Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “Why is that damned thing so long?” Scott asked about the gaff when Aurelio stepped over the wall with the stool and box of equipment, leaving Max alone in the pit with the bird.

  The look Aurelio shot him contained a hint of scorn, as though he was tired of Scott’s ignorant doubt. In the pit, under the watchful eye of the referee, the handlers exchanged birds, checking that wings and tails had been duly clipped, the gaffs positioned correctly. Satisfied, they swapped birds again, each retreating a few steps to groom and primp the feathers of his fighting cock one last time.

  “He never tell me he is also the handler,” Aurelio said, rocking side to side, his weight tilting on one foot, then the other, his voice heavy with disapproval.

  The referee summoned the handlers and the crowd clamored in anticipation of the bout. Each handler urged his bird forward, holding it by the tail feather as the gamecocks collided and exchanged pecks, their feathers ruffled, wings spread, striking at each other without yet inflicting any damage. This practice of breasting and billing enticed the birds to engage right away. You could see the fight enter their eyes.

  Withdrawing until he stood by the low burlapped wall, Max smiled at Scott and Aurelio, saying, “Deseale suerte a mi gallo glorioso.”

  “He boasts again of his handsome bird, asks for our blessing,” Aurelio said.

  “It’s what the birds might say,” Scott suggested, “all that strutting and attitude, it’s what they might say of themselves if they could. We are handsome, therefore invincible.”

  Aurelio smiled at the remark, but it was a grim smile, forced or insincere, maybe both. So Scott asked what troubled him.

  “He should be concentrating on the bird,” Aurelio snapped, and Scott was relieved to find that he wasn’t the source of the Spaniard’s displeasure. Clearly, though, Aurelio had his doubts about Max and his bird. Had he too laid down a large bet on the beautiful Spanish black?

  Again the referee beckoned the handlers, ordering them to pit the birds, so Max set his handsome black bird with the bright red face in the dirt before him, hovering above and behind the bird, far enough away that it could focus solely on its rival. Instinct told the bird to swagger, pontificate, prepare for onslaught. Its opponent, a stunning white gamecock with bluish-gray breast feathers, came in low and aggressive. The birds measured each other, one craning its neck forward, the other lunging for a quick strike, their wings raised and flapping in sharp, violent motions, each parry and riposte sounding like a percussive slap. As the Spanish black sprang into the air, leading with talonlike feet and the torturous metal gaffs, it flared its wings above its nape angelically, slanting forward, such grace in the low-to-the-ground flight of the two opponents that for a brief interval it was as though they floated in an image torn from someone’s elegant dream.

  The white gamecock was swifter, mercurial in its movements. It slipped past the talons of the Spanish black, dodging thrusts, then billing it hard and stiff in the neck, the two birds propping themselves and rotating on their tail feathers, raising talons and bounding forward, gaffs held high, searching for angles at which to strike. The Spanish black’s responses and adjustments lagged behind those of its rival. All at once it became clear that Max’s bird couldn’t win. When Scott glanced again at Aurelio, he saw defeat written on the Spaniard’s face.

  What happened next—in a manner of minutes, in a splash of time in which all incidents blur—was one of those events in life people often say are best forgotten. You might spend half your time wishing to remember exactly what you’d done (unable to rid yourself of the belief that even forgotten actions contain hints of the true self), the other half feeling grateful that the mind is so marvelously porous (so much of everyday experience slipping almost immediately beyond our apprehension of it). There may be occasions on which we ought to be thankful for what we can’t remember, but always there is the allure of shame, a sense that here lies one more thing that must remain hidden from sight, even perhaps from yourself.

