The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (57 page)

Just then, from outside the palace, a metallic roar, a clanking clamor, was heard.

“Oh, my god, the Garden of Computers!” cried Fifo, now paddling one of the rafts that the diligent midgets had distributed among the guests. “I forgot! It’s feeding time! Come on! You’ve gotta see this!”

And plucking up their courage, the entire floating entourage followed Fifo to the Garden of Computers.

Meanwhile, Mayoya and Bloodthirsty Shark were swimming out of the palace into open water. They were pursued by the harpooners, several planes, and a fleet of enormous attack helicopters presented to Cuba by the former dictator of Romania so Fifo could “contain the rebellious hordes”—it was clear that Fifo had no intention of allowing those two traitors to live. Bloodthirsty Shark, fearing for its life, gave Mayoya a lingering farewell kiss, dropped him off near the shore, and then dived into the waves and began to gnaw at the Island’s foundation—much to the surprise of the other rodents. And even more surprising, Bloodthirsty Shark ordered all the other sharks (with depth charges still going off all around them) to start gnawing at the foundation, too. And all the sharks began to gnaw. They were joined by throngs of octopuses, squid, crabs, sea urchins, sea turtles, and other sea creatures whose family members had been wounded or killed by the depth charges and harpoons. And as though that were not amazing enough, several bishops in full bishopric regalia, nuns in their wimples, the head of Soviet counterespionage, some of Fifo’s most trusted generals, a Miss Universe, a Nobel Prize winner, and even a high official in the Chinese Empire (among others), taking advantage of the momentary confusion, dived into the water to help.

Meanwhile, Miss Mayoya, with the triumphant air of a queen who’s just had the screw of his life, had reached the shore and collapsed, exhausted with pleasure, near the milling crowd of Dissed & Pissed. Immediately this group, egged on relentlessly by Deaconess Marina, King Miguel I of Portugal, the head of the Zambian Armed Forces, Clara Mortera, and the Prince of Batavia, decided that the fairy should be tried by court-martial for high treason. The tribunal was composed of, among other celebrities, the queen of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, the president of Amnesty Intercontinental, Padre Gastaluz, Sakuntala la Mala, Odoriferous Gunk and his dying mother, and the head of the Italian Communist Party; also seated on the panel were the cunning Mahoma, Delfín Proust, SuperSatanic, and Skunk in a Funk, who, under cover of the confusion caused by the flood, had escaped the palace to confront Mayoya. The court’s sentence (unanimous) was handed down within five minutes: Mayoya was to be burned alive on the seashore before the anguished eyes of Bloodthirsty Shark, who was constantly poking its head up out of the water to see what the fate of its beloved little fairy queen was to be.

Mayoya was bound to a sharp rock and dry sticks were piled all around her. Hiram, la Reine des Araignées, lit the pyre. Padre Gastaluz and Bishop O’Condom began to pray for the salvation of the fairy’s soul. The queen of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, in all her regal splendor, approached the flames, waving a huge cross she had made out of two planks. “Abjure! Abjure as Joan did!” the queen of Carnival was shouting as she waved her cross around like a magic wand.

“Yeah, like crazy Joan,” said Sakuntala la Mala loudly as she threw more kindling on the fire.

But instead of abjuring, Mayoya hawked a wad of smoking spit straight at the queen of the Carnival in Rio, putting out her eye.

While the queen burned, the Disappointees, including the head of the Third Independence Party of Puerto Rico, Corazon Aquino, Uglíssima, and even the Anglo-Campesina and Odoriferous Gunk’s dying mother, formed a huge circle around her, clasped hands, and began to dance around the gigantic pyre. This ritual continued for a long time, since although the queen was burning on the outside from the flames, inside he was just
hot,
remembering the incredible pleasure she had experienced during the world’s greatest screw with Bloodthirsty Shark. And as she recalled the ecstasy of those moments, the queen came in a flood of cum, extinguishing part of the fire, which had to be started again.

Meanwhile, in a delirium of rage and impassioned grief, Bloodthirsty Shark rose into the sky, its horrid teeth crushing Fifo’s planes—which could never have destroyed the fearsome fish anyway.

