The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (50 page)

That false, forged information she feeds Fifo—disinformation feebly feigning faithfulness to the facts, but in fact faked—so fully and unfairly deforms the prima facies of the case that it should be flatly dismissed as fictional flights of fancy. Furthermore, the false facts she feeds Fifo—falsehoods vilely betraying fellow poets and patriots—are the unpublishable fictions of a fibbing informant frustrated in publishing fictions legitimately. Phooey on all fibbing informants feeding Fifo fiction!

For Paula Amanda

Miami, May 9, 1998

Dearest Reinaldo,

I suspect you haven’t gotten the other letters I’ve been sending you from Paris, New York, and even Timbuktu. I’ll write more another day, but for now I just wanted to drop you this note to tell you that I’ve never felt such a cosmic, suffocating, and implacable loneliness as I’ve been feeling on these beaches in Miami. Everything is so dehumanized, so alien, so plastic, so monumental, so soulless. The mystery of a little grove of palm trees, a sheltered place in the sand, a hill (even a tiny little hill) on which you can stand and look out over a palm grove and feel the wind in your face, a dusty path winding down to the water’s edge, a wild jasmine plant, the water so clear that you can see the bottom—a place where there’s the chance of a chance meeting, and where there’s a high sky, and a street with sidewalks and doorways—all of that, all of it
lost.
I put up a Christmas tree this year, decorated it, painted the apartment, read some of my texts aloud—to help me remember you. But nothing works. I reach out to touch and I can’t touch myself. I don’t exist and yet I suffer from my existence. I don’t belong to
this
world, yet I know, of course, that the world I yearn for no longer exists.

Don’t think for a second that this climate is like Havana’s. The city is an oven. I say city, but it really isn’t a city; it’s more like a conglomeration of short, squat, spread-out housing projects—a cowboy town where the automobile has elbowed out the horses.

I’m dying of loneliness, dying of love. I’m dying because of all the things I don’t have, because of all the things I wanted to do and never got to do. Because of all that I did do, and all the things I had but didn’t know I had, and therefore lost. Because of all that I didn’t have the sense to enjoy while I had it. Because of all that I enjoyed and that doesn’t belong to me anymore. Because of all the things that I’ll never do now. Where to find a place in which to live out this horror?—And as though all these other horrors were not enough, I also have to work so I can keep on being horrified. I’ve washed cars, I’ve washed floors, I’ve washed dishes in hotels. Sometimes I get lucky and I make off with a whole set of china and sell it in Southwest Miami—with the help of Pedro Ramona Lépera, let me add, a petty criminal who’s famous here (where there’s so much competition that achieving that kind of fame is not easy). But other people may have had it even worse. SuperChelo, for instance, was stabbed and died instantly, covered in oil; if you see her down there, it’s her spirit that you’re seeing. Some people said it was drugs, but the
real
gossips—who unfortunately almost always get it right—say that it was a murder planned by Chelo. Then there’s Miguel Correderas—with that huge hairy body of his, I hear somebody thought he was a bear and tried to stick him in the zoo. Fortunately he was saved by the fact that he now has his American citizenship, which he managed to get because he’d spent more than a year in jail accused of the perfect homicide. I saw the old thing yesterday—she looked like a plucked rooster, as the song says (or said). He told me he’s going through a terrible time financially because besides the fact that his parents came from Cuba he’s got a lover. He went to an employment agency to get a job as a licensed cocksucker; he figured he’d do home delivery, if you know what I mean, for the most respectable gentlemen of the city. So poor Correderas, after filling out
reams
of forms and I don’t know what—they gave him an aptitude test. I mean they had him give this old guy a blow job in front of the licensing board—and you won’t believe this, but the fairy flunked! Is it a tough field here or what? Can you imagine, that poor old queen who’d spent her whole life sucking cock in vacant lots and undergrowth, and now they won’t give her her license? I mean, how humiliating! But it just goes to show you—here in Miami, our calvary is unending. . . .

