Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  Giraut interlocks his fingers and rests his chin on the resulting interwoven fists. According to the observations he has been making over the years, Estefanía “Fanny” Giraut considers her only son a mentally weak individual, completely incapable of doing anything worthwhile with his life. With serious problems of introversion close to autism that make him live in an inner world of childish fantasies partially inherited from his father. With a total lack of the mental mechanisms necessary to carry out the natural socialization process that everyone carries out during their prepubescence. As a result of which he has never had what is commonly known as a Circle of Friends. Those male friends that one goes out for drinks with, or plays golf with, and those female friends that could potentially become girlfriends and/or wives. Someone who hasn't gone through those necessary natural phases that are known as the Ages of Man, among which are sexual awakening and the entrance into adult life. A mediocre student. A person who lacks initiative. A thirty-three-year-old total virgin. A misfit, in other words. A failure, because of his congenital deficiency, and definitively ruined by a father who was also defective and a criminal repeat offender. On one occasion, Fanny Giraut made a comment alluding to the fact that Lucas Giraut lacked the sufficient degree of masculinity for carrying out a typical act of coitus with a woman. It is true that Lucas Giraut is a virgin in many more senses than he would be willing to admit publicly.

  “Son,” says Fonseca to Giraut, in that serious tone that Fonseca usually adopts when he assumes some sort of quasi-parental role. “You still have time to stop this all. Let's call it a misunderstanding. We are people who love you.” Giraut can't perceive any kind of nervous beating in the treelike network of blood vessels on Fonseca's temples. “No one wants anything to happen that could change the fact that we are people who love you.”

  The Arab or Hindustani lawyer removes the pen from between his teeth and his smile, surrounded by his short little beard, grows even closer to the lecherous, evil expression of a villain. Of one of those Arab villains in those American movies centered around the conflict between American freedom and the Arab lack of respect for all that is sacred.

  “My client wants to express his absolute indifference to the plaintiff's offer,” he says in a high-pitched voice with a slight Near Eastern accent. “My client would like to make clear that the offer seems to be clear proof of the plaintiff's true intentions. My client is the principal shareholder of LUCAS GIRAUT, LTD. There is no indication of inappropriate relationships. Et cetera. My client wants to make clear that he finds this all to be a waste of time.” He clears his throat. A lock of black curly body hair sticks out of the upper edge of the collar of his shirt. “Regarding the accusations on my person, everything that has been said here in front of witnesses could be the basis of taking legal action. I am a citizen who has never been formally accused of any crime. Now my client and I would like to take our leave. See you at the trial. None of what was said here is going to be overlooked.”

  Once Estefanía Giraut called her son A Waste of Time in an Expensive Suit. On other occasions she has referred to him as: Drooling Runt, More Useless Than Sandals in the Arctic, Born Loser, International King of Failure 2003, The First Step Toward the Extinction of the Species, Pile of Genetic Remains and Complete and Utter Idiot. In one of Lucas Giraut's childhood notebooks from fifth grade, Giraut describes in detail how his mother is run over by a cattle train and killed. Including a diagram of the distances at which they found the different pieces of her corpse. For several months, and until the child psychologists sounded the alarm, Giraut was telling anyone who would listen the story of the cattle train and his mother's death.

  “Are you threatening me?” Fonseca sends a defiant eyebrow gesture to the non-Caucasian lawyer. A certain palpitating vascular movement is apparent at his temples. “Be more specific. Is Bocanegra going to send his heavies after me? Are they going to shoot me in the knee?”

