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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  At last the giovanotto, unable any longer to contain his passion, exploded with the power of a volcanic fumarole (this was his first orgasm in his life), bathing with his fiery liquor the entire intestinal tract of the master, who, feeling himself filled with that lava (which issued even from his mouth), sprinkled his own well-aged liquor on the half-finished statues. And just as the gladiators produced their seminal eruptions both at once, they emitted, in unison, a titanic howl of pleasure. That sound, like the sound of Armenian earthquakes, not only made the Arno once more overflow its banks, but crumbled the tower of the Cathedral of San Marcos in Venice, dangerously tilted the Tower of Pisa, and devastated Pompeii.

  The sweet giovanotto pulled his sword from the recumbent body and stood up, proudly contemplating the conquered master. The master, lying upon the floor, looked up at the young man—his spread and firmly planted legs, serene and at the same time in an attitude of glorious advance; his thighs like solid, indestructiblecolumns; the phallus, with its typical Italian shape like a bobbin or a country boy’s tipcat-peg (with a slight bulge in the middle and pointed at the ends), resting upon a pair of satisfied and recently discharged balls; the half-clutched hands, their throbbing veins still half-engorged; the full, virile face and the curls stuck to the forehead; the ears still alert; the eyes possessed by a look like none other. Everything about the young man displayed—exhaled!—the strength and harmonious serenity of a man who had just tasted victory. . . . Don’t move! Michelangelo ordered him, gazing up at the giovanotto from under the triumphal arc of the balls. And taking up hammer and chisel, in less time than it took Cleopatra to squash a mosquito bred upon the Nile with her golden flyswatter, he had reproduced on a colossal scale every heroic feature of the Florentine youth who had just slain him.

  Quadruple adventure, that: phallic, anal, holy, and glorious, for in bringing Michelangelo to the petit mort the young man had laid him at the gates of paradise, and at the gates of glory.

  Observe, then, my friends, the reposeful and yet tense features of the sculpture; observe the circulation of the blood under the skin of the hands. Observe those feet planted with the assurance of a lord of columns, the legs, the thighs, which proudly rise with the plentitude of a king who, victorious, has just passed unscathed through a tempest; observe those buttocks, the backside of a demigod, clenched in the rectal contraction that impelled the phallic thrusts, observe the pubes, still moist with sweat from the backside of Michelangelo. Observe the ensemble, and especially the sweet glans now in repose, and above all, observe the magnificent balls drained of their unquiet semen (the right one hanging somewhat lower than the left), observe the fingernails, the ears, the still-tense muscle in the throat, the arms that still show the mark of one who has just indulged in vigorous exercise; observe the belly still contracted, the erect nipples, the tousled hair. Observe yet again, after the ejaculation, the sweet triumphant member, so recently refurled, immobile yet as though ready once more to advance, and you will see that the model who posed for the David, that anonymous Florentine youth who hung out on the old bridge, had just ejaculated, gloriously, within his master, just moments before the master’s genius (which visits us only at the most exceptional moments) transfigured him to the immortality of stone.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (14)

  That false, forged information she feeds Fifo—disinformation feebly feigning faithfulness to the facts, but in fact faked—so fully and unfairly deforms the prima facies of the case that it should be flatly dismissed as fictional flights of fancy. Furthermore, the false facts she feeds Fifo—falsehoods vilely betraying fellow poets and patriots—are the unpublishable fictions of a fibbing informant frustrated in publishing fictions legitimately. Phooey on all fibbing informants feeding Fifo fiction!

