Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“I think you are married,” says the voice of Hannah Linus from the shower. “I've seen how you look around you every time you come in or out of the gallery. Or the hotel. You married men have the same secretive air.” She pauses. “It's in everything you do. You're like a criminal committing a crime.”

Saudade dials a telephone number on the numeric panel of the telephone with its guts spilled out. After a couple of seconds, the magnetic card reader installed inside the body of the telephone begins to retransmit the card's information. With a shrill, irregular buzz. Saudade closes his eyes and wipes another drop of sweat from his forehead. The retransmission lasts exactly fifty-two seconds. Hannah Linus's postcoital showers last on average two and a half minutes according to what Saudade has had the chance to witness. The transmitter's buzzing is like a very sped-up version of the noise made by Teletypes and Morse code transmitters in old movies. The sound of the shower doesn't have those momentary interruptions of people who turn off the faucets to save water while they soap up. On the other side of the curtains, seven floors below, a group of kids look at Aníbal Manta admiringly and point at him with their fingers and make hyperbolic comments about his body size.

“I don't care,” says Hannah Linus from the shower. Her tone of voice is that loud voice people use when they are showering to talk to people outside of the shower. A loud voice that's not quite a shout but close. “That's fine with me. I almost always get involved with married men. More comfortable for me. I don't like to have guys following me around all the time.”

The buzzing of the transmitter ends. Saudade starts to put the screws back in place.

The sound of the shower stops. From where he is, Saudade manages to see a hand stick out from inside the shower door and feel around for a towel.

Saudade puts the magnetic card back in Hannah Linus's wallet and the wallet back in Hannah Linus's bag.

Hannah Linus comes out of the shower drying herself off with a towel. She ties the towel around her body the way women do. Which is to say above her breasts. Leaving her knees and part of her thighs in view. She finally enters the bedroom. Braiding her hair with her head leaned to one side and a distracted expression. She stares at Saudade with a slight look of disgust.

Saudade is lying on the bed. He gathers his face in a smile that Hannah Linus finds repulsive and moves aside the sheets to show her his penis, again completely erect. A giant clap of thunder makes the glass panes of the high windows and the suite's furnishings shudder. It occurs to Hannah Linus that coexistence in the same physical space with men she has just had sex with is getting harder every day. Almost like a sensation of physical repulsion. Must have to do with getting older. Although she can't remember ever having slept with anyone as moronic as this guy before.

“I'll give you two hundred euros if you get out of here right now,” says Hannah Linus when the thunderclap's vibration dies down. Still braiding her hair. With her head still leaned to one side. “Three hundred. I just want you to get out. The money's in my bag.”

Saudade doesn't seem particularly surprised. He shrugs his shoulders, the smile still on his face. About ten feet from where he is lying, and reflected in the bedroom's full-length mirror, the thirty-six-inch plasma television continues to broadcast a muted loop of adult films.

Aníbal Manta looks up from his X-Men comic book and studies Raymond Panakian's figure from a distance. Panakian is sitting on his wicker chair in front of the painting he's already been working on for four days. Aníbal Manta's stomach is growling. He's in a bad mood and his stomach is growling and he doesn't have the faintest idea how someone can spend four whole days working on the same painting. And it's not like the painting is any great shakes either, in his opinion. He claps his comic book shut. He stretches his arms in his chair and lets out a long and noisy yawn while his stomach continues growling. The chair he's sitting in isn't a wicker chair. It's one of those metal fold-up chairs that after an hour cause intense pain in the middle of his butt. He looks at his watch. The warehouse of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD., is completely silent in the midafternoon. There is a compact disc of Jamaican music in Bob Marley's stereo system, which belonged to Bob Marley before he disappeared, but putting it on is completely out of the question because it skips and the music turns into a series of bursts of labored and irritating hiccups.

Manta stands up. His degree of boredom and uneasiness is dangerously close to that degree of boredom and uneasiness that makes people do inexplicable things. The temptation to go over to where Panakian is working and kick out a leg of his chair and knock it to the floor, for example, is a temptation that Manta finds inexplicably difficult to resist.

And it doesn't seem that things are going to change until the very day of the job in the gallery. Every morning at nine sharp Raymond Panakian sits on his wicker chair with his little pots of paint and his palette and his blue work coveralls like the blue coveralls people wear to work in car repair shops or in industrial plants, people who work nonstop until eleven at night. Beneath the light of a small lamp that emits a strange blue shine. Yanel comes to watch him in the mornings and Manta usually arrives at three to relieve him. Six or seven hours watching a guy sitting in a wicker chair copy a little painting from an illustration he has stuck to one side with thumbtacks. There's no cure for that level of boredom. No supply of comic books can alleviate it. The X-Men one he has in his hand, for example, he's already read six times. For the first time in his life, Manta has the feeling that the X-Men comic books from the classic period could be something other than half an hour of fascinated contemplation and unrivaled aesthetic experience.

Panakian doesn't turn to look at him or make any movement that seems to acknowledge that Manta has stood up. His blue work coveralls with paint splotches over his turtleneck sweater make him look like a worker from another era, one in which human faith in socialist utopias hasn't yet waned. Manta doesn't have any idea what damn language the guy speaks.

Manta walks around the warehouse three times and smokes a cigarette. What he'd really like to do is head over to the supermarket two blocks away and buy some food to eat during the rest of his endless shift. The end of the workday in the warehouse isn't marked by any hour in particular or any visible progress in the work. The workday simply ends when Panakian gets up from the wicker chair and washes out his brushes and walks over to the exit and waits there. If that weren't enough, the security conditions in the warehouse don't allow Manta to leave him alone for even a minute. Not even to go to the supermarket. Every time he goes to the bathroom in the upper floor of the warehouse, Manta has instructions to handcuff Panakian's wrist to a pipe.

After pacing the warehouse three times, Manta throws his cigarette butt to the floor, stands right behind Panakian and looks over his shoulder at the half-painted picture. With his brow furrowed.

Aníbal Manta has his reservations about the second St. Kieran panel, which is the one Panakian is copying now. In narrative terms it could be a continuation of the one he was copying last week, the one with the guys falling through cracks in the ground. Or not. After all, Manta is a seasoned comic book reader. The second painting has very small figures in the lower part, but mostly seems to be a representation of the canopy of heaven. A black sun in the middle of a black sky. The sun is a simple black sphere surrounded by a crown of dying flames. Overall it's quite strange. The sky isn't black like the black sky in nocturnal pictorial representations. It is a much more absolute black. Without stars. Without night clouds and without any nuances of any kind. It is a black that seems to absorb one's gaze in a fateful way. A black that's more like no sky at all. On the Earth below, there are columns of smoke and fire. The little figures seem to be fleeing. Not in any specific direction, but in every direction. If you look closely, you can see terrified expressions on their little faces.