  Lucas Giraut's lawyer has already gathered up his papers from the table and put them away in his briefcase. He has already stood up and is about to leave the meeting room of the plaintiff's law firm. The Legal Mediator lifts her palms in a placating gesture and also stands up. She repeats several times the idea that nothing of what has been said during the ongoing meeting figures in any legal document of any kind. She appeals to the professionalism of those present and she pulls her skirt down, which had inched up as a result of her sitting with her legs crossed. Her facial expression and body language are slightly more tense and slightly less self-assured versions of her conciliatory and quasi-maternal expression and body language. Still seated at the table, Lucas Giraut surreptitiously seeks out the gaze of the sickly-looking redheaded lawyer. From the door, the possibly Semitic or Persian lawyer indicates that the time to leave the room has come. In the pink-eyelashed gaze of the plaintiff's representative, Giraut thinks he has found a mix of professional greed and killer instinct that he finds somehow essentially legal but, at the same time, impossible to disassociate from the basic fact of being redheaded.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 35

  Hannah Linus: Reprise

  Hannah Linus's body movements loosen up until they meld with the waves' aquatic vibration. The water is warm as it can only be after an entire day beneath the subtropical sun. None of the waves are strong enough to disturb her feeling of inner peace. Hannah Linus focuses on the idea that she has finally found a place where no one can bother her in any way. No one can interrupt her idyll with herself in this subtropical island where the sand is white and fine and the sea is always calm. With no jellyfish or sharks or aquatic animals. She lifts an arm and repositions her green plastic eye protector. With no work obligations. Without having to talk to anyone, although that was a personal option she had chosen out of the many on the promotional brochure. The sensation is vaguely sexual. She couldn't exactly say why she finds the sensation sexual, but in general terms Hannah Linus has never been very good at describing her sexual feelings or communicating to other people her sexual impulses. Without even mentioning the fact that those impulses clearly make her uneasy, conceptually.

  Hannah Linus is opening her mouth in a tension-releasing yawn and moving an arm to hold her eye protector when her head hits something soft and flabby. Something that judging by the tactile sensation could very well be a butt. Hannah Linus frowns and raises a hand in apology. Her eye protector floats off across the thermal saltwater pool toward the edge lined with relaxing candles. Hannah Linus can't imagine who the idiot is who lined the pool with little candles. She curses in Swedish and makes her way through the floating bodies and the erect bodies of the aquatic therapists toward her eye protector.

  Besides Hannah Linus, there are half a dozen clients of the SpaCenter floating in lethargic poses in the pool's salt water. Hannah Linus makes her way with difficulty through the salt water, following the green stain that the artificial waves carry farther and farther off. Through the fog that floats over the heated pool she thinks she can see someone signaling to her from the entrance to the dressing area. According to the Spa-Center's promotional brochure, salt water heated to the exact temperature of thirty-eight degrees Celsius supports most of the body's weight. The vertebrae and muscles relax more easily and the spine is freed from the force of earth's gravity. The complete holistic treatment lasts sixty minutes. And the heated salt water produces an optimum energy-conducting effect. Hannah Linus couldn't care less about what the Spa-Center's aquatic therapy promotional brochure says. Nor is she particularly interested in the emancipation of her muscular and skeletal systems. What she really wants is a place where everyone leaves her alone and where she can shut her eyes and imagine that she has rented an island paradise to get away from it all.

  Around her, the aquatic therapists are leading the lethargic floating bodies through the pool with gentle motions and intermittent immersions. Hannah Linus finally traps the green stain that is her eye protector. A few steps away from her, framed by the candle's little flames, a Japanese
master of Reiki therapy is laying his hands on a patient to transmit his flow of vital energy.

  “Miss,” says someone from a corner of the pool. Hannah Linus squints her eyes to see through the fog. It is a young man with the official swimsuit of the Spa-Center chain, pointing with one finger to his diving watch. “Miss. I think your sixty minutes ended two minutes ago.”

  Hannah Linus gathers her things from the locker and dries her hair vigorously with a towel. Then she knots the towel below her underarms and starts to walk toward the dressing rooms with her sports bag hanging from her shoulder. She is walking between the bubbling hydromassage pools when a shaved head with swimming goggles emerges suddenly from the bubbling surface of one of the pools. Causing some sort of heated wave that splatters the floor and walls. Hannah Linus stares with a frightened face at the guy now coming out of the hydromassage pool, leaning effortlessly on his muscular tattooed arms. The guy takes off his swimming goggles and looks at her with a wide smile. Hannah Linus is paralyzed with horror, her towel splattered with water and her sports bag hanging from her shoulder.

