The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights
Page 1
Contents
NOTICE
TO THE JUDGE
INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS COLCHIE
THE FLIGHT OF GERTRUDIS GÓMEZ DE AVELLANEDA
A TONGUE TWISTER (1)
“HM, TOP, SEEKING SAME . . .”
IN THE MONSTER MEN’S ROOM
A TONGUE TWISTER (2)
PAINTING
THE SEVEN MAJOR CATEGORIES OF QUEENHOOD
FAIRIES ON THE BEACH
A PRAYER
A LETTER
A WALKING TOUR THROUGH OLD HAVANA IN THE COMPANY OF ALEJO SHOLEKHOV
BUSES OR TURTLES?
OSCAR FLIES BY NIGHT
A JOURNEY TO HOLGUÍN
A JOURNEY TO THE MOON
A TONGUE TWISTER (3)
BEFORE UNDERTAKING A LONG JOURNEY
HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A FAIRY SPURNED
A JOURNEY BY TRAIN
THE STORY
A TONGUE TWISTER (4)
VIRGILIO PIÑERA READS HIS EVANESCENT POEMS
FOR BOSCH, SHE NOSHES
SOME UNSETTLING QUESTIONS
A TONGUE TWISTER (5)
IN THE MONSTER MEN’S ROOM
A TOUR OF INSPECTION
ROSA’S LITTLE PINK SLIPPERS, THE MAGIC RING, AND THE SEVEN-LEAGUE SWIM FINS
THE STORY
A TONGUE TWISTER (6)
A LETTER
MEDICINAL IMMERSIONS
A TONGUE TWISTER (7)
THE PARTY BEGINS
THE LOCK QUEEN
A TONGUE TWISTER (8)
NOUVEAUX PENSÉES DE PASCAL, OU PENSÉES D’ENFER
THE SUPER-SKEWER
THE THREE WEIRD SISTERS, PLUS ONE
THE GUEST IN DISTRESS
THE DEATH OF LEZAMA
A TONGUE TWISTER (9)
ST. NELLY
THE STORY
A TONGUE TWISTER (10)
THE FOUR MAJOR CATEGORIES OF TOPS
A DYING MOTHER
CRUCIFUCKINGFIXION
THE ANGLO-CAMPESINA
THE KEY TO THE GULF
THE ELECTRIC VENUS
COCO SALAS’ SECRET
A TONGUE TWISTER (11)
THE SEVEN WONDERS OF CUBAN SOCIALISM
IN THE LIBRARY
A CLARIFICATION BY THE THREE WEIRD SISTERS
A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT (THOUGH IT WAS BRIGHT AS DAY)
A TONGUE TWISTER (12)
STOOL PIGEONS
FOREWORD
A TONGUE TWISTER (13)
THE CONDESA DE MERLÍN
IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS
AT THE EXIT TO EL MORRO CASTLE
FAREWELL TO THE SEA
JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA’S LECTURE
A TONGUE TWISTER (14)
A LETTER
THE AREOPAGITE
A TONGUE TWISTER (15)
FORBIDDEN COSTUMES
THE AREOPAGITE’S STORY
A TONGUE TWISTER (16)
A FUGITIVE’S TOCCATA AND FUGUE
A JOURNEY TO THE MOON
A TONGUE TWISTER (17)
MONKEYSHINES
IN EL MORRO CASTLE
THE STORY
A TONGUE TWISTER (18)
THE CONFESSION OF H. PUNTILLA
SKUNK IN A FUNK
A TONGUE TWISTER (19)
THAT EARTHSHAKING COUPLING
A TONGUE TWISTER (20)
A LETTER
THE DEATH OF VIRGILIO PIÑERA
A TONGUE TWISTER (21)
THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF YOUNG TEODORO TAMPON
A TONGUE TWISTER (22)
A PORTRAIT OF LUISA PÉREZ DE ZAMBRANA
A TONGUE TWISTER (23)
CLARA’S HOLE
A TONGUE TWISTER (24)
THE GRAND ONEIRICAL THEOLOGICAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHICAL SATIRICAL CONFERENCE
A PRAYER
A TONGUE TWISTER (25)
THE GARDEN OF COMPUTERS
A TONGUE TWISTER (26)
ASS-WIGGLING AND BACKSIDE-SWINGING
A TONGUE TWISTER (27)
THE DUAL NATURE OF THE [GENIUS, TYRANT]
IN THE MONSTER MEN’S ROOM
A TONGUE TWISTER (28)
THE LADY OF THE VEIL
ASS-WIGGLING
A TONGUE TWISTER (29)
THE ELEVATION OF THE HOLY HAMMER
THE BURIAL OF VIRGILIO PIÑERA
THE DEPARTURE
A TONGUE TWISTER (THE LAST ONE)
CLARA IN FLAMES
PANDEMONIUM
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
THE STORY
AFTERWORD
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE COLOR OF SUMMER or The New Garden of Earthly Delights
A Viking Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by Andrew Hurley and the Estate of Reinaldo Arenas
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 978-1-1011-9932-9
A VIKING BOOK®
Viking Books first published by TheViking Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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Viking and the “V” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: April, 2002
P E N G U I N B O O K S
THE COLOR OF SUMMER
Reinaldo Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943. In 1980, he was one of one hundred twenty thousand Cubans who arrived in the United States on the Mariel boatlift. Arenas is the author of the Pentagonia, a quintet that he called a “secret history of Cuba,” comprised of the novels Singing from the Well, The Palace of the White Skunks, Farewell to the Sea, The Color of Summer, and The Assault. His memoir, Before Night Falls, was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the fourteen “Best Books of 1993” and was hailed by Mario Vargas Llosa as “one of the most shattering testimonials ever written.” Arenas wrote six other novels, including The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando (which won first prize for the best foreign novel of the year in France), five novellas, short stories, essays, experimental theater pieces, and poetry. After arriving in the United States, Arenas settled in New York where he lived until his death, from AIDS, ten years later.
