by Javier Calvo
Bocanegra's arrival is announced by the thundering sound of his steps on the wooden stairs and a slight trembling of the floor. A moment later, he reaches the top of the stairs, wrenching an anguished creak from the floorboards. The Show Business Impresario and Reputed Best Friend of the late Lorenzo Giraut shows his teeth in a ferocious grin. Over six feet of flabby flesh with an impossibly shiny bald head crowning his wide, mustachioed face. Giraut looks Bocanegra up and down and carries out a quick suitological analysis of his beige Prada suit, with the following results: indifference; sumptuousness that becomes disdainful without ever being classy; contained violence and respectability strictly based on negative personality elements.
Bocanegra energetically extends his flaccid hand to his host. The smile on his wide, mustachioed face is cruel for some reason that's hard to discern. There's something intrinsically cruel in Bocanegra's features. Something that doesn't seem to depend on the specific configuration of said features at any given moment.
“I can't explain how much this means to me.” Mr. Bocanegra raises a hand to his chest and wrinkles his large soft face into an expression of emotional pain. Then he makes a gesture with his large hairy mitts that includes the entire office. “Being here. That you called me. I don't need to say that your father was more than a brother to me. Fuck, I'd fit most of my real brothers with cement shoes and dump them in the sea. But that's another story.” He frowns. “Your father was the most significant person in my life. I know it's strange for me to say that when most likely you don't even remember me. How old were you the last time I saw you? Four? Five? But what can you do.” He gives a resigned shrug. “Your mother never liked me. Let's just say that she never wanted me to set foot in her house. Which is why you've never seen me, and why your father never told you about me. Fuck, I don't even want to think about what would have happened if she'd suspected that I worked so closely with your father.”
Lucas makes a sign for his guest to sit down in the armchair on the other side of the Louis XV cartonnier. Mr. Bocanegra drops himself heavily into the armchair and leans back against the wide back with his arms extended. There is certainly something familiar about him. It's not his wide, mustachioed and slightly sweaty face, or the way he talks. It's more the way his features adjust to his different emotional states without losing a constant trace of underlying cruelty. Some sort of background trace. A trace that evokes large predators in ecosystems not dominated by human beings.
“My mother is a difficult woman.” Giraut takes out his silver cigarette case embossed with the initials that he shares with his late father and offers his visitor a cigarette. There is a moment of silence as Bocanegra lights his cigarette with the lighter that Giraut extends to its tip before continuing. “Things tend to get complicated when she's involved.”
“God bless your mother.” Bocanegra takes a drag on his cigarette. His feminine coat, made of sable or Chinese otter or maybe astrakhan lamb, somehow manages to make his figure more threatening. Like some sort of cosmic provocation directed at no one in particular. “The truth is that I don't blame her for hating me. After all, your mother hates the entire human race. You should have seen the face I made when your father told me he was going to marry her. Why don't you just marry an electric eel, I told him.”
Lucas Giraut nods.
“Mr. Bocanegra.” He places both hands, palms open, on the surface of the cartonnier. “As you are well aware, I didn't get to know my father very well. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I get the impression that my father never made any effort to help me get to know him. Or, of course, to get to know me.” He shrugs his shoulders. “The circumstances of his life and his death are a mystery to me. And my mother has made sure that it remains that way. And nevertheless, I am pretty well versed in the professional aspects of his life. Some of his international dealings are still legendary in the antique business.” He gestures toward a pile of professional magazines on top of the cartonnier. “And of course, since when he died he left me at the helm of his corporation, I now have access to all company documents and records. Including those documents and records which, due to their nature, have never been examined by anyone outside of my father's intimate circle. And here is where you come in.”
Mr. Bocanegra seems to sprawl out even further in his chair. The way he superimposes his new position onto the original one is analogous to taking out a second mortgage on top of the one you already have. His new lounging position seems to suggest abundance in every sense of the word and a laxness bordering on defiance.
Lucas Giraut takes a file out of a drawer. He places it on the cartonnier's writing surface and opens it up to the first page.
