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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  “Open the gate and then close it immediately!” came Fifo’s orders.

  The huge gate rose, and Karilda rushed through the opening like a streak of lightning followed by the Dowager Duchess and the she-cats. Skunk in a Funk, Mahoma, Hiram, and SuperSatanic also took the opportunity to return to the reception after attending the burning of Mayoya. But when the great sword fighter and karate star (I forgot to say he was a black belt in karate, too) tried to get in, the gate fell in his face like a guillotine. The desperate (and desperately jealous) husband sang his (baritone) song of woe to the Dissed & Pissed, and then he joined them, waiting for the huge armored-steel gate to open again at the inauguration of the Carnival.

  “Then I’ll kill her,” he said.

  And Bishop O’Condom once more raised his hands to heaven.

  THE DEATH OF LEZAMA

  Reinaldo was out on the balcony of the apartment that belonged to Aristotle Pumariega, who was trying everything he could think of to persuade his wife to become a lesbian, because Pumariega could experience orgasm only when he watched two women making love. Pumariega’s wife, who was seventeen years old (he was in his sixties), absolutely refused to engage in that sort of sexual behavior. The argument had gone on for hours. Gabriel, bored, was looking out over the stalled traffic on the Rampa. Just then PornoPop, The Only Remaining Go-Go Fairy Queen in Cuba, arrived in an absolute delirium of delight, because she’d been invited to Fifo’s big party. She was going to read her Pornopoems at the Grand Oneirical Theological Political Philosophical Satirical Conference! And without further ado—more or less as a rehearsal, but in the most Aristophanic way (since she was, after all, in Aristotle’s house)—she began to recite several of her brilliant poems. When she finished, she went over to Reinaldo and sat down beside him on the balcony.

  “Can you believe Joseito died!” she sighed.

  “Joseito? Who’s Joseito?” Gabriel asked.

  “José Lezama Lima, silly. They buried him this morning.”

  “Oh, yeah, terrible,” Reinaldo said, looking back out toward the Rampa without another word.

  “Oh, darling! I almost forgot to tell you—the section of the congress on dreams—Impossible Dreams it’s called, isn’t that precious!—is going to be chaired by André Breton, who’s coming back from the dead just for this event!”

  But Gabriel just looked out over the Rampa.

  That night Reinaldo (Gabriel forgotten, now Skunk in a Funk) went with Hiram to Lenin Park. They were going to steal all the mariposa jasmine (Cuba’s symbolic flower, since as everyone knows, mariposa means fairy in Spanish) they could, to sell it on the black market so they could buy some cream cheese and soda crackers for their poor empty stomachs. At nightfall, staggering under a load of white flowers, they stopped at the bridge over the reservoir in the park, which had been built by Celia Sánchez herself. There, Skunk in a Funk told Delfín Proust about Lezama’s death, and as he spoke he began to sob. Delfín tried to console Reinaldo, but Skunk in a Funk’s crying got louder and louder. Finally, dropping the huge load of flowers, Gabriel leaned out over the water and began to howl. At that, La Reine des Araignées picked up some of the long branches of jasmine and began flagellating the weeping queen, who ran back and forth on the bridge, shrieking and wailing. Soon the white petals of the flowers covered the queen’s bruised and welted body. But Delfín, not satisfied with that, ran back to the vast field of mariposa flowers, picked every one of them, and returned to the bridge, where she went on flagellating (now harder than ever) the face and body of Skunk in a Funk, who was bleeding and crying out Lezama! Lezama! Lezama! Finally, giving one last enormous howl, the queen, covered in blood and white flower petals, jumped feet first into the waters of the reservoir.

  After that act of homage and exorcism, Skunk in a Funk emerged as fresh and moist as a daisy, and Delfín helped her out of the water.

  Off to one side of the bridge, more than two dozen teenagers had witnessed this spectacle. The two queens, redolent of jasmine flower, approached the delicious bouquet of multicolored adolescence, and in less than three minutes’ time they had all retired to an abandoned picnic pavilion where the teenagers, driven to a frenzy by the fragrance of the flowers and Skunk in a Funk’s tears, made mad love to them till midnight.

  Along toward dawn, the two queens (fragrant, flushed, and ethereal) left Lenin Park. Each of them carried a long stalk that ended in a splendid-looking jasmine flower. Swiftly they swished toward the Cementerio Colón, where they laid the flowers on Lezama’s still-fresh grave.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (9)

  That Miche is quite an accomplished muchacha, whether cha-cha-ing a cha-cha or chomping pork chops or launching a coffee shop or just shopping for the cheapest shipping charges to Chicago. But secretly, she’s a chippy—she’s got the itchiest britches in the Michigan vicinity. When the itch hits her, she scratches her snatch, unlatches the back hatch of her hatchback, and with a catch in her voice yells Pancho! Pancho! And Pancho chows down.