  “You,” she manages to finally mutter. “What are you doing here?”

  “Me?” Saudade points to his chest with his eyebrows widely arched. “Are you a client of this place, too?”

  Hannah Linus sets off running through the hallway that leads to the dressing rooms, grabbing the upper edge of her towel with one hand and the strap of the sports bag with the other. Halfway there she slips and crashes into a middle-aged woman, who falls stiff as a board into one of the hydrotherapy pools. Hannah Linus doesn't turn to hear the complaining voices. Nor does she stop to avoid a cart of towels whose handler stares at her with a mix of hate and prudence. Saudade reaches her a few steps from the door to the women's dressing room. He grabs her by the arm and turns her toward his smiling face. Hannah Linus sticks a hand into her sports bag. She takes out a travel-size spray can and points it in Saudade's face.

  “You can't imagine what this does,” she says through clenched teeth. “You can't imagine what it can do to your eyes.”

  Saudade looks at the spray with a frown.

  “Ecological hairspray,” he says. “You're gonna blind me with that?”

  Hannah Linus looks down and reads the label on the spray can. She puts it back in her sports bag and takes out the personal self-defense spray that she bought a month ago, after she was attacked in her own office at the gallery. Saudade sighs.

  “How dare you follow me,” she says. In a voice that is both low and tense. “Your wife put me in the hospital. You could have called to see how I was.”

  “I came now to see how you are.” Saudade shrugs his shoulders. He looks Hannah Linus over with a vertical visual sweep. The kind of look usually associated with the first phases of a sexual advance. “And it looks like you're fine. Although it's hard to tell, with that towel on.”

  A couple of people with the official swimsuits of the Spa-Center chain are attending to the middle-aged woman who was violently knocked into the hydromassage pool. Other clients of the spa franchise have gathered around the scene of the fall to check on the victim's state. Hannah Linus begins to experience that whole chain of sexual feelings that simultaneously produces a certain feeling of conceptual uneasiness. Saudade sticks a hand beneath the towel she has knotted below her underarms. Hannah Linus realizes that she has been holding up the personal self-defense spray for a minute, with the nozzle orifice not exactly pointing in Saudade's direction. Nor is she entirely sure that she's broken all the security seals necessary to be able to trigger it. The tension she is feeling isn't exactly the tension you feel when your personal safety is in danger. It's a tension of contrasting elements. It looks like they are finally taking the woman out of the hydromassage pool. Her face is very red and her swimming cap has shifted on the crown of her head in such a way that it now looks sort of like the Smurfs' flaccid, fallen hats.

  Hannah Linus is experiencing a certain difficulty concentrating. Saudade is saying something about the fact of having an important professional career and a son at a difficult age. He is saying that his career and his son take up a lot of his time and barely leave him opportunities for socializing. Or for visiting people in the hospital.

  “I'm going to call security,” she interrupts. Looking with something like curiosity at the hand he's placed beneath her towel, which is now playing with the elastic edge of her one-piece bathing suit. “And when I leave here I'm going to ask for a restraining order. For you and your crazy wife.”

  “I had to pay the whole month's fee just for them to let me in,” says Saudade, with some sort of martyrological face. “If that doesn't show you I love you, I don't know what I have to do.”

