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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  Total silence fell upon the room. Gingerly, Mahoma deposited the near-dead La Reine on the floor, and everyone settled down to listen to the poet, who for hours had been locked up in Olga Andreu’s bedroom, waiting to make his appearance until all the guests had arrived. So now, barefoot and dressed only in a guayabera so long that it reached all the way to his ankles, Virgilio made his entrance.

  “Maestro! Maestro! Welcome!” shouted the queens almost in unison.

  “Bring in the brazier,” was the poet’s only greeting.

  Olga Andreu, Mahoma, and Skunk in a Funk hurried out to the kitchen and returned with a hibachi filled with charcoal. They placed it beside the small table that the poet was sitting at, and immediately Virgilio began. He began with a poem he had written the night before—and his listeners immediately knew they were in the presence of greatness. It was a perfect poem, containing all the most secret, hidden sadness of every person individually and the pain of humanity in general. While the poet read, a magical hush, a sort of spell, a wondrous enchantment, fell over all those terrified and grotesque figures. The guests’ expressions became peaceful, their eyes filled with sweet tears, their bodies took on a serenity, a repose that terror had prevented them from feeling for many years. All were enveloped in a sort of ecstasy of beauty. Even Uglíssima, the most horrific queen on earth, took on an undefinable but visible loveliness that sensibly contrasted with her formerly bloodcurdling features. Olga Andreu had turned off the living room lights (leaving Virgilio illuminated only by the glow of the hibachi) and now as she stepped forward to find a seat on the floor, she was a beautiful sylphlike teenage girl. Everyone was enthralled. Poetry had taken the listeners to another realm, a place that no longer existed almost anywhere, much less there, on that island accursed and at the mercy of Fifo’s insane and often cruel caprices. And so while the poet read, the guests, now transported to a place far from all those horrors, found themselves led deeper and deeper into magical gardens where music played, where an unearthly, beautiful song was heard, where time, its implacable horrors in abeyance, molded realms that were actually habitable, paths that wandered off into misty promises, wondrously life-affirming anthems, soft blue peaks, and fields of sunflowers. . . . But then, alas, Virgilio’s reading of the poem ended, and before the applause broke out, before the spell was broken, he had tossed it into the flames of the hibachi.

  A gasp of horror escaped all those who had heard the poem.

  “Maestro, what are you doing?” cried Sakuntala La Mala, tearing at her wig, while Antón Arrufada stuck his hands in the flames to try to rescue the poem.

  But Mahoma and Skunk in a Funk, obeying a sign from Virgilio, stopped the queen, and even slapped her a couple of times. Virgilio then spoke.

  “Yes—cry, shout, kick, pull your hair or your toupees. But heed me, my friends—these poems are the originals, not copies. And tonight, as I read them, I shall burn them.”

  “Maestro, for heaven’s sake, think of us! How can you deprive us of this beauty?” exclaimed Uglíssima.

  And cries of approval seconded Uglíssima, who suddenly looked more horrific than ever. But Virgilio, ignoring the voices of protest, went on talking.

  “I shall burn them all. But first I shall give you the opportunity to enjoy them, myself the opportunity to read them. One writes for others, there is no doubt of that. And all writing is revenge—to that rule, there can be no exception. Thus, I write my revenge and then am obliged to read it; if I didn’t, it would be as though it had never existed. But immediately afterward, I must burn what I have read. I can leave no proof of my revenge, for if I did, then a greater revenge, Fifo’s revenge, would swoop down upon me and annihilate me. Resign yourselves to hearing these poems one time and one time only, as I have resigned myself to my own fate, which is yet more terrible—the fate of having to write them, read them but once, and consign them forever to the flames.”

  And at that, the poet put on his thick glasses, picked up another sheet of paper, and began to read another brilliant poem. Instantly, his audience was once again transformed. This time, the room was filled with angels, slender nymphs, teenagers with the faces and bodies of demigods, and all in thrall to the music of a true God.

  When he had finished reading, Virgilio raised the poem and addressed his audience curtly:

  “I repeat—there are no copies, this is the original. Once I fling it into the flames it will be gone forever.”

  And so saying, the poet flung that manuscript into the flames.

  A wail of horror filled the apartment. Tomasito the Goya-Girl writhed in grief on the floor, Chug-a-Lug gave a cavernous moan, Arrufada wept, Coco Salas removed his glasses, and Paula Amanda stifled a scream with a kitchen towel that she was planning to steal from Olga Andreu. And yes, even the fairies who would inform on Virgilio the next day could not contain their emotions.

