Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  Twenty minutes later, they both stop in front of the building where Raymond Panakian's apartment is located, according to the written instructions inside the brown envelope that Bocanegra gave them. Saudade examines the marble façade with its delicate restored detailing, which depicts nymphs in nightgowns and little overweight angels.

  “He's a piece of shit filthy rich guy,” he says, and digs some ice cream remains out of his teeth with his finger. “I love sticking it to fancy pants shit for brains rich guys.”

  Saudade and Manta go up the marble steps that lead to Raymond Panakian's apartment and stop in front of his door. Saudade unlocks the holster he wears hidden beneath his Umbro sweat suit. He closes his hand around the butt of the pistol and rings the bell. The Umbro sweat suit that Saudade wears is the official sweat suit of his favorite soccer club. A minute passes. Saudade and Manta look at each other. Someone is playing a classical melody on a piano in one of the neighboring apartments. Manta takes a set of picklocks out of his pocket and tries several of them in the lock before getting it open. The piano melody advances cheerfully toward an allegro loaded with arpeggios. They both enter and close the door carefully behind them.

  “Mr. Fancy Pants?” asks Saudade, addressing the empty apartment. “Where are you, Mr. Filthy Rich Shit for Brains?”

  “I told you what my therapist said,” says Manta. “About how the things you say make me feel. And be careful. Don't make so much noise.”

  They both sit in facing armchairs in the living room. Saudade opens a Spider-Man comic book and begins flipping through it distractedly. A clock taller than Aníbal Manta himself fills the room with its rhythmic and vaguely soporific sound. Manta rubs his temples with his fingers and tries to remind himself of the idea that violence toward others is a mask covering violence toward oneself. He tries to remind himself about breaking the link between his emotional stress and his fits of rage and his therapist's oft-expressed conviction that he has the power and the tools to break it.

  “What are all these posters?” Saudade points with his head at the wall behind Manta.

  Manta turns and looks at the framed posters that cover the walls and which, in spite of being in Italian, are vaguely familiar. One of the posters seems to be a numbered list of twelve maxims.

  “They're Alcoholics Anonymous posters,” says Manta after a moment. “This guy used to drink everything, even mouthwash, till somebody stuck him in one of those hospitals and they turned him around.”

  Saudade nods with a neutral expression and returns to his reading. Half an hour passes. Manta reflects on the fact that his therapist often asks him to imagine his power to break said link as a symbolic equivalent to the superpowers of the Marvel superheroes he admires. The truth is that Manta isn't at all amused by his therapist bringing up his fondness for superhero comics. The truth is that he's unable to avoid perceiving a certain condescending and slightly mocking tone in the allusions his therapist makes to Marvel comics. Now Manta grabs a comic from the pile of superhero comics on the small table and tries to concentrate on reading. Saudade has started talking about the shame and disgust inherent in working with a fat piece of shit that reads comics.

  “If you don't like soccer you can try tennis,” Saudade is saying as he flips through an Incredible Hulk comic. Manta can't help but notice that as Saudade turns the pages he is horribly wrinkling and folding the cover. “I know a place my boss used to play when I was a cop. It would definitely do you good to run a little. It's obvious you have to do something. You can't walk around looking like that. Chicks don't like it.” He closes the comic book and rolls it up to point it at Manta in a way that no comic book lover would ever roll up anything remotely resembling a comic book. “You think some chick wants to have a fat guy sweating all over her ass? Or wants to wait a half hour for some fat guy to find his cock under his beer belly? If I were you I'd sign up at a gym today. You can come to my gym if you want, but don't tell anyone that you know me. I don't want people to think that I have greasy friends like you. You'll see. Your wife'll quit screwing the neighbors when you lose forty-five pounds. There's nothing wrong with being big. The ladies like big guys, but not fat guys.” He shrugs his shoulders and carelessly tosses the comic onto the other comics piled up on the small table. “I go every week for a massage. In the same place my wife goes. The chick is crazy about me. The massage chick, not my wife.”

  The reason why Aníbal Manta has never joined a gym, in spite of having considered the idea on several occasions when he was younger and having even gotten as far as the door of a gym, is his fear of being taunted and jeered at by all the slim and attractive gym clients. In therapeutic terms, the daily taunts and disdain seem to weigh on him much more than his potbelly. The piano in an apartment nearby is playing a melody that is powerfully reminiscent of the music in those scenes in horror films when something terrible is about to happen. Manta wipes the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. He would like to find some nonviolent, and therefore not therapeutically negative, way to tell Saudade to shut his fucking mouth for once and fucking all.

  “Like this guy,” Saudade is saying, as he points to a character in an Italian Fantastic Four issue. “Why the fuck is he blue? What a load of crap. Have you ever seen a blue guy walking down the street? And this other guy.” He snorts and points at another character in a different panel. “This guy is made of bricks. And he's wearing underwear. Hey.” He examines the panel carefully and lets out a chuckle. “This brick guy looks like you. Did you see?”

