Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“What the fuck are you doing?” Hannah Linus stretches on the other side of the king-size bed. “What's wrong with you? Are you ten years old?”

The position in which Hannah Linus is lying facedown on the other side of the bed suggests very recent and very frenetic sexual activity. Her blond hair, which is normally organized into two very straight symmetrical braids at either side of the nape of her neck, is now a sticky tangle of damp locks. A coital flush still covers entire areas of her body.

“A moment ago you weren't thinking I was ten years old.” Saudade makes that gesture characteristic of bodybuilders, flexing an arm held high with his gaze fixed on the bulging bicep. “When you asked me to do that thing again. That thing that broke the table.”

Hannah Linus rolls her eyes. She feels around for the pack of cigarettes on the night table. She takes one out and lights it with squinted eyes.

“I'm not tired,” says Saudade. Distractedly watching a figure with an umbrella being dragged by the fierce wind, seven floors below, on the other side of the window. “You don't have to feel bad about that. A lot of women get embarrassed. I mean, when they can't take any more. When they can't keep up with my pace. But there's no need to be embarrassed.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I understand.”

Hannah Linus takes a drag on her cigarette. The waves of postcoital tedium that overtake her now are almost overwhelming. In fact, sometimes the feelings of impatience and disgust provoked by being in the same space as a man with whom she has just had sex, or even just having to talk to him, are almost unbearable for her. She's not one of those women that need the approval or companionship of the male gender, nor does her self-esteem depend on arousing the male sexual appetite. She has no elements of dependence in her personality and she certainly feels no curiosity for the partially pleasant sensations similar to degradation that can be found in sex with socially or intellectually inferior men. In point of fact, Hannah Linus feels no conscious curiosity about anyone. She considers herself her favorite person and the model on which to gauge other's failings. The way other people fail to be like her is like the way flies hit the windowpane again and again. Hannah Linus yawns. That seems to be the essence of The Universe According to Hannah Linus: several million employees, taxi drivers and lovers that a Scandinavian divinity with turgid breasts and Hannah Linus's features has placed on the Earth for her to use and enjoy. Saudade isn't so different from the rest of the people, she says to herself with a sigh. Just stupider.

“We could call a whore,” Saudade is saying. Provoking rhythmic contractions of his abdominal musculature in front of the mirror and proudly contemplating how his muscles contract and expand. “That way you wouldn't get so tired. It's easier if there's two of you.”

“Call a whore if you want.” Hannah Linus stands up and stubs out the cigarette in the disposable ashtray on the night table. She checks the time on her cell phone. “You can stay with her. I have things to do.”

Saudade watches out of the corner of his eye as Hannah Linus walks with lazy steps toward the bathroom of the hotel suite. The suite bathroom is reached through a mirrored door located in the middle of an entire wall of mirrors. From the height of the bed where Saudade is, and through the doorjamb of the half-open door, a massage table and a platform with three steps leading to the Jacuzzi can be seen. Then he looks in the opposite direction. Toward the slightly elevated living room where a thirty-six-inch plasma screen is showing a loop of adult films. And toward the trail of clothes that leads from the suite's vestibule to the remains of the broken table in the living room. And there, in the middle of the stream of clothes, his gaze finds what he was looking for: Hannah Linus's bag. A vaguely wrinkled black leather Chanel bag with gold rings. The same bag that Hannah Linus keeps with her at all times and where she keeps the magnetic security codes of all the buildings she is responsible for. And then something surprising happens.

A flash of lightning illuminates the suite bedroom and Juan de la Cruz Saudade's face for a fraction of a second. And during that infinitesimal fraction, Saudade's face reflected in the pane of the high window is not at all the face that had been talking and having sex with Hannah Linus up until that point. It is a mask of pure hatred. An open iron door to an industrial oven of hostility. Without any of those elements of basic kindness or sociability that we associate with being human. A hatred that has elements associated with gender and socioeconomic status but that transcends them broadly, to cover everything that moves and breathes on the Earth. A hatred that rarely is seen outside of certain sculptures and ritual masks from prehistoric civilizations. Then the lightning ends. The vision only lasted that random fraction of a second. Saudade's face recomposes itself.

“All chicks like to fuck other chicks,” he says. “It's a proven fact. So you don't have to get embarrassed. And you don't need to act tough. About the whore. All women get jealous. That's another proven fact.”

Saudade listens. Hannah Linus's voice comes from the bathroom, muffled by the shower door. He thinks he can vaguely make out the words “ass” and “idiot.” Then he hears the sound of plumbing for a second and finally the regular, comforting murmur of the shower's water falling into the stall.

Saudade jumps off the bed as soon as the shower comes on. His naked, muscular movements seem to have lethal precision. He crosses the suite to the living room and picks up Hannah Linus's bag. He takes out her wallet, which by this point is familiar to him, examines the cards inside and finally chooses one. A gold card with Hannah Linus's corporate logo, which Saudade has seen her use on various occasions to open the gallery building's security devices. He heads toward the little table beside one of the living room windows and opens the curtain. He looks down for the only figure on the entire street who is not being dragged along with an umbrella by the wind. After all, the figure seems too big for a simple storm to be able to budge him from his place in the middle of the sidewalk. Aníbal Manta looks up toward the curtain of the seventh floor of the hotel that has just opened and nods in silence beneath the rain. Saudade raises his thumb toward the enormous, steadfast figure on the sidewalk and closes the curtain again.

“Tell me something,” says the voice of Hannah Linus from the shower stall. Mixed with the sound of the water. “You're married, right?”

Saudade directs his attention to the telephone on the small table. He turns it over and leaves it upside down on the varnished wood surface. Like an animal on its back. Then he opens one of the drawers of the small table and takes out a screwdriver no bigger than a toothpick. He uses it to take out the four screws that hold the body of the telephone to the base. The speed and skill with which he does it suggest previous training monitored by someone with a stopwatch. The inside filled with cords and electronic devices is now visible.

“Married, me?” says Saudade. With his face gathered in a concentrated expression. “Men like me don't get married, sweetheart. It would be a waste. I come and go, you know.” He wipes a drop of sweat from his forehead with a tattooed wrist. “I have a duty to my work.”

Saudade examines the inside of the telephone until he finds a piece of plastic attached to the base with recent soldering. The piece has a long, deep slot on one side and a plate with circuit and cords on the other. A red pilot light stares at him from the telephone's guts. Saudade runs the magnetic strip of Hannah Linus's card through the slot, several times, until the pilot light turns green. A click is heard inside the recently soldered piece.