Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  “Then we must think of something else altogether.”

  The charismatic Cuban was distinctively Mediterranean in appearance, with thick, dark hair, eyes brown-black and piercing like those of some magnificent bird of prey, and a long, rugged, lightly tanned face, his sloping nose set symmetrically like a pitched tent above a paintbrush mustache and two quarter-moon lips. In a beige linen suit, a white shirt, and brown and red striped tie that accentuated the lines of his lean body, he wore the last throes of youth well. He hailed from a traditional Catholic family that owned a tobacco plantation outside the city of Santiago de Cuba and openly professed loyalty to the Spanish crown. Since the mid-nineteenth century any man who didn’t join the family business went on to become an architect, lawyer, engineer, or government administrator, their contributions as citizens demonstrable in the buildings, roads, statutes, and policies of their beloved city. When Matéo chose study in the United States, he broke with tradition and cast himself as the family’s black sheep, further alienating himself by later supporting the now defeated Republican cause in Spain as well as a succession of failed progressive reforms here at home. So fierce were the disagreements with his family that on returning from New York to his homeland, he had emigrated within his own country, from the east up to Havana.

  His memories of New York City were bittersweet, since he looked back on those years as the best of his life. He had thrived in that cosmopolitan city, on the easy exposure to new ideas in arts and letters, in the commercial and social sectors. In winding up a story about an evening at the Algonquin, he reached out to touch Scott’s jacket, saying, “Listen to this,” as if to impart a secret of great significance, except each sentence that followed proved no less generic and predictable than those that had come before. His stories about New York were twice-told stories, constructed over the course of a decade to account for his time among the yanquis. When he spoke of the crash, Matéo talked as if it were a distinctly perceptible event, as if the market when it came down made a sound like a building collapsing and everyone rushed into the street to see what was happening, the loss of investments and savings and stored-up dreams instantaneous, the resulting suicides occurring all at once, people tumbling out of windows everywhere, littering the streets and sidewalks like corpses on a battlefield.

  “Where were you in October 1929, mi compañero?” Matéo asked him. “What did you see?”

  “On a camel’s back, most likely,” Scott said.

  Matéo translated his words and the girl laughed, spitting out a bit of her drink.

  “It’s no joke,” Scott said, “though I thank you for laughing all the same. I seem to recall that I was in Morocco with my wife.”

  “I think to myself,” the woman explained, “there are no camellos in New York, and the picture is muy raro, how you say—”

  “Bizarre,” Matéo interjected.

  “We were ignorant of what had happened for several days,” Scott said, “catching only echoes of the event in the international papers.”

  “And it is no joking matter, of course,” Matéo said to the girl, reprimanding her for her irreverence. “I must walk over several suicides as they lay dying in the streets, their spines shattered, no reason to hang on anymore.”

  But it wasn’t like that, Scott wanted to protest. Even war wasn’t like that most of the time.

  Just then he felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. Staring at his shoes, he tried to remember where and when he had purchased them. The room was revolving like a carnival ride, the lobby populated in its corners by soft, shadowy black forms, everything in the foreground out of focus.

  “I have to be off.”

  “Mi compañero, we are enjoying your company, you cannot leave. Besides—”

  “I must see to my wife’s dinner,” Scott said, aware that he was being rude, but knowing from experience that if he did not get food in his stomach soon, he would lose hold of the night.

  “Besides, it is uncivilized to eat before nine,” Matéo declared. “I miss much about your America to the north, except your dinner hour. This I could never bring myself to accept.”

  “We only arrived yesterday, we haven’t made the transition. My wife is still catching up on sleep,” Scott said, “and she will—”

  “I will tell you what we shall do,” Matéo said, refusing to relinquish his new friend. He proposed that they walk to the end of Calle Obispo and enjoy a drink at La Floridita, renowned for its daiquiris and seafood. Scott yielded to the friendly coercion because he thought the open air might do him good, postponing thoughts of Zelda and dinner until he regained his equilibrium.

