Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “It’s a nice surprise,” he said. “I want you to do what brings you pleasure.”

  “I know you don’t love riding the way I do, so we’ll ride gently at first.”

  Dressed in snug canvas trousers, boots, and a bright red shirt, Aurelio rode the gelding with skill, directing them up the beach into the winds, swinging his outside leg back and prodding the horse with his heel, urging it into a canter. Maryvonne, also dressed appropriately in black riding pants and a loose white blouse, could not get her mare up to speed. After pressing the mare with her heel, she snapped the reins against the withers repeatedly, but without result. Only Scott was overdressed for the outing, and he regretted that he hadn’t insisted on running back to the room for a change of clothes.

  “He rides well, don’t you think? He trained for the cavalry,” Zelda said, and Scott tried to remember whether he had read anywhere about the Republicans assembling a cavalry.

  Zelda crouched forward, one hand on the reins while she ran the other forward over the horse’s silky golden neck, stretching her leg over Scott’s in an effort to prod the horse’s haunches. The jolt of acceleration caused Scott to lose balance, swaying to the side, so that he had to right himself by inching forward in the saddle and wrapping a forearm around his wife’s waist, struggling to find the horse’s center of gravity.

  Zelda let out a laugh, whinnying and zestful. She loved speed in a way he did not; she loved any occasion to test her body and her nerve. She rode with a destination in mind, one she would not share despite several queries from him. For the moment she concentrated only on passing Maryvonne, after that on catching up with Aurelio, who rode the bay gelding with manly elegance, the horse’s hooves kicking up sand, the beach ahead resplendent in sunlight, empty of sunbathers. Zelda guided their horse close to the water where the sand was damp and firm, and soon she was shouting to Aurelio as they drew near, “Do you remember where we turn?”

  “Any one of the dirt roads,” he called back.

  “Zelda, where are we going?” Scott shouted into the wind.

  “Why are you against surprises?” She laughed as she overtook Aurelio and the slowing gelding, and next she turned their horse with a single snap of the reins onto a dirt path to ride between modest stone bungalows and cottages with thatched roofs into the center of a small village. Aurelio, somewhere back where the beach met the dirt road, waited on Maryvonne.

  Scott discerned the small church with its modified mission front as they cleared an open-air market that consisted of several huts side by side, the posts of one hut all but indistinguishable from those of the next, a long row of them running up into the straw and frond ceilings, beneath which merchants stood hawking everything from fruit and live chickens to pottery, colorfully embroidered peasant shirts, and silver jewelry.

  “I think we should buy you a proper hat,” Zelda said. “In that silly tweed you resemble an English lord taking survey of the manor.”

  For a second Scott’s thoughts ran across a continent to Sheilah, his girl from England, marooned in California with her great secret. Zelda’s remark made him think of Sheilah’s elaborate cover story, the illustriously invented ancestry backed by the picture she’d once showed him of an English lord propped on a horse who was supposed to be her uncle, how after weeks of his poking for details she’d broken down and let him in on the enigmatic truth: she had been reared in a British orphanage, a Jewish waif forsaken for eight years by a mother too destitute to raise the child herself. She was a self-made woman in every sense of the term, including the fantastic lineage concocted to procure a place on the London stage, later a husband (whom she quickly divorced), and still later work as a Hollywood gossip columnist. No one else knew, not her ex-husband, not the real British lord with whom she had months ago broken off an engagement to become Scott’s full-time mistress. Some honor, he thought, and now I’ve left her. But he couldn’t think of her just now—that was over, most likely.

  “A lord pompously propped on his fine pony,” Zelda said, “while he checks on the good-for-nothing Irish serfs.”

  “Your point is that the serfs or the indigenous populace might be less likely to resent me if I buy one of their hats?”

  “Honestly, Scott, I’m worried that your stodgy old cap won’t shield you from the cruel sun, but it’s simply more efficient to appeal to your vanity than to your health.”

  “Tell me about the church,” he said.