  But by then the poet was already beginning to read his third great poem of the night. This was a poem that embodied the sound of rhythmic drumming and the echo of great hymns, and it celebrated the length and breadth of the Island. Its listeners did not simply listen, they became the poem—leaves, fruit, flowers, cool burbling water that ran among the rocks and through the plains, lakes, a tree filled with birds, furiously satisfied desires, clamor, and revenge. Suddenly, they were all heroes; suddenly, they were all giants; suddenly, they were all children. Suddenly, they were all sitting under a green palm tree listening to a sweet melody. Rain pattered on the leaves. They listened to the music of the rain as it fell on the leaves. They were transported into the center of low clouds, came out onto a wide field where thousands of people were working in the hellish sun, and after that horrible vision they returned to the primordial tree where, returned to beauty and innocence, they fell asleep to the thought that that last, horrible, other vision was but a nightmare which made the reality the poet had showed them all the more beautiful.

  “Another ephemeral poem that shall be fuel for the flames,” resounded the voice of the poet as he ended his reading and dropped the poem onto the brazier.

  This time the listeners expressed their dismay with wails of shock. So loud were the protests of disbelief and pain that Olga Andreu turned on the lights and begged them to control their grief, since otherwise the Watchdog Committee for her block might hear them, and then, in the face of the possibility of a search, Virgilio would have to burn his poems before he read them.

  “What we might do is gag those who can’t control themselves,” suggested Virgilio, who was terrified that the Watchdog Committee might knock at the door. “Raise your hand if you want to be gagged.”

  And everyone, including Skunk in a Funk, Mahoma, Sakuntala La Mala, and even Olga Andreu herself, raised a hand. The hostess decided to sacrifice one of the few bedsheets she had left, and she, Skunk in a Funk, Mahoma, and La Reine des Araignées tied a gag on everyone in the living room. Then, after they had also gagged themselves, Virgilio continued his reading.

  Now they were seeing thousands of Indians massacred (some burned alive) and other thousands who turned, armed with sticks and stones, to confront their persecutors. They saw millions of black men and women enslaved, and thousands of runaways hunted down with dogs, but sometimes instead of being devoured by the howling pack the runaways would turn the tables and devour the hounds that pursued them. They saw thousands of guajiros, simple country people, machetes upraised, advancing against an oppressor’s army that exterminated them by the hundreds with every cannon blast, yet the survivors continued advancing. And now they saw millions of people of all races enslaved and constantly monitored, but somehow managing to elude the surveillance and throw themselves into the sea, to gnaw away at the base of the island. And they saw themselves, under the ocean, gnawing desperately, while armies of sharks (led by one huge and particularly bloodthirsty specimen) bore down on them to devour them. And then, at last, they saw the country and the countercountry—because every country, like all things in this world, has its contrary, and that contr
ary-to-a-country is its countercountry, the forces of darkness that work to ensure that only superficiality and horror endure, that all things noble, beautiful, brave, and life-enhancing—the true country—disappear. The countercountry (the poem somehow revealed this) is monolithic, rigid vulgarity; the country is all that is diverse, luminous, mysterious—and festive. And this revelation, more than the images of all the beautiful things that they had seen, invested the listeners with an identity and a faith. And they realized that they were not alone, because beyond all the horror—including that horror that they themselves exuded—there existed the sheltering presence of a tradition formed of beauty and rebelliousness: a true country.

  When Virgilio burned the poem, whines, moans, whimpers, bleats, muted and desperate sounds of weeping were heard, in spite of the muzzles and gags. (Perhaps the sounds came from deeper inside.) Some of the guests, prevented from verbalizing their shock and dismay at the loss of all that beauty, scourged themselves; others banged their heads against the wall; many scratched their faces with their fingernails; some pulled out an eye or inflicted some other terrible pain upon themselves. Miguel Barniz, for example, pulled out all his hair and hit himself so hard in the face that ever since then he has been a bald, puffy fag.

  “You can put out the fire now,” said Virgilio, ending the reading. He had read eighty brilliant poems.

  The guests took off their gags, and when they fully realized that the poems they had heard were irrevocably lost, that those heartrending verses now lay among the ashes of the hibachi that Mahoma and Skunk in a Funk were carrying back into the kitchen, they could not stifle a unanimous howl.

  “The Watchdogs must have heard that wail,” said Olga Andreu, terrified. “It’s five A.M.”

  “Get me out of here, then!” Virgilio cried. “They may think we’re plotting something!”

  Instantly, countless fairies leaped to transport the poet back to his apartment. Since he was barefoot, and Fifo’s troops might consider such a thing a “public spectacle” or evidence of “extravagant behavior,” they surrounded him. And so, almost as though on a litter, and hiding his bare feet, Virgilio was accompanied back to his two-room apartment in El Vedado.

  Once home again in his little apartment, Virgilio, unable to sleep, and possessed by the rage to create, began to work on a new collection of brilliant poems, which would be burned next week at Olga Andreu’s house.

