“Any Americans in the bar, by chance?”
Matéo ignored the question.
“So you didn’t see anything?”
“Nothing that can be of much use.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Duties of a citizen.”
“That would be a first,” the detective joked. It was impossible to tell whether he meant to accuse all of Havana’s citizens of a lax sense of duty or only the one sitting before him.
“Well, I am also an acquaintance of the victim’s family and of course I feel someone must pay for what happened. How is the victim this morning?”
“The family has not told you?”
“I have not spoken to his family since last night,” Matéo said.
“Let’s only say,” the detective replied, hesitating, most likely revealing less than he knew, “he has not regained consciousness.”
The detective asked in whose company Matéo spent the previous night.
“Only a girl,” Matéo replied, and the two men laughed.
“No foreigners in your party?”
“I believe you just asked me that, yes?” He couldn’t decide if the detective was merely fishing. “Why do you ask, my friend?”
Matéo had to be careful. The detective knew more than he was letting on; perhaps someone had mentioned seeing Matéo in the company of the yanquis, buying them drinks. He was a man known for mixing business and leisure, the two modes hardly separable for him. None of which was truly compromising, so long as he didn’t get caught in a lie.
“One witness reported seeing foreigners in the club,” the detective said. “I wondered if you met them, maybe spent time or some friendly cash on them.”
“What good would foreigners be to your case? They were not part of the fight, this much I can be sure of. What are the chances they witnessed anything in so large a crowd of people?”
“Well, Americans often make the best witnesses,” the detective said. “They are cooperative, they wish to see justice move swiftly so they can get on with their lives. Our judges find them reliable. We have a society that puts its trust in Europeans of all stripes, no sense pretending otherwise.”
The detective himself was a mulatto with a long jaw, a thin smile, an even thinner mustache, and cobalt eyes. When he spoke he showed no teeth, curling his lip so that one of his nostrils flared even as the thin mustache tented, then fell. It was hard to determine whether there was any bitterness in what he said. Matéo had known all along why the police and lawyers might be interested in tracking down Scott and Zelda. It was true, Americans were good for clearing cases. Even if Zelda had seen nothing, the police might persuade her to identify a suspect who resembled the blurred image of her memory, and whatever she said, the prosecutors could make it stick.
“In your opinion, the victim will recover, yes?”
“Of course this makes all the difference.” The detective smiled wryly. “If he recovers, it’s a petty squabble over some girl that got out of hand, American, Cuban, it does not matter. Two gamecocks preening for a female. We have all been subject to such fits on occasion.”
“Yes,” Matéo said, “a spontaneous crime, the passion of jealousy, hard to say which of the two was to blame.”
“Except one has not regained consciousness,” the detective said.
“And, of course, the assailant stabbed the man after he stumbled,” Matéo replied. “He must be held accountable. Intentions do not always matter under the law. I will keep my ear to the ground and maybe I will stumble across your Americans.”
“You’ll let me know if you hear from them, is that what you’re saying, sir?”
“Duties of a citizen,” Matéo replied, and rose to take his leave.
He walked out of the office convinced that the detective was holding out on him. It would take some maneuvering, but he could track down the necessary information—was the wounded man dead or alive, and if hospitalized, what were his chances?—before the day was done. He might as well start at the top: General Benítez, chief of police. Matéo had made Benítez money several times over on a string of investments. Benítez would tell him what he needed to know.
In the afternoon Matéo kept a reporter at the Havana Post from running a story about the Fitzgeralds’ visit to the Old City in the society pages. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he bought himself and the Fitzgeralds some time by promising to get together with the reporter the next afternoon. Matéo’s motives in protecting the American couple weren’t entirely mercenary. Something about Scott reminded him of his younger brother. Of course, Matéo’s break with his family in Santiago had strained his relationship with his brother, whose politics were as twisted and reactionary as those of the rest of the family, but nevertheless every now and then Hector traveled to Havana and they met for dinner, drinks, and conversation about their favorite baseball players over Por Larrañaga cigars. During his youth, Hector had been a hard drinker always in trouble with their father, and the only one who stuck up for him was Matéo. Scott too had the habits of the hard drinker and the kindly soul often at odds with authority, and from his days in New York City, Matéo remembered such men of talent fondly, tolerant of their bohemian, sometimes squalid tendencies. Everything had been so aimless in the Village in the twenties, the parties so free and licentious; some men never righted themselves afterward.
But what was Scott’s story? There was an air of irrepressible poise about him, the style of someone who’d made a success in the world but now exuded whiffs of intermittent hard luck. If he was writing for Hollywood, he must be doing pretty well.
They visited an old church on the hacienda, the doors still open for Sabbath devotions, several local women lingering to light candles and recite rosaries in the pews nearest the altar. Zelda redeemed herself in the eyes of their guide when she too insisted on lighting a candle.
“Your wife is religious,” he said to Scott as he observed her crouching low in one of the pews, genuflecting as she dropped to her knees. Scott, while apparently studying the altar, wondered what Matéo had intended in procuring this guide for them. Was it a way of keeping track of them? And if so, for what purpose? “My wife, Dios la bendiga,” the guide continued, “was also a holy woman all her life. Now she is dead, sometimes I tell my friends, who is to look out for my soul? All the women of Cuba, they are religious. This is a country in which God matters, the women look after us.”
