The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (63 page)

The immense shell of the old convent was lighted by all the lanterns, oil lamps, wall sconces, torches, votives, and tapers that Clara had managed to collect and store in her room. Even before the exhibition was opened to a clandestine yet knowledgeable public (and to the curious of every stripe), the news of that event unique in the history of Cuban (and world) painting had spread through Havana. Some three hundred masterpieces by a single painter, gathered in a single place, painted in a single fit of creative inspiration, and exhibited for only a short time—that was something that doesn’t happen very often (perhaps it happens but once) in the history of art.

The exhibit opened.

In addition to Clara’s friends and enemies, an enormous number of people managed to jostle their way inside. They all wandered among the canvases, so struck with their brilliance that they couldn’t open their mouths, or couldn’t close them. It was impossible, standing among those paintings, to make a single comment—nor was it expected.
Seeing
them was what counted, not commenting on them. Some people wept silently. The entire universe—or at least the entire universe to Clara Mortera—with all its visions, myths, terrors, and ecstasies, had come to this final birth. Clara had never been able to visit the Prado Museum, or the Uffizi, or the Louvre—in fact, she had never been off the Island—and yet that night, in that badly lighted hole, paintings were shown that were far superior to some works that hang permanently in the world’s most famous museums.

The exhibit lasted for three days. It closed on the third night, when the candles guttered out.

Before the last lights were extinguished, Clara invited everyone to have a bit of dinner. Hard-boiled eggs and water from the cistern were passed around.

Women, men, and fairies attired in amazing costumes, in addition to the entire Cuban intelligentsia, foreign cultural advisers, and ambassadors, filed past the paintings, each holding a hard-boiled egg that gleamed like some strange fruit. Finally, they all put their hard-boiled eggs in their pocket or purse as a souvenir of a magical night (perhaps the only magical night of their lives).

A cosmos in the palm of one’s hand. All who emerge from it emerge bewitched, enchanted. In this convent I have heard the trumpets of the Epiphany.
So thought José Lezama Lima (without speaking) when, even though he’d been carried on a litter by Skunk in a Funk, Mahoma, Sakuntala la Mala, and Delfín Proust, he arrived home panting and almost at the verge of exhaustion.

“I saw the All, and because it was the All, nothing of it can be spoken,” Virgilio Piñera said in Olga Andreu’s house.

But in all honesty it must be said that Virgilio saw only two of the hundreds of paintings that were shown:
The Portrait of Luisa Pérez de Zambrana
and
The New Garden of Earthly Delights.
Virgilio spent the entire evening standing in front of those two paintings, as though he had realized that there was no reason to go any farther, and that besides, it was impossible to take in over three hundred masterworks in a single night.

The next day, Clara Mortera closed the exhibition and sealed up the entrance to the convent with a piece of cardboard. Until the day of the Carnival, no one except Clara herself would enter the building again.

What the neighbors lamented most was that with the sealing off of the convent, the sale of water came to an end forever.

In a fit of sybaritic ecstasy inspired by Horatian verses and Samothracian statues, two sisters, incestuous lesbians, Anastasia of Russia and Anisia of Prussia, seated on a sealskin-upholstered sofa, spent several leisure hours in vice and dissipation, spurning Boethian consolations and seesawing, instead, first Anastasia up and Anisia down, then vice versa, in bouts of licentious caresses.

For Nancy Mojón and Urania Bicha

Following Fifo, the audience rushed to flee the Aquarium Theater, in which the water was rapidly rising.

Fifo was on a large motorized raft. Bobbing along behind him came his guests, who were on not only rafts but also inner tubes, motorboats, dinghies, sloops with bellied sails, and even gondolas quickly improvised by the diligent midgets, who poled them with uncanny dexterity.

Fifo was
very
excited; he couldn’t
wait
to get to the Garden of Computers, whose denizens were roaring desperately—clearly, it was feeding time. But as he was putt-putting down a long flooded passageway, he caught a glimpse of the International Conference Hall, a huge auditorium with a high vaulted ceiling and perfect acoustics—although the water was beginning to rise in this theater, too. Fifo pulled up his huge raft (on which his intimates and favorites were also riding) and abruptly decided that then, at that very instant, before the auditorium was completely inundated by the rising waters, the Grand Oneirical Theological Political Philosophical Satirical Conference, a fundamental part of the Carnival program, would be held. And instantly orders were given to that effect.

