Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

The game resumes with Valentina Parini in the left wing position for the home team. A few steps away from where Lucas Giraut is watching the game with his hands in his pockets. Barely any of the players on the downtown team have breasts. The players on the downtown team are smaller in size and some of them are black and have Asian or Latin American features. The center for the downtown team is a tall Chinese girl with chipped teeth. The Chinese player slam dunks into the home team's basket and smiles with a look of true Asian cruelty in her chipped smile. Five minutes later a visiting player slams Valentina with her shoulder in such a way that Valentina and Valentina's glasses fly across the floor in opposite directions. Someone shouts out that someone should step on that retard's glasses. Valentina Parini walks calmly back to the bench.

“Everybody thinks you're my mother's boyfriend.” Valentina sits on the end of the bench closest to Lucas Giraut. The player named Adelfi goes out onto the court again, in the midst of a small ovation from the spectators that fill the portable stands. Mostly players' parents. “And my mother is in love with you. I've been noticing. Analyzing the things she does. I don't care that they say I'm too young to understand these things. And I can see things that other people don't. Like in the books I read, for example.” She takes off her glasses and examines the damage they've suffered with a focused expression that wrinkles up her tiny nose and makes her look even more like a tree-dwelling monkey. “Do you want to marry my mom? This is a serious question.”

Lucas Giraut raises his eyebrows and strokes his hairless chin with two fingers. In someone else, the gesture could pass for reflective or even calculating, but in his face it only seems to transmit a certain distracted perplexity. The rest of the substitute players seated on the bench have stopped paying attention to what's happening on the court and are now openly staring at Valentina Parini and Lucas Giraut.

“She wants to marry you,” says Valentina. “I've known for a long time. Remember the other night? At the end of the party? When that waiter carried her out to the street to throw up and then we stuck her in the taxi?”

Giraut searches through his memories of the trip home after the last of his mother's Unnumbered Birthday parties. The moment in the taxi when Marcia Parini began slapping frenetically on the back window with the palm of her hand. The fact that neither Valentina nor he himself were able to identify said slaps as the universal sign made by all drunks in taxis who need to get out to vomit again. The taxi driver's anger as Valentina pulled her mother out of the back door still drooling vomit and how quickly the taxi driver's anger disappeared when Lucas Giraut opened his wallet and put all the bills it had inside into his hand. And finally the walk home through the dark alleys of the Gothic Neighborhood with their smell of urine, with Valentina and he himself carrying Marcia by the armpits, and Valentina carrying her mother's purse and high heels in her free hand. The three creating a scene that any passerby would naturally assume to be a family scene. And most likely, in the end, it did have some genuinely family element to it.

“The signs are clear.” The girl puts her glasses back on and wipes off the dust that her fall has left on the sleeveless green shirt of her uniform. “She doesn't kiss you. She doesn't grab you by the neck and nibble on your earlobe. With you she doesn't act like she does with all the others. And when we're at home together she talks about you. Not all the time, but a lot.” She shrugs her shoulders. “Those are the signs. So it's up to you to decide if you want to marry her.”

A player in the green shirt of the Italian Academy's Basketball Club is twisting on the floor beneath the visiting team's basket with her hands on her crotch. Beside her a black player from the visiting team has her hands held high in the universal sign for innocence in sports sign language. Someone says something insulting about the defensive style of the multiracial team from downtown and a moment later the visiting player who was insulted has one of the home team players firmly locked in a neck grip. The home team player lets out a moo, her face purple and her eyes open very wide. The rest of the impeccably tricolored players watch the scene with reverential fear. The referee blows her whistle emphatically and gestures a lot with her arms.

“Sixteen days till the worldwide release of Stephen King's new novel.” Valentina takes advantage of the fact that the rest of the players have shifted their focus to the multiracial struggle that is taking place beneath the visiting team's basket. “And I want my mom to let me go to the release party. In that big bookstore downtown. They leave the bookstore open until midnight and fans can go and buy a special edition. The first edition. But so she'll let me go I have to be good and act like I'm an idiot in front of the teachers and show up for basketball games and all that. I don't know how I'm going to stand it.” She makes an impotent gesture. “This is torture. Everybody laughs at me. The teachers more than anybody. I could kill all these stupid girls, like that.” She snaps her fingers. “At least these public school girls know how to fight.”

Giraut stares with a blank face at an overweight girl who seems to have been listening to their conversation from the bench. The overweight girl looks away as quickly as she can. With a slightly offended face. The attitude of Valentina Parini's classmates toward Valentina Parini has been mainly an attitude of distrust and mockery and general lack of respect since Valentina read aloud in Spanish class an essay titled “The Prayer of Those Who Have No Father and No Mother.” Which is to say, since what is known as the Spanish Class Mishap. Since then, the frequency of taunts and nicknames has increased. Along with the good-humored tortures in the school playground. And the comparisons with physically grotesque or insane film and television characters. Valentina Parini has recited The Prayer of Those Who Have No Father and No Mother on various occasions to Lucas Giraut during their meetings at dusk in the courtyard of the old ducal palace in the Gothic Neighborhood.

“Perhaps you should rethink your idea,” says Giraut with a pensive expression. “I mean about reading your novel at the talent show. It could be dangerous. I think that by this point they must be watching you very closely. And don't say anything to your school psychologist about what you're writing. Or maybe tell her you're writing some other novel. One where you don't kill all your basketball teammates. One where there's no blood, or final massacre or heads bursting open or anything like that.” He shrugs his shoulders. “When psychologists hear those kinds of things, you're done for.”

The overweight girl is staring at them with her plump face. Shaking her head and gathering her features in an expression of intense displeasure. Some of the faces nearby turn to pay attention to the conversation taking place near the bench.

“You are horrible,” she says to Valentina Parini, pointing at her with an accusatory finger. “And so is this man. And I'm going to tell the principal everything.”

Valentina Parini readjusts her green plastic kid's glasses on her tiny nose with her index finger and gives the overweight girl an obscene gesture of an openly sexual nature. A gesture that any spectator would consider absolutely inappropriate to someone her age.

The dome of St. Peter's basilica and the vaguely extraterrestrial rooftops of the Vatican are outlined against the gray backdrop of the morning sky on the other side of the window of the hostel in the Piazza Navona where Aníbal Manta and Juan de la Cruz Saudade are staying under false names. Aníbal Manta lets his gaze wander through the room: starting at the paintings of deer that decorate the walls, then moving on to the frayed bedspreads on the two single beds and finally to the figures of Saudade and the Italian whore kneeling on the ground giving him a blow job accompanied by expert hand movements on his penis and testicles. Saudade's powder blue and white Umbro sweatpants are wrinkled around his ankles. Saudade, reflects Manta, has never been good at conversations that involve any kind of emotional communication. That's one of the reasons, perhaps the main one, why he's never liked Saudade. In the two years that he's known him, every time they have to do some job together — and their profession usually leads to long periods of forced cohabitation — every attempt that Manta has made to establish that kind of communication has been met by Saudade looking around distractedly. Or picking at his cuticles or nodding in a purely mechanical way while contemplating select parts of nearby female anatomies. Manta closes his eyes and tries to concentrate on the blow job the second Italian whore is giving him, as she kneels on the floor in front of his legs with his pants down around the ankles.