The Color of Summer: or The New Garden of Earthly Delights Read Free

American admirers to the extent that it placed in the same prison cell an aging, reactionary homosexual and a homophobic young marxist—just to see what might happen.
    From the time Arenas finally settled in New York in 1981 until his death, he had one incredible stroke of publishing good fortune. He found an editor, Kathryn Court, who, despite the prevailing intellectual climate, not to mention the financial prospects, short term or long, promised to publish the entire Pentagonía in English. This gave Reinaldo hope and carried him through the darkest hours of his struggle with AIDS. When he first tested positive for HIV, in 1987, he prayed to a photograph of “Saint” Virgilio Piñera he kept above his desk, asking him for another three years to be able to finish the remaining two volumes of his Pentagonía .
    Saint Virgilio was listening. In the late 1980s, a barely legible manuscript of the fifth volume, The Assault , turned up in New York and Reinaldo set to work deciphering and revising it. A dark parable of absurdist dystopia, in the tradition of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground , Kafka’s The Penal Colony , and Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm , Arenas’s savagely comic tale is told by a torturer, a slavish, venomous agent from the Bureau of Counterwhispering. Indeed, his mind is so twisted by the nihilistic mechanics of a society that has been finally reduced to an indestructible system of destruction, he can only discover a kind of warped solace in the thought of somehow destroying his own mother. This ferocious quest for a kind of incestuously murderous exorcism takes him, and the reader, though every social layer of this hell. The chapter headings, borrowed from the chapter headings of a variety of other literary and esoteric works, including some of the author’s, serve to heighten the dissonance of the novel. This was to be the final apocalyptic vision of a revolution gone mad.
    Now, Arenas had only the fourth volume to write: The Color of Summer . (Weakened by AIDS, he would be forced to dictate his autobiographical memoir, Before Night Falls .) The novel is a remarkable comic achievement, lending new meaning to the old adage: divide and conquer. For in this Carnivalesque celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution (actually the fortieth, but the dictator Fifo is ever prone to exaggeration), Arenas divides himself into three characters—Gabriel, the dutiful “straight” son; Reinaldo, the famous “persecuted” author; and Skunk in a Funk, the conniving pícaro “faggot”—in order to take his pleasure, and his revenge, while writing and rewriting and, yes, rewriting a novel called The Color of Summer . The book gives the illusion of being a slapstick hodgepodge of high and low styles, of comical vignettes skewering friend and foe alike, mixed with tongue twisters, letters, anecdotes, lists, a play at the beginning, and an author’s “Forward” seemingly stuck at random in the middle. By the end, the island has been gnawed away from its rocky base and floats off into the Gulf Stream until it finally sinks.
    This deceptively casual structure was born of necessity: Arenas did not know exactly how long he had to live. So each little vignette is in fact quite carefully structured as a complete entity unto itself, just in case it might suddenly be the last. And the novel was fitted together additively, so that not only the island may be atomized at any moment; so may the book. As Reinaldo suggests in his “Foreword,” he is offering his reader, literally, a comically “cyclonic” or “round” novel, which “. . . never really begins or ends at any particular place; readers can begin it anywhere and read it until they come back to their starting point. . . . But please don’t take that as either a merit or a defect—just a necessity that is intrinsic to the structure of the work.” It is a work of astonishing playfulness and equanimity for an author already