Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  “Did you screw that girl?” Iris Gonzalvo lifts up one leg in a right angle over her body and is running a fingernail over the tiny imperfections on her legs left by the waxing. “If you did, you can tell me. I've seen it all. You wouldn't be the first guy I know who did something like that. I mean fucking twelve-year-old girls.”

  Giraut takes a pensive drag on the cigarette and hands it back to his sexual partner. He isn't entirely sure why Iris Gonzalvo has a perfectly smoothly shaved pubis. In a way that doesn't at all suggest childlike associations. Nor does he really understand how she ended up with all those tattoos on her most private parts. It doesn't seem very likely that she just went into a tattoo parlor and took off all her clothes and pointed to her private parts and then lay down to wait for them to do them. Although he admits to himself that he could be wrong about that.

  “Everyone thinks I did.” Giraut blows out a mouthful of smoke. “Except Marcia, I guess. The girl's mother. Valentina says that her mother wants to marry me. Nothing sexual has ever happened between us. I mean with the daughter. Well, or with the mother either. We like to sit and talk in the courtyard. Sometimes in the winter we put out one of those portable heaters. We make up stories. Like for example that we're very powerful and can kill people. People that annoy us or people we hate. People like my mother and her lawyer. Valentina is a very special girl. She wants to be a writer. She's very smart. She could get the best grades in her school, but she wants to get bad grades. That's the kind of person she is. Special. Sometimes she gets really angry. I mean she has nervous fits. Now the doctors say that she has schizophrenia, but I don't believe it. I think she's angry. And growing up. Growing up isn't easy. It wasn't for me.” He pauses and looks at Iris Gonzalvo's leg, lifted in a right angle. Iris is flexible and slender and one would have to have a screw loose to say that she wasn't exceptionally sexually attractive. “One time at school she said she saw a man throw himself into the garbage incinerator in the basement. The police came and they emptied out the incinerator and examined the remains and they even said they had found a piece of the man's bone. Later they realized it was a chicken bone. That was when they put her into therapy. And she's been in therapy since she was eight years old. It's hard to explain why she does those things.”

  Iris Gonzalvo lowers her leg to the bed. She turns on her side and leans on one elbow. Looking at Lucas Giraut.

  “I don't know why I like you,” she says. The position in which she is lying and leaning on one elbow doesn't allow her to shrug, but she moves her neck in a way that looks like a shrug or at least gives the same feeling. “You're weird and not very handsome and terrible in bed. I've never seen anything like it. But I think I like you. I'm not sure if I remember the last time this happened. I've gone out with so many maniacs and so many losers that I don't even care that you're weird. And I don't mean that we're going out or anything like that. In case you thought that's what I said.”

  “We're not going out,” says Lucas Giraut.

  “That's what I said.”

  Iris Gonzalvo sits on the bed and leans forward to pick up her underwear. Lucas Giraut's bedroom doesn't look like any bedroom Iris has ever seen. It's very big and has old windows with mullions and even one of those big trunks with rivets like you see in the movies. If it weren't for the television and the walk-in closet separated from the bedroom by a curtain, she would feel like she was in one of those movies, like The Lord of the Rings, where people live in castles and fly on the backs of dragons. There is also a painting depicting a half-naked guy tied to a post with a ton of arrows sticking out all over his body. The guy with the arrows is looking up toward the heavens and looks like he's crying and his long upturned face somehow makes you think of Britney Spears's face. In Iris's opinion. The light from the streetlights of the Old City that enters the windows is halogen yellow colored and a little like a scary movie. Iris puts on a very small pair of panties and walks up to some sort of enormous antique throne made of painted wood that has a circular hole in the middle of the seat. A bag of golf clubs sticks out of the hole. She takes the golf clubs out and sits down. She puts her slender arms on the arms of the throne and looks at Giraut.

  “Is this what I think it is? Must be worth a lot of money.”

