Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  At first Scott didn’t believe her.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said, then tried to explain, but still it didn’t make any sense, the details all jumbled. For a moment he feared she had come unhinged. Only later, as they lay awake in each other’s arms at the hotel in the early morning, did the source of her panic resolve itself into something like linear narrative, as he arranged the component parts neatly enough to see Matéo’s girl guiding Zelda into the bathroom and announcing, “I’ll stand guard,” or some such well-intended phrase that Zelda couldn’t hear for what it was, concentrated as she was on the fine steel blade the girl extracted from a case strapped to a garter inside her thigh. “She was offering to protect you, I am sure of it,” Scott told his wife by the gray morning light, and Zelda could no longer disagree. But that hadn’t seemed a likely explanation as she stepped into a stall with a flimsy door and broken clasp, her pelvis tightening, her bladder though full unable to release a drop of urine. No time for hindsight or clearheadedness, not while crouching in such a vulnerable pose, with a stranger outside your stall holding a long, thin blade. She had risen from the seat and rushed back to the table, shoving her way through the crowd, oblivious to the ire she provoked, to the curses, even to the handsome black man who had chivalrously thrown himself at her maligners—she must find Scott and tell him what had happened.

  Amid the commotion of the bar he had tried to calm her, still not quite believing her, not finding any cause for alarm in Yonaidys’s actions in the bathroom, even if what his wife said was true. He praised the band, vowed that the bar was safe even as he shot nervous glances at Matéo, who surveyed the ongoing ruckus, which was gradually rolling forward, spilling into their corner of the establishment. Scott draped his arm over his wife’s shoulders, protectively, keeping her attention averted from the wildly tossing, listing swarm she had incited. Eventually, though, she must have heard the shouts and threats, or felt the pressure of Scott’s forearm holding her in place, because she shrugged her shoulders free of his hold and spun around and into the glint of a second knife, this one held less than a foot from her cheek by the black man in the guayabera. He was turned sideways in a defensive posture, his flank toward her, his right arm raised high and held away from his body, the blade dancing in his hand. The mulatto in the light-blue jacket who’d cursed her had squared off with the black man, also with knife in hand, the crowd spreading out in all directions, opening a circle around them.

  It was impossible to say how long she stood in harm’s way. Scott, dulled by drink, reacted more slowly than he should have. Matéo stepped between Zelda and the melee even as the knife-wielding man nearest her lost his footing and tried to interrupt his fall with the hand in which he held the knife, whereupon the man in the blue jacket seized the opportunity to plunge a blade twice into the prone man’s chest, the white guayabera flowering like a rose as his body rolled toward Zelda and Matéo, blood splashing onto her dress.

  She was still fixed on the injured man’s bleeding shirt when Scott pulled her stare to his own, her pupils empty and dilated. He cupped her clenched jaw in his hand so that she couldn’t peer down at the splatters on her pale-ivory dress, while Matéo, grasping her at the wrist, dragged them from the scene. She was whispering loudly under her breath, “I could kill you for this, I could just kill you,” and in case Scott hadn’t heard her the first time, “I could kill you for exposing me to this,” the tremolo of her voice succumbing to thoughts beyond her control.

  5

  ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY THEY TOURED A DERELICT bullfighting ring, hardly recognizable as such, the high sun-bleached walls framing an arena long overrun with grass, the sport having disappeared from Cuba forty years ago under pressure from the United States. Their guide was an elderly man with sunburned skin, dark mustache set against a silver mane of hair, and a milky left eye, and he had never recovered from the death of his country’s once-beloved pastime. He could still conjure the bulls as they entered the ring, hides glistening like dark burnished wood in the sun, their tall-shouldered, majestically sculpted bodies arched and readied for battle, an entire stadium hanging on the grace of their incensed charge. Scott mentioned the bullfights in Morocco, attempting to introduce his experiences into the conversation, but the guide was too lost in his own longing for that which he would never again witness to hear his guest’s words.

  “Scott, this is boring, I’m bored,” Zelda said. “I keep expecting Ernest to sprint round the corner in a cape, chasing a mythical bull, sticking it in the ass, saying, ‘I will overstand you, bull, or I am not the man.’”

