The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (52 page)

The story of Rubén Valentín Díaz Marzo, the Areopagite, like the story of every petty criminal, is a pathetic one. When he was a little boy, if his parents wanted to screw without him around they would just throw him out of the house, so the poor little thing would have to sit out on the porch and listen to his parents’ moaning—or more often, the racket they made as they slapped and yelled terrible insults at each other. As a teenager, while his mother was in bed with one of the neighbors (his father would be away on militia duty), Rubén was raped on the porch by a vagrant, then by a black man, and then—horrors!—by an old hag with huge tits who practically suffocated him not only with her tits but with her cunt as well, since she sat on Rubén’s face and made the poor thing eat beaver-pie. Then when he was a young man his parents fled to the United States, leaving him behind; since he was of military age, it was against the law for him to leave the country. And it was that same law that forced him into Obligatory Military Service, where in less than a month he’d been passed from hand to hand (i.e., raped) by his entire platoon, including the lieutenant and the head of the Political Section. Terrified and half dead, reeling from this dreadful experience, Rubén escaped from the camp and negotiated the
permuta
that we mentioned earlier, which left him not only swindled (because he never received the money that was coming to him) but thrown into the world to suffer even further outrages in his two-room “suite” in the Hotel Monserrate—for there, Mahoma, SuperSatanic, Coco Salas, Mayra the Mare, and all the other aging whores in the building immediately forced Rubén Valentín Díaz Marzo to screw them. Even one of Fifo’s foreign spies, who came into Cuba on a diplomatic passport and had an
unbelievable
potbelly, commanded the young man to “take her.” And to top off the humiliation, the spy, who signed her name “Anastasia Filipovna,” turned out to be a military officer in drag.

It was only to be expected, then, that the young man should develop an incurable sexual block. He would have liked to make love, he knew he would enjoy the act of sex, but he couldn’t do it. The only way he could enjoy sex was by watching other couples screw—and from a certain distance even then, since Fifo had handed down a law that punished peeping toms severely.

Thus, Rubén Valentín Díaz Marzo would go off to the parks in Havana, climb up in the leafiest tree he could find, and peek through the foliage at the benches on which lovers would be frenziedly making love. Then, protected by the foliage, Rubén would masturbate. It was only thus, sitting amidst the shady branches of a tree, that he could reach orgasm. And by now there wasn’t a tree in the entire city of Havana that the Areopagite hadn’t climbed up and jerked off in. Yes, the
Areopagite,
because so famous were his aerial masturbations as he looked down upon any sort of couple at all—men with women, tops with bottoms, German shepherds with midgets, vagrants with police chaplains—that Rubén Valentín Díaz Marzo had at last acquired that nickname—which was really more an honorific, or a title, than some tacky
nickname.
But the Areopagite would never be capable of making love to any of those bodies that writhed in pleasure as he secretly gazed upon them. He had to content himself—for such was the nature of his block—to watching, and to cumming all alone, among the leaves. He was, then, condemned to be the Areopagite for the remainder of his poor complex-ridden life!—Jesus! St. Nelly! Could anything be sadder than a poor man who can taste sexual pleasure only by spying on the pleasures of others?

Yes, sad indeed, my dear, is the Areopagite’s story. Sometimes he had to sit on a tree limb for hours on end, waiting for a lukewarm couple to heat up enough for the boyfriend to lift his girlfriend’s skirt and the girlfriend to grab her boyfriend’s member. No matter that rain soaked him to the skin, that sometimes lightning hit the very tree he was perched in, that the wind buffeted him in his nest—the Areopagite would cling to his branches with the stubbornness of a lizard. . . . My tears flood the page as I write the Areopagite’s tale, which I have heard his very lips, terrified and trembling, tell in a wrenching voice of loneliness, despair, and forever-unsatisfied longing. His is a sadness born of the horror and baseness of the present age. The poor Areopagite would madly hump the trunk of a spruce tree, a bully tree, a haya tree, a bay laurel tree, a thorny ceiba, or a swaying pine tree, and to muffled sighs and weeping he would at last ejaculate, while the impassioned lovers down below would actually, deliciously, couple.