“To give just one example.” Giraut examines the file's first page. Bocanegra's evident lack of any curiosity toward the file seems designed to cover up a certain degree of interest and curiosity. “Have you ever heard of the Isle of Guernsey? I confess that when I first came across that name I was a bit confused.” He turns a page of the file. “Well, it turns out that the Isle of Guernsey is a British protectorate located in the English Channel. Its total surface is thirty square miles, with a population of sixty thousand people. Typical animals are the donkey and a local type of cows. Its national color is green.”
Something has changed in Mr. Bocanegra's facial expression. The element of cruelty that lies beneath his features seems to have come to the surface without causing any tangible change in his facial expression. Except perhaps for a quasi-feline element of alertness. His enormous body now seems to withdraw into an alert, quasi-feline crouch.
“I'm sure you would agree,” continues Giraut, “that it doesn't seem like a place where my father would go to conduct business. And, yet, the Isle of Guernsey is the headquarters of Arnold Layne Experts. A company I haven't bothered to investigate for the simple fact that it's none of my business what the people of Guernsey do. And the name isn't the only curious thing about this company. For example.” He continues reading from the file he has open on the table. “The last names of the three principal shareholders are Wright, Waters and Mason. Now if one were to type those three last names into any Internet search engine, he would discover that they are the last names of the three founding members of the British rock band Pink Floyd. While 'Arnold Layne' is the title of the band's first single. Defined in musical encyclopedias as,” he reads, “'An optimistic and seminally psychedelic song about a cross-dresser that ends up in jail.' Okay”—he looks up and observes Bocanegra's facial expression—“I'm not a big fan of rock music. Although, as you already know, my father was. And, yet, the name Pink Floyd brings to my mind a series of memories. You can already imagine what kind of memories. That was the first detail that made me think. And then, of course, there's the date that Arnold Layne Experts was incorporated. The summer of 1978. Of course, it took me a little while to recall why that date was so familiar to me. I was only five years old. So”—he closes the file—“does any of this ring a bell with you?” Giraut raises his thin, pale brows over his namby-pamby eyes. “Are you, perhaps, a Pink Floyd fan?”
Bocanegra leans back and keeps smoking. His eyes squint too fleetingly to be registered as anything more than a vague sensation. In the same way that certain predators squint fleetingly while their brains take in the information necessary for their next predatory action.
“Mr. Bocanegra.” Lucas Giraut puts the file back in the drawer. “I have no intention of starting to dig around in cases that are already closed and which the law has no interest in.” He pauses to once again interlock his fingers in front of his face, his elbows resting on the table's surface. “However, I do have professional goals. And some of them coincide with those my father had. Did you know, for example, that while I was doing my doctorate in Dublin I visited the four St. Kieran Panels when they were on display in the Trinity College museum, and that I had the chance to study them privately for a week? And I don't know if you are aware that my father was arrested in 1978 just as he was taking steps to acquire those s
ame four paintings on wood. I mean the same summer in which someone who was working closely with him sold him to the authorities.” He pauses. “And now those paintings are coming here. To Barcelona. They are going to be exhibited in this city. I don't know if you're following me, Mr. Bocanegra.”
Mr. Bocanegra smiles, very slightly at first. Barely a hint of teeth on an overall backdrop of facial cruelty. Then that hint widens, growing in all directions and revealing both rows of large, voracious teeth. The face of a predator baring his teeth threateningly, and then a bona fide cruel smile. Mr. Bocanegra's Genuinely Cruel Smile. Finally he lifts his eyebrows with an amused expression.
“Are you saying that you want those paintings?” He scrutinizes the round, hairless face of his host. “You called me so I would help you get them? So I would devise a plan of action and a strategy and use my experience and my international contacts?” He takes a last drag on his cigarette and crushes it in the ashtray. “After finding my number in your father's secret files or whatever? In other words, after realizing that I am the person that your father would have turned to if he wanted to do something that surpassed the normal bounds of an antique dealer's reach, et cetera and so on?”
Lucas Giraut stares for a second at the remains of the cigarette butt. Most of which seems to have disintegrated or at least no longer bears any resemblance to the typical remains of a cigarette butt.
