“Not yet, I suppose.”
“She says, the travel does not satisfy, it is not what you want. Your love is always running away from you.”
“Ask her why the Fool came up first.”
Maryvonne posed the question, but after falling silent for a few seconds, without ever lowering her eyes to them, the clairvoyant resumed her slow chant.
“New beginnings,” Maryvonne said in French because she had fallen behind and could no longer retrieve English words quickly enough, “hope, your life without limits, you must leave something behind.” Then in English: “What is behind you is hard to escape, but you are a decided woman.”
“I need her to slow down,” Zelda said. “It’s too much, all at once.”
The old woman, the yellow streaks of her irises set against burnt-sienna skin, the lines around her eyes channels of wisdom, punched out a phrase, “Los demonios del pasado,” as though rebuking a child for interrupting in class. Zelda’s demons were real, the old woman insisted, and she must turn and face them. “Usted siente que no puede escapar de ellos.”
“You fear the past and it chases you,” Maryvonne summarized, again in French.
“What does that mean? Is she saying it’s just my imagination?”
Maryvonne posed the question and the woman flipped three cards: the Star in reverse, the Moon, the High Priestess in reverse. Again the diviner stared at the deck in silence, this time looking up at Zelda with awe, before again shutting her eyes to prophesy.
“What did she say?” Zelda asked, and Maryvonne realized she hadn’t yet translated.
“You are attuned to the spiritual world. You know things before you must know them. This frightens you, but it is only knowledge. You are stronger than those who tell you otherwise.”
The old woman pressed on, her tone now chastising, now encouraging. A loved one, someone whose name was supposed to be large in the world, was self-destructive. Also perhaps quite ill. “This is not your worst moment, I’m sorry,” Maryvonne said in numbed imitation. “A strong feeling here that all is not well, things are not as they appear, your life constructed of mirrors. You keep asking someone to reflect you, he asks the same of you, but why can not you trust yourself?”
Maryvonne decided to omit the part about a man who adores her but cannot love her as she deserves to be loved. She was trying to decide how much of the reading, if any, to share with Scott.
“You know each other intimately because of crisis,” Maryvonne continued. “In the proximate future, you feel betrayed and old resentment returns, but this is where she cannot understand your choices. You need to be kind to yourself, not keep everyone far away.”
Again the old woman spoke of a loved one who was ill and Maryvonne translated sparingly because she couldn’t lie outright; the gravity of the diviner’s tone gave too much away.
The diviner kept saying, “I am sorry to tell you this,” and Maryvonne asked her to be precise, did she mean Zelda’s husband, did she mean Scott?
“Who is it?” Zelda demanded, mustering all the authority she could. “One of you isn’t telling me something.”
“She say again you already know.”
“If I already know,” Zelda replied curtly, “what did I come here for?”
Outside the bodega two villagers prepped gamecocks, squaring them off so that the birds could preen and strut, wings pluming magnificently. The first of the villagers, his skin rough and grooved like tree bark, slashed a smile showing as many missing or broken-off teeth as whole ones; and the second, diminutive, stocky, with a round face and a pug nose, did not look up. The handlers hovered behind their birds as the adversaries stalked one another, the black gamecock now pressing its powerful neck as a lever onto the neck of the other, its rival now pushing off and raising its wings like a cape before lunging forward again, leading with its terrific talons. Each handler, allowing his bird to peck its opponent never more than once or twice, would then scoop it up from beneath with one hand, covering its eyes, shielding it from its rival. The birds’ beaks were tied shut with string, and after taking the gamecock into his arms each handler would coddle his bird, primping feathers, stroking its clipped and stubbled comb, caressing its throat. Soon, though, the men had replaced the birds on the ground, squaring them off, not having to wait even a few seconds for the cocks’ instinctive hatred of each other to kick in.
“Training exercises,” Aurelio explained. Even a bird that had killed many opponents must be kept fresh. The handlers put him through exercises to make sure the reflexes stayed sharp, that the bird hadn’t lost any of his braggadocio, his will to dominate, his impulse to kill. “I will tell you that the slick black one is veteran of many fights. Notice how he props his chest, how big he makes himself, how high off the ground he leaps. Is ready to strike, knowing already what damage he can do. This one,” he pointed to the other bird, “is a novicio. It is difficult to tell—does he have talent for killing, does he not?”
