The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (58 page)

Ñica, in a soignée gown of brown vicuña, growled “Coño, Geño,” at his friend Geño Ñañez when Geño, the meany, went “Nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah” at Ñica’s soignée vicuña gown. Ñica had just asked Geño if he liked vicuña, and thought if he didn’t he should have just said Nyet, not nyah nyah, nyah nyah nyah.

For Ñica

In the midst of all the complications that Skunk in a Funk was involved in—denunciations, persecutions, threats of blackmail, unconfessable diseases, the unavoidable visit to Blas Roka to seek clemency for the Areopagite—and above all at the most complex and difficult moment of his novel
The Color of Summer,
the part in which Fifo was finally leading his guests out to the Garden of Computers—at precisely
that
climactic and terribly complex moment in the plot, Reinaldo had to put down his pen and run off as fast as he could to the house, or room, or
dump
that Clara Mortera lived in. Where, it turned out, he found Teodoro Tampon, round and out of breath, waiting for him. And in Teodoro’s pained expression Skunk in a Funk read a desperate plea for aid for Teodoro and his wife.

The trouble, however, as Skunk in a Funk knew, was that things were not that simple. There was no way it would all end there, with him magically solving whatever the problem was between Teodoro and Clara and then just going back to what he’d been doing. No, Skunk in a Funk knew that problems between a husband and wife (whether she was a whore and he a fairy, or she was a nun and he a Knight of Malta) were
never
really solved.

And there stood Teodoro Tampon with that pained look on his face.

For years now, Skunk in a Funk had had to put up with the clandestine visits of Teodoro Tampon, who would slink into Skunk in a Funk’s room in the Hotel Monserrate and in a gasping voice (and flapping his short little arms) exclaim:

“Please, Reinaldo, lend me your swim fins! Tonight I’m jumping in the ocean! I can’t stand it anymore—I’ve got to get out of this country!”

And with a sigh of resignation Gabriel would crawl under the bed, pull out his beloved swim fins (which were not even a
shadow
of those wonderful swim finds that Tatica had stolen from him), and hand them to Teodoro.
What the heck,
thought Reinaldo, taking it all philosophically,
I’ll
probably never get to use them anyway. And besides, Teodoro Tampon will give them back, like he always does. This dork will never jump in the ocean.

And sure enough, just like always, once he was cradling the swim fins in his arms Teodoro Tampon would grow calmer. He would slide his little cylindrical body into one of Skunk in a Funk’s few armchairs, caress the swim fins (his last life raft), sigh, and begin to intone to poor Skunk in a Funk the infinite rosary of insults and offenses that Clara had inflicted upon him. But his whining voice would sound so resigned to the horror of his life that Skunk in a Funk would soon stop worrying about his swim fins and his mind would wander to the manuscript of his novel, which, if he didn’t finish it quickly, Fifo would surely destroy yet again. So Teodoro would rattle on while Reinaldo would try to mentally compose the chapter titled “In the Garden of Computers.”

Among the terrible humiliations which Teodoro Tampon’s wife had inflicted on him (and which he never failed to mention) was that terrible one the night that he, encouraged by some friends from his native province, first met her. It happened to be a night when Clara had invited a group of sailors to take part in a superskewer in which she (naturally) would be the recipient of the tribute paid by the chain of hunky kabobers to her seductive charms—but Clara had refused to allow Teodoro to take part in that unparalleled coupling. Instead, when it was all over she had ordered him (her voice like a cross between a little girl’s and a high-ranking witch’s) to clean up her room, which looked as though a hurricane had swept through it, and also to stay and live with her. He would be her pimp and protector. Ten years had passed since that night, and the list of humiliations to which Clara had subjected (and was still subjecting) Teodoro was endless.

Every night, when Clara came in from her tour of the docks or the secret swamps of Lenin Park where she’d been playing her dangerous love games, Teodoro would have to take a kitchen knife and scrape off the dried mud that clung to Clara’s legs. And it was a herculean task to get the crust of mud off those knobby knees of hers. Not to mention that before she came in, he would have to go out looking for water all over Old Havana—which was like going out and prospecting for gold.

“One of my worst humiliations,” Teodoro would confess bitterly, clutching the swim fins, “is having to carry a bucket of water across Central Park.” And to top it off, sometimes after he’d climbed the monumental staircase to the room that he and Clara lived in, carrying the bucket that was falling apart and had to be soldered together and plugged up with pieces of soap, Clara would refuse to open the door. Teodoro would have to sit out in the hall and listen to the sounds of orgy inside while he tried to keep the water from leaking out altogether. “And how can I forgive her for not inviting me to her orgies?” he would (not unnaturally) complain. “If you could hear the moaning that
I
hear behind that door. . . .” And Teodoro, his voice slow and hoarse, would attempt to mimic those moans and shrieks of lust—moans and shrieks that Skunk in a Funk would finally halt with a gesture of one of his claws, to indicate that he got the idea.

Clara had also made Teodoro Tampon carve a wooden dildo, and she would order him to use it on her as she screamed “impotent pervert!” at him. Of course Teodoro Tampon, as the legal (yes, legal) spouse of the brilliant painter, was obliged to escort her on all her visits to other painters, where he would keep their host occupied while Clara stuffed tubes of paint, rolled-up canvases, and brushes into the huge pockets of her smock (which she herself had made). When they weren’t paying visits (many painters wouldn’t allow Clara into their houses or studios), Teodoro, risking years of imprisonment for armed robbery and theft, would be sent out to steal the sheets off the clotheslines in Old Havana. It was on those stolen sheets and canvases that Clara painted the masterpieces that Teodoro admired almost ashamedly.

