Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  Iris Gonzalvo thinks for a moment.

  “Penelope,” she says finally.

  “Penelope.” Travers smiles affably. “How appropriate. I suppose you must feel stuck in some dark cold place. Wanting to get out into the light.” Some sort of crowing escapes his lips, which Iris imagines is an affable laugh. “I know you must think I'm a nutjob with millions coming out of my ass while I rot slowly in this horrible place.” He gestures to his surroundings. “Don't be too hard on me. My illness took me by surprise one day, in the middle of the street. You can't imagine how it was. And now that I can't go out anymore, I like to have all my things in reach. That's why everything is so full of stuff. And you should see some of the rooms upstairs.” He points to the ceiling and crows. “But don't think that I asked to become a hermit. I used to love strolling through London. Sailing. Visiting all those wonderful cities around the world.”

  Iris Gonzalvo lets her gaze wander around the room. Or, better put, around the closer parts of the room. The only ones she can really make out through her sunglasses. Her gaze finally lands on a painting above the fireplace.

  “I see that you're not just a beauty.” Travers looks in the direction of her gaze. “You also have good taste. The truth is that that painting is one of the most important pieces in my collection. The Somnambulist in the Ambulance. I bet you are familiar with the artist's other works. This one is a copy, of course. Almost everything in this house is an extraordinary copy. I live in a palace of forgeries, isn't that funny?” He takes a sip on a glass identical to hers. He shrugs. “Of course, if they knew I had the original, I'd have Interpol coming in through the windows in ten minutes.”

  Iris Gonzalvo focuses on looking at the painting. But from what she can tell, The Somnambulist in the Ambulance is nothing more than an abstract composition of colorful splotches. Some of the splotches look slightly like strobe lights, as if they had some relationship to an ambulance's warning lights. There's also a splotch in the middle that could be anthropomorphic, like the figure of someone lying down, but there's no way to be sure with sunglasses on.

  Iris Gonzalvo rummages through her purse. She takes out a telephone connected to a satellite communication line.

  “I have a secure line ready,” she says. “Impossible to trace. And encrypted, of course. It's new technology. I think it was first used in the war in Iraq. So we can get started whenever you want. My bosses are waiting on the other side of the line.”

  Travers stares at her with an amused expression. His face is swollen like people with serious liver problems. Alcoholics with liquid retention issues. His eyes are so swollen that it looks like someone had been punching them. For a moment Iris Gonzalvo has the vision of the two crazy balding blond guys punching their boss in the eyes. And sitting him in the armchair in front of the cats with a glass of port in his hand to make him look like a vampire from a movie.

  “I'm afraid there will be no negotiations today.” Travers's tone is affable and slightly paternalistic. “I'm sorry to disappoint you. But you have to be patient with me. Everything will go fine. But you have to put up with my idiosyncrasies. I suppose they've already told you that I'm fussy about details. Do you think I'm going to do business with you and just let you leave?” He stares at her and for a very brief moment there is a flash of sincerity in his gaze. “A woman like you? Remember that I can't go out on the street. My pleasures are very limited. Merely conversing with you fills me with a warmth I haven't felt in years. Besides”—he shrugs his shoulders—“I have a lot of things to explain to you. Don't you think?”

  “To explain to me?” Iris Gonzalvo takes her pack of British cigarettes out of her purse with a distracted gesture. She puts one between her lips. “What do you have to explain to me?”

  Travers looks at her with a shocked expression.

  “What do I have to explain to you?” he says. “Well, everything. The meaning of everything. The reason that I am here and the reason why you are here, too. Or haven't you realized that you are now part of a story that you've become involved in purely by chance? And isn't it true that you've always felt distanced from who you really want to be? And don't you want to know how it all started?” He lifts his glass of port toward her, in a silent toast. “I have the answers. I am the person in this story who knows the answers.”