  For Paula Amanda

  A LETTER

  Miami, May 9, 1998

  Dearest Reinaldo,

  I suspect you haven’t gotten the other letters I’ve been sending you from Paris, New York, and even Timbuktu. I’ll write more another day, but for now I just wanted to drop you this note to tell you that I’ve never felt such a cosmic, suffocating, and implacable loneliness as I’ve been feeling on these beaches in Miami. Everything is so dehumanized, so alien, so plastic, so monumental, so soulless. The mystery of a little grove of palm trees, a sheltered place in the sand, a hill (even a tiny little hill) on which you can stand and look out over a palm grove and feel the wind in your face, a dusty path winding down to the water’s edge, a wild jasmine plant, the water so clear that you can see the bottom—a place where there’s the chance of a chance meeting, and where there’s a high sky, and a street with sidewalks and doorways—all of that, all of it lost. I put up a Christmas tree this year, decorated it, painted the apartment, read some of my texts aloud—to help me remember you. But nothing works. I reach out to touch and I can’t touch myself. I don’t exist and yet I suffer from my existence. I don’t belong to this world, yet I know, of course, that the world I yearn for no longer exists.

  Don’t think for a second that this climate is like Havana’s. The city is an oven. I say city, but it really isn’t a city; it’s more like a conglomeration of short, squat, spread-out housing projects—a cowboy town where the automobile has elbowed out the horses.

  I’m dying of loneliness, dying of love. I’m dying because of all the things I don’t have, because of all the things I wanted to do and never got to do. Because of all that I did do, and all the things I had but didn’t know I had, and therefore lost. Because of all that I didn’t have the sense to enjoy while I had it. Because of all that I enjoyed and that doesn’t belong to me anymore. Because of all the things that I’ll never do now. Where to find a place in which to live out this horror?—And as though all these other horrors were not enough, I also have to work so I can keep on being horrified. I’ve washed cars, I’ve washed floors, I’ve washed dishes in hotels. Sometimes I get lucky and I make off with a whole set of china and sell it in Southwest Miami—with the help of Pedro Ramona Lépera, let me add, a petty criminal who’s famous here (where there’s so much competition that achieving that kind of fame is not easy). But other people may have had it even worse. SuperChelo, for instance, was stabbed and died instantly, covered in oil; if you see her down there, it’s her spirit that you’re seeing. Some people said it was drugs, but the real gossips—who unfortunately almost always get it right—say that it was a murder planned by Chelo. Then there’s Miguel Correderas—with that huge hairy body of his, I hear somebody thought he was a bear and tried to stick him in the zoo. Fortunately he was saved by the fact that he now has his American citizenship, which he managed to get because he’d spent more than a year in jail accused of the perfect homicide. I saw the old thing yesterday—she looked like a plucked rooster, as the song says (or said). He told me he’s going through a terrible time financially because besides the fact that his parents came from Cuba he’s got a lover. He went to an employment agency to get a job as a licensed cocksucker; he figured he’d do home delivery, if you know what I mean, for the most respectable gentlemen of the city. So poor Correderas, after filling out reams of forms and I don’t know what—they gave him an aptitude test. I mean they had him give this old guy a blow job in front of the licensing board—and you won’t believe this, but the fairy flunked! Is it a tough field here or what? Can you imagine, that poor old queen who’d spent her whole life sucking cock in vacant lots and undergrowth, and now they won’t give her her license? I mean, how humiliating! But it just goes to show you—here in Miami, our calvary is unending. . . .

  But there is one ray of hope—people are saying that Fifo’s fall may come any day now—though you don’t see anybody doing anything to help him along. I hope it’s true. But I wouldn’t want to live to see 2000, and if I’ve hung on this long (I’m sure you know I have AIDS) it’s in the distant hope that someday, somehow, we may be able to meet again and be just one person, the way we used to be. That may happen only after death; I don’t know. Of course I’m not s
o sure of the existence of the Beyond, either. In fact I’ll tell you the truth, I frankly don’t think there’s any there there—no Beyond, and no Here, either. I remember Cuba and I feel like screaming. I look at myself here, and I am screaming. How can I go on living like this—nowhere—with one piece of my soul here and another piece there, with my life split in two (or maybe a million) pieces? I am just a shell of myself, the old dried-out rind of myself. That is my tragedy. This might sound tacky, or even incredible, to you, but it’s worse than a tragedy—it’s my life. This rind will never be able to fill the void within its rindness. I will never be able to join myself to myself again. I will never again be myself, or you—which is the same thing. This ocean, this beach, this sun—they have nothing to do with that man I once was; no complicity links us, none of these places recognizes me, or ever will. If I live another hundred years here, I will still be a stranger, a foreigner, an alien.