But there
is
one ray of hope—people are saying that Fifo’s fall may come any day now—though you don’t see anybody doing anything to help him along. I hope it’s true. But I wouldn’t want to live to see 2000, and if I’ve hung on this long (I’m sure you know I have AIDS) it’s in the distant hope that someday, somehow, we may be able to meet again and be just one person, the way we used to be. That may happen only after death; I don’t know. Of course I’m not so sure of the existence of the Beyond, either. In fact I’ll tell you the truth, I frankly don’t think there’s any there
there
—no Beyond, and no Here, either. I remember Cuba and I feel like screaming. I look at myself here, and I
am
screaming. How can I go on living like this—nowhere—with one piece of my soul here and another piece there, with my life split in two (or maybe a million) pieces? I am just a shell of myself, the old dried-out rind of myself. That is my tragedy. This might sound tacky, or even incredible, to you, but it’s
worse
than a tragedy—it’s my life. This rind will never be able to fill the void within its rindness. I will never be able to join myself to myself again. I will never again be myself, or you—which is the same thing. This ocean, this beach, this sun—they have nothing to do with that man I once was; no complicity links us, none of these places recognizes me, or ever will. If I live another hundred years here, I will still be a stranger, a foreigner, an
alien
.

Now I’m going to take my horror out for a walk along the beach—which at least has less surveillance than it had down there. After I come back, I may write a few pages—the last. Glory and martyrdom, my dear—it’s all that keeps me going. It’s late. Everybody around me is asleep. I’m still awake.

Think of me as an infinite but always present absence, and know that I send you the tenderest, most eternal affection.

Yours,

Reinaldo

Rubén Valentín Díaz Marzo, the Areopagite, had a two-room apartment in the Hotel Monserrate, one of the most appalling dives in all of Old Havana. The variety of tenants sheltered by this rundown flophouse was
amazing
—retired hookers; obese marchionesses such as Mahoma; clandestine clairvoyants such as Sakuntala la Mala; insanely fiendish ballet lovers such as Coco Salas; queens with unquenchable rectal fires such as Eachurbod; murderous bull dykes such as Beba Carriles, who had a female slave, a husband, and several children, bragged about her knowledge of the law, and passed herself off as a witch; well-plowed dancers such as Miss Mayoya, who passed herself off as a virgin field; slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am fairies such as SuperSatanic; refined bull macho butt-stuffers such as the Flower Boys, who never screwed a queen without first wringing her neck; well-mannered, superendowed, and super-
super
-sought-after hustlers like the Key to the Gulf; triple agents for State Security, the KGB, and the CIA such as Kilo Alberto Montamier, who stayed in that fleabag hotel on his supposedly clandestine visits so he’d “fit in”; traffickers in yard goods, black beans, refrigerators, and works of art such as Ramón Sernada (a.k.a. the Ogress); former chairwomen of the Comités para la Defensa de la Revolución, those nefarious Watchdog Committees, who would drag themselves and their huge tits along the hotel’s ancient marble halls and up and down its stairways; poètes manqués; women like Teresa Rabijo, who’d been abandoned with her three kids; pimps with long eyelashes and immeasurable meat; drug dealers; pianists without pianos; transvestites that still owned twenty-seven wigs, such as Alderete; former lovers of former captains and former Party members; gorgeous bisexual teenagers and male sluts such as Pepe, Beba Carriles’ son; judokas, santeros, karatecas, sailors. . . . That was the congeries of people who lived in the Hotel Monserrate; that was the explanation for the deafening, boiling vibration that came from the hotel. These were the people doing all that shrieking and yelling.

Day and night, all you could hear was doors being kicked down, the screams of hookers being stabbed to death, the throbbing of drums, jealous dykes slapping each other, political speeches, glasses being smashed against walls and floors, exorcisms in Lucumí, Chopin’s
Swan Lake
(to which Coco Salas and Mayoya would dance), a crazy old woman constantly calling out to some guy named Jesús who never answered her, the unbelievable goings-on of a family of incestuous pygmies—seven brothers who were constantly fighting over their only sister. When the “domestic disturbance” would start, everybody would say “There go Snow White and the Seven Pygmies!” . . . But in all that racket, it was almost impossible to discern any
specific
noise. The noises of that hellish concert all ran together so, that you couldn’t pick out any scream in particular. Gigantic black men in shorts would prowl the halls of that seven-story wreck armed not only with pricks that would open any door, but also with crowbars that would pry open the vaults of the Banco Nacional before you knew what was happening. And if there was no peace in the hotel rooms, there was even less of it, honey, in the halls, where a constant stream of whores, tops, bottoms, dealers in anything you could imagine, unpublished writers—you name it—would be going up and down the stairs yelling and knocking on doors. It wasn’t unusual to come across a member of the Communist Youth Organization on the stairway, being screwed by an old drunk; one daily spectacle was provided by several Chinese sisters who were forever having their catfights in the halls. . . . Greek sailors, mulattoes from Coco Solo, Asian recruits, and screaming Lawton queens would stand in line in front of the door to Skunk in a Funk’s room. While she was being taken from behind (once again) by the Key to the Gulf, she’d be looking out the peepholes to see the procession that awaited her.

