Men who had secrets to hide.
Her irked sister dancers looked on in a huff,
Accepting her discarded cargo—
Swearing that once the night’s chits were cashed in,
On her they would form an embargo.
It was late in the night that Gloria saw him—
A gringo-fare, standing apart.
He was dapper and lean, by decades her senior;
His impassiveness fluttered her heart.
She decided that moment that he’d be her ‘take,’
And crossed the floor, meeting his eyes.
He stood still and watched as she circled around,
Pressing him flush to her thighs.
‘¿Cómo se llama? Señor Guapo?’
He stared, and again she said—‘Name?’
‘Scholtens,’ he answered, ‘I’m Dutch—new in town.’
And he told her he made sugarcane.
Gloria smiled as she led him to dance,
And in stillness together they clung;
As the dancers brushed past and boleros blared on,
She knew she had reached the first rung.
‘Honey—¡Dios mío! A sugarcane farmer?’ Truman had squealed when he first heard the tale.
He was parked in a booth across from Gloria, in their muy propio spot—a place they went to be alone. To share secrets, where there was no fear of anyone they knew inhabiting adjacent tables. No well-bred ears to overhear even the filthiest of rants.
The Howard Johnson’s diner in Queens. Sometimes the one on the Jericho Turnpike, New York State Route 25. They called these expeditions ‘slumming it,’ for indeed no one they knew—their partners included—would be caught dead in such a place.
On the occasion in question they’d chosen the Turnpike location, as Gloria took care to be particularly discreet. She didn’t mention Señor Scholtens ever, or the fact that she’d once been his Señora. But there was something that Truman had told her that inspired her confession. About his own Mama and her ambition to marry her way out of Podunk, Alabama. How a man named Arch in his slick suit with his fancy speech wooed her with talk of New Orleans.
‘My Mama realized pronto that my Daddy didn’t have dos pesos to rub together. On their honeymoon he ran outta dinero and hadta ask her to pay. Lord, she was just sixteen! So she did what any scrapper would—she went in search of bigger fish, the pursuit of which ended up killing her.’ And then—as if making a declaration of the purest form of love—he said, ‘You’ll be my new Mama, now that mine is gone—my adopted Latina ma.’
‘Su madre adoptiva.’ Gloria had smiled.
‘Mamacita. You know my Mama would’ve given her teeth to be just like you… She tried so hard to be Cuban, to pawn herself off as Nina, but she couldn’t run far enough from scrawny ole Lillie Mae, from her hicksville hillbilly past.’
It was then Gloria chose to tell him the Ballad of the Dance Hall.
Of the wedding to Señor Scholtens, a husband she’d taken great pains to erase.
A husband she’d marry in less than a month and leave in no more than six. He’d been right to question the sugarcane, Truman—though he was wrong about the farming.
‘He was no farmer, Diablito—but a factory manager.’
‘Not much better!’
She nodded in agreement. In fact, it haunted her still.
The stench that never left her. The stench that reminded her always of what it was like to be trapped. She had imagined that a house would be all she’d ever need. Anything to escape the patios de vecindad, with its slapdash shacks in the midst of courtyards stuffed to capacity; ten people in a single filthy room. Gloria Rubio thought anything must be a step up from neighbors on top of neighbors—vecinos asfixia vecinos—two hundred to a courtyard with their flies and racket and waste. What she hadn’t banked on was the stench of the cane.
Sugarcane, as it turned out, was anything but sweet. Instead the smell the plant emitted was one of relentless putrefaction. The stench of sugarcane came to represent to the new Señora Scholtens the very scent of death. She could envision herself taking her life, spiking a drink with poison from a bottle, perhaps falling asleep in the bath. She stopped herself for fear it might take days or even weeks for her corpse to be discovered, subsumed by the rot of the plant.
Señor Scholtens doused himself with aftershave, yet once the noxious fumes of sugarcane found its way into her nostrils, it’s all that she could smell on him. Beneath his impeccably scrubbed fingernails, in the follicles of his mustache, seeping from his beautifully cologned pores, she always detected the acrid scent of decay.
