Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “Scott,” she whispered as the men carried him through the small foyer, embarrassed by her own words, ready to take them back even as she spoke them, “if you can’t take care of yourself, who’s going to take care of me?”

  The strangers, though, didn’t need to hear any of this. She wished them gone at once, out of her room, out of sight, but first she wanted answers. Someone owed her a story: who had done this to her husband? Just then Maryvonne rushed into the room, straight to Scott’s side, now propping pillows behind him, now raising his head and his chest, announcing that she would need to inspect his wounds again.

  “What’s she doing here?” Zelda asked, addressing herself to Scott, though he was the person in the room least capable of answering.

  “I am a nurse, I can help him,” Maryvonne insisted.

  “Did you do this?” Zelda said and the Frenchwoman straightened, misunderstanding the question until she perceived the finger pointed at the bandage over Scott’s eye.

  She had been enjoying a drink on the hotel patio, she said, when her husband and these men came back from their night out, recounting Scott’s preposterous attempt to break up a cockfight. So Maryvonne truly hadn’t been with Scott at the cockfights. Immediately Zelda’s jealousy subsided. Maryvonne could be of use, for a while at least.

  “I ask the man behind the desk please find medical supplies,” Maryvonne explained.

  “Naturally, he was beginning to do this very thing,” said the stranger who had carried Scott up the stairs and dragged him to his bed.

  “I am the most competent medical professional,” Maryvonne continued, “in la voisinage, in the region, perhaps you say.”

  The stranger in the beige linen suit and Panama hat introduced himself, tipping the hat: Colonel Eugenio Silva, owner of the Club Kawama. Zelda remembered the couple on the beach speaking of a wedding involving the daughter of the resort’s owner, who was a military man.

  “Your daughter was married only this past weekend,” she said. “I’m awfully sorry, I wish you did not have to bother with any of—”

  “Oh, no,” Maryvonne cried dramatically, hustling toward the French doors, scolding Famosa García as he swung them open to let in cool night air. “The wet air cannot be good for him,” she said, nodding toward Scott, who lay on the bed succumbing to spasms of hollow hacking that ebbed into a moist, sputtering rumble. His lungs, his lungs, she lamented. Famosa García might choose to step outside or stay put, but at any rate the doors to the balcony must remain shut.

  “This is solid advice. We have sent for a doctor,” the owner of the Club Kawama informed them.

  Maryvonne began to recount what she had heard about Scott’s ill-fated protest of the ceremonial slaughter of a Spanish black gamecock, her voice thick with admiration. It was noble, in her opinion, to stick up for tortured birds. Zelda didn’t bother to argue the point. She did notice, however, that Maryvonne hardly spoke to Aurelio, who several times floated into the room to gape at Scott before retreating from the reproachful glance of his wife to the terrace, hovering near the door, sharing a cigarette with Colonel Silva.

  “I hold my husband responsible for this,” Maryvonne said, struggling with the buttons as she tried to remove the shirt of her patient, who in fitful drowsiness slapped playfully at her hand. “He must take better care of Scott.”

  “How could he know his guest would dart into a cockfighting pit—”

  “It is a stupid sport, the gambling, the violence.”

  “But really how could he know that my husband, bolstered by infallible drink, would try to bring an end to a tradition with more than two thousand years of cruel pleasure behind it?”

  “I suppose you are correct,” Maryvonne whispered, not wishing to let Aurelio hear this concession: though he might eventually be exonerated, it wouldn’t happen all at once. So she reviewed for Zelda’s benefit the steps taken on Scott’s behalf, how she had rinsed his eye with water and administered an analgesic to keep Scott from writhing in pain before exploring it for damage. No lasting injury to the cornea as far as she could tell, though it appeared to be scratched rather badly, the swelling in a three-quarter moon along the orbit of the eye a cause for concern. Also Scott winced in pain anytime someone touched his left arm or his chest near the clavicle, and, of course, there was the cough, sounding worse and worse. She recommended a hospital, preferably tonight.

  “Let me check the bones,” she said, “to see if they are broken. Would you help me calm Scott in case the pain alerts him?”

