Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “Did you know the wife went crazy a decade ago?” the reporter asked.

  “Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald, are you sure?” Matéo asked. Scott hadn’t mentioned anything about mental illness, but of course one wouldn’t talk about such matters, not even with close friends, never mind new acquaintances. “In what way?”

  “Not many details, I got it off the wire from a colleague at the New York Evening Post,” the reporter said, preening for Matéo, trying to come off as more important than he was.

  “But you are too canny to have learned nothing.”

  “My colleague tells me Scott has disappeared into Hollywood, never publishes anything of note, while she spends most of her time in asylums.”

  “None of which you would mention, I hope,” Matéo said.

  “No, my angle is that they were the most glamorous couple of New York in the twenties, also in Paris for a while, he a front-page writer for the Saturday Evening Post, his wife the celebrated flapper. I’d like to find out what they’re doing in Cuba, if he’s researching a script for Hollywood, that kind of thing.”

  If the story came out and it brought the Fitzgeralds unwanted attention, they might flee the country before Matéo had secured Scott’s trust, and he wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. So as he entered the café at Hotel Santa Isabel, Matéo reminded the reporter that he was to be his guest.

  “What is of passing interest in the Old City this week?” he asked the reporter after a first drink. He didn’t quite trust the reporter—after all, gossip was just that, something whispered, not worth saying aloud. He rather hated the society pages of newspapers, having been featured there himself one too many times, his name popping up in association with various women found on his arm, sometimes winning him a note of reproof from his otherwise noncommunicative mother in Santiago.

  “It is a service, like any other,” said the reporter, who like many a soft journalist before him still harbored serious ambitions. He had started working for the Post’s “Activities in the Social World” page three years ago on the rationale that it might open doors. It was hard for him to accept the fact that his secondary status in life appeared to be a permanent track. Keeping company with Matéo was one of his tricks for maintaining a high opinion of himself.

  “You offer the public a view from the ground, without filter, the rumors of the street,” Matéo said, indulging his old associate. “What is the latest covert political news?”

  “So you recall that I was among the first to track Falangist activities in our country?”

  The two men ordered a second round of mojitos as the waiter brought a plate of prawns.

  “Months ago when it became clear Franco must win, did I not say that Antonio Avendaño and Alfonso Serrano Vilariño would begin to feel confident in their cause?” The men he mentioned were closely monitored proponents of Franco’s Falangist alliance, who sought a Fascistic solution to Havana’s notoriously unstable politics.

  “And you were not wrong,” Matéo said, his voice hushed. His friend the gossip columnist was far too brash and boastful to make a good journalist.

  “I did much research, you know,” the reporter said, heaving the ignominy of neglect into his chest. “Collier’s was to run all that I found as a feature article, but instead turned the information over to the FBI of the Americans.”

  “A tough break,” Matéo conceded. “But your information tightened international security, and these men you talk of, what do they matter now?”

  The reporter still believed the article in question would have made his name, and the memory of it stirred bitterness in him. Matéo had served as a source for the story. Since the Cardoñas were among those old families that put their faith in the Church as a beacon for national life, he fed his associate tidbits about where one might find Fascist sympathizers in Havana, among, for example, the staunchest of Fulgencio Batista’s supporters, all on the tacit condition that the reporter would point the finger away from the Cardoñas—away from, for instance, his beloved brother, Hector, celebrated in some circles, maligned in others, for spending the past two years in the mountains north and west of Barcelona among the Falangists as they advanced on that great city. It wasn’t just family Matéo protected, though. He did business with proto-Fascists, several of whom he gladly named for the reporter, others whose identities he labored to conceal, even though the ones he kept secret leaned just as eagerly toward Fascism as the others—all of them encouraging Batista to take his cues from Franco and to protect Cuba’s Hispanic heritage, and bask in the Church’s guiding light, and curtail American influences. To this day Matéo was divided in his opinion about whether Cuba’s interests and those of the United States coincided, and for that reason could not entirely endorse his associate’s rabidly anti-Fascist views. Officially Cuba would side with the Americans in the war to come, this was only proper, but still he remained ambivalent about how much advance work Cubans ought to do for their neighbors to the north.

  “In this very hotel,” the reporter said, “there are Germans who should not be here.”

  “Let the authorities follow the leads, you did what you could,” Matéo said, checking his watch, pulling his seat back from the table. “Please, the bill is paid, finish your meal, though I must be off. And on that other matter we discussed, you will give me a few days.”

  “Sure, why not,” the reporter said magnanimously. “Let us give Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald their privacy for now, let them enjoy our great city. It is hardly breaking news, but you will help me get the interview with them, and will not let them slip away?”

  “Not a chance,” Matéo said.