She knew she had to flee before it took her with it.
One evening as he slept, his bestially stinking perfume lingering on her skin, Señora Gloria Scholtens sat at her vanity, silently applying her rouge. Darkening her lips the color of sangre. Quietly rising and slipping into the second skin of an evening dress. Stealing into the night, lured by the sultry triple-pulse of boleros and finer aromas in the night air.
She knew that she’d find a cabaret. Knew that she would saunter to a table, enjoying the eyes of the opposite sex upon her. She knew that she would sit alone, her fine profile tilted high. She knew a well-dressed man would eventually summon the courage to buy her a drink, and she would feel her power return to her, as she accepted with a smile.
She could feel the tempo of the music inside her picking up in pace, brightening in tone, exploding into the next movement of—
Hark, Diablito! The City of Lights!
On a crisp Paris midwinter’s eve!
Where Gloria Rubio—again on her own—
Proved how much a poor girl could achieve.
While rivals were clad in jewels and couture,
It was said that she bore regal carriage—
‘Be she milliner’s shop girl or nightclub hostess,
She’ll make a fortuitous marriage—’
‘Wait, Mamacita! What year are we in?’ Truman interrupted, this time treading water at the circular swim-up bar in the Villa Vera Racquet Club pool. Licking salt off the rim of his margarita, Acapulco Bay sprawling gloriously beyond. Beside him, Gloria, perched on a chlorine-submerged barstool, shaded by dark glasses and a red sun hat.
‘¡Paciencia! I’m getting there…’
‘And weren’t you already married? To Mister Sugarcane?’
‘Maybe I was,’ she allowed, sipping her hibiscus cooler, fingering a decorative blossom in her glass. ‘Maybe I wasn’t. It was so long ago, I really can’t recall.’
‘And how did we get from Veracruz to France?’
‘Via Mexico City? Or was it New York—? I can’t remember which.’
‘You’re quite an unreliable narrator, you know.’
‘You’re one to talk, Señor “Busybody.”’
Truman beamed with appreciation. ‘Touché, Mamacita.
Touché.’
‘Now listen, pequeño niñato,’ quipped the spirited corridista, as the narrative shifted to its next evolution; its heroine to her next incarnation.
She was barely a day over twenty,
In December of 1935,
Yet she’d ripened and seasoned beyond her years
As if she’d lived multiple lives.
The inscrutable Gloria Rubio
Gave them cause for widespread debate:
In France as a genteel student?
Or courting a darker fate?
Some thought her a Mexican leftist,
Fleeing political rage,
Escaping her father’s assassins,
For slander he’d typed on a page.
She now hailed from Guadalajara
(Veracruz wiped from the slate),
Shrouded in mystery, free of her past,
The ideal candidate for a mate.
Some claimed she was secretly wealthy;
Gold stashed in Swiss bank accounts;
Some disagreed, yet turned a blind eye
When she wed a von Fürs
tenberg count.
They moved to Berlin in late’ 36
And here’s where it gets a bit hazy…
Whispers of dangerous ‘friends’ on the rise,
Though ‘the Countess’ would deem such talk crazy.
The slander was scattered (whatever the truth)
’Midst the smart set during the war—
‘Gloria Fürstenberg—“Traitor” and “Spy”!’
The Countess no more than a— —
‘Whore?’ Truman suggested, sucking on a papaya, spitting out the seeds. Gloria splashed pool water in his direction. ‘Well, sugar—get to the nitty-gritty! Was you working for the Nazis, or wasn’t you?’ Gloria sipped her cooler, silent. ‘Because Slim’s friend Aline—now the Countess of Romanones—she was spying for the Allies in Madrid during the war, and she says she knew you quite well… And that you were working for the other side…’
She stared at him, expressionless.
‘Chismoso,’ she spat, turning and swimming toward the stairs. Her companion dog-paddled after her, nipping at her heels.
‘Well, of course I’m a gossip! But that’s not why I’m interested!’
