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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  “I’ll marry Merlín tonight,” exclaimed the Condesa as her mother extinguished the lamps, the candles, and the candelabra.

  That very night María Mercedes married General Merlín, and by the men of his guard she had a baby girl to whom, in homage to her mother, she gave the name Leonor. And with that union, María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz became the Condesa de Merlín.

  In early 1812 the Spaniards awoke from their syphilitic stupor and instantly tried to boot us out, my dear Leonor, raping women, men, and children who had been destined for myself. We were forced to flee Spain, for as the wife of General Merlín I was part of the court of King Joseph, who could not bear to live apart from us. And so, in the midst of a terrible fog of gunpowder, the thunder of cannons, and the unbearable heat of that summer of 1812 we crossed the Peninsula. And as though that were not sufficiently frightful, the Spaniards were shooting to kill. In addition, I had to nurse my own daughter, your sister Teresita, while being ogled lasciviously by the soldiers, clerics, and counselors of state whom at such a critical pass I could not satisfy. In Aranjuez, my mother died and we buried her in the dust produced by our coaches and horses as we continued on. This was not so much a caravan as an entire city, heaped with scorn and opprobrium, cast out by merciless fate and fleeing to foreign lands. The soldiers were burning with thirst, although I would sometimes console them by allowing them to nurse at my breast. The journey lasted so long that in the course of it I became with child and at last gave birth. This child was a boy, the son of several Breton halberdiers. With my two small children under my arm I marched onward through the smoke and fire, bullets whistling over my head. I thought that I should die, and sometimes had to exercise great control in order not to throw myself before the grapeshot and end my life once and for all. But there are two selves within me, constantly at war—one weak and the other strong. I try always to stimulate the stronger, not because it is the stronger but rather because it is the most wretched, the self which manages to obtain nothing. . . . And so we came, after a year of wandering, to la belle Valencia. In that city I experienced one of the greatest disappointments of my life. My confessor, after violating me from behind, ran off with Casimira, my maid, and they took with them my jewels. I shall never forgive this outrage, for I have ever been an honest woman. While my husband was in camp with the King and his escort, I set about working the streets of Valencia, which teem with the cleverest whores on earth. And yet I made a small fortune and could at last flee from Valencia in the custody of twenty-five soldiers (and what soldiers!) under the command of Captain Dupuis, Lieutenant Diógenes, and Sergeant Albert, always at present-arms. We came to Zaragoza, where the war was at its fiercest. Anywhere one turned, there were shells and shot flying through the air, and the army was bombarding the city. And so we had to flee that city also. But before leaving, I decided to visit the tomb of the famous lovers. And so, somewhat calmed, in the midst of that incessant bombardment, and with my two children under my arm, I escaped to Paris. This was the spring of 1814.

  No sooner had I come to Paris than my beauty, my literary talent, and my voice earned me great fame. Neither Cuban nor Spaniard nor Frenchwoman, though mastering all those cultures and their horrors, I had that air of worldliness, of savoir faire and scornfulness, that is the property only of one who belongs not to this world and therefore cares little about any of the things it holds. With some of my own capital and a loan given me personally by the Emperor, I opened an elegant salon at number 40, rue de Bondy. My salon was visited by Rossini, the Persianis, Alfred de Musset, the Countess de Villani, Mlle Malibran, Goya, George Sand, Balzac, the Viscount Chateaubriand, Mme Récamier, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Simón Bolívar, the Empress Joséphine, Martínez de la Rosa, Chopin, Liszt, and other personalities, for whom I sang. We had more than a hundred fifty years of artistic successes. I sang in the Théâtre de l’Opéra de Paris; accompanied by Strauss I sang on the Champs Elysées; I sang with Malibran in Florence’s grand Piazza della Signoria, where even the statues of the gods were so moved that they became sexually aroused by my person; I sang Bellini’s Norma in 1840 in Havana in the grand hall of my paternal palace, where the lamps showed me to such advantage that I was more enchanting than ever and the Negroes once again were fired to stimulate me with lascivious caresses. . . . Each time there was a grand disaster, I would sing, and so my nobility rose ever higher. I sang for the Greeks after the great earthquake; I sang for the Poles after the insurrection; I sang for the benefit of the inhabitants of Lyons at the flooding of the Rhône; in 1931 I sang for the people of Martinique when that terrible earthquake devastated their poor country. . . . Partout où il avait une grande infortune, je travaillais à la soulager. . . . Et oui, sometimes my husband, with the aid of his troops in Europe, would turn a river from its course and bring on terrible flooding, or cause an earthquake, or collapse a bridge or burn an entire city so that I might sing for the benefit of the victims of the catastrophe. The methods might be thought to be somewhat harsh, but the consolation of my voice would assuage every calamity suffered by the survivors. Such an expression of transport would come upon the faces of the victims when I sang the famous duets from Semiramis or some passage from Norma that all the disasters caused by us were justified by their ecstasy.