  “It comes from Croatia.” Giraut takes a drag on the cigarette with his gaze fixed on the floating beams of the ducal ceiling. “It's worth about five thousand euros. Depending on who you sell it to. It's from the seventeenth century. A unique piece. Only members of the high aristocracy could have one of those, of course.” He pauses. “I've been thinking.” He wipes off a bit of ash that has fallen onto his pale, almost completely hairless chest. “About Valentina. I want to get her out of that clinic. Although I don't know how to do it yet. I've been sending her chapters of her favorite novel. Sewn into other books. They won't let her read Stephen King. They don't let her read anything she likes. I've been talking to her doctors. I think they think that the things she likes are what's hurting her.”

  Lucas Giraut's wardrobe extends along an entire wall and has many dozen Lino Rossi suits hanging in it. Of different colors. All from the most recent season. There are also those kinds of hanging canvas drawers that people use to store shoes. Iris Gonzalvo takes one of the golf clubs out of the bag and pretends she is making a swing with both arms. Still sitting on the seventeenth-century toilet. Her body is slender and her pubis smooth and soft and Lucas Giraut doesn't remember ever seeing a more sexually attractive woman in his life.

  “I've never much liked old things,” she says. “I don't understand why they're interesting. At home the oldest thing we had was the television listings from the week before. Anyway it was impossible to keep anything for more than a week because Eric used to sell it all. He sold almost all my things. They just disappeared. That's something drug addicts do. It's a miracle he never sold our TV.” She puts her feet up on the seat of the Croatian toilet made of antique polychrome wood and hugs her knees. “Not even Eric would dare sell the TV. In the end all we had was a mattress and the lamps and the TV. Although it's more than I have now. I don't know where I'm going to live. I've been staying at my friend's house for ten days and I haven't got any money.”

  Lucas Giraut keeps focusing on the architectural details of the second-floor ceiling of the ducal palace. The truth is he has no memories of his parents' separation. The only thing he seems to remember from his early childhood is blurry impressions of golden flashes from cocktail cabinets and the violent throwing of objects. Glimmers of his father's terrified face at the window of the Fishing Trophy Room. Seen through binoculars from a window of the North Wing. The guests seated among the taxidermied fish and black-and-white photographs of people wearing vests with many pockets. The already treelike face of Fonseca seen from that child's perspective. More or less waist height. Neglected material in the abandoned corners of his mind. One of the possible reasons why Lucas Giraut doesn't remember his parents' separation is that it took place during the Years of Physical Impossibility, in which his parents were never in the same room at the same time. In some unclear period that Giraut situates near the deaths of Rock Hudson and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

  “You can come live here.” Giraut sits up and feels around for a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. It has gotten dark very quickly and now the bedroom is lit only by the halogen yellow and vaguely scary light of the Gothic Neighborhood's streetlights, which comes in through the windows with mullions. “I don't mean living with me like we were boyfriend and girlfriend or living together as a couple. But there's a lot of room in this apartment. You can stay in one of the bedrooms. It could even be good for our mission.” He turns to look at Iris, who is still sitting hugging her knees on the seventeenth-century toilet. “We can prepare your visits to Mr. Travers together. I can give you some private classes in the history of art. To perfect your role and all that. At least until he decides to buy the paintings.”

  Iris Gonzalvo looks at Lucas Giraut with a face not entirely devoid of symp
athy. Her body has tattoos and piercings in places where Giraut had no idea you could get tattoos and piercings. In places that don't show even when you're wearing summer clothes.

  “There's something that doesn't fit in this whole story.” Iris extends her arm as far as she can to take the lit cigarette Giraut is offering her from the bed. “I don't understand what a guy like you is doing working with a guy like Bocanegra. It's really weird. And I think it has something to do with your father. With what happened to your father. And with you wanting to get revenge on whoever sent him to jail.” She releases a mouthful of smoke and gives the cigarette back to Giraut through the space between the bed and the antique toilet. “I think you're hiding something. That you have plans you're not telling anyone. I don't know exactly what kind of plans. But I think you're planning to do something incredibly stupid. Like stabbing Bocanegra in the back. Stealing his money, or the paintings.” She shrugs her shoulders. “Or both.”