While everyone was sailing, rowing, paddling, and poling into the auditorium, in which an enormous dais had been set up with a long table and chairs of various sizes, the President of the PEN Club of Germany, Herr Günter Greasy, thought he’d take advantage of the lull in the activities to present Fifo with the Grand Medal of Honor, an award given only on very special occasions by the German PEN Club to the most distinguished Western intellectual of the past twenty-five years. Ruddy, smiling from ear to ear, and dressed in a black jacket, Greasy leapt onto Fifo’s raft and pinned the medal on him. Everything was done very quickly and without ceremony, but when the famous author pinned the medal on Fifo’s chest, Fifo was filled with such pride that his prominent potbelly swelled to
tremendous
proportions, and it pushed the author of
The Ten-Cent Drum
right off the raft. Instantly, Greasy’s hefty body sank into the depths of the auditorium waters, along (oh, dear!) with the medal, which he’d grabbed to try to steady himself.

Several Vietnamese guests dived into the water to try to save it (yes, the medal, silly), as did other important personages, such as the President of Mexico, the head of the Syrian Institute of Sports, the Chancellor of World University in Santo Domingo, and the writer Carlos Puentes. But they all came up empty-handed.

Accompanied by notables from the worlds of science, culture, religion, politics, and philosophy, Fifo turned his prow toward the dais at the front of the auditorium, where any minute now the Grand Oneirical Theological Political Philosophical Satirical Conference would be beginning. As the procession of water vehicles t . . .

“All right! Hold it right there, miss! This time I have
definitely
caught you. You have just committed a serious literary omission!”

“And precisely what might that be, my
dear
Sakuntala la Mala, if I might ask?”

“Elementary. Elementary, my
dear
Reinaldo. If there are going to be all those important scientists—‘notables from the world of science,’ as you yourself just said—then the conference has to be called the Oneirical
Scientifical
Theological Political Philosophical Satirical Conference. You forgot
scientific,
which is
basic.
”

“You know something, you old queen? You’re absolutely right.
This
time. Sometimes I’m so absentminded . . .”

“Absentminded when it’s convenient, because every time you write my name in that book of yours you manage to remember to add the epithet
la Mala.
So I wonder if you would be so kind as to just call me Sakuntala, period. Or Daniel Sakuntala, which is the name that appears on my birth certificate in Nuevitas.”

“Yes, well, I’ll try to remember, dear. . . . Now if you’ll just let me get back to my salt mine . . .”

As the audience made itself (themselves?—I never know about these plurals and singulars) comfortable on its (their) flotation devices, the midgets used enormous hoses to siphon out the water and keep it at an acceptable level.

There is
no way
to list all the famous people who took part in this conference, but let me give you some idea . . .

Among the notables were Maltheatus, Macumeco, the queen of Holland, Skunk in a Funk, Fray Bettino, Tomasito the Goya-Girl, the Condesa de Merlín, Joseph Pappo, the president of the Tierra del Fuego Liberation Organization (the TLO), the Bishop of Santa Marta, Alderete (in a red wig), the mayor of Venice, Coco Salas, the director of the National Ballet of Chile, SuperSatanic, the inventor of AIDS, the president of the World Federation of Women, the head of the Medellín Cartel, the inventor of the neutron bomb, Miss Papayi Toloka, Jimmy Karter, Delfín Proust, the AntiChelo, the premier of the Communist International, Miss Tiki-Tiki, Robert Roquefort, the SuperChelo, and many, many famous writers (some brought back to life especially for this occasion and even over their own objections, as in the case of André Breton) and prince regents, dictators, and celebrated murderers. The head of the Swedish Academy presided over the conference; as noted by the mayor of Pretoria, he was there because he came from a neutral country.

Milling about the head table there were also many scholars, reporters, listeners, and observers, all of whom did everything they could to get close enough to Fifo to speak to him. But Fifo, surrounded by his personal corps of guards and his brother, allowed only two persons to sit next to him and speak to him: the Marquesa de Macondo and Carlos Puentes, the two most perfect expressions of a race of headless, stunted, ambitious, arrogant, lawless, and unctuously greasy pygmies, whom Fifo had personally chosen to be his intellectual escorts, since he knew that next to those two dim bulbs he’d look like an Einstein.

Before the conference began, the lights in the auditorium went down and for a few seconds the only sound heard was the gurgling of the water and the muffled rumbling of the pumps and hoses. But then suddenly a huge screen lit up, and the world première of the full-length feature
Adios to Maritza Paván
flickered to life on the screen. This film had been shot forty years ago by Alfredo Güevavara in the woods around Havana. It was introduced by the Marquise del Pinar del Río, director of the Florida International Film Festival and creator of the New York New Film Makers Festival and president of the Cartagena Film Institute. The movie ended to deafening applause. Then, to the surprise of almost everyone, Maritza Paván herself appeared. This personage was a faggot something over a hundred years old who had fled the Island forty years earlier; his farewell party had been held in the Havana Woods (and was the subject of the movie they’d all just seen). Now she was included among the guests of honor whom Fifo wanted to introduce that night so as to win over the world’s public opinion and get some international financial aid. The audience applauded Maritza Paván for over ten minutes—although it was impossible to give her the usual standing ovation, considering how tricky it was to stand up on a raft, or a gondola, or any other small craft.

