The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (43 page)

When ectomorphic Macumeco the sexual eclectic felt his rectal cavity concussed by the crash of the quasi-volcanic eruption that echoed clear up to his epiglottis, he was ecstatic, exclaiming, “Oh, what delectable rectal cavitation, but I pray the impregnation is not ectopic. Actually, I’d have opted for active ingurgitation.”

For Aristóteles Pumariego,
a.k.a. Macumeco

First Wonder: The newspaper
Granma

Because it’s the only newspaper in the world in which the events that the newspaper reports on have nothing whatsoever to do with reality. It is the most optimistic newspaper in the world, and among the most frequent verbs you will find in its headlines are
inspire, conquer, overthrow, achieve, optimize
. . . . It’s also the newspaper with the largest potato and sugar harvests in all the world, although we ourselves never see those products anywhere. It has no obituaries, and when somebody is shot by the firing squad the newspaper says that the person died in a state of grace, proclaiming the virtues of the newspaper editor who had the person shot.

Second Wonder: Plastic shoes

These are the only shoes in the world that you don’t have to actually wear, and if you do wear them you have to always be running or at least skipping, which makes for a wonderfully active populace. When these shoes get hot, your feet shrink so much that you could pass for a geisha, who, as everybody knows, gets around with little hops. With these shoes there’s no need for socks. You can walk under water with them and nothing happens. Although they’re generally worn on the head.

Third Wonder: “Roof croquettes”

Also known as “miracle croquettes.” No one knows how these mysterious croquettes are manufactured (it’s a miracle) or what their ingredients are. But they have one exceptional quality that everyone does know
all
about: they stick to the roof of your mouth and there’s no way to get them off.

Fourth Wonder: The bus

This is the only vehicle in the world which once you get in, you can’t get out of, and which doesn’t stop anywhere, ever, although it usually doesn’t come by at all. It forestalls any worry or concern on the part of its users, since there’s no need to bother yourself about where it’s going. It is a mythological creature, and its adventures are beyond human imagination. Once you’re in one, anything can happen, because no matter how many laws have been passed to control what goes on inside, there is no regulation that can stop the vehicle itself or anything that takes place inside it.

Fifth Wonder: The ICAIC Newsreel

This, the newsreel of the Instituto Cubano para las Artes e Industrias del Cine, is the only newsreel in the world in which you can close your eyes, fall asleep, dream through it, and when you wake up give it a round of applause, secure in the knowledge that although you haven’t seen a thing, you’ve see it all.

Sixth Wonder: The films of the former German Democratic Republic

The merit of these movies is that you never have to see them.

Seventh Wonder: Copelia ice cream

This is the only ice cream in the world sold out of a specially built cathedral, and day and night, all around its nave, which is of course a
vaulted
nave, there congregate thousands of the faithful, prepared to suffer all manner of persecution for their steadfastness. The run-of-the-mill consumer has to stand in three lines before coming at last to the yearned-for ice cream: the
pre-line,
in which one waits to be given a ticket; the
line,
in which one stands with the ticket that enables one to enter the cathedral; and the
post-line,
in which one stands, ticket in hand, once one has managed to enter the sacred area in which the ice cream is served up. Several manuals have also been written on how to go about obtaining this ice cream, among them Nikitín’s famous work entitled “Instructions for Breaking into Line at Copelia.” It is very likely that by the time one finally arrives at the yearned-for delicacy, it will have melted or evaporated. But who can take away the joy of having spent one entire night, like some strange Knight-Templar in constant sleepless watch, at a cathedral in which the officiant is a frozen god?