  With her acceptable voice; some literary fame (though it must be said that almost all her books were written by Prosper Mérimée); a rich husband; a powerful and well-educated lover to whom the Condesa gave a fortune that did not belong to her; her own army, which she deployed in her bedchamber; wonder-working physicians who performed unending operations on her—with all these things (plus beauty) María de la Mercedes de Santa Cruz had been welcome in the salons of Paris for a century and a half. In Spain, she’d been awarded the medal of Isabel la Católica, undoubtedly for all the havoc she had wreaked there; she had been given the French Croix d’Honneur, undoubtedly for having introduced syphilis into every Parisian palais; during this century, she had received the Nobel Peace Prize, undoubtedly for having been one of the staunchest promoters of World War I; she had also received the Nobel Prize for Literature, specifically for those novels she’d never written. No shadow seemed to cloud the present brilliance that the Condesa was enjoying, or the shining future that Madame Cassiopeia (escaping for ten minutes from the snares of Inaca Echo) had foretold for her on the Ile de la Cité. . . .

  Oh, my dear Leonor, but in 1959, beside Lac Léman, as I danced a cavatina before more than a hundred sexually aroused Turks (with the Shah of Iran at the piano, my dear), there erupted in my native land a Communist revolution, and like a bolt of lightning, there descended upon Paris one of the most fearsome faggots on the face of the earth. The name, my dear Leonor, of this fairy sprung from the Negro race and of mendicant origins was Zebro Sardoya, though all the world knew him as Miss Chelo. This satanic being who had done me such great harm was born on the flatlands of Camagüey in the midst of green cane fields. From the time he was a young man, his passion was for the black cane cutters, but since he possessed not a single silver real, which was the price for every Negro whether Haitian, Cuban, or Jamaican, the above-mentioned Zebro (now Miss Chelo) would set about masturbating himself with the stalks of sugarcane. Oh, my adored daughter, it pains me to say this, mais je dois toujours dire la verité—so powerful was the anal fire of this creature that the sugarcane stalks, entering his backside, would instantly melt, becoming sweet cane juice. And in this way he razed a number of sugarcane plantations. Sometimes the juice from an entire carload would be squeezed out by Miss Chelo before the ox-driver could lash him with his whip. So widespread did this depraved creature’s fame become that soon the king of sugar of the entire island of Cuba at the time, the fabulously wealthy Señor Lobo, hired him as a one-man processing plant for one of his largest stands of cane. My god, daughter! I still have a letter (one of many) from the Dowager Duchess de Valero in which, in that wealth of detail that is hers alone, she recounts one such bout of processing in one of Señor Lobo’s fie
lds. Miss Chelo (whom as I said above was in fact Zebro Sardoya) got down upon all fours atop the platform under which the carts and wagons piled high with stalks of sugarcane would be unloaded, and as the stalks were taken from the carts they would be introduced into Miss Chelo’s anus by wonderfully dexterous Negroes. The yield, she reports, was enormous; in a single day Miss Chelo would process two hundred acres of sugarcane. Señor Lobo’s fortune grew even greater, he bought even more land, and he multiplied the number of his sugarcane-processing operations—in which the portable cane press was none other than Miss Chelo. Señor Lobo was one of the most important figures during the years of the Republic, and Zebro became his right arm (or, more precisely, his anus). But when the Revolution triumphed, the first thing the victors did was expropriate the ill-gotten properties of Señor Lobo, who had been denounced by the Anglo-Campesina in her newspaper Agitación. There was also a desire on the part of some to imprison Miss Chelo for agricultural corruption, but he flew away (tinkerbell that he was) and landed here—ay!—to my eternal misfortune. Now, my adored one, I shall let the narrator take over this account, for I, as the Princess Clavijo said, cannot go on. Not even the knowledge that one day long ago I was the true queen of Versailles can any longer console me. Nor the knowledge that once the castles of Dissais, Chamblois, and Charenton belonged to me; that once I owned a calash, a coupé, and a carriage with wheels of silver; that mine was the most refined pimp in all of Europe, and charged the most for our services of any man in France; that I danced with Napoleon on the day of his coronation; that my portrait was painted by Mme Paulinier (a painting which won the prize at the Grande Exposition de Paris in 1836); that I was raped by six engineers on a train bound for Baden-Baden; that I have been awarded all manner of titles, honors, and medals; that Eva Perón asked me for political advice on the running of her national bordello; that on a sailboat I spent forty-five unforgettable nights in the company of Fanny Esler—nothing, nothing of that, my daughter, can raise my spirits now. Je suis effrayée comme un oiseau dans la plaine pendant l’orage. Car je n’ai pas d’abri. I leave this dance that is my life and all that it contains of futility, brilliance, delight, and hope—but first I wish to express to you my thanks for having listened to me and for your letter of the thirtieth. And I leave you with the story of my tragedy in the hands of my rustic chronicler. Adieu, my beloved one. . . .