  Zelda poked him in the ribs, her head listing to the side, until he too turned to peer down the bar where a row of women dressed in garish clothing leaned against it at the far end.

  “It’s nothing we haven’t seen before,” he said, keeping his eyes below the gaze of the prostitutes to avoid misunderstandings.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “Look at the one third from the end.”

  He lifted his eyes to the mirror at the back of the bar, and when he saw that the woman in question was waving at them, he immediately said, “Zelda, please don’t overreact.”

  “What was her name?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “He presented her as his girl, didn’t he?”

  “I can’t remember. What difference does it make?”

  “You really think it makes no difference?” she asked. “You take me out on the town with such a woman, and it’s not supposed to bother me? What did you think would happen?”

  “She had nothing to do with what happened.”

  “What about the knife, I forgot all about the knife until now, what about the knife she pulled on me?”

  Scott reached into his coat, trying to remember something he’d written in his journal Saturday night after they returned to the hotel, but the Moleskine wasn’t in the pocket above his heart where he kept it. He felt down along the side of the jacket. Nothing there either. Panic swept over him as Zelda clamored for attention and he reached his hands to his chest, patting himself down, two hands at once, discovering a square bulge in the other breast pocket, the wrong one, but at least the journal wasn’t lost. As he reached for it, however, he could no longer remember what it was he’d wanted to check.

  The girl from Saturday night beckoned for them to join her.

  “Now we must say hello, Scott,” Zelda said.

  “This is neither the time nor place for renewing acquaintances of that sort, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” a man said, intercepting them.

  It was, of course, Matéo Cardoña, who uttered his command while firmly gripping Scott’s shoulder, then bowed forward to graze Zelda’s cheek with a kiss.

  “We were only going to say hello,” Zelda protested. “She was good enough to be on your arm last night.”

  “Our table seems to be ready,” Matéo said, offering no further explanation, refusing even to glance at the girl as they passed
within a foot of her at the bar. Another man was seated at their table and he now stood to pull out a chair for Zelda.

  “May I present General Ernesto Menéndez,” Matéo said, obviously expecting his friends to intuit the honor of being in the presence of such a man. He explained briefly that the general was a hero of Cuba’s war for independence.

  “The Spanish-American War?” asked Scott, his curiosity piqued, since he had long been a student of military history. “Which battles, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “That is your name for the war for Cuba libre,” the general said. “For you Americanos, a Spanish-American war includes all battles to be rid of the Spanish presence in the Americas, while collecting as much of the leftovers for yourselves as is possible.”

  Scott questioned the general’s interpretation of history, saying he had always understood his nation’s intentions in Cuba to coincide with the course of self-determination on which the country continued to this day. He mentioned Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, the Battle of San Juan Hill, the sinking of the Maine.

  “Perhaps it is not so simple as that,” the general replied amicably. Still, he had met Roosevelt; he had friends from the United States who fought among the Brigadas Internacionales in Spain, in defense of democracy, in the effort to prevent Spain from falling into the wrong hands.

  “Only now it has fallen,” Scott said.

  The general was immaculately dressed, in cream-colored jacket and pants, the jacket with a double-breasted lapel, the tapered trousers drawing a fine line toward his tan loafers. His neatly cropped white hair set off a square face, his skin fair, though of a pearl rather than pinkish hue. An old friend of the Cardoña family, he was on display, maybe only so that Matéo might impress upon his guests that he was not a misfit among his own people.

  “My friend, however, is a diplomat always,” the general said to Scott, who hadn’t been paying close attention. “I am no compañero of the Communists, but they rally to our cause, it seems to me.”

  Zelda had missed a piece of the conversation and asked Scott whether it was important. Was the general giving his views on the war in Spain?

  “What war? It is over. What hope to defend democracy if the great democracies will not defend her? In your opinion,” the old general said, again facing Scott, trying to mask his disgust, “should not the United States intervene? Was this not a war for them?”

  It was, Scott assured him. Unfortunately, not all saw it that way.

  “Unfortunately.”

  Scott was tempted to mention his friend Ernest Hemingway and his work on the film The Spanish Earth, a piece of propaganda for the Republicans, also the screening of the film at a fund-raiser Scott had attended only last year in California. He might have named others among his circle who had taken up arms or pens in defense of Spain. He was tempted to expound on his own hatred of the Fascists, but thoughts of war in Europe made him recall his time as an enlisted man during World War I, when he had failed to cross the Atlantic; and under the sway of neglectful history, he suffered once more pangs of irrelevance.

  Zelda was asking Matéo about the man from last night, and Scott could hear him saying, “Most likely he will recover, so please do not concern yourself, Mrs. Fitzgerald.”

