Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  “There's a car out front that seems to be watching us.” Lucas Giraut points with his head at Commissioner Farina's lackeys' car that is parked across the street. “They have cameras. And it looks like they're watching us.”

  “That car belongs to Commissioner Farina's lackeys,” says Mr. Bocanegra. Without looking at where Lucas Giraut is pointing. “The guy that put your father in jail. And who's been on my ass since the late seventies. A real psychopath. One of those cops, you know. Loves car chases. But you have nothing to worry about.” His tone is not reassuring in any kind or quasi-paternal way. It is a tone that mixes elements of quasi-paternal advice with a veiled threat. “That's all you need to know for now. In the next few days I'll give you all instructions and blueprints. Guidelines. The details of my plan. The fee is the usual one for this kind of job. In other words, a ton of money. So you can have some more fun and get yourselves in some more trouble. Except for Mr. Yanel, who has been so kind as to renounce his share in exchange for my taking lightly certain matters that he and I have pending.” He expels a puff of thick smelly cigar smoke and looks at the twisting distorted images of the faces of the four members of his audience through the cigar smoke. “Now is the moment where you ask all the questions you need to. And I hope that they'll be relevant and intelligent questions and that none of them will be too long or complicated, because it turns out that tonight I am having dinner with my nieces and nephews. The people I love most in the world. And I don't want to show up late for my dinner with them. So go ahead.” He makes a gesture slightly similar to the gesture one makes when, in a fistfight, they want to indicate to their opponent to come closer so they can give them a good slug. “Ask me your relevant and intelligent questions.”

  There is a moment of silence. Lucas Giraut has never heard of anyone named Commissioner Farina. Not in relation to his father or his father's arrest. The silence that has fallen over the Meeting Room allows the amalgam of female laughter and dance music to filter through from the Main Floor of The Dark Side of the Moon.

  “Where's Bob Marley?” asks Aníbal Manta finally, his enormous arms crossed over the front of his suit and his eyes a bit squinted. In that way that Aníbal Manta squints his eyes and gathers his features together slightly when he is dealing with matters that challenge his ability to obtain a good perspective on what is going on around him. “Did they really nab him?”

  Mr. Bocanegra stares at Aníbal Manta with an expression that seems to suggest that he's trying to decide if Manta's question meets the requirements he has just put forward.

  “It seems,” he says, “that Bob Marley has had a small streak of bad luck. And it's quite possible that he's going to have another streak of bad luck when I catch up with him. Then he may join our mission. If there's anything left of him, of course. More questions?”

  Saudade raises his hand. Bocanegra's face reflects a certain degree of surprise.

  “I don't mind working with Russians,” says Saudade with a frown, and crosses his arms in a way that perhaps unconsciously and perhaps not imitates the way Aníbal Manta's arms are crossed. Manta is seated behind and definitely falls outside of his visual field. “Or with any kind of strange people. But I don't like working with Piece of Shit Rich Kids that don't know how to tie their own shoes. I'm talking about Mr. Rich Kid Esquire.” He makes a gesture with his eyebrows raised in Lucas Giraut's direction. “I mean, I don't know who you are, Sir Mr. Rich Kid Esquire, but to tell you the truth, I get the impression that you're a shit-for-brains rich kid who has no fucking idea of how people like us do things. And that you're gonna shit your pants when the going gets rough.” He looks at Aníbal Manta. Aníbal Manta looks away. “You all know what I'm talking about.”