  Iris Gonzalvo stares at Travers pensively while he lights her cigarette. In front of them, before the fire, one of the cats stretches out its entire body and opens its mouth in an unrealistically large yawn.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 42

  Before the Law

  The taxi stops in front of a cement esplanade surrounded by blocks of housing projects. The sky is pink. That icy pink tone of certain winter dawns. The blocks of apartments are morphologically similar to giant tombstones or alien monoliths from prophetic films. The classic housing projects in every working-class suburb in every city in the world. From a pictorial point of view, the scene's only special feature is the fact that the alien monoliths of housing projects have taken on a truly pink tone under the first light of day.

  After a moment the back door of the taxi opens. The cement esplanade has basketball hoops and multicolored graffiti on all of its vertical cement surfaces. The air smells of burnt garbage. Of wild dogs. Of boiling urban subcultures. A leg covered in a powder blue and white Umbro sweat suit emerges from the taxi, followed by another identical one. Finally the upper half of a body comes out. It bears certain overall structural similarities with the person formerly known as Juan de la Cruz Saudade. His face has a clear greenish hue. His eyes are two red stains of broken capillaries. His greasy hair is stuck to his head where he was leaning against the upholstered backseat of the cab. A still-smoking cigarette butt between his yellow fingers. Saudade burps and closes the door with a sneaker that bears traces of an unidentified brown liquid. The cabdriver heads off shouting something unintelligible through the open driver's-side window. Saudade remains there for a moment, observing the alien skyline of his neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, his heart swollen with pride, until he notices the smell of his fingers burning, singed by the cigarette's cherry. He tosses the butt absentmindedly. It is in moments like this when Juan de la Cruz Saudade, twenty-six years old, feels most intensely the intrinsic beauty of life.

  In addition to cement esplanades with basketball hoops and blocks of apartments, Saudade's neighborhood on the outskirts of Barcelona has a lot of staircases and abrupt cliffs, which at this time of the early morning are lit by blinking streetlights. Approximately two out of every three streetlights stopped working a long time ago. Saudade goes up half a dozen of the staircases. He dodges water balloons and other projectiles that insomniacs toss from their windows and he stands on some sort of elevated platform above the neighborhood that also serves as the main access to his own block of apartments. Saudade's block is a low, squat concrete box eaten away by the elements that houses more than five hundred souls. The way Saudade walks is powerfully reminiscent of those movies about corpses brought back to life by viruses from outer space. Though, unlike people who have suffered some kind of injury to their lower extremities and walk dragging a leg, somehow Saudade seems to be dragging both legs. Finally he turns around the final bend covered in tribal graffiti and arrives at the door of his house.

  The feeling of well-being and general satisfaction with life that Juan de la Cruz Saudade is experiencing in those moments doesn't quite have to do with the chemical substances he's taken, which alter his perception of many things in general. Nor is it related to the proximity of his bed and the prospect of raiding the fridge beforehand. His feeling of well-being has more to do with the firm conviction that he is full of positive qualities and endowed with an enormous talent for getting the most out of life and enjoying himself enormously in the process.

  Saudade pees on some cardboard boxes that someone has piled up beside a row of city garbage Dumpsters. Peeing intensifies his pleasure. Then he takes the elevator up, using the seco
nds in front of the mirror covered with graffiti to readjust his Umbro sweat suit and run a hand distractedly through his hair. Ready to rejoin his family unit.

  A minute later, Saudade has tried every one of his keys in the lock to his apartment and he is now alternately studying his set of keys, the door to his apartment and the signs that indicate the floor and apartment number. His puzzlement has clear Homeric connotations. He tries all the keys again, one after the other, and runs a fingertip over a lock that seems newer and shinier than the lock he remembers his apartment having. Of course, he is absolutely unaware of the Homeric connotations of his situation. A faint, throbbing headache stirs in his right temple. A good portion of his feelings of satisfaction about life and his overall optimism begin to dissipate as he alternates pushing on the bell with kicking the door with his right sneaker.

  “I must have picked up the wrong keys,” says Saudade to the questioning faces of the neighbors who've opened doors on his landing. “My wife wakes up late. Ha ha.”

