Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  “There are some people that go around saying it's stupid to eat ice cream in the winter.” Saudade has his fingers tangled in the dyed hair of his prostitute and the way her head rocks back and forth suggests that Saudade could be rhythmically pushing her head toward his crotch. “I have just one thing to say to those people—” He makes a theatrical pause. “Fuck off. Right now, I'd say, it's winter.” He points with his chin to the vaguely extraterrestrial rooftops beyond the window. “And look at all the ice cream shops around here. Why are all those people sitting around wolfing down ice cream? Because they're total idiots? No, sir.” He shakes his head with a wise expression on his face. “It's about taste. The taste is the key. In this city they make the best ice cream I've had in my fucking life and the taste is the same in the winter or the summer. As far as I know. In any case, ice cream lasts better in the winter, it doesn't start to melt before you get a chance to finish it. Ha.” Saudade leans his head back and closes his eyes in that clichéd way porn actors do when they've got a woman kneeling in front of them giving them a blow job. It makes Manta a bit nervous that Saudade's penis, even when largely hidden by the prostitute's face and dyed hair, is clearly enormous. Certainly much larger than Manta's own penis. Manta's penis, even though it can't be considered small according to the standard measurements of the average adult penis, does seem proportionally small in relation to the size of Manta's body and the white soft sphere that is his belly. “I'm not saying that I'd rather be sitting here all day eating ice cream instead of being at home with my kid,” continues Saudade, with his fingers tangled in the prostitute's hair. “But fuck. This is the best ice cream I've eaten in my life. That's one thing they've got in this country. In this culture. These sons of bitches make such good ice cream that I could stay here for a few days just for the ice cream.”

  The paintings that hang on the walls depict bucolic scenes in idyllic forest settings featuring herds of deer. There is something unpleasant about those paintings, thinks Manta. They all have dark red skies, skies that attempt to be dusky but are overwhelmingly unrealistic and look like some sort of postnuclear tragedy skies. The deer are out of proportion and some of them look more like dogs or other animals with deer antlers. The situation in which Manta finds himself right now, including the fact of having his pants at his ankles in a room where a prostitute is fellating Saudade's enormous, vigorous penis, gives him a familiar sensation of emotional stress. Traditionally he has never had any problem admitting that the stigma of his looks, along with his fondness for Marvel superheroes, makes up the historical basis of said sensation. A fondness that infantilizes him in the eyes of the world.

  “Ice cream has always made me hard,” says Saudade, who has begun to move his hips back and forth to the rhythm of the head movements of his prostitute. “When I was a cop, we used to go to the whore-houses on Balmes Street,” he says. “Me and my partner. We used to show them our badges and act a little tough, you know. We weren't threatening or anything.” He shrugs his shoulders. “We just wanted to make them a little nervous. We'd have a few drinks and we'd pick out the hottest whores. There was one, I don't remember her name. One of those Russian whores, I guess, but not the skinny kind. Kind with big tits.” He raises his hands to his chest and mimes grabbing some invisible tits. “You'd sit on a great fucking sofa and they'd bring you the whore with her legs spread on a cart with wheels, like the kind they use to bring room service in hotels. With enormous scoops of ice cream on each tit. A couple different flavors with a cherry on top. And more ice cream and chocolate sauce on her pussy and ass.” He sighs with a vaguely nostalgic expression as the prostitute's head movements, now freed from the hands that grabbed her hair, become quicker and more precise. “Since then I can't control myself. Every time I see an ice cream sundae, I just see it and bam!” He punches the palm of his hand, making the whore jump. “Hard as a rock.”

  Manta observes the brown envelope with the corporate logo of Arnold Layne Experts and the photographs strewn on the frayed bedspread. Since he has known him, Saudade has shown himself completely incapable of developing conversations that involve any type of emotional communication. Conversations like the ones that take place in most relationships of male camaraderie and professional friendship. The photographs strewn on the bedspread show a very dark man with plastic-framed glasses and a turtleneck sweater. His angular features and furtive expression in the photos, as he looks around worriedly and gets into a black car with tinted windows, make him look somewhat like a politically exiled pianist. Or perhaps an introverted chess player from the Eastern bloc. The brown corporate envelope the photographs came out of has a name written on it in capital letters in Mr. Bocanegra's unmistakably forceful handwriting: RAYMOND PANAKIAN. Manta closes his eyes again and tries to concentrate: in spite of several minutes of expert fellatio, his penis seems to have lost the desired degree of erection.