  Now I’m going to take my horror out for a walk along the beach—which at least has less surveillance than it had down there. After I come back, I may write a few pages—the last. Glory and martyrdom, my dear—it’s all that keeps me going. It’s late. Everybody around me is asleep. I’m still awake.

  Think of me as an infinite but always present absence, and know that I send you the tenderest, most eternal affection.

  Yours,

  Reinaldo

  THE AREOPAGITE

  Rubén Valentín Díaz Marzo, the Areopagite, had a two-room apartment in the Hotel Monserrate, one of the most appalling dives in all of Old Havana. The variety of tenants sheltered by this rundown flophouse was amazing—retired hookers; obese marchionesses such as Mahoma; clandestine clairvoyants such as Sakuntala la Mala; insanely fiendish ballet lovers such as Coco Salas; queens with unquenchable rectal fires such as Eachurbod; murderous bull dykes such as Beba Carriles, who had a female slave, a husband, and several children, bragged about her knowledge of the law, and passed herself off as a witch; well-plowed dancers such as Miss Mayoya, who passed herself off as a virgin field; slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am fairies such as SuperSatanic; refined bull macho butt-stuffers such as the Flower Boys, who never screwed a queen without first wringing her neck; well-mannered, superendowed, and super-super-sought-after hustlers like the Key to the Gulf; triple agents for State Security, the KGB, and the CIA such as Kilo Alberto Montamier, who stayed in that fleabag hotel on his supposedly clandestine visits so he’d “fit in”; traffickers in yard goods, black beans, refrigerators, and works of art such as Ramón Sernada (a.k.a. the Ogress); former chairwomen of the Comités para la Defensa de la Revolución, those nefarious Watchdog Committees, who would drag themselves and their huge tits along the hotel’s ancient marble halls and up and down its stairways; poètes manqués; women like Teresa Rabijo, who’d been abandoned with her three kids; pimps with long eyelashes and immeasurable meat; drug dealers; pianists without pianos; transvestites that still owned twenty-seven wigs, such as Alderete; former lovers of former captains and former Party members; gorgeous bisexual teenagers and male sluts such as Pepe, Beba Carriles’ son; judokas, santeros, karatecas, sailors. . . . That was the congeries of people who lived in the Hotel Monserrate; that was the explanation for the deafening, boiling vibration that came from the hotel. These were the people doing all that shrieking and yelling.

  Day and night, all you could hear was doors being kicked down, the screams of hookers being stabbed to death, the throbbing of drums, jealous dykes slapping each other, political speeches, glasses being smashed against walls and floors, exorcisms in Lucumí, Chopin’s Swan Lake (to which Coco Salas and Mayoya would dance), a crazy old woman constantly calling out to some guy named Jesús who never answered her, the unbelievable goings-on of a family of incestuous pygmies—seven brothers who were constantly fighting over their only sister. When the “domestic disturbance” would start, everybody would say “There go Snow White and the Seven Pygmies!” . . . But in all that racket, it was almost impossible to discern any specific noise. The noises of that hellish concert all ran together so, that you couldn’t pick out any scream in particular. Gigantic black men in shorts would prowl the halls of that seven-story wreck armed not only with pricks that would open any door, but also with crowbars that would pry open the vaults of the Banco Nacional before you knew what was happening. And if there was no peace in the hotel rooms, there was even less of it, honey, in the halls, where a constant stream of whores, tops, bottoms, dealers in anything you could imagine, unpublished writers—you name it—would be going up and down the stairs yelling and knocking on doors. It wasn’t unusual to come across a member of the Communist Youth Organization on the stairway, being screwed by an old drunk; one daily spectacle was provided by several Chinese sisters who were forever having their catfights in the halls. . . . Greek sailors, mulattoes from Coco Solo, Asian recruits, and screaming Lawton queens would stand in line in front of the door to Skunk in a Funk’s room. While she was being taken from behind (once again) by the Key to the Gulf, she’d be looking out the peepholes to see the procession that awaited her.

