The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (64 page)

The schedule for the Philosophical and Theological sessions indicated that at this point in the proceedings, Odoriferous Gunk would speak. However, thanks to intrigues on the part of Skunk in a Funk, Coco Salas, and La Reine des Araignées, Odoriferous Gunk had been refused entrance to the Palace. But Odie had cleverly made arrangements to send his text to the chair of the panel, who couldn’t refuse to accept it, since it clearly fell within the subject of the conference. In fact, it virtually capped it. They had spoken of God and the Devil, they had descended into the jaws of Hell, and so now clearly they needed to speak of the pleasures of Paradise, of the mission of those who dwell in Paradise and all its avatars, and of their struggles to bring about a world in which one could live happily and at peace. In an introductory aside, Odoriferous Gunk requested that since he, the author, was not to be allowed to read his text, it be read by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but all the bishop had to do was take a quick glance at those pages and he changed color—from red to the blackest of blacks. And so he remained to the end of his days—black, black, black—which made him the object of the most
exquisite
erotic attentions on the part of Tomasito the Goya-Girl, Delfín Proust, Skunk in a Funk, the Dowager Duchess of Valero, and the Condesa de Merlín, all of whom found Negroes
fascinating. . . .
But anyway—Odoriferous Gunk’s paper was tabled for lack of a person willing to read it, and the grand hall continued to fill with water.

It was finally the queen of Holland who (perhaps because she lived in the Low Countries and was used to all this flooding) picked up Odoriferous Gunk’s text (written in Latin) and read it without batting an eye, translating it on the fly into almost perfect Spanish—although sometimes she did skip words like “espingole,” “archivolt,” and “repéchage” and phrases such as “Sursum corda” and “ut supra.” Odie’s thesis was simple yet profound:

We have lost all meaning in life because we have lost paradise, and we have lost paradise because pleasure has been condemned. But pleasure—persecuted, execrated, condemned, exploited to exhaustion, and almost vanished from the world—still had its armies: clandestine, silent armies, always in imminent danger of defeat but utterly unwilling to renounce life, which is defined by giving pleasure to others. “These armies,” boomed the voice of the queen of Holland throughout the flooded auditorium, “are made up of queers, faggots, fairies, and other species of homosexuals all over the world. These are the greatest heroes of all time, those who truly have the dream of paradise and hold to it unflinchingly, those who at all costs attempt to recover their—and our—paradises lost.” And here Odoriferous Gunk took his argument into Egypt and the great male love affairs of Thutmose I, Thutmose II, and Thutmose III; jumped over into Mesopotamia, where he offered a detailed list of all the youths who had brought enchantment to the nights of King Asurbanipal; leaped down to the Greeks, “whose exaltation of the love of one man for another has bequeathed to us that greatest literary work of all times, the
Iliad
”; hopped over to Rome, where he cited all the geniuses and Caesars who had lived basically to make love to men. And then he came to Christ, “that thirty-three-year-old man who wandered about the countryside preaching, and making love, to his twelve apostles.” And with a wave of her hand the queen of Holland called up onto the screen an ancient painting in which Jesus Christ was portrayed with his legs spread and John, the beloved apostle, a
gorgeous
teenage hunk, sleeping placidly with his hand on his master’s lap, the Christ himself and the other disciples glowing with beatitude. Then the paper discussed pagan feasts with their invincible armies of pleasure, the coming of Catholicism, and the widespread use of the bonfire. “Beautiful naked bodies were mutilated. People covered statues’ nakedness with cloaks or fig leaves, cruelly smashed and broke off their sexes. Caped and uncaped, masked and unmasked, the Middle Ages unleashed, and today somehow still unleash, the wrath of their sordid splendor. But the battle to recover Paradise has never ceased being fought, and the army of pleasure, the true angels expelled from life, continue to practice, however and whenever they can, what inquisitors and cowards call ‘the sin against nature.’ ”

