The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights by Reinaldo Arenas

a sound from the outside world, at least not right then. Of course the guards posted outside and the security forces all around the palace had witnessed the battle, but they didn’t think it was anything worth reporting to Fifo. And anyway, they were all screwing each other at the time. The only people who’d followed that amazing postmortem battle with any degree of attention at all were the huge crowd of peeved (and I mean pissed- off) citizens who hadn’t been invited to the party but insisted that they should’ve been. “Oh dear, I don’t think we ought to stand too close to those dead bodies,” said Padre Gastaluz, who made the sign of the cross over them and slipped away on the steadying arms of Valentina Terescova and Deaconess Marina. The Pissed-Off Disinvited followed those personages and took up positions near the coast—not too far from the palace, but at a prudent distance from the huge palace door.

I N THE M ONSTER M EN’S R OOM

     
    Omigod! What time is it?! Two o’clock in the afternoon, three o’clock in the afternoon, three fifteen. —If she kept looking at the clock it’d soon be midnight. And all that in less than five minutes! Obviously Skunk in a Funk, her enemy number one, had driven her clock crazy so it would run six times as fast as it ought to and there’d be no way poor Eachurbod could get anywhere on time, much less to that encounter that she’d been dying to get to. Because it was an encounter that awaited her—she had a date, an appointment with destiny, a rendezvous with a veritable army of men, a throng of big strong hunks, thousands—almost a million—hot and horny beauties. Oh, no doubt about it, that masculine multitude was waiting for her out there in all that ass-shaking and backside-wiggling and drumbeating—waiting to (at last!) impale her. Run, run!—and she was already beginning to see in the distance, dancing to the driving rhythm of the drums, the sex-frenzied crowd. Weigh that anchor, lift off!—you know this is your last chance, because tonight the Carnival begins and ends, never to return. That’s what Fifo announced in that last twelve-hour speech of his. After this Carnival, he intoned, the party’s over. We will have to work at least a hundred years to meet our glorious goals! . . . Oh, but my goal needs meeting now, thought Eachurbod. And so my hope lies in reaching that crowd and getting laid. Hurry, hurry!—so you can get there before all those other fairies beat you to it and take possession of those zippered treasures. And so Eachurbod clutched to his breast Volume XXVII of the Complete Works of Lenin, with a foreword by Juan Marillo—a book Eachurbod used as an ideological shield—and with the thick volume as a kind of coat of arms, she took off running, to get there in time. But oh dear! his clock, knocked out of whack by Skunk in a Funk, was running so fast it made your head spin. Four o’clock in the afternoon, five on the dot, six in the evening, and Eachurbod had gone no more than two or three blocks. And there, in the distance, those bright colors, that happy confusion, all those blacks and mulattoes shimmying, swaying, shaking their asses, those wide-legged pants they wore displaying the divine treasure of their godheads. What if she should be too late for that magnificent gathering? What if all he found when he arrived was a pile of empty paper cups, trampled and pissed-on signs and posters, tattered streamers? She could begin to see a big, bright open-air stage that a thousand half-naked whores were dancing on. Oh, wait, pleasegodwaitforme, remember that I am the man-eater, the super-diabolic, the never-say-die vamp, that I am Eachurbod! And no sooner had she uttered those words than her watch jumped ahead two hours in a single minute. If things kept going that way, the party would be over before he got to the center of the swirling mass where surely everyone was waiting for her. Eachurbod quickly pulled out her pistol—the pistol