Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  The door finishes opening and out of it comes the intern in charge of Valentina's case. Looking at something that's written on a sheet of paper attached to a plastic clipboard. Giraut looks at the intern through his nonprescription glasses. Glasses that he thinks give him a paternal air. The doctor looks up from the clipboard and looks at Giraut with his head slightly leaned down.

  “Mr. Parini?” he asks in a tone that doesn't manage to be probing in the least. A tone that somehow manages to be imperious and perhaps convey certain suspicion. “Would you mind if we spoke in private for a moment? If you want I can ask that they call your wife.”

  Giraut readjusts his glasses on his nose with his middle finger the way he's seen people who usually wear glasses do so often. For a moment he considers the advantages of declaring that anything the intern has to say he can say in front of his daughter. As part of his interpretation of the character of Valentina's father. He's aware that the shockingly svelte nurse and the intern are looking at him with openly inquisitive faces. Finally he shrugs his shoulders.

  “Is there some problem with the paperwork?” he says. Drumming his fingers on the anatomical handles of the wheelchair. One of Valentina Parini's hands is completely crumpled on the ground. “I assume that all the signatures are where they should be. I've already spoken with our legal counsel. I found his advice to be very rigorous.”

  Valentina Parini's face is blank except for a series of sporadic muscle spasms similar to tics that seem to give her features some sort of intermittent activity. In her face that is no longer at all childlike. Valentina's face is the face of someone that has experienced in some indirect, torturous way what is usually known as an initiation into post-pubescent life. Including the addition of an aura of sexuality that's not related to the appearance of secondary sex characteristics. Valentina's alarmingly skinny and inert body isn't sexual in any concrete way, but at some point it has lost that absence of sexuality that children's bodies have. The patch held on with white tape that covers one eye is falling off. So that a couple of strips of white tape are hanging off one side of her face, like two oversized fake eyelashes.

  “Technically speaking,” the intern starts to say. Giraut can see that the doctor is avoiding looking him in the eye. “All the paperwork is correct. The transfer to the center in Uruguay seems to be in order. Although I've already mentioned what I think about the unclear communications we've received from that center. The reports from the doctors that will be taking care of her seem perfectly competent. Their opinions are pretty respectable. You have made it quite clear that they have qualified nurses available for her transportation. Valentina's mother was here yesterday to give her consent. And of course, it's natural that you would want to have your daughter in the center you see most fit.” He pauses. That pause that always separates the apparently conclusive reasons in an argument from the counterargument that will disprove that conclusion. “And however…”

  Another pause. Time seems to freeze for a few seconds under the white fluorescent lamps of the hospital hallway.

  Lucas Giraut opens and closes his hands around the handles of the wheelchair. He changes the position of his feet on the linoleum hospital floor. The hallway walls are partially covered by those signs you find in medical centers with lists of recommendations and proscriptions. A muscle spasm runs across Valentina's face, followed by another that looks like a low-voltage electrical shock.

  “And however,” continues the medical intern. With his gaze fixed on the papers in his hand. His doctor's coat isn't long and white. It's more like some sort of man's blouse that's a blue color that makes you think of the blue color of certain medicines. Of surgical sheets covering sliced-open bodies. “And however, I want to insist on how ill timed a transfer is for Valentina's treatment right now. Maybe we could postpone it a few weeks. Maybe a few months. We're talking about the possibility of losing your daughter in many respects. On the other hand…,” he starts to say, and at this point he lifts his gaze for the first time from his clipboard and looks around him. With serious professional consternation. And certain cautiousness. As if he feared that someone might be listening from behind one of the hall doors. “On the other hand, we understand that you haven't had any contact with Valentina for more than six years. Not even a single phone call.”

  A new muscle spasm animates Valentina's features. A spasm that this time moves across the right side of her neck and through her shoulder to the arm touching the floor. A dry sound is heard when Valentina's knuckles hit the linoleum floor. Lucas Giraut readjusts his glasses with his middle finger again and runs a hand through his long straight hair. The sheet of paper the doctor has on his clipboard doesn't seem to be a medical document of any kind. It looks like a regular sheet of white paper with notes and doodles, like the kind people make when they're talking on the telephone.

