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

by Reinaldo Arenas

  THE STORY

  This is the story of an island whose people were never allowed to live in peace, an island that seemed not so much an island as a constant battleground, a viper’s nest of intrigue, abuse, mistreatment, and unending horror—not to mention betrayals, double-crosses, dirty tricks, and backstabbings without number. No one ever forgave anyone for anything, much less greatness. When someone had a brilliant idea, no one would help the person develop the idea; instead, everyone would try to steal it. This is the story of an island that emerged from one war only to get into another, even crueler one, that marched off a battleground into a concentration camp. This is the story of an island on which wrangling, intrigue, bad faith, ulterior motives, and ambitiousness knew no bounds, and where those who didn’t shake their ass to that sinister national dance were sooner or later destroyed by the island’s curse. Thus the island’s inhabitants, unable to stand the island yet equally unable to escape it, decided to rip the island from its foundation and sail away, free, in search of other seas in which to drop anchor and form an independent state. But as they drifted, they could not agree on which sea to drop their anchor in and thereby survive—much less agree on what kind of government to establish. Every single person had a different idea. Every single person wanted, that is, to govern the island the way they wanted to, and to steer it in the direction they wanted it to go in, no matter what the next person thought. The farther the island floated, the more heated the protests and wrangling grew, and soon people were screaming at each other, insulting one another, throwing tantrums. Finally, the yelling and carrying-on became so violent that the island, which had no foundation, sank into the sea, to the sound of protests, insults, curses, glug-glugs, and muffled whispering.

  AFTERWORD

  It is 1991, the year The Color of Summer was originally written; New Year’s Day, 1999, the day that will mark the fortieth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s Revolution in Cuba, still lies somewhere in the hazy future. You pick up this recently published book and you begin to read of the great celebration, the Fiesta, the Carnival, that a character named Fifo, a Latin American dictator, is holding to mark his fiftieth year in power (some scoff that it’s really only his fortieth but that Fifo says it’s fifty because he likes big round numbers). You read on a bit and you learn that the waters surrounding the Island ruled over by Fifo are patrolled by trained sharks with interesting sexual proclivities, that the streets of the Island’s cities are policed by an army of “diligent midgets.” (The sharks, of course, are not there to keep invaders out, but to keep potential escapees in.) Ah, you perhaps think, this is like Swift, or Voltaire, or maybe even Thomas Pynchon—real life, a real moment in history, rendered grotesque and hilarious through the lens of satire. And you would be right. This novel would be about to take you on a Swiftean, Voltairean, Pynchonian, and especially Rabelaisian voyage to Fifonian Carnival 1999 and the many Lords (and “Ladies”) of Misrule who, in the form of that most disempowered and disenfranchised and downtrodden of citizens, the “sexual pervert,” the queer, the queen, invert Order and send up the pretensions (and consequent absurdities) of inevitably macho-associated Power.

  It is unfortunate for readers in English that the vagaries of publishing (and, it must be confessed, in part the vagrancies of the translator) have caused this powerful, funny, wrenching novel to be published after the future that it foresees, that January 1, 1999, when the Island, unmoored from the seafloor, was supposedly going to drift off into the sunset with a new gaggle of would-be tyrants disputing over the course it should be guided on. Because it would be interesting for us to be able to wait around to find out whether the fate predicted by Reinaldo Arenas for his Island were going to happen also to that other island that his Island is modeled on. But there is still a future in our future, so we may see this outcome yet. . . .

  To understand what has brought Arenas’ fictive Island to this pass in the first place, consider the novels that comprise his “pentagony” (a punning portmanteau-word he coined for a first novel cycle). There are, as the name implies, five of them; this one, The Color of Summer, though the last novel that Arenas ever wrote and here, in English, published last, is the fourth in the series. All the novels take place on this same Island, which it would surely be overly naive of us not to see as Cuba. Read serially, they take readers chronologically, though with certain skips, through the life of a single central character, who may be the “hero” of the pentagony but is almost always beleaguered terribly by the circumstances of his life.