Scott asked his friend how you could distinguish one type from the other, whether you could instill talent for the fights in all gamecocks.
The handler with the barklike skin shot a quick glance at Aurelio, addressing him in a swath of peasant Spanish from which Scott could make out few if any words. It was always so much harder to understand a foreign tongue as spoken by the lower classes.
“Any cock will fight,” Aurelio said, answering Scott’s question, “but many birds, they must die during the first fight, and maybe they are meant to die. It is not in them, the know-how to fight. It is true also with soldiers. Any man can die on a battlefield, brave man or coward, it make no difference. But some men, I can tell you which ones, must die in their first battle. In them the instincts are wrong.”
“Let’s have that drink,” Scott said. The late afternoon sun was strong on his forehead, his back stiff from the riding.
“Los gallos de pelea son bellos,” Aurelio congratulated the men, then to Scott, “Handsome birds, I tell them.”
Aurelio, propping the door to the bodega ajar with his foot, turned to pose a question to the handlers. Apparently he’d won their trust, for the men answered at once, simultaneously, in a flurry of Spanish.
Inside the bodega a man behind the counter wore a wide-brimmed straw hat over stringy black hair and a poorly manicured beard that made his face resemble an unkempt shrub. Two rows of shelves stacked mostly sinful items, beer, wine, Bacardi rum, cigars, and dozens of varieties of cigarettes. They sat at the nearer of two tables in the establishment, nestled against a four-foot-high ledge running the length of a side wall on top of which a copper-colored oscillating Emerson fan, its aluminum blades in the shape of a yacht propeller, washed his cheek in cool splashes of air.
Aurelio ran through the information the two men had shared with him: who fought cocks on the peninsula, where the fights were held, how to procure an invitation to the fights tomorrow evening.
“You will join me,” he said confidently to Scott.
When the Spaniard went to get drinks, Scott tried to distract himself from thinking about what the clairvoyant might even now be saying to his wife. He remembered Zelda’s note, which she hadn’t allowed him to look at earlier. Extracting the Moleskine from his sport coat, he found the note inside, hardly through the first sentence—“Dearest Scott, I want you to know how much it means to me to hear you promise to take better care”—when Aurelio returned.
“Ah, un billet doux,” Aurelio said as Scott covered the sheet of green stationery with his forearm, vowing to return to it as soon as he could. The Spaniard set four drinks on the table, two lagers and two Cuba libres, that cocktail of Bacardi, Coca-Cola, and lime named in honor of Cuba’s throwing off the yoke of Spain and the United States. He carried two cigars, now biting off the end of his own and striking a match, which he held up to the thick wand of hand-rolled tobacco dangling from his lips. The Spaniard sucked on the near end until concentric rings of orange glowed inside the tip and several pungent clouds drifted across the table, then he handed the oth
er cigar and a book of matches to Scott. There was no way to refuse the gift. Scott liked a cigar as much as the next man, but he wasn’t supposed to smoke anymore. Cigarettes were hard to resist but, like beer, relatively inconsequential. Cigars were a commitment, signifying everything he was supposed to have given up by now. He struck the match, dragged on the end of the cigar, then cupped his mouth into an O, releasing smoke, feeling a tickle in his throat and a cough erupting from his sternum. Head turned to the wall, he held a fist sideways to his mouth to quell the coughing and its slicing pains.
“Are we to speak of love or war?” Aurelio asked, drink in one hand, his cigar stabbing at the green stationery on the table. Scott folded the letter into squares and put it back in the Moleskine to prevent an ash from scalding Zelda’s words.
“War,” Scott suggested. One of his favorite subjects. He had been an officer, second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, during the Great War, on the verge of being sent overseas when the armistice was signed. That he never made it over was one of the great regrets of his life.
“A strange regret,” Aurelio said.
Scott recalled the Spaniard’s horrific-looking wound, his scrape with death.
