Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  “My old friend,” says Saudade tearfully. He pauses to happily hawk a phlegm ball. “How're things going? How'd the whole painting thing go? I'm really glad to see you,” he says, his eyes filling with tears, and he's surprised to discover that it's almost true.

  Aníbal Manta doesn't say anything. He turns toward the threadbare curtain that separates Saudade's bed from the bed of the patient next to him. The patient next to him seems to be dead, or very close to it. Manta grabs one end of the threadbare curtain and pulls it all the way closed. De facto separating Saudade from the rest of the shared room. In addition to smelling like a mix of bleach and excrement, the hospital room has several buckets and bowls on the floor into which leaks from the ceiling fall. Juan de la Cruz Saudade watches carefully as Manta closes the curtain and comes back to the foot of the bed. You could say he would be furrowing his brow if he had any brow left to furrow.

  “Aníbal?” repeats Saudade in a suspicious tone.

  “Things went bad,” says Manta. “The Dark Side of the Moon got shut down by the police. The money from the sale got stolen by Giraut and that bitch he brought in. And they kept the paintings, too. The van where they were supposed to be was empty. In other words, the buyer is gonna come after us. Bocanegra's disappeared. Giraut's disappeared. And I'm leaving the country tonight.”

  Saudade thinks about what Manta has just told him. It's strange, but none of it causes him any kind of pain or emotional stress. Nothing seems able to cloud his new mood. Bocanegra can go to hell. He doesn't even care about Giraut anymore. Let him choke on his millions. And yet, there is something that doesn't fit. He furrows what's left of his brow. Something about this situation he's in. It takes a moment for him to understand what it is. When he finally does, he opens his eyes very wide.

  “Hold on,” he says. “What are you doing here? Why did you come visit me?”

  But before he can even finish formulating the question he knows the answer. He is struck by a clean, luminous moment of revelation. And in that moment he also understands how serious his situation is. Completely powerless in a hospital bed. He moves the only one of his eyes that he can see out of at all to look at Aníbal Manta's face. And there, in the eyes of his partner of many years, he sees it all. The endless years of humiliation and emotional stress and intense, deep pain. Pain and emotional stress that date back to elementary school and the constant mocking and hurtful nicknames. The internalized shame about his physical appearance. That dates back to school-yard games whose goal was always to torture that absurdly oversized kid. An emotional stress that survived intact the journey into adulthood. Provoking a chronic failure to adapt. Provoking sexual problems. Provoking a chronic inability to achieve satisfactory erections and to successfully use his unsatisfactory ones. Causing his wife to start visiting the neighbors more and more regularly. Causing a life of fruitless therapy. Saudade could now see all of that, crystal clear, in Aníbal Manta's eyes. Who seems to have transformed right before his eyes. Who seems to have become even bigger than he usually is, if that's possible. Bigger and more formidable. More than ever like The Thing from the Fantastic Four. His arms are the arms of a superhero born of mutagenic overexposures to radiation. Of plutonium explosions. Of mad scientists' laser beams. And his face.

  Aníbal Manta's face has changed, too. Saudade has never before seen the smile that is now on that face.

  An enormous smile. A smile that speaks of retribution. Of sacred laws of retribution that affect every story and are stronger than the strongest character. Because they belong to the realm of Fate.

  “Wait a minute!” shrieks Saudade. “Think! Shit, Aníbal! Think!”

  Aníbal Manta takes an iron bar out of the leg of his pants. His expression conveys something more than fierce joy in the face of imminent retribution. Something that terrifies Saudade even more. Some sort of inner peace. Saudade realizes that Aníbal Manta has become one with the universe. And his terrified scream is heard throughout the entire floor of the public hospital.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 63

  Fire Ball

  Iris Gonzalvo's brick red Alfa Romeo moves at a speed close to the maximum allowed on a four-lane highway, heading away from Barcelona. Northward. Toward the rocky coasts of the Ampurdan. Followed closely by the convertible two-seater Jaguar that's been following them since they left the city. Probably since they left the children's psychiatric clinic. Now no one speaks inside the Alfa Romeo. Neither Lucas Giraut nor Iris Gonzalvo says anything. They don't look at each other, or do anything besides frown at the image of the Jaguar reflected in the car's mirrors. And in the middle of the image, there is a face shaken with rage. Kneeling on the backseat, Valentina Parini is carrying out a series of indecipherable, mystical-looking hand signals directed at the Jaguar's driver.

