The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (69 page)

In pure ecstasy, almost on the verge of fainting, Eachurbod leaves the men’s room. And it is then, as she smells herself and looks at herself, that she discovers that she has been smeared from head to foot with shit. Someone, out of pure spite or getting his perverse rocks off, has covered her entire body with excrement—she looks like a walking
turd!
She hasn’t been screwed, she’s been covered with shit, even up her ass and in her mouth.
Shit, shit, shit!
she says. She’s even got shit in her eyebrows. She’s been slathered in a layer of shit that now, out in the glaring light of Carnival, gleams like some horribly sinister
something. —Ee-e-eek!
Eachurbod screams, slaps out insanely all around her (killing PornoPop, the Only Remaining Go-Go Queen in Cuba) and like some pestilential lightning bolt bolts down Paseo del Prado, the crowd on the avenue parting before her like the Red Sea—
holy Moses!,
you can hear people say. She comes to the Malecón, strips off all her shit-caked clothes, dives into the waves, and swims out to sea, trying to get rid of that smell of shit even as she prays for some hungry shark to come and screw her, or at least eat her. But when they smell the smell of this stinking queen, the sharks turn tail and run. And so the beshat fairy, floating on the surface of the sea, dives, over and over, into the waves, trying to wash off that smell which somehow only grows more smelly. And as she floats (and she’s now been in the water for
hours
) she thinks that the Malecón (but how can this be?) seems to be getting farther and farther away. . . . Eachurbod tries to swim to the coast, but the coast keeps getting farther away. . . . And now the city is a distant point on the horizon, though Eachurbod can hear the drums and see the lights of Carnival.

To the tune of his boom box, vain Valero, once a boxer but his varicose veins now veiled by a fringe of violet voile, dances a fandango and sings a bolero at the bowling alley, where, misshapen, he is mistaken for a bowling pin and forced to dodge a barrage of bowling balls bowled by violent bowlers. Besieged, bleating, his vanity in tatters, Valero belatedly and bad-humoredly beats it, and to cover his bitter retreat he turns up the volume on his boom box, which blasts out a ballad. How did vain Valero the fey balladeer with varicose veins escape the barrage of bowling balls bowled by violent bowlers irate at the volume of the bolero played by the boom box? By beating it, behind a bulwark of blasting ballad, before being bowled over.

For the Dowager Duchess de Valero

Naturally, the diligent midgets had not forgotten Fifo’s orders that the Lady of the Veil be killed during the height of Carnival by a stab wound to the honey-pot, so that it would appear to be a crime of passion. Killing her was easy, but stabbing her in the cunt was another thing—first because she was wearing so many veils that it was hard to tell exactly where her cunt
was,
and second because despite the veiled lady’s social class and political importance she had gotten out of her carriage and mixed into the Carnival throng, and she was moving with uncanny speed through the crowd.

The diligent midgets ran after the Lady of the Veil clutching their knives and daggers, but there were
so many
people, honey, that it was worth your
life
to squat down and stab somebody in the cunt. If the order had been to stab her in the neck, or in the tits, or even in the stomach, the poor midgets wouldn’t have been so hard put, but to duck down and find a honey-pot was just not
possible
in this crowd—not to mention the space needed for a hand to grip the knife and draw back enough to make the stab wound fatal. Besides, the Lady of the Veil was moving faster and faster, perhaps helped along by all her veils, which were now
sails,
girl—she was scudding along, slithering through the crowd like a snake on a wind-surfer. The diligent midgets had
no
idea where this ditzy dame was headed for in that getup of hers—although since it was Carnival, and the last night of Carnival to boot, she could
almost
pass unnoticed among all the outlandish costumes.

“Where in the world was that lady of the seven thousand veils going?”

“Sakuntala, dear, there weren’t seven thousand veils, even if it looked like it.”

“OK, but where was she
going?
”

“That, my dear, only she and I, in all the world, know. But if you promise not to tell,
this
is the cause of all her secret avatars and her personal pandemonium—”

