The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (24 page)

“Flathead! Flathead! Flathead!” he exclaimed as he hugged his mother.

“You’ve gone crazy too,” said the mother, “like everybody in this country.”

But finally she allowed herself to be infected with the son’s happiness, and the two of them were soon laughing uproariously.

The flathead (which never turned up) had broken the ice between the mother and the son. And, more importantly, it had shattered that sense of despair that Gabriel had been possessed by for some time now.

That night, the mother and the son sat out on the porch and talked about the family, and there was even a moment when the mother told a funny story and the two of them laughed again. Gabriel went to bed that night feeling that he had returned to his childhood. And he fell asleep to the lullaby of a no longer existent myriad of invisible crickets.

The next morning, Reinaldo said good-bye to his mother on the porch. I wish I could stay longer, Gabriel told his mother, but my work, my responsibilities . . . The mother told him she understood, and she gave him a hug.

“Next time, come with your wife and the baby—or babies, because maybe by then you’ll have another one.”

“We’re planning to have a dozen,” Skunk in a Funk said, rolling her eyes, and kissed his mother again. “Oh, and thanks for the flathead . . .”

“What! You’re not taking your grandfather’s flathead!”

“I’m taking the
word,
mother,” Reinaldo said, shrugging on the backpack that his mother had loaded down with food she’d made for him, the sweetened wheat-powder that passed for candy that he’d always liked, and even a bottle of rendered pork fat.
You don’t know the sacrifices I’ve had to make to find those things for you.

At the corner, on his way to the train station, Gabriel turned and saw his mother sweeping the street with that same old air of resignation in her face and body, and with that same light stroke—so light this time that the broom didn’t even touch the ground. The glow of happiness that the word
flathead
had kindled in his face faded away.

Long before Skunk in a Funk wound up in the prison at El Morro, he had been caught in a dragnet in Havana—I think on the corner where Copelia is, or maybe at the Capri where everybody went for coffee, but it may have been on the beach at La Concha. They sent him, along with seven or eight thousand other fairies—I don’t remember exactly how many because I was just a little girl at the time—to a concentration camp in Camagüey. There, he spent three years pulling up weeds by hand. That was where he really got that funky, sulky, unsociable attitude of his. Once something happened that deeply moved him: One day a young queen took off running, trying to get out of the camp, and she was so desperate to escape that she threw herself on the electrified fence. She was electrocuted—“fried chicken” as the camp humor put it. Knowing that so far as the rest of the world was concerned neither she nor any of the other thousands of fairies locked up in that camp were of the slightest interest—at the time, the whole world was singing the praises of the Socialist Revolution and its New Man, the way people sing the praises of that witch doctor in Uganda today—Skunk in a Funk put her own troubles aside, pushed her sexual desires out of the picture totally, and wrote whenever she could—and pulled weeds when she couldn’t. Then one day one of the queens, a fairy who held Skunk in a Funk in some esteem (from a distance), came up to her and gave her the following news:
Man has just landed on the moon.
Skunk in a Funk didn’t say a word, she just looked at the raggedy faggots pulling weeds, and then turned her eyes on the terrible electrified fence. Then she went on with her work. But that night there was a full moon, and all the inmates were able to witness the spectacle of Skunk in a Funk, standing on a rock in the center of the field in which they assembled for work every day, in the throes of some strange, ritual, ceremonial lunacy, ripping off her clothes, tearing out her hair, and digging her fingernails into her face—and then, naked, bleeding, turning toward the moon.

Tell me it isn’t true! Tell me it isn’t true!
she screamed, leaping up and down under that huge satellite, supplicating, in despair.

In a chain gang in a cane field in the rain, in-your-face gay tale-teller Reinaldo Arenas is constrained by hyenas to raise cane. Unswayingly praying to Ares to pave the way to his release from this chained travail, escapist Arenas entertains himself by telling himself tales he’s spun of penises seen in urinals and train terminals until, flayed by the hyenas’ maces, he’s returned to the traces.

But one day Reinaldo Arenas’s prayers to Ares are answered—not by Ares or by Venus but by Hera, Zeus’s chosen, who, irate, hears Arenas’s keening pleas for release and unchains him posthaste from the chain gang.

Escaping the chasing hyenas, escapist escape-artist Reinaldo Arenas hastily hails a plane for Spain, where his daydreams of unpersecuted penises seen in urinals and train terminals are realized.

For Reinaldo Arenas

Gabriel was going back to Holguín to visit his mother, as he did every year. Each time he came back to the place where he once lived, in that (perversely named) neighborhood of Vista Alegre, his mother would be outside sweeping the street. His mother swept so lightly that the broom would barely brush the ground, much less sweep away the dirt.

