The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (73 page)

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, no 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).

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