Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  “Everything works fine when I masturbate.” Yanel looks at Iris with a frown. “I've told you many times. So it's not strictly true that I can't get it up. It's not the same thing that I can't get it up with someone else as if I can't ever get it up.” He pauses. Several of the guests located in groups meta-adjacent to where Yanel is talking to Iris are looking at him out of the corners of their eyes. “I could give you a thousand excuses. That's obvious. But I'd rather not. That's something that I think you should appreciate. As my fiancée and all.”

  “Iris told me that she wants to become a famous actress,” says Álex Jardí. His ass is excessive, according to every known canon, yet its enormous size seems to give him a certain quality that's hard to explain. A certain moral solidity. Or a certain extraordinarily solid anchoring to the ground. “She also told me that you might try to thwart her success. Due to envy brought on by your own failure as an actor.”

  Yanel makes a pained face and leans forward to massage his knee with his hands.

  “Who is this guy?” he says. With his waist doubled forward and still stroking his knee. “And why are we here? I've never read a book, I don't think. Maybe when I was a kid.” He looks up at Iris Gonzalvo, who is now looking at him with her arms crossed and an impatient expression. “And what do you mean by all that? And why are you talking to me in that tone of voice?”

  At this point it is difficult not to suspect that some of the members of the groups meta-adjacent to the group composed of Eric, Iris and the man named Álex Jardí have subtly moved closer in order to eavesdrop on the conversation. Some vectors and degrees of head leaning seem to corroborate this suspicion.

  “I mean,” says Iris, “that I'm tired of deodorant ads where you can only see your armpit. What makes you think I want to marry someone who's in commercials where you can only see his armpit? Same goes for ads where my fiancé is running the marathon with two thousand other people. Not to mention the car commercials.” Now all the expressive elements of her face and body seem to be focused on transmitting fatigued repugnance: the crossed arms; the rolled eyes; the head slightly cocked to one side. “We are here because I've decided to start meeting interesting people. For the first time in my life. And I can't believe you're going to start that number with your knee. Do you really think it's going to work again?”

  Eric Yanel leaves his drink on a passing waiter's tray and squats on the floor. With a look of intense pain. Grabbing his knee with that expression, like he'd just eaten something rotten, that athletes have as they grab their knees or other recently injured body parts.

  “It's one of his tricks,” says Iris Gonzalvo to the man with the fattest ass Eric Yanel has seen in his life. “The knee thing. He does it to get pity. In situations like this. Shit.” She snorts in irritation. “I can't believe I used to fall for it.”

  Now Eric Yanel is sitting on the floor. Hugging his leg, with an expression of intense pain on his face. Several of the party guests approach him and ask if he's okay. Yanel looks up from his knee and at where Iris Gonzalvo was just a moment before. And where she is no longer.

  Yanel leaps up. He extends out his neck periscopically and searches the room with his gaze. Several guests continue to approach him with glasses of water, putting their hands on his arm and asking him if he needs anything. Solicitous men with bellies hanging like basketballs. Women with horribly cellulitic thighs. Bloated calves. Yanel pushes them away and finally manages to see Iris's svelte figure and long dark hair in the distance. In the section of the party closest to the exit. She seems to be getting her fur coat and her tall, furry Moscow-inspired hat from the coat check. She waits with a neutral expression for an employee to help her put her coat on and then leaves the nightclub with majestic strides. Yanel's face is as shaken as if someone had hit him over the head with a mallet.

  “Something similar happened to me once,” says the guy with the fat ass and the comically wide face. While Yanel looks toward the exit, his face shaken. “I mean those erection problems you have. When it happened, my wife and I used all kinds of sex toys. Even vibrating objects and electronic thingamajigs. And once in a while, I didn't mind paying some guy to fill in on certain conjugal duties,” said the guy with the fat ass. His expression transmits a strange enthusiasm. An enthusiasm reminiscent of Oriental holy men. At the happy end of their chain of reincarnations. “We also enjoyed public places, or unlikely settings.”