  FOR BOSCH, SHE NOSHES

  But gosh, even if she could steal paint and a couple of canvases from Saúl Martínez, how was she supposed to paint that apocalyptic painting she intended to paint, if she’d never seen a masterpiece in real life? And especially if she’d never seen The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch—if all she had was a vague idea that she’d gotten from those dreadful reproductions that she’d seen, and that didn’t even belong to her. She had to go to the Prado! See the masterpieces firsthand. See Guernica—see, above all, Bosch’s great triptych, the great apocalypse that she would use as a model for the horrors she was suffering, for all the things that she saw around her. There was no other solution. She had to visit the Prado. And with that decision, Clara Mortera also became a rodent.

  SOME UNSETTLING QUESTIONS

  Before going any further with this story, I want to make it clear that I have never been able to discover why Fifo refused to admit a substantial group of VIPs—people who were photogenic, impressive, and sometimes even faithful to him—into the Fifo-fest at his palace. My guess is that personal intrigues, old grudges, chicanery, Machiavellian ruses, professional jealousies, and political strategies, in addition to compelling reports that I have had no access to, must have influenced this defiant posture—a posture which caused (among other things) a desperate open letter to be written (using a boulder for a writing desk) and thrown, after being tied to a big rock, through the castle door. I cannot understand, for instance, why Odoriferous Gunk and the Anglo-Campesina weren’t invited while Mayoya and Skunk in a Funk, among other notorious queens, were. Why had an invitation been extended to Karilda Olivar Lubricious and not to the Duchess of Alba and Clara Mortera? Why had an invitation been sent to the president of the French Neo-Nazi Party while the King of Morocco hadn’t even been allowed to land his plane? Why was the head of Alfaguara Publishers there, while the CEO of Siglo XXI had been locked out? It was even more astounding to find that the Shah of Iran’s son was in the palace while the eleven wives of the dictator of Libya had been turned away. Why, for example, was Jane Fonda in attendance while a fine Scottish mare sent by the Queen of England had been denied admittance? Nor is it easy to understand why a hunter of poisonous arachnids in Nepal would be feted while the foremost lobster-fisherman in Nipe Bay wouldn’t even be allowed to approach the building. Or why a world-renowned advocate of the right of women to enter the Catholic priesthood should be turned away while an invitation had been extended to the chairwoman of a group for the conservation and training of lesbian whales in northern Greenland. And what about the fact that honors were paid to the head executioner in Iran while the chief executioner of Albania had been overlooked? What was Coco Salas doing there, sitting in the chair reserved for the president of the Spanish Royal Academy? Why had the president of the French Communist Party been invited and not the most famous bull macho in all of Outer Mongolia? What was the leader of the Galapagos Island guerrilla movement doing there when the wild-dog catcher in Puerto Rico had been left out? Why was the head of the North Korean secret police admitted when the self-invitation that Chelo, a super Mata Hari (among other things), sent herself had not been honored?

  I believe the most likely explanation is that there’d been some confusion when the guests were chosen.

  For example, around a table covered with exquisite delicacies and surrounded with waiters even more exquisite sat Swiss bankers, Catalonian terrorists, raggedy men and bag ladies chosen from the ranks of the homeless in New York City, Soviet cosmonauts, Greek royalty, prostitutes from Madrid’s Calle Ballesta, Tibetan monks, international Mafiosi, Hollywood stars, Mother Teresa, the President-for-Life of Ulaanbaatar, Mayra the Mare, the president of the Swedish Academy, Bokassa, Peerless Gorialdo, the Key to the Gulf, Uglíssima, the president of the PEN Club of South Korea, the inventor of the neutron bomb, three Iraqi assassins, the secretary of the World Peace Movement, the creator of AIDS, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the mother superior of the monastery of Clarist nuns in Manila, the chief executioner of Senegal, Nena Sarragoitía, five winners of the Cervantes Prize, the Chief Rabbi of Miami Beach, Soviet Academy-member What’s-His-Name Popov, Papayi Toloka, the commander-in-chief of the Red Army of China, the madam of the largest brothel in Kyoto, the president of Afghanistan, several farmers from the southern United States, a worker from Baku, a Finnish labor leader, Günter Greasy, the primíssima ballerina of Nova Zembla, several Olympic athletes, Mao’s widow’s daughter, the last bull macho butt-stuffer in Riga, the lady director of the National Endowment for Democracy, a professor of South American indigenous languages, the spokeswoman for the World Nudist Society, the bishop of Tucumán, the leading bull macho butt-stuffer in Baghdad, a sharpshooter from South Yemen, the head of the Extreme Left Party of the Marianas Islands, Stalin’s daughter’s granddaughter, the tallest black man in Zaïre, the king of Saudi Arabia, Sydney Australia’s leading drag queen, two winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and one for Literature, the inventor of concentration camps controlled by lasers (who had also been given a Nobel Prize) . . . But the bottom line is, there’s no way my poor brain can understand these anomalies (which may not even be anomalies), much less explain them to anybody else—I’ve got enough to do just telling what I saw.