The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (44 page)

So those were the cries that echoed through the theater in which Halisia was dancing
Giselle,
the cries that caused Fifo and almost his entire entourage to rush outside.

Suddenly, queer and soldierboy found themselves surrounded by Fifo’s troops, Fifo himself, and a multitude of personalities.

“Oh, it’s Carlitos Olivares Baloyra, the son of my friend Carlos Olivares Manet, with a cunt in the middle of his forehead,” said Fifo, taking all this in as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Come inside, come in, come to the party. You look so weird you’re bound to entertain my marvelous guests. And as for your companion,” and here Fifo ran his eyes over the hunk-thunk-thunk from top to bottom, “bring him along, too! Let’s go—come on into the palace. Let the party continue!”

Before entering the palace, Skunk in a Funk took off the long Egyptian scarf that Margarita Camacho had given him and wrapped it around Carlitos Olivares’ forehead.

“It wasn’t María Teresa Freyre de Andrade who turned you in to the police for stealing
Death in Venice,
” Skunk in a Funk confessed to Olivares; “it was me. It’s one of my favorite books and I used to go the library to read it almost every week. What you did, neither God nor St. Nelly can ever forgive. And I don’t hold out much hope for your getting rid of that stigma on your forehead, either. For the rest of your life, you’ll be a queen with a cunt. Yech . . . But let’s go on in, because after I list the seven wonders of Cuban socialism (which I’m sure will cost me my life sooner or later) and recite my Thirty Truculent Tongue Twisters, Lezama is going to read something.”

“Lezama,” sniffed Halisia. “I’ve never understood a word of what that crazy old man wrote—even if one of the texts he wrote was about
me.
Didn’t make a bit of sense; there was no way in the world to make head or tail of it. Fifo even banned it. But if he’s been resuscitated and he’s going to read, I suppose it’s because Fifo has authorized it, so let’s go in and listen to him. Though I suppose we’ll have to applaud him, too.”

Then Halisia gave a great jeté, thinking she’d be able to leap all the way through the door of the grand palace. But since she was almost completely blind her head hit the trunk of one of the trees in the park and she plummeted, headfirst, into the crowd.

“Heavens!” shrieked Coco Salas, jumping up and down hysterically. “I think she’s dead!”

“Yeah, right,” spat Fifo, standing before the still-rigid ballerina. “Old bitch is too mean to die. Throw a bucket of cold water on her, she’ll be up in no time.”

“No! No water!” screamed Halisia, sitting up. “This makeup is three inches thick and it costs a fortune! I’m perfectly fine.”

And the great ballerina started walking, bumping her head into one tree after another until at last her faithful Coco took her by the hand and they followed the grand procession that was now reentering the grand catacomb of the palace.

Alejo, why the long sojourn on foreign soil? Why the prolonged aloha? Your Havana Viejo loas long for you, Alejo.
Où est l’Alejo d’antan?
Return, Alejo, old boy; we’re spoiling for you, old goil, to rejoin us on our soil. Loyalty to Fidel, hell no. Loyalty to the roisterers and roilers of old! Merrily we’ll once more roll along, Alejo, so, hey—why not, Alejo, merrily say “Havana Viejo, ho!”?

For Alejo Sholekhov

So poor Virgilio thought that if he burned all the originals of his poems and didn’t leave any copies he’d be safe from Fifo’s wrath? How very touching. But it was not to be, my dear, because while the Queen of Cárdenas (which is what Miss Queta Pando called Virgilio) was reading his poems—which were truly inspired, truly brilliant, as I said before—two of the most sinister queens on earth, strategically fitted with tape recorders in their respective anuses, recorded the entire reading. Which means that at the same time those screaming queens were following their police orders to the letter, they were also enjoying the immortal words of the above-mentioned traitor
and
enjoying those huge tape recorders up their ass. Who knows how many of the oohs and aahs and moans emitted by those vile bitches were due not to the pleasure of the reading and their grief at the burning of the poems, but rather to the way they were being
pleasured
by those tape recorders up their asses whenever they wiggled around on the floor like two orgasmic marmosets?