  “Well, it’s on the scale of chapel more than church, don’t you think,” she said, informing him that she had scouted it earlier this morning. “It was built only this past year, funded by the du Pont family, if I understand correctly, Irénée du Pont, who has a place here on the peninsula.”

  The facade of the church, constructed of large rectangular stones, had battered sides rising to a gable, on top of which there was a small altarlike form encasing the bell.

  After the European couple caught up with them and all four tourists dismounted their horses and tied them up, Aurelio refused to enter the sacred building. A priest emerged from behind the church, one of the villagers having run off to inform him of the arrival of guests, and he smiled for the tourists, speaking in blunt provincial Spanish, Maryvonne translating.

  “He would like to show us the inside,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, gracias, monsieur. Wait,” Zelda said, mixing Spanish and French. “Excusez-moi, gracias, Padre.”

  The priest guided the women past the diminutive buttresses toward an entrance on the side of the church near a cubic stone chapter house connected to the back of the church, Scott trailing them, observing Aurelio still planted, stiff backed, not far from the horses.

  “Zelda,” Scott called, “I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

  His words drew the priest’s attention to the two men, and as the duly appointed liaison between God and men, even perhaps between men and their own souls, he issued a second invitation.

  “Dios y yo,” Aurelio called out, “hemos elegido sendas distintas.”

  The priest flinched at the staunch rejection of God’s hospitality, looking around him for local villagers, obviously embarrassed.

  “Él nunca te abandonará, cualquiera sea tu senda,” the priest said, bowing respectfully, then extending his arms to either side of him to lead the women inside the church.

  “As you wish to believe, Padre,” Aurelio answered curtly.

  “Aurelio,” Zelda called, intervening, “remember, you must go to the market to obtain the items for our picnic.”

  “Gladly, Mrs. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.”

  “Why did you tell him you had rejected God?” Scott asked his companion once the priest and the women were out of hearing distance.

  “Your Spanish is not very good, my friend,” Aurelio said. “Not what I said, though it is true enough. Perhaps I would be more precise if I say, God, he has rejected my people.”

  “I get it,” Scott said, thinking of the lost war in Spain. “You’ve a quarrel with the Church.”

  “Not personal,” Aurelio said. “The pelea, perhaps you say complaint, it belong to all of Spain. You are faithful man, piadoso—if so, if I insult you, for this I am sorry, truly.”

  “Not religious, not insulted,” Scott said. He pulled the flask of Martell’s from his jacket, looking over his shoulder to ascertain that Zelda had in fact entered the church and could no longer see him, then extended the flask to Aurelio. After the Spaniard took a polite sip and handed it back, Scott tilted his chin for a slow, pleasurable swig.

  “Well, I must check on them,” Scott said, half-inclined to visit the market with Aurelio and stand in solidarity against the Catholic Church for having thrown in with Fascists, but instead he entered the small church where Zelda knelt at the altar as though she were a communicant waiting on the host. It caught him by surprise every time, his wife’s newfound piety. Studying her face, her chin burrowed in her breast, he witnessed someone longing for a peace that refused to overtake her. Scott envisioned thousands of
mothers and wives kneeling on prie-dieux, whispering in pews across Spain, petitioning for the return of husbands, sons, and fathers they knew to be lost, silently pleading that an entire three years of ruthless violence might be undone.

  Before they could leave, Zelda insisted on lighting several votive candles. They stood beneath the church’s exposed-timber ceiling, reminiscent of colonial missions, and as she implored him in front of the priest to make a donation, he tried to remember when her modes of prayer had become so Catholic. As a young couple they used to attend services together, visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, where they had been married, later appreciating the High Mass at Notre Dame, which despite her Protestant upbringing she relished for its pomp and majesty. Still, prayer was something they rarely discussed. They were acolytes of a post-religious era, in flight from the strictures of the Catholic and Protestant God, all those teetotalers, prohibitionists, anti-petting prudes, the generally puritanical populace—it was hard to imagine they might ever look back.

  Aurelio, with his arm full of groceries, met them in the shade where they had tied up the horses.

