We must also remember that Cuba—indeed, Latin America in general—has not experienced “coming-out” in the same way the United States has. “Gay”-ness, as that social construct is defined and lived in the U.S., is not native to those countries, and even though there is a great deal of U.S. cultural influence in Latin America, the naturalization of the construct “gay” is far from complete. As Ian Lumsden tells us in his book Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality, it means a different thing to be a homosexual in the U.S. than in the various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. That cultural difference has, then, also influenced the choice of epithets to be used in the translation for the homosexuals of Arenas’ novel; they do not inhabit the U.S., and so they are never “gay.”
Yet another transgressive strategy used by Arenas is what we might call multigendering. In one paragraph, one sentence of the original Spanish, a character may be el, “he,” and ella, “she,” and then el again. The translation has respected those shifting gender-attributions caused by Arenas’ switching back and forth of pronoun gender for a single character—readers should not think that someone forgot to proofread the manuscript. Arenas also frequently transgenders his characters, calling a male character “La Something”—the Spanish equivalent of saying “Miss Something”—when the person referred to is male but queer or, at times, uppity. The translation generally renders this as “Miss X,” though sometimes it uses some other clearly “bitchy,” “queenly” locution. In this regard, Arenas’ camping is thoroughgoing, and used the way even straight audiences of La Cage aux Folles or Torch Song Trilogy have been made aware it is used—for “attitude.”
But we must be clear about campiness and queerness: being scandalous was not only Arenas’ way of saying “I am” but also his way of making two broadly human points, applicable to all, gay or straight: first, all persons deserve the freedom to live as they want to live, without the oppressions and constraints that are imposed from somewhere above; and second, the imagination must be given free rein, for only thus can beauty be brought into the world. Arenas’ novella The Brightest Star (Arturo, la estrella más brillante) is a working-out in fiction of that last postulate.
Seen in this way, homosexuality, or queerness, is but one of a number of metaphors, as much as issues, that Arenas uses to portray the larger, overarching struggle of Power versus Freedom. The political system of Cuba is another of those metaphors—an obvious one—but so is the family, and especially the mother-son relationship; so is religion; so is salaried work; and so, amazingly enough, is the weather, which in Arenas’ novels batters the characters into submission. The artfulness of Arenas was, as it is of any great writer, to make literature out of the stuff of life—and not only out of the stuff of life, but out of all the rest of literature as well. All of these novels are shot through with, even based on, literary allusions and parallels and references. In Farewell to the Sea, the seven days of Creation form one of the scaffoldings upon which the “plot” is hung; in The Assault, there are explicit parallels with Aeschylus’ The Libation-Bearers. This novel, The Color of Summer, might be seen on one level as a rewriting, in fiction, of Bakhtin’s ideas on Carnival and on political and social satire; its subtitle makes explicit its debt to the ideas and figures of Hieronymus Bosch. Many of Arenas’ novels borrow their shapes and approaches and styles from other genres and a range of techniques: science fiction, Greek drama, other sorts of theatrical presentation, the dramatic monologue, magic realism, Swiftean satire (one thinks inevitably of Gulliver throughout Arenas), fable, the tongue twister, the ballad, the operetta, nursery rhymes. . . . (The list goes on and on.) Thus, while there is much that is autobiographical in this and the other novels (and this one in particular asks to be seen as a roman à clef), Arenas’ work is also, and we believe more importantly, a dense literary fabric that has an integrity and an aesthetic of its own; its debts to life, while great, are nothing in comparison with its debts to the world of literature that Reinaldo Arenas so desperately wanted to inhabit yet was for so many years cruelly prevented even from visiting. (His novels were banned in Cuba, and his reading privileges at the National Library were revoked.)
Now that we have brought up the question of The Color of Summer as a roman à clef, a word no doubt needs to be said about the playlet that begins the novel and about some of the characters that are seen within the novel per se. As though he wanted to erase the “fourth wall” that stands between the reader of fiction and the book just as it is felt to stand between the playgoer and the play, Arenas begins this novel with a closet-drama, inviting the reader to imagine the two locales, Key West and Havana, standing off ninety miles from one another, and the characters that tread the boards there—this is not a novel in the realist vein, a “slice of life,” he is saying, but very clearly a literary work. (To make the point all the clearer, he makes the first fifty or so pages of his novel, the pages of the playlet, rhyme—though more on the order of Ogden Nash than Shakespeare.) The situation is this: To celebrate his anniversary, Fifo has decided to stage a grand cultural gala, using (co-opting) the biggest stars of Cuban literature to give luster to the event. To make the gala even more awe-inspiring, he has decided to bring the very greatest lights of Cuban culture back from the dead—namely, the poets José Martí and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and the novelist José Lezama Lima. (Martí and Avellaneda are poets whose verses Cuban schoolchildren learn by heart, as American schoolchildren learn, or used to learn, Longfellow and Poe and Frost; Lezama Lima is as legendary a novelist in Spanish-language letters as Joyce or Faulkner is in English.) Trouble is, Avellaneda will have nothing to do with Cuba or with allowing herself to be used to legitimate Fifo, and so she makes a run for it (in a matter of speaking), over the sea, trying to get to Key West and safety. At that, Fifo stages an act of repudiation, and this is where the curtain rises.
As the characters come on stage, many of the lines they speak, especially in the case of the poets and novelists, are famous lines taken from their works, and in the Spanish original Arenas italicizes those lines. Here they have been translated to fit into the context Arenas builds for them, this hilarious doggerel he weaves their grand poetry into, and likewise italicized so that the reader can at least know that they are instances of Arenas’ intertextualizing. English-language readers may miss some of the references, some of the allusions, some of the fun of Arenas’ spoofing, but by imagining that all the lights of Cuban literature (whether in Cuba or abroad) and the entirety of Fifo’s entourage are being skewered on the sharp pen of Arenas, the play will be almost perfectly comprehensible.
What is supremely clear, in the playlet and in the novel as a whole, is that even in the worst of times, the human spirit of the oppressed and abused allows them to find humor in their situation. The “facts” that Arenas narrates are appalling, the conditions of life that he portrays are often subhuman, and yet through creativity and ingenuity, the characters of his novel, and of his real-life Havana, draw pleasure, even hilarity, out of their Fifo-constricted lives. The Cuban choteo—irreverent humor, black humor, gallows humor which takes seriously nothing that “ought” to be taken seriously—is, like Rabelaisian humor, redemptive; it springs from the indomitable spirit of the folk. This novel, and the pentagony as a whole, is a tribute to that indomitable human spirit, which in Arenas’ case is not a cliché, but the central fact of his tragic life and all his writing.
Andrew Hurley
Jacqueline Loss
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Austin, Texas
September 1999
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
The one-act playlet that begins this novel is a farce, written in a kind of doggerel. Taking my cue from the high comedy and irreverent tone of that text, I have produced a playful and some would say “irreverent” translation that is, I think, faithful to it in spirit. Just as servility and sobriety are anathema in those pages, servility and sobriety in the translation would have betrayed them.
Andrew Hurley
The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights Page 57