  There is a long moment of silence. Bocanegra's expression seems to indicate that Saudade's question definitely does not meet with the previously established requirements of relevance and intelligence.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 10

  Italian Academy Basketball Club

  “My mother embarrasses me,” says Valentina Parini, seated in a genuinely prepubescent posture on the bench of the basketball court of Barcelona's Italian Academy. She isn't seated with her back erect in the modest and elegant carriage of a postpubescent girl. Instead her legs hang down and her body leans slightly forward and she grabs the edge of the bench with her hands. “I mean when she's looking for a boyfriend to marry her. People can't tell, but I can. I can always tell.” She turns to look at Lucas Giraut, who is standing with his hands in his pockets a few steps behind the basketball court bench. Dressed in a burgundy herringbone stitch Lino Rossi suit. In addition to Valentina Parini, there are three other girls sitting on the bench. Alternately paying attention to the game that is taking place on the basketball court and the conversation that Valentina is having with Lucas. “Like the other night. Sometimes she embarrasses me so much it makes me want to punch her.”

  Lucas Giraut nods. Marcia Parini's behavior during the last part of Fanny Giraut's Unnumbered Birthday party was pretty much the same as it always is toward the end of every Giraut family party she's ever been invited to. Rubbing rounded parts of her anatomy against the anatomy of various male guests, hanging with both arms from the neck of said guests and speaking into their ears while kissing them on the cheeks.

  Giraut watches as the center from the home team, a tall plump girl, throws the ball vigorously against the opposing team's backboard. The ball bounces off the backboard and forces several players on both teams to crouch instinctively and cover their heads with their hands. The referee blows her whistle emphatically and gestures with her arms. The visiting team is a team from downtown made up of racially diverse girls with no uniforms. Some of the prepubescent and postpubescent girls from the downtown team chew gum with cruel expressions on their faces. Many of them have scabs on their knees and wear faded T-shirts of bands for teenage girls. One of the girls from the downtown team wears a faded black T-shirt of a metal band. The girls from the home team, including Valentina Parini, are impeccably dressed in uniforms with green T-shirts that read “ITALIAN ACADEMY BASKETBALL CLUB BARCELONA” on the front, white shorts and red socks that come all the way up to their unbruised knees.

  The coach of the home team shouts something from the sidelines of the basketball court, putting her hands along both sides of her mouth and making signs to one of the players on the home team defense to sit on the bench.

  “Parini,” says the home team coach, who wears her hair short and seems to have something below her nose that slightly resembles a mustache. “You replace Adelfi.” She looks at Lucas Giraut with clear displeasure, which doesn't seem to be based on Giraut's presence behind the players' bench but rather on the mere fact that people like Lucas Giraut exist in the same cosmos as she and her players do. “If your father doesn't mind, of course.”

  There is a second of silence. Some of the players from the downtown team watch the scene with their hands on their hips and spit on the floor of the basketball court.

  “He's not her father,” says one of the players seated on the home team bench.

  “She has no father,” says another of the home team players. “Her father left.”

  The player named Adelfi limps to the sideline of the school basketball court. She grabs the towel held out by one of her teammates and uses it to wipe her forehead and underarms. Someone mists one of her knees with a medicinal spray.

  “I'm not her father,” explains Giraut to the mostly hostile faces that watch him from the bench, the playing field and the portable stands located at his back. “I'm a friend of the family's. I live in the apartment upstairs,” he says, and the faces just look at him with neutral expressions.

  “He's not my father.” Valentina Parini looks at the coach with a frown behind her green plastic glasses. “And I don't want to go out. I'm the worst player on the team. I'm the worst player on any team. Every time I go out everyone laughs at me. Adelfi can play better than me even if they cut off her leg.” She
shrugs her shoulders. “Why don't you kick me off the team?”

  The players waiting on the basketball court cross their arms or put their hands on their hips and spit on the ground or bounce the ball while they roll their eyes and look at each other with bored expressions. The basketball players on the female section of the Italian Academy of Barcelona's Basketball Club are tacitly divided into two categories based on whether they have breasts or not. The players with breasts move with a discreet but firm elegance and modesty as of yet unknown to their teammates without breasts. The breasts of the basketball players with breasts move in directions related to the movement of the ball and the game in progress. They sway vertically in parallel to the ball's bouncing on the ground. They are projected forward when a player with breasts throws the ball forward and they go back in toward her thoracic cavity each time she receives a pass. When a player with breasts jumps to slam dunk, her breasts are projected gloriously up toward the heavens.

