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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  “Absentminded when it’s convenient, because every time you write my name in that book of yours you manage to remember to add the epithet la Mala. So I wonder if you would be so kind as to just call me Sakuntala, period. Or Daniel Sakuntala, which is the name that appears on my birth certificate in Nuevitas.”

  “Yes, well, I’ll try to remember, dear. . . . Now if you’ll just let me get back to my salt mine . . .”

  As the audience made itself (themselves?—I never know about these plurals and singulars) comfortable on its (their) flotation devices, the midgets used enormous hoses to siphon out the water and keep it at an acceptable level.

  There is no way to list all the famous people who took part in this conference, but let me give you some idea . . .

  Among the notables were Maltheatus, Macumeco, the queen of Holland, Skunk in a Funk, Fray Bettino, Tomasito the Goya-Girl, the Condesa de Merlín, Joseph Pappo, the president of the Tierra del Fuego Liberation Organization (the TLO), the Bishop of Santa Marta, Alderete (in a red wig), the mayor of Venice, Coco Salas, the director of the National Ballet of Chile, SuperSatanic, the inventor of AIDS, the president of the World Federation of Women, the head of the Medellín Cartel, the inventor of the neutron bomb, Miss Papayi Toloka, Jimmy Karter, Delfín Proust, the AntiChelo, the premier of the Communist International, Miss Tiki-Tiki, Robert Roquefort, the SuperChelo, and many, many famous writers (some brought back to life especially for this occasion and even over their own objections, as in the case of André Breton) and prince regents, dictators, and celebrated murderers. The head of the Swedish Academy presided over the conference; as noted by the mayor of Pretoria, he was there because he came from a neutral country.

  Milling about the head table there were also many scholars, reporters, listeners, and observers, all of whom did everything they could to get close enough to Fifo to speak to him. But Fifo, surrounded by his personal corps of guards and his brother, allowed only two persons to sit next to him and speak to him: the Marquesa de Macondo and Carlos Puentes, the two most perfect expressions of a race of headless, stunted, ambitious, arrogant, lawless, and unctuously greasy pygmies, whom Fifo had personally chosen to be his intellectual escorts, since he knew that next to those two dim bulbs he’d look like an Einstein.

  Before the conference began, the lights in the auditorium went down and for a few seconds the only sound heard was the gurgling of the water and the muffled rumbling of the pumps and hoses. But then suddenly a huge screen lit up, and the world première of the full-length feature Adios to Maritza Paván flickered to life on the screen. This film had been shot forty years ago by Alfredo Güevavara in the woods around Havana. It was introduced by the Marquise del Pinar del Río, director of the Florida International Film Festival and creator of the New York New Film Makers Festival and president of the Cartagena Film Institute. The movie ended to deafening applause. Then, to the surprise of almost everyone, Maritza Paván herself appeared. This personage was a faggot something over a hundred years old who had fled the Island forty years earlier; his farewell party had been held in the Havana Woods (and was the subject of the movie they’d all just seen). Now she was included among the guests of honor whom Fifo wanted to introduce that night so as to win over the world’s public opinion and get some international financial aid. The audience applauded Maritza Paván for over ten minutes—although it was impossible to give her the usual standing ovation, considering how tricky it was to stand up on a raft, or a gondola, or any other small craft.

  When the applause finally died down, the president of the Swedish Academy opened the conference.

  The theological section was amazing. A statement read by the Bishop of Santa Marta and, he claimed, approved by the leaders of every world religion concluded that there was only one God, and that God was Fifo. The moment was a solemn one. Fifo, who had already been invested by the president of Venezuela as one of the Caesars, now was to be worshiped as a god. Unfortunately for Fifo, however, and without appearing on the program anywhere, just then Salman Rishidie raised his hand and said it was impossible to talk about the existence of God without also mentioning the existence and potency of the devil and the irrefutable proofs of his existence.

  At that, the imposing figure of Tomasito the Goya-Girl rose to her full height behind the table and waved a huge notebook at the audience.