  But the last time Pancho and Miche matched passions in the back of her hatchback—ouch! Secret chippy Miche loves to get her snatch’s itch scratched, but the last time she latched onto Pancho to scratch it, she got a nasty rash.

  For E. Michelson

  ST. NELLY

  Aurélico Cortés (a.k.a. Cornelius Cortés) had died at the age of eighty-two never having been laid by a man. Not that he didn’t go for men—Aurélico Cortés was one of the screamingest queens on the face of the earth. It was just that for seventy years he had lived with his mother and father and had been brought up with a horror of sin and an idea of the shame of it all if the world should learn that he was queer. “Before I have a queer for a son, I’ll commit suicide,” said his mother when Cortés was only seven (she lived to be ninety-nine), and the poor little queen, who was already feeling an indescribable attraction for men, made a vow that she was never going to be the cause of her mother’s death (much less by suicide). “A fag for a son, and I’ll set myself afire!” swore the mother on Cortés’ twelfth birthday. And at that, the poor little prepubescent fairy realized once and for all that she’d never be able to enjoy the pleasure of sleeping with a man—which was, on the other hand, the only thing that might give her life meaning.

  Cortés renounced even the pleasure of looking at men, let alone speaking to them. He devoted himself to his studies and was first in his class at the National School of Dental Prosthetics. Dressed all in white, like a nun, she spent her days pulling rotten teeth out of mouths without ever once looking at the groins of her clients, some of whom were really quite impressive. On Sundays and her other days off she made pious pilgrimages to the Cinémathèque to see The Battleship Potemkin, much to the joy of her father, who had been one of the founders of the Popular Socialist Party. Every month she turned her salary over to her mother, who counted it methodically and gave little Aurélico back exactly enough to go to the Cinémathèque to see The Battleship Potemkin. Sometimes his father would suggest that Cortés also see “A True Man,” but Cortés would shiver with emotion and terror just at hearing the title.

  Since she had read somewhere that salt and spices could act as aphrodisiacs, her diet was frugal and her food lacked any savor whatsoever. When her mother and father died—Cortés being seventy-something at the time—his skinny figure was all hunchbacked from leaning over all those open mouths for so many years; his head was almost bald, with only a few curly wisps emerging from the middle of his scalp; and his teeth, which he had always taken such pains to keep looking nice, were gigantic, almost horselike. It was too late to be starting a new life. And so Cortés plodded on with his monklike existence. And besides—what man was going to screw such a horrid old bag as herself? An additional consideration was that her father, and especially her mother, still exerted an enormous influence on Cortés’ behavior. The most tragic part of the whole thing was that as she grew older, her virginity became ever more unbearable—but the fear of sinning was stronger than all her homoerotic yearnings.


  The queen sublimated her faggotry by offering her help to other queens—putting in false teeth without charging a penny, giving them her own ration of meat (out of fear that any protein she consumed might bring on concupiscence), even passing out her salary among the indigent queens such as Delfín Proust and thousands of others who lined up in front of the Ministry of Public Health on the day Cortés collected his wages. And so, as the years went by (and the queen became an increasingly horrendous old thing), she never ceased doing good deeds for queens. But always, always, always, under the condition that none of them dare say that she, Aurélico Cortés, was a queen too. Oh, if his mother’s memory should be sullied by such an indignity! She would die a virgin, and no one would ever be able even to hint that she was a . . . you know. She had never even mentioned the subject of faggotry to any other fag. My god! How that poor queen suffered, seeing all the other queens swishing around as openly as you please, fluttering their wings around in all directions, making jokes about themselves and their men, and talking constantly about their conquests (which they always exaggerated, of course). So terrible were her sufferings that although she was in perfect health, she died one night as she lay atop the ironing board that she always slept on (head downward, for greater mortification). She died a virgin (not like that slut of a daughter of Bernarda Alba’s) and with the knowledge that no one could prove (at least beyond a reasonable doubt) that she had been a queen.