  The sexual feelings that Hannah Linus is now having manifest themselves in the form of small shivers and strange sensations that are like slight temperature changes and tingling in her middle section. Something located in the lower part of her spinal column. One of the reasons that Hannah Linus isn't good at communicating her sexual impulses, and experiences a feeling of conceptual uneasiness toward them, is the fact that her sexual responses usually seem to be mixed with ideas of submission and self-degradation in a violent context. With images of struggle and twisted arms. Of violent penetrations in underground parking lots. Hannah Linus has no idea why the dominant culture links violent penetrations with underground parking lots. The facilities of the Spa-Center Diagonal franchise are impregnated with a characteristic odor. A mix of dampness and bath salts and incense. The odor doesn't contribute to the sexual sensation but it does accentuate the strangeness of the situation. The knot that holds up Hannah Linus's towel below her underarms comes undone with a sigh and falls to the ground. The towel lies wrinkled at her feet. Imparting a certain atmosphere of classical mythology to the scene. The unveiling of the classic defenseless female. Her exposure to the forcefulness of the classical phallus. Leda and the Swan. The Rape of the Sabine Women. Hannah Linus sticks her hand beneath Saudade's swimsuit and grabs his penis. A group of Spa-Center clients, who are passing by at that moment, whistle and clap.

  After a taxi ride and an hour of violent sex, Hannah Linus is lying in the bed in her apartment beside Saudade's sweaty tattooed body. Overcome by postcoital sloth. The layout of their horizontal bodies on the king-size bed of Hannah Linus's apartment is the following: He is faceup, with his hands interlocked beneath the nape of his neck. With his legs extended and his feet slightly sticking out over the bottom end of the bed. Whistling some optimistic postcoital song. She is at a semi-fetal angle, with her body curled and facing away from Saudade's, massaging her temples with the fingers of one hand. Victim to that wave of postcoital pessimism, and waiting for the Minimum Acceptable Time to pass so she can kick her sexual partner out of her bed and her apartment. The colossal tedium of having to share the moments after orgasm. The uncontrollable urges of freedom. Saudade springs from the bed, still whistling, and leaves the bedroom. Hannah Linus takes advantage of the moment alone to put on her underwear and a skirt.

  “Don't make plans for this summer,” says Saudade. The distance and the specific degree of echo to his voice indicate to Hannah Linus that he has entered the kitchen. That he's probably holding the door of the refrigerator open and examining its contents. “I'm gonna take you to Thailand. To one of those hotels on the beach that have absolutely everything. Where they do everything for you. You know what I mean. You're gonna love it.” Hannah Linus thinks she can hear the noise of pantry doors opening and closing. “Even though you're not into chicks. The chicks there touch you in a way that makes you forget about everything. Forget about those snooty places you go to. With the little bubbles and all that. There are no massages here like the ones they give you there, darling.”

  Hannah Linus notices a strange smell. She sits up with her vaguely sore limbs and puts on a shirt. Saudade's voice now sounds slightly occluded and distant, as if he were eating something and had moved to the living room. Hannah Linus puts on a shoe and limps out of the
bedroom with the other shoe in her hand. Saudade is seated on the sofa with the television remote control in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. He looks at Hannah Linus with a smile.

  “I'll pay for everything, of course,” he says. “I'm gonna be loaded. Very soon.”

  Hannah Linus throws her shoe with all her might toward Saudade's smiling head. He has no problem avoiding the projectile with a lateral head movement. Still maintaining his optimistic expression. The heel of the shoe leaves a nick in the wall's plaster in the shape of a heel of a shoe.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 36

  Mutagenic Explosions

  A ten-foot-long Venezuelan crocodile hangs, suspended from a half dozen cables, from the ceiling of the main room of the Atomic restaurant in Barcelona's Ensanche. Above and to the right of the slightly lateral table where Iris Gonzalvo and Lucas Giraut are seated. At dinner hour. In the main room, which is packed on a Monday dinner hour. The restaurant's walls are decorated with framed reproductions of photographs related to nuclear radiation and genetic mutations. In the entryway, right above the reservation desk where an employee dressed in an aseptic-looking red kimono checked Iris and Giraut's reservation, an enormous black-and-white photograph shows a human silhouette stamped into a wall in Hiroshima by radiation. It's similar to a shadow in negative. The effects of instantaneous disintegration. The employees with aseptic red kimonos come and go through the various sections of the restaurant, looking like characters in one of those science-fiction films where humankind has evolved to the point where human emotions have been systematically eradicated.