  The first novel chronicles the character’s miserable childhood on a hardscrabble farm in pre-Revolutionary Cuba (Singing From the Well); the second (The Palace of the White Skunks) follows his young manhood in the heady months of the anti-Batista struggle when he is searching for his place in the Army of Revolution and (less successfully) in the New Social Order. The third novel (Farewell to the Sea) is set in the first years under the Castro regime, when the hero, conforming to society’s and the political order’s expectations, is now married and working in an office in the Revolution. This novel, The Color of Summer, set fifty (forty) years later, portrays the protagonist as a writer and a queer and a son who’s deep in the closet, and the last novel, The Assault, takes place in a dystopian future when all the men and women of the Island have been reduced under the emotionally and physically crushing Regime to animals, “vermin,” and the hero is a furious, raging nameless Avenger-Son out to get the Mother of all Tyrants. (Arenas himself addresses the shape of the pentagony, and some of his intentions for it, in his “Foreword” on page 252—yes, page 252—of this novel.) From one book to the next, the hero’s name changes—it is first Celestino (unless Celestino is an imaginary playmate for the unnamed real main character), then Fortunato, then Hector, then Gabriel/Reinaldo/Skunk in a Funk (depending upon whether he is in his role as Dutifully Masculine Son or Long-Suffering Writer or Flaming Queer), then that anonymous no-longer-victim of the fifth novel. But through the changes of name there are two constants that tell us that the character is always the same—first, the character is always a writer, and second, the character is always a homosexual.

  Indeed, for the purposes of the themes that run throughout the pentagony, those two identity-tags, “writer” and “homosexual,” are one and the same. Arenas makes this clear in Singing From the Well, when the boy-hero wants to write, to “tell his story,” “sing his song,” but no one will give him paper. (In fact, the whole family is illiterate, so there’s no paper around.) He steals his grandfather’s account books to “scribble” in and is thrashed within an inch of his life, perhaps even killed (there is much ominous talk of “burying the hatchet”), and so as a last recourse he takes a knife and begins to carve poems (“gobbledygook,” his grandfather calls them) on the trunks of the trees. Unable to bear this assault on “nature”—one might ask which is worse, though: carving on trees or carving poetry on trees—the boy’s grandfather takes up that ever-present hatchet and chops down every tree for miles around, while the grandmother has this to say about the boy’s writing, or perhaps about writing in general: “That’s what girls do.” Thus, in the Cuba that Arenas portrays, writing and non-machista malehood, separately and together, are “unnatural,” and represent the terrible threat to the Order of Things that arises when a person fails to conform, or questions the status quo, or quests after transcendent beauty (often evoked very movingly by Arenas). It is a threat that the harsh, glaring, hellishly hot reality of this particular society, perhaps all societies, cannot admit or allow. And when Society, the Status Quo, the Family, Social and Sexual Normalcy—all those Institutions with a capital I—feel themselves under threat, they defend themselves with violence, fury, rage, and even, sometimes, murderous destruction.

  Put the other way around, Arenas’ subject is always the crushingly asymmetrical relationship between Power (whether political, social, religious, family, or, in the New Social Order, all of those at once) and the Individual, that person who does not want to live the way
his society or his religion or his family says he should live until he’s experimented with living the way he’s drawn to live. Arenas writes about the buried life of Possibility, the life that is portrayed to us in our dreams and imaginings, the life of sweetness and beauty that our depressing surroundings deny us, the life that is so often taken from us (especially if we live in a “traditional society,” and who, in a way, does not?) by those who say they know what’s best for us, what’s best for us all. Arenas’ constant question is why differentness must be a curse, why any attempt at freedom of self must finally lead not just to our imprisonment (whether real or self-inflicted: the prison of the closet) but ultimately to our destruction.

  Each of the books addresses this question in its own way. The Color of Summer does so with wicked satiric humor. This, as we indicated above, is the most Rabelaisian of Arenas’ novels; the Carnival planned by Fifo for his fiftieth (fortieth) anniversary allows the oppressed citizens of the Island, and more especially the outcast and persecuted queers among them, to take part in that transgression/inversion of the power structure that Mikhail Bakhtin has discussed in relation to François Rabelais—and they take part in it with, as the saying goes, a vengeance. “No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images,” Bakhtin says; precisely the same is true of the images of Reinaldo Arenas.