And as though all that were not enough, hundreds of homeless men and women and former fugitives from justice had taken up residence on the roof, setting up their tents and even building fires to keep warm and do their cooking—which meant that several times the Holy City they had built up there had been invaded by firemen who, seeing all those people, would run back down the stairs in terror. Among the people who set up their tents on the roof of the Hotel Monserrate was Odoriferous Gunk, with his dying mother.

Naturally the Hotel Monserrate had only one entrance. And before the door to the hotel there would gather a huge crowd of pickpockets, murderers who murdered for the fun of it, fairies cruising, and guys selling foreign jeans that were “wrapped up in this newspaper here,” though the package contained nothing but a bunch of rags. (The only pair of pants the con man owned was the pair he had on.) Also at the hotel entrance was a bus stop, at which every bus headed for Old Havana, Marianao, El Vedado, and Guanabo supposedly had to stop—which meant that at the door of the Hotel Monserrate there were not only the persons mentioned just above but also, like a throng of the faithful before the gates of Jerusalem, a crowd of people, all carrying shopping bags, who would rain curses on the mother of God and the bus driver when—as was almost invariably the case—the bus would howl by without stopping, leaving in its wake a cloud of pestilential exhaust.

One day, at precisely three o’clock in the afternoon, a really strange thing happened at that bus stop. A bus shrieked to a stop before the door of the Hotel Monserrate and before you could blink—it disappeared! It, my dear, and all its passengers, who were mugged, stripped of their belongings, carved up, and sold as cuts of beef all over Old Havana. As for the bus itself, Mahoma, Coco Salas, SuperSatanic, and Mayra the Mare (who also lived in the hotel) instantly turned it into earrings, combs, pots and pans, table knives, and even metal sandals that made a hellish racket you could hear all over the building. The inhabitants of the Hotel Monserrate lived for days and days in terror as Fifo’s police searched the building from top to bottom and inside out. Finally, the police found one of the wheels off the carved-up bus under Alderete’s bed. So as to avoid being carved up himself, Alderete made a run for it, changing wigs at every corner. All the inhabitants of the building were charged as accomplices to a political crime, since the fact of wanting to keep, or conspiring to keep, the wheel off a bus was proof—according to the prosecutor—that every one of them was about to try to escape the Island.

In order to jail all the tenants until a trial could be held—which of course might take years—Fifo ordered a gigantic iron prison gate installed across the Hotel Monserrate’s only door. But with criminals like these, my dear, there was no security measure that anybody could take that would
ever
work. Within hours, Snow White and the Seven Pygmies, aided by Beba Carriles, the Clandestine Clairvoyant, and Mayoya, had dug a tunnel that came out in a big seven-door refrigerator in the bar on the first floor. Thousands of half-frozen criminals poured through the bar to freedom. Other stratagems were also employed by the whores and fairies so they could get out and fornicate even while the gate remained locked tighter than a drum. To give just one quick example, Beba Carriles’ slave, known as Dimwit, a countrywoman from Pinar del Río and purportedly a virgin, would dangle from the window in a huge sack tied to a rope attached to a pulley that Pepe, Beba’s son, would operate. Pepe would lower the sack with Beba’s slave inside down to the street level; the slave’s current boyfriend would climb into the sack with her (coining a phrase in use in Cuba to this day), screw her eyes out, and then take off; and the Dimwit would have herself, much relieved, pulled back up again by Pepe. Then the Dimwit, who as always had picked the pocket of her boyfriend of the moment, would turn over to Pepe the fortune that she’d reaped: a tin matchbox, a pack of cigarettes, a linen handkerchief . . .

