by Javier Calvo
Mr. Travers collapses into the armchair again. In front of the fire, one of his cats is licking his paws with a sleepy face. Iris Gonzalvo hasn't asked about the painting over the fireplace again. The Somnambulist in the Ambulance. After a month of coming to this room twice a week, she's made her own interpretation of the painting's composition of colored splotches. Although maybe it's merely a matter of suggestion. Her seeing the man lying inside an ambulance. A man that for some reason she now sees with a beard and dressed in women's clothing.
“Exactly,” says Travers. “It seems that the last painting in the series took centuries to see the light of day. They had it hidden or well covered. In any case, they didn't think it was appropriate to have it in the church. From the very beginning, Brother Samhael's paintings were seen as dangerous. Something more than a series of religious paintings. They say that just seeing them caused changes to your spirit. In time, they became considered pagan objects.” He leans forward to pet his cats with a strangely wrinkled hand. His hands seem to belong to an older person than the rest of his body. “When you think about it, it's a miracle that they've survived. Don't you agree?”
Iris puts down the magazine she is flipping through. She takes a drag on her cigarette with half-closed eyes.
“Someone told me you believe in magic,” she says. “That maybe you want to use those paintings in some sort of ritual. Do you really think that the paintings, you know”—she shrugs—“have powers?”
“Doesn't their power to terrify people impress you? To make everyone afraid to look at them? To make someone voluntarily lock themselves up in a cell and throw away the key? Or to make people rob and kill for them? Perhaps you need to re-pose the question, Miss DeMink.” Travers lifts up a cat. A Persian cat with yellow eyes. He takes it in his arms as if it were a child and the two, Travers and the cat, stare at her with slightly mocking expressions. “Perhaps we should ask ourselves if what we do with things like those paintings is important. If fate is something we can bend to our wills. That would be true magic. Or if we are just simply characters in a story. And therefore it doesn't matter where we hide. Because fear will always find us. Like that boyfriend you mentioned. I come from an important family of wizards, miss. Starting with my great-grandfather, Mr. Arthur Travers. Perhaps you've read something about him. But now.” He makes a gesture that seems to indicate impotence, or at least a certain mysteriousness. “Does it matter if we use those paintings to invoke an angel, or a demon? Using them as talismans? Or if we melt down the canvas and paint and breathe in the vapors to fill ourselves with their power? That, young lady,” says Travers, and Iris feels the weight of both the man's and the cat's gazes upon her, “is something that we'll only know if we try. Don't you think?”
Iris Gonzalvo stands up. She starts to walk through the smoking salon of Mr. Travers's palace in central Paris. During the weeks she's been coming there, she has grown used to finding ways to pass the time in that room. Reading magazines while Travers talks, or even doing the crossword puzzles in the newspaper and nodding once in a while or saying “mmm” in that way people say “mmm” to indicate that in some part of their mind they're still listening. Most of the time, however, she walks around the room. To the point that she is already familiar with most of its elements. With the World War II battle reconstructions and with the artworks and antiques piled up everywhere. With the antique toys that always make her think of horror films. With the giant glass display cases filled with curios. Taxidermied things and things in bottles of alcohol. And yet, she thinks now, she's never really understood what kind of place she's in. She has never managed to assimilate on a deeper level the idea of the place and the man locked up inside it. Surrounded by strange things and fake things. She hasn't really considered what that man's mind must be like. Except for the fact that she suspects that the smoking salon and the man's mind must be very similar. If not one and the same.
Now she stops in one of the corners of the room. She stands there looking at something hanging from the wall. It appears to be a fishing trophy. A commemorative plaque with engraved nautical motifs and the framed photograph of the winner proudly holding up the first-prize winning piece. Grabbing it by the tail with an arm sheathed in a glove up to the elbow. Iris furrows her brow. The photograph has suddenly made her think of Lucas Giraut. Wasn't Giraut talking to her a few days ago about something having to do with his family and fishing trophies? She can't remember, and yet she has the feeling that the photograph is important. Important in a way she doesn't understand. Like the room itself. Like the man seated in front of the fire.