  In the elevator down to the street, Saudade examines a sock on the elevator floor with a pensive expression. The sock is vaguely familiar to him. Or at least enough for him to know that at some point it was white. The chain of implications of the episode he seems to be experiencing is too terrible to even consider. He exits the apartment building and looks up toward the balcony of his house. The plastic Christmas tree remains in the same place on the balcony where he left it two years ago. Then he turns to look at the boxes sprinkled with urine beside the Dumpsters. A powder blue and white sleeve with Umbro's rhomboid logotype sticks out of one of the boxes. Certain suspicions arise in Saudade's mind. Dogs barking and the screech of commercial gates opening are heard in the distance. Saudade kneels and picks up a piece of broken paving tile from the paved ground. He takes a few steps back and throws it toward his own balcony. The piece of tile breaks the glass of his balcony's glass doors with a sound that creates echoes in the early-morning air.

  “Where's the other sock?” shouts Saudade to his wife's face when she appears on the balcony. Holding up the once white sock that he picked up in the elevator. “What did you do with my things?”

  “Your son is calling the police,” answers Matilde Saudade from the balcony. With her face transformed into a whirlwind of surprised eyebrow gestures. “Now I'm going to lower the blinds.”

  Saudade examines the sock in his hand with a pensive face. He uses it to wipe the sweat from his forehead and looks up again at the balcony. The sound of commercial gates screeching open seems excessive compared to the number of businesses in the neighborhood.

  “I spent the night working in the warehouse,” says Saudade with his hands placed at either side of his mouth, the way people do when they are trying to project their voice. Forgetting perhaps that he has a dirty sock in his hand. “If you don't believe me, call whoever you want. Remember your overactive imagination problems.”

  “I sold my wedding ring,” says Matilde Saudade's face, suspended above the railing of the balcony. With her hair hanging from both sides of her face. The perspective that Saudade has of his wife's face from the street is both familiar and strangely unfamiliar. “To pay for the new lock. Go sleep somewhere else, please.”

  Saudade puts the sock in the pocket of his sweat suit and sits on a step at the building's entrance. His feeling of well-being seems to have almost completely vanished. If there's one thing that Saudade hates intensely in this world, it's problems. Up until that moment he was fairly convinced that he had managed to establish a pretty satisfactory strategy in his life for making problems abruptly swerve as they approached him and go piss off somebody else. Saudade doesn't have anything against other people's problems. Now he sighs. He hugs his knees and drums his fingers against one of his legs. In the distance, beyond and below the elevated concrete platform that dominates most of the neighborhood filled with apartment buildings, a new noise is heard. It isn't the screech of commercial gates or the barking of wild dogs. The sky has turned from pink to soft purple and then to an intense blue that you only see in deep winter skies. The noise heard in the distance is the sound of sirens from police patrol cars. Saudade is definitely beginning to suspect that a problem has just shown up in his life.

  “I want you to go, too,” says the voice of Cristian Saudade from some point located above his father's head. “You never talk to me. And I hate your soccer team.”

  Saudade approaches the boxes sprinkled with urine next to the Dumpsters and opens the first one. He takes out several pieces of clothing. Many of them look as if they haven't been washed in a long time. A pair of dark glasses from his days as a cop. Souvenir T-shirts from day trips to coastal towns overwhelmingly devoted to the leisure industry. Fruit-flavored condoms. He opens another box. Clothes. DVD movies. The seminal works of his pornography collection in DVD. One Up Front and One Up Back 3. Barely Legal: Volumes 1 and 2. Anal Rapist 6. Anal Virgins 2. Two regional police officers appear at the top of the stairs of the elevated platform. Saudade sticks several DVDs in the pockets of his sweat suit. Inside the pant legs. Inside the jacket of his sweat suit. The DVD movies he sticks inside the jacket of his sweat suit accumulate around his waist and give him a strangely marsupial look.

  “Sir,” says the voice of a police officer behind him. With that friendly and at the same time peremptory tone that police officers use in situations of potential conflict. “Sir, stand up and put your hands where we can see them, please.”

  Saudade opens another box. More DVD movies. Colored condoms. Condoms with latex rings. Saudade's thoughts include several rhetorical questions regarding what went wrong in his life to cause such an unfair turn of events. He takes a traditional Japanese nunchaku out of the box and holds it up with a vaguely melancholy expression.