  But when Cortés died, her friends (all queens) realized that a saint had died, and they rushed (at the urging of Skunk in a Funk, for whom Aurélico had made a perfect partial plate and installed it free of charge) to begin the process of her canonization as St. Nelly. A huge committee, the Committee for the Canonization of Aurélico Cortés, was formed by Skunk in a Funk, and its members—Tomasito the Goya-Girl, Antón Arrufada, the cunning Mahoma, Mayoya, La Reine des Araignées, the Dowager Duchess de Valero, Uglíssima, and Carlitos Olivares (the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba), among others—worked day and night at the job, while ten thousand others sent a hundred letters a day to the Pope requesting (sometimes demanding, sometimes pleading) that Aurélico Cortés be canonized. At last the old pope, who felt an extraordinary attraction for men (so great an attraction, in fact, that he did not allow women to be priests), took up the request to beatify the Cuban queen. In St. Peter’s Basilica, as his eye fell upon a young man in shorts who was asking for the papal blessing, the Supreme Pontiff meditated: A saint for faggots is good political strategy for the Catholic Church. The world is full of fairies who have fallen away from the Church because of our tradition of discrimination; with this canonization, all those queers—which is to say half the population of the world—will return to the fold. And besides—poor old queen, how she must have suffered, never to have felt the pleasure of the male member. Yes, that’s it, I’ll have her canonized.

  The canonization, announced in Rome, took place the next week in the Cathedral in Havana at a ceremony that is unlikely to be outshone in the long history of Catholic liturgies. There, upon the altar, lay the mummified corpse of the deceased and soon-to-be canonized queen. Two thousand cardinals knelt before the body while Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes read the homily and the apologia. Then Monsignor Sacchi, in the name of the Supreme Pontiff, also pronounced a panegyric. Last, taking even Fifo by surprise, His Holiness the Pope himself burst into the nave—he had decided at the last minute that he couldn’t let the opportunity to appear before the television cameras of the world (which were following the ceremony’s every detail) go to waste. The Pope confirmed, authorized, and pronounced a special encyclical by which Aurélico Cortés was canonized, under the name St. Nelly. More than a million queens, filling the sanctuary and crowding into the plaza outside the Cathedral, fell to their knees at the Holy Father’s words, and then in unison intoned a Te Deum Laudamus.

  The canonization had been a triumph. Even Fifo, who at first resented all the pomp and show (after all, he was still in the closet, so he hated and despised maricones), finally saw that the Pope’s visit to the Island was a propaganda triumph for his regime. And anyway, he thought as he knelt, with or without St. Nelly these faggots here had better watch out. I’m tired of them screwing even my handpicked private guards—men I’ve reserved for myself—and making me have to kill them for high treason.

  The body of the canonized queen inside its magnificent coffin and the Pope in his Popemobile led a procession almost fourteen miles long through the streets of Havana to the Cementerio Colón, where the remains of St. Nelly were to be laid to rest. The huge tomb, with its papal seals and coats of arms, was surmounted by a gigantic white statue that portrayed the saint as a smiling young queen, her outspread wings bigger even than Oscar Horcayés’. All the fairies in the procession touched the image, crossed themselves, and, sure that they now had a patroness to protect them, went off cruising, filled with optimism and faith. . . . St. Nelly would perform miracles, St. Nelly would find hunks for them, St. Nelly would free them from those awful thugs and every infectious disease.

  And indeed, within days the miracles of St. Nelly were the talk of Havana. She had saved Skunk in a Funk’s life when Skunk was caught in flagrante delicto in a tent, being buggered by a lifeguard: the Skunk, chased down the beach by a platoon of soldiers shooting at her wildly, threw herself into the waves, her death apparently imminent. But just as that moment St. Nelly unleashed a ferocious thunderstorm, and such fierce rain fell all along La Concha beach that the poor queen was soon invisible, so she was able to swim (with her clothes on top of her head) to her room in Miramar. . . . Another well-publicized miracle was that of the rain of tickets for free meals at This Little Piggy, The White Rabbit, and other fine restaurants in Havana that St. Nelly showered over Coney Island (on the beach at Marianao) when she saved the life of Eachurbod, and although Eachurbod did perish, St. Nelly was later instrumental in her resurrection. . . . And then there was the miracle she performed with Ñica, darling—that hundred-year-old invalid of a queen who suddenly stood up and ran, not walked, to the water’s edge, threw herself into the sea, and, eluding all of her pursuers, which was an army of at least a million sharks, swam till she reached Key West. Uh-huh, I’ll tell you—within a few days St. Nelly, the miracle-working fairy godmother, was the toast of Fairyland.