  “Here,” she said, “I have those irrefutable proofs of the existence of the devil, which I will now proceed to read.”

  And standing atop a stunning new pair of platform shoes that she had bought from Mahoma, Tomasito the Goya-Girl began to read (from a document drafted by Skunk in a Funk, by the way). By the time Tomasito reached the end of the document, the evidence of the existence of the devil was clearly overwhelming, but the most overwhelming proof had been saved for last—the existence of Fifo himself. At that, Fifo instantly decided that Tomasito the Goya-Girl had to be put to death, but he couldn’t give the order at that particular moment, so publicly and all, and certainly couldn’t have the execution carried out there in front of everybody. “I want you to slit her throat and cut out her tongue during the Carnival,” Fifo whispered to one of his most conscientious midgets, who transmitted the order to Raúl Kastro.

  Naturally, the accusation that Fifo was the devil incarnate raised an angry protest, most conspicuously and vociferously on the part of Carlos Puentes and Elena Polainatosca. For minutes on end the uproar was deafening. The head of the Swedish Academy, perhaps because of his country’s neutrality, didn’t know what to do. But Dulce María Leynaz, loudly banging the gavel (which was supposedly the Swedish scholar’s prerogative), said that this was a panel in which people could say whatever they wanted, and that there would be a discussion period after they all had given their papers.

  “And if you people don’t settle down, I’m not going to donate to the state the manuscript of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, which is, I warn you, the only thing that pleases the palate of my precious rats. . . .”

  And since it was not to be conceived that the Island let that manuscript get away (especially since Fifo had already sold it to the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia for a fortune—and pocketed the money for it), the conference had to be allowed to continue.

  Now it was Skunk in a Funk’s turn to speak; she had chosen a theological topic.

  “Since we are talking about God and the Devil,” she began, “which in the long run are the same sinister thing, we should delve a little deeper into Hell, or Paradise—which of course are also the same thing.

  “In every life, in every work of art, in every book—i.e., in every hell—there is a descent into the absolute inferno. I invite my listeners to descend with me. Our journey will be brief, for I will show you only the Seven Wonders of Cuban Socialism.”

  And in a dizzyingly brief voyage which lasted only fifteen minutes but summarized forty years of horror, Skunk in a Funk descended into the most recent Cuban inferno.

  Other papers were longer than Skunk in a Funk’s, but we must remember that Skunk had also pre-presented a paper at the Satirical session, her Thirty Truculent Tongue Twisters, so she couldn’t really take too long for this one. Some of the most memorable presentations at the Conference were André Breton’s on “Impossible Dreams” (during, naturally, the Oneirical session) and the AntiChelo’s on “The Seven Major Categories of Queenhood,” which combined the Scientifical and the Philosophical—although it was read during the Theological session, perhaps because it dealt at length with “Sublime” and therefore divine queenhood. Of the Theological and Philosophical sessions perhaps the most memorable paper was entitled “Nouveaux Pensées de Pascal, ou Pensées de l’Enfer,” an apocryphal work read by SuperSatanic, who explained that Pascal was unable to be resuscitated for the Conference because no one was absolutely sure where he was buried. . . . During the Scientifical session, of extra-special interest to all was the Condesa de Merlín’s paper on “Clocks and Steam Engines,” which made a substantial critique of the steam
engine (“the cause of so much destruction, so much slavery”) and clocks (“which only serve to remind us of our mortality”); during the Political session, the brilliant Fray Bettino, with his text titled “Grand Captains of the Morning Sun,” read an apologia for Hitler, Stalin, and Fifo and attacked democracy as “ephemeral and vulgar, a state which results from a scarcity of great men able to bridle human passions.” This paper caused considerable controversy among the audience, and that in turn again caused the head of the Swedish Academy some distress, and that led Dulce María Leynaz to gavel the proceedings once more to order.

