by Javier Calvo
Yanel stops sobbing for a moment, but doesn't lift his head up from between his knees. The only part of his head that is visible to the other people in the room is the back. Where the messy matted hair that looks like dusty, dirty doll hair is sticking up, like he hadn't washed it after sleeping on it.
“He can't stay here,” says Iris Gonzalvo. “No one can invite him to spend the night.”
Lucas Giraut passes a tissue to Marcia Parini. She tries to put it into Eric Yanel's hand.
“If anyone invites him to spend the night here I'm taking my things and leaving,” says Iris Gonzalvo.
Out of the corner of his eye, still seated very rigidly on the sofa in a posture few would hesitate in calling pharaonic, Lucas Giraut can see that Marcia Parini is stroking Eric Yanel's dirty, messy hair.
Wonderful World
CHAPTER 52
That's My Boy
“That's my boy.” Commissioner Farina jumps to his feet in the stands of the amateur racetrack. He pats Pavel on the shoulder and points to the amateur car of reduced dimensions that now makes its way along the start of the track piloted by Commissioner Farina's son. Pavel remains seated beside him with his handcuffed hands covered by a jacket. The car piloted by Commissioner Farina's son is now in second place and has the number two painted on the front. Farina applauds and puts the index and middle fingers of both hands into his mouth and lets out a long, powerful whistle. Then he sits back down in the stands to Pavel's right. “Do you want to know what I said to my boy when he got up this morning and we all had breakfast together at home? It's very important for us to have breakfast together. All at the same table. Even though my kids have to get up earlier than the rest of the kids in their class. We're one of those families, you know? What's the point of having kids if you can't show them the things that will guide them through life? And I'm very good at that. Because I'm a man with experience.” He nods with satisfaction. “Nobody knows the things I've seen. Did I ever tell you my father was a policeman, too?”
Pavel moves his handcuffed hands forward and down, carefully so that the handcuffs don't show beneath his jacket, and picks up the cup of soda with a straw that he has in front of his feet. He brings the straw up to his mouth and takes a sip of soda. The cars in the race this morning are not professional ones, and were probably designed for children. They are not only reduced in size but they also don't seem to have any kind of bodywork beside the panel with the number painted on it. They look like unfinished prototypes, or chassis on wheels. Miniature car skeletons. Pavel is struck by the strange feeling that the machines are still growing and that in a few years they'll become normal race cars.
“I'm not saying that I want to do with my son exactly what my father did with me.” Commissioner Farina applauds and whistles as the cars take the curve and make their way across the straight stretch on the other side of the circuit. The amateur circuit has an oval or elliptical shape, or actually more like if someone took a circumference and stretched its two diametrically opposed points. There are a lot of tires piled up around the track and in the island in the middle. Pavel isn't sure why there are so many tires everywhere. “I know times have changed and all that. What I told my son this morning while we were having breakfast is this. Son, I said. Sometimes I call him son and sometimes I call him David. David is his name. Son, this morning you are gonna make the whole family proud. You're gonna drive as if your father was chasing you with his standard-issue gun and you're going to beat all those other kids. But above all, most importantly, you can't come in second. Son, I told him, your father knows about life because it's his lot to see the things no one sees. Things that aren't pretty. And what I learned is this: in life only the people who win first place count. There's no prize for second place. You're the winner or you're the loser. That's what I told him. And he knows what he has to do if he doesn't want to spend the summer working in my father-in-law's garage.”
Pavel puts the foam cup with a straw down on the ground in front of his feet and picks up the bag of salted peanuts next to it. He opens it with his teeth and spits out a piece of plastic. At the end of the first lap, Commissioner Farina's son's car, with the number two painted in white on green, is in fourth place. The car in the lead, very far ahead of the others, is the one with the number six. The number six is painted in red on white. You can't see any part of the kids piloting the cars except for their helmets and the gloves that grab the steering wheel. The gloves and helmets make their hands and heads look disproportionately large.
