The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights (31 page)

“I want that pilot shot,” Fifo said to his minuscule guard as soon as the Lady of the Veil had retired to her quarters. “Because of his dereliction of duty we were all almost killed at the Baracoa Anvil.”

The two escorts immediately shot the pilot, then snappily saluted. But no sooner had they saluted than Fifo called up his special forces and more than five hundred of his loyal midgets and ordered them to shoot the two surviving members of his former private escort.

“They know too much,” he told the midgets. “And as for the Lady of the Veil, I want her stabbed in the cunt and killed during the Carnival. It should look like a crime of passion. I don’t want any political trouble with the Arab world.”

How gaily Tomasito the Goya-Girl tripped along in her pink platform shoes. They were really
marvelous
shoes, and they’d been made especially for her out of genuine red crocodile hide. Uh-huh,
red,
because all the crocodiles, after they’d been moved on Fifo’s orders to the Bay of Matanzas, got so mad they turned absolutely
livid,
and they stayed that way. . . . Oh, but how gaily, how perfectly cheerily, the queen tripped along in those attention-getting red shoes. To think that she had spent more than ten years writing some aunt of hers who lived in Miami (although she had to admit it wasn’t her real aunt, it was just her aunt by marriage), begging her to send her a pair of platform shoes just like these. (One of her most sacred treasures was the picture of a pair of platform shoes she’d snipped out of a foreign fashion magazine that she’d bought on the black market.) And all of a sudden, at one of Virgilio’s get-togethers (and poetry readings), she’d met the cunning Mahoma. There that great whalelike thing sat, wearing a pair of platform shoes
just like
the ones whose photograph she gazed at longingly, lovingly, rapturously, day and night. And when she’d asked Mahoma where she’d found such a treasure, the fat thing had told her that she manufactured them herself, and that they cost three hundred pesos. Tomasito the Goya-Girl couldn’t believe her ears: three hundred pesos was three months’ salary! Tomasito pleaded with Mahoma for a discount, even a teeny one, but the cruel queen told her to forget it, she had an
infinite
list of clients ready to pay whatever she asked for her creations, but what she
could
do was put Tomasito’s name on the bottom of the list and give her a chance to start saving up. And you better save fast, hon, because if Fifo finds out about my little business he’ll take it away from me—he might even have me stoned to death with platforms.

And so poor Tomasito the Goya-Girl followed the advice of the cunning Mahoma and after work at the Tire Collective, she put in ten hours extra every day for three months (alongside Olga Andreu) picking up cigarette butts at bus stops and selling them wholesale in the Plaza de la Catedral. Finally, carrying the three hundred pesos, she climbed up to the loft (built in an architectural style known universally in Havana as “the barbecue grill”) where Mahoma lived. And there sat the great flabby thing surrounded with gigantic half-finished clogs. God, how beautiful! Some of those platforms must have been a foot and a half tall! With platforms like that, Tomasito the Goya-Girl said to herself, I’ll be the slenderest girl-queen in the world.

“Now these are just samples, in case some thieving bull macho top (which they all are—thieving, I mean) gets the idea to steal them,” Mahoma winked conspiratorially at Tomasito. “I’ve got the real stuff hidden.” And at that, the shoe queen opened a gigantic closet that no one would have ever suspected existed, since it was behind a wall covered with an immense oil portrait of Mahoma himself signed by Clara Mortera. And there, before Tomasito the Goya-Girl’s eyes, lay a treasure trove of platform shoes, the most dazzling sight she’d ever seen. They were made out of precious woods pulled through the hole in Clara’s wall and covered with canvas that Mahoma dyed so skillfully that no one would ever have imagined that it wasn’t genuine alligator. Although for very special clients—such as Tomasito the Goya-Girl—the shoe queen had
real
crocodile skin, taken from crocs hunted down and skinned by the Dowager Duchess de Valero and Karilda Olivar Lubricious’ husband Teodor Tampon, who happened to possess a razor-sharp saber. The shoe queen chose from among the ones with real crocodile-hide the tallest, loudest,
reddest
pair of platforms she had to offer. “These, darling, are
you,”
she said to Tomasito. “If the problem is attracting attention, then these are perfect. And they’re made of the real stuff.” Tomasito paid the three hundred pesos and started down the steep steps from the barbecue grill so fast that she lost her footing and slid halfway down headfirst. “You need to practice walking with those platforms, honey!” shouted Mahoma. “Or else you might break something!” But Tomasito picked herself up and flew like lightning out the door, her glorious red platform shoes making such a clickety-clack that she even gave a fright to the Weird Sisters, who were on their way to a special reading with Lagunas, the Clandestine Clairvoyant.