At last, the once sexy, once dancing fairy was fried to a crisp.
Requiescat in pace,
said Padre Gastaluz, sprinkling the ashes with water from his silver aspergillum (the same aspergillum he had used to bless a steam engine more than a hundred and fifty years earlier). And then the ashes were thrown into the sea, where Bloodthirsty Shark was once again gnawing at the Island’s foundation.

I, Meme, mummified male mammal, hum as I munch the yummy male member of Momo, the Mameluke mime. My mommy, muse of all member-munchers and sometimes memo-minder for Mumo the Minister of Mammal Morals, always gave me mameys to munch as a mimetic mimicry of male-member munching. Mommy herself makes music on Mumo the minister’s much-munched male member by mimicking
me
humming munching on Momo’s yummy male member.

Which male members does Meme’s mommy munch and which members are munched by Meme? Who munches the member of Momo the Mameluke mime, and who munches the member of Mumo the Minister of Mammal Morals? Who merely mimics munching? And what is the exact meaning of mimetic?

For Meme Solas, a.k.a. the Mummy

Havana, July 25, 1999

My dearest Reinaldo, Gabriel, and Skunk in a Funk,

I just want to answer—once and for all—those letters from the three of you that have managed to get through. (And since the ones I’ve gotten all say more or less the same thing, I don’t think I’ll be failing to address anything important.) I assure you that I can imagine how much you’ve all suffered—and will go on suffering—and how lonely you must be up there, far from this country that is and always will be ours, no matter where we live. But get real. Nothing that you suffer can compare with the horror of life down here. Up there, even if all you get is kicks in the ass, at least you can yell about it—here, we have to applaud when we get kicked, and applaud enthusiastically. How can the three of you have the nerve to tell me I should stay here? Have you forgotten so soon that living under a tyranny is not just a shame and a curse, but an abject act that fills us with self-disgust because if we want to live, we have to play the game by the tyrant’s rules, whether we want to or not?

I’m really tired of all your moaning and carrying-on, and of hearing how alone you are, and about the plagues that are killing you. We’re all alone here, too, and I have the plague, too, but I don’t get the medical attention I need—there’s
no way
for me to get it—and I can’t make the slightest whimper.

You might ask, then, how I dare to write so openly. The answer is very simple: Tomorrow, at the height of Carnival, I plan to throw myself into the sea with my latest (my
last
) novel—which I haven’t been able to smuggle out of the country—and my swim fins. Into the sea! With a little luck the coast guard and the sharks will be drunk celebrating the triumph of Fifo’s reign, and I’ll be able to escape. Although most likely I’ll just die trying.

You haven’t said anything about my books. I hope all the ones I’ve sent you arrived safely. You know, I think, that everything I’ve done comprises a single enormous work. Sometimes, as in the case of the Pentagony, it follows a single line, with the same characters and the same desperations and calamities; in other cases, the characters, in other guises, travel through time—they’re friars, black slaves, pathetic mad condesas. But all the things I’ve done—poems, stories, novels, plays, and essays—are linked; they form a series of historical, autobiographical, and agonic cycles, a series of anguished transmutations. Even in the book of poems I titled
The Will to Live Manifesting Itself
, there is a sonnet inspired by Skunk in a Funk. So I ask of you—please, if all this is published, tell people that my books constitute a single enormous whole in which the characters die, are reborn, appear, disappear, travel through time—always mocking, always suffering as we ourselves have mocked and suffered. All of my characters form a single mocking, despairing spirit, the spirit of my work, which is also, perhaps, the spirit of our country. As for my play
Abdala
, don’t publish it, for heaven’s sake—I really don’t like it; it’s a sin of my youth.

Well, that’s about it—I’ve got to go get my novel into a bottle. And tomorrow, into the sea. There’s no way for me to tell you how I feel, so I’ll resist the temptation to put into words things that can’t be put into words. . . . As I finish writing this letter, I feel that I am holding each of your hands in mine—this may be the last time we ever do that.

It’s terrible to say good-bye when almost certainly we’ll never see each other again yet we are all, still, part of a single scattered person, and when in addition we say good-bye across a distance, in absentia, without being able to see one another, and through a letter that may well never reach you. Really, the horror we’ve experienced not even the worst kind of criminal deserves. Maybe when I get to Hell I’ll be able to smash the Devil in the face and ask him what we’ve done to deserve this. But no—I’m sure I’ll never have that consolation. Not even the consolation of Hell. Before me, the ocean, just the ocean. . . . Beyond that, oblivion. Period. Maybe that’s the best thing. Maybe. . . .