  His equilibrium, however, was in no hurry to return. They walked several blocks into the flow of automobile and pedestrian traffic on the Calle Obispo, under awnings that cast nighttime shadows folding one over the next. The tourist crowds thinned and soon the people passing were mulatto or dark skinned and spoke only in Spanish. The girl, silent for much of the night, attempted to describe an event of some sort, at first in broken English, next in Spanish, then lapsing into pantomime. She gestured at the steps of nearby buildings and the natives assembled there, turning to Scott, asking, “Entiendes?,” fearing he hadn’t and so repeating her phrases, mentioning Americanos and Cuba libre and maybe also the sufferings of friends and family in the wake of the depression and the country’s many internal military conflicts. He couldn’t remember her name, only that it was a thick Spanish word beginning with a Y or a yielding J, and his inability to do so troubled him. He asked Matéo how many blocks until they reached the Floridita.

  Not far, the Cuban promised, motioning up the street into the dark.

  At the next corner Scott still couldn’t make out any likely destinations.

  “It’s too far.”

  “My friend, it is not far at all,” Matéo said, guiding him by the elbow. “We will soon be there.”

  The girl, still gesticulating, pleaded with him to follow.

  “What is she saying?”

  “Only that she wishes you to join us, she is sure you will like La Floridita, she has many friends who drink there regularly.”

  “Tell her that it is kind of her, kind of both of you, but I can’t, not tonight. Zelda will soon come downstairs looking for me and she will be alarmed when she can’t find me.”

  Earlier in the evening Matéo had explained what he did here in Havana, and if only Scott had been paying closer attention, he might have recalled more than the word liaison and a vague account of recruiting American investors. Was it possible that the past three hours were part of a Saturday evening con to draw a lone American down a forlorn urban street?

  “We will escort you to your hotel,” Matéo announced, turning on his heels. “If you wish to enjoy our company, we will join you for dinner at a restaurant on the Plaza de San Francisco near the harbor, but perhaps you and your wife will be eager to dine alone.”

  When the familiar pale rose building of the Ambos Mundos came into sight, the street again populated by people speaking multiple languages, Spanish, English, but also French, German, and Portuguese, Scott remembered his hunger and felt torn about what to do next. The places Matéo had proposed along the harbor seemed far away, but in a spirit of compromise Scott allowed himself to be led to the rooftop restaurant of his own hotel.

  “You are worried about Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald, perhaps?” Matéo asked once they were seated, and for a second Scott couldn’t remember having used his wife’s name. His companion offered to run downstairs and leave a message for her. Only tell him which room. Before Scott could think better of it, he had given out Zelda’s room number, realizing as Matéo walked away that it would have been more circumspect to write a note to his wife and leave it with one of the bellhops at the front desk.

  Seated alone with the girl, Scott studied her closely. He wouldn’t have put her at more than seventeen, the age of his daughter Scottie. Experimenting with English phrases, she inevitably lapsed into Spanish, frustrated to discover from his earn
est but puzzled expression that he couldn’t understand a word she was saying. So she took to giving him language lessons. “Tenedor,” she said, lifting her fork as Scott nodded. A band played a sauntering style of local music, and she began to identify their instruments for him by opening her hand in a soft sweep. Bajo de pie. Guitarra. Maracas. After what seemed a longer than necessary interval, Matéo rejoined them, reporting that he had run into a friend in the elevator but nevertheless completed Scott’s errand.

  “Not long until nine o’clock,” he said with evident satisfaction at having spared his guest the mistake of eating at an uncivilized hour.

  “And where would you go,” Scott asked, “for a late-night cocktail on a Saturday night in Havana?”

  Matéo named several clubs and bars—the bar at the Plaza Hotel, the Two Brothers Bar near the docks, the Pan American Club. “I will show you any of these, or I will escort you to places off the beaten track, in honor of Manhattan speakeasies.”

