The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (47 page)

There was, however, one person unmoved by her singing, one person who, furious, outraged, stalked out of the building—for she’d lost the phallic prey that had been about to touch her lips. And that person was Eachurbod, who, Volume XXV of the
Complete Works of Lenin
in hand, flew like greased lightning past the Condesa and emerged, a fiery ball of rage, into the bustling street.

I dreamed of an enormous castle that I lived in with my whole family, and in every room loved ones did trivial, familiar things.

I dreamed of a pair of comfortable shoes.

I dreamed of a cataclysm.

I dreamed of a big, sweet, manly black man, just for me.

I dreamed of a field of cape jasmines.

I dreamed of a bench alongside the ocean where I’d go in the evenings and just sit.

I dreamed that the bus I was waiting for always came on time.

I dreamed of being a teacher.

I dreamed that I had a sculptural (or at least acceptable) body, not these shriveled, fallen breasts.

I dreamed of an enormous balloon pulled by all the grackles in Lenin Park, and I would ride inside the balloon and travel far, far away, so far away . . .

I dreamed of having the same husband for a long time.

I dreamed of having a son who wasn’t gay, but a big strong carpenter or bricklayer.

I dreamed of a typewriter with an Ñ.

I dreamed I wasn’t bald.

I dreamed I had a nightmare—I lived in a janitor’s closet in the Hotel Monserrate, and while people kept their eye on me and watched me, I kept them under surveillance too. And when I woke up I saw that the nightmare was true, so I tried to dream that I was dreaming.

I dreamed of reams and reams of white paper that I could write a novel on.

I dreamed of an almond tree growing in front of my house.

I dreamed that a naked angel came and carried me away.

I dreamed that you didn’t have to have a ration book to buy salt.

I dreamed that I was young and healthy and that there was an overgrown lot across the street from my house where horny recruits hung out waiting for me.

I dreamed that I turned on the faucet and there was water.

I dreamed of a city like the one I lost, but free.

I dreamed of avenues and broad tree-shaded promenades.

I dreamed of a huge country sort of house with a palm-thatch roof and a zinc-roofed breezeway that the rain made a loud noise on.

I dreamed of a Chinese-made electric fan.

I dreamed that Lezama and María Luisa were in a big room and they called me and when I went over to them Lezama was saying to María Luisa,
Look how good he looks.

I dreamed of a pair of comfortable false teeth.

I dreamed that somebody was knocking on the door. I opened it, and there stood a smiling young man, all hot and ready.

I dreamed of a pressure cooker.

I dreamed of a river with green water that said to me,
Come, come, here lies the end of your desires.

I dreamed that I was going far, far away, and when I got far, far away I could still keep going far, far away . . .

I dreamed that a plague as terrible as AIDS could not be true, and that pleasure did not entail disaster.

I dreamed of the smell of the sea.

I dreamed that all the horror of the world was a dream.

When, after serving his two years’ sentence in the prison at El Morro, Skunk in a Funk took his first steps into freedom, he found his mother waiting for him with an even more pained and grief-stricken expression on her face than usual and a new shirt and a sack full of gofio in her hands. (He hated gofio, and always had—it was nothing but sweetened cornmeal, it tasted like sugar-laced sawdust, and it turned to mud and stuck to the inside of your mouth.) A wave of indescribable pity came over Skunk in a Funk when she saw her mother standing there with that faded, heavy sack.

His mother, weeping, said: “I came to get you so you’d come home with me to Holguín. Sooner or later you’re going to have to do it, so I think you should get it over with. It’s the only way out that’s left for you.”

Suddenly all the pity that Skunk in a Funk (and Reinaldo and Gabriel) had felt for the mother turned to fury—fury at life, at El Morro Castle, at himself, and at his mother. And so, turning to her, he replied:

“Mother, after I’ve lived for two years in a castle, don’t think I’m going to live in a hovel in Holguín. As long as I can remember, the only thing I ever wanted to do—and finally actually did—was get out of that town, get out of that awful house, get away from you, and now my plans are to get out of the country. I’m not going to live forever, and the time I have to live, I want to live somewhere besides here. So I’ll be seeing you.”

And Skunk in a Funk turned her back on his mother and started walking away as fast as he could. When he’d got more than a kilometer away, he turned and saw the figure of his mother standing on the esplanade before El Morro Castle, sack in hand. That’s the way I’ll remember you for the rest of my life, Skunk in a Funk said to himself, moved, and he even thought for a second about going back and embracing her, but then he took off running toward East Havana, where some enormous black men were tossing a ball into the air across the street from an improvised basketball court.