Andrew Hurley is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. He has translated all of the novels in Arenas’s Pentagonia, and is also the translator of Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions.
Thomas Colchie is a literary agent and translator. He has edited, among other collections, A Hammock Beneath the Mangoes: Stories from Latin America; and is at work compiling a companion volume of more recent Latin American short fiction.
P E N G U I N B O O K S
THE COLOR OF SUMMER
Reinaldo Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943. In 1980, he was one of 120,000 Cubans who arrived in the United States during the Mariel boat lift. Arenas settled in New York, where he lived until his death
from AIDS ten years later.
Andrew Hurley is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. He translated all of the novels in Arena’s Pentagonía, and is also the translator of Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions.
Because I’ll tell you, anywhere there are this many whores, you can’t make a single one of ’em follow orders.
Carajicomedia
Notice
~
The author of this work is solely responsible, both in life and in death, for the ideas and opinions contained herein, and expressly relieves his publisher, estate, translator, and literary agent of any liability that might arise out of the publication of this volume.
To the Judge
~
Whoa, girl, just hold it right there. Before you start going through these pages looking for things to have me thrown in jail for, I want you to try to remember that you’re reading a work of fiction here, so the characters in it are made up—they’re concoctions, denizens of the world of imagination (literary figures, parodies, metaphors—you know), not real-life people. And another thing, my dear, while we’re at it—I wrote this novel in 1990 and set it in 1999. I mean think about it—how fair would it be to haul me into court for a bunch of fictitious stuff that when it was written down hadn’t even happened yet?
The Author
INTRODUCTION
In May of 1980, the Cuban dissident poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) arrived in Key West, Florida, after a harrowing five-day sea voyage on a pleasure craft named the San Lázaro. Having thus completed his own Mariel “exodus” that should have taken no more than seven hours, he expected to be welcomed by the American intellectual community that had hailed his works, published abroad while he was still in Cuba. He did not realize how parsimoniously the title of dissident was meted out to foreign authors (who ever heard of a dissident American author?) by the U.S. intellectual community and its publishers. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, “dissident” was a term customarily restricted to certain, and only certain, Soviet and Eastern European authors, the qualifications for which have never been revealed by Washington insiders or the then budding media conglomerates. Latin American authors were not dissidents but “exiles.” Cuban exiles, Haitian exiles, Dominican exiles, Chilean exiles, Argentine exiles. Manuel Puig (Argentina) was not a dissident writer; Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia) was. Likewise, Solzhenitsyn (USSR); but not Manlio Argueta (El Salvador). And especially not Cubans, writers or otherwise—Gusanos (worms), escoria (dregs), agentes del CIA (CIA agents), perhaps. Reinaldo did not know that in America he would become, not a celebrity, but an invisible man; that he would vanish, disappear.
There is an old saying of the Cold War, first told me by Carlos Franqui, one of the early revolutionaries who joined Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra to organize and direct Radio Rebelde: “In Communism and in Capitalism, they kick you in the ass,” he said. “But the difference is, under Communism, you have to smile and say, Thank you; whereas under Capitalism, at least you can scream.” Well, Reinaldo Arenas had come to scream . . .
