Fifo has no choice but to trust that the act of repudiation, which he orders to begin at once, will work.

Halisia Jalonzo, entering
S
TAGE
L
EFT
,
inaugurates the act of repudiation.
She is carrying a huge ostrich egg. The truth is, Jalonzo ought not to be in the part of the ceremony devoted to poets, but once she gets something in her head, honey, nobody can do a
thing
with her—plus, we mustn’t forget that she just had her hundredth birthday, or so they say. Still, it’s not right—and we’ll be sure René Tavernier (R.I.P.), the president of the PEN Club, hears about this.

H
ALISIA
J
ALONZO
:

Go then, witch! Good riddance to bad rubbish!

And don’t come back, ingrate Gertrudis!

(No way this flight is her idea.

Behind it all, I know, is Plizescaya—

my nemesis, the cunning Plizescaya.)

Go—we’ll all be better off without ya!

She raises the huge ostrich egg and throws it into the sea, making an enormous splash (for the first time in years, honey!) and raising columns of water that drench Avellaneda.

A
VELLANEDA
:
(dripping wet, but still rowing; to
H
ALISIA
)

The show you make makes crystal clear

that you’re in Fifo’s pay, my dear

whoring, as always, for that “art” of yours.

Some art! You haven’t really danced in years.

Farewell, I leave you in Fifo’s keeping,

in lands of misery and weeping,

while I depart to seek my freedom.

Before I go, though, I just want to say:

it breaks my heart to see you sell yourself this way—

(though at your age, and in the shape you’re in, you kind of
have
to stay. . .)

but good luck, Halisia, anyway—

and as they say in show biz, sweetie, break a leg!

Oh, and thank you for the egg.

Halisia Jalonzo, an expression of defeat on her face, takes out a huge magnifying glass and peers through it at Avellaneda’s bosom, which swells to ENORMOUS proportions. Unable to control herself, but to herself alone, she speaks these lines
: