The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (67 page)

“It can’t be! It can’t be!” roared Fifo. “That ruins my public image. Stop that whore! Stop her! Or at least perform an act of repudiation against her! I want her
smeared
when she gets back to Spain. And if
El País
interviews her, I’ll withdraw my financial support from that rag! Send Raúl and one of my doubles to preside over the act of repudiation. A
big
act of repudiation! And let the Carnival begin!”

And immediately the delegation of guests prepared to follow Fifo to the Carnival’s assembly point for the Carnival parade, while the diligent midgets organized the act of repudiation against Avellaneda and made secret plans to kill her. The guests mounted armored cars, floats, horse-drawn carriages, a nineteenth-century gig, trains with rubber tires, Alfa Romeos, trucks covered with flags, and every other kind of vehicle imaginable and set off for the Grand Fiesta. At the head of the procession was Fifo, riding inside a gigantic lighted transparent balloon with a red neon sign on top with huge blinking red letters that spelled out a single word—
FIFO.

But before Fifo climbed into this huge whatchamacallit, the chief of protocol (none other than Raúl Kastro), who had to get going for the Carnival, approached him and handed him a dress uniform and a pair of new boots, reminding him that before the kickoff of the Carnival there was another activity scheduled.

“What?” roared Fifo, one foot inside the balloon.

“A tour of Old Havana with Alejo Sholekhov,” said the second-in-command (who still harbored some hopes of becoming Number One).

“Well, then, Old Havana it is! Let’s get going! Tell Sholekhov to start getting his talk ready. And tell him to keep it short—we’ve got to get this goddamned Carnival on the road!”

T
HE
A
DVENTURES OF
T
OTO
AND THE
H
OTTENTOT
T
OOTSIE

“Oh, Tito, look, a Hottentot,” commented Toto. “And to top it off, she’s quite a tootsie!” And at the sight of the Hottentot tootsie’s titanic tattooed tits, Toto was totally smitten. “Will you be my t-t-tootsie?” Toto stuttered. “If you’ll be my totem pole,” tittered the Hottentot trollop. And they trotted off to try some thitherto taboo totem-pole tupping.

That was Thursday. On Tuesday Toto felt terribly fatigued, so he attempted to teach himself some new tricks. To his torrid Hottentot tootsie he sighed, “Say—totting up my tepid existence till today, I’d venture an attempt at something new, not
too
difficult, a task at which I could tickle the black-and-whites of this electric typewriter.”

“Toto, you’re a total trip!” trilled the tattoo-titted Hottentot. “You could typewrite about tons of things—tepees, Thebes, tautologies, cataracts, catheters, tarantulas, tetanus, tigers in Tibet, or tortoises in Lake Titicaca. You could type texts about extinct turtles, tom-toms in Tanzania, Tartuffe, steroids such as testosterone, tops, bottoms, bottles, stoppers, storm troopers, tanks, gigantic testicles, or tens of thousands—tons and tons—of terribly trite subjects such as these. You can’t be too trite, in fact, because if you turn out treacly stupidities on your trusty typewriter, they’ll sell like hotcakes.”

“Oh, my Hottentot, is that true?” Toto asked timidly.

“Totally,” the Hottentot tootsie hooted happily. “And I’ll just take twenty percent!”

And so in a trice Toto started typewriting, and today, Toto has triumphed, taking to his pup tent (or tepee or tenement) a Nobel Prize for typewriting.

For the Marquesa de Macondo and Karmen Valcete

A bald, fish-shaped creature (Julio Gámez) stre-e-etched its gelatinous body; a round, squat queen (Miss Lois Suardiaz) began to whirl like a top; a gray owl (the Anglo-Campesina) opened its round, watery eyes, shook the sleepiness out of its wings, and began to flutter; one particular plump, spiny fairy (Mendivito, they called her) pulled from her bag some
hideous
pieces of cloth painted all over (by her) with Picasso-like parrots and impossible pricks, and waving them about as her
hideous
banner, began to move. The body of that bearded fairy who was spilling out of her costume (Miss Emilio Bedell) left a wake like an eighteen-wheeler’s as it moved down the street. A squiggle dressed all in black (Odoriferous Gunk) was dragging the tent in which his mother lay eternally dying. . . . Super-Satantic (shooting out of the Palace like a bottle rocket) grabbed a hypodermic syringe, filled it with her own AIDS-contaminated blood, and waved it around in the air as she joined the Dissed & Pissed. A queen ran, arms and legs going every which way, along the coastline, brandishing a huge pair of scissors. Where was that silly queer going with those enormous scissors?

Where, you ask, Miss Thing? To cut off Coco Salas’ false eyelashes in the middle of the Carnival so everybody would see her, of course—because I’m
not
going to let that ugly little gnome prance around in Carnival and bat eyelashes that don’t belong to her. Eyelashes
which,
I’ll have you know, she got by cruelly snitching on her friends and family members, one of whom being her father, who’s now been executed. That’s why she put the whip to her sleigh dogs like that, to get away . . .”

“
Sleigh
dogs?”

“Yes,
sleigh
dogs, my dear. Do you think a sleigh won’t work on sand? . . . I’m off! Out of the way, Sakuntala, or you’re roadkill!”

The queen was whipping at the dogs harnessed to her sleigh (which she’d just climbed up on), insulting them verbally, calling them Vicentina Antuna, Vilma Espina, Clementina Cirea, María Roca Almendros. . . . The dogs (bitches, all of them, as you can see from the names Coco was calling them), stung by the fury of being so terribly insulted, ran faster and faster.

Following the queen in her sleigh (which was now moving at quite a clip) marched the members of the group of Snubbed and Seething, who had been heroically waiting at a spot near Fifo’s subterranean castle. They marched (or rather trotted) hard on the heels of Fifo and his splendid entourage in order to have their revenge and, if possible, prevent both Fifo
and
his famous guests from making it to the Carnival alive.

But one of the queens in Fifo’s court—to wit, the cunning and satanic Delfín Proust—took in the entire surroundings with one sweep of his country-boy, milk-fed gaze, calculated the fury of the attackers, and quickly concocted an invincible plan of defense, consisting of assigning Halisia Jalonzo, walking backward and performing the mad scene from
Giselle,
as the rear guard. If seeing that old hyena-toothed, big-nosed hag with her hair standing up all over her head and waving a sword at them didn’t freeze the enraged attackers in their tracks, then nothing would. The seconds gained by the paralysis (the shock!) of the attackers would give Fifo and his entourage plenty of time to get to the Carnival, and even to take a detour first through Old Havana with Alejo Sholekhov. Only one person was not stunned into immobility by the horrific sight of the classical ballerina—the husband of Karilda Olivar Lubricious, who just kept coming, saber aloft, making death-dealing slashes at the air (which whistled at every stroke), and determined to hack the poetess to pieces. Karilda Olivar Lubricious, seeing her husband gaining on her, broke from the official group and (with her faithful cats)
ran
—trying to lose herself in the hurly-burly of the Carnival.

Karilda’s husband zoomed like a meteorite through the procession, trying to catch the poetess and put her out of his misery.
What do we do?
Fifo asked the thoughtful (though bald) head of Güevavara, using the microphone installed in his balloon. (Fifo often sought Güevavara’s advice at critical moments.)

“Give orders to start the ass-wiggling and backside-shaking while we do our duty with Sholekhov,” replied the queenly queen. “Don’t forget that UNASCO’s people are here, and they brought their checkbooks.”

Instantly, all the Fifaronian orchestras, including the Aragon Symphony and a hundred others even worse, began to play as loudly as they could. Ears were assailed by the simultaneous rhythms of a salsa, a merengue, a dengue, a guaracha, a mambo, a pachanga, a cha-cha-cha, a rumba, a lambada, a fox-trot, and one rhythm even catchier than these, a rhythm that made anyone who heard it feel the irresistible need to shake his ass (or hers). All those in the procession were suddenly shaking their backsides, wiggling their asses, moving their legs and thighs, shimmying their shoulders, bobbing and weaving their necks. The hunkiest hunks shook their little bubble-butts and rubbed them up against the bubble-butts of other hunks who, had it not been for that music and that party, would have pulled out their switchblades and sliced and diced them. . . . Oh, honey, you just can’t imagine—this tickling, I’ve just got to scratch it. It’s like a thrumbling in the blood, it’s like something’s nipping at you and you gotta shake it out, even if you disenjoint your whole body.
Go, girl! Go!
The engine backfires.
Weed! Grass! Shake yo’ ass!
Go
awn,
man, step right on! Shake it, but don’t break it! Let that rhythm get you, girl! Go with it, flow with it, let it
do
you, hon! I’m gonna shake till I come undone, I’m gonna shake myself till my legs fall off, shake myself till my arms fall off—why, honey, I’m gonna shake myself till my
ass
falls off!

Listen, now that the music’s started let’s go have some
real
fun over in Bar-tolo’s plantain field.
Oh, that plantain field has got a plantain for you all right, honey, the biggest plantain you ever saw, bigger than the one Rapet Diego shoves up his ass. Oh, grandma, what a big
plantain
you have! The better to
mmmm
you with, my dear! Ay, ay, ay-y-y-y-y!

Shake it, shake it! I don’t think I can take it!

And while I’m shaking my ass and wiggling my backside, I think—though I can’t imagine why—about the word
rumpityhumpity.
And I keep wiggling and shaking—I can’t control myself—to the rhythm of this music. Such music, my lord! Such music! I can’t control myself! Can
not!
Shake it, shake it! It’s our national rhythm, our national song, our national
anthem!
It’s our national movement—our very own ass-shaking and backside-wiggling!

The orchestras, bands, and marching musicians go on playing. The unanimous, spontaneous ass-wiggling and backside-shaking goes on wiggling and shaking. All of which gives Fifo time to put on that
huge
olive-green uniform of his and take the official swing through Old Havana and then, though his entourage is a bit perplexed (having just witnessed the burial of Alejo), put on a big smile and join the Carnival. To the sound of snare drums and with a preliminary throb and shudder, out of Fifo’s balloon shoot fireworks the likes of which the world has never seen, while the participants in the act of repudiation take their places. . . . The music goes on playing and everyone is dancing—and as people dance and swig their beer out of cardboard cups, they all grow more and more excited. (I mean
aroused,
you know?) And not caring who they’re next to, or who’s watching, everybody in the crowd starts touching, rubbing, humping, feeling up neighbors, and dancing close. And right there in the middle of the crowd, people started taking it up the backside, or at least giving and getting a good blow job. . . . And up in the gigantic illuminated ball that looks like some shining Popemobile on steroids, Fifo, floating some three feet off the ground, waves to the millions of ass-shakers and backside-wigglers—and even
he
begins to wiggle a little. But then he becomes very serious—and then he starts shaking his ass again—and then he recovers his composure and puts on his bad-guy expression. Oh, but then he can’t control himself, and starts shaking like he’ll throw his joints out. . . .

That duality is his tragedy, thought a Uruguayan essayist (and medalist of the Casa de las Americas) who, temporarily pausing in his ass-wagging, began to write an essay which he provisionally titled “The Dual Nature of the Genius.” The despicable essayist thought that if things went badly for Fifo he could always replace the word “genius” with “tyrant” and submit it for consideration for the Mikhail Gorbachev prize given by the PEN Club of New York.