The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights

by Reinaldo Arenas

  “This is me you’re talkin’ to, my dear,” La Reine replied. “You’re drooling so hard you can’t even talk. I can hear that little heart of yours go pitty-pat from all the way over here. In fact, I think you’re about to have a seizure.”

  “Twit, what you hear is this stupid train. I’ve had the best men in Havana and all of Oriente, not counting the other provinces.”

  “I doubt it, but that’s not the point. That was then and this is now, honey. Which is what interests me—the present. What we’ve got here in the present, in case you haven’t noticed, is a greatbighuge hunk of a thing with his legs spread just a few feet from where I’m sitting.”

  “He’s all yours.”

  “Thank you, my dear, but I doubt that he’s yours to give away. I shall work for him. As soon as the lights go out, I’ll spring. You can watch my things for me.”

  “They don’t turn out the lights on trains anymore, you know. Since that terrible scandal when Miguel Barniz was discovered on the Matanzas-Havana train being fucked by three black men while Karilda Olivar Lubricious was masturbating under an open umbrella, Fifo has given orders that all trains will be lighted, or at least partially lighted, at night.”

  “Dark, lighted, or semilighted, that soldier is mine. I think he even looked this way.”

  “Uh-huh, he did,” said Skunk in a Funk, hoping to see the queen get in over her head, because Skunk in a Funk knew firsthand that the recruit wanted nothing to do with faggots.

  The train had been jogging along for several hours now, and La Reine des Araignées hadn’t taken her eyes off the young recruit, who for his part had fallen asleep and started snoring the second the train began moving.

  “He’s just playing, pretending to snore,” La Reine des Araignées whispered to Skunk in a Funk. “He’s doing it so he can get a blow job and not have any moral responsibility for it, no pangs of conscience—you know, it all happened while I was asleep. Thousands of men have gotten blow jobs that way, my dear, on trains and buses and planes and boats. They pretend they’re snoring, and while they’re sawing logs they come all over you!”

  At midnight, the light grew dimmer, and only a single bulb toward the center of the car remained lit—to save precious fuel. Fifo’s order was apparently honored in the breach. And speaking of breeches, in the light of that one dim light, the recruit’s treasures looked even more alluring. In the dimness, his body relaxed even further, his legs spread wider; all of Glory culminated at the intersection of those olive-green thighs.

  “I can’t take it any longer. I’m off to war,” said La Reine des Araignées.

  “Attack! Attack! I’ll watch your things,” the wicked Skunk in a Funk softly encouraged.

  In a single leap, La Reine des Araignées landed beside the still-snoring hunk.

  The fairy’s thigh approached the young soldier’s thigh. La Reine des Araignées allowed her diminutive thigh to brush the muscular other one. And then she began to rub that diminutive thigh of hers up against the greatbighuge other one. The owner of those muscular other thighs went on snoring, legs akimbo. Hiram, as though hypnotized by the power of those spread thighs, her eyes sparkling wildly, allowed her diminutive hand to fall onto the greatbighuge thigh. Through the dimness, Skunk in a Funk, surrounded by suitcases and shopping bags and packages-tied-with-string and backpacks and stench, looked on. Hiram’s hand had daringly moved to the still-snoring recruit’s fly. Oh, god, what if Skunk in a Funk were just a disgusting old queen that nobody wanted anymore, a faggot ready for the old folks’ home, a wreck, and that knock-your-eyes-out recruit had spurned her not because he didn’t like fags but because he didn’t like old, decrepit, over-the-hill fags. Oh, look, she thought she’d die: La Reine des Araignées had unzipped the hunk’s fly and was sticking her hand down into the cave where the fabulous treasure was buried. My God, my God, what Skunk in a Funk was now seeing was Hiram, handling the job in the most skillful way, completely opening the recruit’s pants—first unbuckling his belt, then pulling his underwear all the way down, and then, without further ado, going down on him. And all the while, the recruit went on snoring. And all the while, Skunk in a Funk had to watch La Reine des Araignées’s things. What gall that Hiram’s got, thought Skunk in a Funk, watching him on his knees before the recruit, burying the soldier’s gigantic cock (and even, at one point, both testicles!) in his throat. La Reine des Araignées, her mouth stuffed, directed a look of triumph at Skunk in a Funk, who was moribund with envy. In ecstasy over his triumph, Hiram put a hand on each of the recruit’s thighs and began to knead and caress them, while his mouth went on devouring the divine member, giving it little love nips, wetting it with saliva, and uttering soft and lascivious moans. At last, this slurping and moaning began to penetrate the recruit’s sleeping brain, and he began to stir. He stopped snoring, opened his eyes. And then (omigod!) he was awake (because he really had been asleep). And what he saw made his eyes almost pop out of his head: His pants were down around his ankles and some kind of fairy hummingbird was sucking the nectar from the flower of his manhood.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU FAGGOT!” boomed the voice of the recruit—so loudly that everyone on the train, including the moaning animals, fell silent.