  All seated at the table had spent time along the Côte d’Azur in France, enchanted by the white splendor of its beaches and the translucent Mediterranean waters. Charting their travels as a couple, Zelda spoke cheerfully of Antibes, of the villa at St. Raphaël, of trips to Monte Carlo—all of this, she asked them to remember, before anyone had discovered summers along the coast. She took long swims in the sea and danced at the beachside bistros, she relished the private salons in the casino at Monte Carlo, asking Scott to corroborate her memory on this point or that. It was as though she now recited pages from her 1924 affair while omitting mention of the French flyboy with whom she’d fallen in love, recalling the year in which she betrayed her husband as a time of complete unity between them—and yet she meant every word of it. Scott could see no reason to steal that year back from her when there were so many since with which her imagination could do so little.

  At one point the general took Scott aside to say that Matéo had mentioned his interest in investing in one of Havana’s new hotels or casinos.

  “Your friend must have misunderstood the state of my fortunes,” Scott said with a laugh.

  “You’re very thoughtful about your finances,” the general said. “This is exactly what I myself look for in an investor.”

  So the general and Matéo were in business together. It annoyed Scott to have been dragged to this bar under false pretenses.

  “This is why I recommend, my friend, that we present some options to you,” the general said.

  Scott had respect for the man’s elegance, for the nonchalance of his sales pitch. It was beneath his dignity to become importunate or pushy. The matters of which he spoke were affairs among gentlemen.

  Assured of the general’s good will, and reaffirmed in his confidence in Matéo by the company he kept, Scott began regaling the two men with stories, told with deadpan panache, about the exploits of Zelda and Scott as a foolhardy young couple. He told them about being photographed running through a fountain outside the Plaza Hotel.

  “What was the point of your actions?” the general asked.

  “But that’s just it,” Zelda jumped in. “There wasn’t any. Why not just be glad that you were beautiful and oh so young and able to drink for several days, dance every night, even in fountains, or go for a swim in the Hudson River in your finest clothes.”

  Matéo seconded their careless view of life in the twenties in New York City, and also in Paris, which he had visited only once, and though the general was a man inclined to order, he was a drinker who believed in catharsis, as he put it, as long as it was not a perpetual state of existence.

  Testing the old man’s tolerance, Scott told him about the time he had passed out behind the wheel of an automobile on their way home from a soiree in the French Alps, Zelda in the passenger seat, the car stalled at the edge of a precipice, the two of them sleeping off the glimmering daze of several consecutive nights of revelry, unaware that for hours on end they were no more than two feet from rolling into a gorge.

  “In the night I got up to relieve myself,” Scott said, “and I found a bush of some sort, most likely some thistle running along the precipice, and somehow I returned to the car without stumbling over the edge, apparently without ever noticing where I was.”

  “Like a man who sleepwalks in a minefield,” the general said.

  “It was not until morning,” Zelda remarked, “when I awoke and opened my door to find that if I took one small step at a time, pas de bourrée as they say in ballet, I might patter tiptoed back up the ledge, alongside the car, walking uphill—”

  “Couru, couru,” the general said, showing himself to be an aficionado of her forsaken art.

  “But if I took merely two graceless forward steps, like any crude pedestrian, I would have plummeted to my death. Only then did we back that beaten-up jalopy off the precipice.”

  “That’s magnificent,” Matéo said.

  “It was a fine sports car,” Scott said, “a coupe of some sort. Zelda has no memory for such things.”

  “I thought we were just telling tall tales,” she said. “What do the details matter?”

  “And they are mostly true, yes?” Matéo interjected.

  “Fair enough,” Scott said. “I have always enjoyed my wife’s flair for adding color to our history.” They both knew he might speak of the time she grabbed the wheel and attempted to steer them over the edge of a cliff, but he wouldn’t say such things, not unless prompted by her jealous, impassioned denunciations of him, not until years of pain and alcohol and remorse were again all at once coursing through his system.

  “In the real story,” he said, “but honestly I can’t remember, didn’t the French police come and wake us up and warn us how close we were to the
cliff?”

  “It’s more exciting the way I tell it,” she said, turning again to their hosts. “Isn’t it, gentlemen?”

  “For all my action in the field, I have been so close to death few times in my life,” the general said. “Your adventures, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, are battles in their own right.”

  The waiter brought another round of daiquiris and Scott took a swig of his drink. He no longer felt defeated by the misadventures of this past year, or by the follies of his youth, but somehow better for them. He asked if his Cuban hosts wanted to know what making movies was like, what it was really like, and the two men responded, “Hear, hear,” and he could tell they found Hollywood far more interesting than the life of an ordinary author, even one who had formerly dominated the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. He excused himself to use the bathroom and as he passed the bar, lips set in a neutral if friendly smile, he stared down the row of prostitutes and observed with some relief that Yonaidys was no longer among them.