  The waiter brought the first course, and Scott placed an order for a chicken dish and a side of Moros y Cristianos for Zelda, trying to imagine how he would take the food from the restaurant when the time came to leave. He sampled the vegetables course, yuca and chayote, the latter a kind of squash, and was enjoying a hearty yellow soup when all of a sudden there was a terrific two-beat carom of metal on metal like the sound of two large trucks colliding at high speed or a sharp thunderclap heard from the center of a storm. Scott surveyed the restaurant, then the street, looking for calamity, for violence, for panic. The waiters hadn’t dropped their plates. The customers conversed with one another as they had moments earlier. Only the behavior of the girl at his side was altered. Her tongue rolling in rapid Spanish, she demanded Scott’s attention as Matéo repeated her name again, so that this time Scott caught it, memorizing it by saying it several times in his head: Yonaidys, Yonaidys. Now translating her sentences into English, Matéo managed to keep pace with the zealous outpouring of words.

  “That sound just now,” she explained, “it is the cannon that goes off each night at nine across the harbor at Morro Castle.” She couldn’t say exactly how old the tradition was, older than herself, older than Matéo or Scott, older than anyone she knew. When she was a child her mother would say to her, “As soon as the cañonaso a las nueve sounds, los niños must go to sleep.” It was a custom, so someone once told her, started perhaps by the British when they wrested control of this great city from the Spanish, the signal by which they closed the harbor each night. Over the years in a country where there were not so many clocks, not so many watches, not so many whatever, it became a way of telling everybody, it is now nine o’clock. An everyday threshold for the people of this city—the end of day, beginning of night.

  “So you might enjoy that,” Matéo was saying on behalf of the girl, “if you go to the castle, they have a ceremony around that issue, soldiers who form and march and ignite the cannon.” In pomp and majesty the custom was observed each night.

  “We will be sure to visit the castle,” Scott said. He was imagining his wife sitting up in bed, staring into the darkness of a strange room, groggy and disoriented, jolted from sleep by the blast of the cannon.

  What the girl remembered most of all, well, what she meant to tell him, she could remember saying, “No, Madre, I cannot sleep yet, it hasn’t sounded, you know, el cañonaso hasn’t sounded.” She didn’t know what else to say. It was in their memory, every night, all who were born or made their home in this city.

  The waiter brought the main course, a filet mignon, setting the plates before them, and Scott stood up to take him aside, asking if he might bring the extra plate of food as soon as possible.

  “I must go and check on my wife,” he announced as he reclaimed his seat.

  Matéo looked surprised. “It is just a loud noise. She will have slept through it, either that or she will go back to sleep.”

  “But she will be up and about, expecting me to take her to dinner. She needed the rest yesterday, but she will wish to see Havana tonight,” Scott replied, resenting that he had to explain anything to a man he hardly knew. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll see if she’d like for us to meet you later for a cocktail.”

  “Muy bien,” Yonaidys said agreeably, alert to the growing tension.

  “Eat and we will discuss many things,” Matéo said, and Scott had the sense he was being bullied.

  He could stomach hardly any of the meal. He took small bites, trying to look as though he were savoring each, spreading the rice and plantains across his plate, nibbling at pieces of steak, the food settling high in his stomach, ballooned from all those drinks. The waiter returned with the check and Scott saw that the bill was given in pesos. He had forgotten about the need to change money. He calculated the exchange rate in his head, adding several dollars to the standard tip, the extra money meant to appease someone or maybe just to allow for the possibility that his math was poor. “This should cover it,” he said, putting the money on the table. “Will they accept American dollars?”

  “It is no problem, my friend, but you were to be our guest.”

  “Another night,” Scott said, worrying about his impulse toward generosity. Always this habit, even while in debt, even when he couldn’t predict next month’s income: the worst part of the past ten years was having to hear that damned voice in his head—You can’t afford this, let someone else pay—every time he went to pick up a check.

  Yonaidys rose from her seat, folding her arms around Scott’s shoulders, tilting her chin so that he might graze her cheeks with his lips.

  “Please, if Mrs. Fitzgerald is not too tired,” Matéo said, also standing but not yet embracing Scott, “we will be here for at least a few more hours.”

