The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (49 page)

A glistening erotic boar’s tooth was certain to emerge from each of those monumental statues. Even one of Cellini’s Perseuses, lance at the ready, waited, and still waits, for us before the doors of the Bargello, and a black Bacchus with a deliciously domesticated serpent awaits us when we cross the Ponte Vecchio, while panting Antinouses beg for our kisses in galleries and museums. The Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo della Signoria, or Palazzo Vecchio as it is often called, where the nobility of Florence met to rule the city, was (and still is) surrounded by men with naked balls, some displaying irresistible erotic intentions, others engaged in daring sexual combat, such as Hercules and Diomedes—as
Hercules holds a spread-legged Diomedes, his testicles and prick inflamed, Diomedes still more daringly grabs Hercules’ twin manly orbs and phallus, while an Alcibiades with clenched ass and magnificent Etruscan pontoon observes the scene.

We should not be surprised that in such a city, in which the most beautiful young men had been reproduced in the nude and much larger than life-size, a virulent fever, a veritable epidemic, of male and female nymphomarmoreals should break out. At night, and sometimes in broad daylight, men and women would copulate for hours on end with the statues. Catherine dei’ Medici was excommunicated several times by the pope for having been discovered on numerous occasions in the Piazza della Signoria impaling herself on Neptune’s erotic trident. It is said that on more than one occasion Dante was hung by his servants from the enormous breasts of Giambologna’s Sabine. And as for Lorenzo the Magnificent, he had such a desire to be possessed by the god Apollo that he stripped naked and backed into the statue located on the Ponte Victoria, thereby introducing into himself the divine attribute which drove Juana la Loca loca, yet toppling the statue from its pedestal, both man and god tumbling, still as it were engaged, into the depths of the Arno. Lorenzo was saved thanks to the skillful maneuvers of some fishermen, but the statue of Apollo remained at the bottom of the river, inflaming it to such a degree that its aroused waters overflowed their banks, flooded the city, and rose all the way to the tomb of Beatrice de Portinari. But the eros aroused by those naked men with their magical, enchanted wands not only impregnated the entire city (and the river), but also inflamed the very pigeons with lust. In flocks these birds would fly all over Florence and, desperate (the poet Zenea, present here with us tonight, will be able to confirm the case), bill and coo among the gigantic germinative orbs and peck at the magic flute. So overwhelming was the invasion of Florence by these winged creatures that since that day, in the language of the Tuscans every fairy is a pigeon, and Signora Medici-Riccardi, who found that there were so many birds that she was barely able to fornicate with the statues any longer, issued an edict which sentenced to death any golondrina that lighted upon those marmoreal ephebes. And since then, the pigeons, driven mad by their inability to peck the fruit of Adam, fly, shrieking, up into the sky and then dive headfirst into Giotto’s campanile. Yes, they, like so many others, prefer death to a life in which they are forbidden to experience the dart of Eros. This suicidal event is the reason the Duomo is visited every spring by millions of tourists, who know that there will be plenty of fresh meat in both senses of the word. The flesh of the pigeon (pun intended, my dear friends) is, of course, a delicacy. And once more I turn for confirmation to the great bard Zenea.

Thus we see that the pinnacle of Florentine culture (or its vita nuova) was a true pinnacle, for it was a phallic pinnacle, a tribute to the god Priapus and a recognition of those who incorporated the serpent of the outside world into their own. Peace reigned in the Piazza della Signoria, and in the city as a whole, for more than two hundred years. Imagine an entire people being possessed by the most glorious gods, the strongest and most muscular athletes. Do you suppose they had time or motive for vain complaints against their neighbors? When una madonna or a country girl was not absolutely fulfilled by her husband or her lover (or by both), there, among the trunks of a little glade, she could find a magnificent Apollo waiting for her, his glistening boa always erect. And as for the country boy, the priest, the poet, and the melancholy prince, they might easily make their afflictions fly—all they had to do was wander into the woods a bit, and they could screw or be screwed by Hercules, or lift that purse they wore to cover their groin and back into a sword-wielding Perseus. The people laughed and sang thanksgivings to the staff that measures all and consoles all. Only the pigeons went on committing suicide, as did the crabs and turtles who, of course, were unable to climb the phallus Nike. And who was that city screwing and being screwed by if not the city itself? Because who were, after all, those pagan gods, those heroes, those magnificent Biblical figures, if not the youths of the popolo who for a thousand lires would allow themselves to be painted au naturel? We can safely say that the great period of Florentine culture was an age of unparalleled equality because everyone lived in a democracy of the phallus.