Clara would oblige her husband to invite some friend of his up to her room, and there she would steal his ration card, which she’d then sell on the black market. “Why, she stole my ration card from
me,
” Skunk in a Funk exclaimed when Teodoro reached this point of his tale of woe—“and I had planned to buy myself a knit polo shirt that Clara promised to paint for me for the big Carnival!” Then he turned back to his novel.

Clara also forced Teodoro Tampon to eat anything he could get his hands on, including grass and sawdust, so that he’d be so fat that alongside him, Clara would look svelte and beautiful. It was truly pathetic to see those two walking along the Malecón—Clara tall, straight, and thin with her long dress made of flour sacks embroidered by hand (by Clara herself) and her long neck encircled by an artsy necklace made by Poncito, and Teodoro waddling along like a ball that from time to time the grand Clara would help to roll along with the tip of one of her elegant Greek sandals. Sometimes when they went out, Clara would dress Teodoro up as a woman, piling humiliation upon humiliation so that all the men would be sure to look at her. The pathetic round ball, in drag, would also have to carry all of Clara’s accoutrements—the makeup, parasols, perfumes, condoms, sexual lubricants, and other paraphernalia that she, as the
grande dame,
refused to carry. “What hurts me more than anything is that she’s made me get so fat and look so much
older,
” Teodoro would complain. “You know I’m just twenty-three, and she’s fifty-seven.” Skunk in a Funk knew that Teodoro was older than that, and Clara younger, but he kept his mouth shut. He was just there to
listen
to Teodoro—ay, and the chapter on the Garden of the Computers hanging fire—as Teodoro told how his wife had forced him to legally recognize all the children that she’d had by men from the most distant corners of the world. Teodoro Tampon was the only man in the world who, with the same wife, had had three Chinese children, one Yugoslav, four Arab, two African, one Swedish, one Russian, several Greek, one Basque, one Indian, and one Syrian. The house was a maddening babble of tongues. And Clara would make Teodoro go out in the street with that gaggle of children of every race and age and beg for food and money while she made love to some sailor in a doorway down on the docks. Then Teodoro would have to turn over the take from their begging to his wife’s lover and in addition take on the responsibility for the fruit of that furtive coupling, since the sailor would invariably leave Clara pregnant—this was a woman who, in spite of her age (or Teodoro’s count of it), seemed never to lose her fertility.

From time to time Teodoro Tampon would also have to write the reports that Clara, an “underground” artist, had to file not only on other underground artists but also on those who had gone public. Clara (and therefore Teodoro) also had to turn in all the freelance hookers who didn’t have their licenses from State Security.

Every week Teodoro would have to turn in these reports to Fifo’s Counter-Information Headquarters—i.e.,
the Garden of Computers,
which Skunk in a Funk had still not been able to finish. . . . “I even have to turn in a report on you,” Teodoro had confessed to Skunk in a Funk as, like a child, he caressed the swim fins in his lap.

But this confession, no doubt sincere, neither irritated Skunk in a Funk nor alarmed her in the slightest. She knew she was under constant surveillance, wherever she went. And especially by her most faithful friends—friends such as Teodoro Tampon. . . . “I
have
to make those reports!” Teodoro would whimper. “If I don’t, I’ll be picked up under the vagrant law, because Clara has contacts. Why, not long ago she committed murder and got away with it.” Skunk in a Funk, like everyone else in Old Havana, knew about this, but he had to listen resignedly as Teodoro Tampon once again recited the tale of his mother’s murder. Yes, my dear, his
mother.
What happened was that Clara Mortera had invited her mother-in-law, a countrywoman from Holguín, to spend a few days with her. After the old lady had moved in, Clara poisoned her so she could steal a pair of the old lady’s rubber shoes and some costume-jewelry earrings. Teodoro could not allow himself to flinch or say a word as he watched that murder-robbery. But his exasperation reached the breaking point when he told (and here he raised the swim fins and then put them down on his lap again) how Clara had made him enter the College of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Havana—an unbearable place where Teodoro was forced not only to write literary compositions of his own but also to read his classmates’, and in addition join the university militia (in which, to his chagrin, he had already been promoted to corporal and squad leader).

So Skunk in a Funk had to sit resignedly and hear the harrowing trials and tribulations, and pathetic confessions, of Teodoro Tampon—and more than that (even when she put her hands over her ears), his final, oft-repeated, exclamation, “But I can’t take it anymore! Tonight I’m putting on your swim fins and jumping into the ocean! I don’t care if the sharks
do
eat me! It’s better than this!”

“The only favor I ask of you is that if you’re captured you don’t tell them that the swim fins belong to me.”

“Not to worry,” replied Teodoro. And perhaps because this was the friends’ last farewell, he invited himself to a cup of Russian tea that Skunk in a Funk had bought on the black market from a dealer from over in Regla.

Still, it would be unfair to leave the impression that Teodoro Tampon was under Clara Mortera’s thumb this way simply because of cowardice or greed or fear or some other ignoble emotion. The truth was, Tampon also had immense admiration for Clara’s artistic talent, and he loved her. Clara often encouraged Teodoro to develop his own creative potential. Clara, in fact, had been the spark that lighted the fire in the somewhat ditzy but infinitely inventive mind of Teodoro Tampon.

Of all Teodoro’s confessions, those that most interested Skunk in a Funk (and so of course Gabriel and Reinaldo, too) were the ones that dealt with the inventions that Teodoro, under Clara’s inspiration, had made or attempted to make. Often these were inventions or ideas for things to be used around the house or for a specific occasion, albeit for the delight and enjoyment of everyone—such as the time Teodoro hooked up the entire apartment building to a lightbulb outlet in the park. The whole thing exploded, but fortunately Teodoro had time to retrieve the hookup before the police arrived. Some of Teodoro’s ideas also allowed him to live a few hours of hope, happiness, and mockery—because like all such ideas, they stemmed from irreverence for the status quo.