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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  Meanwhile, the bus was going crazy—the big-bellied woman was still shrieking, the black men were trying to save Eachurbod’s life, and other people were yelling that the faggot deserved to die, preferably on the spot.

  Eachurbod somehow recovered the red-bound tome and shielded his head with it, trying to protect herself from the enraged hunk, who was still kicking and hurling insults while all the passengers were loudly giving their opinions or verdicts. And to make matters worse, it was five o’clock in the afternoon and the bus was traveling through the José Martí Revolutionary Plaza. The pregnant woman gave an earsplitting scream of desperation. And just at the moment, the bus driver stopped the bus and threw all the doors wide open. A police officer was walking toward Eachurbod, pistol drawn. But Eachurbod, Volume XXV of the Complete Works of Lenin held aloft, pushed through the crowd, snatched up off the floor a wallet that she thought belonged to her, and took off running across the Plaza de la Revolución. Off the bus leaped the pistol-packing policeman, the supposedly offended well-packed hunk, several rehabilitated hookers, a park guard, and three resentful closet homos who also wanted to see Eachurbod done away with so they could win a medal for being Workers in the Vanguard. Eachurbod ran—or flew, if the truth be told, my dear—across the plaza. So great was her desperation that in almost no time she had put a good English mile between herself and her pursuers—none of that metric stuff for her. And yet her feet never slowed until she came to the locked gates of the grounds of UNEAC—the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists—where she screamed for political asylum, as on a previous occasion Tomasito the Goya-Girl and Reinaldo Arenas had also done (though fruitlessly, it must be noted). So piercing and so terrifying were the shrieks of the poor pursued and persecuted queen that the president of UNEAC, Nicolás Guillotina, that great bulldog-looking creature, came down the marble steps himself and opened the gate to Eachurbod. Of course he had to, didn’t he? After all, Eachurbod—a.k.a. José Martínez Matus—was the only creature on the entire Island who knew Sóngoro Cosongo by heart and who would, on the arm of Nancy Mojón, recite it in its entirety while dancing on Nicolás’s glass coffee table.

  Once inside the offices of UNEAC, Eachurbod explained to the bulldog what had happened and he put the red-bound volume and what was purportedly his wallet down on that same glass table.

  “What’s this!?” asked Nicolás in utter terror.

  “Not to fear,” said Eachurbod. “It’s just Volume XXVII of the Complete Works of Lenin. Don’t you remember that you gave it to me yourself? It has that introduction by Juan Marinello.”

  “The hell with Marinello and that whole fucking book! What terrifies me is that wallet with the initials of the Communist Party on it.”

  “I picked it up when I was trying to get away. I thought it was mine; I figured it fell out of my pocket when that guy was trying to kick me to death, but now I realize that it was the guy that was kicking me that lost it.”

  “Idiot!” said Nicolás Guillotina, opening the wallet. “You were playing with the dick of no less than Juantormenta, the world champion runner. This is his wallet. I don’t know why he didn’t catch you. My God, I think he’s outside now!”

  Terrified again, Eachurbod peeked through the blinds. “Yep, that’s him, that’s the guy I was fooling with, but he can’t be Juantormenta. He’s white.”

  “He’s black and he’s queer,” said Nicolás Guillotina. “Haven’t you heard that he puts on white makeup when he goes out cruising, so no-body’ll recognize him? As always, my dear, you fucked up.”

  “Ay!” shrieked Eachurbod, falling to his knees before Nicolás (but not before putting Volume XXVIII of the Complete Works of Lenin down as a prayer stool). “Protect me! Cover me with your flag! Take me in as a phallico-political refugee. If I leave this building that son of a bitch will cut off my head just to win some more points with Fifo! I’ll recite Sóngoro Cosongo for you!”

  “I can’t! I can’t!” Nicolás was saying as he paced back and forth across his luxurious office. “Sooner or later Juantormenta will get in here and kill you, and if I try to help you you’ll take me down with you. Look at what happened to me when I tried to defend José Mario—Carlos Franqui almost refused to make me Cultural Attaché to the Soviet Union. . . . No, hon. There’s nothing I can do for you. Run, try to save yourself the best you can. I can’t even stay here with you another minute. I’ve got to leave—I’ve got to leave right now. Today that son of a bitch Fifo is celebrating his fiftieth anniversary in power and I’ve been officially invited to preside over H. Puntilla’s second retractation. The first time I got out of it by checking myself into the hospital, but this time there’s no way, because I was resuscitated especially for this event and Fifo personally invited me. Ay, there’s the limousine they sent to drive me to the celebration, straight to the Hall of Retractations. So long, Eachurbod, and may Lenin and Sensemayá the serpent help you. After all, it was a serpent that got you into this, wasn’t it? And by the way, I think it’s best if you don’t try to go out the back way. Oh, but you can’t stay inside. I’ll tell you what—if I were you, I’d go up on the roof and wait for Halley’s Comet to pass by and grab a ride on its tail.”

  Nicolás made his deliberate, bulldog way down the enormous marble steps, opened the outside gate and closed it again behind him, gave a contemptuous look at Juantormenta, and got into the hearse that was to drive him to Fifo’s palace.