  “He's not my father,” says a hoarse and alarmingly subdued version of Valentina Parini's voice. From the wheelchair. From the head fallen to one side of the wheelchair. Which now starts to slowly rise. “This man. He's not my father.”

  Everyone looks at Valentina. The silence in the hospital hallway seems to change. Into a silence that's different from the simple absence of sounds. Different from that metallic, reverberating silence typical of hospital hallways. Somehow, Valentina's words seem to have reconfigured the scene. They seem to have endowed it with something intensely surreal. Not as if her words had revealed that the man claiming to be her father isn't her father and that had reconfigured the network of relationships between the four people in the hallway. More like that Valentina's words had just revealed that none of the people in the hallway were who they claimed to be. Like those moments onstage when the characters in a scene turn into actors.

  “Valentina?” asks the intern. His brow furrowed.

  Valentina sits up with a crunching of bones and stiff joints. The various parts of her body move with a marionette's disjointed motions. Or like those dolls whose different parts are held together with string. Finally she lifts her neck and looks around.

  “He's not my father,” she says. And beneath her chemically induced hoarseness, her voice seems to take on the important tone characteristic of revelations. “He's Doctor Angeli. Don't be fooled by his appearance.” She makes a series of facial and hand gestures that seem to be some sort of secret code. “Doctor Angeli has no true form.”

  The three adults standing in the hospital hallway are now looking at various different points of the hall, in a way that suggests they are each trying to avoid looking at each other. Valentina's wheelchair occupies a blind spot right at the center of their gazes. Or at the exact center of what their gazes seem to be avoiding.

  “Don't trust the disguises,” continues Valentina. “Doctor Angeli is Doctor Angeli until proved otherwise. I know him well. He came when I was very little. Saying he was my father. But I unmasked him. I gave him a special alarm clock to fix and he had to escape. That was the test. Fixing the alarm clock.” Valentina's lower lip sticks out slightly as she speaks, the way some psychiatric patients' lower lips stick out slightly or are too wet. “Doctor Angeli often passes himself off as people's mothers or fathers. Really, almost everyone that claims to be a mother or a father is Doctor Angeli.”

  The intern is looking at the notes and doodles on the paper clipped to his clipboard. With a frown. Without bothering to hide said doodles. Someone clears their throat. The throat clearing breaks the essentially elusive nature of the scene. The nurse looks at the doctor. The doctor looks at Giraut. Giraut looks at Valentina and pushes her chair forward. As he heads down the hallway, flanked by the warnings on the hospital posters, he hears the intern's voice.

  “You can still change your mind, Mr. Parini,” says the doctor. “Think of the girl.”

  Five minutes later, in the parking lot of the pedestrian street that holds the children's clinic, Giraut pushes the chair up to the back of Iris Gonzalvo's brick red Alfa Romeo. He helps Valentina stand up and get into the back of the spor
ts car. Valentina does all this without any sign of surprise. Iris Gonzalvo covers her alarmingly skinny body with a travel blanket. It all happens quickly.

  “There are clothes in the backseat,” Giraut says to Valentina after the car leaves the lot. In that way that drivers speak to the passengers in the backseat. Looking up and through the rearview mirror. “You can't wear hospital clothes. We are in a somewhat complicated situation. This city isn't safe for us anymore. We have to leave the country. We'll meet up with your mother and her boyfriend abroad. Your mother found a boyfriend. His name is Eric.”

  The car moves through upper Barcelona until it has left behind the last old stately homes on the outskirts and enters the tunnels that go through the hills. Sitting in the passenger seat, Iris Gonzalvo looks through the rearview mirror with concern. She is wearing a white Kenzo dress that reaches her knees and Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses and her hair is gelled back into a bun. The light inside the tunnels makes them orange. That color that reminds you of the glow of jack-o'-lanterns with candles inside. Giraut doesn't seem to have noticed what it is in the rearview mirror that is worrying Iris. In the backseat, Valentina is putting on the sweater and pants they brought for her.

