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

she was still standing when another divine (and very manly) man, a mulatto in a white polo shirt and blue velveteen pants, and this one also pawing at his divine privates, pushed open the door and then—same song, second verse—slammed it in Eachurbod’s face again. Then, within seconds, a teenager (and omigod what a teenager) went through the door, followed by a young sailor boy with quite a duffel bag. Dear heavens, and now there was a black man in a pair of mechanic’s overalls, clutching at his toolbox. Behind the black man came several fresh army recruits and a respectable-looking gentleman dressed in white from head to toe, and sporting a Máximo Gomez moustache. What was this? How many dazzling men had been invited to this house? Who lived here? Do you suppose Fifo himself was holding one of his secret orgies in there? Stepping in front of the self-interrogating Eachurbod, three fresh-scrubbed farmworkers, several students in their ironed school uniforms, and several high-ranking military types pushed through the door, all of them clutching at their crotches when they arrived as though that were the password that gained them admittance. Jesus! and now a still-pubescent bright-skinned mulatto (with eyes of amber) entered, holding his crotch, his unparalleled crotch, a crotch that could have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch and that was threatening to burst from its bonds. And then another mulatto of fiery skin and eyes, but with a sweet sword shaft between his legs, penetrated that sanctum—and he was already unzipping his fly (a fly which whispered a command that neither Eachurbod nor you either, Mary, could have disobeyed). And so the fluttering queen, shaking off his dejection and jumping up and down in the puddle of his own nervous perspiration, started toward the door. He was almost certain that if he went inside he could be arrested, tortured, sentenced to death as a terrorist, or maybe under suspicion of espionage—because the odds were that this house was the reception or training center for all the secret police who were keeping an eye on the ideological direction the Carnival took—but the order (Follow me . . . ) given by that body, by all the bodies that had just gone in there, was stronger than all the fear and terror of the risk. Using the red-bound volume (so as not to leave any fingerprints), Eachurbod pushed open the enormous colonial door, which still proudly sported a brass knocker with the face of a dragon and several copper nails, and stepped into the mansion. Instantly, he discovered that that noble two-hundred-year-old villa, the birthplace of the Condesa de Merlín, was now furnished with long troughs hung on the walls of every room, and before those long troughs hundreds of men, staffs of virility in hand, were urinating—the mansion was now a huge fountain fed by the most beautiful human springs ever imagined. The Condesa de Merlín, whispered Eachurbod, inhaling a fragrance that intoxicated him, could never have imagined that her home would be dedicated to such a noble cause. And so it was—by order of Urban Renewal (and therefore by order of Fifo himself, who hated colonial architecture—any architecture, in fact, that was not of his own design), that historical residence, that national monument, had been turned into a gigantic latrine.

A T ONGUE T WISTER (2)

     
    Gotta watch that puta Puntilla—she’d sell you for twenty pieces of pewter, stool-pigeon you for a tin pizza plate, turn turncoat on you for a tiddlywink—she doesn’t give two poots. Yep, to take care of her own sweet patooty, Puntilla the pie-eyed prostitute turns tricks for whoever’s got the biggest dick. Puntilla the potbellied poetaster— ptui!
    For H. Puntilla, whose real name
is Leopoldo Avila

P AINTING

     
    I will paint plants with their roots upside down, seeking their nutrients in the sky. I will paint leaves that move about the canvas and ask impossible questions when one looks at them. I will