The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (45 page)

Delfín, a femme and a nonlesbian thespian defined by his finicky fussing—for instance, his dentures are fixed with Fixodent, not Fasteeth—was desirous of finishing himself off theatrically but found it difficult to fix on the most fashionable method, and he refused to finish himself off before finalizing every detail of his grand finale. Finally, frenetically gathering information for his decision and frantic at the prospect of finagling Ford Foundation financing for his project, he fixed upon defenestration. But Delfín’s defenestration plan fell flat.

For Delfín Proust

In the person and estate of María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz Mopox Jaruco y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlín, were joined all the qualities needful for happiness, and indeed she was one of the most fortunate creatures on the island of Cuba in the nineteenth century. Her wealthy family possessed an enormous sugarcane plantation and sugar processing establishment—and (very important) a large company of slaves.

Even when she was but a girl, with that tenderness that is innate in children, María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz Mopox Jaruco y Montalvo would arouse the sexual fires of all the male Negro slaves and compel them to possess her in the middle of the sugarcane fields.
J’aime fort les jeux innocents avec ceux qui ne le sont pas.
The erotic activities of the young girl not only became the stuff of scandal throughout the province of Matanzas, in which her family’s estate lay, but also caused a decline in the family’s sugar production. Throughout the length and breadth of those cane fields, one heard nothing but the child-Condesa’s moans of pleasure and the cries (in Mandingo, Lucumí, and Carabalí) of the aroused black slaves who, machete in hand, fought for the possession of that still-child’s body. There was not a single able-bodied black man in the entire slave population of the estate who had not possessed the young Condesa in the middle of the fields, their bed the soft young cane shoots and dry leaves. And pity the black man who refused to couple with the insatiable child. The aristocratic creature would intrigue against him so cleverly and so ably that the Conde and Condesa de Montalvo y Jaruco would soon clap him in the stocks and then hang him.

Yes, the Condesa’s entrance into the cane fields wreaked terrible havoc. So much havoc, in fact, that her grandparents decided to send the child off to the famous convent in Santa Clara while her parents, their reputation in tatters, fled to Spain, their faces covered by a visorlike mask of black rock crystal.

Once shut away in the convent, the Condesa set about arousing the other girls, the nuns, and even the abbess. Such was the brazen lechery that the budding young lady unleashed among those cloistered women that at any hour of the night or day, all one heard in the convent were earsplitting shrieks and wails of pleasure, the product of their unprecedented—and unnatural—couplings. For not only did the Condesa practice the sin of Sappho with all the nuns and other females of the convent and couple with the farmhands in the surrounding countryside, she also had her way with the draft animals, the fowls, and not a few well-proportioned instruments of labor, even including holy staves and a cannonball that a mad nun escaped from a French community house for lay sisters had brought to the Santa Clara nunnery. All of these unholy partners and devices would inspire erotic shrieks from the Condesa and her crew, and at last led to such cackling and carrying-on that the Bishop of Havana, one Espada, sent an army to carry out a sacred, secret investigation, which he personally directed.

Within days the Condesa, who by now was a strikingly beautiful teenage woman, had corrupted the bishop. His army, meanwhile, sired children upon all the nuns, who immediately turned the convent into an orphanage. But soon the Condesa was denounced by the spiteful mother superior, Sor Inés, who could not bear to witness (without being invited to join) the Condesa’s fevered lovemaking with the bishop in the middle of the baptistry. And so the Condesa was forced to flee the convent. (First, however, she had her revenge on the mother superior by setting fire not only to the convent but also to the entire barrio of Jesús María de Santa Clara, in which the religious house was located.)

From the convent the Condesa made her way on foot across the province of Las Villas and then Matanzas, coupling whenever she could with the campesinos and farm animals. And finally, as she masturbated with the walking stick belonging to a vagabond whom she had forcibly possessed beside the very walls of the patriarchal castle in Havana, she entered her family home exclaiming that she had decided to return—since the truth was, she experienced total pleasure only when she was being possessed by her great-grandfather, an aged nobleman shaped like a rat who (one must withhold nothing) had been sodomized by one of the Condesa’s little feet when she was no more than five years old. The young woman’s family held a council and decided that she had to be sent away, banished, expatriated—that is, sent to the house of her mother, the Condesa Leonora. In the years since she had last seen her daughter, the mother had been widowed; she was now living in Madrid, where she kept a literary salon that was at the same time one of the most famous whorehouses in all of Europe. She numbered the entire Spanish nobility among her clientele; even Louis XVI had once spent several nights of pleasure there, in the company of Charles III of Spain. But untitled hoi polloi also passed in procession through the whorehouse—and all, to a man, contracted a strain of galloping syphilis that so infected and degraded the population of the Peninsula that most Spaniards today are deformed, insolent, mongoloidal, stunted, thin-haired, big-assed and, in a word, sculpted with a sledgehammer. The noble Montalvo family, of our own beloved Cuba, have therefore left their inexpungible mark upon the entire race.