  “We are the people with no father and no mother,” says Giraut. Looking at Valentina through the rearview mirror. With both hands on the steering wheel. “The world begins with us.”

  “The world begins with us,” repeats Valentina from the backseat.

  Lucas Giraut follows Iris's worried gaze to the mirror. There is a car closely following the Alfa Romeo. Giraut squints and can make out the face of the car's driver. A face distorted by rage. With something in his hand that Giraut trusts isn't what it looks like. Beneath the jack-o'-lantern glow of the tunnels, the distorted face of the driver of the car following them doesn't look human. It is a wet, shiny face. Wrinkled and bald. Giraut swallows hard. It is the face of Mr. Bocanegra. And what it looks like he has in his hand is a gun.

  In the backseat, Valentina turns to look through the back window.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 62

  One with the Universe

  The hospital Juan de la Cruz Saudade is in is no prestigious private clinic on a pedestrian street uptown. It's one of those desolate public hospital landscapes. Without individual rooms. One of those hospital landscapes perpetually bathed in the smell of bleach and excrement. That make you think of hospitals in horror movies and hospitals in allegorical films where the main character seems to be in a hospital, but it turns out he's really in hell. The patients' whining and sobbing is heard everywhere. Just the way people supposedly whine and sob in hell. But not Juan de la Cruz Saudade. Saudade's not whining or sobbing or panting or making any other kind of sound to show his suffering. His state is too precarious and whining or crying would intensify the pain of his numerous injured parts.

  “I know you're really messed up and all,” says Hannah Linus, seated in a folding chair beside Saudade's hospital bed. “And that you're not supposed to give bad news to people when they're in the hospital. But I've been wanting to tell you this for a while. That's why I came when you called. Because I wouldn't have dared break up with you in any other moment. But here it's different. Let's just say you're not very seductive. You're so messed up that I don't find you impressive anymore. So that's it.”

  She makes a happy gesture, like the happy sigh of someone who's just had a heavy burden lifted. “I said it.”

  From his hospital bed, Juan de la Cruz Saudade tries to move his neck enough to be able to see Hannah Linus. He looks like a hospital patient in a comic strip or a cartoon. With both legs in casts and both arms in casts and his torso and head partially covered in bandages. He even has a leg lifted and held by a system of straps to the ceiling over his bed. A dry snap in the area of his cervical vertebra dissuades him from continuing to try to see the woman sitting next to his bed. Some of the parts of his body, the parts that aren't in bandages or casts, show burns covered with ointment and stitched-up wounds. Even still, Saudade is pretty satisfied with the results of his encounter with the Russians. He's alive, and that's definitely a consolation. In the end, he managed to convince them he wasn't Giraut. Well, actually it was that weird guy with the plate in his head that convinced them. The only problem was after confirming that he wasn't Giraut, everyone seemed to forget about him. Everyone except that little man who talked like Donald Duck. Saudade shivers slightly when he remembers the little man and his drill and the rest of his do-it-yourself tools.

  “Well, I guess that's all I have to say.” Hannah Linus picks up her purse. She takes a little mirror compact out of it and redoes her lipstick. “I'd better be going. So you can start getting used to never seeing me again and all that.”

  Hannah Linus closes the compact with a vaguely metallic click and puts it back in her purse. At the end of the hall a terrified scream is heard. One of those screams that echo through the halls of Spanish public hospitals and make you think of the screams of damned souls in hell. Not so much screams of pain as screams of pure, unadulterated suffering. Saudade's room is one of those shared rooms that have several beds separated by threadbare curtains. Saudade moves his head a bit and lets out some sort of soft, unintelligible croak.

  “What's that?” Hannah Linus frowns.

  “Gggggggrrrl,” Saudade seems to be saying.

