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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  The next night, when the beautiful teenager sat (naked) in the broken-down (but only) chair in Skunk in a Funk’s room, the Skunk, kneeling before him, confessed in all sincerity that he, Lázaro, was the only man that had ever fully satisfied him and that all day he’d done nothing but think about him—and that he’d decided that he loved him. “For the first time,” he said, and it was true, “I’ve fallen in love. You have fulfilled all my dreams, have plumbed the depths of my sensuality. And when we’re alone, I’m not going to call you Lázaro, but rather the Key to the Gulf.” And as Skunk in a Funk was speaking these words, he gazed entranced at, and gently caressed, that monumental key that would soon open the gates to his immense gulf. Then, as he possessed him, the Key to the Gulf confessed that he had never done this with anybody, “even with a real woman,” he said. And that confession almost made the fairy die from happiness.

  For more than three months the Key to the Gulf leaped over the wall every night and frenziedly transverberated Skunk in a Funk, who gave thanks to St. Nelly that his Aunt Orfelina hadn’t discovered the teenager’s nightly visits.

  One morning before dawn, after having been possessed in the most convincing way by the Key to the Gulf (who was smiling as he crept downstairs), the entranced fairy went out onto the balcony to watch how lightly and gracefully the marvelously conditioned young man jumped over the wall after more than three hours of lovemaking. But Skunk in a Funk did not see the young man vault the wall. He’s so athletic, he thought, he probably jumped over before I even got out onto the balcony. The next night, Lázaro couldn’t possibly have gotten all the way down the stairs before Skunk in a Funk, wrapped in his only sheet, stepped out onto the balcony so he could watch his love god leap the wall. He did see the marvelous adolescent carefully close the door to the back stairway and make his way across the yard. Now he’ll jump, the fairy said to himself, even more entranced. And that leap is a leap that he will make in my honor. But instead of going toward the garden wall, the teenager crossed the back yard toward the door of Orfelina’s room. The Key to the Gulf didn’t have to knock; Orfelina opened the door—which showed that it had all been planned beforehand! The fairy, unable to control himself, and still wrapped in his only sheet, tiptoed swiftly down the stairs, tiptoed over to Orfelina’s room, and peeked through the window. His beloved teenager was frenziedly possessing Orfelina, who was moaning with pleasure at the immense key. The fairy, mute with horror, ran up to his room. So that, he said to himself, was why he hadn’t been discovered and denounced—his aunt was taking kickbacks! The whole day, Skunk in a Funk meditated, and at last he reached the conclusion that he loved the young man too much to give him up because of another woman. If he likes women, he said to himself, all the better; that shows he’s a real man, and that he was telling me the truth when he said I was his first fairy. But I don’t care, I’ll have my revenge anyway—I’ll send an anonymous note to my uncle, who as an upstanding member of the Party is always trying to figure out a way to catch his wife with another man so he can throw the whore out and keep the house for himself.

  That very day, Skunk in a Funk wrote out the note and with the help of the Divinely Malign (dressed as a lieutenant) sent it to his Uncle Chucho, who worked in the regional Party headquarters. That night the fairy and the Key to the Gulf made love as passionately as always. But the second the Key to the Gulf started down the stairs, Skunk, wrapped in the sheet that she’d now dyed black (thanks to a packet of dye given him by Mahoma), went out onto the balcony. This time the teenager didn’t go toward the door of Orfelina’s room; he knocked on the door of the dining room. Instantly the door opened and behind it, Skunk saw his Uncle Chucho, who invited Lázaro in. Jesus! thought the fairy, I never should have sent that note—now my uncle, as a member of the Party, will surely kill my beloved Key to the Gulf. How could I ever have been so perverse? And wrapped in his black sheet, the fairy ran down the stairs so fast that he slipped and broke his kneecap and cracked his forehead wide open. Bloodied but unbowed, however, he continued on. There was no way he was going to let his Uncle Chucho, that disgusting Party slimeball, kill the Key to the Gulf. When he came to the door of the dining room, Skunk in a Funk stood aghast. On top of the huge dining table, the beautiful teenager was violently and rhythmically screwing Uncle Chucho, who had stuffed a napkin in his mouth to muffle his shrieks of pleasure. So he’s never done anything with another fairy! Skunk in a Funk sneered to himself. I’m going to stand right here and wait for him and get to the bottom of this. And Skunk in a Funk waited in fury for the Key to the Gulf to finish his business with Uncle Chucho. But when he’d finished, instead of coming out of the house, he went into Tony’s room. Tony, Skunk in a Funk’s cousin, was famous for the number of girlfriends that he had—yet there he was in bed, on all fours, ready for the arrival of that teenager who started banging the son with even more violence than he’d screwed the father. So loud and aroused were Tony and the beautiful teenager’s cries and moans of pleasure that Skunk in a Funk, tears in his eyes, had no alternative but to go back up to his room and masturbate.