Farewell

Skunk in a Funk

Just five minutes to go before the official inauguration of the Grand Carnival (although it had, of course, actually started several hours ago), which meant that Fifo’s orders to assassinate Virgilio Piñera were coming down to the wire. The agents had to work fast.

Virgilio’s closest friends—José Rodríguez Pío, for one—had provided Fifo’s security forces with detailed reports on his routine: the old poet went to bed early and got up at sunrise, had a cup of coffee that he’d bought on the black market, and immediately sat down to write. Later, he went out with his burlap sack to stand in line for yogurt.

Virgilio lived alone on the tenth floor of a small apartment house in El Vedado. It was ten
P
.
M
. and he was already in bed, deaf to the noise of Carnival that filled the street below. The poet’s eyes were closed, but the memory of Humberto Arenal’s latest novel was keeping him awake. How, wondered the poet, can a person write so badly and at the same time be my friend? These literary and ethical questions prevented the poet from falling asleep even though the law of the household (set down by himself) said that he should have been in dreamland long ago in his absolutely darkened bedroom.

Virgilio thought he heard the door to his apartment open and someone come in.

“Is that you, Arrufada?” he asked fearfully, for Arrufada had a key to his apartment and would often stop in to read him his latest play.

But the old poet got no reply. In the darkness he thought he heard someone come through his little living room, bump into a chair, and enter his bedroom. From the heaviness of the footfalls, Virgilio deduced that it couldn’t be Antoni Arrufada—in fact, that it couldn’t be a single person.

The reader will remember that when Fifo gave the order for the hit, he had given strict instructions that it be carried out in silence and that it appear to be not murder but rather suicide or heart attack, something along that line.

Suddenly, the bedroom light came on and the poet saw four muscular men jump at him. They grabbed him by the neck and started strangling him. That was one of the alternatives Fifo had suggested to his stooges—Barniz and Paula Amanda had told Fifo that Virgilio had mentioned several times that he wanted to hang himself, and strangling was a lot like hanging. Plus, once Virgilio was dead they could string him up with a rope that one of the killers had brought along. “Wring that chicken neck good for me”—those had been Fifo’s very words. So the agents had their hands around Virgilio’s neck as the poet’s big frightened eyes stared back at them. But the old poet’s neck was so long, so skinny, and so flexible that there was no way to wring it. So the eight murderous hands began to pull on it, intending to at least rip the poet’s head off. But this, too, was not to be, because the poet’s long, narrow head was no bigger around than his neck, which meant that the murderers’ hands slipped up his neck and right off the top of his head, and the agents found themselves clutching air. In fact, to the chagrin of the four agents, not only Virgilio’s neck but his entire body was so slippery and so virtually ungraspable that it was more like the body of a snake or an eel than a man’s—which made it impossible to strangle him, pull his head off, or draw and quarter him, especially since everything had to be done in silence. (Don’t forget that Fifo wanted this done discreetly.) Exhausted after tugging for more than an hour on the poet’s untuggable neck, the gorillas turned out the lights in the apartment and went outside to regroup. They decided to have a couple of beers, which they drank from their cardboard cartons to the sound of the Carnival bacchanalia.

“What a nightmare I had!” Virgilio said to himself when he was alone once more in his darkened room. “I dreamed that four men came in and tried to strangle me. I
have
to stop reading Humberto Arenal.”

And making a tremendous effort—because outside, the Carnival was in full swing, the noise was unbelievable, and the memory of the novel continued to haunt him—the poet fell asleep. But in a few minutes the front door of his apartment creaked open again, and Virgilio awoke.

“Is that you, Arrufada?” the poet asked, sitting up in his bed.

But there was no reply.