  All right, then, returning to the caprices of that crazy old nymphomaniac, let’s pick up the thread of her story: Yes, in 1959 Zebro Sardoya arrived in Paris—a dreadful, conceited, willful, scheming faggot with an urge to triumph in the City of Lights. Naturally, seeing that he had no talent and that his only weapon was his cane-squeezing backside, he found himself a place as a maid and also started working the streets. While he was sucking off Arabs he would steal their wallets and then pay them five francs for the blow job, usually clearing fifty francs or so; while he was sweeping the floors of the Camachos’ palais and Princess Hasson’s castle with his tongue, he would steal the drapes and à la Scarlett O’Hara make himself gorgeous frocks that he’d wear to the Place Pigalle, dressed as a rumba-dancing negress, to cruise the Japanese diplomats and Bushman ambassadors.

  One Sunday while she was fornicating under the Pont Neuf in exchange for a rotten fish, a decrepit old man of Malaysian origins passed by. Though it’s hard to believe, the old man (perhaps because he was almost blind) fell head over heels for the ex-sugarcane-squeezer and invited her to the Café Flora (the intellectual center of Paris) for a drink. The Camagüey roué(e)’s eyes (and every other part) lighted up. The fearsome Malay, known throughout Paris as the Mummy (at the time he was about ninety years old), had made a fortune during the Hitler years by turning in Jews, thousands of them; he would be sent the skins of his victims and would use them to manufacture the shades of table lamps that he sold wholesale to Herr Kurt von Heim. When Hitler was destroyed and World War II ended, the Mummy decided to adopt French citizenship, and of course also take on a hundred-percent French name. As for Zebro, that very night in the Café Flora the genocidal Malay, intimate friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, bestowed upon him the name Miss Chelo.

  Miss Chelo, an irrepressible exhibitionist, was passionate about bel canto and (as a literary hack) about literature. The Mummy just happened to be the owner of a large publishing house in Paris, which meant that Chelo, with a quantity of flattery, affectation, humiliation of some, gratification of others, and cocktail parties that must have cost a fortune, had soon put the Condesa de Merlín in the shade, at least in the literary department. Through sophisticated international networking (conspiracy) she soon grew famous, and even won a number of prizes. As for bel canto, her singing teachers were Mario of Monaco, Marcelo Quillèvere, Tebaldi, Maria Callas, and Luciano Pavarotti, and although her voice was still that of a cricket and her body that of a hippopotamus struck in the head by lightning, when she was fitted with a complex mechanical apparatus that extended her register she sang at the Théâtre de l’Opéra in Paris, at La Scala in Milan, and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her quavering notes were even to be heard at Chiesa di Dante. And as though that mechanical enhancement were not enough, the Queen of Camagüey got herself a ruinously expensive plastic cunt with which she seduced the most refined ladies of French politics and culture. This cunt had the advantage of being portable and easy to disconnect, so when she wanted to seduce a prominent man, the faggot undid the cunt and with a good deal of grudging willfulness made use of her natural member, which, her being Negro and all, was not small. On other occasions, of course, as with the ambassador from Yugoslavia, the Vatican press secretary, and the King of Equatorial Africa, she used her ass, which, as we have previously noted, was incalculably powerful. China, India, and the Arab world were seduced by her tongue. Through the French Jews she controlled all French radio; through the Muslims, television; and since she was an intimate of Khaddafi she gained control of the press through terror. For just as when faced with a woman she would become a woman to seduce her, and with a man he would become a man and screw him, so, depending upon the circumstances, s/he would be Muslim, Jew, Christian, Tibetan, pagan, Spiritist, animist, Brahman, Buddhist, Yoruba, Shi’ite, or atheist. . . . I tell you, Mary, that fairy was amazing—singer, orator, writer, Benedictine, schemer, lecher, and agent of any country that would stoop to flatter her hypertrophied ego. All-fucking-powerful and more—at last Zebro Sardoya, the horrid creature, once an impoverished and illiterate country girl, came to control the smoke-filled rooms and most prestigious salons of France, and of the entire terraqueous globe.