  And instantly the recruit, pulling up his pants, grabbed Hiram by the neck and started strangling him. But just as the queen was about to expire, her spider nature returned to her, and she began to spin, hands and feet flailing, till she unscrewed her neck, like a bolt from a nut, from the infuriated recruit’s grip. And before the eyes of the passengers, who sat paralyzed at this scene of lust and mayhem, La Reine des Araignées vaulted over to where a smiling Skunk in a Funk sat, picked up all her bags and baggage, and took off down the aisle, scattering beans and rice and every other kind of grain to the four winds and setting free all the domestic animals, which now were also running along behind the queen, no doubt looking (as she was) for the exit. A little way behind her came the gigantic, enraged recruit and Skunk in a Funk, who didn’t want to miss the end of this epic chase. . . . Never again, my dear, in the national or international history of the railroad will a page such as this be written: Carrying his cardboard suitcases, a trunk, five briefcases, several shopping bags, and a backpack, the queen ran through the entire length of the train, smashing ankles and inspiring screams of pain and cries of “Kill ’er!” And still running, still carrying all her bags and baggage, like Halley’s Comet but with a much longer tail, she ran the length of the train, keeping a car-length lead on her pursuers. But the train, unfortunately, was not infinitely long, and so finally, in the last car, La Reine des Araignées had to stop. In seconds, the enraged recruit, Skunk in a Funk, a crowd of people who’d been bruised and stepped on by the fleeing queen, and lord knows how many animals—the whole train caught up with her.

  “You son of a bitch faggot!” the recruit screamed as he pummeled La Reine des Araignées. “You won’t get away with this! You sucked my cock—while I’m still under investigation! Do you hear that—under investigation?”

  “Under investigation for what?” asked La Reine as she tried to shield herself with some of her baggage.

  “Under investigation for admission to the Young Communists! This could go on my record, it could ruin my career! You know what I ought to do to you? I ought to kill you. You’ve done a terrible thing, God will never forgive you. That’s what I ought to do—I ought to kill you,” the delicious recruit screamed in fury as Skunk in a Funk looked on high-mindedly and approvingly. “But no,” the young soldier stopped himself, looking down scornfully at the queen he had thrown to the floor. “No . . . I won’t dirty my hands with a filthy faggot. That could go on my record, too, and get me blackballed. I’m not going to kill you, but I’m not going to keep traveling on a train with a sick, perverted faggot. That could go on my record too. So I’ll tell you what, faggot—if you don’t want me to throttle you, you jump off this train.”

  Hiram realized that it was an order that was not negotiable—that if he di
dn’t throw himself off the moving train he’d die at the hands of the enraged giant. With desperate eyes he looked over toward Skunk in a Funk.

  “I’ve got to jump,” he said. “Be a dear and throw my things off after me—all my things. All.” And without further ado the queen opened the back door of the train and leaped into the void—and she was followed by almost all the animals that had been brought on the train.

