For Virginia Woolf
A LETTER
New York, May 20, 1996
My dear Reinaldo,
This, my friend, is my seventh letter to you from New York. Since I haven’t received any reply, I thought I’d try again. It wasn’t easy to get here. I’m only semilegal, as lots of people are. I told you that New York is like a huge factory, full of tall crates with people running in and out of them. I can tell you now that in the months I’ve been here, I’ve seen the twinkliest of fairies and the queenliest of queens on earth, but the list is way too long to send you. Odoriferous Gunk is here. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the old queen is still down there—she came up here and left a double in charge of her dying mother. She’s definitely here, running around writing poems that are so bad that she’s already made a great reputation for herself in Miami (a town whose name I do not wish to remember). Up here, every Cuban queen considers herself a queen (if you get my drift) just because she’s alive, and a lot have made themselves into painters—such as Carlota María Luis and Brielíssima and Singadíssima (who, like so many of our queer compatriots, have escaped the island and left doubles behind, or double-doubles in the case of the Siamísimas). Just yesterday, while I was walking through Central Park, I ran into Brielíssima and Singadíssima, joined at the navel, cruising in the “badlands,” you know, but Brielíssima held her head so high and was walking so stiffly that she kept whacking her head against the tree limbs—so there she was, her bald head bleeding like crazy, but she would not bow her head. Apparently that jungle queen hasn’t realized that Noo Yawk is a jungle.
Naturally, I’ve tried to promote some interest in your work up here, dear brother, but as you know, here in the United States there are no intellectuals, no artists, no politicians. All there are are businessmen, and all they’re interested in is the short run—and that includes the president himself (who by law has to be mentally retarded). Up here, memory has been replaced by an unbelievable sense of rapacity. Why, Fifo herself could buy this country if she wanted to, and if she had the money—although you know, come to think of it the U.S. banks might give the poor old thing a loan if she’d pay a high enough interest rate. She might already be looking into that, who knows, or something along those lines. Anyway, the supposed U.S. “intelligentsia” (which of course doesn’t exist) calls itself “progressive,” “leftist,” etc., and in order to continue to be “liberal” (what a word), it opposes everything that the government might try to do—and, naturally, never does.
The beaches here are cold and dirty, and there are no men. The black men up here are the most beautiful things on earth, but as with all good things here, you have to content yourself with looking but not touching. There’s even a word for it here—window-shopping. Which doesn’t mean you go out buying windows, darling. And then, of course, with The Plague we’ve returned to the Middle Ages. Tell me—should we continue “onward”? And just what might that word “onward” mean?. . . “Gays” (that’s what they call themselves up here) are organized into unions, and they screw only among themselves. Some kid themselves that they’ve been screwed by a man. Not me. Down there, I was at least real, even though what you might call Painfully Real. Up here, I’m a shadow. Who the hell is going to care about my pain when all anybody is interested in up here is what’s called the Quick and Dirty? The Show. No Complications. And yet, my friend, this is the only place in the world where one can survive—I say that with all my heart, because I say it without illusions.
Some fairies, such as Miguel Correderas, have given themselves up to la vie bohème. With the adventures Miguel has had, he could write a book. Poor queen, always running after some nonexistent (i.e., extinct) man. On a beach one day he ran into a leather boy who handcuffed him, started whipping him, and forced him to lick his boots for hours. Then, practically beating him to death, he forced him to fuck him. All this on a public beach, mind you. After screwing this American specimen, Correderas had to pay him. Another time, he was jogging through the Village (an area where these gays dress in lavender and spend their lives working out in gyms so they’ll have big tits) and this gay called out to him from a window (so he says). It was New Year’s Eve and the poor old queen thought he was going to see out the year in the most exciting way. But it turns out that this supposed man throws Miguel into a cage he’s got in his living room and keeps him there for eight days, giving him vodka enemas and insulting him day and night. . . . Along with Correderas, Julieta Blanca, and several other screaming queens, I’ve explored the porno neighborhood on 42nd Street. There are some real hunks that hang out around there. Of course they’re hustlers, so they have their price, or prices. For ten dollars you can suck them off, for example; for fifteen, they’ll suck you off; and for twenty they’ll bend over for you. And they’ll tell you all this without batting an eye, as if they’re reading a contract.