“The first day I came here,” she says finally. Without looking at Travers. “You told me that you could explain the meaning of everything to me. I mean, the meaning of what we're doing. Why we're here and all that. You told me that you were the character in this story that had the answers.” She runs a finger along the fishing trophy plaque and looks at her fingertip. It's black from the layer of dust covering the plaque. “What exactly did you mean by that?”
“I mean that I'm the only one that knows the whole story.” Travers's tone isn't mysterious. It is simple and natural. As if he were saying something perfectly obvious. “From the beginning. From Camber Sands. From the Down With The Sun Society. After all, I'm old enough to remember everything. You can't know a story's ultimate meaning until you know the whole story.”
Iris Gonzalvo runs her fingers over the plaque on the trophy to remove the dust covering it. Until she can read the inscription. The plaque says that the winner of this first prize for deep-sea fishing is Estefanía Giraut. The trophy seems to be more than thirty years old.
“Do you also know what's going to happen?” says Iris finally. After thinking for a moment. “Do you know what's going to happen with the paintings? Will there be a deal? Are you going to keep them?”
Travers lets out one of his affable, crowing laughs.
“Is that a trick question?” he says. “Are you trying to worm an answer out of me?” He pauses, during which Iris can imagine him perfectly, stroking his cat's head. In that way that certain characters in vampire stories stroke cats' heads. “Don't worry. I'll make a deal with you. I'm interested in buying the paintings. You can tell your bosses. Everything is moving forward. As much as it pains me to lose you. But by my age, I've learned to get over farewells.”
Iris Gonzalvo approaches the sofa where Travers is seated. With her arms crossed.
“And that's it?” she says. “That's all? That's the only thing I had to do? Sit here two afternoons a week for a month and wait?”
The way her arms are crossed is that way some people cross their arms when asking for an explanation. Especially some mothers or wives or teachers.
“Waiting is undervalued these days,” says Travers, completely calm. “Imagine, in centuries past, people used to wait entire decades for the stars to align in a particular way. In your case, you just waited for certain things to happen.”
Iris Gonzalvo takes her red leather Adeline André coat and her purse from one of the room's coatracks. She puts on her coat herself and takes out the satellite phone to see what time it is. Then she turns for the last time.
“One more question,” she says, looking toward the flames in the fireplace.
“Yes?”
“What does the painting mean?” she says. “The one with the people hiding in the caves.”
Travers gets up from the armchair and stares at her.
“Oh,” he says in an amused tone, “that. It just means that something terrible is going to happen. It's the third sign that something terrible is going to happen.”
Iris thinks about it for a moment and then nods. Mr. Travers has already become a mere black silhouette with the gleam of the flames in the background. A ragged, swollen silhouette, with a tangle of long curls that fall. Iris puts her purse over her shoulder. She waves goodbye and closes the door behind her.
Wonderful World
CHAPTER 51
People Are the Ones
That Leave
Lucas Giraut walks down the stairs that lead from his apartment on the upper floor of the former ducal palace to the door to the street, where someone has been ringing the doorbell for a minute already. The insistence of the ringer's ringing is the insistence of a lunatic. Although the door to the street is two large wooden doors with iron rivets, the door that opens is a smaller door inside one of them. The bell for the upstairs apartment where Giraut lives has a high-pitched sound that reverberates throughout the building. Unlike the much softer electronic buzzing sounds you hear when you ring most modern doorbells.
At the foot of the stairs, Giraut adjusts the lapels of his suit in an oblivious gesture, runs a hand through his hair and opens the small wooden door inside the larger ones. Eric Yanel smiles at him from the other side. He lifts a hand in greeting and gives Giraut a kick in the groin that makes him double over and leaves him on the ground, at the foot of the stairs.