Mentored throughout his teen years by an avuncular priest whom he had loved as a father, Scott had lost his feeling for God in his early twenties, but he couldn’t enter a church without awakening the rhythm of belief, if only in the echoes of his love for that kindly, cultured man. On dipping fingers in a font of holy water, crossing himself and murmuring a prayer without consciously thinking about the words, he felt a calm flow through him. It was like returning to a place where he belonged, his wanderings completed, as though life were a journey on the order of the prodigal son’s, your greatest ambition to get back to where you started.
So Zelda prayed while he and the guide toured the church, Famosa García deciphering some of the finer details of the stations of the cross, revealing demons crouched in the corner of a stained glass window that displayed Jesus scourged. He said mysteriously, “Are sacred places not worth fighting to preserve? You would agree, yes, churches cannot be desecrated, men and women of God should not be forsaken?”; and Scott understood him to be speaking in code of Spain and the victorious alliance of royalists, clergy, and nationalists. The afternoon sun slanted through the windows above the chancel, suffusing the marble in an arrow of colored light that folded over the altar rail, casting shadows into the nearby pews. Those at the back of the church where Zelda knelt were darker still. It was time to leave, so he slid into the pew beside his wife, her eyes shut tight, lips fixed in beatific contentment. He tapped her on the shoulder several times. She smiled as she lifted her head to see him sitting next to her, as if she were used to him at last. They exited the church in sil
ence.
“I wasn’t unbearably rude earlier, I don’t think,” she said to Scott as she drank wine over a late lunch. She probably shouldn’t be drinking wine—how many times had the doctors taken him aside to remind him that alcohol wasn’t good for her and he must avoid drinking in her company? But he was exhausted from the sightseeing, eyes heavy from lack of sleep, simply too weary to police her choices.
“Scott, didn’t you sleep well? You have bags,” she said, running her finger into the bone-sore sockets above his cheekbones. He wondered if she had no memory of asking him last night to watch over her while she slept or of his combing her temples with his fingers as she purred gratitude. Not until she was all the way under, more than an hour later, was it safe to leave her, and still he lay at her side, waiting until sunlight was leaking beneath the curtains to slip next door to his own bed.
“You didn’t answer my question, whether you thought I was terrible to the guide earlier.”
“I thought it was a statement.”
“You think he’s forgiven me, then?”
The table at which they sat, in a café in a small fishing village along the northern coast, faced the Gulf of Mexico. From its stilted wood deck they looked out over a harbor where small to midsized ramshackle fishing boats, some no bigger than dinghies, docked along two weather-beaten piers that jutted out into the expanse of ocean beyond. The boggy seawater, full of reeds and cattails closer to shore, ran up to and beneath the deck of the café. Not much of a breeze today, but the coastal air was cool, pleasing in its briny stench. Flies settled on the pink meat of the guava slices set before them. The waiter returned with bowls of mussels, fish, and lobster in a red broth. Scott ordered another rum and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola. The waiter, when he wasn’t tending to Zelda and Scott, talked with their guide at the bar, the restaurant otherwise empty at the siesta hour. “We keep eating when we should be sleeping,” Zelda remarked midway through her bowl of soup. All he had a taste for was the guava, though the thickening flies (he waved them off every now and then) discouraged his enthusiasm for the tart, pasty fruit. Several times Zelda looked up from her bowl to suggest Scott try the soup, and for God’s sake stop waving at the flies, there was nothing to be done about them, but he continued to sip his cola, occasionally flapping his hand, his chair pulled out from under the table’s umbrella into sunlight because it was too cool in the shadows.
“I feel rather bad for the poor man now,” Zelda was saying. “He held up bravely under my derision, in his own servile way.”
“He’s making a living, Zelda. Just getting by, like the rest of us.”
A copy of yesterday’s Havana Post, an English-language daily, lay on the table next to them and she retrieved it, flipping absentmindedly through its pages.
“But he’s forgiven me,” she said, trying to find a headline that grabbed her. “I can tell. What did he say again about his wife?”
On the fifth page, as if she had been searching for it, she discovered under the headline “Wings Over Cuba” their names in print: “Arrivals from Miami by plane yesterday were F. Scott Fitzgerald, novelist writer from Hollywood, Calif., and Mrs. Fitzgerald.” She was his spouse, nothing more, but to the world at large they were still a couple of note, the writer and his wife.
“When you were praying in the church,” Scott was saying, “Señor Famosa García told me that you reminded him of his wife.”
“And she’s dead?”
“For several years.”
“Then he’s definitely forgiven me,” Zelda said, folding shut the newspaper. “We’ll make it up to him by asking if we can take a picture with him. Does he know who you are?”
“I’m sure it would mean nothing to him.”