  “Couldn’t you ask Aurelio to do it?” Zelda suggested. “He’ll be better able to hold Scott still. My husband can be fierce when drunk, especially after he’s been wronged.”

  Laying a palm on her shoulder, Famosa García asked if he might speak with her on the balcony. She hadn’t known this man was even on the peninsula, and she couldn’t begin to understand how Scott had ended up again in his company. It might mean Matéo Cardoña was still tracking them, though whether to keep the Havana police off or on their trail she couldn’t have said. Still, she followed this man with the square, strong chin onto the balcony, distracted for several seconds by the chatter of the palms. He returned Scott’s wallet to her after describing how the assailants had rolled her husband while he was on the ground in the pit. It had been a struggle to retrieve the wallet because the men felt cheated. Choosing words carefully, Famosa García impressed on her that the men who’d done this to Scott were not in the wrong. “It was no easy matter,” he said. “If not for the friendship with Señor Cardoña, I might be forced to wash my hands of this matter.”

  She flipped through the billfold, still a large amount of cash inside, though considerably less than before. She had no way of measuring how much might have been pilfered.

  “How much do you suppose is missing?”

  “One thing at a time,” Famosa García said. “I have made arrangements for a car to transport you to Havana this night.” He also recommended a call to Señor Cardoña, who could arrange for Scott to be checked into one of Havana’s finest hospitals. It was a lot for Zelda to take in at once. It meant packing up the room in a quick hour or so; it meant leaving the beach and sun behind before they’d even had a chance to enjoy them. But Scott’s health could not be left to chance. For the next few hours at least, while her husband was too enfeebled to protest her decisions, it was up to her to assure his well-being.

  “What you propose makes sense.”

  “Would you like to speak with Mr. Cardoña first?”

  “Order the car, if you would be so kind,” she said.

  “I have done so.”

  “Please arrange for the hotel to ring Mr. Cardoña,” she said, exercising an authority that depended on her former life, on reserves of charm and worldliness but little else. “Perhaps a half hour from now, when things have calmed down.”

  “Did I ever tell you who you remind me of?” she asked, kissing the Cuban on the cheek by way of thanks. It was impossible to say which of them now held the upper hand, whether she was charming him to procure his assistance or whether she was being baited, drawn along some course charted by Matéo Cardoña for inscrutable reasons. “Remember, the other day, I mentioned your resemblance to a friend of ours? After studying the photograph and your strong chin I noticed it. Ernest Hemingway, you have heard the name?”

  “Of course; he is a famous American author who lives in Cuba. You know him?”

  “One of my husband’s oldest and dearest friends,” Zelda said formally, glad that Scott could not overhear her dropping Ernest’s name to increase their standing in this man’s eyes.

  Inside the room chaos had erupted, or rather, Scott had erupted in the form of chaos. Roaming between the bed and the dresser unsteadily, tilting over his suitcases, ransacking hers, he muttered, “I demand to know where it is.” Maryvonne apprised Zelda of what had happened. She had been examining his wounds, the clavicle that made him wince whenever she touched it. Nothing broken as far as she could tell: a series of b
ruises shaped like the toe of a boot formed a kind of necklace on his skin, several bearing the imprint of a medallion, and also there were open cuts where the boots’ metal toes had sliced into the skin. As she next sterilized the wounds, the sting of iodine stirred Scott, prompting him to curse Famosa García and Colonel Silva, accusing them of being in league with his assailants and vowing to avenge himself once he found a weapon. It was for this reason he now tossed the contents of the luggage, glancing up every few seconds to threaten the two men, warning them they would be sorry if they hung around much longer.

  “Was it wrapped in his shirt?” Zelda interrupted.

  “What?”

  “The medallion?” she said, staring at her husband’s bandaged ribs and naked, bruised chest. “It was around his neck, strung on a piece of twine, a gift from me.”

  “I did not see it, I am sorry,” Maryvonne said.

  “Somebody has hidden it, obviously,” Scott protested abstractly, rummaging through the suitcases.

