Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“My mother has never understood me.” Lucas Giraut runs a hand through his straight blond hair and admires the drawing that he is making under the lamp's insufficient light. “She doesn't even know me,” he continues. “The only reason she speaks to me is because my father named me primary stockholder. Before that she hadn't called me in six years. And she'll stop talking to me when she manages to get me out of the way. I know that she makes fun of me all the time. And that she doesn't care about what I want. She never has. It's like when I was a kid. She never did anything to make me feel good. She always gave me birthday presents I didn't like. It was almost as if she gave them to me because she knew I wouldn't like them. They were usually fishing-related.” The drawing Lucas Giraut is scribbling with his fountain pen on the top page of a block of notes depicts a vaguely human and vaguely female figure whose most striking element is a very flat oval face that transmits no emotion whatsoever. “Fishing rods. Fishing vests. Hats. Things like that.”

“For the love of God.” Fonseca rolls his eyes. In the margin of the beam of light, his hands seem extraordinarily strong and firm in spite of the lightness of his limbs. Giraut thinks he has seen the same phenomenon in certain birds. “What the hell does that have to do with it? And what are you trying to pull by making me sit here in the dark? And in this chair? I'm sixty-five years old. Do you think any of this is going to do you any good?”

“I was a kid,” says Giraut. “I don't think my mother understood what that means.”

The suitological analysis of Fonseca's gray Armani suit offers the following results: corporate discretion, a firmness impervious to obstacles and an absolute acceptance of his place in history. Just as Lucas Giraut has a chance to prove once again, still doodling on the top page of his note block, Fonseca is completely immune to any suitological criticism. He is also immune to all the different Attack Strategies thought up by Lucas Giraut and Valentina Parini in the courtyard of their house. With his face reduced to a network of gnarled tendons and treelike veins. With whole parts of his face sunken in, giving the impression that his face is nothing more than a layer of skin and nerves and tendons stretched over a bird's skull. Seated in a rigid chair that is absolutely inappropriate for any type of interpersonal business meeting, Fonseca is the second most immune person to any type of mental attack strategy that Lucas Giraut knows.

“Listen to me, son.” Fonseca keeps his face out of the lamp's conical beam of light. “We don't have much time. Your mother is not going to let me leave this office without you signing those papers. You know how she is. I figured you would have realized it by this point, but now I'm going to tell you even more clearly. It is not in your best interests to get in her way. Even though you're her son. So let's quit dancing around the subject. Tell me what it is that you want. If it's reasonable, you'll get it. And this”—he lifts a skinny but powerful finger—“is not a negotiation. It's a gift. A small gift to show you our goodwill.”

Lucas Giraut slowly tears out the page he's been drawing on and balls it up, without looking at his mother's lawyer. He throws it in the wastebasket.

The question of Lucas Giraut's childhood birthdays takes up dozens of pages in the secret childhood notebooks that constitute his subjective chronicle of those years. Year after year, Lorenzo Giraut systematically forgot his son's birthday, in spite of the many, not very subtle hints in the form of anonymous notes and red circles in engagement books that Lucas left during the days leading up to his birthday. Often Lucas Giraut wondered if there could have been something true in those systematic and perfectly predictable oversights. In his father's slightly amused expression and in the cheerful melodies he whistled when he got up on the mornings of his childhood birthdays. As he stared at him from the other side of the breakfast table.

“I need to know what happened the night they arrested my father.” Giraut concentrates his gaze on the next blank page of his block of notes with a look of concentration. “I mean the night at Camber Sands. In the summer of 1978. I need to know the details. Someone held the cargo in the port that my father was going to sell and someone called the police. I've been reviewing my father's accounting ledgers and his desk diaries, as well. That night there should have been someone else in the hotel room. Some sort of business partner. Someone who didn't show up. And who called the police.” He starts to trace the contours of a new drawing. With a frown. With the tip of his tongue sticking out artistically from between his lips. Finally he lifts his gaze for an instant in Fonseca's direction. “I need to know if my father was betrayed. And if so, I need to know who it was.”

“Son.” Fonseca looks at him with theatrical fatigue. “Your father was a strange man. Who did strange things, like turn off all the lights and cover the windows with newspaper pages. Or like leaving you the majority of the company stock in his will. Which could only be a joke. A strange joke. Which is why I'm here today. To tell you that your mother is willing to forget everything. To forgive things other people wouldn't forgive, and perhaps to give you a job more suited to your talents. Perhaps in some other part of the world. Let's be honest: you were never exactly the son your parents expected. I think that in many senses the word disappointment could be used.” He pauses. Giraut doesn't, not even for a second, see Fonseca make any sign of being uncomfortable in his hard, rigid chair. “And as far as what happened to your father”—he shrugs his shoulders—“who could know about that at this late date? Your father was a disturbed man. Who associated with undesirables. And it doesn't seem prison helped him at all. When he got out, I don't think it could be said that he was himself.”

According to the hypotheses laid out in Lucas Giraut's childhood notebooks, Lorenzo Giraut's systematic and inexplicable forgetting of his only son's birthday was somehow related to other inexplicable elements of his paternal behavior. Like the fact that he never directly answered his son's questions. Like the fact that he invented strange explanations for everything. Like the fact that he lived and died without letting his son know basically anything about who his father was.

“I know about the Down With The Sun Society,” says Lucas Giraut. He now seems to be prolifically drawing a group of three figures with their arms around each other's shoulders in a gesture of male camaraderie. All three have long hair. “I've been investigating. I know there were three of them. I know they were friends. And I know that they were together in what they were doing.” He pauses and wipes a lock of straight blond hair off his forehead to admire his drawing. One of the three long-haired guys in the drawing wears a coat whose shape seems to suggest that it is a woman's coat. “I need to know their names. Who they were and what they were doing. That's the price.”

Fonseca leans back and the network of shadows on his face darkens until they fuse almost completely with the darkness.

“There's a reason why no one ever spoke to you about those people,” he says. His distance from the light making him inscrutable. “Why your mother kept you far from certain things. Your father had gotten involved with dangerous people.”

“What did the Down With The Sun Society do?” Lucas Giraut puts the finishing touches on the long, slightly tangled hairdos of the figures in his drawing. “How was it involved in what happened in Camber Sands? Were they the ones who betrayed my father? Is that what happened?”