  Lucas Giraut doesn't say anything. Through the floorboards you can hear the vibration of the music Marcia Parini is listening to in the apartment downstairs.

  “Do you have any idea what someone like Bocanegra would do to you if he found out what you're planning?” Iris looks at Giraut with a frown. “Why do you think Bocanegra knows people like Travers, or that guy that forged the paintings? Because he's powerful. And I don't just mean rich. I mean that you can't steal anything from these people and then hide. Excuse me, but you don't know anything about criminals. I know a few things.”

  “A few months ago I found one of my father's accounting ledgers.” Giraut gives the cigarette back to Iris again. “My father had it hidden in a secret place. In Apartment Thirteen. I still can't believe that no one found it before I did. It was his secret accounting. That didn't even show up in the company's private ledgers. You can't even imagine the amount of money my father was dealing with. I'm not surprised that the ledger was so well hidden. When I read it, I discovered something. I found the answer I was looking for.” He sits up to lean his head on one arm so he can look at Iris while he talks. “My father had stopped doing business with Bocanegra three or four months before he was betrayed. All his dealings were with a guy named Koldo Cruz. They had shut Bocanegra out. They may have been doing business behind his back. And then my father was handed over to the police and sent to jail. And guess what else. A year later someone put a bomb in Koldo Cruz's house. And very nearly killed him. You understand?”

  She stares at him blankly.

  “It's obvious,” continues Giraut. “It was Bocanegra. He betrayed my father. And then he tried to kill Koldo Cruz. I guess to protect himself. It all fits.”

  “And now you are going to betray him,” she says. In a slightly lower voice.

  “The money will go through my hands,” he says. “And the paintings as well. Bocanegra has got it in his head that I'm like a son to him. So he trusts me completely.” He pauses. “After what he did to my father.”

  “And you weren't planning on telling me any of this?” she says. In a hurt tone. “Imagine Bocanegra thinks that I'm mixed up in all this. Imagine what he could do to a girl.”

  There is a moment of silence. In spite of her words, Iris Gonzalvo's tone isn't the irritated tone of someone who has just realized that they are at the short end of a secret plan. In fact, it is more like the pitiful tone of someone that has just been set aside by someone they have special feelings for.

  “I thought of something else I should tell you,” says Lucas Giraut finally. Looking at the ceiling beams again, through a pale cloud of cigarette smoke. “I was thinking of taking you with me when I steal the money and the paintings. You and Valentina.”

  In the Years of Physical Impossibility, the terms in which said impossibility manifested itself were rigorously strict. Lucas's parents were never, ever seen together, not even in the Giraut family house in the Ampurdan. On the rare occasions that the entire family went to the house in the Ampurdan also known as Villa Estefanía, Lorenzo Giraut went there in his personal patriarchal car two days before the rest of the family. So when his wife and son arrived in the company car, he was already installed in his study with the windows covered by opaque curtains and it was impossible to see him beyond his occasional strolls at dusk along the breakwater or driving his car toward town. Watched by a boy with binoculars from one of the windows of the North Wing, also known as the Boy's Wing.

  After a moment, Iris smiles. She points her head toward Giraut's crotch.

  “I think your dick is small, too,” she says. “I'm not sure.”

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 50

  The Story's Ultimate Meaning

  As the weeks pass and Iris Gonzalvo makes more visits to Travers's palace in the heart of bourgeois Jewish Paris, she has gotten used to her host's eccentricities. The strange place where Travers seems to spend all his time. Even his conversation topics. Now Iris flies to Paris a couple of times a week and a car takes her straight from the airport to the palace's porticoed patio. The sequence of events is always the same. When they are both sitting in front of the smoking salon's fireplace, they almost never mention the business that they supposedly should be doing, or the St. Kieran Panels. Most of the time Travers seems happy to have her keeping him company. He talks and she half listens, sometimes flipping through one of the magazines or catalogues that are strewn around the room. The lack of progress in the negotiation doesn't seem to upset anyone that she works for. Neither Giraut nor Bocanegra seems nervous. No news, Bocanegra said proudly to her one day, is good news. This afternoon, however, an absurdly cold afternoon in late February, Iris Gonzalvo is sitting as always in the armchair in front of the fireplace when Travers stands up. He goes to look for a book on one of the room's bookshelves and he opens it on the small table in front of Iris.