When Skunk in a Funk entered the reading room of the National Library, everything would be suddenly transformed, herself included. There, surrounded by books, a magical halo would envelop Reinaldo. Gabriel, almost completely alone in the library, would look down the long row of books and from every book would see a unique splendor shining forth. To walk over to those bookshelves, take down a book at random—What world would it reveal to us? What distant place would it transport us to? What music would bear us off to places, beauties, ideas that we never dared to dream of, yet have always sensed? But the most extraordinary moment would be that moment when, cradling the book, he had not yet opened it. At that moment Skunk in a Funk, Gabriel, Reinaldo would hold in their hands not one book but all the books in the world, and therefore all possible and impossible mysteries. Then, a sense of utter plentitude would come upon Skunk in a Funk, Gabriel, and Reinaldo, and they would become one single being. And then, radiant, that being would take the book and turn toward the reading table and sit down and begin to read.

We wish to make it clear that if we have sentenced Reinaldo Arenas (b. Perronales, Cuba, 1943) to a nasty end, it is not, as the author claims, because we were so terribly angered by the buffeting we received from that Negro whose fly was touched by Delfín Proust (b. Guajanales, Cuba, 1944). All of that—the touching of the fly, the blows we received, even our anger—is true. But it had nothing to do with our verdict. What did decide it was that Arenas (a.k.a. Gabriel, a.k.a. Skunk in a Funk) doubted our word, and therefore doubted our power. When the subject was locked in Castillo el Morro, he sent his mother to us (which exposed us to a search at the hands of Fifo’s agents) to try to find out what had happened to his novel. We informed the subject’s mother that the novel had been found by the subject’s Aunt Orfelina, who had turned it over to State Security. But he didn’t believe us. If he did, why when he got out of prison would he climb up on the roof of Orfelina’s house with the intention of recovering his novel? That lack of trust in us, the Three Weird Sisters, is not to be forgiven.

[Signed:]

Clotho

Lachesis

Atropos

Carlitos Olivares, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba, had finally managed to persuade a stunning recruit who was standing guard at the Castillo de la Fuerza to come home with him. The truth was, Olivares (poor thing) had been obsessively hanging around the castle for months. She would stop outside the walls, stick her black, Indian-featured face through the thick iron bars, and stand in ecstasy, contemplating the young specimen of manhood who, feet slightly apart at present-arms (the butt of the rifle gently caressing his fly), stood guard before that historic edifice constructed by Isabel de Bobadilla in 1530 so that she could live at the seaside and await her long-absent husband, who unbeknownst to her had been swallowed
years
ago by the waters of the Mississippi. . . . The crazy queen, possessed perhaps by Bobadilla’s spirit of despairing hope, stood every day, hours on end (her kinky curls sometimes twining inextricably around the bars), in contemplation of that magnificent hunk of man. Sad indeed is the story of this queen—black, queer, and Taino, alas, in a country in which even Fifo himself crows about his white Spanish ancestors and his purportedly unimpeachable masculinity. I tell you, girl, it was
pathetic. . . .
And as though all this were not bad enough, that lanky, bug-eyed, big-assed queen with that wide mouth of hers that drooled like a waterfall at the sight of any masculine figure was no less than the son of the Cuban ambassador to Soviet Nippon.

“My god, maricón! What words escape those false teeth of yours!”

“False, perhaps, but of the very finest quality, my dear, for they were designed by St. Nelly herself and made from ivory and silver—unlike yours, which are made out of plastic and all you have to do is laugh, or even open your vulgar mouth, and they fall out. . . . But let me just continue with this story, if that’s all right with you.”

Carlitos the swishful-thinking black tinkerbell was the son of a daddy who was a big government muckety-muck and a mother that was a
santera,
so you can imagine—the poor thing couldn’t sprinkle so much as a
drop
of fairy-dust at home. And yet once a force of nature—the force of fairydom—decided to set up shop in that dusky body, who could keep it from manifesting itself in a thousand ways? The way she moved her hands, for instance, or the way he batted his ears, the way she pursed her thick lips or the way he blinked his wandering eyes, the swinging of his backside and the staring into space. . . . Nothing,
nothing
could keep the fairy queen from showing herself for what he was, which was why, despite her being a high-ranking muckety-muck sort of queen, she’d been given the title of “the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba.”

