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

ravaged by what he considered to be the first inhuman plague and, most likely, invented by modern science.
    On December 7, 1990, Reinaldo Arenas committed suicide in his New York apartment. No longer capable of managing the stairs to his sixth-floor walk-up, terrified of being sent to a public hospital (the previous year, a private hospital had “released” him in the middle of the night—no insurance—with pneumonia), unable to swallow solid foods, he told me: “I’ve lost my country and my language, the meaning of anything I ever wanted to say. Thanks to Virgilio, I’ve managed to finish my books. There’s nothing left.” He was forty-seven.
    Two years after his death, Reinaldo’s memoir, Before Night Falls , was published to unprecedented acclaim in France and in Spain, where Vargas Llosa hailed it as “One of the most shattering testimonials ever written . . . on the subject of oppression and defiance.” An American edition soon followed, in a haunting English version by Arenas’s friend Dolores Koch, which The New York Times’ s critics selected as one of the Best Books of the 1993. Arenas had become one of the greatest dissident authors not just of Cuba, but of the Cold War. Though he hated Castro’s Cuba, he could be just as scathing about Batista’s. A passionate anti-communist, he showed little love for American intellectuals, “who think about nothing but the state of their bank accounts.” He described Miami as “a town that I do not wish to remember.” He found New York sex a mechanical and dirty transaction, and the brutish pedestrians obsessed with little more than scurrying home to their television sets.
And yet, my friend, this is the only place in the world where one can survive—I say that with all my heart, because I say it without illusions.
    He wrote this in a letter to himself, or rather Gabriel did, in The Color of Summer .
    Not many dissident authors have survived the Cold War. Some of course were destroyed by it, never returning from the various concentration camps that have dotted the maps and graveyards of the twentieth century. Others became as irrelevant as the posturing of opposing forces that have settled back, winners or losers, into the wholly calculated pursuit of strictly capital ambitions. Their books, discarded by publishers and libraries, could still be picked up for a time, in those last few years of the millennium, at used bookstores or the second-hand peddlers’ tables often seen on parts of upper Broadway or lower Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan.
    Does a dissident author ever survive of his dissidence? In rereading the Pentagonía to write this essay, I found a different writer than the one I had experienced in the past. When I first read Reinaldo Arenas, as he was editing and rewriting his works, I had been overwhelmed by the discordant power of his dazzling invective. Now, some ten years after his death, I am continually astonished at the pathos and beauty of his creations. I sense that I am in the hands of a writer of enormous confidence, empathy and resilience. I realize, for example, that I have never read another novelist who writes so lyrically or intimately about the sea—not about life at sea, like Melville or Conrad, but about the sea itself. Throughout his works, Arenas has scattered one invocation after another, in every conceivable condition of light, hour, and weather, summoning the always shifting colors and textures, the ceaseless change and endless repetition of his vast, beloved sea. I understand now why it finally took a painter, Julian Schnabel, to make a film worthy of him, with Before Night Falls. For Arenas himself was a luminous painter of the human soul; and, to the very end, used his gifts to uncover the poetry of a dark and darker world.
     
Thomas Colchie
March, 2001

 
     
     
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