She emerged from the pool, like a glistening Aztec goddess. ‘Why, then, are you interested? If not to run tell Slim and Babe and the other tipas… ?’ Wrapping herself in a towel, reclining ina chaise beneath a palm, she tilted her hat-brim, blocking him out.
‘Because, Mamacita, I’m interested in your story.’ He stretched out in the twin chaise beside her, drip-drying in the sun as she eyed him with suspicion. ‘You are the most intriguing woman I know. You’re like an epic heroine—but better, because you’ve actually lived.’ This seemed to placate her. ‘I, Truman Garcia Capote’—he only used ‘Garcia’ around Gloria— ‘solemnly swear I will not tell a living, breathing soul. Cross my heart and hope to die.’
‘Doubtful.’
Suddenly he lowered the pitch of his voice, dropping all affect.
‘Please. Someone should know—whatever you went through. And I’d be honored if it was me.’
She stared at him, then surveyed the Club clientele warily. As if the bikinied bathers with their golden tans or the daiquiri-swilling swells might house a mole in their midst.
‘All right,’ Gloria said to Truman. ‘But not here. Not now.’
THAT EVENING, IN her own time, she told him. In the privacy of her casa high above the bay—beneath the domed palapa that mimicked the huts of Veracruz. She resumed, in husky, lyrical incantation, the tale of her next incarnation.
Her most mythic of ballads—that of the Wartime Waltz.
To neutral Madrid, two children in tow,
The Countess von Fürstenberg traveled.
With the Count shipped away to the cold Russian front,
The marriage had all but unraveled…
‘Why “unraveled”?’ Truman asked, his voice hushed. Reverent.
Gloria paused. For a moment, silence; the gentle chorus of cicadas on the breeze.
‘I loved him, Fürstenberg… I truly loved Franz-Egon. I thought he was what I’d been searching for. In those saloons and dance halls, on my feet so many nights, so many hours, they’d bleed with the effort. Me leading. Luring. All those bodies… Never a fit. From the moment I met Franz—at Le Bal des Petits Lits Blancs in Paris—he led. He practically lifted me off the floor. I thought, This is it. The last big fish I’ll ever have to hook!’
‘And then… ?’
‘We married in London, moved to Berlin, had the children… We were wildly in love. It seemed too perfect to last. Turns out it was.’
‘What happened?’
‘The war.’ She lit a Sobranie and sat back in her chair. ‘He was stationed in Russia—the Fourth Panzer Division. And from the moment he left I was sick with worry. That he’d be killed, or I’d hear he’d gone missing. That he’d lose those beautiful limbs of his. That he’d never come back… I wrote him a letter a day for a year.’
‘And him?’
‘A bit at first, then… silencio.’ Eyes enormous. Anguished.
‘Darling.’
‘I started to imagine he had died. I pretended that I was a widow, just to get through the days. Knowing was better than not knowing, even if I invented it. I think I started going quietly mad. I really did think about ending it all, perhaps even killing…’ She trailed off. ‘I needed to find some scrap of myself—to recover even an ember of what used to burn inside of me. I needed to do something to force myself to live again.’
‘What did you do?’
A shade of a smile in the half-light.
‘The one thing I knew how to…’
’Twas on the Eve of Saint John, in late’ 42,
Countess Fürstenberg sat at her vanity;
The reflection stared back, an expressionless blur,
As she pondered the state of her sanity.
She painted her lips a cardinal red,
And slipped into black satin gown;
Round her neck hung a noose of the finest of pearls,
As she left for a night on the town.
A taxi she took to the streets of Berlin,
In search of a palace of pleasure.
Charlottenburg’s nightclubs of old had been shut;
There were Party-backed venues to measure.
Each eve out she ventured, dressed to the nines,
To dance on the edge of the flames.
Manically festive, adrift in the whirl,
Befriending a roster of Names…
Why shouldn’t she mix with high-ups in the Party,
If favors were theirs to convey?
For each small advancement, each freedom she gained,
Her dues Countess Fürstenberg paid.