Sitting on a bench in the train terminal, Reinaldo reread the paragraph he’d just written, the first paragraph of a new chapter in his novel. Immediately, he added
The truth was, the mother wasn’t sweeping up dirt and leaves and scraps of paper, she was sweeping up her entire past and present. The mother was trying to sweep up everything she had suffered and was still suffering, a man who had abandoned her, an only son who had turned out to be a queer and therefore wound up in jail. Because her son couldn’t fool her—although she
pretended
she was fooled, she knew everything. Because motherhood—that state, that
nature
told her who her son was and what he was doing. The mother was sweeping up solitude, discontent and dissatisfaction, humiliation of every kind. And she did it in the way she did it—lightly, constantly, and futilely—because she knew that sweeping up so many sorrows was impossible; those sorrows were her life.

Gabriel stopped writing; it struck him that this writing of his was not going to help his mother’s suffering, either. Quite the contrary—if she read this manuscript, it would make her even sadder. During the night he’d spent in Holguín he’d wanted to be very careful not to let his mother discover the novel, so he’d tucked it into the false lining of his backpack. Like all the true, authentic things he’d done in his life, the novel had to be hidden from his mother.

The truth was, this novel (which he almost never let out of his sight) was a kind of curse that had been dogging him now for more than twenty years. He knew the risks he ran if the police discovered the manuscript again, which was why every time he had to go off somewhere for “volunteer labor” (which obviously meant going someplace he couldn’t take this particular text), Reinaldo would stuff all its pages and scraps of paper into a huge bag (a fifty-pound cement bag, in fact) and haul it from house to house, trying to find a friend he could entrust his treasure to. Eva Felipe, an old friend of Gabriel’s, kept the novel for him the whole of one summer—until she started reading it. Shocked, she ran to Reinaldo with the manuscript—more precisely, with the cement bag slung over her shoulder.
My husband is a first lieutenant,
she explained to Skunk in a Funk;
if he discovers these papers he’ll have me arrested. . . .
Then Eachurbod promised to keep “those papers of yours,” but when he discovered that he himself was in it, and portrayed as one of the ugliest and most desperate queens on the planet, she visited Reinaldo and said:
I have just done you a big favor. Rather than doing my duty and turning your novel over to the police, I’ve burned it.
Skunk in a Funk moved Eachurbod up to the top of his enemies list (a
long
list), and sat down that minute to rewrite
The Color of Summer,
the manuscript of which disappeared yet again when Tatica stole his swim fins off the bridge at Patrice Lumumba Beach. So Reinaldo rewrote the novel
again.
It was about that time that Aurélico Cortés’ resurrection occurred. In his novel, Reinaldo gave Cortés the name “St. Nelly,” since Cortés was the only queen in the entire world who had died a virgin, and therefore in a state of grace. When Cortés was reborn and learned that he had been canonized, and that in addition she had supposedly performed a number of miracles (not to speak of being resurrected!), she ran (without shaking off the dust of the tomb) all the way to where Skunk in a Funk lived, seized the evil manuscript, and consigned it to the flames on the instant. So Reinaldo rewrote the novel yet again, put it in some black plastic bags he had swiped while he was planting coffee seedlings in the Havana Cordon, and hid it under the roof tiles of his Aunt Orfelina’s house, in which he was then living. A few months later, Skunk in a Funk and Coco Salas were arrested when they were caught
in flagrante delicto
with two professional baseball players
(enormous!)
out in the middle of a weedy playing field at the Palace of Sports. (Skunk in a Funk was found guilty; Coco, being an informant for G-2, was found innocent.) Imprisoned in El Morro, Reinaldo, having learned that his novel had (according to the Three Weird Sisters) been turned over to the police by his Aunt Orfelina, began to write his novel again. But once smuggled out of prison, the work wound up in the hands of the political police yet again. When he had served his sentence and was released, Gabriel went back to his old room in his aunt’s house, but his aunt, who’d had a new lock installed, told him never to darken her door again. So for days Skunk in a Funk wandered the streets, trying to think of a way to recover his novel—because the truth was, he could no longer be sure that the story the Weird Sisters had told him was true. (In fact, he was almost convinced that the novel was still up on the roof of his Aunt Orfelina’s house, hidden under those roof tiles.) One night, while the Brontë Sisters stood watch, Reinaldo climbed up on the roof, lifted up the roof tiles, and saw with his own eyes that the manuscript had disappeared. Who had committed this militant and most highly patriotic deed? Coco Salas? The lieutenant that was Skunk in a Funk’s contact? His Aunt Orfelina, as the Weird Sisters had said? The Weird Sisters (those bitches!) themselves? Eachurbod? The Ogress, a.k.a. Ramón Sernada? Whoever it was,
somebody
had made away with that manuscript and was holding it over him, waiting (threatening) to send him to jail when the time was right. There were so many mean, nasty,
horrid
informants, envious faggots ready to stab him in the back.