Although she hadn’t eaten in three months (she’d been saving her money, girl, remember?), those red platform shoes filled Tomasito the Goya-Girl with uncontrollable energy. “I won’t be Tomasito the Goya-Girl anymore,” she told herself, “I’ll be a Queen; I’ll stand so tall that this stupid nickname that Skunk in a Funk hung on me won’t make any sense anymore.” And yet somehow it did still fit her, because now, rather than being one of those monstrous court dwarves in Goya’s paintings, she was one of the figures on stilts. But utterly unconscious of this sad fact, Tomasito clickety-clacked from one end of Havana to another. And when, like Hector in the
Iliad,
she had made three circuits of the city, she heard a whistle from one of the little nooks along the Malecón. Ay, somebody was whistling at her, the former Goya-Girl—and it was a black man so huge and so well-equipped that he obviously had to be one of the members of the national pole-vault team—a team that Fifo himself selected and took personal charge of. The towering fairy stopped dead in her clickety-clacks; there came the whistle again. This time the gigantic black man motioned for her to come over. And a conversation was struck up that grew more and more . . . shall we say
intimate.
While he talked, the ebony love god from time to time would delicately (as though he had a secret itch that was just the slightest bit embarrassing) scratch and reaccommodate his balls. The towering fairy would give a little clickety-clack, step back, and then clickety-clack just a
little
closer to the sweet Ethiop. Why don’t we take a little walk along the Malecón? he finally said, sweeping her from head to foot with a look so lustful and so lecherous that Tomasito thought she’d faint dead away on the spot. And so they came to the Castle of Running Waters, a colonial fortress converted on Fifo’s orders into a public toilet. The teetering fairy looked at the
very
impressive black man, who was already disappearing into the blackness of the interior of the building, and she gave a few short, nervous, doubtful little click-clacks. But the gigantic hunk called out to her from the darkness within: “Come on, I’m gonna screw you till it comes out your tonsils.” Heavens, who could resist such an exquisite offer? And so like a flash the teetering-towering fairy rushed into the blackness of the Castle of Power. She felt herself grasped by her nonexistent waist, felt her gigantic lover raise her into the air, felt the burning breath of that body that was about to fill her with meaty happiness. The black man raised her, higher and higher, gave her a little toss, and in midair ripped the platform shoes off Tomasito, just as she felt she was about to be
truly
levitated. But when she fell to the floor what she saw was the gigantic black man standing above her with the gorgeous platform shoes in his hands, and the words of love he was speaking were these: “You better make a run for it, faggot, unless you want that ugly head of yours smashed in with these platforms.” And when she made a gesture of protest, the black man gave her such a whack in the head with the platform shoes that Tomasito the Goya-Girl finally realized that she was about to be killed by a professional assassin. The fairy, no longer towering, dragged herself, trembling and barefooted, from the Castle of Power, and barefooted she continued on through the city, until she came to her own hovel, another barbecue grill made by Skunk in a Funk out of wood pulled through the hole in Clara’s wall.

Lying on her stomach on the wooden bridge at Patrice Lumumba Beach, Skunk in a Funk finished writing the story of Tomasito’s adventure (or misadventure) and she smiled in delight, not only because he was happy with the story he’d just finished writing, but also because she was sure that this tragic but absolutely true story would never happen to
her.
That sort of thing only happened to silly queens who threw caution to the wind and followed any old good-looking thug into some dark place—nobody had ever stolen as much as a safety pin from
her.
Not for nothing was she a friend of the cunning Mahoma, not for nothing did she distrust
everybody,
and especially Men. There she lay, Skunk in a Funk, next to the ocean with her gleaming rubber swim fins under the manuscript of her novel. How many princely black men, how many glorious teenagers, how many
hunks,
had come up to her and asked to borrow her swim fins? But
no-o-o,
she was too wise to ever lend anybody her swim fins.
If they come, let it be for my beauty—never for my swim fins,
she told herself. Not to mention that those brand-spanking-new swim fins, made in
France,
my dear, were the only material treasure that Skunk in a Funk possessed. She had been dreaming of these swim fins for more than ten years, and finally one day a Frenchwoman (a visiting professor brought to the University of Havana by Fifo, and who could reach orgasm only when made love to by a gay man) took a liking to Skunk in a Funk and on one of her trips to Paris brought the treasure back with her. Of course Skunk in a Funk had to squeeze her eyes tight, take a deep breath, swallow her pride, and make love to the professor to get them, but in the end she even got her pregnant, thanks to the erotic inspiration (prodding) of a daisy chain they were in at the time. Nine months later, the Frenchwoman gave birth to a baby boy that was totally white on one side and totally black on the other. In terror she abandoned her son and her husband, Captain Miguel Figueroa (who also screwed women using the daisy-chain method), and took refuge for the rest of her days in a cave in the Pyrenees. . . .

Uh-huh, that was all true (and tragic) enough, but what counted was that Skunk in a Funk now had her swim fins, and
that
more than offset the guilt she felt for betraying her sex by screwing a woman. Pulling on those gleaming black rubber swim fins, Skunk in a Funk would dive into the waters off Patrice Lumumba Beach, La Concha, Cubanaleco, or anywhere in Guanabo, and glide along the seabed more gracefully than any fish. She would glide between the legs of the men who stood waist- or neck-deep in the warm water, conversing with their wives and children, and as that family conversation followed its conventional course (chicken pox, smallpox, the French pox), the glorious hunk’s sexual temperature, as he felt the underwater nibblings and gropings of the artful Skunk, would begin to rise (as would something else, too). Then all Skunk in a Funk would have to do would be pull down the hunk’s bathing suit and suck, while on the surface the noble domestic chat continued—the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the neutron bomb. The hunk would cum with a deep sigh and sometimes even a stirring
Ah!
that would surprise the people he was talking to, while Skunk in a Funk, always below the water, would swim off to the next luscious mouthful. . . . What’s wrong? the wife or sweetheart would ask when one of those gorgeous hunks emitted his
Ah
of delight. Oh, nothing, the glorious hunk whose member had just been sucked would reply, I thought I stepped on a sea urchin or a jellyfish. And the Divine Ms. Skunk in a Funk, with her wonderful swim fins, would work her way along the shoreline, wreaking domestic and aquatic devastation. By now a school of brightly-colored fish that had learned to like the taste of cum (an
exotic
species, certainly) would follow along, knowing that near whatever legs the agile swimmer hovered, a celestial liquor soon would flow. But one must say, in all good conscience, that sometimes Skunk in a Funk would leave off her oral pleasure-giving (and -taking), dive straight down near the shoreline, and begin to gnaw furiously at the base of the island. Because in spite of that wondrous sea that brought her such marvelous men, Skunk in a Funk was another one of those who wanted to flee the island. That was why he gnawed away at the island’s foundation, although she also dreamed of using her swim fins to make it at least to Key West.