  Eric Yanel begins to shiver. At the center of a circle of glasses of water and solicitous offers of medical help. His lower jaw seems to be out of joint and trembling at the same time. In spite of what he said a few minutes ago, it's not entirely true that he has no problem getting satisfactory erections in private. He has actually begun to have problems with the very idea of an erection. The erection as the central distinctive element of the male condition. Yanel has been feeling an unpleasant pressure on his male psyche for months now. He doesn't like to think about his penis and when he does, it's with certain anxiety. He avoids looking at his penis when he showers. Which has been creating a sort of blind spot in his showers. A blind spot located at the height of his crotch. To draw his attention away from it, Yanel has put a portable compact disc player in the bathroom and he sings along to commercial pop songs from the eighties while he showers. Eric Yanel's favorite pop singer is Madonna. Particularly her records from the eighties. The rest of the time, Yanel attributes his general lack of interest in phallic sex to his fiancée's phallic obsession, and the stress that obsession generates in him. On a couple of recent occasions he has paid prostitutes to have them masturbate in front of him, or to let him lick their anuses or vaginas.

  After a moment of paralysis, Yanel blinks. In that surprised way people who've just come out of a trance blink. He stammers out something unintelligible about his knee and starts to limp as fast as he can through the guests.

  Yanel reaches Iris at the corner of the Pedralbes street where Iris is standing in front of a traffic light, her arms crossed over her chest and her body leaned slightly forward and to one side the way people do when waiting for a taxi. Eric Yanel approaches her limping flamboyantly. It is one of those bright winter nights when the scattered stars and the positioning lights of planes in the sky generate metaphors of the Implacability of Cosmic Loneliness and the Possibility of Life Being Shortened by Cancer. Iris's fur coat and her tall, furry hat, in the urban landscape of wrought-iron garden gates and early-twentieth-century mansions, bestow the scene with the unmistakable quality of a romantic theater piece. Yanel left his jacket in the coat check.

  “I'm ready to give it another try,” says Yanel. His panting creates misty little clouds of steam in the frozen air. “I mean fucking. Not that I really want to. I've already explained how bad the pressure and everything make me feel. But I can try. Really.”

  There is a moment of silence. Iris's silhouette is genuinely romantic, with her arms crossed over her fur coat. Yanel is standing before her, turned to one side, with his back curved forward and one hand on his knee. A bit like a Russian soldier in a romantic play, wounded and leaned elegantly toward one of those Russian ladies.

  “You can try.” Iris takes some sort of powder compact out of the pocket of her coat. She picks up a little bit of cocaine from inside of it with a key and sticks it into her nostril. Then she sniffs. “But not with me. I'm leaving you. Good-bye. We're not engaged anymore.” She lifts her eyebrows. “We're not even boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.”

  “I swear things are going to change.” Yanel takes a wallet out of his pants pocket and starts rifling around inside it. “For real this time. I mean, not like the last time I told you things were going to change. You hear me? This time things are definitely going to change. My career is really going to take off. This time for real. I met someone. One of those eccentric millionaires. His name is Giraut.” He finally finds what he was looking for in his wallet. A business card. He pulls it out with trembling fingers and gives it to Iris. “He lives in a gigantic mansion. I've been there lots of
times. A patron of the arts. A good friend of mine. He's going to produce a movie for me. As the star. Scriptwriter. Director. Whatever I want. You can be in it, too, of course.”

  The vaguely orangish glow of the streetlights on the wrought-iron garden gates and early-twentieth-century mansions and Iris's Moscow-inspired silhouette intensify the atmosphere of a Russian romantic theater set. Like those orangish spotlights they project right onto the actors in romantic plays set on winter streets with streetlights painted onto the backdrop. Iris examines the card with an impatient expression.

