Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  “It's called Wonderful World,” says Valentina. Pointing with her head at the promotional brochure for Stephen King's new novel that Giraut has in his hands. “It's the story of a man that wakes up one day and discovers that everything around him has turned perfect. The neighbors that used to hate him now give him baseball tickets. His coworkers are friendly to him. His ex-wife, too. Everything has turned perfect. The world starts functioning flawlessly. Wars end. Politicians turn smart. Which means something's going on.” She's not trying to sound mysterious or showing any traces of preteen excitement. She's just using the natural, confident tone of someone who knows she's the Top European Expert on the Work of Stephen King. “Something alien. Something that is controlling people's minds.”

  “When I was your age, I wrote a novel, too.” Lucas Giraut looks at the promotional brochure under the courtyard's late-afternoon light. On the cover of the pamphlet it says “WONDERFUL WORLD, BY STEPHEN KING” and “WORLDWIDE RELEASE DECEMBER 22.” Giraut takes a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “It wasn't a novel like yours, or like Stephen King's. Really, it wasn't exactly a novel. It was about Apartment Thirteen. I don't know why it's called that. In my family they've always called it that. It's a room in the floor above the place where I work. My father used to go there to hide from my mother, I think. Anyway, I was obsessed with Apartment Thirteen. I dreamed about that place night after night. In my dreams it was much bigger than it really is. It had antique lamps and rooms filled with antiques. And endless hallways.” He looks up toward the Palau de la Mar Fosca. “I still have that novel in my files. I remember that it filled a lot of notebooks. That's how I spent all my time as a kid. Filling notebooks. With drawings and things I wrote. And in the notebooks I have all sorts of drawings of Apartment Thirteen. I mean, the way I imagined it then. Which is nothing like how it really is. I didn't actually get to see it until after my father died. And it turned out to be just a small, windowless room. Because of my father's illness, you remember. The problem he had with windows.”

  Marcia Parini's voice is heard, slightly occluded by the smoke extractor, as it comes from the window of the kitchen of the lower level of the house.

  “Lucas? Is she bothering you?” she asks in a distracted tone of voice. Above the double acoustic cushion created by the smoke extractor and the spluttering of the crêpes on the grill. “Would you like a crêpe?”

  Valentina Parini rolls her eyes behind her child-sized eyeglasses with green plastic frames. You could say that Lucas Giraut is the only friend that Valentina Parini has ever had. In all her twelve years. Giraut folds the promotional brochure advertising Stephen King's new novel and returns it to her. The hammock Valentina is lying in is the same hammock that her father, Mr. Franco Parini, put up, perhaps as some sort of sick joke, the day before he left his wife Marcia and their daughter, never to return. The relationship between Mr. Franco Parini and Lucas Giraut was generally cordial. Once Mr. Parini called Giraut a “yacht club pussy” and a “fucking useless mama's boy” after Giraut leaned out onto his terrace during a conjugal dispute between the Parinis in the courtyard that included the throwing of several pieces of their domestic furnishings.

  “I can't take it anymore.” Valentina drops her hands in an exasperated gesture onto the plaid blanket that covered her lap. “The crêpe thing. I'm twelve years old. I don't want to have to explain again that the things I liked when I was a little girl aren't the same things I like now. This all sucks. My mother made friends with my homeroom teacher. The same one who says I have psychosocial problems.” She makes a disgusted face that wrinkles up her tiny tree-monkey nose. “And the ophthalmologist says that I have to wear an eye patch. Only stupid little kids wear eye patches.”

  “I never wore a patch,” says Lucas Giraut firmly.

  The way he is sprawled out on his white plastic deck chair is slightly different from the way people usually sprawl out. His back, for example, is straight. His shoulders perfectly upright. His arms brought together in his lap with his fingers intertwined or resting carefully on the arms of the chair. The only thing that actually allows one to perceive that he's lounging is a certain barely discernible relaxation of the muscles in his face. Or, in extreme cases, the crossing of his legs at thigh height.