That night, Skunk in a Funk slept in the open, on the boulders in East Havana. The next morning, starving, he got in touch with the Brontë Sisters and found some shelter in Lenin Park. Lenin Park was an enormous craggy stretch of sandy ground turned suddenly, on a whim of Celia Sánchez, into a park. Unbelievably, at a word from Celia (with Fifo’s backing, of course), that wasteland to the south of Calabazar became an oasis, with enormous trees, a dam that made a lake in which they’d installed a floating stage before an amphitheater (where day and night Joan Manuel Serrat sang), and even eight or ten plywood vendors’ stands where you could buy, in unlimited quantities (a thing unheard of anywhere else in Cuba), anything from a glass of milk to a slice of cream cheese and some soda crackers. Lenin Park became a mecca for all the queens in Havana and for any recruits who wanted to screw a fairy out in the stands of reeds—all that without counting the high muckety-mucks in their Alfa Romeos who came to dine at Las Ruinas, a restaurant designed by Coco Salas herself, under the aegis of Celia. There you could also see all sorts of foreign tourists and the most sophisticated hookers (dressed head to foot in white) who would come to the park to pick up Greek sailors and carry them to the tearoom. In other words, my dear (by the way, have
you
been to Lenin Park yet?), that hot spot with its lake and its dam that had to be fed by a whole system of pipes and turbines—thereby depriving all of Havana of water—had become the coolest spot in all of Cuba.

It was there, then, that Skunk in a Funk took refuge, knowing that he’d not lack a place to sleep, trees to stroll under, and even a lake to bathe in, not to mention soldiers to devour and food that the Brontë Sisters would religiously bring him in exchange for the Skunk’s listening enthusiastically to their latest works of literature. He also pretended to be “rehabilitated,” and to prove it, he started pulling weeds up with his hands.

Naturally, after several weeks of Leninary life, Skunk in a Funk, accompanied by the Brontë Sisters (who were careful to walk at a distance of fifty yards from him), showed up at his Aunt Orfelina’s house, but all his aunt had to do was open the door to the ex-jailbird fairy (whom she herself had reported as a counterrevolutionary queer) and she turned fiery red with patriotic outrage and threatened to call the police if he ever so much as walked down her street again. The diabolic aunt, covering her face with one hand in a sign of shame, slammed the door with the other hand while Chucho, her husband (being sodomized by the Key to the Gulf at the time), fired several shots into the air with the pistol that the Party had authorized him to carry, just in case of a national emergency.

Accompanied by the ever more nervous Brontë Sisters, Skunk in a Funk returned once more to Lenin Park.
These trees are apparently going to be my grave,
he said to himself on entering Celia Sánchez’ woods once more. The Brontë Sisters opened their huge sacks and took out a number of huge notebooks, and they began to read aloud—novels, short stories, poems, plays, songs, autobiographies, and long essays. . . .
No, I was wrong. This wood is not my grave,
Skunk in a Funk said to himself as one of the Brontës read a thousand-page poem,
it’s my hell, the hell that awaits us before and after death.
Yet the Skunk had to listen to those infinitely monotonous compositions because it was the Brontës who kept him supplied with cream cheese, chocolate, and soda crackers, not to mention other more humdrum sorts of victuals. Plus, where was a nonperson stamped for the rest of her life as an ex-criminal going to find bread and shelter? Ay, the poor fairy stretched out on the Leninist grass and listened to the droning of that infinite reading. One of the Brontë Sisters (Simón) was working (tirelessly) on a novel titled
La perlana,
and although he’d already gotten to page 5237, that number was absolutely provisional, since on any given night it might be swollen by more than two hundred pages more. He wandered Havana with the immense novel under his arm and whenever he bumped into a friend (or distant acquaintance) he would greet the person with this question: “Want me to read you a chapter from
La perlana?
” And although Simón would start reading, he’d never come to a stopping place, so his detainee would finally have to flee. In time, the youngest Brontë’s need to read people a chapter of
La perlana
became so pressing that he started stopping absolute strangers in the middle of the street or going up to passengers on the Number 69 bus to read them a chapter of his novel. But so dreadful was this unpublished text that soon it became famous throughout Havana, and its fame even spread to the provinces. All it took was for the youngest of the Brontë girls to appear in a park somewhere or stand in line at a movie or get on a bus, and a stampede (in the opposite direction, of course) would follow. Before the innocent-sounding yet desperate question “Want me to read you a chapter from
La perlana?
” there would be mass exoduses, clandestine escapes in boats or by swimming (with pursuit by Bloodthirsty Shark). There had even been a number of suicides. Why, even the Brontë Sisters’ poor mother had hanged herself one night when there was a full moon and a chapter from
La perlana
was echoing and re-echoing through her wooden house, while the father, his eardrums burst, went off to become a charcoal-maker in the Zapata swamps. But totally oblivious to the disasters that they set off (it wasn’t
just
poor Simón’s fault), the Brontë Sisters kept on determinedly writing. And even more so now that they finally had a real reader, a captive reader, the sort of reader who, as in the cigar factories or prisons of the old days, was forced to sit quietly and listen to the voice that read the yawn-inducing text. Nor was it just a
chapter
from
La perlana
that Skunk in a Funk had to listen to every day—it was hundreds of big unending notebooks full. Pedro (the oldest of the girls, and the leader of the family group) would come to Lenin Park, settle his enormous backside onto a rock (which would disappear under his buttocks), and in a voice that seemed to issue from an amphora, would announce: “I am going to read from
The Boy and the Sea Horse.
” And he would wander off into lord knows what sinister labyrinths of lyricism in which a beautiful rosy child (Pedro himself, idealized) was pursued by an evil sea horse than never, unfortunately, managed to put an end to him. After that inconclusive reading, the remaining Brontë (Pablo) would rummage in her bag and produce a poem of only ten thousand lines of rhymed couplets in homage to Cassandra.
Cassandra Forever
—that was the title of the still-unfinished poem. And apparently it
was
forever that Skunk in a Funk was going to have to sit and listen to the cracked voices reading Cassandra, the sea horse, or the infinite chapters of
La perlana.
In the face of those cathartic outpourings, Skunk in a Funk opted for escape. (Always escape.) And he began to wander through El Vedado—discreetly, of course, since everyone knew that Fifo didn’t allow vagrants in the city. Oh, except for the Cavalier de Paris, and only then because the Cavalier de Paris went around distributing leaflets titled
God, Peace, and Fidel
. . . . Ay, how many times, in order to survive, had the poor fairy Skunk in a Funk had to take shelter under the cape of the Cavalier de Paris (who, by the way, was Alejo Carpentier) and suck his member in order to put something in his stomach, even if only a few drops of semen.