  A JOURNEY TO THE MOON

  No one, not even Skunk in a Funk herself, knew the name of that particular prisoner, or what his sentence was (though it seemed eternal), or what his crime had been—though once again, people said it was monstrous: strangling his mother, wife, and children or something along that line. Two passions ruled the deranged murderer, and that was all anybody knew about him: one was his desperate love for or attraction toward the moon; the other was his obsession to fill a huge tank with water that he brought from the bathroom with an eyedropper.

  So irresistible was the loco’s attraction toward the moon that at night, when the moon came out, he would jump up and down, howl in apparent agony, and fall to his knees in contemplation of the heavenly body, and then moan, bellow, and beat his breast as he stretched his arms out toward it, almost as though trying to embrace it. Sometimes he would throw it kisses and break out in some weird language, prayer, or supplication to the moon—the immense moon whose light streamed through the thick iron bars of the prison in Castillo del Morro. When the great orb would rise out of the sea, looking as though one could reach out and touch it, the madman’s paroxysm would reach its peak. He would writhe in convulsions, froth at the mouth, change color, and be shaken by unspeakable trembling; finally, bathed in moonlight, he would fall as though struck by lightning, whimpering amorously until he lost consciousness.

  Several times over the years, on nights when there was a full moon, the other prisoners and the cruelest of the guards had tied the madman up and locked him away in a dark cell, but so pathetic, so eerie, was the moaning of the poor man that no one had been able to sleep and he was taken out and returned to the common cells. The most uncanny thing about the man was that when he was locked up in that tiny cell of his, cut off from the world, there was no way he could know when the moon was full, and yet he did know—because when the moon was full his moaning and howling were much louder and more unsettling than on other nights. Once when the prisoners had tied him up to keep him from seeing the moon, the madman somehow freed himself from the ropes, killed several inmates, and ran out into the prison courtyard, howling in lunatic despair.

  All of which meant that the murderer, now resentenced (hospitals would have nothing to do with him—he was way too crazy for them), had been returned to the common cells, where no one ever bothered him again.

  By the time Skunk in a Funk was sent to the prison, the madman was very close to achieving his goal of filling the tank. Ten years he had been at it, and he had only inches to go—though of course since he was filling it with an eyedroppe
r, it would still take him a few months longer. Day and night the madman would make his way through the clumps of prisoners fighting and bickering among themselves, but he never seemed to see or hear them—all he did was scurry with his eyedropper from the tank to the bathroom and the bathroom back to the tank, trying monomaniacally to fill it. His job was made even harder by the frequent lack of water; sometimes, too, he would have to stand in line to fill his eyedropper. But despite all the shortages and outages, no one even thought of using the water in the loco’s tank. Several years earlier, when one of the prisoners had tried to, he paid for it with his life. Even talking to the loco was risky—the least you’d get for your trouble was a kick and a barrage of unintelligible insults. Skunk in a Funk decided not to speak to the madman, just watch him.

  Clearly, filling the tank with the eyedropper was a task of vital importance to the man. After some time watching him, Skunk in a Funk, thinking to help the poor fellow, cupped some water in his hands and started toward the tank. The madman, moaning, shrieking, and making terrible threatening sounds and gestures, stopped Skunk in a Funk in her tracks. Obviously, this was a personal mission that he alone could fulfill. Skunk in a Funk understood, and he never again interrupted the madman’s labor. She did, however, help make a way for the madman as he hurried back and forth from bathroom to tank cradling his eyedropper in his hand. But one night while the others slept and the madman was scurrying back and forth with the eyedropper, Skunk in a Funk, unable to control herself, asked him in the friendliest yet most respectful way what the purpose of all this work was. The madman, in a voice which was not much more than a confused and hurried moan, or bellow, and which Skunk in a Funk alone was able to decipher, said he was going to the moon.

  Skunk in a Funk never interrupted the madman again; day and night the loco continued on his inalterable track, pausing briefly only to shout, moan, howl, in desperate, piteous ritual. At last, one night the tank was completely filled. The next day the madman spent in constant scurrying back and forth, bringing out (whenever he could—the prisoners were allowed out of their cells only for breakfast, or to go out into the courtyard or to the dining room) pieces of chairs, the legs off benches, sticks, stakes, planks, and any other kind of wood (which the prisoners carved into clubs and daggers to kill each other with). He piled all the wood around the tank and that night, as the moon rose, he lighted it. And when the fire was raging, the madman jumped into the water-tank-turned-cauldron and pulled a metal cover over it.

  The prisoners could hear the madman’s convulsions inside the tank of boiling water, and some tried to get close enough to tip the tank over with sticks and iron bars. But Skunk in a Funk, armed with an even longer bar, kept them all at bay. In the light from an enormous moon suspended before the prison gates, the tank would shake and shiver as the steaming water bubbled, threatening to boil over and flood the gallery. Toward dawn, the sounds inside grew still and the fire flickered out. Skunk in a Funk raised the metal cover from the tank and saw the prisoner, in a fetal position, drowned, boiled, and suffocated. On his face was the placid expression of a child who, cradled by his mother, had just fallen off to sleep. At that, Skunk in a Funk realized that the man had flown off to the moon, for his smile was not of this world.