In the midst of that erotic riot, Michelangelo, who had already decorated the Sistine Chapel for the pope, was hired by the rulers of the city to make a statue of David for the city, larger than life-size. The artist went to the Ponte Vecchio, and there he hired a giovanotto of slender build who might pass for the Biblical hero.

When they arrived at the studio, Michelangelo ordered the young man to remove his clothes while he himself unveiled a huge piece of marble brought down from the mountains of Siena. When the master turned around again, hammer and chisel in hand, he saw that his model had a veritable flamboyán tree, and that it was the season of flower. But as he was accustomed to seeing splendid bodies, he went on with his work. Nevertheless, as the great master, for purely professional reasons, continued to lay eyes—though nothing else—upon the young man, the young man gave signs of a tremendous length of phallus, which in fact grew longer with every chisel blow, as though the sound of the chisel on the stone were the pealing of some magical bell. The great sculptor gazed at that impressive show and discovered that the part between the shaft and the glans looked extraordinarily dimesticable (if I may be pardoned the Italian, but after all, we are in Florence) and that the length that extended in almost a straight line from the glans to the place where two cannonballs lay (as polished and rosy as strawberries from a Rabelaisian garden) was indeed considerable, even to the eye of a Florentine sculptor. The priapic rod, which perfectly reproduced the corporeal leptosomia of its owner,
made the great master’s eyelids flutter several times, but since he had a Biblical hero to carve, he went on with his chiseling. But the Florentine’s python continued to uncoil. It was impossible to stop looking at it; it was also impossible to carve it, because a true Biblical hero, who in addition had just killed a man with his slingshot, was hardly the sort of person to exhibit that prodigious altar candle striving to butt its head into some dark humid grotto. In the first place, the master could not carve the figure of the giovanotto if the giovanotto could not find a more (let us say) relaxed pose; in the second place, one would have to possess the cruelty of an Ottoman to dismiss one model with that gigantic erect Aaron’s rod and find another, less (shall we say) eager one. And so, leaning back against the virgin marble, the master looked once more, apart from any value judgment, at the Alexandrian lighthouse. The unquiet beauty of the youth was comparable only to that of a Greek warrior, spear raised, suddenly lost among the ranks of the Dalmatae and their cruel tumults. The master, across the room, fell to his knees. Then the giovanotto’s penetrant tool began to oscillate, rising and slapping against his breast, with each blow producing the vibration of a glorious campanum pealing out the Te Deum Laudamus. With the epicurean calculation of a Pascal (though Pascal had not yet given any signs of life), the master advanced toward the deity in the manner of the Chinese or the Tibetan monks; that is, contrite and on all fours. When the master arrived at the enormous tree of life, a bituminous whirlwind issued from his mouth.

But he remained immobile in the shadow of the umbravit, the creator of infinite possibilities. The umbravit—that is, the rounded, angelic presence of that virgin adolescent—flooded over him. And it was an invading shadow. Umbravit: a Florentine pontoon which blotted out the sun not with a finger but rather with its rosy glans. That shadow, like the apparition of a Potens, plus the circular, solar shadow of the adolescent balls, fell upon the face of Michelangelo, darkening it yet at the same time bathing it in celestial light. A wondrous relationship was silently forged between umbravit and the laboradit; that is, between that form delineated by the triumphal arc of balls and erect phallus (umbravit) and the titanic crepitations (laboradit) which emerged from the throat and tongue of the unexcelled fairy. The genius queen, now turned whimpering lamb, took shelter in the shadow of the phallic god, and as he leaped upward toward that monumental branch his chisel, his hammer, and a feather fell from him. This feather is part of the grand stew of Pythagorean cosmology, for in Aztec mythology the umbravit also acts by means of a white feather. That is, as Quetzalcoátl stood guard at the temple, grace was shown him in the form of a feather; he flew to it, picked it up, and with royal motions of his hands began to caress his sex and toucan’s balls until he came, in a powerful ejaculation which was the cause of the great lake of the City of Mexico, today the dunghill for that great city. The Olympian orgasm complete, Quetzalcoátl placed the feather under his great serpent, now in repose. “Feathered Serpent”—
such was the god’s name. Feathered serpent there, and also here. Here, the playful pigeon feather, fairy feather, fluttering down upon the sweet dome of the Florentine prick; there, a reigning feather between the balls and serpent phallus of that Mexican god who, thanks to that feather, passed into the eternity of myth, and through the fragrance of the feather which came from the West foretold a great invasion, a terrible, destructive war, sensed the defeat, and spurred on the combat. And these theological and historical deeds were produced by the magnificent Achilles’ heel of all fairies, the phallus
. . . .
At that instant the delicious giovanotto stepped forward, one hand on his hip, and, showing the same indifference as we see in a certain painting by Velázquez when the key to a city is presented upon a red pillow, deposited his phallus upon the red, cushiony tongue of Michelangelo, who in the presence of the literally palatable Priapic daemon became faint, as though struck inwardly by a tempest from Oceania, and at one gulp swallowed the magic cue with its enormous billiard balls.

