by Javier Calvo
“I'm going to leave you alone with the girl for a few minutes,” he says. “It's the least we can do, I guess. Considering you haven't seen her in so many years. There's a button for emergencies by the door.” The medical intern named Victor points to the comer of the ceiling where the security camera buzzes in a barely audible way. “And remember that we are watching the whole time.”
Giraut waits for the members of the cleaning crew to leave, followed by the medical intern. The television is showing supposedly calming images of a group of male penguins chasing a terrified group of female penguins. In the Antarctic. Giraut approaches the tables, takes a chair and sits down. No one says anything. Iris remains standing by the bed.
“Valentina?” Giraut examines the drawings on the table with a frown. The dog chasing the butterfly has one of those anthropomorphic smiles typical of representations of animals in children's storybooks. The dog is smiling happily and chasing the butterfly with cheerful bounds through a field filled with flowers. The same drawing is repeated on each and every one of the sheets of drawing paper. “This is a highly secret meeting. We know what your situation is here.”
Valentina rolls her only visible eye. Giraut thinks he can also see some sort of pursing of her lips that could be a mocking expression. The way she draws dogs chasing butterflies is: with the tip of her tongue sticking out through her lips, in that universal gesture associated with artistic concentration. She holds the colored pencils by grabbing them with almost her entire hand. Like little kids do. Giraut sighs and intertwines his fingers on top of the plastic surface of the table.
“You have lipstick on your face.” Valentina speaks without looking up from the paper. “You don't have to explain anything. Thanks for the books.” She shrugs. “I can't talk,” she adds, and makes a subtle gesture with her only visible eye toward the only window in the visiting area.
Giraut looks at the window with a frown and then looks at Valentina. He gets up from his chair. He goes over to Iris and whispers something in her ear. Iris takes a pen out of her handbag with the airport tag and draws an X on the upper part of his neck. Then she turns so Giraut can draw an X on her neck, too.
“We bear the Mark of the Resistance,” Giraut says to Valentina. Approaching the table again. “You can check it if you want.”
Valentina stops halfway through drawing a canine smile with her tongue out and looks up. She puts the pencil down on the table. Her only visible eye looks at Giraut with interest. Giraut leans over the table and Valentina lowers the neck of his shirt a bit with her hand to examine the pen mark carefully.
“Is it grafted under your skin?” asks Valentina. The way she asks suggests that it isn't exactly a question. It doesn't exactly sound like a statement either. She runs her fingers over the recently drawn X and looks at her slightly ink-stained fingertips. “It's the mark of the rebels of the Resistance,” she adds with a pensive face. “They must have a hidden laboratory. I've seen the Captors.” Now she stares at Giraut. “They aren't hiding anymore. They don't care if we see them now. You can see them if you look through a window for a while and concentrate on the clouds. They don't look like angels. They look like those dinosaurs that had wings.”
Giraut sits back down at the table and signals for Iris to come over. Behind and above their heads, the security camera buzzes and rotates very slightly on its base, which is drilled into the wall. Iris picks up one of the drawings on the table and looks at it blankly. Valentina brings her fingers to her face and tries to rip off the tape holding down her white patch.
“This is Penny.” Giraut leans over the table to speak softly near Valentina's face. “She works with me now. We're going to get you out of here. Very soon. We have a plan. But you have to pretend that I'm your father. It is very important for you to remember that. You have to tell everyone who asks that your father came to visit you today. Your father and his second wife who came from Uruguay.”
He stops when he sees that Valentina has managed to tear off half of the tape strips. A good part of her eyebrow is now missing from her face and stuck to the tape.
“We are in a very powerful control center.” Valentina continues pulling on the tape. The skin on her face tenses and pulls away from her eye socket. There is no pain in her facial expression. Only the same mix of vacuity and determination. “The control centers are the only places they can communicate from. With their planet, I guess. Or with each other. You can see it's a control center because there are a few of them floating up above. Sometimes a lot more. Sometimes there are so many that if you see them from far away they look like a black cloud. And they can read our minds very easily here. It's like a transmission center.” She pulls brusquely a few times and gets the patch completely off. The skin underneath is red and has traces of the tape's adhesive substance. You can't really call what's left an eyebrow. “This is a transmitter.” She holds up the patch so Giraut and Iris can see it. “They can make them easily with their alien technology. Look at these strands here.”
Lucas Giraut looks at Valentina's eye with a frown. The girl's left eye no longer looks in the same direction as the right one. Now it seems like her left eye is always looking at some place outside her visual field. At some point perpetually located to one side of wherever she's looking. The movement of Valentina's recently uncovered eye gives Giraut a strange feeling. It's hard for him not to look at it, or for him to concentrate on other things. Valentina throws the patch on the floor and steps on it with her institutional slipper.
“You can see your things again.” Iris Gonzalvo picks up another drawing and looks at it thoughtfully. “When we get you out of here. We can go on a trip. Or you can go back to school if you want, or see your real father. Lucas told me you've never been on a trip. Since you were a little girl.”