  With its many different faces and voices, the vengeance portrayed in The Color of Summer is embedded in an aesthetic that Bakhtin called grotesque realism. A reflection of the folk idiom of the Middle Ages, its essential components are powerful forces: laughter, mockery/parody/degradation (“the lowering of all that is high”), and behavior transgressive of official norms and dogma, expressed especially in frank talk of sexual acts, body parts, and bodily functions. (This same behavior, this same type of humor characterizes the Cuban choteo, which Jorge Mañach, in a famous study, has defined as “taking seriously nothing that ought to be taken seriously.”) During Carnival, these forces are allowed out, they are allowed to rule the society; free rein (and free reign) is given to all those aspects associated with the “lower bodily stratum,” which during the rest of the year the Establishment, as we used to call it, has done everything it can to suppress. But authorities are clever; they know that they must not totally suppress them, for these “lower” instincts can become explosive if they are corked too long; the authorities know that they must allow at least one day during the year when these impulses can be expressed, for they are, as Bakhtin insists (though we already knew it), tied to the universe’s powerful forces of regeneration. The earthy folk humor of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance recognized this, Rabelais recognized this, and it is easy to see why Bakhtin, writing at a time when an utterly different (and entirely humorless) aesthetic—Socialist Realism—was being imposed from above, would find so appealing the combination of laughter, degradation, and regeneration that he saw in Rabelais. It is also easy to see why Arenas, in a situation much like Bakhtin’s, would also feel the appeal of the forbidden, the appeal of Carnival.

  The major reason for this appeal, even more than its elementary “fun,” its release of the “wickedness” of laughter, is that the Carnival aesthetic has the capacity to redirect the course of events in positive ways. In this novel, for instance, the Carnival is the final straw that breaks the Island’s platform off the seafloor and sends it sailing off toward new and so far undefined, unsocialized horizons. Although the ensuing struggle on the high seas for power and authority makes it difficult to sort through those regenerating elements that Bakhtin viewed as indisputably present in Carnival, Arena’s grand Fiesta certainly creates a linguistic, geographic, and social momentum that pushes hard against the stasis of official culture.

  The two principles that both Arenas and Bakhtin viewed as absolutely alien to the humorlessness and petrification of dogma are beauty and pleasure. The homosexuals in The Color of Summer, like the folk of the Middle Ages, take on the role of defenders of those “pleasure principles”; camping, dressing up, acting out, and fornicating like rabbits, they rub the Establishment’s nose in them and, seen now as subversives, try to overthrow the (olive-)drab and petrified official canon. Using laughter, exaggeration, and common, even foul language; converting insulting epithets into powerful signifiers; and recognizing, even embracing, the supreme importance of the lower instincts and their geography in the body, The Color of Summer’s Carnival counters the official hierarchy—and a “feast of the fools” is the result, in which the low confront the high with the high’s essential absurdity.

  One example from the dozens that are possible: At a public and official conference whose hilarious adjectivally burdened name pokes fun at the sobriety of all that comes from above, especially rational thought and categorization, the homosexuals of Fifo’s Island, the usual outcasts, get their chance to speak out against the ruling class—and speak out they do. Not only do they denounce the abuses enacted by the regime, but also, in typical carnivalesque spirit, they “out” a number of officials, some of whom are present. This rebellion, this pulling down of the idols that occurs in their act of outing, is pervasive throughout Arenas’ work; in the carnivalization of the world that is enacted in this particular novel, the most sacred moments in history are the most likely to be targeted. In one instance, satirizing the central scene of Christianity, crucifixion transforms into crucifuckingfixion as all the orifices of a Great Teacher and Leader (Yasir Arafat in his role as social messiah) are nailed by random phalluses. In another instance, this one clearly tied to “pagan” fertility celebrations, a naked man—a virtual god, and with, of course, an erect phallus—is nailed to a cross and carried dionysiacally, orgiastically through the streets to commemorate the Revolution’s fifty fertile, plentiful years. Even Fifo himself, by the fact of his having arisen out of the people, possesses a duality that is similar to Carnival’s: at one and the same time, he acts with great seriousness and pisses. Fifo is, at once, all the sexuality and erotics of the people (not a spectator) and nothing but power. His, however, is a great power, through which he sanctions but finally unsuccessfully controls a ceremony whose official purpose is to keep tabs on that power and the canon that he prescribes by reining in, temporally and spatially, the queer vagrancies of his people.