The festivities raged, savage parties each night,
Champagne and dancing she’d found;
They reveled and sang and they flirted and drank
To forget the world crumbling around.
Nothing could stop the indulgence they craved,
Not even the bombs when they fell.
An explosion would rupture the dance for a breath—
Then the revels continued in hell.
It was here that our Gloria met the big fish,
The ones who’d provide her way out.
For her favors, safe passage and visas they’d give,
While she made the most of their clout.
Her fame spread through the Reich as one they might trust,
She dining with Himmler and Goering,
Even Herr Hitler was struck by her charm,
He— —
‘Hitler?’ Truman couldn’t help but interrupt. ‘Mamacita, are you telling me you dined with the Führer himself ?’
‘On occasion.’
‘Look, I’m as big a fan of the manner of telling as anyone… But I’m simply dying to know. Were you actually a Nazi spy?’
Gloria took a final drag from her Sobranie, stamping it into an ashtray.
‘I did what I needed to do. To get out. To get my children out. Berlin had grown dangerous. We couldn’t stay there. So I did what I’ve always done. I made myself attractive. I charmed the right men. I let them fall in love with me.’
‘Who did you work for?’
‘All of them. General Wolff of the SS provided my exit permit. The Spanish ambassador, my visa.’
‘And the others? What did they provide?’
‘Safety.’
‘In exchange for… ?’
‘Sometimes a dance, sometimes more. Just like the old days.’
‘Did you smuggle secrets?’
‘I suppose, but I never knew what secrets I shared. I was given a dress shop in Madrid. Bespoke designs, by appointment. Let us be clear—it wasn’t a dress shop. It was fitted with a transmitter in the back room. When I received a coded message, I sent it along to Berlin.’
‘To the Gestapo?’
Gloria nodded, suddenly far away. Picturing still nights inthe Plaza de Colón, lingeri
ng at sidewalk tables over glassesof sweet vermouth. Of cobblestone streets down whichlovers strolled, fingers entwined. Of the tiny boutique in the Calle de Hermosilla, its showroom displaying elegantfrocks. Bolts of finest silks and hand-crafted lace, so cost-prohibitive they could only serve to deter actual customers. Of its rickety stairs leading to a hidden chamber, with itswires and code boards; of its enormous transmitter radio,linked to SS headquarters. Of the heady circles in which she had run, the fêtes and balls and cruises. Of the men that she’d dazzled—more often seduced—in order to access their secrets.
‘Mamacita… ?’ Her reverie broken by Truman.
‘Yes, Diablito?’
‘Did you kill anybody?’
‘Not that I know of. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’ And with that Truman rose and came to sit beside her, patting her arm. She poured them each a glass of mescal, which they sipped in silence, save for the ongoing thrum of the cicadas.
WHAT FOLLOWED WAS Public knowledge. She’d proudly disclosed her post-war history to anyone who asked, for even her failures confirmed her ascent. She’d climbed too high to ever slide back down, and she didn’t care who knew it. These more recent facts she’d shared with Truman early on, over countless luncheon tables— from cheap diners to Le Cirque. From the decks of the Seraphina to the slopes of St. Moritz. Poolside, at her various houses. Ring-side, where they smoked cigarillos and chattered as Cassius Clay battled Sonny Liston in six rounds of grit and grace. Where Gloria could be found, so might her disciple, feeding off her tales.
And thus, Diablito, peace was restored,
On May 8th, 1945.
The Count returned home, to find his wife gone—
She had done what it took to survive.
She had met an Egyptian, eight years her junior,
A penniless prince she would marry,
But three years of scrimping and saving in Cairo
Proved too heavy a burden to carry.
Two years had passed when she caught her last fish,
The banking and brewery heir,
He was already married to one of her ‘friends’—
Though she felt little conscience or care.
‘My husband loves boats and I cannot bear them,’
Her friend made the mistake to confide.
‘Gloria dear, be a doll and go with him?’
(Never dreaming he’d pick a new bride!)
Swan Song Page 23
