Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  Marcia Parini's reaction is surprisingly quick and dead-on, considering her crisis state complete with sobbing and partial hyperventilation. Her arm flies out and grabs her daughter's closest ear. Valentina doesn't have time to duck. The homeroom teacher doesn't have time to stop her. On the other side of the desk, the school psychologist in charge of Valentina's case is too far away to stop her.

  With her face transformed into a toothy mask of rage, Marcia twists her daughter's ear furiously. Making her green eyeglasses fall to the floor. Valentina lets out a scream that reverberates throughout the entire school.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 22

  The Universe According to Hannah Linus

  Seen from the high window of the hotel where Juan de la Cruz Saudade and Hannah Linus are staying, the storm looks like a living thing. Some sort of living turbulence that advances along the streets, blinded by rage and crashing into buildings. Seven floors below, the street has become a quick, shallow river that drags tons of twisted Christmas decorations and garbage bags. The entire world has turned a dark gray color except for the infinitesimal moments when lightning strikes. In those moments it turns a bluish white color. The few pedestrians that venture onto the street don't so much carry their umbrellas as they get dragged by them.

  Juan de la Cruz Saudade is standing on the king-size bed of his hotel suite. Naked and posing in a way that makes you think of bodybuilders posing for bodybuilding magazines. Looking at his perfectly muscular and abundantly tattooed reflection in the room's full-length standing mirror. There is genuine admiration in his face as he looks at himself. There's admiration and there's something more. A blend of sexual desire and that hypnotic fascination with which we watch traffic accidents from car windows or pornographic films broadcast in the middle of the night. Bolts of lightning illuminate his perfect system of muscles and tattoos. The way the storm's electrical flashes illuminate his postures suggests camera flashes. Hanging between his legs, his penis also appears to be posing for a battery of invisible photographers. Partially erect and with something similar to a lazy smile on the glans.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Hannah Linus stretches on the other side of the king-size bed. “What's wrong with you? Are you ten years old?”

  The position in which Hannah Linus is lying facedown on the other side of the bed suggests very recent and very frenetic sexual activity. Her blond hair, which is normally organized into two very straight symmetrical braids at either side of the nape of her neck, is now a sticky tangle of damp locks. A coital flush still covers entire areas of her body.

  “A moment ago you weren't thinking I was ten years old.” Saudade makes that gesture characteristic of bodybuilders, flexing an arm held high with his gaze fixed on the bulging bicep. “When you asked me to do that thing again. That thing that broke the table.”

  Hannah Linus rolls her eyes. She feels around for the pack of cigarettes on the night table. She takes one out and lights it with squinted eyes.

  “I'm not tired,” says Saudade. Distractedly watching a figure with an umbrella being dragged by the fierce wind, seven floors below, on the other side of the window. “You don't have to feel bad about that. A lot of women get embarrassed. I mean, when they can't take any more. When they can't keep up with my pace. But there's no need to be embarrassed.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I understand.”

  Hannah Linus takes a drag on her cigarette. The waves of postcoital tedium that overtake her now are almost overwhelming. In fact, sometimes the feelings of impatience and disgust provoked by being in the same space as a man with whom she has just had sex, or even just having to talk to him, are almost unbearable for her. She's not one of those women that need the approval or companionship of the male gender, nor does her self-esteem depend on arousing the male sexual appetite. She has no elements of dependence in her personality and she certainly feels no curiosity for the partially pleasant sensations similar to degradation that can be found in sex with socially or intellectually inferior men. In point of fact, Hannah Linus feels no conscious curiosity about anyone. She considers herself her favorite person and the model on which to gauge other's failings. The way other people fail to be like her is like the way flies hit the windowpane again and again. Hannah Linus yawns. That seems to be the essence of The Universe According to Hannah Linus: several million employees, taxi drivers and lovers that a Scandinavian divinity with turgid breasts and Hannah Linus's features has placed on the Earth for her to use and enjoy. Saudade isn't so different from the rest of the people, she says to herself with a sigh. Just stupider.