  The schedule for the Philosophical and Theological sessions indicated that at this point in the proceedings, Odoriferous Gunk would speak. However, thanks to intrigues on the part of Skunk in a Funk, Coco Salas, and La Reine des Araignées, Odoriferous Gunk had been refused entrance to the Palace. But Odie had cleverly made arrangements to send his text to the chair of the panel, who couldn’t refuse to accept it, since it clearly fell within the subject of the conference. In fact, it virtually capped it. They had spoken of God and the Devil, they had descended into the jaws of Hell, and so now clearly they needed to speak of the pleasures of Paradise, of the mission of those who dwell in Paradise and all its avatars, and of their struggles to bring about a world in which one could live happily and at peace. In an introductory aside, Odoriferous Gunk requested that since he, the author, was not to be allowed to read his text, it be read by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but all the bishop had to do was take a quick glance at those pages and he changed color—from red to the blackest of blacks. And so he remained to the end of his days—black, black, black—which made him the object of the most exquisite erotic attentions on the part of Tomasito the Goya-Girl, Delfín Proust, Skunk in a Funk, the Dowager Duchess of Valero, and the Condesa de Merlín, all of whom found Negroes fascinating. . . . But anyway—Odoriferous Gunk’s paper was tabled for lack of a person willing to read it, and the grand hall continued to fill with water.

  It was finally the queen of Holland who (perhaps because she lived in the Low Countries and was used to all this flooding) picked up Odoriferous Gunk’s text (written in Latin) and read it without batting an eye, translating it on the fly into almost perfect Spanish—although sometimes she did skip words like “espingole,” “archivolt,” and “repéchage” and phrases such as “Sursum corda” and “ut supra.” Odie’s thesis was simple yet profound:

  We have lost all meaning in life because we have lost paradise, and we have lost paradise because pleasure has been condemned. But pleasure—persecuted, execrated, condemned, exploited to exhaustion, and almost vanished from the world—still had its armies: clandestine, silent armies, always in imminent danger of defeat but utterly unwilling to renounce life, which is defined by giving pleasure to others. “These armies,” boomed the voice of the queen of Holland throughout the flooded auditorium, “are made up of queers, faggots, fairies, and other species of homosexuals all over the world. These are the greatest heroes of all time, those who truly have the dream of paradise and hold to it unflinchingly, those who at all costs attempt to recover their—and our—paradises lost.” And here Odoriferous Gunk took his argument into Egypt and the great male love affairs of Thutmose I, Thutmose II, and Thutmose III; jumped over into Mesopotamia, where he offered a detailed list of all the youths who had brought enchantment to the nights of King Asurbanipal; leaped down to the Greeks, “whose exaltation of the love of one man for another has bequeathed to us that greatest literary work of all times, the Iliad”; hopped over to Rome, where he cited all the geniuses and Caesars who had lived basically to make love to men. And then he came to Christ, “that thirty-three-year-old man who wandered about the countryside preaching, and making love, to his twelve apostles.” And with a wave of her hand the queen of Holland called up onto the screen an ancient painting in which Jesus Christ was portrayed with his legs spread and John, the beloved apostle, a gorgeous teenage hunk, sleeping placidly with his hand on his master’s lap, the Christ himself and the other disciples glowing with beatitude. Then the paper discussed pagan feasts with their invincible armies of pleasure, the coming of Catholicism, and the widespread use of the bonfire. “Beautiful naked bodies were mutilated. People covered statues’ nakedness with cloaks or fig leaves, cruelly smashed and broke off their sexes. Caped and uncaped, masked and unmasked, the Middle Ages unleashed, and today somehow still unleash, the wrath of their sordid splendor. But the battle to recover Paradise has never ceased being fought, and the army of pleasure, the true angels expelled from life, continue to practice, however and whenever they can, what inquisitors and cowards call ‘the sin against nature.’ ”