  “My psychologist says I should tell you that I feel like you never listen to me,” says Aníbal Manta, looking out of the corner of his eye at Saudade, joined at the waist to the swaying figure of the prostitute. “He says that I have to talk to you directly and be completely honest. That that's the only way I can solve my problems with you. He says that I have to explain how I have the feeling that you never pay attention to me and that that makes me feel bad. That I already feel bad enough because I'm big and fat and I like comic books. You're my work partner and my psychologist told me very clearly that I have to take the bull by the horns and be brave and tell you all the things you do that make me feel bad.”

  Manta stops when he establishes that Saudade isn't listening to him. At this point, it not only seems clear to Manta that Saudade's inability to concentrate betrays a classic case of attention deficit disorder. It also seems clearer and clearer that his colleague's sexual compulsion is a subconscious mechanism to avoid facing the here and now. Especially when that here and now involves a conversation with elements of serious emotional exchange. Now Saudade moves the prostitute's head away from his penis and indicates to her through signs that she should turn around and lean forward. The prostitute turns around with a neutral expression. She wipes her lips with the back of her hand and leans forward with her back to Saudade. Manta feels a stab of emotional stress when Saudade's enormous and vigorous penis skewers the prostitute with dyed hair from behind. With incredible ease, it seems to Manta.

  “My kid has one of those things you make ice cream with,” says Saudade, charging furiously with his hips against the prostitute's ass, which is soft and pale and covered in freckles. “Not one of those cheap ones where you put in some powder and mix it with water and then you freeze it with a little stick inside.” He pauses and wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand before resuming the onslaught. The prostitute exudes professional sounds of sexual satisfaction. “It's one of those things that make real ice cream. The creamy kind. You can put in chocolate shavings or whatever you want. I gave it to him a couple of years ago, for his birthday I think. The kid likes ice cream.” He nods, satisfied. “Like his dad.”

  Aníbal Manta's penis still hasn't achieved a satisfactory erection, and the prostitute kneeling in front of him finds herself forced to pause in her fellation to grab it with her hand and give it some energetic shakes. The paintings of deer infiltrate Manta's visual field obstinately. With their wrong-colored skies and their out-of-proportion deer that stare at him from the walls looking like dogs or other animals in costumes. The transition between Aníbal Manta's moments of severe emotional stress and his fits of rage, along with the control mechanisms he's had to develop in order to repress said fits, have become, over time, the main focus of his therapy sessions. The same fits that he began to experience in the school yard when he was a boy of elephantine dimensions whom the other kids called The Thing. The Thing, according to his therapist's explanations, is a superhero grotesque in appearance but endowed with solid emotional values and colossal strength who is absolutely crucial to the Fantastic Four. To the functioning of
the Fantastic Four as a supergroup with balanced superpowers. Those are the elements of The Thing's identity which make his therapist consider him a superhero that embodies the difficulty and pathos and nobility of Aníbal Manta's life. Now Manta closes his eyes and tries to concentrate on those ideas of nobility and difficulty in spite of the fact that the professional noises of sexual satisfaction coming from Saudade's prostitute have turned into shrieks of pleasure that are not strictly professional. Manta's prostitute pauses, raises her head and asks him something in Italian.

  “Don't worry, darling,” Manta says to her, kneeling to retrieve the pants at his ankles and pull them up. The idea that The Thing has no penis beneath the blue underwear of his Fantastic Four uniform flits around his brain like a malicious little animal. “Go with those two if you want.”