  While he was getting himself off, the fairy heard a terrifying wailing sound. Wrapping himself in the black sheet again, he went out onto the balcony. In the middle of the back yard, the beautiful teenager was now impaling one of Aunt Orfelina’s she-cats, who though she’d begged for that magnificent member couldn’t take it all, and died. Skunk in a Funk, furious (and unable to finish himself off), stomped back into his room. But the next day he woke up in a more reasonable frame of mind. What if the gorgeous teenager had been entrapped? Maybe—almost certainly—he’d been blackmailed by Orfelina and forced to screw the whole family (and the cat) in order to keep her, Skunk in a Funk, from being reported to the police. Uh-huh, I’m sure of it—the Key to the Gulf made all those sacrifices in order to save my life. Poor thing, what a terrible sacrifice to have to make for me. And with that fantasy of love, the enamored (and therefore blind) fairy made her way, singing and whistling happily to herself, toward the beach on Calle 16, where all the young men in Havana were supposed to meet that day—because according to the Three Weird Sisters and the Clandestine Clairvoyant, there was not going to be the usual roundup of queens and fairies. It was Tomasito the Goya-Girl who upon seeing Skunk in a Funk singing and whistling to himself asked him what might be the cause of such euphoria.

  “So tell me, girl, who’s been sticking it in up to the elbows to make you look so fully filled, I mean fulfilled, and cause you to go around chirping like that?”

  “That’s right, tell us, tell us who the owner is of the phallus that’s been giving you such pleasure,” leaped in Le Seigneur aux Camélias.

  “It’s a secret,” replied Skunk in a Funk, playing enigmatic. “And besides, there’s no sense in telling you nasty things his name, because you don’t even know him. He’s only slept with me, and he barely even knows my family.”

  “Oh, come on, tell us his name. Anyway, if we don’t know him, there’s no way any harm’ll come to you from us,” argued the Dowager Duchess de Valero.

  Lowering his voice, and with shyness unusual for her, Skunk in a Funk pronounced the name Lázaro González Carriles.

  The fairies exploded in laughter.

  “My goodness, you mean the Key to the Gulf?” said Le Seigneur aux Camélias. “The most famous, best-endowed bugger in all Havana? Why, child, the first time he gave it to me—must have been about two months ago—I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” nodded La Reine des Araignées. “I think that of all the hunks I’m planning to take to Fifo’s party, he’ll win the prize. Over a year ago I bestowed upon him my award as the Best Bugger in Arroyo Arenas,” she went on, “and I have never regretted it.”

  “Not a bad piece of meat,” commented Mahoma with some indifference, “but I’m getting tired of him coming in through my balcony door every night.”

  “I had a piece of that, too, and I can assure you that he is
the best-endowed man in Havana,” said Coco Salas, removing his glasses. And Coco, the most horrific queen in all the world, whom nobody but nobody would screw, even on a dare, opened a little purse woven from silver threads and took out a snapshot of the Key to the Gulf completely naked and with his immense Key standing up like a lighthouse. “I made this portrait just a few weeks ago when we were in Varadero,” Coco explained, as he passed the photo around.

