The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (34 page)

Water cures everything,
says the Ogress. And she leaps from the bridge at Patrice Lumumba Beach into the sea. When the water comes in contact with that sick and misshapen body (whose owner’s real name is Ramón Sernada), it begins to bubble, smoke, and even give off little flames. A terrible smell of sulfur emerges from that area of the ocean in which the Ogress is submerged. All the fish that are swimming in the area die of pollution. Thanks to that strange immunity (the immunity of AIDS) that prevents even Bloodthirsty Shark from eating her, the Ogress can swim out into the open sea and float along the line of the horizon.
Water cures everything,
the queen repeats in fervent hopefulness, recalling the words of Clara Mortera. Water, lots of water—that was also the suggestion (the prescription) that the Three Weird Sisters gave the Ogress when she consulted them in their room next to the hole in Clara’s wall in Old Havana. But even the terrible Weird Sisters refused to examine the Ogress’s sick body up close. The Eldest Fate poked at it from a distance with a trident and the Baby Sister Fate scooped up (in a spoon with a handle three feet long) the icky fluids that oozed out of it. The Weird Sisters pulled on huge goggles, plastic shower caps, aluminum aprons, and rubber gloves and they examined those fluids, looked at each other in bewildered terror, and threw the three-foot-long spoon though the hole in Clara’s wall (instantly killing a member of the Party who was making off with three chalices). Then, looking at the Ogress, they declared: Water cures everything—go jump in the ocean. . . . And ever since then, the Ogress has been taking dips in the ocean. But tumors, chancres, running sores have continued to spread over her body.
Life has been too cruel with me,
thought the Ogress. In her youth he’d done no more than any other fairy did—chase after men—but the immense majority of fairies did the same thing, and they all seemed to be in good health, or at least they weren’t erupting or melting down before your eyes, the way the Ogress was. Yes, what fate had done to her was a clear injustice. Even the nickname the other fairies had given her was so
unfair.
And in that she was right, for Ramón Sernada was not a bad person. The title Ogress had been bestowed on her because of her deformity, and also—the truth, the whole sad truth—because of the bad humors that filled the queen’s body and changed her personality. But how could her personality not suffer, how could she not have bad moods, with all the calamities that had befallen her? And so it was that the innocuous fairy who had once been a sweet thing with long straight hair was transformed little by little into a swollen, yellow, bald-headed, red-eyed horror. Other fairies were impaled every day on the prick of some petty thief, ex-felon, or common hustler who carried the fatal virus, and to all appearances, nothing happened to them—but all the Ogress had to do was touch a cock through a pair of jeans and she broke out with pustules all over. Other queens would suck any cock that swung in front of their lips, but all the Ogress had to do was stick out her tongue a yard away from the nearest prick and her face would turn totally black and blue. Other femmes could go into men’s rooms and get screwed any number of times, but all the noble Ogress had to do was stand at the door and she’d be doubled over with the colic before you could blink an eye, her legs would break out in a nasty rash, and her belly would swell up something terrible. Ever since she was a filly she’d caught every infectious disease there was, from measles to chicken pox, from whooping cough to hepatitis—diseases she’d caught, she said, from just
looking
at some kid in the neighborhood—and now came
this,
on top of all those other calamities. But Ramón Sernada had decided that if it came down to a choice between being a not-person, a not-thing, and being dead, he’d choose death. (Because the only way that she, as a born fairy, could
be
was by being screwed.) Made up by every brush and color in Clara Mortera’s arsenal, she threw herself into the street, ready to die, but first to live—even if only for one night, one night of pleasure. But the Ogress was not to have even that one night. The first man she ran into, a sailor who was splendid-looking and knew it, no sooner screwed her than he transmitted to the poor queen every infectious disease known to humankind. Suddenly the sailor was having his way not with a fairy painted up by Clara Mortera, but with a ball of pus. Enraged, the sailor pulled his prick out of Ramón Sernada’s ass and Ramón Sernada’s ass emitted a sulfurous stench. From that time on, the poor faggot’s life had been one long calvary, a chase from one
curandero
to the next, and very secretly so, since if Fifo found out about her illness he’d have her thrown in a concentration camp. But after paying a visit to the Three Weird Sisters, and then getting the same advice from Clara Mortera as she’d gotten from them, the Ogress would now go to the beach and float for hours on the surface of the ocean, filled with the distant hope that the waves would wash away all her diseases.
Water cures everything,
the Ogress says aloud as she floats on her back on the ocean. Clara Mortera and the Three Weird Sisters couldn’t be wrong about that, she thinks.
Every
body goes to them for advice. Even the Marquesa de Macondo. Why, the Holy Father himself hinted that he planned to return to Cuba to consult those expert oracles of medicine—for his hemorrhoids, they say. . . .
I will be cured. I will be cured,
said the Ogress, filled with hope, as she exposed her terrible excrescences to sea and sky. And it was in that trance of almost mystical ecstasy that she was floating when suddenly something terribly violent, emerging like a missile from underneath the sea, hit her, and blew her to smithereens. The perpetrator of this deed was none other than Tatica, the Angel from Marianao, who had leaped out of the sea, far offshore, with the aid of Skunk in a Funk’s swim fins. The Golden Child kept swimming, fleeing Skunk in a Funk, and he didn’t stop till he reached the beach at Santa Fe.

