Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“There are some people that go around saying it's stupid to eat ice cream in the winter.” Saudade has his fingers tangled in the dyed hair of his prostitute and the way her head rocks back and forth suggests that Saudade could be rhythmically pushing her head toward his crotch. “I have just one thing to say to those people—” He makes a theatrical pause. “Fuck off. Right now, I'd say, it's winter.” He points with his chin to the vaguely extraterrestrial rooftops beyond the window. “And look at all the ice cream shops around here. Why are all those people sitting around wolfing down ice cream? Because they're total idiots? No, sir.” He shakes his head with a wise expression on his face. “It's about taste. The taste is the key. In this city they make the best ice cream I've had in my fucking life and the taste is the same in the winter or the summer. As far as I know. In any case, ice cream lasts better in the winter, it doesn't start to melt before you get a chance to finish it. Ha.” Saudade leans his head back and closes his eyes in that clichéd way porn actors do when they've got a woman kneeling in front of them giving them a blow job. It makes Manta a bit nervous that Saudade's penis, even when largely hidden by the prostitute's face and dyed hair, is clearly enormous. Certainly much larger than Manta's own penis. Manta's penis, even though it can't be considered small according to the standard measurements of the average adult penis, does seem proportionally small in relation to the size of Manta's body and the white soft sphere that is his belly. “I'm not saying that I'd rather be sitting here all day eating ice cream instead of being at home with my kid,” continues Saudade, with his fingers tangled in the prostitute's hair. “But fuck. This is the best ice cream I've eaten in my life. That's one thing they've got in this country. In this culture. These sons of bitches make such good ice cream that I could stay here for a few days just for the ice cream.”

The paintings that hang on the walls depict bucolic scenes in idyllic forest settings featuring herds of deer. There is something unpleasant about those paintings, thinks Manta. They all have dark red skies, skies that attempt to be dusky but are overwhelmingly unrealistic and look like some sort of postnuclear tragedy skies. The deer are out of proportion and some of them look more like dogs or other animals with deer antlers. The situation in which Manta finds himself right now, including the fact of having his pants at his ankles in a room where a prostitute is fellating Saudade's enormous, vigorous penis, gives him a familiar sensation of emotional stress. Traditionally he has never had any problem admitting that the stigma of his looks, along with his fondness for Marvel superheroes, makes up the historical basis of said sensation. A fondness that infantilizes him in the eyes of the world.

“Ice cream has always made me hard,” says Saudade, who has begun to move his hips back and forth to the rhythm of the head movements of his prostitute. “When I was a cop, we used to go to the whore-houses on Balmes Street,” he says. “Me and my partner. We used to show them our badges and act a little tough, you know. We weren't threatening or anything.” He shrugs his shoulders. “We just wanted to make them a little nervous. We'd have a few drinks and we'd pick out the hottest whores. There was one, I don't remember her name. One of those Russian whores, I guess, but not the skinny kind. Kind with big tits.” He raises his hands to his chest and mimes grabbing some invisible tits. “You'd sit on a great fucking sofa and they'd bring you the whore with her legs spread on a cart with wheels, like the kind they use to bring room service in hotels. With enormous scoops of ice cream on each tit. A couple different flavors with a cherry on top. And more ice cream and chocolate sauce on her pussy and ass.” He sighs with a vaguely nostalgic expression as the prostitute's head movements, now freed from the hands that grabbed her hair, become quicker and more precise. “Since then I can't control myself. Every time I see an ice cream sundae, I just see it and bam!” He punches the palm of his hand, making the whore jump. “Hard as a rock.”

Manta observes the brown envelope with the corporate logo of Arnold Layne Experts and the photographs strewn on the frayed bedspread. Since he has known him, Saudade has shown himself completely incapable of developing conversations that involve any type of emotional communication. Conversations like the ones that take place in most relationships of male camaraderie and professional friendship. The photographs strewn on the bedspread show a very dark man with plastic-framed glasses and a turtleneck sweater. His angular features and furtive expression in the photos, as he looks around worriedly and gets into a black car with tinted windows, make him look somewhat like a politically exiled pianist. Or perhaps an introverted chess player from the Eastern bloc. The brown corporate envelope the photographs came out of has a name written on it in capital letters in Mr. Bocanegra's unmistakably forceful handwriting: RAYMOND PANAKIAN. Manta closes his eyes again and tries to concentrate: in spite of several minutes of expert fellatio, his penis seems to have lost the desired degree of erection.

“My psychologist says I should tell you that I feel like you never listen to me,” says Aníbal Manta, looking out of the corner of his eye at Saudade, joined at the waist to the swaying figure of the prostitute. “He says that I have to talk to you directly and be completely honest. That that's the only way I can solve my problems with you. He says that I have to explain how I have the feeling that you never pay attention to me and that that makes me feel bad. That I already feel bad enough because I'm big and fat and I like comic books. You're my work partner and my psychologist told me very clearly that I have to take the bull by the horns and be brave and tell you all the things you do that make me feel bad.”

Manta stops when he establishes that Saudade isn't listening to him. At this point, it not only seems clear to Manta that Saudade's inability to concentrate betrays a classic case of attention deficit disorder. It also seems clearer and clearer that his colleague's sexual compulsion is a subconscious mechanism to avoid facing the here and now. Especially when that here and now involves a conversation with elements of serious emotional exchange. Now Saudade moves the prostitute's head away from his penis and indicates to her through signs that she should turn around and lean forward. The prostitute turns around with a neutral expression. She wipes her lips with the back of her hand and leans forward with her back to Saudade. Manta feels a stab of emotional stress when Saudade's enormous and vigorous penis skewers the prostitute with dyed hair from behind. With incredible ease, it seems to Manta.

“My kid has one of those things you make ice cream with,” says Saudade, charging furiously with his hips against the prostitute's ass, which is soft and pale and covered in freckles. “Not one of those cheap ones where you put in some powder and mix it with water and then you freeze it with a little stick inside.” He pauses and wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand before resuming the onslaught. The prostitute exudes professional sounds of sexual satisfaction. “It's one of those things that make real ice cream. The creamy kind. You can put in chocolate shavings or whatever you want. I gave it to him a couple of years ago, for his birthday I think. The kid likes ice cream.” He nods, satisfied. “Like his dad.”

Aníbal Manta's penis still hasn't achieved a satisfactory erection, and the prostitute kneeling in front of him finds herself forced to pause in her fellation to grab it with her hand and give it some energetic shakes. The paintings of deer infiltrate Manta's visual field obstinately. With their wrong-colored skies and their out-of-proportion deer that stare at him from the walls looking like dogs or other animals in costumes. The transition between Aníbal Manta's moments of severe emotional stress and his fits of rage, along with the control mechanisms he's had to develop in order to repress said fits, have become, over time, the main focus of his therapy sessions. The same fits that he began to experience in the school yard when he was a boy of elephantine dimensions whom the other kids called The Thing. The Thing, according to his therapist's explanations, is a superhero grotesque in appearance but endowed with solid emotional values and colossal strength who is absolutely crucial to the Fantastic Four. To the functioning of the Fantastic Four as a supergroup with balanced superpowers. Those are the elements of The Thing's identity which make his therapist consider him a superhero that embodies the difficulty and pathos and nobility of Aníbal Manta's life. Now Manta closes his eyes and tries to concentrate on those ideas of nobility and difficulty in spite of the fact that the professional noises of sexual satisfaction coming from Saudade's prostitute have turned into shrieks of pleasure that are not strictly professional. Manta's prostitute pauses, raises her head and asks him something in Italian.