Dear lord, and if to this we add the dire risks and near-fatal pratfalls that his erotic adventures sometimes entailed, then surely the reader will see how truly and terribly wretched the Areopagite’s life was. For instance, sometimes the uncontainable arc of his semen would fall from the heights down onto the face of a lover, who would indignantly discover the peeping tom above, grab rocks and sticks and anything else he could find, and hurl them furiously at the Areopagite, who would make his escape (by leaping from tree to tree) only at the risk of a fall that could easily break his leg, or even his very neck. But at other times, the Areopagite would actually be the cause of other people’s pleasure. Once, for instance, after a young lady had spent hours futilely sucking an impotent soldier’s cock, the Areopagite solved the problem when his stream of warm cum fell into the young woman’s face, naturally leading her to think that it was the soldier’s and that she had at last succeeded. She embraced her soldier in an ecstasy of pleasure, and from then on the couple always went to the same bench, where the Areopagite could generously bathe the young woman’s face with his love liquor. But mishaps occurred more often than successes. Many times as he came he would almost swoon, and he would lose his balance. At that, he would crash down out of the tree onto the impassioned lovers, who, enraged, would usually give him a double beating—for the physical damage he’d caused by falling on them and for the coitus interruptus. . . . Once the Areopagite made such a racket up in the tree that he was discovered by an army lieutenant whose meaty member was being deep-throated at the time by Carlitos Olivares, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba. The lieutenant, thinking that the Areopagite was a spy who’d report him to that jealous bitch Raúl Kastro, pulled out his pistol and, to the desperate shrieks of Carlitos, who thought she was about to be murdered, blasted away at the treetop. It was a miracle that Rubén got out of that one alive, I’ll tell you. And another time, when a bunch of students were having a little circle-jerk under a tree in Central Park, the Areopagite came crashing down on them and smashed several of their erect members flat; they almost kicked him to death. Another time, in Lenin Park, the Areopagite lost his grip on a huge rubber tree under which a hundred scouts in the Camilo Cienfuego troop of the Followers of Ché Guevara had formed a delicious daisy chain. The ensuing fall broke not only the daisy chain but the bones of the poor Areopagite as well, who in spite of his injuries had to make his escape before the scouts could pull up their shorts and stone him to death.

Over time, the Areopagite conceived a special voyeuristic fantasy—he dreamed of climbing up into the rafters of the García Lorca Theater and jerking off while Azari Plizeski or Jorge Esquivel made love to Halisia Jalonzo, naked, in her dressing room. To fulfill this fantasy, he sought Coco Salas’ help, and at last, after making all manner of promises to Coco (even going so far as pledging to make the Key to the Gulf Coco’s own personal and exclusive sex slave), he was allowed to climb up into the heights of the theater, from where he could look down into Halisia’s dressing room. That night, like almost every night, Halisia hobbled out on her crutches to the middle of the stage (this was just an ordinary performance—no mosquitoes) and danced
Giselle.
At one of the ballet’s most romantic moments, when Giselle was dancing with that gorgeous prince with the big basket, Halisia whirled offstage for a moment, stuck her hand into her cunt, pulled out a bloody Kotex, and then did a marvelous (and most uncommon) jeté into the arms of the prince—to deafening applause. Oh, but the desperate Areopagite, who was hoping for something a bit more erotically inspiring, was so disappointed that he lost his grip on the rope he was hanging on and fell onto the stage—at the precise moment the entire corps de ballet had encircled the lovers in a beautifully choreographed scene. Leaping off the stage, the Areopagite tried to escape, but Fifo’s implacable police, tipped off by the all-knowing midgets, grabbed him before he could get away.