Iris Gonzalvo sits one butt cheek onto the plastic table. The way she's sitting doesn't convey informality, nor any neglect of the details of her public image. It's more like the way certain singers from other decades would sit one butt cheek on their musical accompanist's piano. With that old-fashioned feline elegance.
“This is very boring,” says Valentina. “I have to spend all day drawing these stupid dogs. I look like a moron. But I have no choice. I have to keep my mind busy. Otherwise they can read my thoughts. If I draw what I'm really thinking about, they can learn more about me. So I draw these stupid dogs and try not to think about anything.” She picks up one of the drawings and stares at it with a calculating expression. “I copied them from a kid's book.”
Giraut stands up and walks to the window. The way he is standing in front of the window is: with his hands together behind his back. Looking at something that could be very close to the window, or very far away. In the novel Wonderful World, the characters that aren't mentally enslaved by the alien race known as the Captors carry out all sorts of repetitive mental activities to keep their minds empty and trick the alien mind readers. A group of boys from Portland, Maine, play video games during the hours they're on watch. While one of them stands guard at the window of the basement where they're hiding with a helmet protected by the Mark of the Resistance. Chuck Kimball, the main character, ends up perfecting the art of constructing models of historical buildings. A couple of old ladies in Augusta, Maine, play bridge all day and try to remain calm until they are found. A lot of the characters create games or mental routines during their workdays or when they have to venture out into the street, all the while hoping that someone from the Resistance will come to rescue them. Giraut doesn't remember there being anything in the novel about transmitters hidden in eye patches or threads of clothing.
“We only have one way out.” Valentina balls up a fistful of drawings of smiling dogs, tosses them into a wastepaper basket and picks up a new pile of white drawing paper. “Getting to a place out of the transmitters' reach. Like a deserted island. And starting the world over. Having kids and all that.”
Then she leans over the table and starts drawing again, with her brow furrowed and the tip
of her tongue sticking out between her lips. With her left eye looking at some place located to the left of her visual field.
Wonderful World
CHAPTER 54
A Vision of Smoke and Flowers
Iris Gonzalvo takes advantage of the privacy of her private compartment in the Talgo train to stretch out a slender leg, pull up her stocking and then do the same with the other leg. The first-class compartments of the Barcelona-Paris Talgo don't look like the private compartments of modern long-distance trains. They look like train compartments from the 1920s. The ones where sophisticated old ladies with fur stoles solved intricate murder cases before the disconcerted faces of police detectives. Iris finishes adjusting her stockings and is checking herself in the reflective surface on the inside of the compartment's glass door when the door opens with a heavy horizontal slide. Aníbal Manta stares at her with a frown as he holds the sliding door open with his enormous arms. His eyes still on her. Although his expression seems to be that of someone who has to go to the bathroom after holding it in for a long time, it is actually Manta's expression of intellectual effort that he usually uses to express some sort of suspicion. With his features drawn together and his brow awkwardly furrowed.
“Are you sure you have everything?” he says. “It's time to move.” The way he looks at Iris is that way people look at someone that has some sort of hospital gown sticking out from under their street clothes. Or someone that walks into a jewelry store with a guitar case. “Do you need us to go over it one more time?”
Iris takes a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and brings one to her lips. Then she leans forward and moves her butt along the seat until the tip of the cigarette is in reach of the lighter Aníbal Manta is holding out. This whole series of movements makes her breasts compress and project outward through the neckline of her blouse and makes her skirt retract to reveal most of her thighs. Manta lights her cigarette. Beneath his suspicious expression something else, something involuntary, appears. Some sort of spontaneous involuntary flicker of admiration. It isn't exactly an expression of sexual desire. It's more like that blend of admiration and confusion you can see in the faces of obese, introverted teenage boys when they look at explosively blooming teenage girls.
Iris stands up, her eyes squinted to keep the cigarette smoke out, and she pulls her skirt down with a pensive face. Looking at the snowy landscape on the other side of the window. The rural tableaux of livestock stables with snow-covered roofs. Cows completely still under the mist. Cows that look like statues of cows. They sometimes watch the train advance and sometimes don't. There is no trace of French shepherds or any other kind of French people. The train advances at full speed along some point on the route between Limoges and Orléans.
“Are you sure I don't know you from somewhere?” Aníbal Manta doesn't stop to speak as they walk in single file through the aisle between the different compartments of the Talgo. “There's something that doesn't fit.”
Iris leads with her purse over her shoulder. Manta follows her closely with a black briefcase in his hand. The handle of the briefcase has the logo of Arnold Layne Experts. Personally designed by Mr. Bocanegra. Iris contemplates the snowy landscape of the countryside on some point of the route between Limoges and Orléans. While still walking. Through the partially steamed-up window of the aisle between the Talgo's first-class private compartments. Manta seems to have recovered part of his composure and continues his probing.
“What did you say your name was?” he asks. “Penny? I don't buy it. I'm convinced I know you from somewhere.”