  A TONGUE TWISTER (17)

  On a remote pastoral tract of agricultural grazing land, a plot abutting a cattle pond whose brackish undrinkable waters were kept in check by a dike, a gaunt and gaga gaggle of ogresses—a pack of particularly ugly hags—delightedly greeted, i.e., applauded, the miraculous copulative contraption concocted by their chocolate-skinned compatriot, an ogre named Otto—a sexual prosthesis affixed to his previously stiff-standing, now pooped-out, prick.

  Otto’s copulative contraption kept the gaggle of ogresses, that pack of ugly hags, contentedly plugged even while Otto was recuperating his powers or complying with other contractual obligations—so plugged they practically purred.

  For the fairies imprisoned in a forced-labor camp

  MONKEYSHINES

  In the immense Hall of Retractations, all was in readiness. The guests, especially invited for this event, had taken their seats before the stage. Fifo was wearing an impressive dress uniform spangled with stars, with a fatigue cap on his head and an Übercap on top of that one, and on top of the supercap he had pinned an olive branch so long that it reached almost to the floor. He also had on a long red cape and knee boots. H. Puntilla climbed the steps onto the stage; his face was covered with white makeup onto which had been painted the marks and bruises of a recent beating. Then came Nicolás Guillotina, with a solemn, mournful expression and flapping his enormous ears. Guillotina produced a sheaf of papers from a burlap bag and began to read the introduction he had prepared for this precedent-setting event, H. Puntilla’s second public self-retractation.

  “Dear friends,” began the famous poet and rumba dancer, “we are gathered together here today for an event that fills us all with enormous pleasure . . .”

  But suddenly he was interrupted by a sound like an exploding submarine, which shook the Hall of Retractations to its foundations. Terrified, Guillotina dropped his papers, scattering them all over the stage, and froze—his enormous ears even stopped flapping. H. Puntilla grew whiter than his white makeup.

  “What the hell was that?” demanded Fifo.

  Several diligent midgets climbed up into the dictator’s box and explained what was happening. It seems that Bloodthirsty Shark was doing his underwater performance behind the glass wall of the huge aquarium. No doubt the magnificent creature had gotten the time mixed up, because his performance was scheduled for later—or maybe earlier (I’m not very good at this shark business). Anyway, giving pride of place to his favorite, Fifo ordered the midgets to conduct all the guests in the Hall of Retractations over to the Aquarium Theater. Instantly Nicolás Guillotina, H. Puntilla, the grandes dames with their magnificent gowns, the kings, the ministers and foreign dignitaries, the presidents, the henchmen and women, and all the other VIPs were led by the diligent midgets over to the gigantic underwater grotto, at the very rear of which, before a huge plate-glass window, they gathered to watch Bloodthirsty Shark do his pirouettes. The midgets quickly distributed bottles of champagne and various aphrodisiac delicacies among the guests. Cocaine, girl—following the advice of Dulce María Leynaz—was passed around on silver trays.

  The act that took place before the guests had no parallel in the history of water ballet. Behind the huge plate-glass wall that opened into the Caribbean, Bloodthirsty Shark was dancing a dance of such singular beauty that it made even Halisia fume with envy. The magnificent creature of the depths rose up like a firebird, hung suspended in the water, waved its fins to fill the aquarium with bubbles of every color, and swam toward the glass, its enormous member fully erect. Each time Bloodthirsty Shark executed one of those magnificent moves, a sigh of almost sexual pleasure escaped the lips of the generals, heads of state, queens, grandes dames, and secret agents—indeed, everyone who was honored to view the glorious spectacle.

  Fifo ordered his midgets to drop a naked prisoner, hands tied, into the underwater grotto. The first thing Bloodthirsty Shark did was cut through the prisoner’s bonds with its teeth and watch for a moment as the victim desperately swam away, trying to escape. But Bloodthirsty Shark easily overtook the man, wrapped him a cloud of bubbles, and dragged him to the bottom of the sea. There, holding the prisoner tight between its monstrous fins, it swam straight up to the surface and with him danced, before a spellbound audience, a dizzying, circular dance—while its erect member created a sea of froth. Finally, crushing the prisoner against the plate-glass wall, it began to devour him, its throbbing member growing larger and larger and swinging about more and more wildly, creating patterns of gorgeous bloody bubbles. This indescribable scene—you just had to be there to see with your own eyes how elegantly the shark swallowed down the pieces of the prisoner’s body—aroused the entire audience, who began frenziedly to masturbate (themselves and each
other).

  “Release the monkeys!” shouted Fifo from his royal box, pushing away the Marquesa de Macondo, who was on her knees madly trying to suck his cock.

  Instantly the diligent midgets opened cages at each side of the aquarium, and thousands of sexually aroused simians poured out and began to mate with the crowd, women and men alike. I tell you, Mary, I couldn’t believe how those big hairy animals with their enormous sex organs would just as soon screw a general as a first lady, an oil magnate or an Oriental henchman as a Miss Universe. I never knew that about gorillas!