Anyway, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba had spent the livelong day on one side of the bars at the Castillo de la Fuerza looking longingly at the round and firm and fully packed specimen of military manhood on the other side—who just happened to come, oh, my heavens, from Palma Soriano. The queen’s drool had been running down the bars outside the Castillo de la Fuerza all day and was now beginning to flood the moats that surrounded the fortress. The delicious hunk thought the tide had come pretty far in.

And the tide of drool continued to rise, until it reached almost to the magnificent medieval drawbridge from whose catwalk the soldierly hunk kept watch—ears pricked, face as stern as one of the masters of the world—on the drooling queen, who apparently was spying on him. His lieutenant had given him strict orders: Contact was forbidden with any persons who might be discovered wandering about the grounds of the military fortress in which the remains of José Antonio Portuonto lie; they might be spies or imperialist agents sent to obtain strategic secrets that Portuonto had carried to his grave. All photographs were forbidden; no one could enter the castle; and no replies were to be given to any questions that might be asked the guard. And in addition, his lieutenant had ordered him to report to headquarters any strange movement in the area of the castle, and to investigate the snooper as much as he could. That was why the wondrous hunk-thunk-thunk (
thunk thunk
because his boots made that delicious sound on the wooden catwalk of the fortress;
hunk thunk
because he was solid as a treetrunk himself) ignored the black fairy tinkerbell and didn’t arrest him on the spot—he just kept a careful, discreet eye on him from behind the dark glasses that gave him an even more martial, more commanding, more
manly
look. Though of course he was ready to drop the pretense the second the spy reached for a pencil or a camera. But the fact is, the drooling queen didn’t reach for anything; she just stood there, drooling, hour after hour.

By the time the drool had risen all the way to the soldier’s boots, his turn on guard duty was over, so he checked in his weapon and left the fortress. There beside the great picket of iron bars stood the black tinkerbell, still drooling. Drooling and quivering. As the hunk-thunk-thunk passed beside her, the black fairy queen could not contain a short death cry, a sort of muffled
ay-y-y
that came from her profoundest depths, her deepest bowels, her small intestine, her large intestine, her ardent rectum, her very heart. The hunk, upon hearing those strange rectal sounds, deduced that the fairy was a superspy equipped with supermodern equipment, so he slowed down. The fairy continued to follow him, and was putting out such a quantity of drool that thousands of housewives started following
him,
carrying every sort of container imaginable so as to make up for the water shortage that all of Old Havana suffers under. Finally Carlitos Olivares, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba, approached the hunky recruit and respectfully asked if he could tell her the time. The recruit, always on the alert, half-smiled at the supposed spy and very respectfully told him that he didn’t have a watch but when he left the castle (
the unit,
he called it) it was one o’clock, so it couldn’t be later than one-fifteen. It’s early, moaned Olivares. Uh-huh, replied the hunk-thunk-thunk, but I’ve been standing guard since midnight, so what I really need is a rest. Olivares swallowed hard and somehow found the strength to whisper:
Come to my house for a rest; my mother will make you some coffee.
Oh, so this is a whole
family
of conspirators, eh? the recruit said to himself, and in the interest of national security accepted the invitation.