  But as you know, my dear, you can’t please everybody all the time, much less if we’re talking about queens—and so pretty soon there were thousands of faggots, led by that Miguel Barniz creature, that were beginning to question St. Nelly’s alleged virginity. A faggot dying virgin at the age of eighty-two? Get outta here. Who ever heard of such a thing?. . . Rumors, protests, whispering campaigns, fistfights, catfights—in a word, controversy—followed. Even Fifo himself heard the rumor that St. Nelly was no saint; she was just a lowlife faggot that had played around with Fifo’s handpicked escorts. Enraged, Fifo gave permission to a group of high-ranking queens to go to Rome and ask the Pope to formally decanonize St. Nelly. Immediately the group took off (in one of Fifo’s private planes) for the Vatican; among them were Paula Amanda (a.k.a. Luisa Fernanda), that Miss Barniz, Chug-a-Lug, Miss César Lapa, María Félix, Coco Salas, Nicolás Guillotina, the Divinely Malign, and a hundred or so other high-ranking fairies, who managed to at least plant doubt in the Holy Father’s mind about the virginity of St. Nelly, and certainly to convince His High Holiness that Fifo really wanted the Church’s newest saint decanonized. The Holy Father, contemplating the long document that Fifo had sent (along with a million dollars for the Poor Box), thought: A faggot turned saint is really not such a good thing for the Church, because although everybody is queer, almost everyone denies it, and therefore everyone will turn away from St. Nelly and the Church won’t receive any offerings in her name. And besides, these are increasingly reactionary times. In fact, at the request of the College of Bishops, I’m planning to start up the Inquisition again, which also means burning people at the stake ad majorem Dei gloriam; fairies will be going to the bonfire. So how a
m I going to have a fairy saint? So that’s it—St. Nelly’s got to be defrocked. And standing on one of the basilica’s many balconies in order to look down on a procession of delicious Polish altar boys who’d come to ask for the Holy Father’s blessing, the Pope spoke these holy words to the Cuban delegation: “Look, guys, I have no problem with fucking over this faggot and decanonizing him, but first you’ve got to prove that she was really not a virgin. It’s a rule. You’ve got to exhume the body, and if it’s not a virgin, I’ll have his sainthood on the spot. Let’s go to Cuba—no time to dillydally. I want to get this over with.”

  The energetic Pope arrived in Cuba once more, and once more the immense crowd, following the Popemobile, came to the Cementerio Colón. Beside the tomb of St. Nelly stood once more all the queens in the country (and not a few from foreign lands), plus Fifo and his entire staff. The tension was palpable. The Pope ordered the mummified body of Aurélico Cortés taken from the tomb. The body was laid at his feet. And then the Supreme Pontiff, raising his pontifical scepter, spoke to the multitude, and these were his words: Beloved brothers and sisters, the only way to prove that St. Nelly died a virgin is to inspect his backside. The test will be performed with this holy crozier. If it enters the deceased’s anus without encountering any obstacle, that will be prima facie proof that he was not a virgin. And at once the Holy Father fitted the scepter to the dead queen’s rear. But that anus which had never taken delight in any type of penetration was as tight as a drum. So the Holy Father (who was determined to prove that Aurélico Cortés was not a virgin) pu-u-ushed the scepter with all his might. And so great was the pleasure that that thick staff sliding up his rear end brought to the dead queen that she immediately came to life again. Because the queen really had been a virgin, and she returned to life the first time she was penetrated. And so, with the papal staff (the staff of life) rammed halfway up her ass, Aurélico Cortés looked out upon that astonished multitude that had fallen to its knees before her; saw the Holy Father giving her his blessing (and trying to upstage her, the bitch!); heard the shouts of the millions of queens, unable to contain their joy, who were shouting vivas to St. Nelly; and, finally, consulting a nearby fairy, discovered what had happened: She, Aurélico Cortés, who had kept her homosexuality hidden for eighty-two years, had been canonized as St. Nelly. So all her years of abstinence and chastity had been for nothing, and after she was dead her “perversion” had been published to the world. I can’t believe this, she said to herself, I’ve been outed by the Pope! Livid with rage (and in spite of the fact that she’d been in the tomb for weeks and weeks), the resurrected queen ripped the staff out of her ass and started cracking it over the head and shoulders of the Pope and all the other dignitaries. As she distributed drubbings right and left, the queen found out not only that the news of her canonization had been broadcast throughout the world, but also that there was a novel, written by Skunk in a Funk, which contained all the details. Still clutching the staff (the Pope meanwhile shrieking Excommunication! Anathema! Excommunication!), St. Nelly rushed off to Skunk in a Funk’s room, gave her four whacks with the stick, and before the writer’s astonished eyes snatched up the manuscript of the novel The Color of Summer and reduced it to shreds with his big horsy buckteeth.