Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “What of the priests and nuns?” Famosa García asked.

  “Excuse me,” Aurelio said.

  “The Communists killed many bishops, many priests and monks, many nuns,” Famosa García said angrily, announcing his loyalty to the Church and the Spanish crown, refusing to look at Aurelio but instead gazing across the table at Scott. “Did he kill priests and nuns?”

  “Never nuns,” Aurelio said.

  “On land the Republicans might have won the war,” Scott continued, suddenly out of his depth. He had suspected Famosa García of harboring Falangist sympathies, but this was more information than he had bargained for. “And in many ways they did win it battle by battle, but the bombing of Madrid, it went on and on, the bombing of children and women never ending. What do you think of the Falangists now?”

  Scott glared at Famosa García, no subtlety left in his insinuations.

  “Maybe the yanquis,” Famosa García said after a long silence.

  Scott wanted to ask this silver-haired Fascist to step outside, but the man was too old.

  “Maybe the government of the United States of America,” Famosa García continued evenly, “should have assisted the Spanish Republic as everyone expected them to do.”

  “Good enough,” Scott said, reaching a hand across the table to clasp the shoulder of the refined man with the strong jaw and milky eye, warming to him, or pretending to do so. “Let’s drink to that.”

  Famosa García made excuses to remove himself from the conversation, but Scott said, “Sit, you might learn something,” then instructed Aurelio to take them through the logistics of a people’s army, how the platoons and battalions worked, how ranks were assigned, who gave the orders.

  “It is the same as any army,” Aurelio assured him, except the men sometimes weighed in on battalion officers, sometimes rendered votes of no confidence in leadership. This was especially true of the Americans of the Lincoln Battalion, infamous for rotating their crop of leaders, some voted out, others stepping down because they couldn’t follow a direct order, others killed in battle, sometimes from incompetence. It was a joke among the Spanish battalions and international brigades, “Who is in charge of the Americans today?”

  “Tell us about the day of your injury,” Scott said to Aurelio. Famosa García protested that he must be going, and this time Scott didn’t prevent him. Only when Matéo’s man had departed did the Spaniard ask whether it was wise to have provoked him so, but Scott dismissed the worry, saying it was nothing compared to what Zelda had put the poor man through three days ago.

  “She is for sure very dramatic,” Aurelio said and Scott pushed his chair back from the table, glowering at the Spaniard. He would fight even this man whom he admired very much, whom he could not possibly defeat, if Zelda’s good name was at stake.

  “Take it back,” he glowered.

  “Stay calm, amigo.” Aurelio took a swig of beer. “I mean no offense. She is free in spirit, braver than most women. Is she stronger than you believe, perhaps stronger even than you?”

  Other men might have felt threatened by such a statement, but not Scott. Pleased to hear Zelda receiving her due, he sat again in his chair.

  He was trying hard to keep himself in line, but there was something he was afraid of and he didn’t yet know what it was. Maybe it was just the damned letter.

  “Couldn’t you ever go back?” Scott asked, wishing to stop talking of Zelda. He felt awe for the Spaniard, this socialist and Basque nationalist who’d fought so bravely for a homeland to which he might never return.

  “My country is lost,” Aurelio said sternly.

  What if the Americans entered the war against Fascism and defeated Mussolini first, Hitler next, wouldn’t Franco fall in the aftermath?

  “I give no thought to such matters,” he insisted. He was fortunate that his cousin had found him in the camps and married him, otherwise he would not be here drinking with a new friend.

  “You admire my wife, no?” Aurelio asked and Scott felt he was being accused of something.

  Just then there was a commotion near the entrance, the gamecock handler with bark for skin calling for Aurelio by name, something about a woman outside. Apparently the establishment in which they were drinking wasn’t a place for women, at least not proper European women. Maryvonne, defying the ban, bulled into the room as Aurelio sprang from his chair, rushing forward to escort her outside, but she slapped at her cousin’s arms, uttering defiant words, sweeping toward the table, there for one reason and one reason only, to speak with Scott.