“I don’t mean to suggest that war is anything less than devastating,” he said. “It’s more like the way one feels about an unpaid debt, and maybe too the writer in me believed it was something I ought to have witnessed. A confession between you and me—my publisher bought my first novel on the premise that any day I was to be shipped out as fodder for the war machine, one of the millions never to return amid that war’s unprecedented rate of fatalities, another illustrative case of the might-have-been.”
“You are a writer, then?” Aurelio asked, and Scott realized too late that he had effectively avoided the topic of what he did until now.
“Let’s not talk about that,” Scott said. He was also a military buff, versed in everything there was to know about the American Civil War, about the strategies of the Great War, about the Battle of Verdun; he knew a great many European wars inside and out.
“It is melancholy to speak of such things,” Aurelio admitted.
If he had it to do over again, would he enlist in the Republican cause?
“Of course,” the Spaniard said. “This is never the question.”
Was he one of the soldiers with correct instincts on a battlefield?
“It is true, you require luck,” Aurelio explained, “especially in the beginning. But say a man, he is ready for battle. Well, in that case there are things he can do in the field that others cannot do, things that make him an asset to his battalion.” He might prove to be a good shot, he might prove efficient in maneuvering away from a line of fire. During his first battle he might suffer four or five false deaths, those occasions on which without some luck he should have died. By his third battle, though, a man might greatly improve his odds. “Now he understands the game better,” the Spaniard maintained. “Improved as a soldier, he moves easier on the field. Deaths surround him, it is true, his own death closes in, but he sees it coming, steps aside. Even when they try to catch him by surprise, he has a play left. To himself a veteran whispers, ‘I know the battle so long and so well,’ but this is dangerous way of thinking.” The trick was to trust what you learned on the field and let the knowledge improve your odds of survival, while yet remaining cautious, never cowardly, but ever cautious.
“Don’t believe your own propaganda, you mean?”
“Yes, I like this saying. Now I see why you are a writer.”
“Let’s not talk about that,” Scott insisted, angry at himself for having said anything in the first place. It made the friendship so much less natural.
“Well, yes, then,” Aurelio replied. “Never believe you know all there is to know because there is forever something new to learn about war.”
Scott couldn’t resist removing the Moleskine from his sport coat. Opening the journal, he jotted down Aurelio’s phrase, about never trusting oneself too much, about always learning something new on a battlefield.
He took a sip of his drink, its cola sweetness an antidote to the remnant taste of bile at the back of his mouth. The drink’s medicinal properties were rather limited. Instead of deadening the nerves, the alcohol fired his frenzied thoughts, making his pulse race, his head feel lighter and lighter. It was a matter of finding the right balance, of reaching the point where the alcohol would quell yesterday’s long hangover, the cumulative toll of weeks and weeks of excess. There were days when the calm returned and you felt again in control, as though you no longer had to burrow ever deeper inside alcohol’s wondrous alchemy, as though you might take or leave the next drink—but this wasn’t one of those days.
He puffed dutifully on the cigar, inhaling the smoke without any enthusiasm for its fragrance. The tobacco mingled on his tongue with the sugar and alcohol, an imbroglio of scents, tastes, forsaken desires. He felt the cough coming in advance this time, pulled out a white monogrammed handkerchief, slightly frayed at the edges, hacking into the linen, feeling the phlegm dislodge in his chest, his cough hollow and barreled, subsiding only to give way to a second fit of violent spasms. When he lowered the handkerchief from his mouth, away from the Spaniard’s line of vision, he saw the blood-spangled pattern, dots and splotches here and there. It had been stupid of him to accept the cigar.
“Your lungs are unwell?” Aurelio said with concern. “I am no nurse like my wife, but in a camp men cough day and night, some of them infected with enfermedad de los pulmones, tuberculosis, some of them no. You have seen the doctor?”
“Not recently,” Scott admitted, not wanting to talk or think about his lungs. He was concerned instead by a man leaning his forearms on the counter near the front of the bodega who appeared to be staring at them. He remembered Zelda at the Pan American terminal in Miami, certain at every turn they were being spied on, and he beat back his own suspicions as implausible.
“Do you see that man there?” Aurelio asked.
