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

Author:Arenas, Reinaldo [Arenas, Reinaldo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2001-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT

(THOUGH IT WAS BRIGHT AS DAY)

Carlitos Olivares, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba, had finally managed to persuade a stunning recruit who was standing guard at the Castillo de la Fuerza to come home with him. The truth was, Olivares (poor thing) had been obsessively hanging around the castle for months. She would stop outside the walls, stick her black, Indian-featured face through the thick iron bars, and stand in ecstasy, contemplating the young specimen of manhood who, feet slightly apart at present-arms (the butt of the rifle gently caressing his fly), stood guard before that historic edifice constructed by Isabel de Bobadilla in 1530 so that she could live at the seaside and await her long-absent husband, who unbeknownst to her had been swallowed years ago by the waters of the Mississippi. . . . The crazy queen, possessed perhaps by Bobadilla’s spirit of despairing hope, stood every day, hours on end (her kinky curls sometimes twining inextricably around the bars), in contemplation of that magnificent hunk of man. Sad indeed is the story of this queen—black, queer, and Taino, alas, in a country in which even Fifo himself crows about his white Spanish ancestors and his purportedly unimpeachable masculinity. I tell you, girl, it was pathetic. . . . And as though all this were not bad enough, that lanky, bug-eyed, big-assed queen with that wide mouth of hers that drooled like a waterfall at the sight of any masculine figure was no less than the son of the Cuban ambassador to Soviet Nippon.

“My god, maricón! What words escape those false teeth of yours!”

“False, perhaps, but of the very finest quality, my dear, for they were designed by St. Nelly herself and made from ivory and silver—unlike yours, which are made out of plastic and all you have to do is laugh, or even open your vulgar mouth, and they fall out. . . . But let me just continue with this story, if that’s all right with you.”

Carlitos the swishful-thinking black tinkerbell was the son of a daddy who was a big government muckety-muck and a mother that was a santera, so you can imagine—the poor thing couldn’t sprinkle so much as a drop of fairy-dust at home. And yet once a force of nature—the force of fairydom—decided to set up shop in that dusky body, who could keep it from manifesting itself in a thousand ways? The way she moved her hands, for instance, or the way he batted his ears, the way she pursed her thick lips or the way he blinked his wandering eyes, the swinging of his backside and the staring into space. . . . Nothing, nothing could keep the fairy queen from showing herself for what he was, which was why, despite her being a high-ranking muckety-muck sort of queen, she’d been given the title of “the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba.”

Anyway, the Most In-Your-Face Queen in Cuba had spent the livelong day on one side of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.