A lot of us have died of The Plague, which is raging, my dear. So those of us who are left are the survivors of an afterlife that we pay for with our very lives—lives we are literally about to lose. Only the remotest twist of fate can offer even the possibility of increasing our life span—an increase that would in fact be a betrayal of life, because any homosexual man who lives more than fifty years in these times ought to die of shame.
However, even though I’ve arrived at the Big Five-Oh (how we used to laugh at that expression, not to mention that the birthday seemed so far away at the time) and, naturally, have been caught by The Plague (it’s not that you catch it, love—it catches you), I haven’t given up—in fact, I’ve gone out looking for a ceiba tree. Uh-huh, a ceiba tree—a famous curandera out in Queens (we were speaking of queens, weren’t we?) said it was the only thing that could save me. She gave me a bilongo—which is this little-bitty package with chicken claws and feathers and stuff in it, wrapped in a piece of cloth and tied with string—and told me to find a ceiba tree, walk around it three times with this bilongo in my pocket, stab the tree trunk three times, gently, kiss its trunk, throw the bilongo down, and without looking back, take off running. But don’t think it’s easy to find a ceiba tree in New York City, and don’t think this is Equatorial Africa or Brotherhood Park in lovely downtown Havana. I spent the whole winter dreaming of a ceiba tree. Finally I found out that there’s one in the Zoo over in the Bronx. So there I went, in the snow, with Salermo and Julieta Blanca. It was a huge tree, and it stood under an enormous vault and was surrounded with a tall iron fence. It was in a greenhouse, of course, with its name in Latin and everything, like something from another planet, and it wasn’t easy for me to get to the trunk. But I jumped the fence, stabbed it three times, kissed it, and threw down the bilongo. And just then, a security guard shows up (the other queens take off running), makes me pick up the bilongo (No littering, the sign says), and gives me a ticket. So now I have to go to court for assaulting a tree or jaywalking or something. Ñica told me that with that on my record I’d never become a U.S. citizen, but I never planned to, anyway.
I went to Prida again for a consultation, and she told me that if I hadn’t been able to throw the bilongo down at the foot of the ceiba tree, I should leave it behind the altar of a church. So I went to the fanciest church in New York City—St. Patrick’s—and there I witnessed a scene that I’m going to tell you about so that if this letter reaches you, you can put it in your novel.
Before I went into the church, I saw this gigantic black man—naked as the day he was born—walking back and forth in front of it in the snow. This is right on Fifth Avenue. But me, who can’t think of anything but my bilongo, I go into the church, and I’ve already totally forgotten about this naked black man. If you can imagine me forgetting about a naked black man. But the black man went into the church too, where there was a mass going on with organ music and everything. Full, full, full. The black man walks down the central aisle, picks up this huge candelabra that’s up near the altar, and starts swinging it around. He kills the bishop that was officiating at the mass with one swing and th
en starts hitting other priests and stuff that were trying to subdue him, and I think he killed a sacristan. Then the police came and killed him.
The next day I read in the paper that this black guy was a Cuban—OK?—that he’d come on the Mariel boatlift in 1980, and that he was crazy.
But in the church I had realized immediately that that black man was Christ, which is why in the confusion I threw my bilongo on top of his body (which was full of bullet holes) and turned and without looking back ran out the door. . . . Now I don’t know what’ll happen to me, but I also don’t think I ought to give it too much thought. Imagine how cold that black man must’ve been before he went into that church. Of course, you can’t believe how hot it is now. I don’t think there’s a nice middle ground anywhere.