  “We could call a whore,” Saudade is saying. Provoking rhythmic contractions of his abdominal musculature in front of the mirror and proudly contemplating how his muscles contract and expand. “That way you wouldn't get so tired. It's easier if there's two of you.”

  “Call a whore if you want.” Hannah Linus stands up and stubs out the cigarette in the disposable ashtray on the night table. She checks the time on her cell phone. “You can stay with her. I have things to do.”

  Saudade watches out of the corner of his eye as Hannah Linus walks with lazy steps toward the bathroom of the hotel suite. The suite bathroom is reached through a mirrored door located in the middle of an entire wall of mirrors. From the height of the bed where Saudade is, and through the doorjamb of the half-open door, a massage table and a platform with three steps leading to the Jacuzzi can be seen. Then he looks in the opposite direction. Toward the slightly elevated living room where a thirty-six-inch plasma screen is showing a loop of adult films. And toward the trail of clothes that leads from the suite's vestibule to the remains of the broken table in the living room. And there, in the middle of the stream of clothes, his gaze finds what he was looking for: Hannah Linus's bag. A vaguely wrinkled black leather Chanel bag with gold rings. The same bag that Hannah Linus keeps with her at all times and where she keeps the magnetic security codes of all the buildings she is responsible for. And then something surprising happens.

  A flash of lightning illuminates the suite bedroom and Juan de la Cruz Saudade's face for a fraction of a second. And during that infinitesimal fraction, Saudade's face reflected in the pane of the high window is not at all the face that had been talking and having sex with Hannah Linus up until that point. It is a mask of pure hatred. An open iron door to an industrial oven of hostility. Without any of those elements of basic kindness or sociability that we associate with being human. A hatred that has elements associated with gender and socioeconomic status but that transcends them broadly, to cover everything that moves and breathes on the Earth. A hatred that rarely is seen outside of certain sculptures and ritual masks from prehistoric civilizations. Then the lightning ends. The vision only lasted that random fraction of a second. Saudade's face recomposes itself.

  “All chicks like to fuck other chicks,” he says. “It's a proven fact. So you don't have to get embarrassed. And you don't need to act tough. About the whore. All women get jealous. That's another proven fact.”

  Saudade listens. Hannah Linus's voice comes from the bathroom, muffled by the shower door. He thinks he can vaguely make out the words “ass” and “idiot.” Then he hears the sound of plumbing for a second and finally the regular, comforting murmur of the shower's water falling into the stall.

  Saudade jumps off the bed as soon as the shower comes on. His naked, muscular movements seem to have lethal precision. He crosses the suite to the living room and picks up Hannah Linus's bag. He takes out her wallet, which by this point is familiar to him, examines the cards inside and finally chooses one. A gold card with Hannah Linus's corporate logo, which Saudade has seen her use on various occasions to open the gallery building's security devices. He heads toward the little table beside one of the living room windows and opens the curtain. He looks down for the only figure on the entire street who is not being dragged along with an umbrella by the wind. After all, the figure seems too big for a simple storm to be able to budge him from his place in the mid
dle of the sidewalk. Aníbal Manta looks up toward the curtain of the seventh floor of the hotel that has just opened and nods in silence beneath the rain. Saudade raises his thumb toward the enormous, steadfast figure on the sidewalk and closes the curtain again.

  “Tell me something,” says the voice of Hannah Linus from the shower stall. Mixed with the sound of the water. “You're married, right?”

  Saudade directs his attention to the telephone on the small table. He turns it over and leaves it upside down on the varnished wood surface. Like an animal on its back. Then he opens one of the drawers of the small table and takes out a screwdriver no bigger than a toothpick. He uses it to take out the four screws that hold the body of the telephone to the base. The speed and skill with which he does it suggest previous training monitored by someone with a stopwatch. The inside filled with cords and electronic devices is now visible.

