“Perdón, lamento interrumpir,” the waiter was saying. “El restauranté está cerrado.”
“Oh, that’s impossible,” Zelda cried. “We’re not even done with the bottle of wine.”
“You must come back to our bungalow,” Maryvonne proposed. “For a nightcap, yes?”
Scott and Aurelio rose from the table to settle the bills, Aurelio insisting that the waiter allow them to purchase a bottle of wine to take with them. Rejoining the women, the Spaniard seized the unfinished bottle and motioned for Maryvonne to pilfer the carafe and glasses as she wrapped the contents of the bread basket in a napkin to stow it in her bag.
“It is not a long walk,” Aurelio informed them, so the two couples took to the shore, where the waves rolled in under a sky bright with stars that made them feel strong and safe.
Trailing the European couple whose habits were those of refugees, salvaging always what they could, unwilling to relinquish new friends or a night’s revelries, Zelda considered that she and Scott had once fallen into many of these same habits, albeit for different reasons. The Frenchwoman, easily annoyed by their every attempt to deploy their rusted cosmopolitanism, responded in English to the queries posed in her native tongue. The only French they could elicit from her was the rather ill-tempered command to switch to a language everyone could speak: “Mais je ne comprends pas, s’il vous plaît le répète, en anglais.” It never occurred to her that they might likewise complain of her use of their native language, her vowels so curled and elided that the lag between her pronouncing a phrase in English and their making sense of it was considerable.
“I made a resolution at the restaurant,” Zelda whispered to Scott as they plodded through the sand. “I promised myself to adore this couple, they are so lovely and have so much potential, but her superiority is testing my resolve.”
“I thought by now,” Scott quipped, “you would be used to the tyranny of the French.”
Overhearing those words but misunderstanding the reference, Aurelio lamented, “Well, what you say is true, now France is also a dictatorship.”
He condemned a recent vote by the French National Assembly to cede all powers of state—the right to build up the military and air force and leverage the funds to do so; the right to engage in preemptive tactics in anticipation of German aggressions; the right to wage war against Hitler on all fronts when the time came—to Prime Minister Daladier.
“Such a decision is momentané,” Maryvonne said in defense of her homeland. “We face enemies without scruples, who do not keep their word from some month to the next. I do not see what decision, that my country had a choice, Hitler takes away our choices.”
“Yes, the French now prepare to do what is necessary,” Aurelio said, “but what if that time has passed already?”
“After the Great War,” Scott remarked, “I set myself against all wars. No more war in my lifetime. But Fascism is not politics, it is a mode of perpetual warfare against the vulnerable, Jews, Czechs, the Basque people—”
“Politics as war by other means,” Aurelio said.
“It can only be defeated,” Scott continued, “by armed opponents, I’m afraid.”
“I do not see how you are going to be so critical of my country,” Maryvonne said, addressing herself to her husband, nationalist pride creeping into her voice, “a country that have provided you refuge when, without refuge, you surely will be dead.”
“I find fault with the French government,” he answered diplomatically, “but not her people. To me the French people are you, faultless, generous, someone to whom I owe my entire life.”
Zelda wanted to hear more of their story, what had happened after Maryvonne found her handsome cousin near death in a refugee camp.
“I wrote letters to my government lamenting conditions,” she said, but it was unclear whether she was addressing her husband’s criticisms or moving on to speak of his escape. “So many letters, without ever a reply.”
It was up to Aurelio to explain how Maryvonne had nursed him back to health, never letting on to her superiors why she dogged the overworked doctors to make sure they tended to an anonymous Spanish soldier. Her brother helped her smuggle provisions into the camp, for Aurelio as well as several other soldiers in dire condition: rainproofed tents, deloused blankets, fresh dressings for wounds, tea, cigarettes, rations of sardines. Already the authorities were relocating Jews and Communists to camps farther inside of France, repatriating Basque farmers who were less than deeply committed Communists under a guarantee from Franco that after being reeducated they might return to their homes. But Maryvonne knew that her cousin could never pass for an ignorant Basque farmer. For men such as him, the prospects were dismal. They had nowhere to be except on that barren borderland. Still, guards could be bribed, if you had money and means, some help from the other side of the barbed wire, maybe also the know-how to embed yourself, once you were inside mother France, in the country’s interior.