Americans walk very very fast and if you don’t keep up with them, they’ll knock you down. You’d think they had important matters to attend to—and in fact, they do work like crazy. But the rush is over something else—they’re rushing to get home, take off their shoes, and lie on the couch and watch TV, which is awful.
Remember—don’t come up here. Or you’ll wind up walking into a church and killing a bishop and getting killed. You’ll wind up that way if you’re lucky.
Love and kisses—
Gabriel
P.S. Yesterday I went to the public library on 42nd Street.They didn’t have The Magic Mirror. But I’ll keep looking.
MEDICINAL IMMERSIONS
Water cures everything, says the Ogress. And she leaps from the bridge at Patrice Lumumba Beach into the sea. When the water comes in contact with that sick and misshapen body (whose owner’s real name is Ramón Sernada), it begins to bubble, smoke, and even give off little flames. A terrible smell of sulfur emerges from that area of the ocean in which the Ogress is submerged. All the fish that are swimming in the area die of pollution. Thanks to that strange immunity (the immunity of AIDS) that prevents even Bloodthirsty Shark from eating her, the Ogress can swim out into the open sea and float along the line of the horizon. Water cures everything, the queen repeats in fervent hopefulness, recalling the words of Clara Mortera. Water, lots of water—that was also the suggestion (the prescription) that the Three Weird Sisters gave the Ogress when she consulted them in their room next to the hole in Clara’s wall in Old Havana. But even the terrible Weird Sisters refused to examine the Ogress’s sick body up close. The Eldest Fate poked at it from a distance with a trident and the Baby Sister Fate scooped up (in a spoon with a handle three feet long) the icky fluids that oozed out of it. The Weird Sisters pulled on huge goggles, plastic shower caps, aluminum aprons, and rubber gloves and they examined those fluids, looked at each other in bewildered terror, and threw the three-foot-long spoon though the hole in Clara’s wall (instantly killing a member of the Party who was making off with three chalices). Then, looking at the Ogress, they declared: Water cures everything—go jump in the ocean. . . . And ever since then, the Ogress has been taking dips in the ocean. But tumors, chancres, running sores have continued to spread over her body. Life has been too cruel with me, thought the Ogress. In her youth he’d done no more than any other fairy did—chase after men—but the immense majority of fairies did the same thing, and they all seemed to be in good health, or at least they weren’t erupting or melting down before your eyes, the way the Ogress was. Yes, what fate had done to her was a clear injustice. Even the nickname the other fairies had given her was so unfair.And in that she was right, for Ramón Sernada was not a bad person. The title Ogress had been bestowed on her because of her deformity, and also—the truth, the whole sad truth—because of the bad humors that filled the queen’s body and changed her personality. But how could her personality not suffer, how could she not have bad moods, with all the calamities that had befallen her? And so it was that the innocuous fairy who had once been a sweet thing with long straight hair was transformed little by little into a swollen, yellow, bald-headed, red-eyed horror. Other fairies were impaled every day on the prick of some petty thief, ex-felon, or common hustler who carried the fatal virus, and to all appearances, nothing happened to them—but all the Ogress had to do was touch a cock through a pair of jeans and she broke out with pustules all over. Other queens would suck any cock that swung in front of their lips, but all the Ogress had to do was stick out her tongue a yard away from the nearest prick and her face would turn totally black and blue. Other femmes could go into men’s rooms and get screwed any number of times, but all the noble Ogress had to do was stand at the door and she’d be doubled over with the colic before you could blink an eye, her legs would break out in a nasty rash, and her belly would swell up something terrible. Ever since she was a filly she’d caught every infectious disease there was, from measles to chicken pox, from whooping cough to hepatitis—diseases she’d caught, she said, from just looking at some kid in the neighborhood—and now came this, on top of all those other calamities. But