So who were those horrid faggots with the elephant-like bodies? Who were those vile double-cross-dressers who’d managed to infiltrate Olga Andreu’s little
hommage
to the great poet? It’s time their names were revealed. They were—and you should remember their names—Paula Amanda (a.k.a. Luisa Fernanda) and Miss Miguel Barniz, two of Fifo’s most trusted (and most faithful) confidant(e)s, and they worshiped Fifo not only politically but physically as well.

So—the minute that Virgilio ended his brilliant reading of his poems, the faggot informants gave him a big hug, tearfully congratulated him, and hauled ass (literally and metaphorically), each in a different direction (because these were supersecret informers), for the special door high up on the side of the Fifalian Palace. And there, at the official door, the two pansies, tape recorders now in hand, met face to face. Their jaws dropped. Their faces turned red with fury. To
think
that the other one might turn in his/her report first! And so as the two faggots banged desperately on the official door with the hand that clutched the tape recorder, with the other hand they were scratching each other’s eyes out and twisting each other’s ears. (They were also sticking their tongues out at each other and kicking each other in their big bellies.) At one point Paula Amanda’s fury reached such a pitch that she grabbed Barniz by his long hair and in one yank snatched him bald—which he remained to the end of his days (and any other version of that creature’s hairlessness is a bald-faced lie). But Barniz, howling in pain at the loss of his scalp (but never ceasing to bang on the official door), wielded his free grappling hook with such fury that he pulled Paula Amanda’s whole chin off (which is why since that day Miss Amanda has sported all that long straggly white hair—supposedly in honor of Fifo, but in actuality to cover up the terrible defacement done him by Barniz). The bloody queens’ catfight was causing such a ruckus that at last the special door opened and Fifo himself was standing in it, surrounded by his gorgeous escorts. Both queens fell to their knees before Fifo and started licking his boots, while at the same time (still kicking at each other) they raised their hands and presented him with the tape recorders. Fifo ordered his escort to separate them while he went off to listen to the contents of the tapes. Almost immediately he returned.

“The two reports are identical,” he declared, “and they have been turned in to me at the same time. Therefore only one of them will be entered into the computers. But I have magnanimously decided that both your names will be set down in the secret record book, as though the report had been handed in by you both. As for the Grand Medal of Patriotism, don’t worry—you’ll each be receiving one the day of the Grand Pre-Carnival Fiesta in honor of my fifty years in power.” Then he turned to his gorgeous escorts. “And by the way, men—that night I want Virgilio terminated. But—and this is important—I want it to be a nice, clean, quiet job, no machine guns or ruckus like in Miami when you goons took out my enemies there. We’ve got to be more cautious here in Cuba—there are fewer people on our side. I want it to look as though that son of a bitch died a nice quiet natural death—a heart attack, or maybe a suicide. In all the hullabaloo of the Carnival, at which I shall be the heart and soul, nobody will notice if an old poet kicks the bucket. And as for you two—” and here he turned once more to the bloody but rapturous queens, “beat it—and keep working like the true little heroes and little ants that you are. And don’t forget, girls—mum’s the word!”

Mary! Get your filthy cum-stinking hands off this book because the authoress, the queenliest queen of them all, is about to sit down and write the foreword to it. Yes, my dear, now, at this late date, more than halfway through the novel, the pansy loca has got it into her head that the book needs a foreword, and so without further ado (like every other crazy queen—no self-control, just rushes right into it) she’s going to do it now, right this minute, and it has to be
now
. So beat it, you nelly queen, till the foreword is done and you can come back and read it.

First of all, about that faggot who said it’s taken forty years to write this book—
fuck you!
I’m not Cirilo Villaverde, I’ll have you know! It’s true that many years ago, while I was still in Cuba, I conceived part of the novel. I even wrote a few chapters of it. But suffering persecution and prisons as I did, and being kept under tight surveillance, not to mention being reduced to utter penury, I wasn’t able to finish it. Plus the fact that almost all my friends and some of my closest family, not to mention most of my lovers (such as Norberto Fuentes, for example), were working for the police. I’d write a page and the next day it would be gone.

I memorized a chapter or two (such as the one entitled “Clara’s Hole”) and the Thirty Truculent Tongue Twisters (which didn’t yet number thirty), so I managed to preserve some of my writing that way. But generally I dedicated myself to survival, like all ex-jailbirds. And of course I was living on an island that was a prison. But through it all, I never forgot that if my life was to have meaning—because my life is lived more than anywhere else in the sphere of literature—I had to write this novel,
The Color of Summer,
the fourth in a Cuban pentagony of which the fifth volume,
The Assault,
had already been written there in Cuba, in a fit of fury, and sent, with all the risks that that implied, out of the country, where I hoped I would later be able to decipher it—because the manuscript was virtually unintelligible.