  “Sir,” says the policeman's voice from behind his back, “it would be best if you left that on the ground, sir. Without any strange movements.”

  Saudade puts the nunchaku on the ground and stands up and turns slowly with his arms in the air. Out of the corner of his eye he can see his family and his neighbors looking out from their respective balconies. Obeying a gesture from the policeman in front of him who is aiming at him with his standard-issue firearm, he unzips the upper part of the sweat suit of his favorite sports team. A dozen DVD movies fall at his feet.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 43

  Human Torso with Octopus Tentacles

  The gym of the Giraut family house in the Ampurdan region is a structure of glass and steel beams attached to the main building of the art nouveau–style house with forged-steel balconies. Half a dozen pieces of gym equipment line the large front window with views of the breakwater. There are men squatting and men crouching. All dressed in business suits. There is a man in a suit, standing up on a stool, feeling the inside of a ceiling lamp with a hand sheathed in a latex glove. Another man is taking towels out of the closets. All the men in the room wear latex gloves. Except Fonseca. Fonseca isn't wearing gloves. Fonseca is standing in front of the large window watching Fanny Giraut's figure approach along the path from the breakwater. With the enormous system of treelike veins throbbing in his temples. Smoking a cigarette. There is a man in a suit squatting to examine the lower part of an exercise machine that's similar to one of those motorcycles without wheels in movies set in the future. With his butt pointed toward the Ampurdan sky.

  The paved path meticulously lined with pebbles that leads from the breakwater to the Giraut family house is known as the Beach Trail.

  Fonseca frowns. Fanny Giraut's figure has stopped in the middle of the path from the beach and is now watching the scene in the gym through the large window. With the inexpressive mask that is her surgically modified face. She is wearing a turban and the upper part of a two-piece bathing suit and a paisley sarong that reveals her legs below the knee. The number of operations to remove varicose veins that Fanny Giraut has undergone to date is eight.

  “Sir,” says one of the men in business suits and latex gloves b
ehind Fonseca's back, “we might have to move some of these machines, sir. To see what's underneath them.”

  To anyone who knows Fonseca either in his private life or in his public legal practice it is obvious that the system of treelike throbbing veins in his temples reveals a much higher degree of nervousness than the normal amount derived from situations of professional stress. The man who has just addressed him has both gloved hands held high the way surgeons hold their hands when they are about to perform an operation.

  Fanny Giraut stops in front of the large gym window and waits for Fonseca to open the door for her. Neither of them says anything for a moment.

  “Who are these people?” Fanny says finally. Without anything that's going through her head appearing in her features. “Fonseca, tell them to leave. And what are you doing smoking in here? Get rid of that right now.”

  Several of the men dressed in business suits and latex gloves are moving an exercise machine similar to a canoe's skeleton with oars so they can examine the tiles underneath it. There is something vaguely alarming in the uniformity of the general appearance and suits of the men that come and go through the gym. Fanny Giraut is standing with her arms crossed at one end of the gym of her house, without looking directly at Fonseca or any of the men in suits.

  “I'm afraid that isn't going to be easy.” Fonseca puts out his cigarette with saliva-moistened fingertips and puts the butt into a pocket of his pants. “It seems that something has happened. There are court orders. The forensics came. We have to go to the office to talk, just you and I.” You can almost follow with your eyes the ebb and flow of blood through the inflamed branches of blood vessels in his temples. “Now.”

  A man in shirtsleeves with a lollipop stick coming from his lips and a generally satisfied and happy facial expression appears on the staircase that attaches the gym to the main house. Besides the gym, the other additions to the house include a solarium with pool on the former terrace, a game room in the basement and the Fishing Trophy Room on the second floor of the house's main building. With views of the breakwater. The Giraut family house in the Ampurdan is located in the middle of a horseshoe-shaped bay, with an enormous breakwater occupying the center of the bay and cliffs on either side. The guy in shirtsleeves takes the lollipop out of his mouth. A rolled-up automotive magazine sticks enigmatically out of one of his pants pockets.