  “Married, me?” says Saudade. With his face gathered in a concentrated expression. “Men like me don't get married, sweetheart. It would be a waste. I come and go, you know.” He wipes a drop of sweat from his forehead with a tattooed wrist. “I have a duty to my work.”

  Saudade examines the inside of the telephone until he finds a piece of plastic attached to the base with recent soldering. The piece has a long, deep slot on one side and a plate with circuit and cords on the other. A red pilot light stares at him from the telephone's guts. Saudade runs the magnetic strip of Hannah Linus's card through the slot, several times, until the pilot light turns green. A click is heard inside the recently soldered piece.

  “I think you are married,” says the voice of Hannah Linus from the shower. “I've seen how you look around you every time you come in or out of the gallery. Or the hotel. You married men have the same secretive air.” She pauses. “It's in everything you do. You're like a criminal committing a crime.”

  Saudade dials a telephone number on the numeric panel of the telephone with its guts spilled out. After a couple of seconds, the magnetic card reader installed inside the body of the telephone begins to retransmit the card's information. With a shrill, irregular buzz. Saudade closes his eyes and wipes another drop of sweat from his forehead. The retransmission lasts exactly fifty-two seconds. Hannah Linus's postcoital showers last on average two and a half minutes according to what Saudade has had the chance to witness. The transmitter's buzzing is like a very sped-up version of the noise made by Teletypes and Morse code transmitters in old movies. The sound of the shower doesn't have those momentary interruptions of people who turn off the faucets to save water while they soap up. On the other side of the curtains, seven floors below, a group of kids look at Aníbal Manta admiringly and point at him with their fingers and make hyperbolic comments about his body size.

  “I don't care,” says Hannah Linus from the shower. Her tone of voice is that loud voice people use when they are showering to talk to people outside of the shower. A loud voice that's not quite a shout but close. “That's fine with me. I almost always get involved with married men. More comfortable for me. I don't like to have guys following me around all the time.”

  The buzzing of the transmitter ends. Saudade starts to put the screws back in place.

  The sound of the shower stops. From where he is, Saudade manages to see a hand stick out from inside the shower door and feel around for a towel.

  Saudade puts the magnetic card back in Hannah Linus's wallet and the wallet back in Hannah Linus's bag.

  Hannah Linus comes out of the shower drying herself off with a towel. She ties the towel around her body the way women do. Which is to say above her breasts. Leaving her knees and part of her thighs in view. She finally enters the bedroom. Braiding her hair with her head leaned to one side and a distracted expression. She stares at Saudade with a slight look of disgust.

  Saudade is lying on the bed. He gathers his face in a smile that Hannah Linus finds repulsive and moves aside the sheets to show her his penis, again completely erect. A giant clap of thunder makes the glass panes of the high windows and the suite's furnishings shudder. It occurs to Hannah Linus that coexistence in the same physical space with men she has just had sex with is getting harder every day. Almost like a sensation of physical repulsion. Must have to do with getting older. Although she can't remember ever having slept with anyone as moronic as this guy before.

  “I'll give you two hundred euros if you get out of here right now,” says Hannah Linus when the thunderclap's vibration dies down. Still braiding her hair. With her head still leaned to one side. “Three hundred. I just want you to get out. The money's in my bag.”

  Saudade doesn't seem particularly surprised. He shrugs his shoulders, the smile still on his face. About ten feet from where he is lying, and reflected in the bedroom's full-length mirror, the thirty-six-inch plasma television continues to broadcast a muted loop of adult films.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 23

  Universal Sign Language for Food

  Aníbal Manta looks up from his X-Men comic book and studies Raymond Panakian's figure from a distance. Panakian is sitting on his wicker chair in front of the painting he's already been working on for four days. Aníbal Manta's stomach is growling. He's in a bad mood and his stomach is growling and he doesn't have the faintest idea how someone can spend four whole days working on the same painting. And it's not like the painting is any great shakes either, in his opinion. He claps his comic book shut. He stretches his arms in his chair and lets out a long and noisy yawn while his stomach continues growling. The chair he's sitting in isn't a wicker chair. It's one of those metal fold-up chairs that after an hour cause intense pain in the middle of his butt. He looks at his watch. The warehouse of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD., is completely silent in the midafternoon. There is a compact disc of Jamaican music in Bob Marley's stereo system, which belonged to Bob Marley before he disappeared, but putting it on is completely out of the question because it skips and the music turns into a series of bursts of labored and irritating hiccups.