She arranged it all, exhausting her paltry savings, bribing a guard to look the other way while her brother smuggled Aurelio out of the camp in a supply truck and escorted him to her family’s modest farm outside Lyon. Only days later she resigned from the Red Cross and joined her cousin. Every member of the family, including her brother, assumed she would never have gone to such lengths, even for a cousin, unless she were also in love with him. So after a week of prodding innuendo from her mother, sisters, and brother, she approached Aurelio and said, “Since everyone believes we are to be married, I propose that you marry me”; and marry her he did, in a modest ceremony in the village, allowing him to elude notice of the ever increasing, rabid minority in France who were hostile to all resident aliens.
“Oh, stop here,” Maryvonne exclaimed as they neared a row of spaciously set-apart stone cabins ensconced in a grove of Australian pines that abutted the silver-sanded beach. She directed attention to the moon, lying low on calm ocean waters, the lights out in all the cabins except one, so that it was impossible to tell whether they housed sleeping guests or revelers who hadn’t yet returned home. It was just shy of midnight, not especially late for a country participating in the rites of siesta and the recalibrated inner clock that followed from the introduction of second sleep into everyday existence.
Maryvonne pulled the radio as close as possible to the small patio door, spinning the dial for a station, while Aurelio dragged chairs from the cabin so his guests could enjoy the sultry ocean air. The announcer now and then peppered his comments with English, reading an advertisement for cigarettes before introducing a song that Zelda recognized right away. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile. While you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style. It was from a war movie made this past year starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, in which she played a Broadway singer whose soldier husband gets killed in battle, and after receiving news of his demise, she must take the stage and sing this cheering song.
“I love this song,” Maryvonne said. Zelda doubted a Red Cross nurse from France could be aware of its association with the movie, since, in that case, the lyrics would surely have troubled her more. “Everybody must dance to this song.”
Maryvonne walked over to Scott instead of her husband.
“Mr. Fitzgerald, you would be so kind?”
Before Zelda could search Scott for his reaction—he might be flattered, he might be irascible, it all depended on how his lungs felt, whether the drinks had restored or drained his strength —she felt a man’s grip on her elbow, as firm as his voice: “We have marching orders.” Zelda allowed herself to be lifted from the chair, the glass of wine extracted from her hand and placed on the ground as the Spaniard pulled her into his arms.
Swaying to the jaunty, marching, military pomp of the song, she gazed over the Spaniard’s shoulder at her husband, who though slow on the uptake had accepted the Frenchwoman’s invitation without protest and now stylishly pulled her through lush, tight waltzing squares. Zelda, chin
resting on another man’s shoulder, took simple pleasure in the song. What’s the use of worrying? Sullavan sang with warbling steadfastness, her voice milking the contrast between what the words recommended and what she must really be feeling. It never was worthwhile, so pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.
When the song finished, Aurelio escorted Zelda to her chair, topped off her glass of wine, and offered a cigarette, which he then lit for her, asking where she had learned to dance so well.
Maryvonne complained about the cool night air and Zelda suspected that Scott had put her up to it. So the couples pulled the chairs inside, where they resumed drinking and smoking, dancing now and then to someone’s favorite song, the room muggy and claustrophobic. Aurelio hung at Zelda’s side, doting on her, and she felt suddenly self-conscious—about lost youth and lapsed social skills, about the roughened texture of her face—unable to receive his stare without glancing away. It occurred to her for the first time that the European couple (theirs was a marriage of convenience, after all) might be in earnest about swapping partners. She watched Scott enjoying the young woman’s flirtatious banter, when suddenly Maryvonne shot to her feet and fled the room.