  Aníbal Manta is well aware, as is anyone in his line of work, that the only really effective forms of personal attack are not heralded by any type of previous warning or maneuver that can give any sort of clue about the attacker's intentions. Which is why the sequence of events that happens next in the living room full of Alcoholics Anonymous posters in Raymond Panakian's apartment in downtown Rome is the following: 1. Aníbal Manta gets up from his armchair and leans over the small table covered with comic books; 2. Aníbal Manta punches Saudade, breaking his nose; 3. Saudade stares at Manta with that expression of perplexity typical of someone who has just had their nose broken so fast that they had no time to do anything; and 4. A stream of blood comes out of Saudade's broken nose. They are both still there, standing in front of each other, Manta stroking his knuckles and Saudade looking at his powder blue and white sweat suit soaked in blood, when the door of the apartment opens and Raymond Panakian appears in the threshold. With his glasses and his turtleneck sweater. With his angular face that looks like a chess player from the Eastern Bloc who's just fled his country to take refuge in the capitalist world.

  Panakian stares at the two strangers that are respectively bleeding and stroking their hand in his living room. The two strangers stare at him. The two bags of groceries that Panakian is carrying fall to the floor. The sound of breaking eggs is heard. Manta and Saudade take out their pistols at exactly the same time and point them at him. Panakian raises his hands.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 15

  Venus with Mirror

  Hannah Linus's commercial gallery is located on an anonymous street uptown, stuck between office blocks, bank headquarters, and corporate buildings. Hannah Linus couldn't care less about the contemporary role of artists and galleries as inner-city colonists and rejuvenators. Just as she couldn't care less about any other fads and trends in the art world. In fact, she is rather proud of the profits that not ever paying attention to trends has yielded her. As she sees it, it is one of those liberating acts that have allowed her to assume control of her life and gradually become more the person that she knows she wants to be. Like when she dumped her first and only boyfriend in high school. Or when, at ten years old, she decided to renounce her parents' religion and wrote a six-page letter to the Bishop of Uppsala detailing the reasons for her decision. Offering arguments against the existence of God and declaring her disappointment with all the hours that she had wasted up to that point in her parish.

  Beside
s her contempt for life's distractions, Hannah Linus considers thoroughness to be another of her talents. In a normal morning of work, she devotes five hours to running the gallery with an hour-long break to do her training exercises. Her glassed-in office on the upper floor of the gallery was designed to optimize productivity. It has the appropriate amount of light. The temperature remains constant. There are no sources of distraction. All the calls are screened, including those of a personal nature. Or they would be if Hannah Linus received any personal calls. But the one feature of her modus operandi that Hannah Linus would single out as essential is the fact that no one interrupts her. All of the workings of Hannah Linus's gallery are designed around the employees not disrupting her except in unavoidable situations.

  Which is why that morning, when she hears someone knocking on the glass door of her glassed-in office and she looks up from her computer, she only has to see Raquel's worried face to realize that something is going to interrupt the proper functioning of things. That something is going to violate her sacred precept of not being disrupted.

  Hannah Linus signals for Raquel to enter. Raquel is her assistant, whom she holds in as low a professional regard as she does the rest of her local staff. Hannah Linus considers local employees to be unreliable, lacking in initiative and prone to distraction. If it weren't for the technical difficulties inherent in the process, she wouldn't mind importing all of her employees from Sweden.

  Raquel enters her office and looks at Hannah Linus, terrified. Instilling respect through fear seems to be one of the few tactics that has worked with the gallery's local staff.

  “Yes?”

  Hannah Linus begins to tap rhythmically with her pen on the surface of her desk. The way she looks at her assistant not only transmits her irritation at being disturbed, but also her absolute conviction that whatever reason there is behind the interruption is not a valid one. She also decides to look her up and down with a slight expression of disapproval. That's another way that Hannah has of maintaining control over her female employees: choosing employees that are less sexually attractive than she is. Hannah Linus is tall and slim and blond, while Raquel is not very attractive in that way that Hannah Linus finds Spanish women not very attractive: as if someone not terribly proficient had made them, trying to imitate a model of proper beauty. Like failed sketches of moderately pretty women. Topped off with cheap clothes.

  “Sorry for the interruption.” Raquel twists a curl of chestnut brown hair around her index finger as she speaks. “But there's a man downstairs. In the gallery, I mean. It's not that he's doing anything wrong, but he doesn't seem normal to me. Or to the security guard. He's a little weird, to be honest.”

  Hannah Linus stares at her fixedly.

  “I'm not sure I understand,” she says.

  Raquel keeps twisting the curl around her finger. It could be a nervous gesture. In any case, Hannah Linus feels an urgent desire to smack her and tell her to stop doing it.

  “Well,” says the assistant. “Remember last month when that guy slipped in and sat in the middle of the gallery and said he was an artist and that his sitting there was an artistic action and I don't know what else, and in the end we had to call the police?” She shrugs her shoulders. “We're not sure what's going on with this guy. Maybe nothing. But he's a bit suspicious.”

  Hannah Linus sighs. She looks at her watch. Six minutes to her break. She supposes she could stop now, solve the situation, do her exercises and recoup the six minutes after closing. She takes a last disapproving glance at Raquel's body and attire, and stands up.