  “Throw it all to me—all my bundles, all my bags, all the packages—don’t leave anything on board,” La Reine des Araignées called out to Skunk in a Funk as he rolled over and over along the tracks.

  Skunk in a Funk began throwing off the suitcases, bundles, briefcases, shopping bags . . .

  “All of it, all of it,” shouted Hiram. “Throw everything you’ve got there.” And Skunk in a Funk threw out all the boxes and bags and bundles and backpacks that lay about her.

  Hiram was now a distant spot between the rails. Unable to contain her hilarity, Skunk in a Funk returned to her seat. The recruit was once more snoring stentoriously, legs akimbo. I’ve got to write this story, Reinaldo said to himself, reaching down for the thick manuscript of his novel eternally in progress. But where was his backpack? It was then that he realized that along with all of Hiram’s belongings he had thrown his own backpack (with the yautías, the bottle of rendered pork fat, and the manuscript of his novel) off the train. Oh, my god! he cried, and now I’ll have to rewrite the story of my novel for a seventh time!

  THE STORY

  This is the story of an island ruled over by an absolute tyrant named Fifo. The tyrant had been in power for forty years, and naturally he exercised absolute control over every inhabitant of the island. People might be starving to death but night and day they were required to praise the abundance in which they lived, an abundance made possible by techniques of production introduced by the tyrant. Nobody was allowed to leave the island or make even the slightest remark against the tyrant; instead, night and day they were obliged to sing anthems to the marvelous freedom and shining future that the tyrant had given them. On the island of this story, all the inhabitants lived at least a double life: publicly there was not a moment they did not praise and laud the tyrant, while secretly they loathed him and prayed in desperation for him to die—preferably a horrible death. But the tyrant had an enormous army and a wonderful intelligence machine, so that destroying him was virtually impossible. The dream of the entire population of the island was no longer to be free, but rather that someday they be able to escape from the island, which was a perfect prison. But how was one to escape from a perfect prison? By air, escape was impossible; only the tyrant had planes and helicopters, and even balloons were under his control. Escape by land was not even to be considered, since the island was an island. That left the sea, and the truth was, in the beginning a lot of people had escaped that way—in boats, on inner tubes, on a couple of floating planks lashed together, once even in a number 2 washtub. But the tyrant tripled the coast guard, patrolled the coast with superfast speedboats, salted the ocean with supersensitive mines, until it was almost impossible to escape by sea. So great was their desperation that people finally decided that the only way of escape was by using the island itself. Once the island could move about, it would run aground near some continent, some free terra firma. So tacitly (they obviously could not speak of this) they decided to gnaw away at the platform that bound the island to the seabed until they had separated the island from its base, and then, when the island was free-floating, entrust their fate to wind and waves. . . . Of course separating the island from its base was no easy task; the base was (as bases have to be) of hardest rock. The conspirators also had to be able to go down to considerable depth underwater in order to chip away at it, and since all tools were under the control of the tyrant the only tool the people had to work with was their teeth. And so, constantly, endlessly diving deep into the sea, the people of Cuba began to gnaw away at the base of their island with their teeth, and in time, they evolved lungs that allowed them to remain underwater for almost an hour and huge buck teeth, like those of Aurélico Cortés and Tomasito the Goya-Girl.

  Of course that constant gnawing at the base of the island meant that the island experienced frequent earthquakes, geysers, temblors, landslides, cave-ins, and even the occasional reddish-colored eruption of a volcano, when hundreds or thousands of the island’s big-toothed inhabitants would be spewed forth, their bodies turned into a huge, purple, flaming plume of smoke. Naturally, all these geological changes attracted the tyrant’s attention, and soon his most trusted national and international agents discovered “a terrible act of communal treason: Vile citizens, become bucktoothed rodents,” read the report, “are attempting to steal the island and deliver it to an imperialist power.” The word rodent, hardly honorific in itself, became the worst insult one could fling at a human being. It goes without saying that immediate attempts would be made to eliminate any person so categorized. And yet these rodents continued to gnaw away without mercy at the base of the island; now, when the seas were very heavy, one began to feel the island sway. The dictator hired thousands of divers and experts in underwater hunting and charged them with eliminating the rodents, but they failed. In fact, sometimes the antirodent forces would even gnaw a bit themselves. Ay, sometimes a general, a comandante, a government minister, or even a bishop of the Catholic Church would dive down in his official uniform (or vestments, as the case might be) and start gnawing. The tyrant could no longer trust even his most trusted troops.