  “I would love to kick you off the team,” says the mustachioed coach. “I dream about it. But your school psychologist says that you're so nutso that if we kicked you off you'd lose it completely.” She makes a sign with her hand to the referee, who is examining the cuticles of one hand without taking the whistle out of her mouth. “So move your rear end and get into your position.”

  The game resumes with Valentina Parini in the left wing position for the home team. A few steps away from where Lucas Giraut is watching the game with his hands in his pockets. Barely any of the players on the downtown team have breasts. The players on the downtown team are smaller in size and some of them are black and have Asian or Latin American features. The center for the downtown team is a tall Chinese girl with chipped teeth. The Chinese player slam dunks into the home team's basket and smiles with a look of true Asian cruelty in her chipped smile. Five minutes later a visiting player slams Valentina with her shoulder in such a way that Valentina and Valentina's glasses fly across the floor in opposite directions. Someone shouts out that someone should step on that retard's glasses. Valentina Parini walks calmly back to the bench.

  “Everybody thinks you're my mother's boyfriend.” Valentina sits on the end of the bench closest to Lucas Giraut. The player named Adelfi goes out onto the court again, in the midst of a small ovation from the spectators that fill the portable stands. Mostly players' parents. “And my mother is in love with you. I've been noticing. Analyzing the things she does. I don't care that they say I'm too young to understand these things. And I can see things that other people don't. Like in the books I read, for example.” She takes off her glasses and examines the damage they've suffered with a focused expression that wrinkles up her tiny nose and makes her look even more like a tree-dwelling monkey. “Do you want to marry my mom? This is a serious question.”

  Lucas Giraut raises his eyebrows and strokes his hairless chin with two fingers. In someone else, the gesture could pass for reflective or even calculating, but in his face it only seems to transmit a certain distracted perplexity. The rest of the substitute players seated on the bench have stopped paying attention to what's happening on the court and are now openly staring at Valentina Parini and Lucas Giraut.

  “She wants to marry you,” says Valentina. “I've known for a long time. Remember the other night? At the end of the party? When that waiter carried her out to the street to throw up and then we stuck her in the taxi?”

  Giraut searches through his memories of the trip home after the last of his mother's Unnumbered Birthday parties. The moment in the taxi when Marcia Parini began slapping frenetically on the back window with the palm of her hand. The fact that neither Valentina nor he himself were able to identify said slaps as the universal sign made by all drunks in taxis who need to get out to vomit again. The taxi driver's anger as Valentina pulled her mother out of the back door still drooling vomit and how quickly the taxi driver's anger disappeared when Lucas Giraut opened his wallet and put all the bills it had inside into his hand. And finally the walk home through the dark alleys of the Gothic Neighborhood with their smell of urine, with Valentina and he himself carrying Marcia by the armpits, and Valentina carrying her mother's purse and high heels in her free hand. The three creating a scene that any passerby would naturally assume to be a family scene. And most likely, in the end, it did have some genuinely family element to it.

  “The signs are clear.” The girl puts her glasses back on and wipes off the dust that her fall has left on the sleeveless green shirt of her uniform. “She doesn't kiss you. She doesn't grab you by the neck and nibble on your earlobe. With you she doesn't act like she does with all the others. And when we're at home together she talks about you. Not all the time, but a lot.” She shrugs her shoulders. “Those are the signs. So it's up to you to decide if you want to marry her.”

  A player in the green shirt of the Italian Academy's Basketball Club is twisting on the floor beneath the visiting team's basket with her hands on her crotch. Beside her a black player from the visiting team has her hands held high in the universal sign for innocence in sports sign language. Someone says something insulting about the defensive style of the multiracial team from downtown and a moment later the visiting player who was insulted has one of the home team players firmly locked in a neck grip. The home team player lets out a moo, her face purple and her eyes open very wide. The rest of the impeccably tricolored players watch the scene with reverential fear. The referee blows her whistle emphatically and gestures a lot with her arms.