In New York I have become involved in a number of political activities, because I will never be able to forget the hell I left behind (the hell that in some way I still carry with me); and then of course I have had to engage in the thousand stupid, time-consuming activities required by daily life in this country where the only thing that counts is money. If to all that one adds the number of manuscripts that I had managed to get out of Cuba, and that I had to make a fair copy of for publication, plus the unending wars that I’ve been carrying on for ten years with the agents (official and otherwise) of Stalinist Cuba, who live in absolute ease in the United States, then one can understand that I have not had a great deal of spare time.

In this country, as in every country that I have ever visited or lived in, I have known humiliation, poverty, and hypocrisy, but here I have also had the privilege to cry out. Perhaps that cry will not meet oblivion. The hope of humanity lies precisely in those who have suffered the most. Thus, the hope of the next century obviously lies in the victims of Communism; thanks to the apprenticeship of suffering that they have served, those victims will (or should) be those in charge of constructing a world that it is possible to live in.

In the United States today there are no intellectuals; there are only third-class penlickers who think about nothing but the state of their bank accounts. It’s impossible to tell whether they are progressives or reactionaries—they’re quite simply fools, and therefore tools of the most sinister of forces. And as for
Cuban
literature, it has virtually ceased to exist in any palpable way either inside Cuba or in exile. Inside Cuba, it has been exterminated or silenced by propaganda, fear, the need to survive, the desire for power, and social vanities. Outside Cuba, it has been stifled by lack of communication, rootlessness, solitude, implacable materialism, and, above all, envy—that microbe that always produces a suffocating stench.

When I arrived in Miami in 1980, I discovered that there were more than three thousand people in the city who called themselves “poetesses.” I fled in terror. The great writers of the Cuban diaspora (Lino Novás Calvo, Carlos Montenegro, Lydia Cabrera, Enrique Labrador Ruiz, Gastón Baquero, Leví Marrero, and certain others) by now have died—or are dying—in ostracism, oblivion, and poverty. Other writers of a certain degree of relevancy not only hardly write but are considered sacred cows. (Let’s get rid of the adjective and call it even.)

My generation (those who now are, or ought to be, between forty and fifty) has not produced a single noteworthy writer, with the possible exception of myself. And it’s not that there never were any; it’s that one way or another they have been annihilated, destroyed, done away with. I am completely alone, I have lived alone, I have suffered not only my own horror but also the horror of all those who have not even been able to publish their horror. Not to mention that I myself will soon be dying.

But no one should think that before Castro, life in Cuba was a bed of roses, either—not at all. Most Cubans have shown an interest in beauty only in order to destroy it. A man such as José Lezama Lima was violently attacked by both his own early generation and the generation that succeeded it. During the Batista years, Virgilio Piñera was insulted by Raúl Roa, who sneeringly called him “a writer of the epicene gender”; afterward, during the Castro years, Roa became a government minister and Piñera went to jail—dying, as a matter of fact, under very suspicious circumstances. Great Cuban literature has been conceived under the sign of scorn, denunciation, suicide, and murder. Cuban exiles made José Martí’s life so miserable in New York that he had to go off to fight in Cuba so that he could be killed once and for all and have done with it. Then and now, the story of the culture of our country has been a sordid one. José Lezama Lima used to say that our country is a country “frustrated in its political essence.” The local color, the exuberance, the light breeze at nightfall, the rhythm of its mulatto women, these are the trappings behind which hides, and continues, our implacable tradition—I like to call it Sinistrism.

For the moment, the apotheosis of Sinistrism is Fidel Castro (that second Caligula with a desire to be a killer nun). But who is this Fidel Castro? A being fallen from another planet upon our unfortunate isle? A foreign product? No, Fidel Castro is the
summa
of that Cuba that has always been: he simply typifies the worst of our tradition. And in our case “the worst” is, apparently, that which has always prevailed, and always will. Fidel Castro
is,
to a certain degree, ourselves. Soon, perhaps, in Cuba there will be no more Fidel Castro, but the seed of evil, vulgarity, envy, ambition, abuse, injustice, betrayal, treachery, treason, and intrigue will still be there, waiting to sprout and grow. In Miami there is no dictatorship only because the peninsula has not yet been able to secede from the rest of the United States.