In time, of course, Arenas would learn that when you scream without a microphone, nobody hears you, except maybe the next-door neighbor, who calls the landlord who calls the police, to have you evicted from your 43rd Street, rat-infested, New York City apartment. In the meantime, professors at famous American universities began expunging his novels from their syllabuses. Newspapers would select reviewers who had just come back from their latest two-week junket in Havana, all expenses paid by the Revolution, to learn how Utopia thrived in “the first free territory of the Americas.” While Reinaldo was living in a police-patrolled, rent-controlled Hell’s Kitchen apartment, the neighboring New York Times published a Sunday magazine cover story on “Revolution and the Intellectual in Latin America.” The theme of the piece was, of course, Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution, its pros and cons in the minds of the Latin American intelligentsia. Incorporating extended interviews with, among other authors, García Márquez of Colombia (pro-Fidel), Octavio Paz of Mexico (anti-Fidel), and Julio Cortázar of Argentina (frequent-flier on Cubana de Aviación, though his books never accompanied him), the most telling aspect of the entire piece was what was untold, naturally. Not a single Cuban intellectual, either inside or outside of Cuba, had been asked his opinion on the subject. Reinaldo wrote a letter of protest to the editor, which was never published. He did not exist.
In Germany, one of Arenas’s publishers sponsored a Latin American festival, to coincide with the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1985, to which neither he, nor the Cuban novelist and essayist Guillermo Cabrera Infante (also in exile, and under contract to the same publisher) were invited. One of the editors of the publishing house was, yes, traveling back and forth to Cuba, learning about the Revolution. It seems that UNEAC (Union of Cuban Writers and Artists) had insisted it would only send its authors if no gusanos were invited. None were, but the promised shipment of genuine intellectual puros never showed up either. As Cabrera Infante would say, Holy Smoke!
Curiously, even the published versions of Reinaldo’s—and Guillermo’s—works became extremely difficult to find. Their Spanish publisher “couldn’t even give them away.” Still, when bookstores ordered copies, they consistently received notices that the publisher was “temporarily out of stock.” Arenas had also been told by his French publisher, shortly after his escape from Cuba, that his translator (the most famous in all of France) was just too busy to translate his remaining works; a few years later Reinaldo received a disheartened letter from that same translator asking why, after so many years of faithful service, the author had no longer wanted him as his translator. Reinaldo screamed. Nobody heard . . .
How different it had been in Cuba. In 1965, a then twenty-two-year-old Reinaldo Arenas had won second prize for the manuscript of his first novel, Celestino Before Dawn, in an annual competition for best fiction sponsored by UNEAC in Havana. With a truly incantatory blend of the prosaic and the lyrical, a young boy “sings” the tale of his own awakenings, sexual and poetic, to the world about him through the irreverent promptings of his (imagined?) cousin Celestino. The novel would be published in 1967, selling out within a week, but would never be reissued inside of Cuba again. (It was eventually rewritten in exile as Singing from the Well. The first version is rumored to have been recently republished in Havana.)
In 1966, heralded as a young prodigy of the Revolution and acknowledged by such luminaries as the Cuban literary “giant,” José Lezama Lima, for the baroque pyrotechnics of his style, his wit, and (more discreetly) his libido, Arenas improvidently entered the manuscript of a second novel in the next annual competition. Improvidently, because with Hallucinations he quite daringly recast the life of the historical Fray Servando into fiction, updating this Mexican pícaro’s exploits with salacious detail and political innuendo.
On December 12, 1794, the iconoclastical friar, Servando Teresa de Mier (1763–1827), renowned for the brilliance of his oratory, his wit, and his intellect, had delivered a heretical sermon at the Cathedral of Mexico City. The heresy was in suggesting, however obliquely, that the aboriginal Americans might have already been blessed with a good Christian “education” prior to the Spanish Conquest—by the Apostle Thomas, whom Servando believed to be revered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl (the Plumed Serpent). Immediately, the incorrigible Servando was banished to Spain, tried, and imprisoned. The balance of his life was spent in jail or in flight, harassed by the Holy Inquisition, hounded by the Spanish authorities, escaping dungeons, wandering in exile. The infamous sermon had wreaked havoc on the course of his life, though fortunately it would provoke his final revenge: the writing of his fantastic memoirs.
His, too, had been an age of revolutions (1776, in America; 1789, in France) and conflicting fanatical fervors, throughout Europe and Latin America. The powers of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Empire had been foundering on both continents. There were many Inquisitions, not all of them religious. Eighteenth-c
entury Rationalism, in its quest for ideological Purities (whether atheistic or clerical, republican or monarchical), seemed bent upon cleansing the Body Politic of the Past, or of the Future.
Arenas’s astonishing fictionalization of Servando’s life in his Hallucinations did win him another “second” prize—but, this time, as something of an anomaly: there would be no first prize. Two jurors (one of them, the Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera) had voted in favor of his novel; two jurors (one of them, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier) had voted against it. The irony was that, despite his strong objections to the Arenas manuscript, Carpentier could find no substitute worthy of the prize. Yet, so great was the venerable novelist’s prestige (Had not Fidel appointed him cultural attaché to an embassy in Paris?), or perhaps his spite (Was he not the inventor of “marvelous reality” in fiction?), that with a simple wave of his magical-realist baton he liquidated the category: Hallucinations was awarded “first honorable mention.”