“I can't explain it,” he says. “But those paintings have a special significance for me. A special value. That's all I can say.”
There is a moment of silence. The lights in Lucas Giraut's office on the mezzanine of the building that houses LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD., are distributed and calibrated in such a way that dusk prevails, all day long.
Mr. Bocanegra stands up suddenly. The way he stands up causes an emphatic lurching of various greasy areas of his face, neck and torso. The coat he is wearing over his shoulders is one of those long-haired fur coats that one associates with wealthy post-Soviet Russian women who smoke while waiting for their chauffeurs in front of some restaurant in Saint-Tropez. A second later, Giraut stands up as well. With a cautious expression.
“I never had kids,” says Mr. Bocanegra, closing in on Giraut. “I'm basically a childless person. No one understands that pain. That hollowness inside.” The face of Mr. Bocanegra, Show Business Impresario, once again adopts that expression of emotional pain that reminds one of a melodramatic silent film actor with stomach problems. Then he extends his enormous arms to both sides of Lucas Giraut's body and opens his hairy, ring-filled hands wide, and before Giraut can react he traps him in an embrace so enveloping and so strong that it makes the soles of his black Lino Rossi loafers come up off the ground. Bocanegra remains that way for a moment, embracing him in silence. Then he nods emotionally with his head. “Your father would be proud of you, boy. And if your father would be, you can bet I am, too. Don't take it the wrong way, son, but for me you're like some kind of a son. Someone incredibly significant in my life. And we have a lot of years to catch up on.”
Lucas Giraut's face is resting on Mr. Bocanegra's right shoulder, with his chin buried into the long hair of the decidedly feminine coat. Still constrained by the embrace, his eyes meet the gaze of the intern, who is watching them from the other side of the mezzanine railing.
Wonderful World
CHAPTER 5
The Dark Side of the Moon
At the very heart of the empire built up over decades by Mr. Bocanegra, Show Business Impresario, at the core of the ever-changing system of cocktail bars, nightclubs and restaurants throughout the Ampurdan that make up that empire, lies The Dark Side of the Moon, standing majestically on its corner in the Upper Ensanche. Flanked by glass commercial buildings with their uniformed doormen and looking out on the traffic of Diagonal Avenue at Vía Augusta from its glazed upper floor. Savage in its defiance of municipal ordinances. Never mentioned in the newspapers. Never the object of neighbors' complaints. Never needing advertising and always far from public opinion, as if The Dark Side of the Moon and public opinion existed in different quantum dimensions. As if they happened in parallel and never were in the same place at the same time. Nothing seems capable of displacing The Dark Side of the Moon from its dominant position in the galaxy of disreputable places in Barcelona's Upper Ensanche.
In The Dark Side of the Moon's private parking lot, Juan de la Cruz Saudade opens the back door of a rental car with tinted windows that is astonishingly similar to the rest of the rental cars with tinted windows that are already parked. Saudade has never seen anyone use the front door of The Dark Side of the Moon. Its clients always go in through the vehicle entrance in the side alley. In the parking garage, Saudade's job consists of taking the keys that the cars' occupants cavalierly deposit in his hand, then showing them the way to the elevator and parking their vehicles. As he parks the cars he tries to damage them slightly, either on the inside or on the outside, in a way that isn't immediately visible. Slight damages that will only be noticed two or three days later.
The car's occupant comes out of the door that Saudade is holding open. He squints under the milky and vaguely iridescent light given off by the garage's fluorescent tubes and then observes Juan de la Cruz Saudade with an expression bordering on horror. Saudade doesn't seem surprised by his reaction. Although technically attractive, his shapely face and tall, slim body are also windows onto a soul that is some sort of industrial oven of hostility. There is nothing remotely kind or friendly in Saudade's features. His reverberating supernova of hostility gleams around his head in exactly the same way that certain venerable old men in remote regions of Asia have an almost tangible aura of beatitude. The guy that just got out of the car takes a step back, intimidated, and his back rams into the side of the car.
“Are you gonna give me the keys or not?”