Ramón Sernada had decided that if it came down to a choice between being a not-person, a not-thing, and being dead, he’d choose death. (Because the only way that she, as a born fairy, could be was by being screwed.) Made up by every brush and color in Clara Mortera’s arsenal, she threw herself into the street, ready to die, but first to live—even if only for one night, one night of pleasure. But the Ogress was not to have even that one night. The first man she ran into, a sailor who was splendid-looking and knew it, no sooner screwed her than he transmitted to the poor queen every infectious disease known to humankind. Suddenly the sailor was having his way not with a fairy painted up by Clara Mortera, but with a ball of pus. Enraged, the sailor pulled his prick out of Ramón Sernada’s ass and Ramón Sernada’s ass emitted a sulfurous stench. From that time on, the poor faggot’s life had been one long calvary, a chase from one curandero to the next, and very secretly so, since if Fifo found out about her illness he’d have her thrown in a concentration camp. But after paying a visit to the Three Weird Sisters, and then getting the same advice from Clara Mortera as she’d gotten from them, the Ogress would now go to the beach and float for hours on the surface of the ocean, filled with the distant hope that the waves would wash away all her diseases. Water cures everything, the Ogress says aloud as she floats on her back on the ocean. Clara Mortera and the Three Weird Sisters couldn’t be wrong about that, she thinks. Everybody goes to them for advice. Even the Marquesa de Macondo. Why, the Holy Father himself hinted that he planned to return to Cuba to consult those expert oracles of medicine—for his hemorrhoids, they say. . . . I will be cured. I will be cured, said the Ogress, filled with hope, as she exposed her terrible excrescences to sea and sky. And it was in that trance of almost mystical ecstasy that she was floating when suddenly something terribly violent, emerging like a missile from underneath the sea, hit her, and blew her to smithereens. The perpetrator of this deed was none other than Tatica, the Angel from Marianao, who had leaped out of the sea, far offshore, with the aid of Skunk in a Funk’s swim fins. The Golden Child kept swimming, fleeing Skunk in a Funk, and he didn’t stop till he reached the beach at Santa Fe.
On the beach at Santa Fe, perched on a boulder in the sun, sat Chug-a-Lug. Tired of not finding anything at Patrice Lumumba Beach, she had flown (yes, flown—on Oscar’s wings, my dear, if you must know) down here, and as she sat there she saw the White Angel emerge from the water and strike a pose that she thought unbearably statuesque. She beckoned. The Angelic Creature, pulling off the swim fins, walked over to the queen, and on his face there was still the smile of satisfaction at recalling that he had blown the Ogress to bits. In fact, the Ogress’s explosion, scattering bloody bits of her across the surface of the ocean, spread the dreaded AIDS virus—the most terrible disease yet known to humankind—throughout the world. But the only person who doesn’t appear on the list of victims of this dread disease is Ramón Sernada himself. Obviously, not even after death could the poor Ogress manage to be anything.
A TONGUE TWISTER (7)
That cute kid, not yet come to puberty, cavorting with that goatherd
, is actually a chick (or chicken) that collects for coupling. The goatherd approaches, she collects, then they copulate—him covering her, her not caring a hoot. A couple of cavorts a week, and she’s set.
How many goatherds would a kid cavort with if a kid cavorted with every Cuban goatherd?
Couldn’t care less—considers herself another Cabrera Infante.
For Hilarión Cabrisas, a.k.a. the Anglo-Campesina
THE PARTY BEGINS
The huge armored-steel gate of the grand ceremonial hall rolled upward and behind it stood Fifo in all his magnificence. He was dressed from head to foot in olive-green: gigantic olive-green boots, olive-green military jacket, olive-green uniform pants bloused at the knee, olive-green tie, and olive-green cap. Near him, but in red, was his brother Raúl, and some distance away, all the ministers and the new presidential guard, made up of a thousand hunky men in camouflage fatigues. At a signal from Fifo, the guests began to file in to the elite reception (to be followed by the Carnival) held to celebrate Fifo’s purported fifty years in absolute power.