There followed a detailed history of the horrors to which queer men of all stripes—both queens and tops—had been subjected from the time of Constantine to the implementation of bourgeois morality and militant Communism. The list invoked the names of Heliogabalus, Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, Louis XIII of France, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon (Lord Byron), Edward II of England, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Louis of Bavaria, Petronius, James I of Scotland, Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, Marcel Proust, Pier Paolo Pasolini, André Gide, Julio Cortázar, Yukio Mishima, Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Federico García Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Witold Gombrowicz, Jacinto Benavente, Virgilio Piñera, José Lezama Lima, and a thousand other famous men. There was a history of the sufferings to which almost every queen and faggot in the world had always been subjected. There was mention of the thousands of Indians exterminated, according to statements by the chronicler and soldier López de Gómora, for practicing sodomy. . . . “And yet, despite persecution,” the queen of Holland’s voice rose in righteousness, “those natives continued to gather together in groups of more than three thousand men to practice that ‘forbidden love.’ ” There was also a list of the names of Spanish-colonial queens and independent-republican queens who had been persecuted in Cuba and throughout Latin America, the names of queens massacred elsewhere under Communism and Fascism. The screen lit up to show the spellbound audience Russian queens frozen in remote gulags, queens burned to cinders in Nazi concentration camps. Photographs were shown of the Cuban queens confined in Fifo’s own concentration camps. There was even a documentary in which one could see how the queer men of Havana had been rounded up in Central Park, on the beaches, on the Paseo del Prado, at the Copelia Ice Cream Parlor and the García Lorca Theater, and even on the Hill of the Cross in Holguín and on Gran Piedra. There were pictures of confinement camps for victims of AIDS. The audience was shown prisons, keys, towers—and tunnels filled with sexual prisoners. In pictures that flashed across the screen almost too fast for the eye to catch, the audience was presented with queens planting coffee in the Havana Cordon, queens cutting brush in Camagüey, queens weeding fields with their bare hands in Pinar del Río, queens crushing rocks in flooded quarries. They were shown the famous driver Pistolprick, the man who was credited with the arrest of César Lapa (that hot-hot-hot mulatto queen) in London. Pistolprick was a
stunning
specimen of manhood who worked in Fifo’s Ministry of the Interior and kept a .45 in his shorts. His secret mission was detecting which Cuban diplomat was a swish. The driver would sit at the wheel of the car with the pistol bulging in his crotch, and when the poor queen, in a moment of rapture, madness, or
life,
threw herself onto that bulge, she’d find herself clutching a pistol. “If you turn it loose, it fires,” the driver would say as he took out a camera and photographed the queen with her hand in the cookie jar. And so the good work of Pistolprick had ruined the diplomatic careers of not only César Lapa but also Paula Amanda, Retamarina, Miss Harolda Gramatges, the Anglo-Campesina, Rogelio Martínez Furiosa, Miss Pereyra, and hundreds more, who now wandered in madness or degradation through the world and Fifo’s Island—cowed or threatened (blackmailed!) by that fateful photo, locked away in Fifo’s secret files, that showed them with their hand on Pistolprick’s fly. “The documentation, as you see,” the text went on, “is overwhelming and irrefutable, so let’s move on to the conclusions.”

The queen of Holland took a sip from the bottle of water which, to guard against poisoning, she always carried in her purse (you wondered what queens carried in their purses, didn’t you, dear?), and went on reading:

—Just a few weeks ago in the García Lorca Theater, while I was watching (who else?) Halisia dance, I was struck by a remark made by one queen to another in the seats behind me.
I left this morning and I haven’t returned since.
That was the remark I overheard, and it struck me that it somehow illuminates all our lives. Who, what, is it that returns? Migratory birds—
birds
—in their eternal quest for the clime, the nest, the tree, the branch to which their memories are forever turning. A homosexual is an aerial, untethered being, with no fixed place, no place to call his own, who yearns to return to. . .—but, my friends, he knows not where. We are always seeking that apparently nonexistent place. We are always in the air, keeping our eyes peeled. Our aerial nature is perfect, and so it should not be strange that we have been called
fairies.
We are fairies because we are always in the air, in an air that is not ours because it is unpossessable—though at least it is not bounded by the walls and fences of
this
world.

