Beautiful Fools

by R. Clifton Spargo

  His instinct was to call Sheilah—why not?—she would want to know he was alive. She would apprehend the latest tumult into catastrophe without explanation. He trusted her discretion and judgment in all matters, so maybe she could tell him what to do next. He marched to the front desk and informed the clerk he needed to place a call, and for a minute, as he hovered over the piece of paper handed to him by the clerk, he was unable to remember the number, but then it came to him. The clerk indicated a phone by a dark wood bench where he could take the call once it had been placed. Thumbing through the Moleskine, he rehearsed what he would say to Sheilah. “Never let it be said there’s no way down from disaster,” he said and scribbled it in the notebook. He remembered the trip to Manhattan this past fall, the vows he had made to Sheilah afterward to divorce Zelda once and for all. It was selfish of him to want Sheilah’s advice. He was too dependent on her sympathy.

  The clerk caught his attention and shook his head to indicate that no one had picked up, and Scott nodded his appreciation, relieved that the decision had been made for him. He had no right to confide in her ever again. And yet there was no one else, other than perhaps Zelda herself in her periods of lucidity, who could begin to intuit how devastating the events of today might prove. “Zelda was gone, Zelda was dead.” He experimented with the words, silently, chanting them so as to postpone their meaning.

  He asked for escort into the village, but when told how long he would have to wait insisted on making the journey alone on foot, a plan frowned on by the night manager. This wasn’t Havana, where all along the Prado the clubs and bars thickened until the morning hours with revelers, tourists, and, yes, thieves too, but also soldiers and policemen. The roads on the peninsula were treacherous at night, often washing out when the rains came. The night manager walked Scott onto the patio, made him listen for the low rumble of thunder rolling in from the Caribbean Sea below them. “You know about the alligators?” the manager asked, even as Scott felt inside his belt for his gun, answering cocksuredly, “Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” The manager handed his guest a lantern. “You will require this to find your way.”

  So, holding the lantern before him (rather like a figure he’d once seen depicted on a tarot card), Scott set out, tracking the dirt trail from the resort through the hum of the noisome roadside marsh, swatting at the insects perching on his neck, heeding the flop and fall of large fish or reptiles in the mucky waters behind the reeds on either side of the dirt lane, several of the splashes long and full enough to accommodate a gator. In the thin darkness, as he circumvented a bank of dunes covered in grass and sand brush that ran off into forest, he passed couples from the hotel returning from evening strolls. He hurried along a narrow partially paved road, past shacks where locals lingered on porches and children at play in the yards crawled out from behind trees like nosy nocturnal creatures. Now and then he stopped to ask someone in crude Spanish, “¿Dónde la iglesia?” and a native would skim his face for information before gesturing down the road, assuring him that it angled straight to the center of the village—no way to depart from it, no way to miss the church.

  Soon the cottages and shacks fell away, and with them the people, as the air grew dark and heavy with moisture. He listened for the rumble of encroaching storms, but all he could hear was the drone of insects, the gurgling croak of frogs and lizards. He checked the kerosene in the lantern.

  Dead on his feet by the time he reached the village, he welcomed the sight of the church set back from the road in an open field palely illuminated by the nighttime sky. As clouds rolled in shadows across the ground, they darkened patches of long grass, scrub, and thicket, and Scott muttered aloud, “What has become of her?” He walked under the freestanding arched gateway to jostle the front doors, locked, then walked round the side toward the square tower addition at the rear, attempting the door by which they’d entered the church this morning, rapping on the thick wood. Anyone inside, the priest or perhaps Zelda herself, would be certain to hear him. It made perfect sense. She had fled to this place to lock herself away from that which was chasing her, to take refuge from the bad tidings of the spirit world; but whatever had transpired in the hours since, she was no longer in the vicinity. No sound issued from inside the church. If the priest heard the knocking, he chose not to come forward into the night.