  It was too soon for the clairvoyant’s reading to be over and he intuited some dire news. She stumbled to recount what had happened, but he could envision it all too clearly: Zelda running off in the middle of the reading, without explanation, without indication of where she was headed. At first Maryvonne thought her new American friend must have stepped outside for fresh air, certain to return in a minute or two, so she had remained seated across the table from the diviner, the two women staring blankly at each other. It was the old woman who at last announced that the Americana wasn’t coming back. Maryvonne rose from the table, upsetting the half-interpreted deck of cards, all but floating out the door into the late afternoon, stunned by the light and air. She remembered the bodega where Scott and Aurelio were waiting. Zelda would have gone in search of her husband.

  “She did not come here, then?” Maryvonne said.

  Aurelio, at a loss for what to say or do, sidled up to the table and clasped his rum drink, eventually lifting it to his lips.

  “I am sorry, Scott,” Maryvonne was saying. “I was sure she only needed fresh air, I was sure she would search for you, she has only been missing a short time.”

  “There will be a simple explanation,” Scott said, expert in putting people off the trail of his wife’s madness. The task at hand: interrupt the conclusions toward which Maryvonne might be racing. The first rule of every crisis. Control the room, manage rumors, anticipate the things that might get whispered by acquaintances and strangers and make it back to friends, family, their literary circle, the general public at large. After all, it wasn’t anyone else’s business—this decade-old illness, longer still if you included its genealogy. What people saw, what they believed they saw, wasn’t reality. Reality was what they could remember afterward.

  He was so calm and convincing that as he watched the spell take hold of Maryvonne and felt her shoulders relax under the steadying pressure of his palms as if he were a priest executing the rite of absolution, he wondered whether he believed anything of what he said. “No need for alarm,” he heard himself saying. “In all probability it is nothing.”

  The initial panic she felt on entering the bodega having lifted, Maryvonne studied Scott. Truly the man was a puzzle. On the beach earlier he had prodded the mare into a dash, worked himself into a state, fretting about what might have happened to his beloved Zelda when nothing had. Now that she’d really gone missing, he took everything in stride.

  “This is not unusual,” he assured his friends. As a nurse she understood codes of discretion, the sentiments people couldn’t express residing inside the words they allowed themselves. “Zelda is an impulsive, spontaneous woman,” Scott was saying. “Most likely she headed for the shore, where we’ll find her walking barefoot in the runoff of the waves. Or she’ll be at the hotel when we return, having gone for a swim. My wife doesn’t follow other people’s rules. The gypsy woman was an imperious sort and I could tell she would rub Zelda the wrong way.”

  They toured the deserted, dismantled market in haste, but found no traces of Zelda anywhere. They made inquiries with a few straggling townspeople: no signs of anyone fitting Zelda’s description. Next they crossed the road to untie the horses and Scott proposed, reasonably, “We’ll retrace our route from earlier, look for her along the beach.” Aurelio hastened Maryvonne into the saddle of the palomino, then mounted the bay gelding, leaving Scott with the mare. When they reached the sands at the end of the dirt road, her cousin
proposed heading up shore, in the direction of the afternoon’s outing. He was obviously unsettled by the entire affair. One of his childhood friends had suffered from nerves in the war, and after a week of heavy bombardment by Mussolini’s airplanes woke three consecutive nights in screams, endangering his entire company, which was entrenched a few hundred meters from the enemy. Though fine during the day, brave and businesslike, capable of shooting straight and accurately, he lost hold of himself by night. Lack of sleep drained him, the nightmares unrelenting, ever fiercer, until one day the lieutenant in charge of the company ordered Aurelio’s friend banished from the front lines. Aurelio didn’t believe most of the propaganda about arbitrary executions for desertion, but he never heard from his friend again. Had he escaped from a hospital bed to wander the streets, clothed as a deserter, earning a deserter’s cruel end? Had he been assassinated by the enemy or, worse yet, by one of his own comrades?