  This much Scott would remember: how the white but blue-breasted bird rose above his rival in full plume, able to get higher all of a sudden, how its steel gaffs plunged into black feathers, frenzied, loosened, floating free as a gaff snagged in the other bird’s breast. Even in injury, Maximiliano’s bird was undaunted, its plumage gorgeous, the feathers from crown to cape standing on edge like frightened hair, wings raised and awful. With the gaff caught in the chest of the black bird, the referee called for the handlers to separate the cocks, Aurelio striding into the pit with the stool and box, Scott pressed against the low burlap wall from the outside, studying the bird. Max tended to his gamecock by plucking a choice feather or two, cooling it with water, applying salve to the wound, but mostly by holding the bird upright so it might crow and jut its neck, gagging on the blood clots in its chest. “If it hacks up a chunk of blood,” Aurelio said to Scott, “that is good.” But as far as Scott could tell the blood merely curdled in the bird’s punctured lung.

  Next he must have walked out wide along the wall, for he could remember Famosa García saying, “The beginning is full of the end. Es portentoso, an opening of ill portents for your bird, compañero,” and though possibly it wasn’t intended as such, Scott heard the remark as a taunt. The referee called for the birds to be pitted again, their fury and hatred for each other evident in their reptilian eyes, and when Max set the Spanish black down, it glared with bright-eyed hauteur at its rival. Almost immediately the white bird inflicted further damage, descending swiftly, a gaff tripping on the edge of the Spanish black’s wing before glancing off. After that, Max’s bird could no longer lift itself off the ground, and the white gamecock came in once more, feet raised, gaffs aimed at its rival, already tilting badly to the left, nearly prone, and as the blows landed Scott felt them as if they struck his own chest.

  It must have been that which led him to hurdle the burlap wall amid a frenzy of shouting, the order of events from here on out arbitrary, as if a spirit of chaos had descended over the pit. Maybe the referee turned and signaled for help (in memory Scott possessed an image of the man’s contemptuous gaze), but in any event before he reached the bird, Famosa García’s German and two locals came out of nowhere to tackle him and he fought back, fists raised, swinging wildly, inaccurately, believing he had to get to the black gamecock if only to spare a single proud bird this rite of barbarism. He took several blows to the head, clenched fists at first, then wild shots to the stomach, one to the solar plexus that knocked the wind out of him and brought him to his knees, gasping, coughing up phlegm even as someone kicked sand in his face. His nose was bleeding. In the confusion he lost track of his opponents, until his gaze latched onto the man in the white suit and he rolled toward him, designing retaliatory damage even in defeat, if only for one of his opponents, if only by bloodying his white linen suit. Scott grabbed at the linen ankle cuffs, attempting to pull the German to the ground, and as the other two assailants increased the severity of their blows, he tried to rub his bloodied nose against the fine clean fabric of the suit of the man who stood above him kicking his leg to free it. Eventually, Scott collapsed, as someone ground a knee high into his clavicle, as someone else plunged a thumb into his eye, the spray of sawdust and granules of sand grinding across the surface of the cornea as he clamped the lid shut and only lamely fended off blows. He rolled free, beyond the kicks to his stomach and groin, the point of someone’s boot catching the bad eye, the pain shooting to his temple, the eye throbbing, difficult now even to open it. Soon he lay in the dirt a few feet from where the gorgeous white gamecock stood over its rival, strutting, taunting, driving its beak into the wounded bird’s chest. A gamecock with any fight left might have held up its heels, offering a well-aimed gaff as a last defense against certain death, but the Spanish black only lay on his side, the reptilian head lifted in a show of defiant dignity as he waited for the rival to come at him again.

  Above Scott the handlers of the birds pled with the referee and cursed the man at their feet, Max mor
e viciously than the other handler, who now held the white gamecock in his arms, turning the triumphant bird away from the rival it hadn’t yet finished off. Several men joined the circle of Scott’s assailants, who while relenting in their attack kicked him every now and then for good measure. A boot pitched at his shoulder glanced off the clavicle instead, so that he felt a sharp twinge in the same area where he’d shattered the bone in that diving accident several years ago. He tucked his wounded arm under his body, fearing the worst, wincing in pain but trying to prevent greater injury, wishing somehow to get beyond this moment so he could assess the damage to himself.