Aurelio asked Zelda to dance again and she accepted, so the Spaniard guided her through a form of native Cuban dance he himself had only recently mastered. The swift, neat movements, always in a radius of a few feet, the constant retreading of the same ground, intensified the dance’s air of intimacy. Scott stared at them in silence from his chair, perhaps winded from the dancing, perhaps dizzied by alcohol or his weak heart.
“Explain to me,” Aurelio called to him, apprehending the duties of host even as he danced with a guest’s wife, “since we have talked of dictators, explain why is Franco attractive to Americans, also Mussolini—why so many Americans affectionate for Fascists.”
“Not all Americans are soft,” Scott responded irritably, and Zelda feared he might get testy, obsessed as he was by perceived insults, always prepared to defend his maligned honor in fistfights he could not possibly win. “I consider myself to be vehemently anti-Fascist.”
“I mean no disrespect,” Aurelio said.
“Excuse me,” Zelda interrupted, finding it odd that no one had said anything about Maryvonne’s departure. “Is she all right?”
“Why didn’t you try to get back into Spain?” Scott asked. Weren’t there ways to continue resisting Franco from within, just as the Germans must now fight Hitler from within their country? How else would Fascism ever fall?
“I am almost certain to be executed,” Aurelio reported with sangfroid. To go back to Franco’s Spain meant certain death before a firing squad.
“It is in here,” Maryvonne announced, entering the room again and holding up a recent copy of LIFE, “a small glimpse of what my Aurelio suffers.” On the cover a girl in straight blond bangs and ribboned ponytails bore a dour expression, a doll in similar blond bangs and ponytail positioned to her right, making it seem as though the girl stood erect, her arm loosely, even reluctantly enfolding a lifeless replica of herself. To reinforce the effect—Zelda found the photograph discomfiting—the doll and girl wore matching jumpers: short rounded collar, diagonal striping in the style of a cravat except that it was flat and sewn into the dress, a thin waistband in the same diagonal striping. Aurelio tried to spin Zelda through a lift in the song, but she pulled free of him, as Maryvonne flipped through the pages of LIFE, arriving at stark photographs of a camp for Republican refugees such as the one she’d found her cousin in.
“It is not Camp Vernet. What you see in this picture is bad but not horrible,” she said, rolling r’s, elongating her i’s, her accent pulling the word into French. “How would you say effroyable?”
“Outrageous, dreadful,” Scott suggested.
“Yes, it is not full of dread,” Maryvonne replied. “The men do not look as though they are fearing for death.”
She flipped the magazine shut, handing it to Zelda, saying she was welcome to take it home with her.
“Where would you stop your life if you could?” Zelda said à propos of nothing, addressing the young woman. “I mean, if you could stop it, and then keep living at that age, having gained enough wisdom, know-how, and talent to make good use of yourself, enough happiness to stare down adversity—”
Aurelio said he thought he understood what she meant: if you could go on living forever, without aging, without losing will, what Schopenhauer called the “will to life.”
“At thirty-five,” Zelda said, “on my birthday. That’s when I’d stop time.”
“Do not forget to blow out the candle, then,” her dance partner said with a sportive lilt in his voice, “and maybe you will get your wish.”
But there was something artificial in his flattery. He didn’t believe she was shy of thirty-five. True, she had stayed young for so long, far longer than most people were able to manage, indulging only her appetite for experience, indifferent to the taxes imposed on pleasure. No longer, though—too many bouts of eczema and insanity, too many starvation performances that weren’t even meant as such. Now she looked her age, several years past thirty-five.
“On my birthday, three years ago,” the Frenchwoman said. “Before that war,” she added, lowering her voice to a hush.