  “Why is that old woman staring at me?” Zelda asked, and Scott looked across the road at a woman in a frock and kerchiefed head, who, with her dark, sun-wrinkled skin and broadly bridged nose, might have hailed from any sunny climate from almost any period in history.

  “She believe with all her heart it is something she must say to you,” Aurelio said.

  “How do you mean?” Scott said, as Zelda asked simultaneously, “What can she have to say to me?”

  “We have right to disobey her,” Aurelio proposed reasonably.

  “Doubtless she’s a fortuneteller of some sort,” Scott said. “On the prowl for customers.”

  “I know that, Scott,” Zelda snapped, addressing herself again to Aurelio. “Why do you say must?”

  “Her words, not mine,” Aurelio said. “‘Tengo que hablar con la doña elegante,’ she say. It is very important. Scott is right. Is the way of women who speak to the spirit world, it is true. Always some message must be translated, if you pay, only if you pay them.”

  “Perhaps she meant me,” Maryvonne laughed. “I am also elegant.”

  Scott was grateful for Maryvonne’s courteous instincts, for the effort to distract Zelda—as a trained nurse, the Frenchwoman could detect the symptoms of an obsessive personality—but Aurelio wouldn’t eat his words.

  “She mean Zelda, I am sure.”

  Scott looked across the street and saw the old woman’s hand held open before her, several fingers curled in a gesture of invitation, neither the hand nor fingers in motion. How long had she been doing that?

  “I won’t speak with her,” Zelda said, the peace she had achieved minutes ago inside the church already evaporating.

  “Zelda is right. It is best to speak to the spirit world,” Maryvonne suggested, “only in God’s house.”

  Aurelio untied the horses.

  “I have watered horses,” he said.

  Scott and Zelda were to ride solo for the next leg of the trip. Immediately she seized the reins of the bay gelding from Aurelio. The Spaniard claimed the palomino for Maryvonne and himself, handing Scott the reins of the third horse, reasoning that since the mare was the weakest, someone should always ride her solo.

  “That way there is better chance to keep up,” he explained.

  Zelda nicknamed Scott’s horse “the old nag” and the name stuck the rest of the day. For as long as he rode the mare, Scott sympathized with her, perhaps detecting something of his own ragged state in her plight, though he wouldn’t have put it that way. What he told himself was simpler: he was far from a skillful rider and didn’t require a good horse, so why not this tired black mare?

  Zelda took the lead, enjoying the lively athleticism of the gelding, and Aurelio kept pace for a while, then dropped behind to see how Scott was faring.

  “Does she have any idea where she’s headed?” Scott asked.

  “Le prêtre, he give us instructions,” Maryvonne said.

  “That was kind of him,” Scott replied, “but where to, exactly?”

  “Zelda, she ask about a place for diving,” Maryvonne said. “The father just smile, then say, ‘Je sais l’endroit ideal,’ so perhaps it is a blessed and blissful place.”

  The Europeans tried to engage Scott in conversation about his wife, her derring-do, her skill on horses and prowess at dancing, but it alarmed him to learn she’d spoken to them about the ballet, and he was deaf to their words as he strained to keep track of Zelda up ahead. The Europeans did manage to extract one story from him. It was of a young Zelda, still a girl of eighteen, during the era of their multiply broken, narrowly repaired engagements (the European couple interrupted, asking for details about the engagements, but Scott put them off). Again he saw the beautiful Zelda Sayre, red-gold hair to her neck sweeping outward in bold wings, her round cheeks flushed pink, the most pink-white girl imaginable. The incident he recited for them? Zelda, flouting Montgomery customs with customary zeal, accused of lewd behavior at a holiday ball, maybe for close dancing, maybe for showing more than a little leg, he couldn’t remember what exactly. Pulled from the dance floor a fourth or fifth time, she found a sprig of mistletoe, attached it to her skirt tails, and for her last dance waved her rear end at the chaperones like a peacock, letting them know, please excuse his French, what part of her precious person they could kiss.