The official explanation for why Pavel finds himself this morning at an amateur racetrack instead of in a police custody cell is that Commissioner Farina didn't want to miss his son's first serious competition. Pavel looks around him. The stands are filled with adults and kids eating sandwiches that mostly come from the sausage stand at the entrance. Most of the adults seem to be fathers of drivers competing in the race. There are some mothers, too. They all shout and clap and whistle every time the cars pass. In a way that also seems like some sort of competition. A whistling and clapping competition. The various family groups look at each other suspiciously out of the corners of their eyes and seem susceptible to succumbing, at any moment, to an eruption of competitive tension.
Pavel looks around him with a frown. It doesn't seem to him that either the place or the situation are appropriate for any type of interrogation or official police conversation. Taking into account the risk that he now runs outside of his cell, given the circumstances. An hour ago, after they took him out of the police station and had him handcuffed on the sidewalk waiting for the car that would take him to the racetrack, a motorcycle pizza delivery guy had stopped in front of him and opened the pizza compartment on his motorcycle and Pavel had thrown himself to the ground and rolled about ten feet away to cover.
“Why have you bring me here?” Pavel talks with his cheek full of half-chewed peanuts. He swallows them and brings another handful to his mouth. “You can't fool me. I know you have scheme. I don't like it.” He shakes his head, making his dreadlocks shake. “I want to go back in jail.”
Commissioner Farina stands up again as the drivers make their way around the start of the third lap. Car number two has gotten ahead of one of its opponents and is now in third place. Commissioner Farina has lit a cigarette and is now alternating nervous drags with sporadic chewing on the cuticles of the hand that holds the cigarette. In the audience there are a good number of fathers on their feet and shouting to cheer their sons on or to protest the unsporting tactics of other people's sons. Farina pats down the inner pocket of the suit jacket he wears over a sport shirt and jeans. His jeans don't have the aerodynamic, second-skin cut of jeans popular with teens. And the hems have obviously been taken up. As is the case with the jeans of many married men over forty-five. Farina takes a wrinkled envelope out of the pocket of his jacket, gives it to Pavel and then returns to his paternal combination of cheers and cuticle biting and whistles of protest.
Pavel opens the envelope with his handcuffed hands still partially covered by the jacket. He pulls out the document inside and reads it. It is a ticket to Kingston with a layover in London for the plane leaving the next morning. In about twenty hours.
“You're basically a free man.” Farina speaks without looking at Pavel. Standing up and ignoring the petitions of the spectators behind him who ask him to sit down. Smoking nervously and bringing his hand to his forehead in some sort of imprecise military salute meant to protect his eyes from the sun that falls directly onto the track. “Thank the Spanish police system. We're like that here. We have a long tradition of letting criminals go free. Almost everyone in business or politics is a criminal. And I personally don't see anyone bothering them.” He pauses and whistles at the track again. The cars in second and third place seem to have closed in on the first, turning the race into what is technically referred to as hotly contested. “As for you.” He shrugs his shoulders. “You're free, too. You're free to decide who orphans your sister of a brother. That's how yo
u say it, right? You're free to decide if you want your friend Bocanegra to take you out or if you want it to be your Russian friends. In the end, it's an admirable situation. I mean it's admirable that you've managed to get everyone gunning for you. You must feel important. I can almost hear them sharpening their knives.” He puts a hand near his ear as if he were listening carefully. “That's why I've brought you here, Bob Marley. So you can tell me some amusing story to brighten my day and make me a happy commissioner. Tell me a story or I'll set you free. And if you make it to the mailbox on the corner, I'll climb Montserrat in bare feet.”