  The poor Condesa de Merlín woke up one day and found that she was being increasingly overshadowed, forgotten, vilified, erased from the map (there was even a rumor that she had contracted AIDS), reduced to nothing by that shameless fairy who one day would be courting the head of the CIA and the next jerking off the Cuban ambassador to France. It was at this point that the Condesa de Merlín determined to over-overshadow that horrid Miss Chelo. To do so, she enlisted the aid of the great-granddaughter of Mary Shelley to fabricate two wise and wonderful queens, Miss AntiChelo and Miss SuperChelo, who would outshine the arriviste interloper. These lovely creatures would also have the power of ubiquity, so that they could be in both Singapore and Fifo’s palace, or a men’s room in Tanzania, simultaneously. But precisely because she was so wonderfully mediocre in every respect, it was Chelo who was currently in vogue, and therefore she continued to sail from one triumph to the next.

  When Chelo heard the reports about the Condesa’s pirated editions of her mediocre self, she sued her in the French courts. As punishment for the Condesa’s crimes, the nation of France confiscated all her castles and turned them over to Chelo, who in addition had poisoned the Mummy and taken over his gigantic publishing house. My lord! That devil (or she-devil) Chelo’s realm now extended from one bank of the Seine to the other. The Condesa, who had neither the stomach nor the power to counteract the evil fairy’s twinkledust, at last gave up the fight, and in a single day
her two hundred ten years (exactly) of life came crashing down upon her. Qui peut calculer combien d’amers douleurs, combien d’immense desolation peut supporter le coeur humain. And suddenly a terrible homesickness for her native land, as strong as her hatred for her adoptive land, came over her. No! she said to herself, looking at her skeletal figure in the mirror. Not here! I shall not be buried here! That Chelo creature is capable of organizing my funeral and even singing naked at my mass. I’ll die as far as I can from that faggot—I’ll die in my own palace, singing within the walls of the mansion I was born in. Yes, it may be my swan song, but I’ll sing it in the place that is my own, surrounded by loved ones, or at least by accomplices. And without further ado, the Condesa sold the few pieces of jewelry she still owned; liquidated her fake Picassos, her portrait painted by Paulinier, and her former house on the rue de Bondy; bought a sailboat and a gig (which she loaded on board the sailboat); put on the same gown she had worn for her visit to her native land in 1840; and, entrusting herself to the waves and winds, set off for Havana with a little orchestra that would accompany her during her last soirée. She’d already sent a telegram to Fifo, announcing her imminent arrival.

  And so in midsummer of 1999, the Condesa de Merlín sailed for a second time into Havana harbor. There was so much hullabaloo and confusion in the city on the occasion of the official festivities that everyone thought this old woman in nineteenth-century dress who sailed into the harbor on a sailboat accompanied by an orchestra had to be a special guest (some wise woman from the Orient, some glorious transvestite, perhaps Miss Chelo himself) invited by Fifo to take part in the Carnival parade. And so it was that the Condesa de Merlín rode through Havana in her smart gig, accompanied by her escort of Versailles-esque musicians, arriving, to the ovations of Negro lowlifes and screaming queens, at the home she had been born in. She entered, followed by her French orchestra, and found herself in her former palace, now converted to a gigantic men’s room. At the spectacle of this monster urinal, she had but two options: die on the spot or sing. Never less than resolute, she chose to sing, and since she knew that this was to be her last concert, from her throat there emerged the highest, sweetest notes that she had ever sung. Her voice was that of an angel, and, accompanied by the orchestra (which rose to the occasion by playing as brilliantly as the singer sang), it echoed and re-echoed in the gigantic men’s room. The men, cocks in hand as they peed at the urinal troughs, stood entranced by that grande dame whose singing moved even the walls and ceiling of the decaying mansion to tears. And thus when the Condesa, with one of her aristocratic gestures, asked the peeing audience to join her in her song, every one of those glorious men, still peeing, joined in, producing the most extraordinary musical event in the history of bel canto. A thousand men, as they urinated, accompanied the old Condesa’s high, crystalline voice, as did the orchestra, which produced never-before-heard arpeggios and theretofore-unsuspected harmonies. No other Norma will ever achieve the heights of perfection, harmonic complexity, and dramatic depths breathed into it that night by María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz in that monster men’s room. The magic flooded every inch of the palace; the Condesa de Merlín had triumphed yet again.