  “You’ve got to hand it to whatever fairy it was that gave him that nickname he always introduces himself with,” piped up Tiki Tiki, “because it fits him like a glove. Imagine me, with this Biscayne Bay of mine, he filled me up completely, and at least for a few hours poured oil on my erotic waters.”

  “Ay! what can I tell you?” exclaimed Hiram, La Reine des Araignées, throwing her arms open. “Why, only last night the Key to the Gulf showed me heaven on Monte Barreto!”

  And the queen, swishing, hands and feet aflutter, gave a leap of pleasure up onto the rocks and began to describe in full detail the divine young man’s phallic prowess.

  “I can assure you,” said Mayra the Mare as Delfín continued with his skipping about, “that if that boy would promise to screw me even once a month, I’d give up my husband and my eleven children and follow him to the ends of the earth.”

  Suddenly Skunk in a Funk realized that from the moment he’d met him (about three months ago), his lover had slept with almost every fairy and every queen in Havana—and almost all the women, too, including even Clara Mortera, who’d already painted his portrait—and that on top of that, he was now recognized as Número Uno among all the hustlers in El Vedado and acclaimed as the Prize Bugger of Arroyo Arenas, a title aspired to by the most famous buggers in the country. The beautiful adolescent introduced himself to all his conquests, and to all those who aspired to be conquered (which meant almost every inhabitant of the Island), by the nickname Key to the Gulf, the name that Skunk in a Funk had so lovingly bestowed upon him.

  THE ELECTRIC VENUS

  Although almost all the guests who filled the immense catacomb of the Fifingian Palace were unquestionably “originals”—Selecto Macumerco and Papayi Taloka come immediately to mind—about whom any number of fascinating volumes might easily have been written, there was one whose fame was so widespread and whose importance was so great that it is simply impossible for us to allow her to pass in review before Fifo without first a few brief observations.

  Her name, first of all, was The Electric Venus.

  The Electric Venus was an Italian queen into whose backside the Oslo Academy of Science had implanted high-voltage wires that the fairy was able to control with a locket that she wore around her neck, dangling between her silicon breasts. When someone was having his way with the queen and she wanted (or had orders) to kill him, all she had to do was turn up the voltage. Instantly, the backside-stuffer would be electrocuted.

  The Electric Venus specialized in assassinating the world’s political leaders. On her impressive curriculum vitae appeared the names of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Mae Pse-tung, Leon Trosvki, Breshnev, the dictator of the Filippines, Marshall Tito, Ché Guevara, Aristotle Onassis, Olaf Palmer, Martin Luther King, both kings of Egypt, Golda Meir (who everyone knows was a man), John F. Kennedy, and some fifteen other constitutional presidents and several secretaries-general of the United Nations. . . . Radiant, the Electric Venus greeted Fifo (who surreptitiously gave her a few affectionate pats on the rear) and made her way into the circle of the world’s most prominent heads of state.

  COCO SALAS’ SECRET

  A truly regal queen dressed head to toe in linen and lace and shod in a gloriously clunky pair of platforms (tailor-made for her by Mahoma) swept in through the magnificent doors of the García Lorca Theater, which had recently been declared a national monument and moved intact to Fifo’s palace. Another fairy, dressed in an impeccable smoking jacket made out of polyethylene bags (and also wearing platforms by Mahoma), made an entrance through the doors. Ten fairies, each dressed in a smashing ensemble and wearing brightly polished earrings, crushed through the door of the García Lorca Theater and with their noses preceding them entered the lobby. A thousand fairies, wearing the most striking costumes imaginable (all designed by the peerless Clara Mortera), poured swiftly into the García Lorca Theater. An extraordinary event was about to take place in this grand hall tucked inside the very palace in which Fifo’s Grand Fiesta was being held. Halisia was dancing tonight!

  “What do you mean dance, you brazen hussy! Why on earth would you tell people, you Communist faggot, that Halisia, who’s eighty years old if she’s a day, was going to dance? I mean, really! I’ve been watching you work for quite some time now, and I haven’t interrupted you because what you say is more or less right, even if every once in a while you throw in one of those snide remarks of yours or drip a little venom. But now to come along and say that Halisia was going to dance, when the last time I saw her she was in a wheelchair and could only take a few steps on a pair of crutches. . . . Dance! You try to tell me, Daniel Sakuntala la Mala (uh-huh, la Mala because I always tell the truth), that Halisia was going to dance—that’s really going too far. . . .”