On the beach at Santa Fe, perched on a boulder in the sun, sat Chug-a-Lug. Tired of not finding anything at Patrice Lumumba Beach, she had flown (yes, flown—on Oscar’s wings, my dear, if you must know) down here, and as she sat there she saw the White Angel emerge from the water and strike a pose that she thought unbearably statuesque. She beckoned. The Angelic Creature, pulling off the swim fins, walked over to the queen, and on his face there was still the smile of satisfaction at recalling that he had blown the Ogress to bits. In fact, the Ogress’s explosion, scattering bloody bits of her across the surface of the ocean, spread the dreaded AIDS virus—the most terrible disease yet known to humankind—throughout the world. But the only person who doesn’t appear on the list of victims of this dread disease is Ramón Sernada himself. Obviously, not even after death could the poor Ogress manage to be anything.

That cute kid, not yet come to puberty, cavorting with that goatherd, is actually a chick (or chicken) that collects for coupling. The goatherd approaches, she collects, then they copulate—him covering her, her not caring a hoot. A couple of cavorts a week, and she’s set.

How many goatherds would a kid cavort with if a kid cavorted with every Cuban goatherd?

Couldn’t care less—considers herself another Cabrera Infante.

For Hilarión Cabrisas, a.k.a. the Anglo-Campesina

The huge armored-steel gate of the grand ceremonial hall rolled upward and behind it stood Fifo in all his magnificence. He was dressed from head to foot in olive-green: gigantic olive-green boots, olive-green military jacket, olive-green uniform pants bloused at the knee, olive-green tie, and olive-green cap. Near him, but in red, was his brother Raúl, and some distance away, all the ministers and the new presidential guard, made up of a thousand hunky men in camouflage fatigues. At a signal from Fifo, the guests began to file in to the elite reception (to be followed by the Carnival) held to celebrate Fifo’s purported fifty years in absolute power.