The sun falls directly on the unprotected stands of the amateur racetrack for cars built for, or adapted to, children. Cars that are like larvae of cars. Like arthropod cars. Pavel doesn't understand why the hell there are tons of tires everywhere. Pavel, by the way, doesn't give a shit about this race or any other kind of car race. He couldn't care less about a ton of people going around and around a cement island filled with tons of tires. In fact, he thinks, as he finishes the peanuts and throws the empty plastic bag to the ground and considers the possibility of bumming a cigarette from that idiot Farina, during the last few weeks he has gradually been discovering that most of the things that used to matter to him now mean nothing to him. Not his books of Rastafarian philosophy and his collection of music magazines with colored Post-its on the most relevant pages. Not his dresser filled with combat pants and T-shirts with the sleeves cut off. Not the pornographic novels that he buys at a bookstore in the Raval. Not his wonderful dreadlocks that have finally reached the approximate length of Marley's dreads on the cover of Legend. Not the extra money that he earns by ripping off Bocanegra and Leon and playing both sides. During the last few weeks Pavel has been thinking about going to live in the jungle. With the snakes and the bears. He's been thinking about building a house up in a tree so the Jamaican bears can't attack him at night, and building his own weapons out of wood and learning to hunt and fish. With a woman. With a black woman. Both of them naked all day long. Fucking all day long in his house up in a tree. And once in a while going down to Kingston, Jamaica. On weekends, maybe. To sell the fish and the game and exchange them for condoms and some bear traps, or something like that.
“Do you need a pen and paper?” Commissioner Farina hands him a notebook that doesn't look very official and a pen. “Let the ink flow, son. And the pen is just a loaner.”
Pavel opens up the notebook to a blank page and pushes the button that makes the pen point appear. All kinds of pre-urban and pre-civilized images are running through his head. Pavel naked and up to his knees in a jungle river. Throwing a homemade spear with that same twist of his body that the Soviet javelin tossers used. With a twist that makes his waist-length dreads ripple in slow motion. And Pavel walking through the streets of Kingston on one of his highly awaited visits. With a string of bananas and fish over his shoulder. Wearing a loincloth and an old T-shirt where Bob Marley's face is now nothing more than a faded splotch. A souvenir from a much more confused period in his life. And all his Rastafarian brothers and sisters waving to him from the hammocks in front of their multicolored houses. Coming over to shake his hand in complicated ways reserved only for spiritual brothers. Offering him spliffs and hugging him. And the women's lascivious gazes running over his body, and him turning toward his ample-assed jungle concubine and shrugging his shoulders. With a resigned smile on his face. Tired but always high-spirited. Suddenly shouts are heard. Openly insulting shouts. Pavel looks up from his notebook. Now everyone is standing and Commissioner Farina and all the other fathers are shouting and waving their fists in the air. The amateur cars are rounding the final stretch. Behind him, two fathers appear to be fistfighting amidst the screams of their family members. Car number six comes in at first place followed closely by Commissioner Farina's son's car, number two. Pavel takes a sip of his soda through the straw as Farina shouts at his son, threatening to break open his stupid fat spoiled head. The rest of the cars cross the finish line in rapid succession under the glaring sun. Frowning, Pavel starts to write in the notebook in hesitant Latin letters.
Wonderful World
CHAPTER 53
Smiling Dogs Chasing Butterflies
“She's obviously gotten worse,” says the medical intern at the renowned children's psychiatric center where Valentina Parini is hospitalized. With serious professional consternation. “And all in the last two weeks. Paranoid attacks. Delusions. We've noticed an increase in the aggression that began before she came here. It seems there are security problems here at the center. We think she's been reading that book again. The Stephen King book. Which is where most of her delusions stem from. And yet”—he looks out of the corner of his eye at the table where Valentina is drawing with a box of colored pencils—“we don't understand how she could have gotten a copy. We strictly control everything that comes in or out of the center. We regularly search their rooms. Our committee reads all the books that come in. It's quite a mystery.”