  “This shouldn't be happening,” says Iris Gonzalvo. Almost to herself. With a very subtle inflection in her despondent tone that could indicate something like sarcasm. She pulls on the hem of her tight white Kenzo dress until it covers her knees and seems to become even more wrapped up in her own thoughts. “We had it all planned. What are we supposed to do now? Do we have to kill him? I don't suppose you have a gun.”

  Lucas Giraut's expression as he drives north on the four-lane highway is his same vaguely namby-pamby expression reinforced by his hairless face and thin blond eyebrows. A lock of pale chestnut-colored hair that has detached from the overall wave in his hair and now falls obliquely over his forehead is the only discordant element in his appearance. The only thing that could indicate that Giraut is living through one of those dramatically conclusive situations that mark the end of a story. One of those situations that generally involve a chase that leads to a conclusive confrontation.

  Outside the car, on the four-lane highway from which the rocky cliffs of the Ampurdan can now be made out on the horizon, it is that hour of the day when the sky isn't yet dark but the streetlamps have already begun to glow with a tenuous, blinking light. That hour of the day that doesn't exactly produce a transitory or provisional sensation, but rather the feeling that you're entering a new ontological state. A state bathed in the misty, melancholy light found at the end of stories. At the romantic apotheoses or the meetings with alien races. In the backseat, Valentina Parini has taken off her sweater and is wrapping it around her head like a turban. Or like one of those towels many women wrap around their wet hair when they come out of the shower.

  Giraut observes the shaken, enraged face of Mr. Bocanegra, Showbiz Impresario and Lorenzo Giraut's Childhood Best Friend, with its wrinkled grimace shiny with sweat. In the middle of the rearview mirror. Under the light that's almost dusk, but not dusky enough for the edges of things to start softening, it definitely looks like what Bocanegra has in his hand is a gun. A gun that he keeps shaking over his head. He is now furiously pounding the butt of the gun against the Jaguar's dashboard. With those inane gestures of pure rage. It's possible that the tiny spot Giraut sees in the mirror at the height of Bocanegra's mouth is foam. Just maybe.

  “There's a really big black spot in the sky above us.” Valentina has both hands resting on the back of the backseat and is looking out the back window of the Alfa Romeo. Looking at the sky above the car. The highway at dusk appears to be empty except for the Alfa Romeo and the Jaguar following it. “I think it's moving. That could mean several things. It could be a radiation area. They can hear better in those areas. Although they could also hear worse. It's hard to tell.” She lifts up the edge of the sweater knotted around her head like a turban so she can see better and glues her face to the window. “Although it could also be them. Now they show themselves. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Flying together. So many thousands of them that from a distance they look like a black cloud.”

  Lucas Giraut and Iris Gonzalvo study the sky in search of black clouds. To the west, on the car's left, the sky at dusk begins to turn a dirty red color.

  “We can't destroy them,” continues Valentina, with her voice slightly distorted
by the fact that her face is glued to the pane. “But we can't live with them, either. They don't want us to. They want us to be like them. But we're different, of course. Because we're immune to their control and all that.” She turns for a moment to look at the two other people in the car. Not exactly as if she were seeking their approval. More like making sure no one was raising any objections. “The best thing to do is to find a shelter. That's what you usually do in situations like this. It could be a desert island. Or up on a very high mountaintop. Some place they can't get to. Where they can't hear us. We can wait until they leave or the germs in the air kill them. Anyway…” She pauses. The strips of white tape and the eye patch now both half hang off her face, revealing an eye that doesn't look in any direction even close to where the other eye is looking. “In either case, now we have to start the world over.”

  “Valentina!” shouts Iris Gonzalvo, looking over Valentina's head.

  She extends her arm over the back of her seat and pushes Valentina's head down, forcing her to lie down on the backseat just as Bocanegra sticks an arm out of his car and shoots at the Alfa Romeo twice. The shots sound muffled from inside the car.