  “It doesn't say anything here about him being a film producer,” she says. “It says here: Lucas Giraut. Antiques Dealer. By Appointment Only.”

  “You don't understand these things.” Yanel looks desperately at an empty taxi that approaches the stoplight where they are standing. “This guy is an intellectual. His family made a fortune off antiques. Oriental art. Old paintings of eclipses and stuff like that.”

  Iris gestures to the taxi with her hand. The taxi slows down and finally stops in front of her.

  “You can't leave me.” Yanel tries to take a cigarette out of a pack but his hand is shaky and several cigarettes fall onto the sidewalk. “I gave you everything you have. You owe me your career.” He pauses. “If you leave me I could kill you,” he adds in a dubious tone.

  Eric Yanel watches as the taxi drives off with Iris inside, showing him her middle finger through the window. Then he starts to head off down the street, dragging his leg.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 27

  The Day of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel

  The Day of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel is coming to an end. The rays of late-afternoon sun fall through the balconies of the Gothic Quarter like the incandescent ashes of a silent fire. The chromatic range of the late-afternoon sun on the roofs also suggests that something is burning in some part of the sky.

  Valentina Parini is sitting with her legs crossed on her bed in her bedroom on the first floor of the Palau de la Mar Fosca. Experiencing a feeling of imminent danger. The Christmas sounds filtering through the wall and closed windows of the former palace not only fail to dispel the feeling of danger but seem to increase it. A few hours ago Valentina Parini discovered that she can only mitigate the feeling of danger by sitting with her legs crossed at the head of her bed and rocking backward rhythmically so that the back of her head hits the wall.

  “Tina?” calls her mother from the bathroom where she is blow-drying her hair during the preparatory phase of her Friday-night Husband Hunting Expedition. “Will you come here for a minute?”

  In front of her bed, in a niche of the wall that Marcia Parini thinks looks too much like an altar, is the broken alarm clock that Valentina Parini was carrying in her hand the last time she saw her father. The last day she ever saw her father. When she went out into the street looking for him so he could fix the broken alarm clock and she found him putting his last packed-up belongings into the trunk of his car. And she stayed there, with the broken alarm clock in her hand, planted in the doorway of the former ducal palace, while her father just said good-bye with a nervous smile, got into the car as fast as he could and drove off, never to return. The day when things really started to go bad in Valentina Parini's life. Not to say that they were good before.

  “Valentina?” Her mother's voice sounds somewhat opaque and at the same time somewhat shrill from inside the blow-dryer's aerial sound cushion. “Remember what we talked about, about having your head in the clouds.”

  The feeling of danger that Valentina Parini is experiencing tonight, which forces her for some reason to rock back and forth and hit the back of her head against the wall, began at some point this morning. At first she didn't pay it much attention. At first it wasn't much more than some kind of pins and needles. Like the feeling you might be being watched. It got worse at lunchtime and during her afternoon classes, until her hands were too rigid to hold a spoon or a pen. Later, at home, the feeling became incredibly urgent. Like someone aiming at your head with a loaded weapon.

  Valentina checks the time on the clock on her desk: it's eight thirty. The back of her head, which she's been hitting against the wall for quite a while, hurts. To be precise, it seems that the combination of the rhythmic motion and the pain is what helps to mitigate the feeling of danger. Now she leaps up from the bed and walks through the hallway holding her breath and clenching her fists tightly. Like those people in horror movies who walk through the hallway of an abandoned house seconds before someone bursts into the darkness of the hallway with a butcher's knife. From the doorway of the bathroom she sees her mother drying her hair in her mother's traditional hair-drying posture: leaning forward, sticking her butt out and moving her head alternately to dry the respective hair that hangs from one side of her head and the other. Valentina bites a knuckle with a pensive expression and observes her mother's ass. She's always found her mother's ass strange and unpleasant. Absurdly soft and flaccid. Tonight, however, she finds the sight of Marcia Parini's ass almost unbearable, and it conjures up all sorts of mental images of marine mammals. Once Valentina saw something on TV about marine mammals and ever since then she's been haunted by those images of greasy beings with mottled gray skin and horrifying warts.