  “Your father was a smart guy,” says Valentina. “About the windows. Keeping away from windows is smart. Anyone who knows how to defend themselves knows that.” She glances cautiously toward the kitchen window of the apartment on the first floor of the former ducal palace. Then she looks at Giraut. She adopts a vaguely confidential tone. “I've been perfecting a new mental attack. I call it the Attack of the Low-Flying Airplanes. It's better than the Machine Gun Attack and much better than the Hand Grenade Attack. It's the best attack I've invented yet. It's great at school, in class or when my homeroom teacher makes me do stupid stuff like go to her office or the school psychologist's office to fill out stupid multiple-choice tests. What you have to do is imagine that you're the pilot of a warplane. One of those old kinds that had a guy on top with aviator goggles that ran a machine gun. Then you imagine the people you want to eliminate. You see them from above, as if you were the guy in the airplane that runs the machine gun. And you plunge down in a nosedive.” Valentina places her hands in front of her torso as if she were operating the controls of an invisible machine gun. “You see them running in every direction, but, of course, they can't escape a warplane. And you get closer and you gun them down and then you make a signal to the pilot for him to rise and then nosedive down again to wipe out all the survivors. If there are any. It's an attack that works better outside, of course. It's perfect for when there's a basketball game. When all my stupid classmates put on their basketball uniforms and are happy and I have to say that I'm sick so they'll let me sit on the bench.”

  Lucas Giraut raises the lapels of his Lino Rossi charcoal gray pinstripe suit. To protect himself against the cold of the December evening. Lucas Giraut is not only fond of Lino Rossi suits. He has also developed a habit of analyzing a man's psyche and the way he perceives his place in the world, all based on the suits he wears. The name he has given that discipline in his head is Suitology. The margin of error of his suitological analyses, according to his own calculations, is little or none.

  “My father was full of strange things,” he says. “Like his window illness. He told me strange things all the time, and every time I asked him something he answered me in that mysterious tone of his, and then I would obsess over it. I'd get home and get in bed and I couldn't get those things out of my head.” He frowned, as if something in the process of remembering was difficult for him. “Once he told me that there was a man on our block who trained vultures on his roof. That he had ten vultures in a pigeon loft and he had trained them to attack people. And once in a while the guy waited until night fell and sent one of his trained vultures to kill someone. I spent weeks obsessing over that. Every time I left the house to go to school, I walked with my back flat against the buildings, looking up at the sky.”

  “I signed up for the talent show at school.” Valentina Parini uses her index finger to readjust her glasses on her tiny nose and looks with her tree-dwelling features at Lucas Giraut, antiques dealer, son of an antiques dealer and supposed mama's boy according to the prevailing rumors in his extended circle of friends and family. “It's something they do every year for Christmas. My school psychologist still doesn't know. And I'm planning on reading my novel. Blood on the Basketball Court. I'm gonna read it in front of everybody. In the school auditorium. With my basketball coach right there. With my school psychologist and my homeroom teacher and all the stupid girls in my class listening.” Valentina Parini's words have what is usually referred to as A Vaguely Threatening Quality. Somehow, that quality seems to emphasize the wandering of her eye. “Maybe I'll invite my mother, too. I won't be able to read the whole thing, of course. Just some parts. The decapitation of the basketball coach. The bomb in the locker rooms. The Graduation Day Massacre.”

 
Giraut intertwines his fingers and rests his smooth, hairless chin on the resulting double fist. About ten feet from where they are talking, on the other side of the frosted glass kitchen window of the two-story house, Marcia Parini's silhouette is flipping a crêpe in the air. Lucas Giraut's most striking physical feature is a round, largely hairless face that doesn't seem to belong to the same person as his tall, thin body with its long limbs. The brown eyes below pale brows always seem vaguely sleepy, giving his face a generally namby-pamby air.

  “I made the last chapter longer.” Valentina Parini adopts a tone somewhat similar to the expert acuity of a literary professional. “I added more descriptions. Of dead girls in the school yard. With their basketball jerseys riddled with bullet holes. Or burned.” She pulls up the plaid blanket that's covering her legs and lap to ward off the twilight chilliness of the December evening. “Some of their heads are blown off.”