  Hannah Linus leans over the bed a bit. With a hand beside her ear. In that universal gesture used to indicate someone needs to speak louder or more clearly.

  “You're going to have to speak more clearly,” she says. “I can't understand you.”

  Saudade lifts an arm in a cast to indicate to Hannah Linus to wait a minute. Then he clears his throat. Or something similar. His throat clearing is long and painful, and sounds like he's choking on his own phlegm. Finally he blinks.

  “Thanks for coming,” says Saudade. “If you ever need anything, you have my cell number.”

  Hannah Linus looks at him with a confused expression.

  “That's all?” she says. Her tone seems slightly disappointed. “That's it? You're not going to threaten to kill me? You're not going to come to my house and stab me in the chest?”

  Saudade seems to be considering the question. Although it seems difficult to believe, merely thinking hurts the injuries on his head. With the only finger he has out of the cast, he pushes the button that sends painkillers into his vein. He closes his eyes and searches inside himself. And to his surprise, everything he finds is good. The seed of unhappiness, wherever it came from, seems to have withered and died at some point. Probably while they were beating him up. All the asphyxiating feelings of vulnerability and imminent doom and loss of omnipotence have vanished into thin air. Along with the doubly asphyxiating and oppressive sensation of living in a universe marked by injustice and a lack of cosmic meaning. He feels fucking great. Finally he's back to his old self. The complete, fulfilled, vigorous person who Juan de la Cruz Saudade really is. The fact that he's alive fills him with a peaceful, and intensely mature, euphoria. You could almost say he feels affection for his fellow man. Of course, he knows that the very idea of feeling affection for others is an idea that could have only been unnaturally induced in his mind by the painkillers and medicines they're giving him. But he's not angry with Hannah Linus. In fact, Saudade doesn't really understand people who get mad at women. He's never really believed that women are real people. Sure, they talk and all that, but it never occurred to him to stop and listen to what they're saying.

  “I'm fine.” Saudade lifts his hand and makes some sort of thumbs-up sign with the only finger that's not in the cast. “Don't worry about me. Good luck with the gallery.”

  Hannah Linus stares at him without saying anything. Her face screws up into a disgusted grimace and bit by bit the disgust transforms into rage. An enraged grimace with her mouth screwed up and her forehead trembling.

  “And that's it?” she says, raising her voice. “That's how you end our relationship? You're not even go
ing to object?” Now Hannah Linus's screams echo through the room and probably through the rest of the rooms on that hall of the hospital. “That's all I mean to you? That's all I'm worth?”

  Lying in his hospital bed with both arms and both legs in casts and a system of straps and harnesses holding up his multiply fractured leg, Saudade struggles to raise his neck to look at Hannah Linus. Suddenly there is a change in the room's lighting. For a minute Saudade thinks that there's been a power outage. Then he realizes that that's not it. It's just that something very large is blocking the overhead light and the lamp. Something the size of a prehistoric animal that would have to be hunted by several prehistoric hunters. The pupil of his eye with less broken blood vessels moves down until it locates the upper part of the mass that is Aníbal Manta. With his closely cropped hair and his hoop earring and his mammoth head and neck. And with his favorite X-Men T-shirt. The one with the original members.

  “Aníbal?” says Saudade. In that vaguely tearful tone of someone getting choked up at seeing an old friend or family member that they thought they'd never see again.

  Aníbal Manta looks at Hannah Linus. With a slightly uncomfortable expression.

  “Oh, don't worry about me,” says Hannah Linus. As she puts on her coat. “I was just leaving. Obviously I have nothing more to do here. It's obvious I shouldn't have come.” She takes a last look at Saudade's hospital bed. “What for? This son of a bitch doesn't care if I'm dead or alive.”

  Aníbal Manta watches as Hannah Linus strides out of the hospital room. Then he looks back at Saudade. With his classic expression of intellectual effort. With a look of intellectual effort that could indicate he's planning something or that he's come with something on his mind.