  Fifo’s control is unsuccessful; in the end the rodents, skunks, and fairies win the day. And their corrosive attack on the rock-hard immutability of a tradition-transformed-into-tyranny, their “gnawing at the foundations,” finds allies in the novel’s nonlinear form (Arenas calls it “cyclonic”) and its heteroglossia, which Bakhtin defines as the presence in a “high” literary work of a wide variety of linguistic registers. Linearity and fixed meanings, such as the solemnity with which History treats leaders or the piety with which Christianity faces its Messiah’s nailing to the cross, are present in The Color of Summer only to be skewered, only to act as the “straight man” for the warping or perverting or “queering” double entendres and tongue twisters of the carnivalesque text. Unlike the official system, which dictates and packages (petrified) truth in neat prose statements, Arenas’ novel—containing in addition to narrative prose a rhymed playlet, letters, parodies of literary works, the discourse of both learned disquisitions and fable, tongue twisters, styles ranging from the elegiac to the apoplectic—corresponds to a desire to make manifest the collisions of fields of meaning often suppressed by systems of authority. And so, as in the folk festivals of the Middle Ages, the Arenian Carnival takes on an idiom of its own, which parallels and parodies the official canon. And as we see in the end of the novel, this idiom has the capacity to engender not only linguistic but also geographic shifts. In addition, the entire novel is endowed, like a couple of its characters, with the capacity for temporal and spatial simultaneity, allowing for uncanny encounters between personages representative of the nation’s greatness and between those same national treasures and the supreme dung of Carnival. In obedience to this defiant structure, no space in the city, n
o linguistic signifier representing that space, remains faithful to its proposed function: a urinal is not only a urinal, a convent is not only a convent. Men’s rooms may be raised to the “sacred space” of transformative and redemptive (homo)sexual encounter; convents may be plundered for wood with which to make sleeping lofts and platform shoes. In Carnival, these inversions become the new norm against which the authoritarian Norm is measured, and with whose pointed humor the high, inhuman seriousness of that Norm is punctured.

  Another inversion central to Arenas’ novel, as it is to the Rabelaisian aesthetic, is the inversion of forbidden/permitted in language. Taking his lead, perhaps, from the civil rights struggles of women and blacks and gays in the United States over the last thirty (forty) years, in The Color of Summer Arenas turns the insulting epithets of the bigoted Establishment into proud statements of identity. In a society or a time in which politeness is a form of suppression, of exclusion, in which “Negroes” and “homosexuals” and “ladies” are patronized in public with those supposedly respectful terms while behind their backs they are called all those hate- and contempt-filled names that we can surely still remember, and they are never fully integrated members of the Establishment, then a clever strategy, as “blacks” and “niggers” (in certain limited contexts, still) and “queers” have seen, is to co-opt the hate-filled name and endow it with pride of identity, pride of self. To call yourself a black or a nigger or a queer in a society that uses those words pejoratively is to say to that society Yes, I am that hard, strong, defiant person that the name makes you think of, a person as filled with pride and anger as you may be by hate. In the Spanish original of The Color of Summer, Arenas used none of the polite and all of the taboo, pejorative words of Cuban homosexuality: maricón, pájaro, marica, mariquita, loca. . . . He was never “nice,” never “polite,” never “well behaved,” never “considerate of other people’s feelings.” He knew that one of the ways a society can work its violence on you is by calling you names—both sticks and stones and names can, in fact, hurt you—but that at the same time, you can deflect those names by turning them into cries of defiance. Arenas will allow none of his queer characters to be “gay” in that assimilationist meaning of the word which applies to homosexuals in the United States, who may be queer and yet an integral and accepted part of the social fabric, for all of Arenas’ queer characters are persecuted, oppressed, under siege, under the constant threat of social and physical nonbeing. And so they are, in this English version, faggots, fairies, queers, queens. . . . In English, or in the United States, and in the late nineties, Arenas’ strategy surely will not seem terribly shocking (though sometimes he is emphatically not politically correct), but just as Spanish-language letters had not for a long time, perhaps never, seen a book as open and unapologetic and homosexually graphic as Arenas’ autobiography Before Night Falls (Antes que anochezca), so The Color of Summer (El color del verano) was something of a succès de scandale when it came out. Arenas knew that one way of getting the (Spanish-speaking) bourgeoisie’s attention was (pace Nelson Algren) by slapping it in the face with a mackerel. Arenas’ novel does not portray a world in which “gay pride” is possible, and so it must be “queer pride,” or even “faggot pride”—harder, more in-your-face, more defiant, more dangerous and revolutionary (at least as seen from the perspective of the Revolution).