Cubans have never been able to gain their independence—the only thing they have ever managed to gain is
pendence.

That perhaps explains why the word
pendejo
(meaning spineless, twit, coward, jerk) is an epithet used constantly among us. As a Spanish colony, we never freed ourselves from the Spaniards; for that, the Americans had to intervene, and then we became a colony of the United States; then, attempting to free ourselves from a fairly conventional sort of dictatorship in the colonial vein, we became a colony of the Soviets. Now that the Soviet Union is apparently on the verge of extinction, no one knows what new horror lies ahead for us, but unquestionably what we deserve, collectively, is the worst. The same people who oppose this line of thought are generally loyal exponents of an infinite vileness. . . . I feel an endless desolation, an inconsolable grief for all that evil, and yet a furious tenderness when I think of my past and present.

That desolation and that love have in some way compelled me to write this pentagony, which in addition to being the history of my fury and my love is also a metaphor for my country. The pentagony begins with
Singing From the Well,
a novel that details the vicissitudes of a sensitive boy in a brutal, primitive setting. The work takes place in what we might call the political prehistory of our Island. The pentagony then continues with
The Palace of the White Skunks,
which centers on the life of a teenage writer-to-be; it gives us a vision of a family and an entire town during the years of the Batista tyranny. The cycle then continues with
Farewell to the Sea,
which records the frustration of a man who fought for the Revolution but then, once inside the Revolution, realizes that it has degenerated into a tyranny more perfect and implacable than the one that he had fought against; the novel details the process of the Cuban Revolution from 1958 to 1969, the Stalinization of it, and the end of all hope for creativity.

Then comes
The Color of Summer,
a grotesque and satirical (and therefore realistic) portrait of an aging tyranny and the tyrant himself, the apotheosis of horror; it details the struggles and intrigues that go on around the tyrant (who is aided and abetted by the hypocrisy, cowardice, frivolity, and opportunism of the powerful of the world), the attitude of not taking anything seriously in order to go on surviving, and sex as the immediate means of escape. In some way this novel is an attempt to reflect, without idealizing or investing the story with high-sounding principles, the half-picaresque, half-heartbreaking life of a large percentage of Cuban youth, their desire to be young, to live the life of young people. This novel presents a vision of an underground homosexual world that will surely never appear in any newspaper or journal in the world, much less in Cuba. It is deeply rooted in one of the most vital periods of my life and the life of most of us who were young during the sixties and seventies.
The Color of Summer
is a world which, if I do not put it down on paper, will be lost, fragmented and dispersed as it is in the memories of those who knew it. I leave to the sagacity of critics the deciphering of the structure of this novel, but I would like to note that it is not a linear work, but circular, and therefore cyclonic, with a vortex or eye—the Carnival—toward which all the vectors whirl. So, given its cyclical nature, the novel never really begins or ends at any particular place; readers can begin it anywhere and read until they come back to their starting point. Yes, dear reader, you hold in your hand what is perhaps the first round novel to date. 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.

The pentagony culminates in
The Assault,
an arid fable about the utter dehumanization of humanity under an implacable system.

In all these novels, the central character is an author, a witness, who dies (in the first four works) but in the next novel is reborn under a different name yet with the same angry, rebellious goal: to chant or recount the horror and the life of the people, including his own. There thus remains, in the midst of a terrible, tempestuous time (which in these novels covers more than a hundred years), a life raft, a ship of hope, the intransigence of man the creator, the poet, the rebel—standing firm before all those repressive principles which, if they could, would destroy him utterly—one of those principles being the horror that he himself exudes. Although the poet dies, the writing that he leaves behind is witness to his triumph over repression, violence, and murder, a triumph which ennobles him and at the same time is the patrimony of the entire species—which in one way or another (as we see once again) will carry on its war against that barbarism often disguised as humanism.

Writing this pentagony, which I’m still not sure I’ll ever finish, has, I confess, taken me many years, but it has also given a fundamental meaning to my life that is now coming to a close.