Javier Calvo: Wonderful World

“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 sports 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.

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.