  “Perhaps all of you could step out onto the terrace for a minute,” Zelda said, and lest they mistake her order for a request, added, “Immediately, please.”

  “What did you do with it?” Scott complained, turning on her now.

  Famosa García herded the others out of the room onto the central terrace in the courtyard, Maryvonne professing reluctance to leave Zelda alone with Scott.

  “He is not himself,” she reasoned.

  “He is my husband and I know all his selves,” Zelda assured her as Famosa García ushered Maryvonne outside and shut the door, which Zelda locked from the inside.

  “Did you hide it on purpose?” Scott said, hovering over his suitcase.

  “It’s on the damned desk where you left it this afternoon,” she replied. He followed the trajectory of her finger and skulked across the room, hanging his head, eyes averted, cupping the handle but aiming the gun at the ground, away from her. He cursed several times, threatening to go after the men who had done this to him.

  “Problem is,” he said, slurring the phrase, taking a swig from a flask of brandy, “simple problem’s this: I don’t who they are.”

  “It does make them difficult to target,” she said lightly, and he smiled at her, tickled by the absurdity of his predicament.

  “Where did you get that?” Zelda inquired, merely nodding at the flask.

  He was pleased enough with his deception, with his well-kept secrets, to indulge her brief sermon on why he shouldn’t be pouring liquor on his misery, not after the drugs he’d been given to quell the hurt in his eye. “Fair enough,” he said, but he would keep the flask for now, also the gun in the event that the men from the cockfight came looking for him. He shuffled bare chested through the French doors onto the small balcony overlooking the beach, the winds off the ocean sharp and raw, the moon-bright sky scrubbed of clouds.

  “Do you know how easy it is to kill birds?” he asked as he turned to her.

  “How easy?”

  “Watch this. See the gull perch there on top the palm.” He aimed the gun and fired at the tree, the shot ringing out in the air as the startled bird flew off. Her body lurched, the percussive explosion echoing in her chest as Scott turned to warn her, “Cover your ears.” Immediately there was pounding at the door, followed by desperate shouts from the courtyard terrace, the words muddled, predictable, exactly the kind of cries, she thought, that people utter in emergencies to compensate for their helplessness.

  “Scott, won’t you please put the gun down?” He fired a second round into the trees as the gulls clawed and circled in the air above the palms, crowing chorally, warning one another.

  “Apparently not that easy,” he said as though considering a change in philosophy. “It’s tougher when you can only see out of one eye.”

  “How is your eye, Scott? May I look?” she asked, approaching him, the pounding at the door of their room urgent now, Maryvonne’s high-pitched clarion call carrying over the male voices.

  “You’re just trying to get the gun,” he said, pulling away from her.

  “Scott,” she cried, losing patience. “I must ring Havana to arrange a doctor for you. Can you promise me not to harm any gulls while I’m gone?”

  “I can do that,” he said, smiling sadly. “If you had ask’ me to kill one, not so sure.”

  Leaving Scott on the balcony, walking through the hotel room to unlock its door, she joined the party nervously assembled on the courtyard terrace, Maryvonne immediately rushing to her side with a barrage of questions, the others joining in. Are you harmed? Is Scott okay? Where did the gunshots come from? Guests cracked doors along the terrace, poking their heads out to cast inquisitive stares, wanting to know what all the damned noise was about but hesitant to complain, not wishing to put themselves in danger.

  “Would you be so kind,” she asked Aurelio, “as to step onto our balcony and help me separate my husband from the gun he is using to shoot at seagulls?”

  “Surely Scott would not be shooting at birds,” Maryvonne protested.

  A veteran of the Republican Army of Spain, stronger and infinitely more sober than Scott, Aurelio followed Zelda onto the balcony.

  “Scott, Aurelio has come to stop you from making a fool of yourself and most likely hurting an innocent in the bargain.”

  “Can I have the gun, Scott?” Aurelio said, stepping in, prepared for a fight if Scott drew on him.

  “Oh, it’s out of bullets anyway,” Scott replied.

  “Where is it, Scott?” Zelda asked, staring at her empty-handed husband, observing that Maryvonne now stood just inside the French doors. “Give the gun to him.”