When the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba arrived at his house with that incredible specimen of manhood, a fierce though silent battle broke out between the mother, the son, and his two sisters. The three women waged a battle of smirks and affectations, backside-waggings, giggles, smiles, and honeyed words—and they even flashed the recruit from time to time, all very subtly of course. The mother brought in the coffee and served it with the greatest of attentiveness, being sure the recruit got a good look at her enticing bosom. The daughters brought him dark Cuban sugar that the old ambassador had sent them from New Stalingrad. And as they deposited lumps of dark sweetness in his cup, both daughters ran their tongues over the hunk’s ears. At which Carlitos, desperate, invited the young man up to his room to see his books. The first thing the fairy did to win the soldier’s confidence (politically speaking) was show him the complete works of Karl Marx; then, to win his friendship, he opened a drawer and gave him a Rolex watch, a pair of nylon socks, a curtain made out of matchbooks, a badge from the Young Communist League, an image of the Virgin of Loreto, a ring, and a bag containing 120 pesos that he’d planned to spend at the Carnival. Then immediately he told the young soldier, who serenely accepted those gifts, that he needed something nice to put that money away in, and he ran over to a gigantic wardrobe closet and produced a silky-soft leather wallet made from the hide of one of Fifo’s crocodiles, and he gave him that, too. The soldier took the wallet without a word and tucked it into one of his big military pockets. The bulge of the wallet in that military pocket so excited the queen that she
flew
over to the big wardrobe closet and came back with a tuxedo, a fez with gold braid, and some marvelous Italian shoes. Kneeling before the love god, she removed his rough boots and slipped on those luxurious pointed-toed masterworks of footware. Ay, but just then—the fairy on her knees before the hunk-thunk-thunk, adjusting the fit of the Italian shoes—the mother barged into the room with a big pot full of nice vegetable soup just like the soup that people made in the province of Oriente (where the soldier was from, you see), and right behind came the sisters with plates, silverware, a linen tablecloth and a folding table that they set up in front of the soldier boy. The hunk soon found himself at the center of the attentions of three women who never ceased cooing and swinging their backsides as they served him his favorite dish. But Carlitos was not about to be upstaged by his sisters, and so he presented the hunk-thunk-thunk with the big Medal of Lenin that had been awarded his father, the ambassador, for his sixty years of work for the Party Central Committee. He also gave him Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice,
which he’d stolen from the National Library—a theft, reported by María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, that had cost him six months of hard labor on the park project, and hadn’t cost him more only because he was the son of the ambassador to Soviet Nippon; otherwise, the fairy would’ve been shot by firing squad. . . . My heavens, but the high muckety-muck fairy was acting more like the tooth fairy, and he continued to pile gifts upon the hunk-thunk-thunk. Around his neck he hung a medal of St. Nelly (pure gold, and struck by Mahoma herself), then he gave him eighteen lengths of fabric, the oilcloth off the coffee table, a floor lamp, a pair of maracas, several areca palms, some wax fruit (grapes, pears, and apples), a rain cape, and a pair of Spanish flip-flops. All this, the gift-fairy piled upon him while his mother and his sisters wriggled about, waggling tits and asses. And the hunk-thunk-thunk accepted all the gifts, thinking they might serve as evidence—heck, prima facie
proof—
against the spy and his family.

Obviously, thought the nonwax fruit, I’m never going to be able to sink my teeth into this delicacy here at home—so he suggested to the recruit that they take a walk through the city and later maybe go to the woods in Havana, where it would be nice and cool. The fairy crammed all the presents into an immense burlap bag and left with the soldier boy, mother and sisters still furiously wriggling.

The Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba (dragging the huge burlap bag) and the hunk-thunk-thunk walked all the way across Old Havana, strolled almost the entire length of the Malecón (where the fairy got the burlap bag tangled up in the wheels of a carnival float), came to Copelia, and stood in line for three hours to buy a melted ice-cream cone. On foot (the fairy never turning loose of this huge burlap
thing
) they traversed all of El Vedado, the hunk in front, the staggering fairy behind with her tongue hanging out (and drooling). And they crossed the bridge over the Almen-dares River and began to make their way into the Havana woods. They had come to the residential sector called New Vedado Heights, which was adjacent to a wooded area that was a more or less official park grounds surrounding the presidential palace. If they were able to enter the grounds, it was because the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba was the daughter of the ambassador to Soviet Nippon and the recruit was one of Ramiro Valdés’s fair-haired boys.

“Mary!
What
has gone and got through those false teeth of yours again?”

I’m telling you, Ramiro Valdés. What do you think, a hunk-thunk-thunk of that (shall we say) caliber is going to go unnoticed by Miss Ramiro Valdés? Oh yes-s-s, Miss-s-s Valdés-s-s they call her. So, now that
that’s
out of the way . . .