  Oh, my lord, will this faggot never let me write my novel in peace? What dreadful fate is mine—to have this fairy on my back day and night, supervising me, tromping all over every word I write. Because she doesn’t miss a word or a chance to tromp on it. Of course since she’s never written a thing and I’m recognized as a marvelous writer, she’s sick with envy, which is why she’s always interrupting me, trying to rattle me and make me lose my inspiration, especially when everybody knows I might kick the bucket any minute. . . . Well, you’d better listen to me, Miss Thing, I’m not going to lose my inspiration or anything else, because I’m of perfectly sound mind and furthermore, everything I say is the truth. Yes—Halisia was going to dance, whether you like it or not, and if you’d let me finish what I was saying you might find out why that eighty-one-year-old witch (not eighty) was still able to dance. So hush, and just listen for once.

  In this city there lives the most horrid of all fairies.

  “Coco Salas!”

  That’s right, Coco Salas. All right, then—What is the mystery behind that fairy? Where does he get the wherewithal to live the way he lives? How can such an ugly queen get her hands on so many nice things—all those fabrics and jewelry and trinkets . . . ?

  “I’ve always wondered about that myself. The number of frocks that queen can put on. . . . But since everybody says that she’s in State Security. . . .”

  Oh, child, don’t be silly. Everybody’s in State Security, even the political prisoners, and nobody else dresses in French silks or has a house full of Bulgarian roses or wears luminescent belts the way Coco Salas does. And all those things, my dear, are gifts, gifts from her intimate friend Halisia Jalonzo. Now then, knowing—as we all do—who Halisia is, think: Is that witch a friend of anybody? Has she not destroyed even the people who thought they were her closest friends? Has she not gotten rid of all the ballerinas with any talent so that she could always be the star? So—a person so monstrously perverse—does it make any sense for that person to be a friend of Coco Salas’? No way. What, then, is Coco Salas’ secret? Well I’m going to tell you, you none-too-intelligent queer: It is through the offices of Coco Salas that Halisia Jalonzo dances.

  “I can’t believe it. I mean I’m speechless. On top of the fact that you won’t just die of AIDS and get it over with, now we’re going to have to take you to the mental ward.”

  Hush, you silly bitch, and listen. Listen to the secret of Coco Salas that only I am privy to, because I am a great observer. As you know, for many years now all Halisia has been doing is tripping all over herself on the stage, falling on her head, and smashing that big beaky nose of hers into the wall. Famous for its hilarity is the true story of the time she danced with her back to the audience and when she started to take her bows she fell on top of the conductor down in the pit and killed him. People wou
ld go to the ballet just to count the times that Halisia fell down. But five years ago, at the International Ballet Festival they hold every year in the water amphitheater in Lenin Park, Halisia, on that floating stage, surprised the world by executing a grand jeté and then doing forty-four consecutive pirouettes. The entire amphitheater broke into cheers, although no one could fathom how that old bag could suddenly have brought back her old dancing from the dead. But Coco Salas, who was in the first row with a huge pair of opera glasses, saw the cause of the octogenarian’s leaps and turns. A ferocious mosquito, one of those that are spawned only in the reservoir in Lenin Park, was biting Halisia on the thighs. The old woman, feeling those stings, hadn’t been able to control herself, so she leaped. The ballet was a success and Halisia won the Silver Slipper International Prize for Dance. The next day Coco Salas showed up in her dressing room with a cardboard box.

  “Who,” Halisia asked him imperiously, “are you?” And she looked him up and down through her immense pince-nez. “And how dare you enter my private dressing room! Only Fifo is allowed that honor. . . .”

  Coco’s only reply was to pull back one corner of his cardboard box and let a mosquito out. The mosquito flew straight for one of Halisia’s naked legs, bit it, and the ballerina gave a leap so high she almost hit the roof of the theater.