  Giraut looks through the rearview mirror. Bocanegra is driving with one hand while the other aims at the back of the Alfa Romeo. The rage in his face seems to have transformed into cruelty. There is another shot and this time they can hear how the bullet buries itself into the bodywork of Iris's car.

  “Son of a bitch!” Iris grapples with the back of her seat as she turns. “Now I am gonna kill him!” She makes her way through the front seats into the back, where Valentina is adjusting her sweater turban. Iris rests the palm of her hand on the back window and starts gesticulating to the Jaguar. “I'll teach you to shoot my car, you fucking son of a bitch!”

  The atmosphere of the four-lane highway at dusk is quickly becoming the atmosphere typical of the conclusion of a story. With chase scenes and shoot-outs and expectations of imminent confrontations. With streetlamps that give off that tenuous blinking light under a sky that's getter redder every minute. With the asphalt of the highway taking on a rusty tinge. With barely any cars passing sporadically on the lanes of the four-lane highway. With Valentina Parini making strange, mystical-looking hand gestures in the backseat. Like those esoteric hand gestures you use to try to protect yourself from a mystical threat. Lucas Giraut looks alternately at the rust-colored highway in front of him and at the rearview mirror and steps on the gas as hard as he can, in an attempt to elude Bocanegra's Jaguar.

  Iris continues gesturing furiously toward the Jaguar. Something appears on the horizon, to one side of the highway. A structure that is still too far away for the car's occupants to see it well under the dusky light.

  “I think that now you have to hit your car against his,” shouts Iris. “I mean my car. Let's see if you can knock him off the highway.” She frowns and seems to be thinking. “But try not to total my car.”

  At that moment Bocanegra sticks his arm with the gun out of the car again. Iris and Valentina throw themselves onto the backseat.

  A shot is heard, and a tire bursting. The Alfa Romeo skids to one side and it takes Giraut a second to regain control.

  “There,” says Valentina. Pointing to a spot outside of the car.

  Lucas and Iris look toward where Valentina is pointing. It is the structure on one side of the highway, which now starts to be clearly visible under the dusky light. It seems to be an abandoned service area. Dark and apparently deserted. The reddish, rusted quality the sky has now is just perfect for the end of a story. Lucas Giraut drives the Alfa Romeo onto the exit ramp that leads to the structure. Followed closely by Bocanegra's Jaguar. Finally he charges at the barrier sealing off the abandoned service area and knocks it down. Shortly followed by the Jaguar.

  Giraut goes a few yards into the service area's parking lot and steps on the brakes. Before Iris can stop her, Valentina opens the back door and runs out of the Alfa Romeo. The sweater tied around her head falls to the ground behind her. The Jaguar charges into the back of the Alfa Romeo. Provoking another furious scream from Iris.

  A few seconds later the scene has decisively reconfigured. Giraut and Iris are now out of the Alfa Romeo with their hands in the air, Bocanegra's gun pointed at them. Several locks of Iris's hair have come loose from her meticulously gelled hairstyle and hang dramatically over the cantankerous expression on her face. Giraut holds up the bottle green Puma sports bag with the money from the sale of the St. Kieran Panels in one of his raised hands. Seen from up close, Bocanegra's face isn't so much a sweaty, wrinkled mask of rage as a more clearly wrinkled and sweaty version of Bocanegra's face. With a horrible cruel smile beneath his sweaty mustache. The suitological analysis that Giraut quickly does of Bocanegra's bone-colored suit indicates: comfort in situations of power; explicit sadism; awareness of the fact that the world will never evolve in a positive direction. Unless, of course, the person wearing the suit wants it to evolve in that direction.

  “What a lovely family portrait,” says Bocanegra with a growl that has something of the cruelly amused purr of a cat playing with its cornered prey. “And I'm a big fan of families. Don't worry about the girl.” He makes a lateral gesture with the gun toward the direction Valentina Parini has headed off running. “I'm not going to do anything to her. Why bother? She's completely batshit anyway. You can tell that just by looking at her.”

  Valentina Parini has stopped running and is now watching the scene from a safe distance. She pulls her shirt up and covers her head with it, without taking it completely off. Revealing her alarmingly skinny belly and prepubescent breasts. Under the dusky light you can see she has a lot of mystical symbols drawn with a ballpoint pen onto the skin of her belly and chest.