In her country, where she was the Boss, the supposedly Omnicunt-potent Leader, she had heard the news of Fifo’s Carnival, and specifically of the existence of a very special float that was to appear—the Lovin’ Spoonful, it was called—sponsored by the Ministry of Construction. Atop this marvelous contraption, fifteen whores were to ride, and they would be wiggling their asses and shaking their tits around a mechanical bulldozer shovel shaped like a spoon that would rise and fall as it dipped into something that resembled a tub of cement. In the bowl of the bulldozer shovel, or “spoon” as they insisted on calling it, rode a magnificent half-naked rumba-dancing “chorus girl,” the undisputed queen of Fifo’s proletarian (and delirious) Carnival. On the bed of the float there was to be a gigantic illuminated fish tank, inside which there were to be hundreds of tropical fishes, thereby attracting the attention of the entire populace to that float and therefore to its queen, who was (as I believe I have mentioned) to be dancing frenziedly in the spoon. From the moment the Lady of the Veils had seen a documentary on Fifo’s previous Carnival (a film made by Manuel Octavo Gómez which had won first prize at the Fez Film Festival, where the award was presented by President Omar Cavafy himself), it had been her dream to take the place of the working girl and shake her
own
ass in that spoon. And so, holding tight to that
idée fixe
(to be a working-class mambo dancer, the queen of ass-shaking, while tropical fishes performed aquatic maneuvers at her feet and the drunken crowd applauded), she had traveled incognito to Cuba and found lodging (thanks to her impeccable credentials as a terrorist and Arab multimillionairess) in Fifo’s palace. Which was why now, hotly pursued by the indefatigable midgets who could not seem to manage to kill her, she was running toward that very Ministry of Construction float, her racing feet flattening she-cats, cat and horse turds, empty cans, suckling babes abandoned by their mothers, and thousands of other objects. Panting, she reached the float and took out a flask that contained a curious liquor prepared from a formula in an unpublished passage in
The Arabian Nights
(a passage, actually, that for certain legal reasons no publisher had ever dared to print). The Lady of the Veil invited all the whores in the corps de ballet to take a drink, and no sooner had they sniffed at the potion than they fell, profoundly sleeping, into the arms of the murderous midgets, who took advantage of the occasion to rape them. Then, as the monumental spoon made one of its descents, the Lady of the Veil offered her flask to the magnificent rumba dancer, who took a sip and instantly toppled off the float into the arms of the dancing crowd. Leaping aboard the spoon, the Lady of the Veil began to dance. The spoon rose almost into the clouds, then fell again, down into a gray, frothy semiliquid substance which looked like fresh-mixed cement and underneath which swam the schools of brilliantly colored tropical fish. The spoon rose, the spoon fell, and the Lady of the Veil, moving her hips and thighs more and more hypnotically, more and more frenetically, swayed her veils, her ass, her neck, her long-fingered hands, and astounded the applauding crowd—who were doing some dancing themselves, I tell you, honey. And while all this was going on, Fifo (still inside his globe) was once more issuing the secret, urgent order to the midgets—“In the cunt! In the cunt! Stab her in the cunt!”

So urgent, so insistent was that order that the midgets decided to make a human pyramid and boost one of their number up onto the spoon. Soon, the agent chosen for this mission had sneaked under the madly dancing veils, his murderous knife drawn and ready to stab her in the cunt. But it was not a cunt the midget found; it was a pair of balls and a prick—a pair of balls and a prick so irresistible that the midget instantly dropped to his knees and starting sucking. The Lady of the Veil, enraged, picked up the midget by the neck, strangled him, and tossed him to the crowd, which bellowed in delirium. Once more, the human pyramid. And once more, a midget under the Lady of the Veil’s veils. This one made the same discovery, and fell to the same temptation, and so he, too, was tossed into the crowd, which suddenly began to chant: “She gives birth while she’s dancing!” One after another, the Lady of the Veil tossed dead midgets into the hysterical crowd, which roared its approval, while Fifo, growing more infuriated by the second, was yelling “In the cunt, I tell you! In the cunt!”

Finally, one of the midgets (who, being a woman, was totally uninterested in men) got through to Fifo on her walkie-talkie: “No cunt here, just prick.”

“Well give it to her in the ass, then!” screamed the Maximum Leader.

With the knife in her teeth, the midget climbed up on the float once more and gave a powerful dagger-thrust straight in the asshole of the Lady of the Veil, who, feeling that mortal wound to her ass, danced even more frenetically. It was her swan song, and knowing that it was, she drew it out as long as she could. And so the Lady of the Veil was gyrating madly if mortally-woundedly upon the spoon when she was glimpsed by Karilda Olivar Lubricious’ husband, who thought that that whore up there with a mask on and dancing the dance of the jillion veils had to be his wife, who just didn’t want to be discovered. So, weapon at the ready, the wronged husband climbed onto the float, leaped into the spoon with a tae kwon do move he’d learned from one of the kids in the neighborhood, and with a single swipe of the saber ripped off the lady’s veils, revealing to all the world the naked body of Omar Cavafy, who, dagger up his ass, promptly expired. Well, maybe not so promptly, because first he gave several gyrations. His naked body, whirling like some weird lawn sprinkler, bathed the crowd in blood—and the crowd, thinking this was just another part of the dancer’s show, applauded even more hysterically.