. . . While Reinaldo wandered the streets, marking time and pretending to undergo rehabilitation by cutting weeds all the way to Lenin Park (where Coco strolled about on the arm of Celia Sánchez), he once more began to write
The Color of Summer.
Gabriel was quickly “rehabilitated,” married in the space of a minute, had a son in five, buried his married life in three more, and wrote (or meditated on) a book about the tragedy of a married faggot and his passion for a teenage boy—a task that took some twelve hours. And all of this he performed while feigning (and suffering) a double, or triple, life, and working without a moment’s rest on the sixth (or was it seventh?) version of his novel—which now, with furtive pleasure, while he was waiting for the train, he was rereading and adding bits and pieces to.

To touch those pages was to touch an authenticity, a rightness, that the world denied him. And yet (Reinaldo, suddenly disconsolate, asked himself as he caressed the yellowing pages) what sense did any of this make? Who would ever read this text? Where in the world would he ever publish it? How long would he be able to carry these pages around without being discovered? And as he contemplated the yautías and the bottle of rendered pork fat alongside the novel that he had now stuffed into his backpack again, he thought again of his mother—he saw her desolately sweeping, sweeping, sweeping the street, and he began to wonder whether the possible happiness of that woman mightn’t be more important than the fate, or the very existence, of these pages hen-scratched in anxiety and fear. He had to choose between the novel that was his very life and the happiness of others. He had to choose between his own beloved, forbidden life and the life of his loved ones. In the world he lived in (maybe in any world) there was no space in which he could live a happy man without making life miserable for the people he loved most. The price he had to pay in order to be himself was so high that the best thing might be to give up on being himself once and for all and offer himself to those other people the way they wanted him. The best thing might be to forget about this manuscript that hounded and haunted him and at the same time constantly eluded and escaped him, and to forget too about hounding and haunting men, whom he also lived for yet who constantly eluded and escaped him. Forget about his life—his whole life—and start a new one. Just like that, as tacky and clichéd and impossible as it sounded:
a new life.
Yes. Devote himself to his wife and son (whom he’d now have to bring back to life, the two of them) and his mother. Because really, if he made that renunciation, what would he be losing? Had living the life he lived brought him any particular happiness? Wasn’t the price he had to pay for a furtive minute of (almost always unachievable) pleasure altogether too high?
Renounce, renounce.
Choose between the bottle of rendered pork fat and that manuscript. Throw that manuscript away right now and keep the bottle of pork fat. Look at your mother—she is that green bottle of rendered pork fat looking up at you (from the bottom of the backpack) with eyes made sad and sorrowful by all the grief you’ve caused her. And so deep was the sadness that Skunk in a Funk felt upon seeing her mother turned into a bottle of rendered pork fat that the expression on her face became gloomier and gloomier, funkier and funkier—so sunk-in-a-funk-looking, in fact, that the people sitting around her began sliding and scooting away, as though she were actually some old skunk beginning to exude her unbearable stink. . . . Gabriel might become a macho, a good father and husband, a beloved son. Had others not been able to pull that off? Nicolaiv Dorrt, for instance, formerly the queenliest of queens—did he not walk now with a manly gait and manner, speak in a rich baritone, and have three (three!) children? My dear! (he was suddenly interrupted by that other fairy who lived inside him) remember that Nicolaiv Dorrt had to be taken to the Emergency Room of Calixto García Hospital with a lightbulb up his ass. . . .
But it won’t be that way with me,
Skunk in a Funk, now become a New Gabriel, promised himself. This trip to Holguín had been a revelation. It had revealed to him the futility of his empty, dangerous, and desperate life lived far from the warmth of a true home. Peace!—that was what he needed, yet had never had. If everything had a price, and in his case the price was renouncing Fairyland, then he would renounce.

But just at that moment there walked past a recruit whose uniform sat upon him like a royal mantle. The recruit sat down on the same bench Gabriel was sitting on—and Gabriel, now suddenly become once more the Skunk in a Funk, asked the young man what time it was, his eyes coyly eyeing the area between the young thing’s legs. The young man looked her up and down, and replied in the following way:

“This watch doesn’t give the time of day to faggots—it’s a
man
’s watch.”

And at that, the soldier went off to sit on another bench, next to a real man.

A man! A man! That’s what Skunk in a Funk had to become. The humiliation she’d just been subjected to confirmed it. What’s more, she was sure that what had just happened happened so that she, Skunk in a Funk, would be encouraged to recover her most macho manliness. God Himself had sent that young recruit to convince Skunk in a Funk that she had to change her life, once and for all. Yes. There was no alternative. She chose the bottle of pork fat. Skunk in a Funk uncrossed her legs (which had been practically wound around each other), spread ’em, and laid her elbows across the back of the bench. Now, at last, all man, Gabriel sat back to wait for the train.