  From time to time Zelda raced back on the gelding to check on them, inquiring, “How’s the old nag holding up?” She made sure no one second-guessed her command of the expedition, declaring, “It’s not far now,” then sprinted ahead until she and her horse were one faint image on the horizon.

  Ultimately, she deposited them on a stretch of beach at the far end of the peninsula just shy of Hicacos Point, the priest having promised her it was secluded, the promontory good for diving, the water deep enough and without rocks. She had dismounted and tied her horse to a tree, already disrobed by the time they approached, in the midst of donning her crimson bathing suit under a date palm, her dimpled lower back visible as she pulled the suit over her waist and the straps onto her shoulders. She announced that she was headed to the top of the cliff.

  They should test the water first, Scott suggested.

  The father, she said in French, had promised it was safe.

  How could she be sure they’d found the right spot?

  “Faith,” she assured him as she marched off.

  He might have run after her, but there was little chance of changing her mind. He might have stripped and swum far out into the water beneath the promontory to assess the depth, checking for boulders, but he hadn’t taken a swim in two years.

  “I will accompany her, my friend,” Aurelio said, beginning to undress beneath the tree to which he’d tied the palomino.

  Scott felt remiss in the face of the Spaniard’s chivalry, but also exasperated by Zelda’s impulsiveness, by the effort entailed in merely keeping pace with her. So he let her climb the steep back of the crag until she was out of sight, with the naked Spaniard chasing after her. All that was left for Scott to do was to stand on the beach and murmur a small petition on his wife’s behalf to some saint in whom he no longer believed, wondering if the Lazarus he wore about his neck held province here, worried lest catastrophe once more befall a woman he’d watched ruin herself, repeatedly, for over a decade. The two figures eventually emerged atop the promontory.

  The day was bright blue and warm and the wind carried the ocean rushing through you, vigorous, salty, but also entirely fresh because this far out on the peninsula everything swept from one narrow strip of beach to the opposite, a terse Atlantic wind whipping across dunes, beach brush, and tall grasses out onto the Caribbean. No fetid pools of backwater, nothing of the land to be gathered up and carried on the breeze—the wind was ocean and sky, nothing else.

  “The sky is always so blue on our vacations,” she said, falling beside him, panting from her sprin
t across the beach, her wet body spraying him as she collapsed on the sand. Maybe thirty yards on, Maryvonne stood, shoes off, a pair of men’s shorts over her arm, her riding pants pulled up off her knees as she waded through the white-foamed scum of splintered waves to greet her husband when he emerged from the water.

  “I’m surprised to find you sitting in the sun, and, look, I forgot all about the hat we were going to buy you earlier, you’ll be sunburnt by now, let me see.” Zelda rested her wet hand against his chin, depressing her thumb on his forehead and cheeks. “It’s all my fault.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “You look lovely and sun-kissed and happier than I’ve seen you in a long time.”

  “You forget, that’s all,” she said, “how charming I can be, how much you like being with me when I’m happy and you’re all mine and nothing could ever make me happier than that you’re all mine and it is right now. Maybe you should take your pen out and write it down in that surly Moleskine. I worry about it, that you only retain the sufferings, never the joy, where’s the joy, Scott, there was also always so much joy, most of the time anyway.”

  “I remember both in equal portions,” he said.

  “Now you’re just being an ornerykins for no reason,” she said. “Why do you want to spoil everything? Tell me, did you watch me the whole time? Would you like to grade my form, and were you jealous thinking of me in the water naked with that handsome man?”

  “You weren’t naked.”

  “How can you be so sure? I might have been, I wanted to be, I love swimming naked in the water.”

  “With strange, handsome men?”

  “Don’t forget naked.”

  “I noticed.”

  “And why not?” she said. “He’s no threat to you. If I didn’t love you, he might be, but I do love you so, and haven’t any interest in men like him. Tell me, have you found my note yet?”

  What on earth could she be talking about? He stopped himself, making sure not to let ire creep into his voice.