  But there was a more fundamental problem even than that: no soldier, however trustworthy he might be, could remain underwater twenty-four hours a day exterminating rodents. What was needed was a force of rodent-repressors whose natural element was the ocean. After much official meditation, the Ministress of Hunting and Fishing, Rolandina Rodríguez, submitted a most thoughtful proposal: “Sea-based antirodentary material,” it said, “exists in abundance along our coasts; we have only to train it. The waters of the Caribbean are the most shark-infested waters in the world. We should, therefore, employ sharks against the rodents. We must create a force of unsleeping and unwearying sharks to devour them. . . .” The tyrant thought this idea so brilliant that he immediately gave orders that the Ministress of Hunting and Fishing be shot by firing squad (since it was inconceivable that anyone except the tyrant could have such a brilliant idea) and stole the idea for himself. Aided by virtually every scientist in the world and the governments of virtually every nation, the tyrant created a huge shark farm where the young denizens of the deep could be trained. The classes would consist of not feeding the beasts, and then when their hunger was unbearable, showing them a rodent, which the shark would instantly devour.

  To this end, the tyrant constructed a miniature island and populated it with volunteer rodents (lured with promises of all the food they could eat, so when the time came they’d be well fed), who went out swimming and were instantly scarfed down by the ravenous sharks. Thus, in only a few months a huge army of antirodent sharks had been created, and these troops, after the playing of the national anthem and a longish speech by the tyrant, were duly deployed into the ocean. The tyrant had had the foresight to appoint a shark over all the other sharks: the strongest, ablest, and most bloodthirsty of the race, whose responsibilities were to command and lead the others, and the Übershark’s name was Bloodthirsty Shark. And indeed Bloodthirsty Shark was a glorious example of the species: an athletic, muscular, gleaming creature possessed of fourteen rows of perfect teeth and a formidable member which the beast employed in the most sadistic way, for sometimes as it devoured its victim it would ejaculate within it. The tyrant would personally feed that gleaming and to a certain point—one must be fair—beautiful creature. From his presidential gunboat or his helicopter, Fifo would toss Bloodthirsty Shark the tastiest of the rodents, and in response Bloodthirsty Shark would make graceful pirouettes in the sea, leaping above the waves, diving and surfacing again, its shining belly upward, exhibiting its ranks of g
listening teeth, its fearsome sex. The tyrant would shudder rapturously at the sight. Finally he had found an ally—an excellent leader, a good soldier who, to make it all the more perfect, could not talk, and who would help him to exterminate the rodents—every last one of them. In order to be in closer contact with the shark, the tyrant had had a huge underground palace built, just at the edge of the sea. There, he installed an aquarium with an immense glass window behind which he would spend long hours transfixed, contemplating the graceful motions of Bloodthirsty Shark, who would sometimes bring a rodent to the glass in its jaws and there, before the tyrant’s eyes, kill it, rape it, tear it to pieces, and swallow it, while he, the tyrant, would leap about in glee.

  Yet the incredible thing about all this was that in spite of that terrible, incredibly disciplined underwater army and the absolutely trustworthy voracity of Bloodthirsty Shark, the people of the island continued to gnaw away at the island’s mooring.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (4)

  Bibulous Barniz, like some burlesque burgher, stood imbibing beer in a bar in Borneo (or perhaps Batavia) when a bearded Bedouin (or perhaps Berber), putting back bourbon after bourbon, tipped his biretta and proffered him his prominent protuberance. Barniz, bedazzled by the Bedouin (or perhaps Berber), put by his beer and imbibed the bubbly brew produced by the barbarian’s protuberance. Oh, what a bubbly brew the bibulous Barniz imbibed!