On her arrival at the Cortes in Madrid, the Condesa, who was but sixteen years old yet already skilled in exhibiting the splendors of her fair features, immediately overshadowed her mother, so that María Mercedes soon became the center of attraction of those
soirées
attended especially by the literary, religious, and high military crowd. Sometimes while someone was reading a sonnet by Garcilaso, a shot would be fired that would do away with a bishop or some dauphin from a distant kingdom, but the reading would go on imperturbably, for everyone knew that at the end of the artistic evening the naked Condesa would interpret the most difficult passages from
La Donna del Lago.
But just as the Negroes on the Conde’s sugarcane plantation had been worn to almost nothing by the fiery young Condesa, so the entire population of Spain began to suffer from the young woman’s erotic insistence—the men became indolent, effeminate, and weak, while the women fled to the coast of the Mediterranean, created another jargon even more horrid than Spanish, and began to dance the
sardana,
a dance which was no more than a pretext for leaning upon one another and not falling dead to the floor.

The Montalvo women, now lacking both men and women to service them in the many ways that they required servicing, began to conspire to induce the French to invade the Peninsula. The night that Napoleon’s brother Pepe entered Madrid, he slept (where else?) at the Montalvos’ house. The Condesa’s fire spread through the entire French army, which, touched by that flame, burned Spain to the ground. Of course one must admit that many of the massacres committed by the army were due also to the incessant acts of treason committed by Francisco de Goya, who, brush in hand, would point to the nest in which the members of the nation’s armed forces had taken refuge and then, when the bloodshed that he himself had inspired was sufficiently horrendous, would pack up his colors, go to where the events were taking place, and paint the catastrophes of war. In that sense,
Los fusilados del dos de mayo
is one of his most
original
works, in every sense of the word.

But let us return, my dear astonished fairies, to the adventures of our own Cuban Condesa. After having her way with virtually the entire armed forces of France, María de las Mercedes became even more seductive, and in her face glowed even brighter the light of chastity that made her so irresistible. One night her mother, leaving Napoleon’s bed, sent for her daughter.

“María, the King wishes to see you married.”

“Married? Impossible. It is the King that I wish to marry.”

“Mercedes, he is not the man for you. Look.” And with no further ado, the elder Condesa de Montalvo pulled back the spread that covered José Bonaparte’s good parts and he lay naked before María Mercedes, who was shocked at the insignificant size of his member.

“So that’s why they call him the
Little
Napoleon,” she said, disillusioned. “All right, then, I’ll agree to marry another man, under the condition, of course, that he give me his consent to sleep around on him. Who is he?”

“General Merlín, a cold, severe count, who only sleeps with his private guards. You shall meet him soon.”

“First I want to meet his private guards. I refuse to make a bad marriage.”

“My dear daughter, one sees that you are the fruit of my womb. I knew that you were going to make that request.”

And instantly Leonora Montalvo (whose
nom de guerre
was Teresa) clapped her hands together several times in the Andalusian manner and a hundred stunning, well-built men in jerkins and tights appeared in the room where King Joseph lay sleeping.

“I’ll marry Merlín tonight,” exclaimed the Condesa as her mother extinguished the lamps, the candles, and the candelabra.

That very night María Mercedes married General Merlín, and by the men of his guard she had a baby girl to whom, in homage to her mother, she gave the name Leonor. And with that union, María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz became the Condesa de Merlín.