From the beach below came a rush of angry voices in Spanish, and as Zelda darted to the rail of the deck, Scott rose slowly, tired of alarm. Two young boys had been fishing with hand lines from the shore, and one of them had hooked a sizable fish, fighting it by backing up the beach in order to wear it out. In his distracted state, he had walked his own line straight into that of the other boy. At the rail Scott heard the explosion of the fish breaking the surface maybe twenty yards from shore, magnificently iridescent in the sun as it slapped sideways on the water and disappeared again. The boy who had hooked the fish became all the more frantic. He let out line from his stick as the fish ran, let the stick on which the line was wrapped rotate like a motor in his palms so as to avoid slicing his fingers, and when the fish no longer ate up line, he again backpedaled up and away from the shoreline, tugging at the hopelessly tangled lines and shouting in Spanish at the other boy who followed him only because he had to. The owner of the café descended a wood staircase to the beach, striding across the blanched sand to settle the dispute. As soon as he reached the two boys, each plunged into his version of events, gesticulating fiercely, now and then pointing to where the fish had jumped. When it again broke the surface, the owner of the café pulled out a knife, biting its leather handle to hold it between his teeth as he assumed possession of the two sticks on which the lines were wrapped.
“He’ll have to cut the lines,” announced Famosa García as he came forward to perch his forearms on the rail. “It’s only the one with the fish on it that matters, of course.”
“He seems to be gathering a lot of line,” Zelda remarked as the café owner cautiously wrapped the lines together around the conjoined sticks.
“That’s no way to catch a fish as strong as the one the boy has hooked. My friend is letting the eager one down easy, would you say; he is doing everything to pretend they will catch the fish. Cuando el pez huye de nuevo, when it makes its run, the boys will comprehend necessity. The fish is too far out. Without a proper reel, it will take all day, hours and hours, to pull it in.”
“And the sharks will claim it before then,” Scott said.
“This could be true,” the guide replied.
He seized this opportunity to hand Scott an envelope on which were written the words “To Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald,” and for a second Scott imagined the note might be from Ernest, who’d learned somehow (Max might have told him, after all) that Scott was in the country. Scott tore it open, but when he didn’t recognize the handwriting, he glanced down at the signature. In the note Matéo Cardoña inquired after Zelda and expressed his hopes that the Fitzgeralds were enjoying the expertise of one of Havana’s finest guides. He closed with an invitation to join him for drinks and dinner at La Floridita tomorrow, the restaurant for which Scott, Matéo, and the girl had started only last night. “Arrive by eight,” Matéo instructed. “I will meet you there and report on what I will have learned for you.”
“What does it say?” Zelda asked, sidling up next to Scott and the guide, resting her forearms on the rail, which suddenly bowed forward, not just a few inches as if testing the groove in the newel but rather a full foot or more, bending like the string of an archer’s bow, even as Zelda’s trained instincts as a ballerina took over. It was as though she’d thrown herself too far forward during a performance, catching herself before anyone could detect the wobble, already recovering by the time Scott caught her dress at the waistband and wrapped his hand around her waist and brought her to him until they were posed in a travesty of the ballet’s “poisson position,” or “fish dive,” the woman with head tucked, dipping beneath the horizontal plane of the man’s hold. The guide hadn’t been so lucky. With no one to catch him, he pushed at the rail in an effort to right himself, but when the beam failed, popping free of the newel on one end and crashing to the deck, he could only fall to his knees, throw his legs into a baseball slide, and let his shins eat splinters as Zelda burst into laughter.
“Why are you laughing?” Scott asked. “You might have been seriously hurt.”
The guide, from his knees, was spewing a torrent of Spanish profanity.
“I tell my amigo how many times, it is necessary to fix the rail,” he said, rising to his feet, gaping at the strangely laughing woman.
“You two are awful bores,” she said. To the guide she added, “If only you could have seen your face as you lost balance.”
“You wouldn’t be laughing if you’d plunged into the water,” Scott said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “But comedy is all about what hasn’t happened to you. And it’s funnier when it could have been you, but it’s somebody else instead.”
They could hear the café owner’s sandals on the staircase. He had sprinted across the beach as soon as he heard the crashing beam, relieved now to find that everyone was all right, unwilling to surmise how many times he’d asked the village carpenter to look at that post. Zelda wandered to a darkened corner of the café. “Does this work?” she called to the owner, drawing everyone’s attention to a camera on a shelf loaded with plates and pitchers, its stand propped against the wall beneath the shelf.
It did in fact work, though the owner wasn’t sure there was any film in it just now.
“Then you must find some film,” Zelda said. “We’ll pay, of course. We want a picture with your friend, our guide for the day, who has been so lovely and patient with us.”
The guide might have been angered by Zelda’s fit of laughter, but her talent for finessing people prevailed. Once he realized she was asking to have her picture taken with him, he took on the role of intercessor, negotiating with the owner as to where they might find film and how much it would cost, the owner now hastening away in search of the film. In his absence, the boys from the beach climbed halfway up the stairs, complaining that the café owner had cut their lines and allowed their fish to get away. It was clear they felt that something was owed them for their loss, and they appealed to Scott, asking him if he spoke Spanish, until Famosa García came to the top of the staircase, recommending that they renew their labors. “Debe pescar otro pez,” he shouted, waving them away. Another fish, that was the answer. “Eso es todo lo que se puedes hacer ahora.”
Beautiful Fools Page 11