  Aurelio, haunted by memories, needed to be on his own. So he led his horse up the beach on a private reconnaissance mission, leaving Maryvonne to ride beside Scott. Applying pressure to the palomino with her heel, she soon had it cantering to the shore, where the waves were higher and rougher, Scott keeping pace on the mare so that they might cross the sands to explore brush, palms, and thin pine forest, then slash down to the water again, combing the terrain for clues of any sort. The spindrift off the water moist and cool, the temperatures dropping, she examined the western sky, trying to guess how many hours until sunset. Below them a trail of gray-black clouds unfolded like the plume of a forest fire.

  While they surveyed the empty beach, Scott interrogated her about what the old woman had said inside the hut, how Zelda had reacted to each cryptic statement. Maryvonne fastened on the last set of cards, trying to recall which three cards the diviner had laid down, in what order.

  “The occult details,” he said, “are irrelevant to the situation as far as I can see.”

  “Well, Scott,” she replied in French, “your wife flees in the middle of the reading, after the diviner deals those exact cards. It seems it might be important.”

  “My apologies, I didn’t mean to suggest you were unhelpful,” he said, again full of gentlemanly charm. Amazing how he could turn it off and on. “Was I terribly rude? That wasn’t my intention.”

  He asked Maryvonne to take him through everything Zelda had heard and seen, trying to figure out what had prompted her flight. So she recounted the denouement of the reading, Zelda asking, “Tell me about the man I have loved my whole life,” Maryvonne tracking the unfolding prophecy for her. “Is he faithful?” Zelda asked in a guarded tone. She didn’t care if he slept with other women. All she wanted to know was whether an alien affection had taken root in his heart. “He will always love you,” Maryvonne said, translating, watering down the diviner’s words about a man in the cards who loved two women, whereupon Zelda leveled her accusation: “She is evasive on purpose; she needs to tell me what the cards say.” Then the diviner dealt the final three cards—the Devil, nine of cups reversed, the six of wands reversed—and Maryvonne muttered to herself, “Christ.”

  “Why?” Scott asked.

  Well, she explained, a friend in the Red Cross read tarot and had talked to her about cards of illness, blight, and mortality. Those three were dark cards, especially in combination.

  “Any other signs?” he asked. “How did she look?”

  “One minute she is fine, the next she accelerates—rushes, no?—from the hut.”

  As he turned his horse away from hers to angle it up the beach, she heard him mutter, “Damnit, Zelda,” seeming rather more angry with than worried for Zelda.

  The line of stone cabins from the Club Kawama came into view, the beach populated with straw huts, sun umbrellas, and stray late afternoon bathers; and now Aurelio hailed them from behind, his horse advancing in a steady canter.

  “No sign of your wife that way, my friend, and I see she is not in your company. Should we notify the authorities?”

  Scott blanched at the suggestion, stammering for a second, then with majestic cool began to thank them for their help, assuring them he could handle things from here.

  He is lying, Maryvonne thought.

  “I’ve inconvenienced you enough,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” she protested.

  “Well, we can return the horses for you,” Aurelio said. “One less matter for worrying, and I mean what I say about the cockfights tomorrow; you must be my gues’.”

  “Guest,” Maryvonne said, correcting her cousin because she was angry with him, hearing that she too failed to hit the t on the end of that word in English. Normally Aurelio would have defended himself, but he said nothing, accepting her reproof—first, for his indelicacy in looking forward to tomorrow’s outing while Zelda was missing; second, for having made plans with Scott that didn’t include her.

  11

  MOST LIKELY HE EXPERIENCED THE ABSENCE AS LONGER THAN IT was, so he approached the clerk at the front desk, resolving not to let his worry show.

  “Buenas tardes, Señor Fitzgerald,” the clerk greeted him.

  “My wife hasn’t left word for me?”

  “No, señor, you are expecting a message?”