“It has already begun,” Aurelio said, taking Maryvonne in his arms, dipping her in a mock dance, naming her as his raison d’être. “All the world does not know it, but even three years ago, the war, it commences already.” Spinning in his arms this distant cousin who was also his wife, who somewhere along the way must have fallen in love with him, he began to kiss her immodestly, the two of them standing in the middle of the room, grinding into each other as if trying to crush some sadness wedged between them. “Besides,” he said, “you would not know me then.”
There was a pounding at the front door and Aurelio disappeared into the small foyer, only to be greeted by a boisterous man scolding in Spanish who forced his way inside. The hotel’s on-duty manager stood in the center of the living room. “Los invitados no pueden dormir aquí!” While waving two fingers at Scott, he spoke only to Aurelio. “You cannot sleep here, he say, unless you pay for your own room.” Aurelio’s translation was unnecessary. Both Zelda and Scott understood the manager well enough. On the trail of raucous behavior, immorality, maybe just pleasure itself, the man spent part of every night policing noise. It was not an easy aspect of his job, but it was his job all the same.
“We’re staying in the main villa, second floor,” Scott said, interrupting.
“Excuse me, señor.”
“Hardly the freeloaders you’ve mistaken us for,” Scott said.
Zelda had the feeling that the manager wasn’t there to prevent freeloaders so much as to break up an imminent orgy.
“Perdón, mi error,” the manager said automatically, but he held his ground, suggesting it might be best if they returned to their room. Other guests had lodged complaints about the noise.
“Which guests?” Scott asked. “I would like their names.” He hated having authority of any kind wielded over him. It made him irate, violent, rash.
“Lo que me pide es imposible,” the night manager said, before switching to English. “Impossible, I can give no names; I can violate the privacy of the guests never, not at any time.”
“It is late in any case,” Maryvonne said. Zelda looked across at Aurelio, but he seemed ready to join Scott in the quarrel.
“Well, we’d like our privacy now,” Scott said to the night manager. “You may wait outside, please.”
The manager, perhaps regretting having labeled guests of the resort trespassers, capitulated and stepped outside. The two couples said their goodbyes, Aurelio pleased by Scott’s performance, Maryvonne professing her pleasure in the night and insisting on meeting again.
The night manager stood under a bull-horn acacia tree, waiting on them, humbler now in manner, oddly contrite about having to break up their party, but it was true, other g
uests had complained about the noise. It made no difference to him, personally.
“Recent troubles notwithstanding,” Zelda said as they walked across grass and fallen palm fronds, “I enjoyed them, and they’re clearly more appropriate company for us.”
“You’re a snob, Zelda,” Scott said. “Besides, Matéo is from older money than any three of tonight’s party combined, yourself included.”
“True enough,” she said. “On the whole I liked him too. But you can’t blame me for worrying about his judgment.”
“What he did for us cannot be denied.”
She let the remark pass. Enough of that, no bickering, she wanted to talk about how much she had enjoyed tonight, how charming and knowledgeable Scott could be, how calmly he’d put that manager in his place. Did he think it likely the girl Maryvonne had a crush on him? Scott said she was hardly a girl, and he hadn’t noticed anything except Aurelio’s doting on Zelda. “But his wife’s so much younger than I am, what could he see in me?” Maryvonne was in her late twenties, Scott said, pushing thirty, hardly a young girl anymore. It felt like a huge divide to Zelda—a decade was such a long time in a woman’s life.
“I like it when we do things,” she said as they followed the path back to the villa. “We don’t go on outings often enough, maybe that’s why we forget how good we can be together.”
She didn’t mean it as criticism. To make this clear, she pressed herself against his flank, inspiring him to wrap his arm around her waist. She hardly noticed the ocean, never more than thirty yards away during their homeward stroll, but she could taste the salt air going into her lungs.
Inside their room he sat next to her on the bed. “Why did you choose that date, of all years? It was such a bad year, the year you turned thirty-five; you suffered so, you were so far gone and I wasn’t sure you—”
Beautiful Fools Page 17