  Saudade plows into the prostitute with dyed hair, her hands now against the wall, making all the furniture and the paintings of deer tremble. Aníbal Manta lights a cigarette.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 12

  Iris Without Eric

  The set of the shoot of the second low-budget production featuring Penny DeMink is filled with those elements designed to represent opulence and sophistication that one finds on the sets of low-budget productions where no one, from the production designer to the viewer in his hotel room, seems to have ever had any experience of opulence or sophistication. Adult films that will never see the light of theaters or ever be published in DVD format. Tapes with generic titles destined to fill the late-night loops of the last television channels in airport hotels for businessmen. Films devoid of the glamour and genuine excitement of the real pornographic industry. Without real sex acts between sex goddesses and Olympic studs. Where slow motion is a way to fill time and close-ups are a way to distract attention from the lack of budget for set design.

  “Get closer to her,” says the director in a bored tone. In that same bored tone one uses to talk to one's mother or sister while paying attention to what's happening on TV. “And put your hand on her ass, fuck. Don't be afraid. Her ass won't bite you.”

  The back wall of the set is covered with a moth-eaten curtain that someone took from a bankrupted theater. It's a detail of the set that no one seems to have bothered to justify in terms of the plot. As often happens with this kind of set. There are statues that look vaguely classical depicting nude women in positions close to sexual ecstasy. There is a statue of a cherub that emits a parabolic stream of water from its tiny penis. There is a canopy bed and someone has attached what look like sequins to the gauzy curtains that hang from it. There doesn't seem to be any plot justification for the sequins. The charmingly coarse signs of opulence found in low culture. Out of the darkest sewers of the film industry. And in the middle of it all, standing beside the canopy bed, Iris Gonzalvo caresses her svelte neck with a melancholy face. Her white flesh glows beneath the lights. Like a heavenly body illuminating its own crown of rotating debris. Turning it all into mere reflections and shadows of its glow. With her Rococo-style powdered wig and her high lace-up boots and her corset that constricts and raises her breasts on which someone has painted a beauty mark with eyeliner pencil. Magnificent in spite of the infinite clumsiness of her character portrayal or maybe precisely because of it.

  “Are you deaf?” the director asks Iris Gonzalvo. With his eyebrows raised in an incredulous expression. Then he turns to his assistant. “Is she deaf? Am I not talking loud enough? Where did we get this girl from?”

  The director's assistant shrugs her shoulders and pats the pockets of her photographer's vest as if the answer to the director's questions might be in one of them. In addition to the photographer's vest, the director's assistant wears combat pants and a stopwatch hanging from a chain around her neck and a pocket protector filled with pens and one of those baseball hats with a jokey message.

  “I think that she's one of the girls the boss hooked us up with.” The director's assistant shrugs her shoulders. With her lips slightly pursed. “I'm not sure. They all end up looking the same to me.”

  Iris Gonzalvo is standing beside the canopy bed. In front of a dark-haired young woman of approximately her same age and height. They both wear powdered wigs and period makeup and are dressed in very tight corsets and lace-up thigh-high boots. They both wear thong underwear that exposes their Brazilian waxes. The only difference between their equally clumsy character portrayals seems to be chromatic.

  “Let's try it again,” says the director. With that expression of tried patience that consists in massaging one's eyelids with the thumb and index finger while shaking one's head slightly. Seated on his chair with a fabric back. “Let's see. What's your name again?”

  “Penny,” she says, with that voice of hers that is both smooth and gravelly. Filled with sharp edges that make up for her lack of lung power.

  “Very good, Penny. Let's not waste any more time. The script says: 'Girl one grabs girl two sensually and kisses her and brings her over to the bed and they both sit on the bed. Cut.' You are girl one. So you have to grab girl two sensually and kiss her and all the rest. You understand?”

  Iris Gonzalvo nods. She scowls almost imperceptibly. Her skin is so white that it's almost iridescent. Too bright and magnetic to be real.

  The director signals to the guy in charge of the clapper board. The director's assistant calls for action. The guy in charge of the clapper board claps it and everything seems to stop. The director, along with his assistant and the cameraman and the lighting and sound technicians and the guys in charge of the spotlights and of holding up microphones in exact locations, all create some sort of a completely immobile and vaguely baroque tableau. Inside of which a second tableau comes to life, the one made up of the two young women clumsily portraying eighteenth-century ladies with thong underwear and Brazilian waxes who are about to begin an interlude of lesbian sex. The transition between the outer tableau and the inner tableau looks like those trompe l'oeil visual tricks in puzzle magazines.