And even when we are on terra firma, such as now, we are always somehow ready to take flight—that is why we always have that alert expression on our faces, why we always seem to be flitting along on tiptoe or, as our great poet Lezama Lima put it, like some
crucified swallow,
always expectant, always unmoored, always clasping the fairy dream of an almost impossible return—a return that would unquestionably be a return to
pleasure.
And pleasure, as we all know, is the essence of Paradise. We have been expelled from Paradise, and Paradise has been wiped off the map. And who gets the blame for the sin that caused Paradise to be closed and locked up?
We
do, my friends, for we are, in fact, the true birds of paradise—sparkling, twinkling, multicolored beings of light. We are not ashamed to sprinkle a little fairy dust, a feather from our feather boa, in public. One of our missions as former denizens of Eden is to fill the world with fairy dust and feathers of all colors and sizes, so that no one will forget, first, that we have descended into the world from Paradise and, second, that we intend to recover that Paradise from which we were expelled. And expelled, I must insist, not because we were the classical biblical couple who were commanded to love each other “chastely” and then broke the rule, but rather because we were
different
—because the real Adam and Eve were two men (one, apparently, in drag) or two queens, or two women who broke the celestial rule because they sought their own heaven. Yet there is no heaven, my friends, but the heaven of pleasure. That has been clear since the beginning of life. We have before us, then, a sacred task: To create the army of pleasure, or, better said, to continue to be soldiers in that army, its eternal reinforcements. It is a divine mission because it exalts (and for a moment makes us forget) the human. Our object is to create (or, if you prefer, preserve) a mythology and metaphysics of pleasure. A dangerous, difficult mission, yet disinterested—because what we want is for
everybody
to have a little fun! What man doesn’t like his dick sucked by a fairy? A fairy who suddenly appears and then flies away, with no complications of any kind. Let’s be honest, here, girls—the pleasure that that man feels is
wonderful.
And not only do we give that pleasure free of charge—sometimes we even pay for it! And when we give someone pleasure, we feel pleasure too. The good thing about us fairies is that when we look back, we can always say, What a life I’ve lived!
How much
life I’ve lived! Because in addition to our own lives, we have helped other people live. . . . That, then, explains my firm decision to create, or make better known, the mythology and metaphysics of pleasure. I say metaphysics because it is a general, Aristotelian theory of great and devout fervor. We queens are the members of a religious, and therefore fanatical and holy, body whose purpose is to give and receive pleasure. Over against all the horrors of the world, and even within them, we set the only thing we possess—our enslaved bodies—as the source, fount, and vessel of grace. It is this aspect of our worship that is the justification for our beloved St. Nelly, patron saint of our aerial altars (so often vilified and smashed)—for all religious bodies must have their holy virgins (and, in our case, martyrs), who in one way or another stand for, symbolize, our unending
via crucis.
For we have experienced, and continue to experience, all the sufferings that strike the human species—domestic strife, illness, old age, abandonment, loneliness—yet in addition to those sufferings common to all we are made to live through yet more terrible calamities. We have suffered derision and extermination. We have been buried alive, walled up, burned, hanged, shot by firing squads, discriminated against, blackmailed, and imprisoned. There have been, and still are, attempts to destroy our kind completely. Science, politics, and religion have taken up arms against us. The creation of the AIDS virus, manufactured with the clear intention of annihilating us and all those who, like us, seek after adventure (for all adventure is the expression of a disquiet, a yearning, and holds out
erotic
possibilities), is but the most recent attempt to bring our history to an end—and yet ours is a history that cannot have an end, because it is the history of life itself in its most rebellious, authentic manifestation. What has been sought by every means possible is a world that is chaste, practical, and sober. We oppose that horror with all our hearts and souls, we assume all possible risks, and we wield against it that infinitely powerful weapon the only weapon that we possess—pleasure.