Among the thousands of personalities who filed through the massive door (each one bowing reverently) were the ambassadors of all Communist, formerly Communist, capitalist, and neutral countries; the papal nuncio Monsignor Sacchi, who told Fifo that the Holy Father might very possibly make an appearance at the last minute; the Marquesa de Macondo, who, not content to shake the dictator’s hand, shook his testicles; the Lady of the Veil; England’s Princess Dinorah, who arrived completely nude and followed by her enormous retinue and a swarm of photographers (who were denied entrance); the King and Queen of Castile; the King and Queen of Switzerland; the executioner of Cambodia; the Prime Minister of India with the mummy of his mother (whom he himself had murdered); the emperor of Belgium; Mother Teresa; the head of the Medellín cartel; the Satrap of Verania; the most important members of the Cuban exile community, all of whom were, it now turned out, agents in the pay of Fifo; the presidents of all Latin American republics and dictatorships with their respective spouses (who served as Prime Ministers); Papayi Taloka, the famous Japanese transvestite who had been jerking off Emperor Hirohito for eighty years; the Prime Minister of Ceylon; Outer Mongolia’s greatest terrorist followed by 1,326 lesser terrorists who headed up international terrorist organizations; and Raisa Gorbachev on the arm of the First Lady of the United States, who told Fifo that the President was sorry not to be able to come but he was making love to his rabbit. Fifo nodded understandingly and, breaking the rules of protocol that he himself had set, embraced the American First Lady and Madame Gorbachev. And the parade of dignitaries continued—African kings, Arab dictators, former presidents now in exile, Norwegian princes, millionaires who owned whole islands and sometimes whole countries, Deng Xiaoping on a stretcher, an Eskimo filmmaker, the Turkish High Bugger, the latest Miss Universe, a eunuch from Madagascar, the leader of the South African Workers Union, five hundred cloistered nuns, the doorman of Sing Sing Prison, all the members of the Swedish Academy (who were planning to give Fifo the Nobel Peace Prize), six Argentine cows, a Canadian zebu, five hundred or so monkeys in their cages, the president of the OAS, Fr. Bettino, the administrator of the London necropolis, the inventor of AIDS, the president of the World Federation of Women, seven hundred renowned writers, an expert in bacteriological weapons, the world high-diving champion, Yasir Arafat with twenty-five Panamanian hunks, the head of the French Communist Party, the Empress of Yugoslavia, the director of the Bronx Zoo, the Electric Venus, the head of Amnesty International, the mummies of Andre Ceauşescu and his wife Elena on a gurney pushed by Vanessa Redgrave, the Queen of Vietnam on the arm of the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, actors, senators, three thousand trained and licensed whores, male ballet dancers, the editors of the world’s most important newspapers, a hundred or so Totomoya Indians, and thousands of men and women of imposing physical grace and bearing, wearing the most outlandish costumes or completely nude. . . . After these came the local guests—among them, Halisia Jalonzo on the arm of Coco Salas, Alfredo Güevavara on the arm of Miss Pereyrra, the executioner of La Cabaña Prison, Manetta, Paula Amanda (a.k.a. Luisa Fernanda), Miss Mayoya, Skunk in a Funk, H. Puntilla, Nicolás Guillotina, La Reine des Araignées with her company of gorgeous teenage boys (among whom the resplendent Key to the Gulf would play a central role in tonight’s festivities), Silbo Rodríguez, Dulce María Leynaz, Eee-u-u-ugh Desnoës, Miguel Barniz, Miss Divinely Malign, SuperSatanic, and AntiChelo, the SuperChelo, and thousands more queens, fairies, and femme leather boys preceded by impressive specimens of Cuban butch-hood and other outstanding figures in the island’s political, agricultural, naval, and literary worlds. The heterogeneity of the guest list will perhaps be less puzzling if we bear in mind—and this might be one response to the chapter “Some Unsettling Questions”—that Fifo had invited not only close friends and allies but also persons under suspicion of various crimes and acts of treason, several personae non gratae, and even a few outright enemies whose noses he took great pleasure in rubbing in this coup that had swept the world.
The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights Page 23