  Iris Gonzalvo takes a step toward her costar. She puts an arm around her waist and brings her mouth close to hers. She places her other hand on the nape of her neck and caresses the soft tangled hairs that stick out from beneath her powdered wig. She is about to kiss her when the director's shout interrupts her approach.

  “What in the hell is wrong with you?” The director slaps his copy of the script in exasperation. “Didn't I tell you to put your hand on her ass? On her ass! And that's a sensual kiss? Doesn't look sensual to me. To me it looks depressing. Look, I'm depressed.” He makes a face that's hard to decipher. “And what's wrong with your face? You don't feel well? Because that's the face I make when I have heartburn.”

  Iris Gonzalvo turns somewhat to look at the director with a defiant face. A face so full of defiance and contempt that for a moment the director and the other members of the crew on the low-budget production stare at her in terror. Someone even goes so far as to take a terrified step back.

  “I'm acting,” she says to the director. “Trying to live the situation as if it were real. I'm sure there are other ways that she and I can communicate besides putting a hand on her ass.”

  The director stares at her for a moment with a perplexed face. Then he frowns. Then he stands up. His subordinates seem to move slightly away from him in that incredibly subtle way that subordinates have of giving the impression that they're moving away from their furious superiors without really budging from their spots. The director's face is literally red with rage. Especially in the upper part of his cheeks.

  “Communicating?” he says. “And how the fuck do you plan on communicating? She only speaks Polish. We had to use fucking sign language to explain to her that she didn't have to do an enema before the shoot.” He moves toward his assistant, who seems to have backed up a few steps more, or perhaps shrunk in size, and who is now hugging a copy of the shooting plan in such a way that any armchair fan of psychology could see is a clearly defensive gesture. “I don't care if the boss got you this job.
Find me another girl the same size. And get this one out of my sight. Send her upstairs to the boss.” He rolls his eyes. “I can't believe that someone can be incapable of acting in a movie where the only thing they have to do is show their ass.”

  Five minutes later, Iris Gonzalvo is dressed in a bathrobe and seated in the production company owner's office. Stroking her recently washed and still wet hair with an absent gesture. With her face clean. Taking pensive drags on a cigarette.

  The owner of the production company making the low-budget film Iris was just fired from sniffs two lines of cocaine from the inner reflective glass surface of some sort of cigarette box. He lifts his face from the table and inhales sharply. He's a muscular guy with a shirt that's too small for him and waxed eyebrows. His eyebrows are waxed in that way that used to be associated with homosexuality before male cosmetic treatments became commonplace. The owner of the production company massages one wing of his nose with his fingertip.

  “I don't know if I can keep giving you work,” he says. With the concerned expression of someone who holds all the power. “People say that you cause problems. And honestly, I think so, too. What do you expect? That some Hollywood producer is going to see one of your films and discover your enormous talent and hire you? If you're very lucky I can get you an audition to do a porn film, but honestly…” He looks her up and down. A clear note of skepticism seems to have been added to the mix of concern and absolute power. “I don't think you're that hot.”

  Iris Gonzalvo looks up, scandalized.

  “Of course I'm hot,” she says. “I'm incredibly hot.”

  “Not hot enough. And you're old. You must be twenty-five years old.”

  “I'm nineteen.”

  There is a moment of tense silence. The boss's office at the production company for hotel cable movies is one of those corporate offices where everything conveys the idea of impermanence. The only furniture is a table and two chairs. The computer on top of the table is a laptop. There is no decoration of any kind. The light comes from bulbs without lamp fixtures. The walls haven't been plastered since the last occupant left, so you can still see holes and marks where the wall was drilled to hold up furniture that is no longer there. The precise term in the jargon of that specialized market that refers to the type of films prepared and filmed in the industrial space where Iris is sitting in a robe smoking is not “low-budget film.” The precise term is “ultra-low-budget film.” Of which ideally two or three are shot a day. To reduce costs in rental equipment.