In early 1812 the Spaniards awoke from their syphilitic stupor and instantly tried to boot us out, my dear Leonor, raping women, men, and children who had been destined for myself. We were forced to flee Spain, for as the wife of General Merlín I was part of the court of King Joseph, who could not bear to live apart from us. And so, in the midst of a terrible fog of gunpowder, the thunder of cannons, and the unbearable heat of that summer of 1812 we crossed the Peninsula. And as though that were not sufficiently frightful, the Spaniards were shooting to kill. In addition, I had to nurse my own daughter, your sister Teresita, while being ogled lasciviously by the soldiers, clerics, and counselors of state whom at such a critical pass I could not satisfy. In Aranjuez, my mother died and we buried her in the dust produced by our coaches and horses as we continued on. This was not so much a caravan as an entire city, heaped with scorn and opprobrium, cast out by merciless fate and fleeing to foreign lands. The soldiers were burning with thirst, although I would sometimes console them by allowing them to nurse at my breast. The journey lasted so long that in the course of it I became with child and at last gave birth. This child was a boy, the son of several Breton halberdiers. With my two small children under my arm I marched onward through the smoke and fire, bullets whistling over my head. I thought that I should die, and sometimes had to exercise great control in order not to throw myself before the grapeshot and end my life once and for all. But there are two selves within me, constantly at war—one weak and the other strong. I try always to stimulate the stronger, not because it is the stronger but rather because it is the most wretched, the self which manages to obtain nothing. . . . And so we came, after a year of wandering, to
la belle
Valencia. In that city I experienced one of the greatest disappointments of my life. My confessor, after violating me from behind, ran off with Casimira, my maid, and they took with them my jewels. I shall never forgive this outrage, for I have ever been an honest woman. While my husband was in camp with the King and his escort, I set about working the streets of Valencia, which teem with the cleverest whores on earth. And yet I made a small fortune and could at last flee from Valencia in the custody of twenty-five soldiers (and what soldiers!) under the command of Captain Dupuis, Lieutenant Diógenes, and Sergeant Albert, always at present-arms. We came to Zaragoza, where the war was at its fiercest. Anywhere one turned, there were shells and shot flying through the air, and the army was bombarding the city. And so we had to flee that city also. But before leaving, I decided to visit the tomb of the famous lovers. And so, somewhat calmed, in the midst of that incessant bombardment, and with my two children under my arm, I escaped to Paris. This was the spring of 1814.

No sooner had I come to Paris than my beauty, my literary talent, and my voice earned me great fame. Neither Cuban nor Spaniard nor Frenchwoman, though mastering all those cultures and their horrors, I had that air of worldliness, of
savoir faire
and scornfulness, that is the property only of one who belongs not to this world and therefore cares little about any of the things it holds. With some of my own capital and a loan given me personally by the Emperor, I opened an elegant salon at number 40, rue de Bondy. My salon was visited by Rossini, the Persianis, Alfred de Musset, the Countess de Villani, Mlle Malibran, Goya, George Sand, Balzac, the Viscount Chateaubriand, Mme Récamier, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Simón Bolívar, the Empress Joséphine, Martínez de la Rosa, Chopin, Liszt, and other personalities, for whom I sang. We had more than a hundred fifty years of artistic successes. I sang in the Théâtre de l’Opéra de Paris; accompanied by Strauss I sang on the Champs Elysées; I sang with Malibran in Florence’s grand Piazza della Signoria, where even the statues of the gods were so moved that they became sexually aroused by my person; I sang Bellini’s
Norma
in 1840 in Havana in the grand hall of my paternal palace, where the lamps showed me to such advantage that I was more enchanting than ever and the Negroes once again were fired to stimulate me with lascivious caresses. . . . Each time there was a grand disaster, I would sing, and so my nobility rose ever higher. I sang for the Greeks after the great earthquake; I sang for the Poles after the insurrection; I sang for the benefit of the inhabitants of Lyons at the flooding of the Rhône; in 1931 I sang for the people of Martinique when that terrible earthquake devastated their poor country. . . .
Partout où il avait une grande infortune, je travaillais à la soulager. . . . Et oui,
sometimes my husband, with the aid of his troops in Europe, would turn a river from its course and bring on terrible flooding, or cause an earthquake, or collapse a bridge or burn an entire city so that I might sing for the benefit of the victims of the catastrophe. The methods might be thought to be somewhat harsh, but the consolation of my voice would assuage every calamity suffered by the survivors. Such an expression of transport would come upon the faces of the victims when I sang the famous duets from
Semiramis
or some passage from
Norma
that all the disasters caused by us were justified by their ecstasy.