  There followed a detailed history of the horrors to which queer men of all stripes—both queens and tops—had been subjected from the time of Constantine to the implementation of bourgeois morality and militant Communism. The list invoked the names of Heliogabalus, Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, Louis XIII of France, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon (Lord Byron), Edward II of England, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Louis of Bavaria, Petronius, James I of Scotland, Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, Marcel Proust, Pier Paolo Pasolini, André Gide, Julio Cortázar, Yukio Mishima, Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Federico García Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Witold Gombrowicz, Jacinto Benavente, Virgilio Piñera, José Lezama Lima, and a thousand other famous men. There was a history of the sufferings to which almost every queen and faggot in the world had always been subjected. There was mention of the thousands of Indians exterminated, according to statements by the chronicler and soldier López de Gómora, for practicing sodomy. . . . “And yet, despite persecution,” the queen of Holland’s voice rose in righteousness, “those natives continued to gather together in groups of more than three thousand men to practice that ‘forbidden love.’ ” There was also a list of the names of Spanish-colonial queens and independent-republican queens who had been persecuted in Cuba and throughout Latin America, the names of queens massacred elsewhere under Communism and Fascism. The screen lit up to show the spellbound audience Russian queens frozen in remote gulags, queens burned to cinders in Nazi concentration camps. Photographs were shown of the Cuban queens confined in Fifo’s own concentration camps. There was even a documentary in which one could see how the queer men of Havana had been rounded up in Central Park, on the beaches, on the Paseo del Prado, at the Copelia Ice Cream Parlor and the García Lorca Theater, and even on the Hill of the Cross in Holguín and on Gran Piedra. There were pictures of confinement camps for victims of AIDS. The audience was shown prisons, keys, towers—and tunnels filled with sexual prisoners. In pictures that flashed across the screen almost too fast for the eye to catch, the audience was presented with queens planting coffee in the Havana Cordon, queens cutting brush in Camagüey, queens weeding fields with their bare hands in Pinar del Río, queens crushing rocks in flooded quarries. They were shown the famous driver Pistolprick, the man who was credited with the arrest of César Lapa (that hot-hot-hot mulatto queen) in London. Pistolprick was a stunning specimen of manhood who worked in Fifo’s Ministry of the Interior and kept a .45 in his shorts. His secret mission was detecting which Cuban diplomat was a swish. The driver would sit at the wheel of the car with the pistol bulging in his crotch, and when the poor queen, in a moment of rapture, madness, or life, threw herself onto that bulge, she’d find herself clutching a pistol. “If you turn it loose, it fires,” the driver would say as he took out a camera and photographed the queen with her hand in the cookie jar. And so the good work of Pistolprick had ruined the diplomatic careers of not only César Lapa but also Paula Amanda, Retamarina, Miss Harolda Gramatges, the Anglo-Campesina, Rogelio Martínez Furiosa, Miss Pereyra, and hundreds more, who now wandered in madness or degradation through the world and Fifo’s Island—cowed or threatened (blackmailed!) by that fateful photo, locked away in Fifo’s secret files, that showed them with their hand on Pistolprick’s fly. “The documentation, as you see,” the text went on, “is overwhelming and irrefutable
, so let’s move on to the conclusions.”

  The queen of Holland took a sip from the bottle of water which, to guard against poisoning, she always carried in her purse (you wondered what queens carried in their purses, didn’t you, dear?), and went on reading:

  —Just a few weeks ago in the García Lorca Theater, while I was watching (who else?) Halisia dance, I was struck by a remark made by one queen to another in the seats behind me. I left this morning and I haven’t returned since. That was the remark I overheard, and it struck me that it somehow illuminates all our lives. Who, what, is it that returns? Migratory birds—birds—in their eternal quest for the clime, the nest, the tree, the branch to which their memories are forever turning. A homosexual is an aerial, untethered being, with no fixed place, no place to call his own, who yearns to return to. . .—but, my friends, he knows not where. We are always seeking that apparently nonexistent place. We are always in the air, keeping our eyes peeled. Our aerial nature is perfect, and so it should not be strange that we have been called fairies. We are fairies because we are always in the air, in an air that is not ours because it is unpossessable—though at least it is not bounded by the walls and fences of this world.