So now the Areopagite is awaiting trial for contempt, sabotage, and personal damages—crimes punishable by up to eleven years in prison and a thousand rations of five pesos each. And Skunk in a Funk, the Areopagite’s friend and confessoress, has promised to intervene for him. This very afternoon, in fact, Skunk has an appointment with Blas Roka at the Palace of Justice. Oh, yes, she was going to speak to Blas, whose prick the Skunk had sucked once in an elevator when she was on her way to the courtroom to be tried for corrupting the morals of a minor. Once again she would get on her knees before the old militant in the Communist Party Central Committee, kiss his shriveled balls—all that and
much more
the poor Skunk would do to save that poor, long-suffering Areopagite from prison. For once in prison, what tree or statue was the poor voyeur ever going to be able to climb in order to get his rocks off? Yes—she, Skunk in a Funk, was willing to perform the most
appalling
sacrifices, even go so far as to suck Blas Roka’s cock, or Felipe Carnedehado’s, even to screw Alfredo (Güé) Güevavara—anything, everything—she would do it all if it would free the poor lonely Areopagite,
son frère, son semblable,
from the claws of justice. . . . Yes, but first I’ve got to go over to Clara Mortera’s house—she gave me an ultimatum, and I’ve
got
to run over to her room on Wall Street in time for that meeting. My heavens, what’s gotten into that creature? And the worst part of it is that I can’t say I’m not going because in addition to being such a horrid sinister old woman she’s a genius, and
mon semblable,
too—plus she’d done me no end of favors. So I’ll go. Then we’ll see about Blas.

Ah, the jolly Goya-Girl, all curls and gurgles. Her tastes, god-awful, run to gaudy jewelry, gewgaws, gadgets, gimcracks, gentry, country junkets, jocks in jeweled jockstraps she can chew on, and youngish hunks with monikers such as Yeyo, Yayo, Gugo, Lastayo, and Tellez. The Goya-Girl lures the yummy gullible youngish hunks she goes for with gifts of yo-yos, pogo sticks, boomerangs, bronze gongs from Hong Kong, glass balls, rolls of foil, oil, doilies, go-go-girl thongs, and funky old g-strings; then when they’re gaga over the goodies, she gulps down their lingams and engulfs them in cunning Goya-Girl tonguings or, gurgling, humps them.

For Tomasito the Goya-Girl

Eachurbod shot like lightning out of the gigantic men’s room.

She was
so
furious at missing out on that wonderful phallus—which she was
just
about to pop into her mouth—that for an hour she could hardly see.

Meanwhile, back in the gigantic men’s room, in the cloud of dust she left when she made her exit, all the men were still pissing and singing along with the Condesa in
Norma,
while Eachurbod, momentarily blind, pushed her way through the crowd, lashing out right and left with Volume XXIX of the
Complete Works of Lenin.
 . . .

Now just hold on right there! I’d like to get this straight if you don’t mind. Is it Volume XXV, XXVI, or XXVII, or XXIX? Make up your mind, sweetie, because you really seem to be jumping from one volume to the next.

Good lord, girl, will you
ever
get down off that academic high horse of yours? I mean, what
difference
does it make for chrissake whether it’s Volume One or Volume Two Jillion of the Complete Fucking Works of Lenin, if nobody in her right mind but Eachurbod is ever going to stick her nose in the goddamn thing? So, please, do you
mind?
Let me just see where I was now. . . . Oh, yeah—

Eachurbod was pushing her way through the crowd, elbowing people right and left and waving around Volume XXXIX of the
Complete Works of Lenin,
with an Introduction by Juan Marinello. It was a huge red book, as I’ve said a hundred times already, whose cover bore not only the fearsome name of Lenin but also that of the publisher. Which just
happened
to be the Soviet Academy of Science. And which just
happened
to be enough to make the entire crowd, which was on its way to the Carnival, part like the Red Sea before the blind queen, who finally, bumping into the wall of the military fortress called El Catillo del Príncipe (the Prince’s Castle, for those of you who haven’t taken Spanish 101), magically recovered her sight. This enormous former prison, now converted into a military barracks, was an
extremely
dangerous place for Eachurbod. If the lieutenant of the guard so much as caught
sight
of her he’d have her arrested, and who knows—maybe even locked up in a cell right there in the Prince’s Castle.
A black prince is not the same thing as a black girl in Prince’s,
said the devouress to herself.
Although I myself, of course, being black from all the sun I’ve been exposed to from cruising all the time, am a black princess, not a prince . . . though unfortunately I don’t live in a castle
. . . . And without further ado she turned down Avenida de Rancho Boyeros and took a bus that was packed full of people, hoping to continue her cruising in Central Park and the Paseo del Prado, where the Carnival was already beginning to show some signs of life.