The master stuffed those gigantic balls into his mouth and then sat back on his heels and nipped and bit at them as methodically and swiftly as a squirrel in New York’s Central Park plays with a walnut before leaping with it up into its dark lair. And that was precisely what the great sculptor did—with the agility of a trapeze artist in the Great Theater of Shanghai, he leaped up onto the Florentine lad’s prick and straddled it with his two skinny legs. Then he who was David took the master by the waist, deposited him on the culminative tip of his manhood and began to penetrate the master with his serpent, which butted and nosed its way forward with the sureness of the jungle mole, spreading open the countless rings of that dark anal grot. While the young man’s awl worked with impassioned artistry, Michelangelo bit one hand and with the other caressed the reproductive orbs that were battering his buttocks like the furious twin clappers of a bell calling the faithful to their unction. Many years later, as he was joyously dying, Michelangelo was to recall those caresses he had given the formidable germinative lobules, associating them with a Japanese history lesson in which an emperor, after losing his final battle, caresses the polished filigree of the handle of the sword with which he is about to commit hara-kiri. But suddenly, and with no warning or battle cry, the giovanotto introduced the full length of his rod of life into the backside of the great sculptor, who, giving a bellow of glory, opened his arms and was upheld only by the phallus of the youth, who was inching his way with ever greater perseverance along la via angosta. The master, as though possessed by some Titanic wind, began to rise through the air. And as he floated, he seemed to be ridden by a young hippogryph. Finally the master, perhaps under the weight of the still-drilling youth, fell to the floor, where the giovanotto began to pump his member in and out of the master’s body with such swiftness that it surpassed even his own sighs. And so that penetration became supersonic. At that, Michelangelo burst forth with a terrible
shrieking, which alarmed (and brought into the studio) the entire population of Florence, while the gladiators continued with their unparalleled combat. And then, in a final coup de grâce, the entire length of the imposing young Tuscan’s horn of flesh passed into the master’s cavern. Yet still not content with this advance, the young man grasped the master by the girdle of his loins and also plunged his two gigantic testicular onions into his channel. When the great sculptor felt not only the umbravit’s tree of life but also the seeds of the tree possess him, a pain (which was ineffable pleasure) came over him, and he tried to dislodge that enormous stalk and its two enormous bulbs from himself. But just as dogs when they couple in the street cannot separate themselves until the bout is done, just so Michelangelo could not unsheathe that magnificent virility from its scabbard and, unable to escape that transpiercing potency of life, the master began to bite, with all the voracity of a shark of the Caribbean Sea, the masses of marble that awaited his magical hands. His teeth now atomic drill bits (thereby stealing a march on Einstein by some four hundred years), and chiseling with the velocity of a Malayan typhoon, he carved a good number of the statues which, like the Pietà and other masterworks, are the glory of the Florentine Academy today. A cloud of dust arose from those marmoreal masses upon which it appeared that some beaver had attempted to carve out unending tunnels. Under that cloud of dust, the two gladiators (the younger one completely naked, the other with his sweaty cloak twisted up about his waist) continued their combat. The young man went on growing inside the master, and the master went on chewing up boulders and slabs of marble from Murano and Siena, carving out extraordinary works of art. The entranced Florentines gathered at windows and doors could also watch the colossal battle, like some silent film, on the walls of the great studio, where the gigantic shadows of the umbravit and the laboradit were projected in an extraordinary dance, creating a cinematographic precedent that would be followed centuries later by the brothers Lumière.