  Juan de la Cruz Saudade is in the gallery, standing in front of an oil painting from the Bellini school. Holding up his chin on one hand and his elbow with the other. With a frown. Like one of those clichéd depictions of art gallery visitors that one finds in Sunday magazine comic strips. He even wears glasses hanging from a little chain around his neck.

  Hannah Linus meets Raquel and the security guard at the foot of the stairs. She looks first at her assistant, then at the guard and finally at Saudade.

  “So?” She crosses her arms in an irritable gesture. “What's the problem? I don't see anything strange. He's not doing anything.”

  “That's the problem,” says the guard. “He's been like that for almost thirty-five minutes. In front of the same painting. In the same position. I swear he hasn't moved a muscle.” The guard shakes his head. “I think that he's some other moron like the one last month. He's waiting for us to call the police so he can be in the newspaper.”

  Hannah Linus has never been afraid of complicated or uncomfortable situations. Even in her student years in Sweden one could see her strength of character reflected in other people's faces. In their respectful and uncertain expressions. And in the vaguely stammering way that people addressed her. Those reactions never made her uncomfortable. Although they meant she was condemned to exclusion from the circles of friendship and camaraderie she saw around her. But that was the price to pay for being who she was, she said to herself. For getting the best grades. For being the perfect daughter and the employee of the month, every month. And it was in complicated situations where others withdrew that she could take a proud step forward and shine in all her magnificence. Hannah Linus from Uppsala. The absolute queen of the World of Hannah Linus.

  Now she uncrosses her arms and walks across the gallery. Under the gaze of the paintings that make up the exhibition of sixteenth-century oil paintings. Some of the court members and peasants and mythological figures that populate the oil paintings seem to look at her with terrified expressions as she crosses her own gallery with a frown.

  “Good morning,” she says to Juan de la Cruz Saudade when she reaches his side. “Have you consulted our price list?”

  Saudade stares at her with an amused look of surprise. For a moment they both remain that way, looking at each other, he looking slightly down and she looking slightly up due their differences in height. Saudade is wearing a black suit on top of a salmon Prada for Men shirt and has his hair slicked back along his perfect skull. Hannah Linus feels some sort of very soft tingle in her abdomen.

  “Lovely,” says Saudade. Then he takes off the eyeglasses hung on a little chain and sticks one of the arms between his lips in a flirty pensive gesture. His lips are large and fleshy and flanked by two perfectly symmetrical lines that constitute Saudade's most sexually attractive facial element according to a significant majority of his past lovers. “I mean this, of course.” He points to the painting with the arm of his glasses. He smiles. “It's incomparable. Ahem, fascinating,” he says after a brief hesitation.

  Hannah Linus looks at the painting. It's a Venus in front of a mirror from the Bellini school. Frankly a minor piece, even in a two-bit exhibition such as this one. Chosen as a filler and duly situated beside the door to give the impression that the walls are filled without attracting too much attention. The Venus is looking at herself in the mirror with a bored face, beside an open window that shows a rural landscape as dictated by the conventions of the period. Her pale, cellulitic body is naked except for the gauzy, unnaturally twisted sheet that covers her sexual parts.

  “How can I explain it?” Saudade squints. “The chick is in her birthday suit and it's obvious she's a hottie.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Or must have been in her day. And yet, that's not the important thing. It's not like when you see a naked chick in a porn movie. I don't know if you get me. This is like something more…” He takes an ever so slight pause to give emphasis to the word, “artistic.”

  Hannah Linus stares at Saudade. For a second it seems as if she is going to say something. Then her gaze shifts toward the extreme opposite end of the room, where Raquel and the security guard are watching her with quizzical expressions. Then she looks at Saudade again.

  “Is this your gallery?” says Saudade. Looking at the painting again. With the same half smile. “That's great. I like art a lot. I could spend hours looking at pictures and all that.”

  Hannah Linus seems confu
sed. The man seems to be in no way terrified by her presence, nor by the tone of voice with which she questioned him. A tone that she has been perfecting over the years. He shows none of the terrified uncertainty that she usually inspires in people. The man gazes at the painting and when he looks at her he does so with some sort of superiority. Of amused self-confidence. With an expression so openly insulting that Hannah Linus can't help but feel intrigued. And then there's the man's face, and his body. The man is so tall and slender and sexually attractive that it's hard not to look at him. Even with his suit and his glasses and his impeccable veneer of civilization, the man provokes in her mind sharp images of brutality and violent sex and powerful genitals. Hannah Linus wipes a drop of sweat from her forehead. She looks at her assistant again and then looks at Saudade.

  “Are you interested in buying this Venus?” she says.

  Saudade looks at her as if he doesn't understand.

  “I mean the painting,” she says.

  Saudade frowns a bit. Hannah Linus can see the tip of his tongue playing with the tip of the arm of his glasses. Hannah Linus's mind fills with strange images.

  “I don't know,” Saudade finally says. “These are good paintings, but in general I like the paintings that are in more out-of-the-way places better. In discreet places where no one can see them.”