The minute she climbed onto that Number 67, which had seen more than forty years of hard service, our heroine’s nostrils were set quivering by the scent of a beloved perfume. It was the exquisite fragrance given off by round, firm, fully packed black hunks crammed together inside that oven, and ready to make some carnival. The sniffing queen, wielding her ubiquitous red tome, pushed her way to the back of the bus at the precise instant that someone was vacating one of the rear seats, so into it the queen gratefully plopped, heaving a sigh. Eachurbod was, then, sitting on that long rear seat in the bus, and to her left were some truly impressive specimens, a couple of mulattoes with their shirts open and some black men (
oh, those scrumptious black men who on the burning plains of my homeland . . . )
who looked as if they’d been sculpted by Cárdenas himself; there was also a pregnant woman on that side. But on the right, between the window and the faggot, there sat a hunk every bit as striking as those black men. He was white, with the look of an innocent country boy—athletic-looking, with full, straight hair—and the minute the fairy sat down beside him he spread his magnificent legs.

Eachurbod stole a quick furtive glance at the hunk, who just then spread his muscular legs even wider and—oh, Mary, can you believe it!—drew one of his powerful hands up his thigh to touch his crotch. At that, Eachurbod opened the immense Volume XXV of the
Complete Works of Lenin
that he always carried, wherever he went, and he began to pretend to read, all the while looking out of the corner of his eye at the delectable hunk of man who was sitting there squeezing his crotch. Then, as though accidentally, Eachurbod let one of the flaps of the book flop onto the thigh of the magnificent male. The magnificent male made not a motion, not a peep. Which led Eachurbod, still apparently engrossed in Leninism, to let the whole volume brush the delightful passenger’s thigh. The delightful passenger, drawing his hand once again up to his crotch, adjusted his pants leg so as more comfortably to accommodate what he needed to accommodate—for under the cloth of the pants leg, the hunk showed Eachurbod a very impressive-looking nightstick. Once more Volume XXXOOO (silly me, I mean XXXIII) of the
Complete Works of Lenin
fell, softly, upon the horny traveler’s thigh. And this time the fairy, her delicate hand shielded by the thick tome, actually touched the divine phallus of the athletic love god. And the phallus gave a leap that lifted the red volume with its Introduction by Juan Marinello. Such was the joy felt by the fairy at touching that bulge that in order to prolong her ecstasy, like the cat before she leaps upon her prey, she read a paragraph from that Volume XXXI of the
Complete Works of Lenin.
It was a boring, complicated diatribe against Bakunin and the anarchists. When she had done her religious duty, the fairy turned her attention (and her bug-eyes) once more upon the magic torpedo. She picked up the red tome and let it brush, softly, softly, against the traveler’s leg. And yes, there it was—the magnificent one-eyed serpent, practically drooling, and ready to breathe fire. But just then the fairy, suddenly seized with caution, looked around and saw that the muscular Negroes and the woman with the big belly had seen her maneuvers, or some of them. And an old man who was standing in the aisle seemed to be aware of Eachurbod’s legwork. So naturally the fairy, though almost on the verge of swooning, had no choice but to return, prudently, to her Lenin, and so she swan-dived once more into the book. Now Lenin was calling for the death of Bakunin and all of his followers, including Trosky, Malenkov, and Rosa Luxemburg. At least that was what Eachurbod, in his desperation, thought it said—the truth was, she really could
not
concentrate on her reading. I mean, how could she, my dear, with that incredible piece of man sitting next to her with his legs spread wide and his prick about to burst out of his pants? Could
you,
Miss Thing? But there sat those big black bucks and that big-bellied sow, and there stood the old man over her, and everybody in the whole bus, including the bus driver, no doubt, peeking in his rearview mirror (but of course pretending absolute insouciance, you realize), just
dying
to see whether the fairy was going to make a dive at that monster cock. But given the risk she’d be running, the fairy returned to her deadly-dull Lenin—and knowing that a horny hunk was sitting beside her, she allowed her face to take on the radiance of devotion as she read.