  “I’ll do my best to persuade her.”

  “If we have left and you wish to find us—”

  “You can leave a note for me at the front desk,” Scott said, uncertain whether he was brushing his host off or making plans to enjoy his company another time. He wouldn’t know anything for certain until he had returned to the room and made sure Zelda was safe.

  Once he was free of his dinner companions, Scott’s affection for them returned. He believed again in his talent for spotting the “good ones” at any party or bar: those people there to be looked at—because, after all, who wasn’t?—who also delved beneath the surface, seeking the beauty from every gathering because memory of it might be all there was to keep you afloat years later when the tribulations came.

  The arrow of the brass dial above the doors indicated that the elevator was on the bottom floor. Too impatient to wait, he made for the gray marble staircase, his dread returning as he envisioned his wife waiting for him, alone and afraid. Taking the stairs in a hurry, he found that he was short of breath after a single flight, annoyed by the fact that he could be winded from descending stairs, but refusing to slow down. Halfway down the next flight, the dizziness set in and he reached a hand to one of the railings as he watched the caged iron elevator ascending, empty except for the operator. By the time he reached their floor, he was panting, having to rest his hands on his knees to catch his breath. He had been pushing himself too hard, for weeks now. Not just the drink, but the worry over Zelda’s and Scottie’s expenses, the constant trolling for work in the wake of his expired contract at MGM, trying to land on a picture, any picture, not caring how good or how promising it was; all he needed was a job that paid well enough to keep his head above water while he made room for his real work, the kind that mostly didn’t pay well, not for him, not anymore. He needed time to immerse himself in the new novel about Hollywood, for which he had already prepared copious notes. It was doubtful he would get much rest on this vacation, most of his hours to be spent worrying whether Zelda was happy, making sure she didn’t slip back. He couldn’t let that happen, he had to bring her back to Asheville intact.

  “Where were you?” Zelda said as he entered the room.

  “Zelda, you’re up at last.”

  �
��Where were you?”

  When it appeared she might sleep through the night, he’d gone for food, figuring she would be hungry when she awakened.

  He held the plate of food in front of him, but as soon as it came within range she slapped at it, connecting with a blow strong enough to have toppled the warm dinner onto the bed if he hadn’t been ready for just such a response.

  “I don’t want your food,” she said. All her fear converted to choler, she was imperious, impassive, prepared to put everything on him, her eyes the color of granite, her skin ashen. “I want to know where you were.”

  She held his gaze without flinching, her expression radiating a fierce indifference. She was waiting for him to say the wrong thing, to make the mistake that would allow her to detach from him and everyone else.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  Maybe a drink or two with dinner. After all, she had been asleep a long time.

  “Where were you?” she asked again.

  She sat erect, stiff backed, sheets pulled up to her neck, her fingers clenched so hard on the white cotton that the blood had gone out of them. Also she was shaking, either from the cool night air or from her muscles relaxing now that he was here at her side and she didn’t have to fight the terror all by herself.

  He had stopped in to check on her several times.

  “Scott, there was someone at my door.”

  She must have heard the cannon, that’s all, it was a custom of the city.

  “I know what I heard. There was someone at the door and you weren’t here.”

  Again he tried to explain about the cannon, which went off at nine each night to mark the closing of the bay. Most likely the carom of the blast had penetrated her dreams.

  “No, there was someone at the door, knocking over and over. I heard voices in the hall. They knocked at my door and they might have gotten in, but you were nowhere to be found.”

  The old, pure pity for her overtook him. He knew what to do when she was like this, how to handle her, if only she would let him. All he had to do was walk to the bed and sit beside her, reach his palm onto her shoulder, his moves methodical and understated as if he were appeasing a vigilant watchdog awakened in the night that recognized his smell from years ago but couldn’t yet place him. Slowly he let his hand drop, gliding it over her well-defined arms until he was cupping the opposite shoulder, now kneading his thumb into the tautness of her neck.