“That's how I like it.” Yanel goes in and closes the door behind him. “Now we're starting to understand each other. No, really. I think that from now on we can begin to have a more satisfying relationship. More equal. You've got her upstairs, right? I wouldn't want to have come over to this shithole and find she had just gone out shopping. Or that's she's out fucking someone. Just when I come to take her back home,” he says. In spite of his impeccably clean and pressed white Paul Smith polo sweater and tweed trousers, certain physical changes that Yanel has undergone in the last few weeks are hard not to notice. His face is pale and soft and his eyes glassier than usual, and beneath his white Paul Smith sweater you can see the incipient but firm curve of a flabby belly that was never there before. Not to mention his hair. One could go on and on about the changes in his hair. “Well, what?” he says. With his hands on his hips. Watching as Giraut twists on the ground. “Are you going to just lie there? Because it doesn't seem very hospitable to me.”
Lucas Giraut's face is very red and his eyes are tightly shut and he's chewing on his lip. His style of twisting on the ground consists basically in rolling on his back with his body shriveled, and bringing his knees to his chest. Yanel grabs him by the collar of his cobalt blue Lino Rossi suit, pulls him up until he manages to get him somewhat vertical and pushes him upstairs. The staircase that goes up to Giraut's apartment is one of those marble staircases with a carved marble balustrade. The kind that make you think of women from days gone by with complicated evening gowns elegantly descending the stairs. Under the attentive gaze of a multitude of suitors with tuxedos and expectant faces. Yanel half escorts, half pushes and half drags his host up the stairs and into the living room of his apartment. Giraut, meanwhile, seems to be having trouble breathing.
Sitting on one of the living room's leather sofas, Iris Gonzalvo and Marcia Parini look up from the photo album that Marcia is showing Iris and stare at the two men who have just come in. The photos show Valentina Parini in various stages of her life. Lucas Giraut collapses into an armchair. Covering his crotch with his hands.
“Eric?” Iris Gonzalvo looks at Eric with a mix of surprise and commiseration. “What happened to your hair? You look horrible.” She raises a hand to her immaculate neck. “I think that's the most horrible hair I've ever seen in my life.”
Eric Yanel looks at himself in a silver-framed mirror on the wall in front of him. His hair is no longer long, blond and meticulously coiffed in some sort of French side wave. Like Johnny Hallyday's. Like Alain Delon's. Now it looks a little like a doll's fake hair, teased up with grime after months in a closet. It also looks like those old brooms that had very rigid fibers, made of something like straw. In the armchair, Lucas Giraut seems to be regaining a more or less normal breathing rate. It also looks like at some point in the last few weeks Yanel has picked up the habit of moving his lips when he's thinking or talking to himself. Without any sound coming out.
“No one understands how hard it is to be me.” Eric walks from one side of the living room to the other. He takes a cigarette out of a pack, but instead of lighting it he just puts it between his lips and puts the pack back in his pocket. His exceptionally glassy eyes are also filled with small inflamed capillaries. “Because of all the prejudices. The…what are they called?…the preconceived notions. The clichés about the acting profession. People think I spend my life in luxury hotels. Drinking expensive cocktails and sunbathing. That I have money for my every whim. That I go around in a private jet. I don't know what else. People think that women just throw themselves at me and that I'm incredibly happy.”
His cigarette is still not lit. Yanel is grabbing it with his fingers and bringing it to his mouth and sucking his cheeks in as if he were smoking. Even though it's not lit. The spatial pattern of his steps around the living room is like that mathematical symbol that can either be the number eight or infinity.
“People think I'm like Brad Pitt,” he continues. “Or like George Clooney. Maybe more like Brad Pitt. That my life is like some young handsome single actor's life who has no problems and luck smiling on him all the fucking time. Maybe more like Orlando Bloom. People think I'm on Capri. Or on the Côte d'Azur. People call me up and say, 'Shit, Yanel. How are you? Are you on the Côte d'Azur? I wish I was as lucky as you.' People,” he says in a vaguely melancholy tone. For a moment he seems to have lost his train of thought. He takes a drag on his unlit cigarette. “Well, that's not how it is. I may be handsome and well dressed, but my life sucks. I'm broke. I'm not on the Côte d'Azur. I'm in an idiot's apartment in a shithole of a neighborhood. But people don't like to hear that. People hate losers like me.”