  Among Scott’s attackers stood Famosa García, not so much intervening as helping to decide what should happen next. At last Aurelio arrived, maybe he had been there the entire time, and he shouted that the Americano had rightly paid for what he had done. Scott wanted to protest, tasting blood in his mouth, but since he seemed to have been forgotten for the moment, he felt along his waist for the Smith & Wesson revolver, ready to pull it on the next person who tried to kick him, except it wasn’t there, that was yesterday, the gun was back in the hotel room with Zelda. If only he’d thought to bring the damned gun. Was this their idea of a fair fight in Cuba? His head dizzied by pain, anger, and alcohol, his mouth filling with blood and saliva as his lungs burned from the effort to catch his breath, he pressed a palm into the sand to raise himself, afraid to use the other because of the sharp stinging in the clavicle on that side. Please don’t let it be broken again, he said to himself.

  He would remember later that he had tried to do a one-handed push-up to get to his knees, but the heel of a boot descended, digging into the small of his back so that he was flattened against the ground once more, the boot stepping on the hand by which he’d tried to raise himself. Facedown in the dirt, he felt split open, unprotected: the jagged pain in the clavicle, the raw sear in his lungs; but worst of all was the eye, swollen shut, constantly blinking, fluttering, and he could feel a scraping along the surface of the eye, as though a piece of coarse fabric were embedded beneath the lid.

  Some of the pain and outrage would subside within the hour, the parameters of the event blurring until Scott reached a point where he could hardly see himself as an actor in the scene that had unfolded in the pit. It is often this way with our greatest humiliations. Leftover feelings (indignation, embarrassment, remorse) persist, but gradually they detach themselves from the event itself. Later it even becomes possible to treat the episode, if only in the way we talk about it in our heads, as belonging to that which is unreal.

  Aurelio kept arguing with the men, saying that Scott’s transgression was irrelevant, that the cockfight was long over, the Spanish black clearly done for after the second injury. Only then did Scott remember to search the floor of the pit again to locate the gamecock, which lay maybe four feet from him, slick and greenish black through the chest, the fine sheen of its coat glistening like oil on the surface of water, the bird no longer attempting to lift its head, since no antagonist stood above, taunting it with the knowledge of its own dying. Max protested, shouting at Aurelio, spewing tobacco juice at his feet, claiming that his bird still possessed a reasonable chance of winning. But one only had to look at the Spanish black, prone on the floor of the pit, and listen for the gurgling noise emitted from its perforated chest to know better. The bird kept kicking his legs, spinning, scattering sawdust, trying to recover and fight and kill whatever it was that had done this to him, but he couldn’t right himself.

  No one could understand what Scott had done or why he had done it, Aurelio least of all. “I told you this was not the one,” he said, practically spitting with anger, pleading with him in hindsight, wanting answers—but this remark must have come after they extracted him from the pit, half-carrying him to the Oldsmobile, Scott supported on the shoulders of Aurelio and Famosa García. “I told you our winner comes much later,” Aurelio said. “I do not see why you have done this, Scott Fitzgerald.” It seemed to him that Aurelio’s wrath, though contained, was greater even than that which Scott had suffered in the pit. Expecting consolation from his friend for the way the German and the two local Cubans had come at him all at once, hardly a fair fight, Scott instead met with disgust. Now it was Famosa García who spoke up on Scott’s behalf, “It is a weakness in Americanos I have met. To watch an animal dying, it is something they cannot do. It does not fit with their image of themselves.” All Aurelio could say in response was “¡Ay, cabrón!” They had been banned from the cockfights, Aurelio as well as Scott. “You cost us money, Scott Fitzgerald, do you understand? You owe us money.” He spoke with contempt, as if dressing down a soldier who had panicked under fire. “Why did you try to rescue that no-good bird? It is acceptable to lose the early bets, remember, I tell you this.” But somewhere in the middle of the Spaniard’s lecture the night went black.