  For Miguel Barniz

  VIRGILIO PIÑERA READS HIS EVANESCENT POEMS

  It was a red-letter night at Olga Andreu’s house—Virgilio Piñera was going to read his poems. From the crème de la crème of Havana society—composed of (among others) La Arrufada, Miss Starling-Bird, Skunk in a Funk (in her role as Reinaldo), the cunning Mahoma, Miguel Barniz, and Paula Amanda, a.k.a. Luisa Fernanda—Olga Andreu had invited all those queens who in her view (1) could be trusted and (2) adored Virgilio Piñera. The living room of the small apartment was wall-to-wall with queens of all ages, from Harolda Gratmatges (ninety-eight years old and blind) to Miss Mayoya, an illiterate queen with a truly sculptural body who according to rumors spread by Virgilio himself was still a virgin, since she was saving herself for none other than Bloodthirsty Shark, whom she’d fallen madly in love with. And “wall to wall” is not just a manner of speaking, my dear: People were sitting on the floor, so crowded together they were practically on top of one another—and the heat was stifling. Among the other guests were the Brontë Sisters, the Three Weird Sisters, Miss Oscar, Chug-a-Lug (not named for his beer-drinking skills), Tomasito the Goya-Girl, the Ogress, the Horrible Marmot, Miss Pricked by Thorns Amid the Roses, and almost a hundred more. The screeching and racket those queens made was like something out of Pantagruel. Sakuntala La Mala was saying that she predicted that a new comet, much larger than Halley’s, was approaching, and heralding no end of horrors; Miss Mayoya, an incorrigible exhibitionist, was dancing to the rhythm of her own clapping hands, trying out a special wiggle she was planning to debut at the Carnival; La Arrufada was exchanging viperous sussurations with Miss Starling-Bird. La Reine des Araignées was telling Reinaldo how she’d managed to make it back to Havana after fifteen days of dreadfully perilous adventures and every imaginable sort of exploit on sugarcane trucks, tractor-trailers, pickups, and mules. She claimed (who knew?) to have been screwed by more than two thousand men on that hallucinogenic journey; the most memorable, she said, was when she’d gotten into the back of a pickup in Matanzas and discovered a runaway black man, completely naked so his prison uniform wouldn’t give him away. La Reine said she’d crossed the entire province of Matanzas sucking on the black man’s cock. The pickup had sped through the countryside, she said, leaving thousands of campesinos and the entire population of Matanzas (including the Dowager Duchess de Valero) openmouthed in incredulity, though they were witnessing the blow job with their own eyes. “It was a marvelous trip,” sighed Delfín Proust at last. Then Skunk in a Funk asked her what had happened to all the bags. “Gone! Utterly lost! Lost forever!” exclaimed Delfín, fluttering her spidery arms and (perhaps unintentionally) scratching the cunning Mahoma’s gigantic face. Mahoma gave a shriek and hurled herself at the other queen with every intention of murdering her. An earsplitting cat fight broke out, ten times louder and shriller than the normal shrieking and cackling of a moment before. Miss Mayoya, the Weird Sisters, Miss Not Out Yet, and several other fairies (apparently friends of Hiram) tried to stop Mahoma, but Skunk in a Funk was yelling “Kill her! Kill her!” in the pre-murderess’s ear, hoping that if La Reine were dead, she wouldn’t be able to turn the manuscript of The Color of Summer over to Fifo—because Skunk in a Funk was certain that Hiram hadn’t lost it. So anyway—there was Mahoma, standing in the middle of the room shrieking, her two monstrous hands around La Reine des Araignées’s neck, lifting her off the floor with every intention of smashing her head against one of the walls of Olga Andreu’s apartment. But just at that moment, Olga announced that Virgilio Piñera was about to begin his reading—his reading of his evanescent poems.