Scott looked across the room as if for the first time.
“What about him?”
“He keeps watch on us, no?”
“We’re under surveillance, you mean?” Scott said and Aurelio nodded. It occurred to Scott that the Spaniard had his own reasons for paranoia. How had he accounted for his escape from the camp again, his subsequent emigration from France? A contact here in Cuba had played a role, but was it possible Aurelio had entered the country illegally?
“I can’t be sure,” Scott started to say, when the man pushed off the counter and walked toward them. In an instant Scott recognized him, Señor Famosa García, the pompous yet handsome silver-haired guide hired by Matéo Cardoña to show him Havana. Delighted at first by the coincidence, he studied the elderly Cuban’s evenly bronzed face and ghastly milky eye as though registering the features of an old acquaintance, but it wasn’t coincidence, of course.
“How do you two know each other?” Aurelio asked.
Famosa García stood above the table, uninvited, Aurelio preparing to rise and chase the man off if Scott didn’t want him here.
“May I join you for a minute, Señor Fitzgerald?” Famosa García asked.
“Why not,” Scott said.
The dignified emissary took the chair next to Scott and leaned into him as he sat down, whispering into the side of his head that he had a message to convey from Señor Cardoña.
“Not now,” Scott replied. “Maybe later at the hotel. We’ll have to get you a drink because we’re talking of Franco’s Spain. What are your views on the triumph of the Fascists?”
Aurelio shifted in his chair uncomfortably.
“Don’t worry,” Scott said boisterously, perceiving humor in the situation but unable to lay hold of it. “May I introduce Famosa García, who is friends with Matéo Cardoña of the formidable Cardoña family of Santiago de Cuba, not all of whom are enemies of Fascism. But my friend Matéo is a champion of freedom, someone who hates Fascism as much as I do.”
Famosa Garc�
�a stiffened at his remarks, maybe because he’d come here on an errand and had to report back to Havana soon and it wasn’t his duty to have drinks with Scott, but maybe also because he hated the United States rather more than he hated Fascism.
“Shall we drink to Señor Cardoña and the demise of Fascism?” Scott said, tilting his glass to the messenger, who lifted empty hands to indicate he was in no position to toast friendships or causes.
“Señor Fitzgerald, I am here on specific matters only.”
“It will have to wait.”
“After all Señor Cardoña has done for you,” Famosa García protested coolly, “he deserves this minute of your time, no?”
“No,” Scott said. After all he’s done for me? he wanted to say. You mean guiding me to an out-of-the-way bar where my wife nearly gets killed but instead watches a man knifed? Do you mean promising to make it go away afterward but then constantly hounding me to report that, well, sadly, it hasn’t gone away yet and he must track me through Cuba to remind me of this fact? “Not this minute of time, anyway,” Scott added, softening his position, realizing it would be unwise to send Famosa García away carrying such a harsh message.
“Señor Cardoña has done much on your behalf,” Famosa García continued, turning again so that he spoke only to Scott. “There is more to say, about the police, about the investigation.”
“For now, though,” Scott blustered, including his friend Aurelio, “we talk of Spain.”
Scott couldn’t explain his own recklessness, but he wanted to elicit a confession from the silver-maned Cuban. If you admit your sympathies for the Falangists, he said silently to himself, then and only then will I let you deliver your message.
“Sometimes I am tired of talking of Spain,” Aurelio said.
“This man fought and was wounded,” Scott said, holding up his drink, tilting it slightly so that rum and soda spilled onto the table like a libation. He didn’t require Aurelio to fight his battles for him. Rather he would stick up for his noble friend. “Nearly died in the fight to keep Spain a free republic. I’m sorry to say this in his presence, but he and his men never had a chance, and do you know why? You haven’t told me any of this, Aurelio, but you will see that I understand why the war was lost. Let me tell you. Because the Germans and Italians, the united forces of Fascism, controlled the air, because every time a battalion of Republicans seized a strategic position, the planes manned by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, all volunteers I’m assured—no violations of the Non-Intervention Pact as far as President Roosevelt could decide—bombarded the trenches until they were as rife with corpses as with able soldiers.”
Beautiful Fools Page 22