The recruit kept strolling among the trees in the shady woods. The fairy tagged along behind, struggling with the immense bag with all the presents in it. By now she knew the recruit’s whole rural-family history (which he’d of course been narrating during the course of the walk), knew the names of his sisters, his mothers, his grandmothers, but when the recruit started talking about his great-grandmother on his mother’s side the queen interrupted by asking him if he had a girlfriend. The hunk-thunk-thunk told him he was single and unengaged. At that, the queen threw the giant burlap bag to the ground and feel to her knees before the manly soldier, stationing herself directly in front of his fly. The soldier boy, thinking that he wasn’t the appropriate person to kill a spy, and especially a spy who hadn’t confessed to anything, proudly and firmly (though not violently) rejected the fairy’s advances. The fairy, still on his knees, then confessed to the soldier that for more than a year he’d been gazing longingly at him day and night from the iron bars of the Castillo de la Fuerza, that he loved him, that he couldn’t live without him. Then the soldier quite calmly (thinking always of the tape recorders that were surely hidden among the trees, recording every word of their conversation) told him no way, he didn’t like men, if he’d gone home with him and accepted his gifts it was out of pure military courtesy, but he abominated sexual relations between men, he thought they were absolutely immoral. The queen then dropped his pants and showed the hunk his immense black ass and said:
You screw me or I scream.
The soldier, recoiling before that immense ass thrust virtually in his face, lied and said:
Listen, I told you—I’ve never had sex with anybody, but the day I do, it’ll be with a woman.
The desperate queen replied:
But I am a woman!
The soldier, at that, and never for a second losing his composure, pulled out a pistol he had hidden practically in his groin, pointed it at the queen’s head, and spoke the following words:
If you’re a woman, then show me your cunt. . . .
—
Uh-huh, uh-huh, right away, I’ll show it to you right away,
promised the fairy, and he began to pat himself all over the body, trying to find a sudden cunt. But no luck—all he had was a cock, a pair of balls, and a desperate ass. On the verge of an epileptic fit, the fairy tucked his prick between his legs, closed them tight so all you could see anymore were her pubic hairs, and showed the recruit what she was pleased to call her cunt. But the recruit was too sharp for that—on the contrary, suspecting that an international spy and a screaming queen to boot was trying to trick him, he said:
Open your legs or I’ll kill you.
The queen had to open her legs, what choice did a poor girl have, and the recruit gazed upon a pair of dried-up balls and a droopy dick.
A cunt! A cunt,
demanded the recruit, suddenly unable to control himself.
Uh-huh, uh-huh, I’ve got one right here,
said the fairy queen, patting herself under the arms, on the tip of her toes. My dear, what desperation, as that fairy tried to find a cunt. Finally she stood atop the sack filled with all those priceless objects, raised her arms to the heavens, and set up a silent prayer to merciful St. Nelly—
Please, send me a cunt,
right now! Ay, but since St. Nelly was almost totally blind, she missed the mark and the cunt landed on the queen’s forehead, where it instantly stuck.
What in the world is that?
said the recruit, looking at the cunt that covered the queen’s entire forehead—
you’re not just a faggot, you’re a monster.
And turning away (first picking up his presents), he began to walk off through the proud, towering trees. The truth was, there was nothing more repugnant to that hunk-thunk-thunk than a cunt.
I don’t want cunt, and I don’t want ass—meat is what I crave, too. And to think that in the interest of national security I’ve lost a whole day on a fairy and three whores, when I planned to suck dick like a madman in the urinals at Carnival—You fuck me or I scream! You fuck me, I tell you, or I scream!
screamed Carlitos, running after him. The queen’s supplication was so desperate that the recruit turned and, ignoring the possibility of tape recorders, looked the fairy queen in the eye.
I’ve never liked cunt,
he said,
much less on a faggot’s forehead.
And at that instant the queen’s hands went to her head where—horrors!—her fingers found a drippy patch of hair, and a cunt. That was
it!
That was the last straw! The poor queen, doubly mocked (by men and by the gods), stood in the middle of the woods and gave out a scream so loud, so loud, that no fairy has ever equaled it. And then she did it again, but this time even louder.