  The modest chapter house connected to the church remained dark. Was there any point in knocking there too? What if the priest answered only to say, yes, he’d let Zelda inside the church to light a few candles but sent her away hours ago? Nevertheless, Scott approached the door, all other avenues exhausted. He rapped firmly if reluctantly: no answer.

  So he retraced his steps through the thickened night, listening to peals of distant thunder, detecting the scent of this warm, muggy place for which he felt a strange affinity, not unlike what he felt for the Deep South. He was one of those who believed that the American South held the key to the nation’s soul. For a long time he had intended to write the great novel of the Civil War, having often interrogated Zelda about the moods and texture of the land as it had inscribed itself on her being. Only months ago, while working on Gone with the Wind, he had pored through his ledger and her letters in search of sketches from Zelda’s childhood, of anecdotes accumulated while stationed in Montgomery or while visiting her family, of lore gathered while living in recent years in towns such as Tryon and Asheville. Early in their marriage she used to stop him in the middle of a conversation to ask, “Are you writing that down?” or “Are you memorizing my words again?” She could think of nothing more amusing—that was how she put it—than to be someone’s muse. He pretended, through his father’s ancestry, that he too had the South in his soul, but he didn’t, not really. Which was why he relished his wife’s stories of her beloved yet horribly constrictive South, the stench of wisteria in springtime and the ache of the rain-drenched landscape, the history that came at you from all sides, filling up your imagination before you had time to exercise it on your own. As he walked through the thinly forested marshlands of Varadero, he felt he was tracking the scent of her childhood.

  At the hotel he checked with the manager—still no news—returning the lantern, then escaping by a side entrance to follow the dunes out beyond the stone cabins to the shoreline, there to watch the roll of whitecaps as he roved moonlit sands for a long while, not really believing he would come across his wife.

  “Everything is okay, I understand,” Aurelio hailed him as he approached, and Scott smiled, saying, of course, why wouldn’t it be?

  Maryvonne and Aurelio had been drinking all night in the company of an American couple, an older man and a young bride whose names Scott didn’t catch. Maryvonne presented Scott as a dear friend, only gently referring to his wife after he hinted that Zelda had elected to remain in her room. His European friends were nothing if not discreet, the sole allusion to today’s outing to Hicacos Point occurring when Maryvonne reached under the table to capture and squeeze his hand in her fine, slender fingers.

  It was probably well past midnight. Scott, in a black cast iron chair set before a black cast iron table, traded small talk and refused to glance at the watch on his wrist. Now and then he plundered a thinly picked over plate of cheese and fruit brought to the table before his arrival. He was ravenous but loath to admit it. His wife was dead for all he knew, and here he was craving food, the first time in weeks he’d had any appetite whatsoever.

  “Do you mind?” he asked Maryvonne, helping himself to another chunk of the cheese.

  “Scott, when was the last time you ate?”

  He thought about it for a minute; the answer, of course, at the picnic this afternoon, and hardly anything then.

  “No wonder you are hungry,” she said.

  Dying for a drink, he offered to buy a round.

  “We have to be going,” said the American man, who had tired eyes and a sallow jaw. He must have been in his early sixties, the wife still in the bloom of youth. She seemed reluctant to leave.


  “Oh, don’t spoil her fun,” Scott said, but the man didn’t appreciate misplaced gallantry.

  Scott feared Aurelio and Maryvonne would follow the couple’s lead and turn in. Over a long career as an owl and a drinker, he’d learned that even a single person’s decision to call it a night could trigger a chain reaction, bringing the most vibrant of parties to an end. Among apes, someone once told him, most likely it was Ernest, yawning wasn’t just contagious, it was communicative. When the head ape yawned, it was a cue—we’re going to sleep, folks, whether you like it or not; and the other apes returned the yawn, submissively, suddenly tired themselves. From a young age Scott had quarreled with those inclined to quit on a good time before it was exhausted. He would sooner fall asleep on his feet (had done so on many an occasion) than leave a party early. Tonight, though, wasn’t about extending pleasure. It was about postponing solitude for as long as possible.