It looked as though the building were sentenced to quarantine for life. So the tenants started throwing down onto Calle Monserrate (the street on which the eponymous hotel stood) every imaginable object and all manner of filth, especially urinals full of piss and plastic bags filled with excrement. They also rained down dead rats, dishes, gigantic platform shoes (made by Mahoma) that would cause the immediate death of anyone struck by one, bloody Kotex, aborted fetuses. Once a poor old lady who had been waiting patiently for over a year for a Number 98 bus was hit by a bloody hand thrown from the roof by a drugged-out satan-worshiping homeless man who had been celebrating a religious ritual (in which Odoriferous Gunk took part) involving human body parts. A lead mannequin once fell off the balcony of Coco Salas’ room and made a huge hole in the middle of Calle Monserrate, not to mention taking the lives of several militia boys. Another day, a big sinister bull dyke—a sculptor who’d been given both a Guggenheim and a Wilson Center Fellowship for work which consisted of runny-looking splayed-out turds—was thrown from the balcony by her husband (Sr. Marsopo Antoni), instantly becoming what she had always sculptured: a huge splat of shit.

In addition to flicking lice and ticks down into the street, the itinerants up on the roof would spend their days throwing rocks (which Pepe would haul up with his pulley) at pigeons, trying to kill them for dinner. These hungry vagrants seldom had much luck hitting the pigeons, but they often (perhaps accidentally) hit the students at a high school across the street. Several students died from brain injuries after being hit in the head with rocks. Because of these killings and several other, more minor casualties, a new wave of police officers stormed the building, to do another search. But this time they didn’t leave. For several days, little packages of ground meat would be tossed from the building to homemakers on the street below, who would tussle and elbow each other for the prize—and generally catch the packages before they hit the ground. All this despite a rain of foul-smelling, bloody water that also fell on the furiously shoving housewives.

The truth was, by now Fifo’s Secret Police were seriously considering taking down the prison gate at the entrance to the Hotel Monserrate and letting the people inside get on with their lives; the internment was more expensive than the danger to public safety if they were all set free. The last straw—the event that brought down the iron bars at last—was laid by Coco Salas. For months, Coco had been using a telescope to watch a teenager at the high school across the street. One day, Coco threw the teenager a note inviting him up to his room. He wrapped the note, a twenty-peso bill, and a little Tiffany lamp to give the package some weight, in a page from the Revolution’s (and Cuba’s only) newspaper,
Granma,
and he lobbed it across the street. The gorgeous twink picked up the note and read it; it contained the secret of the entrance to the hotel through the refrigerator in the bar next door. All he had to do, the note said, was bribe the manager with the twenty pesos. The young man, who was nothing if not quick-witted—it was Davidcito, one of the most sinister faggots on earth in spite of the fact that nobody would ever have suspected he was “that way”—crawled through the refrigerator and came up to Coco’s room. He was sporting an irresistible hard-on as he came through the door, and he instantly started stripping off his clothes. Coco wasn’t far behind. But then Davidcito pushed Coco out onto the balcony and locked the door from the inside! That left the old queen naked and imprisoned on his own balcony, which as luck would have it was directly over Calle Monserrate (oh, I forgot—it was also called Avenida de Bél-gica). While Coco, standing naked on the balcony, pleaded with David to open the door, David took the queen’s enormous suitcases and a big portmanteau he found in the back of the closet and packed up all the queen’s belongings—including some old ballet slippers, a box of mosquitoes, and some fresh surveillance reports that Coco hadn’t even had time to turn in to Fifo’s computers. Giving the manager of the bar a handsome tip (a mosquito bigger than a turtle), the teenage hustler strutted out of the building.

From the balcony, the naked queen saw David emerge from the building and make his way down the street, dragging all her belongings behind him. At that, Coco began to scream like an air-raid siren. For more than a week that horrid old thing ran from one end of the balcony to the other, screaming. All Havana was put on alert; everyone was nervous; there was even talk of a curfew. Not only did Coco’s screaming interrupt Halisia’s sleep, and Fifo’s; his naked body, running from one end of the balcony to the other on the busiest street in Havana—a block from Central Park—made a visual as well as aural impact that drove away tourists, counter-spies, and important journalists. Finally, some two hundred midgets from Fifo’s crack Secret Police took down the iron gate at the entrance to the hotel and released the howling banshee from the balcony.