Oooh, what sweet ass-wiggling!
whispered (and sometimes even screamed) the ass-waggling, hip-wiggling crowd, clutching paper cups filled with beer. And yet from time to time the dancers would set their cups filled with the precious liquid down on the Malecón and in groups of three, or twenty, or sometimes a hundred, dive into the water, gnaw awhile on the Island’s foundation, and then return to the Carnival, where they would go on dancing and drinking. Policemen, too, would leave their helmets on the seawall and dive down to gnaw at the Island’s foundation. Rumba-dancing black women would disappear from their floats for a few moments, dive in, gnaw awhile, and return to join the dance; army cadets, sailors off the Gulf Fleet (who were therefore expert in aquatic maneuvers), brigade leaders, army officers, and members of the Party would dive down, gnaw, come up again, and then even more enthusiastically applaud the glorious parade. Fabulous trapeze artists would make their way along the center of the avenue that ran beside the Malecón, do an incredible somersault, plunge into the sea, gnaw at the Island’s moorings, and somersault back up into the center of the parade, making deep bows to the globe in which Fifo was riding. Behind the acrobats came Halisia Jalonzo, who was dancing the Black Swan while Coco Salas filled the air with mosquitoes; some of the supporting dancers, in a single jeté, would dive into the water, gnaw, and return to the corps de ballet. (One can’t say that Halisia turned a blind eye to this behavior because the truth is, she didn’t have any choice which eye to turn—they were both blind, and besides, she was
exhausted,
my dear, from having taken part in the act of repudiation that had been held not far from where she was now dancing.)

Behind Halisia came Pablito Malés and Salvia Rodríguez, who were singing (or howling, really) “They’re even killing themselves for love”—and weaving in and out between their legs were the terrified she-cats belonging to Karilda Olivar Lubricious, who had disappeared into the crowd. Now thousands of painters were making their way past; perched on a gigantic easel, or dangling from ropes, they were wielding their brushes on a canvas as big as a billboard—and on the canvas there began to emerge a gigantic portrait of Fifo. Then came hundreds of musical groups of every kind—symphony orchestras, bands, conga players—and then all the official limousines with Fifo’s VIP guests. (Fifo himself, of course, in his red balloon, was up front leading the parade.) Among the guests, we might make special mention of the Condesa de Merlín in her elegant gig, with her huge fake hairdress and her incredible fan and a midget in blackface sitting on her lap (and sometimes under it). The Condesa was tossing colored streamers into the crowd. So thrilled was the Condesa with the spectacle, and especially with the streamers (the reverse side of which bore a long diatribe against Fifo), that she didn’t realize when SuperSatanic, sitting beside her in the gig, jabbed her with the fatal needle (following orders from Miss Chelo). The Condesa, thinking it was an affectionate pinch, thanked SuperSatanic and expelled her from her carriage with a soft kick. . . . As the parade continued, Skunk in a Funk was now searching ever more frantically for Tatica, who had stolen her first pair of swim fins. Although Tatica had disappeared into the crowd of thugs from Arroyo Arenas, Skunk in a Funk continued with her search, for the quest had become a question of honor. Clara Mortera was exhibiting her collection of forbidden costumes—a work that was truly unique and that was the
dernieríssimo cri
in both Carnival and street attire. And yet . . . somehow, she was outdone by Evattt, the Black Widow (which was the name she’d been known by for many, many years), who won the People’s Palm for her monumental mourning gown crocheted from black silk and spangled with crosses confected of barbed wire. Hundreds of poets paraded by, reciting a hymn composed in honor of Fifo. And now the journalists were passing, an army of them, taking photos right and left and especially trying to get a picture of Fifo’s balloon. Suddenly—breaking up the parade, the wild throng of drums, the ass-swinging and backside-shaking—from out of the crowd rose Raúl Kastro, swathed in a huge mosquito net and wearing a ponytail and a crown of laurel. Sighing piteous and mournful sighs, he pushed his way through the crowd, stood for a moment on the Malecón, and in a final act of protest against Fifo, who had refused to transfer absolute power to him, leaped into the ocean. When the old soldier swathed in mosquito netting fell into the sea like some weird interplanetary parachutist, Fifo, up in his balloon, gave a huge howl of laughter that was echoed by the crowd, who continued dancing wildly. And in the midst of all this hurly-burly, hubbub, and hullabaloo, Delfín Proust announced that the moment had come for the Elevation of the Holy Hammer.