Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“Yes?”

Hannah Linus begins to tap rhythmically with her pen on the surface of her desk. The way she looks at her assistant not only transmits her irritation at being disturbed, but also her absolute conviction that whatever reason there is behind the interruption is not a valid one. She also decides to look her up and down with a slight expression of disapproval. That's another way that Hannah has of maintaining control over her female employees: choosing employees that are less sexually attractive than she is. Hannah Linus is tall and slim and blond, while Raquel is not very attractive in that way that Hannah Linus finds Spanish women not very attractive: as if someone not terribly proficient had made them, trying to imitate a model of proper beauty. Like failed sketches of moderately pretty women. Topped off with cheap clothes.

“Sorry for the interruption.” Raquel twists a curl of chestnut brown hair around her index finger as she speaks. “But there's a man downstairs. In the gallery, I mean. It's not that he's doing anything wrong, but he doesn't seem normal to me. Or to the security guard. He's a little weird, to be honest.”

Hannah Linus stares at her fixedly.

“I'm not sure I understand,” she says.

Raquel keeps twisting the curl around her finger. It could be a nervous gesture. In any case, Hannah Linus feels an urgent desire to smack her and tell her to stop doing it.

“Well,” says the assistant. “Remember last month when that guy slipped in and sat in the middle of the gallery and said he was an artist and that his sitting there was an artistic action and I don't know what else, and in the end we had to call the police?” She shrugs her shoulders. “We're not sure what's going on with this guy. Maybe nothing. But he's a bit suspicious.”

Hannah Linus sighs. She looks at her watch. Six minutes to her break. She supposes she could stop now, solve the situation, do her exercises and recoup the six minutes after closing. She takes a last disapproving glance at Raquel's body and attire, and stands up.

Juan de la Cruz Saudade is in the gallery, standing in front of an oil painting from the Bellini school. Holding up his chin on one hand and his elbow with the other. With a frown. Like one of those clichéd depictions of art gallery visitors that one finds in Sunday magazine comic strips. He even wears glasses hanging from a little chain around his neck.

Hannah Linus meets Raquel and the security guard at the foot of the stairs. She looks first at her assistant, then at the guard and finally at Saudade.

“So?” She crosses her arms in an irritable gesture. “What's the problem? I don't see anything strange. He's not doing anything.”

“That's the problem,” says the guard. “He's been like that for almost thirty-five minutes. In front of the same painting. In the same position. I swear he hasn't moved a muscle.” The guard shakes his head. “I think that he's some other moron like the one last month. He's waiting for us to call the police so he can be in the newspaper.”

Hannah Linus has never been afraid of complicated or uncomfortable situations. Even in her student years in Sweden one could see her strength of character reflected in other people's faces. In their respectful and uncertain expressions. And in the vaguely stammering way that people addressed her. Those reactions never made her uncomfortable. Although they meant she was condemned to exclusion from the circles of friendship and camaraderie she saw around her. But that was the price to pay for being who she was, she said to herself. For getting the best grades. For being the perfect daughter and the employee of the month, every month. And it was in complicated situations where others withdrew that she could take a proud step forward and shine in all her magnificence. Hannah Linus from Uppsala. The absolute queen of the World of Hannah Linus.

Now she uncrosses her arms and walks across the gallery. Under the gaze of the paintings that make up the exhibition of sixteenth-century oil paintings. Some of the court members and peasants and mythological figures that populate the oil paintings seem to look at her with terrified expressions as she crosses her own gallery with a frown.

“Good morning,” she says to Juan de la Cruz Saudade when she reaches his side. “Have you consulted our price list?”

Saudade stares at her with an amused look of surprise. For a moment they both remain that way, looking at each other, he looking slightly down and she looking slightly up due their differences in height. Saudade is wearing a black suit on top of a salmon Prada for Men shirt and has his hair slicked back along his perfect skull. Hannah Linus feels some sort of very soft tingle in her abdomen.

“Lovely,” says Saudade. Then he takes off the eyeglasses hung on a little chain and sticks one of the arms between his lips in a flirty pensive gesture. His lips are large and fleshy and flanked by two perfectly symmetrical lines that constitute Saudade's most sexually attractive facial element according to a significant majority of his past lovers. “I mean this, of course.” He points to the painting with the arm of his glasses. He smiles. “It's incomparable. Ahem, fascinating,” he says after a brief hesitation.

Hannah Linus looks at the painting. It's a Venus in front of a mirror from the Bellini school. Frankly a minor piece, even in a two-bit exhibition such as this one. Chosen as a filler and duly situated beside the door to give the impression that the walls are filled without attracting too much attention. The Venus is looking at herself in the mirror with a bored face, beside an open window that shows a rural landscape as dictated by the conventions of the period. Her pale, cellulitic body is naked except for the gauzy, unnaturally twisted sheet that covers her sexual parts.

“How can I explain it?” Saudade squints. “The chick is in her birthday suit and it's obvious she's a hottie.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Or must have been in her day. And yet, that's not the important thing. It's not like when you see a naked chick in a porn movie. I don't know if you get me. This is like something more…” He takes an ever so slight pause to give emphasis to the word, “artistic.”

Hannah Linus stares at Saudade. For a second it seems as if she is going to say something. Then her gaze shifts toward the extreme opposite end of the room, where Raquel and the security guard are watching her with quizzical expressions. Then she looks at Saudade again.

“Is this your gallery?” says Saudade. Looking at the painting again. With the same half smile. “That's great. I like art a lot. I could spend hours looking at pictures and all that.”

Hannah Linus seems confused. The man seems to be in no way terrified by her presence, nor by the tone of voice with which she questioned him. A tone that she has been perfecting over the years. He shows none of the terrified uncertainty that she usually inspires in people. The man gazes at the painting and when he looks at her he does so with some sort of superiority. Of amused self-confidence. With an expression so openly insulting that Hannah Linus can't help but feel intrigued. And then there's the man's face, and his body. The man is so tall and slender and sexually attractive that it's hard not to look at him. Even with his suit and his glasses and his impeccable veneer of civilization, the man provokes in her mind sharp images of brutality and violent sex and powerful genitals. Hannah Linus wipes a drop of sweat from her forehead. She looks at her assistant again and then looks at Saudade.

“Are you interested in buying this Venus?” she says.

Saudade looks at her as if he doesn't understand.

“I mean the painting,” she says.

Saudade frowns a bit. Hannah Linus can see the tip of his tongue playing with the tip of the arm of his glasses. Hannah Linus's mind fills with strange images.