  “¿No explíco correctamente?” the guide asked, fearing he had erred in some way. “You and the señora wish me to explain again?”

  “Zelda,” Scott said with exasperation.

  “I don’t care, I’m awfully bored.”

  “I understand English, señora,” the guide said, hurt by her rudeness. “I have been talking to you in English all day.”

  “Yes, and mostly boring me in English all day.”

  Scott grimaced, flashing her a look of gentle reproof.

  “If he would only speak in Spanish,” she said, “I might imagine centuries of recondite history beneath his words, the dark Catholic soul of the Romance languages, all those monks mysteriously transcribing the thoughts of God in illuminated texts, taking dictation from Jews and other heretics stretched on the rack, the torture of bulls some kind of metaphor for—”

  “Zelda, this must stop.”

  He was not altogether against the humiliation of the guide, who was a surprise gift from Matéo Cardoña and also something of a pompous ass. They’d come downstairs from Sunday brunch on the rooftop restaurant to find themselves summoned across the cavernous lobby, and at first Scott thought it must have something to do with the previous night, the end to which he began to replay in his head. First, the panicked urgency of getting Zelda out of the bar—he could remember saying as much to Matéo, in those very words, “I have to get her out of here,” and Matéo accepted Scott’s petition as though he were used to solving problems under circumstances more hazardous than these: “It is easily done. I will slip your wife out before the police arrive, here like this.” Scott hadn’t yet given any thought to the police, but no matter, Matéo took hold of Zelda’s wrist, beckoning Scott to follow, expertly guiding his guests through the huddling patrons and the onslaught of newcomers gathered at the entrance by the rumors of blood, most having been nowhere near the violence when it occurred. As yet no police. In this way, Matéo remarked, the Havana police were reliable. Nevertheless, they would soon arrive to comb the crowd for witnesses, some of whom might well remember a white American woman with high cheekbones and piercing eyes who stood only inches from the slain man, his blood splattered on her dress. Only then did it occur to Scott that Zelda was a material witness to a crime. Who knew what Cuban law called for, what the duties of a witness were in this city?

  Might the police detain her for hours or days, demanding that she remain in the country until the trial? He foresaw the hassle, the need to borrow money, and if so, from whom? Over the past three years he’d paid down his debts but only at the cost of exhausting the goodwill of all his creditors: Max Perkins and Scribner’s; his agent Harold Ober; maybe even reliable Arnold Gingrich at Esquire. He could never turn to Sheilah for money, not after the way they’d parted. Of course, worse than any material debt was the possible cost to Zelda—who knew what toll reliving the crime over and over again might take on her?

  They had slalomed through nighttime revelers on narrow streets, turning often, wending through a barrio ripe with the sweet, sickly smell of excrement and trash. Eventually Matéo drew them across an unevenly cobblestoned plaza at the far end of which stood a baroque cathedral in gray limestone with oddly asymmetrical bell towers. Along the colonnaded porticoes of the government buildings that flanked the square to the north and south, vagrants clustered around barrels of fire, their voices not quite carrying to the center of the pla
za. “It is best to keep moving,” said Matéo, making sure Scott understood what was being done for him. At the far end of a street branching perpendicularly off the square, he could make out several men in uniforms, either soldiers or police, and immediately scanned his memory for details he had accumulated about this city’s recent history of coups, military dictatorships, and rogue paramilitary armies. “We must part here,” Matéo said, instructing Scott to continue three blocks down this same road past the uniformed men, until he reached Calle Obispo, there to take a left. Another four blocks, and the hotel would come into view. “Excuse me,” Scott interrupted. “Are those soldiers or policemen?” If stopped, Scott was to say he and his wife were returning from a romantic stroll along the Malecón. “Where?” Scott asked, and Matéo explained, “El Malecón, the seaside promenade on which I found you earlier. Tourists cannot get enough of it. And remember you enjoyed the ocean air, you lost track of the time, cutting back by way of Cathedral Square. You did not stop anywhere else. Entiendes?” Scott replied that he did and shook hands with his new friend, wondering how he could ever repay Matéo’s solicitude, worrying that his favors came at a price still to be named. Then he and Zelda walked hand in hand into the night, circumnavigating the soldiers who wore rifles slung halfway down their arms and inspected tourists through white clouds of cigar smoke without saying anything.