  “You haven’t seen her?”

  “¿Hay algún problema? Something is wrong?”

  “No, no,” Scott said. “We must have got our wires crossed in town. I was supposed to meet her, I forget where.”

  “Mrs. Fitzgerald has not been here,” the clerk said as he checked the empty mail slot.

  On the cinder path that threaded among the bowing palms to the villa with its red-tiled roof, Scott replayed the past three days in his head, the mistakes, the opportunities for reprieve. He shouldn’t have taken her to that bar Saturday night in Havana; he should have reacted more quickly when she was in danger. He should never have allowed Matéo to take charge of their safety. Also, he had been far too lax about the wine and cigarettes, neither of which Zelda was permitted at the Highland, neither of which he was to allow her while on holiday—but once they were out of town he could never enforce the rules set by her doctors. Normally, when she started breaking down, there were warning signs. He had time to catch on and reprimand her, speaking to her at times as to a child. Saying simply: “That’s enough.” Now and then seizing her (a full-on clash of wills might ensue, objects thrown, slaps exchanged) to lead her home. His gruff tactics drew the attention of their friends, especially in the years before most people had intuited the depths of her illness. Many of their acquaintances accused him of being boorish—you couldn’t treat a grown woman that way—but Scott knew from experience that often nothing else worked. Outside the church this afternoon, after he had caught up with her to find her raving about providence, about the words of that damned yellow-eyed clairvoyant, he’d known what to do. But he couldn’t bring himself to humiliate Zelda in front of new friends.

  He climbed the courtyard stairs, pausing at the door to his room to catch his breath, the tightness in his chest like pangs of regret, the by-product of the afternoon’s rush of activity. His brow soaked, he raised the handkerchief to it, blotting the sweat, remembering only afterward about the coughed-up blood. Lowering the handkerchief, he eyed the reddish smears on the linen, the orange-yellow halos that had formed above them. Inserting the key in the lock, he called her name in a circumspect whisper—“Zelda, Zelda, are you home?”—then cracked the door.

  Quickly he cased the room, checking the bathroom, finding his watch on a shelf by the sink and sliding it onto his wrist without looking at the time. On the balcony he surveyed the grounds of the hotel. Beyond the line of scattered, seething palms, the surf pounded the sands, hungrily lapping up beach. She was a strong swimmer, but the white-capped waves were as high as he’d seen them—the Gulf current must be formidable by now.

  Clearly, she hadn’t been back to the room. He checked the sun on the horizon: maybe an hour and a half of daylight left. He felt the chill of encroaching rains, the moisture in
his lungs. Where could she be? Only so many places to visit on this peninsula, only so many ways to get lost, even if you wandered straight into the wilds of its largely unsettled terrain. The forests weren’t all that deep. He knew of marshes, some swamps, maybe also quicksand; he had heard tell of alligators, iguanas, and boa constrictors. Of more immediate concern, though, was the human element. It was a peninsula of impoverished fishermen and their families, only recently annexed as a leisure destination by rich Habaneros, by Americans and Europeans. He remembered the unsavory characters from this afternoon’s bodega, the rules about where women were allowed, where they weren’t. He could imagine how deep the locals’ resentments of tourists must run, and Cuba wasn’t the south of France. This was an island nation of gambling, speculation, and organized crime, a one-crop economy propped up by dictatorships and frequent coups, a country kept under thumb first by Spanish rule, now by American moneys and policies.

  Pulling the French doors shut behind him, Scott shuffled past the bed to his suitcase set on the steel rack, rummaging through the clothing until he found the pair of BVDs in which he’d wrapped his handgun back in Encino. Too bad he hadn’t thought to bring it with him Saturday night at the bar. He checked the cylinder to see that the gun was loaded and cocked the hammer, holding the Smith & Wesson aimed at the ground, peering down its barrel. Then he released the hammer with his thumb and eased the trigger out. In case I need it later, he told himself, wedging the gun into his belt under his jacket.