  Scott, elbow propped on the balcony rail, gestured toward the base of a palm tree. “See over there, hard to see in dark, but I threw’t in the yard, tired of that damned Smith ’n’ Wezz’n, doesn’t shoot straight anyway.”

  Aurelio announced to no one in particular that he would retrieve the gun.

  “I just kept the gun loaded with one or two bullets,” Scott continued, surveying the desolate beach, shirtless, shivering as he spoke, interrupted by his own hacking cough. “I just kept it on hand all this time, in case you slipped away, in case things got too terrible for us.”

  He was referring, of course, to the years when she had seemed past recovery. He could be so maudlin when he drank. Maryvonne glanced at Zelda, sympathy and embarrassment in her smile. Aurelio, standing near the doors, tilted his head to beckon Zelda into the room, and Maryvonne stepped aside to let them pass, then hastened toward Scott, cooing his name, coaxing him to come out of the night air because it wasn’t good for his lungs.

  “I do not recommend putting trust in this Famosa García, whoever he is,” Aurelio said as Zelda listened to Maryvonne pleading behind her. “Scott,” the Frenchwoman implored him, “you must obey me because I am a nurse,” as Scott forlornly, half-flirtatiously replied, “My own nurse?”

  “He is friends with men who did this, you understand,” Aurelio said. “For a long time he talks to them in the pit as Scott lies on the floor, beaten and bleeding. I do not expect him to assist me afterward and I cannot figure out what he is doing. I do not trust him, that is all.”

  Zelda conceded that she had already enlisted Famosa García’s help in arranging transportation to Havana tonight. Maryvonne, arms wrapped around Scott’s torso, palms clamped to his naked chest as she rubbed his stomach and kidneys, led him out of the night air.

  “Be careful what you ask,” Aurelio warned, before hurrying off in search of the gun.

  Matéo Cardoña lifted the receiver of the phone on a small table in the corner of the lobby of the Hotel Nacional. His network in the city was extensive, and when he wished to be found, he was not a difficult man to find.

  “Hello,” he said, in a tone that suggested he had been expecting the call for several days. “How can I be of further service to you, Mrs. Fitzgerald?”

  Famosa García had rung an hour earlier from the peninsula. On hearing his report about what had tra
nspired at the cockfight, Matéo applauded his associate’s plan to have the wife speak with him as soon as possible. “Resourceful of you,” he remarked, not wanting anyone else to lay claim to the Fitzgeralds, wishing to make sure that he was the one to help them, the one to whom they were indebted. And when Famosa García asked to have his own assistance remembered to Mr. Fitzgerald, Matéo replied curtly, “Of course,” assuring his underling that he kept a mental log of favors received, favors paid out.

  “Can you help me?” the woman on the other end of the line asked after explaining her predicament, blunt but altogether dignified in her directness.

  “Did your husband truly try to break up a cockfight?” Matéo replied, laughing. “He is most imprudent in his bravery. Those are dangerous men he crossed, lots of money in play, it is a serious sport. He seems to have a talent for finding trouble.”

  “It was you who took us to that bar on Saturday,” she said.

  “I did not intend any insult,” Matéo replied quickly, adopting a tender if paternalistic tone. “It is good to recall who your friends are, Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald. Do I not deserve your gratitude for the assistance I have rendered so far? Our acquaintance is brief, and though I have not known your husband long, I feel not unlike a brother toward him.”

  “Well, then, you’ll help us,” she said.

  “For just such an emergency, my man is there on the peninsula.”

  “Why is that, may I ask? Why exactly is Señor Famosa García here in the first place, and why was he also at the cockfights?”

  “Oh, this is not so important—Famosa García conducts business of mine. I often use him as courier, as a liaison, since he is reliable, discreet. As for cockfights, they are a passion of his, none of my affair.”

  As she ended the phone call, she wondered which of her own words were genuine, how much of Matéo’s persistent hospitality honest. She wanted to believe in the generosity of other people, but Aurelio’s warning not to trust Famosa García or anyone he knew lingered in her thoughts.