  Being met this morning in the lobby of the Ambos Mundos by a guide they hadn’t hired, before they’d even decided what to do with their day, had made Scott uneasy. It felt too much like being spied on. But it wasn’t this fact alone that inspired his resentment of the silver-maned Cuban guide, who was, after all, hardly to be blamed for his paid-for meddlesomeness. No, it was the guide’s alternately officious and sycophantic manner. One minute he was bragging in petty bourgeois terms of hiring himself out to the highest bidder, the next slandering the Europeans who paid for his words but were indifferent to the wells of historical truth he could tap, preferring to be told nonsense (the guide used the word burradas, then translated it) about the passion of the Caribbean soul. Such were the results, he said, of a national economy dependent on the production of sugar, tobacco, and rum, on sweets and sin, on Americanos for whom Havana was an around-the-clock carnival; such, the wages of endless corruption. He spoke contemptuously of foreigners and his fellow countrymen alike.

  Not only did he deserve to be put down for his airs, but maybe his cynicism merited a client such as Zelda. Still, it wasn’t wise to let go of the reins on her spite for too long.

  “Zelda,” he said again, “please get yourself under control. Señor Famosa García will complete the tour and then we will—”

  “I do not wish to subject the señora,” the guide said, interrupting Scott, “to my observations if they do not please her, if they are too boring for her ears.”

  “Well, that can’t be helped,” Scott said. In her unkindness Zelda was a picador, pricking the hide, enervating the soul, weakening the guide’s will to go on. “You’ve been paid well, and I’ll tip you later for having to put up with my wife’s cruel if precise wit. So let’s move on. Where to now?”

  Already this morning the guide had driven them along the famous seaside promenade he judged an acceptable consequence of the brief American occupation of his country three decades ago, stopping at the far less acceptable monument erected in the 1920s to commemorate the sinking of the Maine, presuming they would wish to pay homage to their countrymen and the event that provoked the United States to declare war on Spain. He talked them through a visit to the Catedral San Cristóbal de la Habana, which they’d briefly glimpsed the previous night, entertaining them with stories about the rivalry between Havana and Santo Domingo over two sets of bones, each reputed to be those of Christopher Columbus himself.

  “It is up to you,” the guide said politely. “I am here to provide for you, of course.”

  “One of the haciendas, then?” Scott suggested. “What other remnants of Spanish barbarism might we find entertaining, perhaps the defunct slaves’ quarters at one of the sugar mills?”

  His refusal to soothe the guide’s vanity won Zelda’s gratitude, he could tell from the way she held herself, and it pleased him to be able to read her body language.

  “Was I awful before?” she whispered when they were in the backseat of the car.

  “No,” he said, only then pivoting to look at her, understanding that she meant much earlier—as in, the night before, when she hadn’t spoken as Scott pulled her gaze from the skirts of her dress, not a word of gratitude or curiosity as she was dragged through dank, shadowed streets by Matéo, not a whisper to Scott as he avoided the cigar-toting soldiers and delivered her to the lobby of the Ambos Mundos, riding the elevator to regain the safety of her room.

  “You were frightened, that’s all. I’ve seen you far worse,” he said.

  Even today she couldn’t remember anything of what had happened after the knife plunged into the man’s chest, the blood bright and effervescent on his white shirt. She asked her husband to tell her how they’d escaped the bar and made it back to the hotel, and as Scott described their exit remarked, “Oh, yes, I remember someone pulling at my arm.”

  “We arrive at the hacienda of one of the great sugar mills of the old regime in Cuba in five minutes,” the guide said to them. All morning he had been estimating the time it took to go from one place to the next, and always it took longer than he said.

  “Do you think anyone noticed anything?” Zelda whispered. “Maybe they could see the shadow of the crime, the way it clung to us, maybe they could see it my eyes. Do you think they will come for me?”