  The abandoned service area has a two-story building that at some point was a restaurant. There are also some shacks with sealed-off bathrooms and a playground and some picnic tables. The scene seems perfectly convenient as the setting for the final scene of a story. The colors are appropriate. The lighting works. The very fact that the place is abandoned seems to have been specifically devised for one of those confrontations that take place at the end of stories. And yet, something's not quite right. Something's missing, something that would make the story's ending truly conclusive. And in some way that's hard to put your finger on, the four protagonists' faces reflect that. That lack of conclusion.

  Bocanegra growls with sadistic pleasure and addresses the two figures with their hands up under the categorically reddish sky.

  “You,” he says, slightly moving the barrel of his gun to point at Lucas Giraut. “Of all the backstabbing pieces of shit in the world, you are the worst. The King of the Backstabbing Pieces of Shit. You knew I don't have kids. Although I highly doubt that ever mattered to you. Seeing the circumstances. After all those conversations about what I felt for your father and how I felt for you, like the son I never had, and all the other things I told you about how hard it is to be me and have everything I have. Seeing my pain. My pain here, inside.” He beats on his chest a couple of times with the gun. “The things I felt about what you represented for me. The things we never did and all that.” The grimace of happy rage is gone from Bocanegra's expression. His face looks like the face of a man imprisoned by rage and cruelty. The face of those men whose rage and cruelty is about to make the world around them implode violently. “Sundays in the park. The goddamn Sundays in the park. All those things that I can't do with my greedy, repulsive nieces and nephews. Seeing how your face lights up when I give you a puppy. Taking you to soccer games with me. To the racetrack. To all those things kids like. Sitting with you on the beach and putting a hand on your shoulder and talking to you the way fathers talk to their sons. About serious things. In that serious tone, you know. Saying things like: 'Son, it's time you knew about such and such.' Teaching you what I know and watching you grow up. I know a lot of things. I'm a man who takes his work very seriously. Fuck, you could almost say I invented my line of work. And
I have no one to teach it to. No one to talk to in that serious tone on the beach while we watch the fucking sun set. And all those things that make fathers proud. Seeing you be successful in life with that happy face parents have. You know that happy face? That tired but happy face.”

  The color of the sky could be called dramatic. The rocky hills of the Ampurdan that rise on the horizon aren't particularly majestic but they could be confused with majestic hills under a certain light. Iris Gonzalvo rolls her eyes. Without lowering her hands.

  “Bo-ring,” she says. “Can you just kill us already, please?”

  Bocanegra raises the hand holding the gun to his forehead. His expression of rage and cruelty has started to decompose his features the way certain very extreme feelings can decompose features. They're still the exact same features but they've become completely unfamiliar. His forehead wrinkles like plastic right before it burns. His skin tenses over his tendons and his lips fold over his teeth in an infinitely cruel smile.

  “How come no one understands the pain of a childless man?” he says. None of his features has moved and yet their arrangement has become fundamentally different. His mouth no longer looks exactly like a human mouth, or at least it doesn't give off the same feeling. “It's not like having knives stuck into your chest. I know that's what people say, but that's not it. It's not like getting stabbed in the back or anything like that. It's like burning here inside.” He touches his belly and chest with the gun. “It's like a fire that grows and grows with each day and every year and in the end turns into a ball of fire. Into a fire ball that makes me want to break things and start shooting people.” Now Giraut can literally hear Bocanegra's teeth gnashing. With a sound like two pieces of metal scraping together inside a mechanism. Like that little noise that makes drivers furrow their brows and listen carefully to the little noise coming from somewhere in their car. “And now I want to shoot someone, goddamn it.” He stares at Giraut. Moving slowly toward him. With something in the gleam in his eyes and the trembling in his face that evokes the moment right before a violent implosion of the world around him. “You'd really rather go off with that bitch instead of staying with me? After all the things I promised you? After I promised you we'd have fun together and do thousands of things and be business partners just like your father was my partner and maybe someday you'd be the heir to everything I have? But you never have enough, right?” He raises the barrel of his weapon very slowly toward Giraut. “That's why I can't hold back this yearning I have, to shoot. Because you never have enough. No one ever has enough and that makes me sad and it pisses me off.”