  The waiter returned with Cuba libres, and Maryvonne and Aurelio showed no signs of quitting on him.

  “I never finished the story of my injury, about which you asked me earlier,” Aurelio said. A crack of thunder hammered the sky, followed by lightning that illuminated the sand dunes and grove of pines behind them. The flames on the lanterns surrounding the patio bent low, nearly extinguished by a heavy wind, as the nearby palms and almond trees chattered nervously.

  “What is this storm waiting for?” Maryvonne remarked.

  “Sshh,” Scott said, playfully putting a finger to her wine-stained lips. “If you don’t acknowledge them, sometimes they pass right on by, like noisy drunks at a party.”

  “It was more difficult to accept I had the injury than anything,” Aurelio said. “It is only until you are better, they say to me, confining me to a cot, only I was not prepared to fight again and try to have a good result. In the hospital I do not get better, do not get stronger.” He could remember the morning when the staff came to impart the news that he would be sent away, the nurses checking on him more often than usual, promising the doctor would soon speak with him. In telling his tale Aurelio lingered over phrases, trying to find the right words in English, Maryvonne whispering to him in French or Spanish, helping him recall his own story, their voices tapering off in the wind, as palm fronds whispered above them.

  Off to the north waves clapped heavily on the beach, sometimes supplemented by a long sigh of surf, the ruminations of the storm hanging on the wind. Scott let the Spaniard’s voice wash over him, oddly comforted by this tale of woe that had nothing to do with his wife’s sad story. He didn’t have to pay close attention to the minor details because there was nothing at stake for him in them.

  “Did we mention this part of our story last night at the cottage?” Maryvonne asked, worried lest her cousin prove tedious.

  “I don’t think so,” Scott said. “Besides, Aurelio and I share an interest in the niceties and minutiae of warfare.”

  He imagined that the hotel bar would be closing before long and wondered if there was time for another round.

  “You never want them to smile at you,” Aurelio said, “with that face they put on for the dying, the maimed, the castrated.” The sadness in his voice was curtailed only by the knowledge that his bright nurse of a cousin would soon rush to his side to see him through the valley of death. He could speak objectively of his own pain as a consequence of her intervention. He could report on what it was like to be a wounded, dying soldier stalked by a sedately smiling doctor, soon thereafter to be marooned in a refugee camp; and he could do so because, for all practical purposes, he spoke of another man’s fate.

  “I wish Miss Zelda were here to share this story too,” Aurelio said, and the fact that the Spaniard was so ready to believe Zelda safe in her room made Scott think less of him. How could such a man have survived a war? But the Spaniard’s affections were so simple and sincere that it was difficult to stay angry with him. “Please tell her I say that we miss her.”

  “Well, on that note,” Scott said, “I must attend to her.”

  “And we attend las peleas de gallos tomorrow evening?”

  “Of course,” Scott replied, then turning to Maryvonne. “Will you be joining us?”

  “Is not allowed,” Aurelio said stiffly, and Maryvonne rose, her reddening face averted from her husband. In the French manner she pecked at each of Scott’s cheeks, her lips moist on the corner of his mouth even as water simultaneously struck his forehead. The rains had come at last.

  “Perhaps Zelda and I will discover,” she said, pausing on that word she pronounced dé-coovere, then continuing as if for effect, “activities still more exciting.”

  “If she’s up to it,” Scott said, reminding himself that everything uttered over the past hour was more or less a lie. None of these plans—the cockfights, the renewal of friendship, the dinners—would come to pass.

  Winding through the wildly tossing palms en route to the villa, he dawdled long enough to be sure the Europeans were out of sight, then doubled back to the reception area to find the night manager yawning, bracing his forearm against the counter.

  “What are we to do next?” the manager asked. His narrow, rodentlike face was fearful, not a good sign.

  “You’ve been in touch with the police already?” Scott asked, though he doubted the man had taken any initiative.

  “I am waiting only for you, that is all,” the night manager said. “We will call first thing this morning?”