  Valentina goes into the bathroom with her face wrinkled in disgust. She kneels in front of the toilet and vomits a couple of streams of something liquid and bitter. Marcia Parini lifts up her head and looks at her daughter while still drying her hair.

  “Did you stuff yourself with chocolate again?” she says. With the same simultaneously opaque and shrill voice that she uses to make herself heard over the blow-dryer. “It serves you right. Didn't I tell you to defrost yesterday's leftover lasagna?”

  Valentina lifts the palm of one hand to indicate that she's okay and for a moment she has to repress the desire to hit her head against the edge of the toilet.

  “You're going to be alone for a little while tonight.” Marcia Parini turns off the hair dryer and puts a tight dress on over her underwear. “If your grandmother calls, tell her I went to a Book Club meeting. You can watch TV, but just regular TV. No satellite stuff.” She looks in the mirror and adjusts the straps of the tight dress with her fingers. “And leave the lights on in the living room and stairway, the last time I almost broke my neck.”

  Valentina proceeds to rinse out her mouth as her mother leaves the bathroom. Then she hears the clickety-clack of the high heels her mother wears when she goes out husband hunting and, a minute later, the noise of the door to the street closing.

  Valentina Parini leans her head slightly and squints her eyes and concentrates on trying to hear Lucas Giraut's footsteps in the apartment upstairs. Sometimes she follows his itineraries through the house: from the sofa to the fridge, from the kitchen to the television, from the bed to the bath. When she's home alone with her mother, it comforts her to know that Lucas is in the apartment upstairs. Doing his usual routines, seated in front of the computer or simply reading his professional magazines about antiques. Tonight no footsteps are heard, or any other noise that would indicate that Lucas Giraut is in his apartment on the upper floor of the former ducal palace. In Valentina's opinion, Lucas Giraut isn't stupid like other people. In the moments when Valentina Parini isn't wishing with all her heart that her mother wasn't her mother, she wouldn't mind if Lucas married her.

  At eleven thirty on the Night of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel, Valentina puts on her parka and goes out. She crosses the Plaza Sant Jaume with its stupid institutional crèche made entirely of recyclable materials and takes Ferran Street. At this time on a Friday night, the streets of the Gothic Quarter are filled with groups of drunk British and Irish tourists singing British and Irish songs and vomiting on the sidewalks. Although she walks with her head bowed and her hands in the pockets of the parka, several British and Irish tourists start following her, saying things in English and even trying to touch her. A couple of teenage
Arab petty thieves try to corner her against a wall, but she stares at them and something in the way she stares at them makes them back up, terrified. When she finally gets to the Ramblas, the contrast makes them seem like a much more pleasant place. With their hordes of tourist families and sleepy policemen.

  The entrance to the franchise store in the Plaza Catalunya where the Launch Party for Stephen King's New Novel is taking place has been decorated for the occasion with a gigantic promotional banner that has the title of Stephen King's new novel, WONDERFUL WORLD, above a stereotypically idyllic image of an American suburb. Valentina Parini goes up the escalator wringing her hands. The feeling of danger that she's been feeling all day seems to have solidified and concentrated around this moment and place. The moment she's been waiting for for weeks, but which for some reason seems to have transformed into a vortex of danger. Some of the customers of the franchise store move aside to let her pass.

  When she gets to the floor where the bookstore is, she finds hundreds of Stephen King fans lined up in front of the counter where the first copies will soon be available for sale. The fans on line are mostly wearing promotional T-shirts and caps for different Stephen King novels and films, and heavy metal bands. One of the fans is wearing a full-body bunny costume, the kind they sell at the souvenir shops. Some of them look at Valentina with terrified expressions and move aside as she comes through. She advances with erratic steps to the end of the line.