  From the other side of the courtyard they can hear noises from the street. Christmas carols coming from cheap municipal amplification systems. The directions guides give to the groups of tourists that cluster around the cathedral. The shouts of alarm when one of those tourists discovers that the handbag tucked under the arm of the pick-pocket who's athletically running away belongs to them.

  “I'm dying to see their faces,” says Valentina. “At the talent show.”

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 2

  Eric & Iris

  Eric Yanel and his fiancée Iris Gonzalvo are lying on contiguous deck chairs on the enormous deck of the Palladium Hotel & Spa in Ibiza. Beneath the reasonably warm sun of Ibiza's off-season. On the hotel's private beach, made of tempered salt with a high iodine content, a group of sunbathers with permagrins watch the game of mixed volleyball that is taking place a few feet below the deck. The deck chairs where Eric Yanel and Iris Gonzalvo are lying aren't exactly arranged in parallel, but rather in slightly centrifugal angles. Perfectly symmetrical to both sides of the small aluminum table where their drinks rest. A Finlandia with cranberry juice for her and a ten-year-old Macallan with ice for him. With a partially melted ice cube floating on its golden surface, like someone doing the dead man's float under the sun.

  Iris Gonzalvo sits up to take off her eye protector and watches her fiancé while leisurely stroking the golden ring that joins the cups of the upper half of her navy blue Dior bikini. Eric Yanel has a cigarette dangling from the side of his lips and is looking with a frown at a magazine open in his hands. The shadow of the umbrella with the Palladium Hotel & Spa's corporate emblem that Eric and Iris have behind them only covers the part of their bodies above the chest.

  “What is this?” Eric Yanel uses the back of his hand to tap the satin-finished page of the open magazine. It's one of those glossy magazines for men. With photo essays on the breasts and buttocks of sculpted and digitally retouched women. “Who the hell is Penny DeMink? And why is there a photo of you here?”

  Iris's expression is inscrutable behind the heart-shaped frames of her sunglasses. She bought those glasses after she saw them in an old movie projected onto the wall of a discothèque. A sonic amalgam of diving bodies, children's screams and the whistle blows of the hotel's social directors reach the deck from the private beach that extends below and from the hotel's complex of indoor pools. In addition to the tempered salt private beach, the Palladium Hotel & Spa in Ibiza has indoor pools on every floor, outdoor pools filled with seawater, a special aloe vera bath, saunas, Roman steam rooms, special tubs for thalassotherapy and a fangotherapy room.

  “I swear I don't understand why I keep wasting my time with you,” says Iris Gonzalvo. Her voice is smooth and at the same time gravelly, like the voice of someone who, due to lack of lung power, has learned to fill their tone with sharp edges. “You're not even listening to me. I'm Penny DeMink. It's one of those names. What are they called? And what's important is what it says about me. In case you haven't gotten that.”

  Iris Gonzalvo's body is thin. With a very flat stomach and wide shoulders. Her skin is very white in spite of the sun and has a light covering of freckles that can only be seen when you get up close. Neither of them is wearing a bathing suit, strictly speaking. Eric Yanel is wearing some jean shorts and an Armani Sport polo shirt. Iris Gonzalvo is wearing the top of a navy blue Dior bikini and a paisley Cacharel sarong. The midday heat is that reasonably warm heat, like a caress, that's typical of the low season in Ibiza.

  Eric Yanel pulls a tiny bottle out of the pocket of his shorts, one of those bottles of cocaine with the screw-on tops that come with a tiny spoon built in. He opens it, fills the tiny spoon, and raises it first to one nostril and then the other while he sniffs with a distracted expression. He reads the text of the glossy magazine for men and puts the tiny bottle back in his pocket.

  “Pseudonym,” he says. “But what's this? You made a dirty movie?” He shakes his head. The way he pronounces the word “dirty” betrays his French origins. “Shit. At least I've never done a dirty movie.”