Iris keeps walking. In some of the fields the train passes there are fences made out of tree trunks that have doors for animals and openings too small for an animal to get through but big enough for a person to climb through, using a system of steps made out of trunks. During the first period of her romantic relationship with Eric Yanel, they spent three days at a horse farm in the part of France the Yanel family hails from. During one of those rare trips that Yanel took her on. Iris doesn't really have any bucolic memories of her visit to the horse farm. Not even close. Probably the most outstanding detail of said visit was the moment when she found Yanel having sex with the riding instructor. The same instructor that had given them a class that morning. The countryside was also snowy on that trip. In the guestrooms at the farm there were blankets that looked like untanned animal hides. With hair and everything. When Iris found them, the instructor was wearing her complete riding instructor uniform with the white pants around her ankles. The way Yanel was having sex with the instructor was: penetrating her from behind. In the position known as doggy style.
“You never worked at The Dark Side of the Moon?” says Aníbal Manta's voice from behind Iris Gonzalvo's back. With suspicious inflections that make you think of people with hospital robes sticking out from under their street clothes. Or dilettante grannies investigating complex criminal cases on board rural trains. “As a dancer? As a waitress? Or maybe working the private parties? This is ours.”
Iris stops in front of a private compartment that's far from hers. She releases a mouthful of smoke and tosses her cigarette butt through a window. The tinted glass of the compartment only shows two anthropomorphic outlines sitting in facing seats. Iris knocks on the sliding glass door of the compartment and waits for one of the two occupants to open it. The door slides open and Iris is greeted by the identical smiles of Mr. Fleck and Mr. Downey. With their blond, freckled and partially bald heads. The one that has just opened the door looks first to one side of the aisle and then the other and finally makes a gesture indicating that Iris can enter.
“Miss DeMink,” says Mr. Fleck, or maybe Mr. Downey, as he shakes her hand and moves aside so she can come into the compartment. “You can't imagine what a pleasure it is for us to see you again.” He points with his head toward Aníbal Manta, who is standing on the other side of the door. “The bodyguard stays outside, as always.”
Iris Gonzalvo sits down and waits for the two men to fill the seat in front of her. The Talgo compartment has opaque, reddish brown curtains. The seats are upholstered with a pattern that imitates tweed. The wall lamps have lampshades shaped like truncated cones. It all makes you think of dilettante old ladies and police detectives with waxed mustaches and an irrepressible fondness for a good meal. Of railway crimes involving numerous suspects and labyrinthine plots of personal betrayals.
“We want to convey our sadness at seeing you in these circumstances,” says one of Mr. Travers's two employees.
“Talking about money is always unpleasant,” says the other.
“If only we could skip this hassle.” The first one makes some sort of helpless gesture with his hands. “But what can we do. It's the nature of business.”
Iris Gonzalvo nods with a half smile and opens her purse. She pushes her hair off of her forehead and pulls out the envelope with the Arnold Layne Experts logo whose contents detail the amount of the financial request. Mr. Downey or Mr. Fleck takes the envelope and starts to tear the edge of it with a concentrated expression. Iris's gaze wanders to a building on the other side of the window that looks like a windmill without those giant blades that windmills have in puzzles and on posters at travel agencies. Something partially red moves through the fog near the windmill and Iris imagines that it is a riding instructor with her little red jacket and her white pants down at her ankles. Then she imagines more horseback-riding instructors with their butts in the air. Hiding from the train behind stables covered with snow and leaping through the fields with difficulty due to the fact that they have their pants down at their ankles. Dozens of riding instructors covering their butts with their hands. Chased by groups of teenagers with desire on their faces. Chased by men with their penises in their hands. Trying to jump over the fences made of tree trunks and falling into the snow because of the pants around their ankles.
A throat clearing brings her back to the reality of the compartment. Mr. Fleck or Mr. Downey takes the document out of the envelope and his gaze
slides vertically down it until it reaches the money figure. He makes an expression of theatrical perplexity and passes it to his colleague. The second man reads the figure and looks at the first with an identical perplexed expression. Now that she has them in front of her, Iris Gonzalvo discovers that the similarity to the main character in CSI is less striking than she had previously thought. The freckled redhead that solves all the CSI cases, while not very expressive in general, gives off a powerful virility and self-confidence that these two guys don't at all. In fact, now that she can see them better under the natural light that comes in through the train windows, their skin has a texture that reminds her vaguely of plastic. Finally Mr. Fleck, or maybe Mr. Downey, folds the document again and puts it back in the envelope. Now both men have those stereotypical expressions of shock and perplexity and somewhat amused incredulousness that are part of the universal body language of financial negotiations. One of them lets out a giggle.
“The answer is no, of course,” says the other. He takes a lighter out of his pocket and lights one of the corners of the envelope on fire. While holding it up by the opposite corner. “That, and that we are deeply disappointed. We aren't merchants, Miss DeMink. We don't bargain. We don't talk about money like hawkers on a public street.” He pauses to watch how the envelope burns with a flame that's barely visible under the light coming from the windows. Almost giving the impression that the envelope is spontaneously turning black and being consumed. “Mr. Travers is a very special person, we thought you understood that. A spiritually superior man. In many senses, more than just a man.”