  “What,” Scott cried, experiencing outrage even as he performed it, only too happy to pawn off his own negligence on this obsequious, reproachful, slippery man. “But hadn’t we agreed—if the search parties came up empty, you would call the police right away?”

  “Señor Fitzgerald, I apologize, I do not understand, I thought you want me to wait.”

  “For what?”

  The night manager shrugged his shoulders.

  “Tell me what we could possibly be waiting on, for God to step in and find her himself?”

  Scott wheeled about, started to walk away, head spinning with recriminations, for himself, for the night manager, for that damned clairvoyant and her cursed words.

  “I should call the police?” the night manager called after him.

  “Of course,” Scott said, halting in his tracks, practically spitting the words.

  “In the morning?”

  “No, goddamnit, as soon as possible.”

  “They will ask to speak with you.”

  “So send them to my room. If I’m not there I’ll be on the beach—”

  “But the rains,” the manager said with genuine concern, and the two men peered through the French doors that opened onto the patio, where nighttime staff were pulling down lanterns, stacking chairs, and securing tables with rope so they wouldn’t get blown off in the fierce winds.

  “At any rate, I’ll be easy to find,” Scott said, returning to the desk to make it up with the man. “Tell me what you think I should do next, Señor, but I’m sorry I’ve forgotten your name?”

  “Señor Valdés,” the night manager replied, then added gently, “You must sleep.”

  “I’ll try, but you tell the police they needn’t worry about waking me.”

  “I will call them, Señor Fitzgerald, they will find her, who knows, maybe the priest from the church, Padre Hijuelos, he find her a bed for the night—but la policía will know, they will know soon enough.”

  He had put off returning to his desolate hotel room, but he couldn’t postpone it any longer. So he headed through the French doors into the lashing rains, the night manager whose name he’d already forgotten shouting after him, maybe starting forth with an umbrella, but not before Scott, assisted by the wind, slammed the door shut; and again he was on the cinder path, now pooling with water, having to hop from one patch of higher ground to another, weaving among the sudden ponds already inches deep. There was no way to continue the search in this storm. It was impossible to see even a few feet ahead of you—the villa, no more than fifteen yards away, not
hing but a massive shadowy blur. He would wait out this round of storms, maybe try to close his eyes. If I lie down for half an hour, girding myself against the worst, he reasoned, I’ll be better equipped to venture again into the night.

  With the eave of the roof shielding him from everything but the ribbons of blown rain, he put his key in the door and stopped to look at his watch for the first time since slipping it on earlier in the night: 2:59, the witching hour, the setting for every dark night of the soul. He swung the door open, and as he stepped into the narrow corridor found his path dimly lit by a lamp from deep inside the room. Had the maids come to turn down the bed and left it on? Had someone, Famosa García or another of Matéo’s minions, broken in and tossed the room? He felt for the handle of the gun in his belt and took two more steps, then saw her there, kneeling before the bed, her face pale in the artificial light, awash in dread. She scrambled to her feet. He couldn’t fathom what had just happened. Nevertheless, relief surged through him, waves of it pounding his ribs from inside. She was all he’d ever wanted in life, he sometimes still believed that.

  “Scott, I was worried about you,” she said feebly, plaintively. “I didn’t know where you were.” But that couldn’t change any of the basic facts concerning what she’d put him through these past twelve hours, which felt much longer than that, which felt like many episodes of disaster strung together and replayed before his eyes in unrelenting memory. She held her ground, though, demanding information. “Why did you stay out so late?”

  12

  WHAT SCOTT MUST HAVE FELT JUST THEN—ON WALKING INTO a hotel room to discover the wife he believed to be missing, possibly harmed, kneeling but now slowly rising from the foot of the bed, his own thoughts not quite accessible to him, the repertoire of grief playing out all at once. He must have experienced the euphoria of averted catastrophe even as the emotions rolled through him, tossing one against another, first joy, then fury, next despondency, next ardor, then joy again.