  Manta stands up. His degree of boredom and uneasiness is dangerously close to that degree of boredom and uneasiness that makes people do inexplicable things. The temptation to go over to where Panakian is working and kick out a leg of his chair and knock it to the floor, for example, is a temptation that Manta finds inexplicably difficult to resist.

  And it doesn't seem that things are going to change until the very day of the job in the gallery. Every morning at nine sharp Raymond Panakian sits on his wicker chair with his little pots of paint and his palette and his blue work coveralls like the blue coveralls people wear to work in car repair shops or in industrial plants, people who work nonstop until eleven at night. Beneath the light of a small lamp that emits a strange blue shine. Yanel comes to watch him in the mornings and Manta usually arrives at three to relieve him. Six or seven hours watching a guy sitting in a wicker chair copy a little painting from an illustration he has stuck to one side with thumbtacks. There's no cure for that level of boredom. No supply of comic books can alleviate it. The X-Men one he has in his hand, for example, he's already read six times. For the first time in his life, Manta has the feeling that the X-Men comic books from the classic period could be something other than half an hour of fascinated contemplation and unrivaled aesthetic experience.

  Panakian doesn't turn to look at him or make any movement that seems to acknowledge that Manta has stood up. His blue work coveralls with paint splotches over his turtleneck sweater make him look like a worker from another era, one in which human faith in socialist utopias hasn't yet waned. Manta doesn't have any idea what damn language the guy speaks.

  Manta walks around the warehouse three times and smokes a cigarette. What he'd really like to do is head over to the supermarket two blocks away and buy some food to eat during the rest of his endless shift. The end of the workday in the warehouse isn't marked by any hour in particular or any visible progress in the work. The workday simply ends when Panakian gets up from the wicker chair and washes out his brushes and walks
over to the exit and waits there. If that weren't enough, the security conditions in the warehouse don't allow Manta to leave him alone for even a minute. Not even to go to the supermarket. Every time he goes to the bathroom in the upper floor of the warehouse, Manta has instructions to handcuff Panakian's wrist to a pipe.

  After pacing the warehouse three times, Manta throws his cigarette butt to the floor, stands right behind Panakian and looks over his shoulder at the half-painted picture. With his brow furrowed.

  Aníbal Manta has his reservations about the second St. Kieran panel, which is the one Panakian is copying now. In narrative terms it could be a continuation of the one he was copying last week, the one with the guys falling through cracks in the ground. Or not. After all, Manta is a seasoned comic book reader. The second painting has very small figures in the lower part, but mostly seems to be a representation of the canopy of heaven. A black sun in the middle of a black sky. The sun is a simple black sphere surrounded by a crown of dying flames. Overall it's quite strange. The sky isn't black like the black sky in nocturnal pictorial representations. It is a much more absolute black. Without stars. Without night clouds and without any nuances of any kind. It is a black that seems to absorb one's gaze in a fateful way. A black that's more like no sky at all. On the Earth below, there are columns of smoke and fire. The little figures seem to be fleeing. Not in any specific direction, but in every direction. If you look closely, you can see terrified expressions on their little faces.

  “Fuck it,” says Manta after a minute of contemplation. His stomach lets out an enthusiastic growl. “I could give two shits.”

  Panakian doesn't look up from his work when he hears Manta cursing. Manta grabs him by the shoulder and shakes him. Panakian stares at him with his glasses that look like they should be on a pianist or a political refugee chess player. Like those glasses devoid of any traces of style that the state gave out free to the citizens of socialist countries.