Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

Manta lets out a grunt of acquiescence. Then he looks at Panakian's pale, scrawny backside. With the splintered piece of pool cue in his hand. With the same facial expression that Olympic archers have before releasing an arrow. Or bowlers before sending the ball down the lane. The spectators groan and make horrified faces and shake their heads. Aníbal Manta smiles beneath his broken nose.

Eric Yanel stretches out his neck periscopically to see above the heads of the party guests, who are nothing like any idea Yanel has ever had about what party guests should be. In spite of the fact that it's perfectly clear that a party is being celebrated in the uptown nightclub. There are uniformed waiters strolling with trays of filled glasses, which are being replaced with empty glasses at a dizzying rate. Everyone is animatedly drinking and smoking and talking. But Yanel can't seem to reconcile the guests with his idea of a party. Many of them are fat. Others are old, and some are both things at once. No one is wearing really expensive clothes and most of those present have no discernible hairstyle. A veritable ocean of spare tires, beer bellies, fat ankles, swaying double chins and nonexistent waists as far as the eye can see. Many of the guests look as if they've never set foot in a gym in their lives.

After a moment, Yanel locates Iris Gonzalvo at a distant point of the party. Talking to a guy with a wide face and metal-rimmed glasses. The most striking aesthetic element of the guy talking to Iris seems to be an ass much larger than any ass Yanel has ever seen on a man. An ass that would even be too big on a woman. Big and fat. It used to be that Iris would never have been seen in public talking to a man with an ass like that. Yanel feels vaguely alarmed. With his drink in his hand, and trying not to touch anyone more than strictly necessary, he makes his way through the mass of unlikely party guests that separates him from his fiancée.

“I don't think you should feel bad,” the guy with the unbelievably fat ass is saying to Iris when Eric stops in front of them with his drink in his hand. “For having put out your cigarette in that man's face. Of course it is annoying that he's suing you and all that. Especially when you say you're going through a difficult moment financially.” He shrugs his shoulders. Now that he can see it up close, Yanel speculates that the guy's face is actually wider than it is long. “But you definitely were expressing what you were feeling. Solving a complex communicative situation. It was brave to do what you did. And, more importantly, you were completely sincere.”

Iris Gonzalvo turns partway toward Eric Yanel and looks at him with a slight frown. Yanel doesn't detect anything in her gaze that resembles sympathy. Which causes him certain confusion: Was there ever anything positive in the way his fiancée looked at him, or is he feeling nostalgia for something that only ever existed in his imagination? The truth is he can't remember.

“Eric,” she says to him, “This is Álex Jardí. He writes books. Those things people read. I was telling him about my problems, about you never being able to get it up anymore. And how no one wants to give you work anymore and we have no money and no one has called us in months.” She takes a sip on her drink without taking her eyes off of Yanel. Then she gestures with the half-empty cup to the guy with the unbelievably fat ass. “Álex published a best seller a few years ago. One of those books that help people find themselves and live happier lives. Called The Lost Rivers of London.”

“They're four independent stories,” explains Álex Jardí. “But interconnected. I consider it a sort of manual. To finding your own inner lost river. That's what I call that person we all have inside of us. The person we want to be. We all have one inside but we have to learn to let it out. To metamorphose.”

Yanel looks at the guy with the fat ass. His face is wide in a way that makes you think of cartoon characters that have been hit by a falling piano, making them more horizontal than vertical.

“I don't understand anything,” says Yanel. “I don't understand what these people are.” He points with his head toward the people around him. His facial expression makes one think of Muslim clerics at a summer foam party. Of Oxford graduates in the middle of a slum. Of Japanese people in any social event outside of Japan. “I also don't understand why we're here when we could be in some normal party. Who's throwing this party? I don't know anyone.”

“You don't know anyone because this is a literary party,” Iris tells him. “The people here are writers, editors and journalists. Which is to say not the kind of party that you're used to. There are no naked whores carrying around trays filled with lines of cocaine. And you're probably gonna have a hard time finding someone to suck you off in the bathroom.” She makes a vague gesture with the hand that holds her drink, toward Yanel's crotch. “Although it must not be very fun for you anyway. Considering you can't get it up anymore.”

Eric Yanel rubs the wings of his nose with a circular movement of his index finger and thumb, which is one of his traditional nervous gestures. One of Eric Yanel's Classic Nervous Gestures. One of those gestures that people who know him automatically associate with his idiosyncratic gesticular repertoire. The wings of Eric Yanel's nose seem to be always red. As the result of some kind of localized skin irritation. Eric Yanel's other Classic Nervous Gestures are (a) sniffling loudly and often while wrinkling up his entire face, and (b) abruptly tossing his head back to reconfigure his coiffed blond hair, the way hair models on television shampoo commercials toss their heads back to shake their long locks and the way regular people shake their long hair in parody of the shampoo ads. In Yanel's case, however, there doesn't seem to be any attempt at parody. Parody seems, in general, to be foreign to his expressive repertoire.

“Everything works fine when I masturbate.” Yanel looks at Iris with a frown. “I've told you many times. So it's not strictly true that I can't get it up. It's not the same thing that I can't get it up with someone else as if I can't ever get it up.” He pauses. Several of the guests located in groups meta-adjacent to where Yanel is talking to Iris are looking at him out of the corners of their eyes. “I could give you a thousand excuses. That's obvious. But I'd rather not. That's something that I think you should appreciate. As my fiancée and all.”

“Iris told me that she wants to become a famous actress,” says Álex Jardí. His ass is excessive, according to every known canon, yet its enormous size seems to give him a certain quality that's hard to explain. A certain moral solidity. Or a certain extraordinarily solid anchoring to the ground. “She also told me that you might try to thwart her success. Due to envy brought on by your own failure as an actor.”

Yanel makes a pained face and leans forward to massage his knee with his hands.

“Who is this guy?” he says. With his waist doubled forward and still stroking his knee. “And why are we here? I've never read a book, I don't think. Maybe when I was a kid.” He looks up at Iris Gonzalvo, who is now looking at him with her arms crossed and an impatient expression. “And what do you mean by all that? And why are you talking to me in that tone of voice?”

At this point it is difficult not to suspect that some of the members of the groups meta-adjacent to the group composed of Eric, Iris and the man named Álex Jardí have subtly moved closer in order to eavesdrop on the conversation. Some vectors and degrees of head leaning seem to corroborate this suspicion.