  And even when we are on terra firma, such as now, we are always somehow ready to take flight—that is why we always have that alert expression on our faces, why we always seem to be flitting along on tiptoe or, as our great poet Lezama Lima put it, like some crucified swallow, always expectant, always unmoored, always clasping the fairy dream of an almost impossible return—a return that would unquestionably be a return to pleasure. And pleasure, as we all know, is the essence of Paradise. We have been expelled from Paradise, and Paradise has been wiped off the map. And who gets the blame for the sin that caused Paradise to be closed and locked up? We do, my friends, for we are, in fact, the true birds of paradise—sparkling, twinkling, multicolored beings of light. We are not ashamed to sprinkle a little fairy dust, a feather from our feather boa, in public. One of our missions as former denizens of Eden is to fill the world with fairy dust and feathers of all colors and sizes, so that no one will forget, first, that we have descended into the world from Paradise and, second, that we intend to recover that Paradise from which we were expelled. And expelled, I must insist, not because we were the classical biblical couple who were commanded to love each other “chastely” and then broke the rule, but rather because we were different—because the real Adam and Eve were two men (one, apparently, in drag) or two queens, or two women who broke the celestial rule because they sought their own heaven. Yet there is no heaven, my friends, but the heaven of pleasure. That has been clear since the beginning of life. We have before us, then, a sacred task: To create the army of pleasure, or, better said, to continue to be soldiers in that army, its eternal reinforcements. It is a divine mission because it exalts (and for a moment makes us forget) the human. Our object is to create (or, if you prefer, preserve) a mythology and metaphysics of pleasure. A dangerous, difficult mission, yet disinterested—because what we want is for everybody to have a little fun! What man doesn’t like his dick sucked by a fairy? A fairy who suddenly appears and then flies away, with no complications of any kind. Let’s be honest, here, girls—the pleasure that that man feels is wonderful. And not only do we give that pleasure free of charge—sometimes we even pay for it! And when we give someone pleasure, we feel pleasure too. The good thing about us fairies is that when we look back, we can always say, What a life I’ve lived! How much life I’ve lived! Because in addition to our own lives, we have helped other people live. . . . That, then, explains my firm decision to create, or make better known, the mythology and metaphysics of pleasure. I say metaphysics because it is a general, Aristotelian theory of great and devout fervor. We queens are the members of a religious, and therefore fanatical and holy, body whose purpose is to give and receive pleasure. Over against all the horrors of the world, and even within them, we set the only thing we possess—our enslaved bodies—as the source, fount, and vessel of grace. It is this aspect of our worship that is the justification for our beloved St. Nelly, patron saint of our aerial altars (so often vilified and smashed)—for all religious bodies must have their holy virgins (and, in our case, martyrs), who in one way or another stand for, symbolize, our unending via crucis. For we have experienced, and continue to experience, all the sufferings that strike the human species—domestic strife, illness, old age, abandonment, loneliness—yet in addition to those sufferings common to all we are made to live through yet more terrible calamities. We have suffered derision and extermination. We have been buried alive, walled up, burned, hanged, shot by firing squads, discriminated against, blackmailed, and imprisoned. There have been, and still are, attempts to destroy our kind completely. Science, politics, and religion have taken up arms against us. The creation of the AIDS virus, manufactured with the clear intention of annihilating us and all those who, like us, seek after adventure (for all adventure is the expression of a disquiet, a yearning, and holds out erotic possibilities), is but the most recent attempt to bring our history to an end—and yet ours is a history that cannot have an end, because it is the history of life itself in its most rebellious, authentic manifestation. What has been sought by every means possible is a world that is chaste, practical, and sober. We oppose that horror with all our hearts and souls, we assume all possible risks, and we wield against it that infinitely powerful weapon the only weapon that we possess—pleasure.