  She spoke as though she didn’t want him to give her an honest answer. Sometimes he would have liked to ask her, “What are you capable of hearing today?” His impulse even after all these years was to confide in her, but he could never be certain whether she was up to the challenge of assessing her own well-being.

  “For all they know, I could be the person who stabbed the man.”

  “Don’t be preposterous, Zelda,” Scott said, reminding her again that they had done nothing wrong.

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “Besides, I probably couldn’t tell them anything. I don’t remember looking at the man’s face, and if I did—”

  Scott asked her to lower her voice.

  “If I did, I hardly remember the color of his skin or the slope of his nose or the angle of his jaw. Still, do you think it’s right that we left without saying anything?”

  In her mind she was a fugitive from last night’s violence, calculating how long she might have to stay on the run.

  “We did nothing wrong,” Scott said again. Wrong place at the wrong time, that was all, but they were safe now.

  She laid her left wrist on his lap, palm open and up, a gesture of invitation, and he stared down at her hand for a brief while, then clasped it in his, intertwining his fingers in hers.

  “I didn’t mean what I said,” she whispered.

  At first he couldn’t figure out what she was talking about.

  “It’s a powerful feeling, I really can’t control it,” she said. The guide tossed off phrases from the front seat, but Scott ignored him. “It accumulates in me like bile, and I have to get it out of my system—you understand, don’t you? It doesn’t mean anything, not really. They were just words and you were in the way of them. I’m sorry you’re so often the one who is in the way of them.”

  Now he understood and he heard the words again, fresh and sharp as if she’d just spoken them, I could kill you for this, suffering their malice for the first time.

  “It’s only because you’re so good and loyal, and what’s your reward?” she said. “You always come back for me, even when no one else will. Even if everybody else is content to let me rot my days away in a madhouse.”

  “Zelda, don’t.”

  “Not you, you always come back.”

  Not an insignificant portion of Matéo Cardoña’s Sabbath had been devoted to making inquiries o
n behalf of his new acquaintances from the United States. He started by visiting the police station, letting it be known he was at the bar last night when the incident took place, since he was certain to be placed there sooner or later.

  “Tell me, Mr. Cardoña, what did you see?” asked the detective, who was well aware of the prestige of the Cardoña name and whose courtesies were so exaggerated it might have been reasonable to infer hostility beneath them.

  “If only I’d caught a better glimpse,” he replied. “It would make things simpler.”

  “Indeed it would,” the detective said.

  On any other night Matéo might have remained on the scene and taken charge, paying the two largest men he could find to seize the assailant and obtain the weapon. Of course, it all depended on the man—whether Matéo owed favors to any of his acquaintances or might procure their favor on credit. Matéo Cardoña was by all accounts a pragmatic man. Even now, if the police were to apprehend a suspect and it was someone he agreed to identify, his reputation in the city was such that a prosecutor would have little trouble obtaining a conviction on his word alone. But then the assailant might remember seeing Matéo in the company of the two Americans who had riled him in the first place, and Scott had made it clear he didn’t want his wife involved. For the time being, there was more to be gained in covering for the Fitzgeralds.

  What was it that made his actions from last night suspicious to the detective? Well, for one thing there was the mistake of leaving the scene, his judgment warped by the Americans, by his own inscrutable desire for the woman with her languorous eyes and thick pouting lips, also her amply curved figure, more like that of a Cubana than an Americana. Even today the image of her slow swaying inside the music pursued him, her motions sensual yet precise; and when he’d spotted the knife in the air, so close to Zelda’s face, the animal terror in her eyes, the color draining from her cheeks, he had known he must act. So he seized hold of her wrist as the man nearer Zelda slipped, his rival’s knife plunging into his chest as Scott rushed forward to obstruct her view while the wounded man writhed on the floor. The sensible thing to do was to stay and report what they had seen to the police. Not much could be made of Zelda’s role in the affair. Who would care if some white woman out of her element became claustrophobic and tried to shove her way through a crowd? Nevertheless, when Scott said, “We have to get her out of here,” Matéo took it as a command.