Among the thousands of personalities who filed through the massive door (each one bowing reverently) were the ambassadors of all Communist, formerly Communist, capitalist, and neutral countries; the papal nuncio Monsignor Sacchi, who told Fifo that the Holy Father might very possibly make an appearance at the last minute; the Marquesa de Macondo, who, not content to shake the dictator’s hand, shook his testicles; the Lady of the Veil; England’s Princess Dinorah, who arrived completely nude and followed by her enormous retinue and a swarm of photographers (who were denied entrance); the King and Queen of Castile; the King and Queen of Switzerland; the executioner of Cambodia; the Prime Minister of India with the mummy of his mother (whom he himself had murdered); the emperor of Belgium; Mother Teresa; the head of the Medellín cartel; the Satrap of Verania; the most important members of the Cuban exile community, all of whom were, it now turned out, agents in the pay of Fifo; the presidents of all Latin American republics and dictatorships with their respective spouses (who served as Prime Ministers); Papayi Taloka, the famous Japanese transvestite who had been jerking off Emperor Hirohito for eighty years; the Prime Minister of Ceylon; Outer Mongolia’s greatest terrorist followed by 1,326 lesser terrorists who headed up international terrorist organizations; and Raisa Gorbachev on the arm of the First Lady of the United States, who told Fifo that the President was sorry not to be able to come but he was making love to his rabbit. Fifo nodded understandingly and, breaking the rules of protocol that he himself had set, embraced the American First Lady and Madame Gorbachev. And the parade of dignitaries continued—African kings, Arab dictators, former presidents now in exile, Norwegian princes, millionaires who owned whole islands and sometimes whole countries, Deng Xiaoping on a stretcher, an Eskimo filmmaker, the Turkish High Bugger, the latest Miss Universe, a eunuch from Madagascar, the leader of the South African Workers Union, five hundred cloistered nuns, the doorman of Sing Sing Prison, all the members of the Swedish Academy (who were planning to give Fifo the Nobel Peace Prize), six Argentine cows, a Canadian zebu, five hundred or so monkeys in their cages, the president of the OAS, Fr. Bettino, the administrator of the London necropolis, the inventor of AIDS, the president of the World Federation of Women, seven hundred renowned writers, an expert in bacteriological weapons, the world high-diving champion, Yasir Arafat with twenty-five Panamanian hunks, the head of the French Communist Party, the Empress of Yugoslavia, the director of the Bronx Zoo, the Electric Venus, the head of Amnesty International, the mummies of Andre Ceauşescu and his wife Elena on a gurney pushed by Vanessa Redgrave, the Queen of Vietnam on the arm of the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, actors, senators, three thousand trained and licensed whores, male ballet dancers, the editors of the world’s most important newspapers, a hundred or so Totomoya Indians, and thousands of men and women of imposing physical grace and bearing, wearing the most outlandish costumes or completely nude. . . . After these came the local guests—among them, Halisia Jalonzo on the arm of Coco Salas, Alfredo Güevavara on the arm of Miss Pereyrra, the executioner of La Cabaña Prison, Manetta, Paula Amanda (a.k.a. Luisa Fernanda), Miss Mayoya, Skunk in a Funk, H. Puntilla, Nicolás Guillotina, La Reine des Araignées with her company of gorgeous teenage boys (among whom the resplendent Key to the Gulf would play a central role in tonight’s festivities), Silbo Rodríguez, Dulce María Leynaz, Eee-u-u-ugh Desnoës, Miguel Barniz, Miss Divinely Malign, SuperSatanic, and AntiChelo, the SuperChelo, and thousands more queens, fairies, and femme leather boys preceded by impressive specimens of Cuban butch-hood and other outstanding figures in the island’s political, agricultural, naval, and literary worlds. The heterogeneity of the guest list will perhaps be less puzzling if we bear in mind—and this might be one response to the chapter “Some Unsettling Questions”—that Fifo had invited not only close friends and allies but also persons under suspicion of various crimes and acts of treason, several
personae non gratae,
and even a few outright enemies whose noses he took great pleasure in rubbing in this coup that had swept the world.

Dressed in his olive-green uniform and flanked by his gorgeous security forces, Fifo triumphantly gave the order for the party to begin. At that, the Armed Forces Orchestra played the Fifonian National Anthem, which all stood to hear, hands over hearts as the midgets had instructed, and then the national anthems of every country of the world. Fifo wanted to be sure to please all his honored guests—who would be enjoying not only the fabulous dinner and the exquisite wines and other liquors that not even kings and queens could taste any longer, but also (as the invitation had promised) “rare and edifying spectacles.” Among the events announced for that night was a superskewering, one canonization and two decanonizations, a crucifuckingfixion, a self-decapitation, five hundred strangulations performed by five hundred expert midgets, twenty-seven resurrections of famous people, a striptease performed by the chief executioner of Teheran, a Russian-roulette duel between the mayor of Boston and Tomasito the Goya-Girl,
Giselle
danced by Halisia Jalonzo, a Grand Oneirical Theological Political Philosophical Satirical Conference whose subjects were god, the devil, madness, dreams, paradise, hell, Florentine art, the steam engine, and the categories of queenhood, among other fascinating topics. The speakers were to be Delfín Proust, the Archbishop of Canterbury, José Lezama Lima, the Divinely Malign, André Breton, Salman Rushdie, Skunk in a Funk, the Queen of Holland, the AntiChelo, SuperSatanic, and several winners of the Nobel Prize (among others). The program was then to continue with a second retractation by H. Puntilla, the official introduction of Bloodthirsty Shark, an excursion to the Garden of Computers, and a walking tour through Old Havana under the guidance of Alejo Sholekhov. . . . It was a
fascinating
program. And in the middle of the opening ceremonies, his ears deafened by the acclamations of his guests and the noise of the orchestra, stood Fifo, olive-greener and more beaming by the minute, personally seeing that the evening’s activities went off without a hitch. Only the Marquesa de Macondo dared interrupt him; unable to contain herself, she fell to her knees before the high commander and fleetingly brushed his ball-sack with her lips. Many, including Arturo Lumski, feared that this irreverence would cost the Marquesa her life, but Fifo, smiling, slapped her head away and continued his hostess-with-the-mostest duties without missing a beat.