Lucas Giraut and Iris Gonzalvo nod their heads more or less simultaneously. They are both sitting with their legs tightly together and their hands on their laps at the foot of the child-size bed in Valentina Parini's room at the clinic. The colors and objects in the room seem to have been chosen based on their therapeutic qualities. The walls are painted in a sedative tone of light green. The television in front of the bed plays something that looks like a loop of calming images of deserted natural landscapes and animals in the wild. Around the bed, half a dozen members of the center's cleaning crew wearing very thin latex gloves are searching the room in search of Stephen King's New Novel. A female member of the crew is taking all of Valentina's clothes out of a drawer, unfolding them carefully and then refolding them into a cardboard box. Another one is standing on a bench and taking the curtains down. Another is kneeling on the ground checking to see if any of the floor tiles are loose. Giraut is wearing an ink blue Lino Rossi suit. Iris is wearing a sky blue Lilly Pulitzer dress with a low back but not a plunging neckline, and she decided not to wear much makeup. Considering that she's supposedly the stepmother of a poor girl locked up in a mental ward.
“How can you be so sure…?” Iris reads the name on the ID tag that the medical intern has clipped to the front of his white coat and looks into his eyes. “…Victor? I mean, it doesn't seem possible that she's read that book. With such strict observation and so much staff here at the center. I imagine that you are investigating other possible causes of her deterioration. That's what I would do.”
In one of the corners of the ceiling there is a security camera, which emits a buzz that's barely audible beneath the sedative music coming from the television. Iris Gonzalvo stares at the intern as she talks to him. With a convincingly maternal blend of frankness and worry. The intern whose name tag identifies him as Victor frowns.
“I read that book.” He is turning the pages of his plastic-covered file as he speaks. Without looking at them. His expression of professional consternation sets itself apart from nonprofessional expressions of consternation by the slightly deeper tone of his voice and a hint of distracted calmness in the way he addresses them. “It's a good book. Entertaining, that's for sure. I'm not saying it's not interesting. Everybody likes that kind of entertaining book once in a while. But that's not the point. We have heard descriptions of certain creatures from Valentina. We have seen her make certain gestures with her hands when she's alone, on the security camera tapes. We've identified certain drawings on the inside of the bathroom stall doors.” It seems that his way of turning pages in the file is just a nervous gesture, just like the chewing on a pen or playing with a little ball that other nervous people do when they talk. “It's obvious that she is identifying with what happens in the book.” He shrugs his shoulders. “For example, she's convinced that I'm a slave to the aliens.”
On the table where Valentina Parini is sitting, drawing with colored pencils on a pile of white drawing paper, there is a copy of The Lost Rivers of London by Álex Jard�
�. With the classic signs of wear on the spine that indicate it has been opened too wide. The book is on top of a tidy pile of books in large octavo format. All with the same dimensions. Valentina Parini doesn't seem to be trying to eavesdrop on what is happening on the other side of the room. Although her appearance hasn't changed noticeably since the last visit, somehow she isn't the same person. There is absolutely nothing childlike or prepubescent in her face or her expression. Her expression is determined and at the same time empty. They have cut her hair in a way that accentuates the verticality of her face and the wideness of her forehead and she is wearing a patch over her eye, held on by strips of translucent white hospital tape. What she's drawing on every sheet of paper are almost identical variations of the same drawing. A white dog with black spots chasing a butterfly.
“I understand perfectly how you must feel at times like this.” The doctor crosses his arms in such a way that the plastic-covered file hangs from one of his hands beside his hip. “Considering that you have just flown in from Uruguay on the first flight after hearing the news and all that. But you have to understand that it is a very slow process. It could take weeks to get any response from her. We should be prepared.”
One of the members of the cleaning crew clears his throat and indicates to Lucas Giraut and Iris Gonzalvo with a latex-glove-covered gesture that he needs to inspect the space under the bed they're sitting on. Giraut stands up and wipes the lower part of his back with both hands in an instinctive gesture that he does every time he gets up from a seat that isn't one of his own personal chairs. Next to him, Iris Gonzalvo also stands. She picks up her handbag with the tag from the Montevideo airport still stuck to the handles and takes Giraut by the arm in a classic marital gesture. She kisses his hairless cheek, leaving an almost perfect red lipstick print. The intern looks at both of them with an intensified version of his slightly distracted expression of professional consternation.