  “You are an intelligent woman,” says Travers. Today he seems to be wearing the tattered remains of a silk dressing gown over his frayed wool sweater. All his clothing seems to have been rescued from some sort of natural disaster. “In addition to being very pretty. Tell me, please, from your heart, what do you think this painting means?”

  Iris Gonzalvo leans forward a bit to better see the reproduction in the book that Travers is showing her. Beneath the inadequate light from a table lamp covered with a cloth. The title of the painting, according to the caption below the reproduction, is: And They All Hid in the Caves and Among the Mountain Crags. The painting shows some sort of hellish landscape. The sky is black and in the middle of it a black sun shines, surrounded by a crown of pale flames. There are fires on the horizon. The rocky landscape is filled with skeletons and dead people in pools of blood. The survivors crowd together inside caves and holes in the ground. They all look up at the sky in terror. They are all very pale. They embrace each other. Others are on their knees with their hands at their chests, praying. In general, it is clear that they are hiding from something, but the painting doesn't give enough information to understand what it is they're hiding from. Iris Gonzalvo recognizes the reproduction. It is one of the four paintings whose sale she is supposed to have been negotiating for weeks now. But she has no idea what it means. No one's explained that to her. They explained how much it's worth in the international market and how much the price will go up when it comes to light that the copies in the Hannah Linus Gallery are fakes. But nobody thought to give her an interpretation of the painting's meaning. Personally it reminds her of the covers of the heavy metal records her brothers listened to when she was a kid.

  Travers is staring at her. Iris Gonzalvo decides to make up a response. It can't be worse than sitting there like an idiot and not saying anything, she thinks. She looks at the book. She points to the people hiding in the caves and the holes in the ground.

  “All these people think that they're safe,” she says. She shrugs her shoulders. “But they don't have a chance. I don't think even one of them is going to make it. I've known people like that. My ex-boyfriend was like that.”

  Travers nods
, with a satisfied expression. Now he seems to be scratching a shred of his silk dressing gown, in a nervous gesture a doctor would probably find worrisome. He picks up the book with both hands and closes it. With the book under his arm, he nears a monogrammed lighter to Iris Gonzalvo, who uses it to light a cigarette. If there is some trace of relief in her face, luckily there isn't enough light for her host to see it.

  “The story of the St. Kieran Panels is fascinating.” Travers nods to himself. In spite of his sloppy appearance, which could be taken for the eccentricity of the extremely rich, Iris Gonzalvo doesn't see anything about him that makes him look like a rich eccentric. “As fascinating as the story of their creator, Brother Samhael Finnegan. Although there is little information on his life, they say he painted locked up in his cell by the light of a single candle. They also say he spent thirty years without leaving his cell in the St. Kieran monastery. It seems he was agoraphobic and photophobic. Two illnesses that are much more common than people realize.” He heads to his cocktail cabinet filled with delicate-looking cut crystal bottles. He serves a couple of glasses of port and takes a cup in each hand. “In his day, of course, there was also the fear of the Apocalypse. Which they thought would arrive at some point near the millennium. All these things are in the paintings, of course. After his death, his legend grew throughout Ireland. They started calling him the Mad Monk of Limerick. His paintings were much rawer and much more terrifying than what people were used to seeing at the time. And there was the question of his last painting. The fourth in the series.” He puts one of the glasses into Iris Gonzalvo's hand. “Have you heard about the fourth painting, Miss DeMink?”

  Iris Gonzalvo takes a sip from her glass of port.

  “The one they covered with a sheet,” she says, remembering something Giraut had told her a couple of weeks earlier. “The one they didn't let people see.”