The four agents, now about half drunk, entered Virgilio’s bedroom and turned on the light. While one of them put his hand over the poet’s mouth, the others carried the playwright’s fragile body out to the balcony. If what Fifo wanted was for Virgilio’s assassination to look like suicide, then what better way to do it than by throwing him over the balcony? What proof would people have—people who didn’t dare speak out openly, anyway—that the poet hadn’t leaped to his death intentionally? And without further ado the four muscular agents threw Virgilio’s body (dressed in lilac-, black-, and white-striped pajamas) over the balcony railing.

And that seemed to be that, thought the exhausted assassins, who peeped over the edge to see the mess the poet made when he splattered on the sidewalk down below. But to their amazement and consternation, the body of Virgilio hadn’t splattered; it was floating in the air. And then, to make matters worse, it was picked up by a passing breeze and blown back onto the balcony. Clearly the man was so skinny that he was weightless, or at least lighter than air—which made it hard to throw him off the balcony. Virgilio grabbed the railing and pulled himself back into his apartment.

“Pepe! Pepe!” the desperate poet called out to his putative friend. “There’s four blackguards in here who’re trying to kill me! Guillotina sent them!”

But Rodríguez Pío, watching through the peephole in the front door of his apartment across the hall, didn’t make a peep.

Fifo’s stooges picked up Virgilio’s body and threw it over the balcony three more times, but the body would always float up again and waft into the apartment.

“Try this arsenic!” said a voice (Rodríguez Pío’s) behind the murderers manqués, and a hypodermic needle filled with arsenic clattered across the hall and into the apartment.

The four stooges grabbed the body that had just floated into the apartment again and held Virgilio down for the lethal injection. But the poet’s skin had been so toughened by his diet of wheat-based products and Bulgarian yogurt, plus the sun he was exposed to when he stood in the infinite lines, that it was more like a turtle shell than human skin. So the injection was useless—it was like trying to stick a straight pin into a crocodile. Enraged, the murderers threw the poet
and
the hypodermic needle over the balcony and decided to go down and have a few more beers and think up some way to finish this off.

“What a nightmare I had!” Virgilio told Rodríguez Pío, who had crept into the apartment to see if the murderers had left so he could steal the presumably dead poet’s copy of
Larousse.
“I dreamed that four muscular men—the kind you don’t see much in Havana anymore—had thrown me over the balcony!”

“An old man’s bad dreams,” Pepe tried to calm him. “Muscle-men don’t even know you exist anymore. Go to bed—tomorrow you won’t remember a thing.”

And he left.

It took Virgilio, who was still a bit nervous from all the excitement, a long time to get back to sleep. Besides, the noise from the Carnival down below was deafening. But he made a great effort and fell asleep at last. He had hardly closed his eyes, though, when the four persistent stooges came back.

“Is that you, Arrufada?” Virgilio asked for the third time, now convinced that he was going to get no sleep that night.

But the poet got no response. All he heard was the muffled sound of footsteps coming toward him in the otherwise silent darkness. The sound stopped beside the big bed in which Virgilio was lying. And then one of Fifo’s secret police agents turned on the light. Standing before Virgilio were the four thugs out of his nightmare, now realer than ever, carrying a huge easel on which stood a large painting covered with a black cloth. The men swooped the cloth away, and Virgilio’s eyes opened wider than they had ever opened in his life, despite all the horrors he had seen. The only thing on the canvas (whose paint, by the way, was still fresh) was a gigantic cunt surrounded by glistening pubic hair, the cunt lips open wide to reveal the pink bud inside, which was painted with such realism that it seemed to leap out at the poet. In fact, it seemed to be writhing on the canvas, oozing sexual juices, and gurgling lasciviously. Piñera, unable to bear such a sight, died instantly of cardiac arrest.

The four stooges checked to make sure the poet was really dead; then they dressed him and began arrangements for his funeral, which would be held that very morning. As they left, they picked up the gigantic painting—which Fifo had already sold to Anastasia Filipovna, who was waiting impatiently in a yacht just off the coast—and carried it away with them.

Today, dear readers, the murder weapon that was used in the assassination of Virgilio Piñera, a canvas three feet wide by six feet high, can be seen in Gallery 21 (Fetishes and Religious Objects) in the Tyrant’s museum, thanks to a generous donation from Peggy Guggenheim. It is Clara Mortera’s masterpiece, a painting entitled
Portrait of Karilda Olivar Lubricious,
an oil on canvas which she had done earlier that day.