And so it was that one day the fairy found himself trying to squeeze a few drops of semen out of that aged, noble writer who wandered the street incognito—when suddenly a neutered she-cat, also a lover of the male milk, slithered under the Cavalier’s enormous cassock. She-cat and fairy fought a brief but furious battle, a violent exchange of meows, wails, howls, screams, scratches, and kicks—all of this between the legs of the poor old writer who, with those two wild beasts hanging on his testicles, began to run wildly up and down La Rampa shrieking curses in French. Finally, Skunk in a Funk, whose fury was greater than the she-cat’s, took the animal by the scruff of the neck and threw her into the air. The she-cat, giving a death howl, fell at the feet of her owner, Helia del Calvo, who had been looking for her all over the city.

“No one has
ever
treated one of my cats this way,” Helia del Calvo said to Skunk in a Funk.

“Lady,” replied Skunk in a Funk, “I’d tear a
panther
to pieces, much less a cat, if it tried to steal my food.”

And before the astonished eyes of Helia del Calvo, Skunk in an Funk picked up the moribund she-cat, disemboweled it with his bare hands, and devoured it.

“You’re just the person I need!” Helia del Calvo exclaimed. “If you can do that to this cat, who’s so fierce she’s been making my life miserable for fifteen years, then you’ll probably be able to cat-sit
all
my cats and find fish to feed them with. I have twenty-seven. Do whatever you have to do—I’ll give you a place to stay and all the fish you can eat.”

And so it was that Skunk in a Funk found himself living in Helia del Calvo’s house on Calle Jovellar in central Havana. Helia was a dotty old woman who’d been the lover of Pichilingo, one of the comandantes who had been with Fifo in the Sierra Maestra. But since Pichilingo hadn’t died in combat, he’d later been killed by Fifo himself, who’s
never
been able to tolerate competition. Helia’s grief at the terrible death of her lover (Fifo buried him alive) drove her mad, and she started picking up all the stray she-cats in the neighborhood and bringing them home with her. She also started picking up all the teenagers in the neighborhood and trying to bring them into her bed with her, too, but since all of them politely turned down her invitation, Helia finally gave herself over, body and soul, to her she-cats, which, lacking he-cats, would either try to screw anything they could find or simply writhe in crazed lust on the floor. To try to curb their sexual appetite, Helia had had all her she-cats neutered, and yet, alas, the neutering hadn’t ended the animals’ sexual hunger, and that made her very sad. Helia adored her she-cats because secretly, she herself was one. Feline, voracious, never satisfied, self-centered, vengeful, and diabolic, she had made up her mind to outlive Fifo, and had sworn to throw a dead she-cat into his grave. Her hatred and, of course, her cats were what was keeping her alive. The tyranny with which she ruled over the animals was terrible—she wouldn’t even let them go out onto the balcony. Once when Helia opened the door to the balcony, two cats leaped out the door, jumped over the railing, and committed suicide. From that time on, the house was kept hermetically sealed, and since it was illuminated by powerful lightbulbs that added
kilowatts
of heat, the temperature inside hovered at somewhere around 123 degrees.