  “Sixteen days till the worldwide release of Stephen King's new novel.” Valentina takes advantage of the fact that the rest of the players have shifted their focus to the multiracial struggle that is taking place beneath the visiting team's basket. “And I want my mom to let me go to the release party. In that big bookstore downtown. They leave the bookstore open until midnight and fans can go and buy a special edition. The first edition. But so she'll let me go I have to be good and act like I'm an idiot in front of the teachers and show up for basketball games and all that. I don't know how I'm going to stand it.” She makes an impotent gesture. “This is torture. Everybody laughs at me. The teachers more than anybody. I could kill all these stupid girls, like that.” She snaps her fingers. “At least these public school girls know how to fight.”

  Giraut stares with a blank face at an overweight girl who seems to have been listening to their conversation from the bench. The overweight girl looks away as quickly as she can. With a slightly offended face. The attitude of Valentina Parini's classmates toward Valentina Parini has been mainly an attitude of distrust and mockery and general lack of respect since Valentina read aloud in Spanish class an essay titled “The Prayer of Those Who Have No Father and No Mother.” Which is to say, since what is known as the Spanish Class Mishap. Since then, the frequency of taunts and nicknames has increased. Along with the good-humored tortures in the school playground. And the comparisons with physically grotesque or insane film and television characters. Valentina Parini has recited The Prayer of Those Who Have No Father and No Mother on various occasions to Lucas Giraut during their meetings at dusk in the courtyard of the old ducal palace in the Gothic Neighborhood.

  “Perhaps you should rethink your idea,” says Giraut with a pensive expression. “I mean about reading your novel at the talent show. It could be dangerous. I think that by this point they must be watching you very closely. And don't say anything to your school psychologist about what you're writing. Or maybe tell her you're writing some other novel. One where you don't kill all your basketball teammates. One where there's no blood, or final massacre or heads bursting open or anything like that.” He shrugs his shoulders. “When psychologists hear those kinds of things, you're done for.”

  The overweight girl is staring at them with her plump face. Shaking her head and gathering her features in an expression of intense displeasure. Some of the faces nearby turn to pay attention to the conversation taking place near the bench.

  “You are horrible,” she says to Valentina
Parini, pointing at her with an accusatory finger. “And so is this man. And I'm going to tell the principal everything.”

  Valentina Parini readjusts her green plastic kid's glasses on her tiny nose with her index finger and gives the overweight girl an obscene gesture of an openly sexual nature. A gesture that any spectator would consider absolutely inappropriate to someone her age.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 11

  Paintings of Deer

  The dome of St. Peter's basilica and the vaguely extraterrestrial rooftops of the Vatican are outlined against the gray backdrop of the morning sky on the other side of the window of the hostel in the Piazza Navona where Aníbal Manta and Juan de la Cruz Saudade are staying under false names. Aníbal Manta lets his gaze wander through the room: starting at the paintings of deer that decorate the walls, then moving on to the frayed bedspreads on the two single beds and finally to the figures of Saudade and the Italian whore kneeling on the ground giving him a blow job accompanied by expert hand movements on his penis and testicles. Saudade's powder blue and white Umbro sweatpants are wrinkled around his ankles. Saudade, reflects Manta, has never been good at conversations that involve any kind of emotional communication. That's one of the reasons, perhaps the main one, why he's never liked Saudade. In the two years that he's known him, every time they have to do some job together—and their profession usually leads to long periods of forced cohabitation—every attempt that Manta has made to establish that kind of communication has been met by Saudade looking around distractedly. Or picking at his cuticles or nodding in a purely mechanical way while contemplating select parts of nearby female anatomies. Manta closes his eyes and tries to concentrate on the blow job the second Italian whore is giving him, as she kneels on the floor in front of his legs with his pants down around the ankles.