Saudade puts his hands on his hips, an inappropriate gesture for his position at the very bottom of The Dark Side of the Moon's hierarchical staff pyramid. His technically attractive face is badly shaved. The legs of a pair of powder blue and white Umbro brand sweatpants and some sneakers with worn toes stick out from beneath his corporate jacket.
The Dark Side of the Moon client drops his keys in the palm of Saudade's outstretched hand and hurries off toward the velvet-walled elevator that leads to the main level. Saudade takes a little bottle of cheap scotch from the pocket of his jacket, unscrews the top and takes a swig while thoughtfully watching the man who heads off still sneaking nervous little peeks over his shoulder. Although he is a practicing devotee of all manners of hatred, it is the hatred associated with questions of gender, race and socioeconomic status that Saudade has raised to the level of art. An art as venerable and rich in nuances as, for example, seventeenth-century Flemish pictorial portraiture.
The pounding music from the main floor of The Dark Side of the Moon travels through the walls and floor to the private parking garage. Making everybody down there feel like they are inside a living body. The light is milky and a bit iridescent. Saudade prepares to park the newly arrived car and damage it slightly in the process when another rental car with tinted windows comes in down the private parking garage's ramp. The second car stops with a screech of its tires beside the first one and its back doors open almost simultaneously. Four executive types stumble out from inside. Their business suits show the archetypal signs of executive celebration: ties loosened and pulled to one side; deep red stains on their suit fronts. Their executive hairstyles are unkempt and several locks have escaped from the tyranny of their hair gel. One of them carries an uncorked bottle of Moët et Chandon and drinks straight from the bottle.
“Hey, kid,” shouts one of the executive types from the other side of the car Saudade is about to park. “What's going on? You gonna make me walk all the way over there?”
The four executives start laughing. Their laughter is that strangely shrill, not very masculine laughter that Saudade automatically associates with Piece of Shit Rich Boys laughing at someone who's lower class. It
doesn't sound quite like hyenas laughing, more like someone just pretending to laugh. One of the executives slaps himself on the knee. They all wipe tears of hilarity from their cheeks. Saudade's tattooed hand, filled with thick rings, closes tightly around the small bottle of whiskey he has in his jacket pocket. His teeth gnash almost audibly in the middle of the echo-filled private parking garage. At that moment one of the executives with loosened ties and decomposing hairstyles stares at him with his eyes squinted.
“Saudade?” says the executive. “Is that you?”
One of the fluorescent tubes on the private parking garage's roof starts to blink and give off a slight mechanical hum. In that way that fluorescent tubes in parking garages blink and buzz as the prelude to a rape or a shoot-out or one of those violent acts that are usually committed in underground parking garages.
“You know this guy?” asks one of the other executives.
“Damn straight,” says the first one. “Must be five or six years now. He used to do jobs for our company. Special jobs.”
The four executives are silent. A silence filled of respect, cautiousness and curiosity mitigated by the fear of asking the wrong questions. Someone clears their throat. The executive carrying the open bottle of Moët et Chandon in his hand takes a swig.
“Holy shit,” says the executive. “How's it going? You work here now?” he says in a shaky tone. “For Bocanegra?”
Some sort of deep tremor runs through Juan de la Cruz Saudade's tattooed arms and muscular back. The whiskey trembles inside the bottle in his pocket. Most of Saudade's tattoos are drawings or political or even paramilitary slogans associated with his favorite soccer club. The supernova of hate that surrounds his face shrinks to an iridescent, flickering white dwarf. The executive who claims to know Saudade begins to apologize in a voice choked with emotion. A couple of Bocanegra's employees who keep guard by the elevator are now watching the scene with unconcealed curiosity. Saudade's face reminds one of white dwarfs and black holes and all kinds of heavenly bodies that implode in silence and cause galactic cataclysms around them. The blinking of the ceiling's fluorescent tube creates intermittent shadows on the cement floor. One of Bocanegra's elevator operators makes a sarcastic comment. Saudade approaches the group of executives, who remain paralyzed beside their rental car, and holds out a hand with the palm facing up. The executives deposit the keys with the rental company's corporate logo on the key ring and disappear from Saudade's vicinity. After a moment the noise of the elevator is heard.