Javier Calvo: Wonderful World

“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.”