And so, in that state of ecstasy, Eachurbod continued her journey. An observer might easily have thought that the author of “Imperialism, A Superior Phase of Capitalism” was imparting mystical lashes to the impassioned soul of the young faggot. Oh, but wait—out of the mist of her contemplation she begins to discern that the turned-on traveler sitting next to her has stretched one of his legs out, touching the queen’s beside it, and in a hoarse voice has said: “Touch my dick again.” It was not simply a supplication by an aroused male, it was a divine commandment, given by Lenin himself:
Touch it again,
Lenin commanded. Clearly, reasoned the devouress, the hunk wants me to touch him so he can cum once and for all, and in peace. She had to keep that commandment of the gods; not to do so would be heresy. What did she care about the envious crowd that was observing it all? Besides, with that immense red tome protecting her nobody would be able to see a thing, and if people had a dirty imagination, that was
their
problem. Yes, clearly the queen should make her move. So with one hand she let Volume XLVII of the
Complete Works of Lenin
fall gently across the thighs of the muscular hunk and with the other she grasped the serpent, which gave such a leap that it sent the red-bound volume flying. And suddenly everyone on the bus could see the fairy queen grasping the delectable hunk’s member. The delectable hunk, meanwhile, seeing himself exposed, his delectable dick grasped firmly in the hand of the fairy queen, and also seeing himself seen by everyone on the bus—he did what anybody
would
do, he tried to salvage his morals (and especially his freedom) by swelling with pretended, and thus obviously sincere, wrath.
You faggot!
he yelled at the faggot so that everybody on the bus could hear,
how dare you touch my cock? I’m a man, goddammit!
 . . . And he picked up the sacred text with an Introduction by Juan Marinello and started beating Eachurbod over the head with it. Eachurbod tried to protect herself from the Leninist onslaught—she even crawled under the seat—but the muscular hunk, apparently now even more enraged, stood up and started
kicking
the poor fairy (who by now was bleeding profusely) in the head. I tell you, hon, it was hit the lights and let’s make a run for it! And now the formerly delectable piece of meat was grabbing the handrail at the top of the bus and swinging back to get a good start and kicking with both feet at the poor fairy huddled under the seat. The big-bellied woman started screaming and threatening to have a miscarriage, the black guys tried to step in to save Eachurbod, and one of them even tried to hold back the big raging bull, who was still kicking as he yelled, “This faggot touched my dick, and
no
faggot touches my dick!” It was the rage of a deity profaned that was roaring and kicking there; it was as though that phallus, only seconds ago erect and drooling for Eachurbod’s caresses, had suddenly been transformed into a silver chalice or the face of Moctezuma, which no man can look upon and live. A basilisk that kills the man who gazes upon it, that phallus was.

Meanwhile, the bus was going crazy—the big-bellied woman was still shrieking, the black men were trying to save Eachurbod’s life, and other people were yelling that the faggot deserved to die, preferably on the spot.

Eachurbod somehow recovered the red-bound tome and shielded his head with it, trying to protect herself from the enraged hunk, who was still kicking and hurling insults while all the passengers were loudly giving their opinions or verdicts. And to make matters worse, it was five o’clock in the afternoon and the bus was traveling through the José Martí Revolutionary Plaza. The pregnant woman gave an earsplitting scream of desperation. And just at the moment, the bus driver stopped the bus and threw all the doors wide open. A police officer was walking toward Eachurbod, pistol drawn. But Eachurbod, Volume XXV of the
Complete Works of Lenin
held aloft, pushed through the crowd, snatched up off the floor a wallet that she thought belonged to her, and took off running across the Plaza de la Revolución. Off the bus leaped the pistol-packing policeman, the supposedly offended well-packed hunk, several rehabilitated hookers, a park guard, and three resentful closet homos who also wanted to see Eachurbod done away with so they could win a medal for being Workers in the Vanguard. Eachurbod ran—or
flew,
if the truth be told, my dear—across the plaza. So great was her desperation that in almost no time she had put a good English mile between herself and her pursuers—none of that metric stuff for her. And yet her feet never slowed until she came to the locked gates of the grounds of UNEAC—the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists—where she screamed for political asylum, as on a previous occasion Tomasito the Goya-Girl and Reinaldo Arenas had also done (though fruitlessly, it must be noted). So piercing and so terrifying were the shrieks of the poor pursued and persecuted queen that the president of UNEAC, Nicolás Guillotina, that great bulldog-looking creature, came down the marble steps himself and opened the gate to Eachurbod. Of course he had to, didn’t he? After all, Eachurbod—a.k.a. José Martínez Matus—was the only creature on the entire Island who knew
Sóngoro Cosongo
by heart and who would, on the arm of Nancy Mojón, recite it in its entirety while dancing on Nicolás’s glass coffee table.