Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

None of that stupid chitchat from her local employees, she says to herself as she chews. Letting her gaze wander in that way that anyone eating by themselves, anywhere in the world, lets their gaze wander. Not sitting uncomfortably at a table in a cafeteria that smells of grease, surrounded by the smoke of half a dozen cigarettes. No putting up with the way her female employees laugh absurdly at her male employees' jokes. To hell with all of them, thinks Hannah Linus as she stabs a cherry tomato with her fork and brings it to her mouth.

The cherry tomato remains suspended a couple of inches from her open mouth. It remains suspended in the middle of its trajectory from its plastic container to Hannah Linus's mouth because of something that she has just seen. Something that's approaching the reinforced glass door of her office with furious strides. Through the deserted office area. A young woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that's a knockoff of a well-known sports brand. Hannah Linus pulls out first one earbud and then the other and stares with her brow furrowed as the woman furiously enters her office and bolts the door from inside. The woman's ponytail is an obviously erroneous stylistic choice, considering the structural features of her face.

The two women stare at each other in silence. The most characteristic facial feature of the furious woman that has just come in is a nervous tic that makes her wrinkle her forehead compulsively at regular intervals. As if approximately every half second she was surprised at something.

“First of all,” says Hannah, moving the container of salad to one side and placing the plastic fork next to it. “I don't know who you think you are coming into my office unannounced. And second of all, I demand you unbolt that door.” She examines the woman from head to toe. “Are you the cleaning lady? This office was already cleaned this morning.”

The woman holds Hannah Linus's gaze. Hannah discovers that it is difficult to concentrate on what she wants to say, because of the woman's nervous tic, which makes her appear constantly surprised about everything.

“You're Anna, right?” says the woman with the sportswear and the nervous facial tic finally.

“Hannah,” answers Hannah. “Hannah Linus.”

“Go to hell,” says the woman.

“What?” Hannah seems perplexed.

“I said go to hell.” The woman remains leaning on the bolted reinforced glass door, staring into Hannah's face with a furious expression that her tics contradict approximately every half second with random infiltrations of surprise. “Nobody tells me how to talk. Much less some bitch from England.”

“I'm Swedish…,” Hannah starts to say, but she stops when she sees the woman with the tics take her back off of the door and start walking toward her desk. Her gaze rests for a fraction of a second on the intercom on her desk that can put her in touch, through a simple sequence of button pushing, with the gallery's security guard. She is beginning to suspect she could be in a potentially dangerous situation. “Hold on. How did you get in here?”

The woman stops on the other side of the desk and sends deceptive facial messages of surprise while her mouth twists in an expression of disgust. She leans her body over the desk and rests her palms on its surface. Her rhythmically convulsive facial features could be found attractive by someone attracted to features that convey permanent dissatisfaction mixed with potentially explosive fury. The locks of hair that escape from her ponytail and fall over her face give her a certain air of matricidal heroine in a Greek tragedy.

“I'm Saudade's wife,” says the woman.

Hannah Linus lifts a hand to her mouth and begins to chew on a cuticle while inside her the feeling that she could indeed be in a potentially dangerous situation grows. The door that connects the gallery with the office area is not locked, and the woman must have gotten in when the guard was distracted. Her hand tries to surreptitiously approach the intercom on her desk, but before she has a chance to reach it the woman grabs the device with both hands and pulls on it with all her strength, trying to rip it from its network of different colored wires. She doesn't manage it on the first try, or the second, and the woman continues wrestling with the intercom in her hands. Pulling furiously and fruitlessly on the network of wires. Hannah Linus looks past the woman. Past the office's reinforced glass wall. Toward the security guard who has just become aware of the situation that is going on and is now running through the empty gallery toward the reinforced glass door.

“I don't deny this is a delicate situation.” Hannah Linus looks at the security guard. He has just arrived at the door and is now struggling with the door handle, not yet realizing that it's bolted from inside. “This is all very unpleasant.”

The woman with the nervous tic opens her eyes very wide in a gesture that paradoxically does not emphasize the elements of compulsive surprise already present on her facial landscape.

“You're a whore,” she says. “If you ever see my husband again I'll kill you.”

She pauses and seems to realize that she's still holding up Hannah Linus's desk intercom. She looks at it for a moment as if someone had just put it in her hand as an annoying joke and she places it back on the desk.

Hannah closes her eyes and raises her hands the way people raise their hands when asking for a moment to think. The security guard's struggle with the door is now clearly audible as the glass door beats against its metal support structure, causing a weak vibration of the other glass walls. The woman continues to lean slightly over the desk and observes Hannah Linus with an expression in which surprise seems to have completely disappeared in favor of rage. A rage that's present in all of her features as small seismic tremors.

“I'm not going to see your husband again.” Hannah makes small pacifying movements with her hands. “I swear. Step back a bit. This is making me quite nervous.”

The security guard has stopped struggling with the door and is now talking on his walkie-talkie while making a series of hand gestures in Hannah's direction through the glass door of her office. The security guard's gestures seem to be both asking her to wait a few seconds and assuring her that everything is going to be resolved in a satisfactory fashion. The woman in sportswear with the nervous tic and not very flattering styling that was probably created without the help of a professional stylist takes a step back. Her mouth still gathered in an irritated expression.

“I'll kill you.” The woman backs up slowly toward the door and stops to point at Hannah with her index finger and thumb extended upward. With that universal threat usually known as the Finger Pistol. “You understand?”

Hannah Linus rolls her executive chair a couple of inches back and picks up a pen from her desk. She holds the pen by the end opposite the point and makes a series of taps on the desk with the cap end. It is a gesture that she has been perfecting over hundreds of executive meetings. Meant to both attract the attention of whomever she is talking to as well as dramatically underscore her words.

“Talk to your husband.” Hannah Linus looks at the woman with some sort of renewed confidence. In the background of her visual field, her administrative assistant, Raquel, is running a bunch of keys over to the place where the security guard is waiting. The security guard is now looking at Hannah Linus with a reassuring smile whose main message seems to be that the situation of imminent danger to Hannah Linus's personal safety is already in the process of being defused. “This type of situation can be solved. Contrary to what they say.”

What happens next takes Hannah Linus by surprise. Probably because she was already anticipating an uncomplicated conclusion. So that she is unable to interpret the movement of her adversary. Nor does she manage to get out of the way when the woman comes around the desk and attacks her. Causing the chair and its occupant to fall over onto the carpeted floor. The two women are rolling around on the ground with several locks of Hannah Linus's hair tightly grasped in the other woman's hands when Raquel finally manages to open the glass door. With the fourth key that she tries in the lock.