When the applause finally died down, the president of the Swedish Academy opened the conference.

The theological section was amazing. A statement read by the Bishop of Santa Marta and, he claimed, approved by the leaders of every world religion concluded that there was only one God, and that God was Fifo. The moment was a solemn one. Fifo, who had already been invested by the president of Venezuela as one of the Caesars, now was to be worshiped as a god. Unfortunately for Fifo, however, and without appearing on the program
anywhere,
just then Salman Rishidie raised his hand and said it was impossible to talk about the existence of God without also mentioning the existence and potency of the devil and the irrefutable
proofs
of his existence.

At that, the imposing figure of Tomasito the Goya-Girl rose to her full height behind the table and waved a huge notebook at the audience.

“Here,” she said, “I
have
those irrefutable proofs of the existence of the devil, which I will now proceed to read.”

And standing atop a stunning new pair of platform shoes that she had bought from Mahoma, Tomasito the Goya-Girl began to read (from a document drafted by Skunk in a Funk, by the way). By the time Tomasito reached the end of the document, the evidence of the existence of the devil was clearly overwhelming, but the
most
overwhelming proof had been saved for last—the existence of Fifo himself. At that, Fifo instantly decided that Tomasito the Goya-Girl had to be put to death, but he couldn’t give the order at that particular moment, so publicly and all, and
certainly
couldn’t have the execution carried out there in front of everybody. “I want you to slit her throat and cut out her tongue during the Carnival,” Fifo whispered to one of his most conscientious midgets, who transmitted the order to Raúl Kastro.

Naturally, the accusation that Fifo was the devil incarnate raised an angry protest, most conspicuously and vociferously on the part of Carlos Puentes and Elena Polainatosca. For minutes on end the uproar was deafening. The head of the Swedish Academy, perhaps because of his country’s neutrality, didn’t know what to do. But Dulce María Leynaz, loudly banging the gavel (which was supposedly the Swedish scholar’s prerogative), said that this was a panel in which people could say whatever they wanted, and that there would be a discussion period after they all had given their papers.

“And if you people don’t settle down, I’m not going to donate to the state the manuscript of Federico García Lorca’s
Blood Wedding,
which is, I warn you, the only thing that pleases the palate of my precious rats. . . .”

And since it was not to be
conceived
that the Island let that manuscript get away (especially since Fifo had already sold it to the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia for a fortune—and pocketed the money for it), the conference had to be allowed to continue.

Now it was Skunk in a Funk’s turn to speak; she had chosen a theological topic.

“Since we are talking about God and the Devil,” she began, “which in the long run are the same sinister thing, we should delve a little deeper into Hell, or Paradise—which of course are
also
the same thing.

“In every life, in every work of art, in every book—i.e., in every hell—there is a descent into the absolute inferno. I invite my listeners to descend with me. Our journey will be brief, for I will show you only the Seven Wonders of Cuban Socialism.”

And in a dizzyingly brief voyage which lasted only fifteen minutes but summarized forty years of horror, Skunk in a Funk descended into the most recent Cuban inferno.

Other papers were longer than Skunk in a Funk’s, but we must remember that Skunk had also pre-presented a paper at the Satirical session, her Thirty Truculent Tongue Twisters, so she couldn’t really take too long for this one. Some of the most memorable presentations at the Conference were André Breton’s on “Impossible Dreams” (during, naturally, the Oneirical session) and the AntiChelo’s on “The Seven Major Categories of Queenhood,” which combined the Scientifical and the Philosophical—although it was read during the Theological session, perhaps because it dealt at length with “Sublime” and therefore
divine
queenhood. Of the Theological and Philosophical sessions perhaps the most memorable paper was entitled
“Nouveaux Pensées de Pascal, ou Pensées de l’Enfer,”
an apocryphal work read by SuperSatanic, who explained that Pascal was unable to be resuscitated for the Conference because no one was absolutely sure where he was buried. . . . During the Scientifical session, of extra-special interest to all was the Condesa de Merlín’s paper on “Clocks and Steam Engines,” which made a substantial critique of the steam engine (“the cause of so much destruction, so much slavery”) and clocks (“which only serve to remind us of our mortality”); during the Political session, the brilliant Fray Bettino, with his text titled “Grand Captains of the Morning Sun,” read an apologia for Hitler, Stalin, and Fifo and attacked democracy as “ephemeral and vulgar, a state which results from a scarcity of great men able to bridle human passions.” This paper caused considerable controversy among the audience, and
that
in turn again caused the head of the Swedish Academy some distress, and
that
led Dulce María Leynaz to gavel the proceedings once more to order.