  14

  NEAR THE END OF ANY VACATION SHE WOULD START TO WANT THE hours back, reclaiming whole days in her mind, the ones squandered on bad company and poor restaurants, on visits to art galleries that displayed nothing but minor talent. Mostly, she regretted the mistakes she made with Scott, episodes during which she tried his patience or ran off spur of the moment without telling him where she was headed. He might promise not to hold them against her, but they hung over them—how could they not?—as further proof of her illness. She refused to dwell, however, inside the betrayals and recriminations. “What’s done is done,” she whispered to herself, a mantra reminding her that sorrows and regrets mattered only insofar as they placed limits on what might happen next. Still, a sickly envy infected her behavior, an envy not so much for other people’s lives or the adventures that remained open to them as for her own better days.

  Dejected, she spent the night in bed, drained of expectations, wondering how much of it was her own fault. Maybe she really was asking too much of him. She knelt for a while at the foot of the bed, read from the Field novel, dozing off with a finger in the pages of the book only to be visited by silhouettes adrift on the weak orb cast by the lamp, glinting in splashes of red and gold. She prayed, still not fully awake, Dear God, we’ll try again, please say we’ll try again, but her petitions provoked the sibilant whispering. In half-sleep she pulled herself up in the bed, listening for words from guests in an adjacent room, from revelers in the room above, trying to locate a source, any source, that might account for the noise. She tried to evaluate herself objectively. The voices were bothersome but not yet ominous, she reasoned. Saying aloud to herself: “It’s my choice.” And: “It’s not yet illness as long as there’s choice involved.”

  Sometime after midnight she awoke with a start and walked onto the second-floor terrace to inspect the courtyard, leaning on the balustrade to peer down into the recesses of the arched portals, the cement cool beneath bare feet. Rather than returning to bed she pulled the chair from the desk onto the terrace to keep watch on the courtyard staircase. Without dread or fear, with only the grim certainty that she must stay alert for what came next, she kept herself erect in the stiff-backed wood chair.

  She was still sitting, just so, as a buzz mounted from the courtyard. “Which room is it, which is Mr. Fitzgerald’s?” “Will we wake her, do you suppose?” Scott’s was not among the murmuring voices. “This staircase, are you certain?” Now a woman’s voice in a French accent, Maryvonne most likely: “Yes, it’s the only one possible because their balcony faces the sea.” As the voices climbed the stairs, someone asked whether after yesterday’s events the wife would be able to handle the news, and another member of the party replied tersely, in Cuban-inflected English, “I do not see that there is another option.”

  Zelda braced herself for the worst. Two men rounded the corner, stumbling forward as they supported a wastrel of a man between them, but they started at discovering her sitting there alone, in that stiff-backed wood chair, the door of the room propped open as she gazed into the dark. She could only have been waiting for them, yet she said nothing. They called her by nam
e, “Is that you, Mrs. Fitzgerald?”, then more formally, “Mrs. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, is that you?” Several additional people now gained the terrace, clustering behind the two men who shouldered the slumping figure who was most likely her husband, though she couldn’t be sure from here, the eaves of the terrace projecting long shadows over the faces of those assembled at the top of the stairs.

  “It’s about Mr. Fitzgerald. He is hurt,” a distinguished, statuesque stranger announced. The panic rose in her chest. Time to face it again, time to see what her husband had done to himself. The stranger asked permission to enter the room and lay Scott on the bed, and as he drew close she could see that his companion was their handsome guide from Havana, who raised a finger to the brim of his hat and nodded politely.

  “Zelda,” Scott mumbled, recognizing her, trying to raise his arm, but it only flopped uselessly against his body. His face a bloody pulp, lips swollen, a white gauze bandage taped over his eye, he was covered in cuts and blood that had seeped into the cloth of his fine blue shirt. “Zelda,” he whispered as though she alone could hear him, “you have to help me, we have to get the bastards who did this.”

  “Revenge is a dish best served cold, Mr. Fitzgerald,” counseled the distinguished man in the beige linen jacket who had placed himself in charge of delivering Scott to safety.

  “Or at the very least sober,” Famosa García said.

  “Serves them right, though,” Scott remarked, more or less in conversation with himself.