  “It's not a dirty movie.” Iris Gonzalvo takes the magazine from his lap and puts it on the little table. “It's an adult film. And of course you've never done one. You've never done any kind of movie. Your specialty is car commercials where no one can see you because you're inside the car.”

  Eric Yanel's long, blond, perfectly coiffed hair, which includes a somewhat larger-than-life wave over his forehead, also betrays his French origins. His habit of wearing penny loafers without socks isn't a particularly French trait, but along with his fondness for polo shirts and his long, blond, very coiffed wavy hair, helps to distinguish him as a member, or at least a descendant, of the French rural upper class.

  “Of course you know why you're with me.” Yanel picks up the eye protector from the little table and places it over his eyes while reclining the adjustable upper part of the deck chair. He lies back with his hands on his chest. His gesture reminds you of the position in which corpses are placed into coffins. “You're with me because if you weren't with me you wouldn't be able to be in a place like this drinking and sunbathing. Instead you'd be throwing yourself at German businessmen in convention hotels.”

  “Right now I'd enjoy throwing myself at a businessman,” says Iris Gonzalvo in an even tone. “From Germany or from wherever. I'm twenty-four years old. I'm incredibly hot. And I'm in Ibiza. I should be fucking until I can't walk anymore.”

  Eric Yanel turns his head toward his fiancée and stares at her as if he could see her through the plastic eye protector. Each half of the eye protector is shaped like a mollusk shell. Beyond his fiancée's deck chair, in a spot that would be perfectly visible to Yanel were he not wearing the eye protector, a Floor Manager of the Palladium Hotel & Spa is speaking in a hushed tone to the Director of Customer Service.

  “You women just don't get it.” Yanel takes the tiny bottle of cocaine out of his pocket again. He unscrews the top and raises the tiny spoon first to one nostril and then the other before replacing his eye protector. “The male sex drive is much more subtle than people think. Ever since sexual liberation, women started seeing men as simple objects. That can be used at any moment. They glorify the permanent erection. But the truth is”—he makes a hand gesture that suggests resignation—“we aren't machines. It's been shown that men obtain their fullest sexual gratification through masturbation. Scientifically proven.”

  In the volleyball court on the private beach below the hotel's deck, the two mixed teams jump and shout and laugh loudly. A female player falls to the ground, gets up coated in white sand and starts brushing it off her breasts and hips amidst a chorus of naughty titters and vaguely sexual whistles.

  “If I jerk off one more time, my clitoris is going to fall off,” says Iris Gonzalvo.

  Her hair is long and curly in a way that is incongruent with the decade in progress. Long and curly like the hair of some models and actresses in the eighties.

  The Floor Manager and the Director of Customer Service begin to cross the smooth, sunny length of the deck tow
ard Yanel and his fiancée. On the beach volleyball court a more tangible sexual episode is taking place. A couple of male players are laughing and chasing a female player around the court. She carries the ball nestled below her swinging breasts. The scene is strongly reminiscent of certain classic pictorial motifs having to do with the hunt of half-naked women.

  “I've only been in one car commercial where no one could see me.” Eric Yanel gazes at the off-season Ibiza sun with his eyes covered by the protector. “And I did it as a favor. That's something we actors do. Sometimes our agents ask us to do favors for their friends.”

  The Floor Manager and the Director of Customer Service stop in front of the deck chairs occupied by the engaged couple. The Director of Customer Service moves a step ahead of the Floor Manager, as stated in company protocol. The Director of Customer Service is very tanned and his hair is dyed blond. The only corporate emblem he is wearing on his sporty attire is his plastic ID badge pinned to the front of his shirt.

  “Mr. Yanel,” the Director of Customer Service addresses the face partially covered by the eye protector, “we don't have to do this out here. We can move to a more private location.”

  Eric Yanel takes off his eye protector calmly and delivers a perfectly proportioned smile to the Director of Customer Service. A smile that could be a perfect advertising smile except for a certain yellowish tone. He sits up and offers a hand to the Director of Customer Service. The Director of Customer Service looks at the hand as if he were having some reservations before shaking it with a neutral expression.