  And as though all that were not enough, hundreds of homeless men and women and former fugitives from justice had taken up residence on the roof, setting up their tents and even building fires to keep warm and do their cooking—which meant that several times the Holy City they had built up there had been invaded by firemen who, seeing all those people, would run back down the stairs in terror. Among the people who set up their tents on the roof of the Hotel Monserrate was Odoriferous Gunk, with his dying mother.

  Naturally the Hotel Monserrate had only one entrance. And before the door to the hotel there would gather a huge crowd of pickpockets, murderers who murdered for the fun of it, fairies cruising, and guys selling foreign jeans that were “wrapped up in this newspaper here,” though the package contained nothing but a bunch of rags. (The only pair of pants the con man owned was the pair he had on.) Also at the hotel entrance was a bus stop, at which every bus headed for Old Havana, Marianao, El Vedado, and Guanabo supposedly had to stop—which meant that at the door of the Hotel Monserrate there were not only the persons mentioned just above but also, like a throng of the faithful before the gates of Jerusalem, a crowd of people, all carrying shopping bags, who would rain curses on the mother of God and the bus driver when—as was almost invariably the case—the bus would howl by without stopping, leaving in its wake a cloud of pestilential exhaust.

  One day, at precisely three o’clock in the afternoon, a really strange thing happened at that bus stop. A bus shrieked to a stop before the door of the Hotel Monserrate and before you could blink—it disappeared! It, my dear, and all its passengers, who were mugged, stripped of their belongings, carved up, and sold as cuts of beef all over Old Havana. As for the bus itself, Mahoma, Coco Salas, SuperSatanic, and Mayra the Mare (who also lived in the hotel) instantly turned it into earrings, combs, pots and pans, table knives, and even metal sandals that made a hellish racket you could hear all over the building. The inhabitants of the Hotel Monserrate lived for days and days in terror as Fifo’s police searched the building from top to bottom and inside out. Finally, the police found one of the wheels off the carved-up bus under Alderete’s bed. So as to avoid being carved up himself, Alderete made a run for it, changing wigs at every corner. All the inhabitants of the building were charged as accomplices to a political crime, since the fact of wanting to keep, or conspiring to keep, the wheel off a bus was proof—according to the prosecutor—that every one of them was about to try to escape the Island.

  In order to jail all the tenants until a trial could be held—which of course might take years—Fifo ordered a gigantic iron prison gate installed across the Hotel Monserrate’s only door. But with criminals like these, my dear, there was no security measure that anybody could take that would ever work. Within hours, Snow White and the Seven Pygmies, aided by Beba Carriles, the Clandestine Clairvoyant, and Mayoya, had dug a tunnel that came out in a big seven-door refrigerator in the bar on the first floor. Tho
usands of half-frozen criminals poured through the bar to freedom. Other stratagems were also employed by the whores and fairies so they could get out and fornicate even while the gate remained locked tighter than a drum. To give just one quick example, Beba Carriles’ slave, known as Dimwit, a countrywoman from Pinar del Río and purportedly a virgin, would dangle from the window in a huge sack tied to a rope attached to a pulley that Pepe, Beba’s son, would operate. Pepe would lower the sack with Beba’s slave inside down to the street level; the slave’s current boyfriend would climb into the sack with her (coining a phrase in use in Cuba to this day), screw her eyes out, and then take off; and the Dimwit would have herself, much relieved, pulled back up again by Pepe. Then the Dimwit, who as always had picked the pocket of her boyfriend of the moment, would turn over to Pepe the fortune that she’d reaped: a tin matchbox, a pack of cigarettes, a linen handkerchief . . .