“I don't find you that handsome,” says Marcia Parini with a calculating expression. “At most, kind of interesting.” Marcia inspects Yanel with one of those vertical looks that travel over someone's entire body and make you think vaguely of a scanner's sweep. One of those looks that are traditionally associated with sexual predation. “The clothes are fine. Maybe if you fixed yourself up a bit more.”
“I hate people,” continues Yanel. Looking at Giraut. Looking him up and down with something similar to scientific interest. Giraut is still in the same armchair. He no longer has his hands at his crotch. He no longer has difficulty breathing. The dark red color in his face is now limited to his cheeks and where he would have cheekbones if his face weren't so round and soft. “If you don't fulfill their expectations of you, people shit all over you. They leave you by the side of the road and shit all over you. Acquaintances. Friends. Agents. Girlfriends. Especially girlfriends. They leave home when you're taking a little nap and forget to mention that they're going. That is what people are like basically. Always ready to leave when you don't have a yacht docked on the Côte d'Azur. When you are having problems and your agent only calls you for ridiculous commercials. When the only part of you that people recognize is your armpit. When your debts are as big as the foreign debt of a small third-world country.” The pattern of his steps around the living room is still essentially identifiable with the number eight or the infinity symbol. Sporadically alternating with circular and spiral patterns. The general effect is vaguely hypnotic. “That's how people are. People are the ones who leave. They're equivalent terms. Everyone leaves. Girlfriends leave. The people that don't answer your calls are the ones who leave. People that don't call. People that don't want to lend you more money. People that don't offer you contracts.” He pauses again and for a moment it seems he is out of breath. He takes a long, deep drag on the unlit cigarette as if the cigarette could give him some oxygen. “People that don't say good morning in the stairway.”
There is a moment of silence. Marcia Parini is turning the pages of the photo album she has in her hands with a pensive face and once in a while looks up furtively at the guy walking around the living room with an unlit cigarette in his hand, blowing out invisible puffs of smoke. The way people look furtively when they feel they're in a situation they shouldn't be in and seeing things that are none of their business. Lucas Giraut remains seated in his armchair. In that posture of his,
with his back very rigid and his arms horizontally rigid on the arms of the chair. Like some kind of replica of those pharaonic images sculpted in stone. Without looking at Yanel. Looking at a point that apparently doesn't correspond with the location of any of the people in the room.
“He doesn't even have nice armpits,” says Iris Gonzalvo. Shrugging her shoulders. With an expression that says she's just stating a fact, not making any sort of judgment. “They let him be in the deodorant commercial because he gave the director a bag of coke this big.” She makes a gesture with her hands to represent the size of the bag in question. “Which, by the way, he never paid for. The coke. And you aren't smoking a cigarette,” she adds, now addressing Yanel and pointing to his unlit cigarette. “What the hell do you think you're smoking?”
Eric Yanel stares at Iris for a long moment. As if he wanted to make an angry comeback but he still hadn't thought up what to say exactly. With his mouth half open. As if he were about to reply. Then he looks down. He stares at the cigarette in his hand. His expression isn't exactly one of surprise. The moment is embarrassing. The only sound in the room is the sound of Marcia slowly turning the plastic-covered pages of her photo album. Finally Yanel sits down on the floor. On the rug. He sits on the rug and he hugs his knees and he buries his face between his knees and breaks out in tears. His sobs are too high-pitched and not very masculine.
“Typical,” says Iris Gonzalvo. “I swear I was expecting this.”
From the sofa comes the dull, somewhat leaden sound of Marcia Parini snapping the photo album shut. Iris and Giraut turn their respective heads to look. Marcia sighs. She gives the closed album to Iris, gets up from the sofa and goes over to where Yanel is sitting and crying noisily. She kneels down next to him and runs a hand over his shoulders.
“We all feel like that once in a while,” she says. “Feeling alone is just that. A feeling. That's why you feel bad. I understand you. Look at me.” Her tone of voice is not maternal. It lacks those soft, enveloping features that maternal voices have when comforting someone. “I'm thirty-four years old. My husband left me. My daughter is in a mental hospital and she hates me. And I can't find a husband. No matter how hard I try. And I really am trying. That might be the problem in and of itself.”