Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“I mean,” says Iris, “that I'm tired of deodorant ads where you can only see your armpit. What makes you think I want to marry someone who's in commercials where you can only see his armpit? Same goes for ads where my fiancé is running the marathon with two thousand other people. Not to mention the car commercials.” Now all the expressive elements of her face and body seem to be focused on transmitting fatigued repugnance: the crossed arms; the rolled eyes; the head slightly cocked to one side. “We are here because I've decided to start meeting interesting people. For the first time in my life. And I can't believe you're going to start that number with your knee. Do you really think it's going to work again?”

Eric Yanel leaves his drink on a passing waiter's tray and squats on the floor. With a look of intense pain. Grabbing his knee with that expression, like he'd just eaten something rotten, that athletes have as they grab their knees or other recently injured body parts.

“It's one of his tricks,” says Iris Gonzalvo to the man with the fattest ass Eric Yanel has seen in his life. “The knee thing. He does it to get pity. In situations like this. Shit.” She snorts in irritation. “I can't believe I used to fall for it.”

Now Eric Yanel is sitting on the floor. Hugging his leg, with an expression of intense pain on his face. Several of the party guests approach him and ask if he's okay. Yanel looks up from his knee and at where Iris Gonzalvo was just a moment before. And where she is no longer.

Yanel leaps up. He extends out his neck periscopically and searches the room with his gaze. Several guests continue to approach him with glasses of water, putting their hands on his arm and asking him if he needs anything. Solicitous men with bellies hanging like basketballs. Women with horribly cellulitic thighs. Bloated calves. Yanel pushes them away and finally manages to see Iris's svelte figure and long dark hair in the distance. In the section of the party closest to the exit. She seems to be getting her fur coat and her tall, furry Moscow-inspired hat from the coat check. She waits with a neutral expression for an employee to help her put her coat on and then leaves the nightclub with majestic strides. Yanel's face is as shaken as if someone had hit him over the head with a mallet.

“Something similar happened to me once,” says the guy with the fat ass and the comically wide face. While Yanel looks toward the exit, his face shaken. “I mean those erection problems you have. When it happened, my wife and I used all kinds of sex toys. Even vibrating objects and electronic thingamajigs. And once in a while, I didn't mind paying some guy to fill in on certain conjugal duties,” said the guy with the fat ass. His expression transmits a strange enthusiasm. An enthusiasm reminiscent of Oriental holy men. At the happy end of their chain of reincarnations. “We also enjoyed public places, or unlikely settings.”

Eric Yanel begins to shiver. At the center of a circle of glasses of water and solicitous offers of medical help. His lower jaw seems to be out of joint and trembling at the same time. In spite of what he said a few minutes ago, it's not entirely true that he has no problem getting satisfactory erections in private. He has actually begun to have problems with the very idea of an erection. The erection as the central distinctive element of the male condition. Yanel has been feeling an unpleasant pressure on his male psyche for months now. He doesn't like to think about his penis and when he does, it's with certain anxiety. He avoids looking at his penis when he showers. Which has been creating a sort of blind spot in his showers. A blind spot located at the height of his crotch. To draw his attention away from it, Yanel has put a portable compact disc player in the bathroom and he sings along to commercial pop songs from the eighties while he showers. Eric Yanel's favorite pop singer is Madonna. Particularly her records from the eighties. The rest of the time, Yanel attributes his general lack of interest in phallic sex to his fiancée's phallic obsession, and the stress that obsession generates in him. On a couple of recent occasions he has paid prostitutes to have them masturbate in front of him, or to let him lick their anuses or vaginas.

After a moment of paralysis, Yanel blinks. In that surprised way people who've just come out of a trance blink. He stammers out something unintelligible about his knee and starts to limp as fast as he can through the guests.

Yanel reaches Iris at the corner of the Pedralbes street where Iris is standing in front of a traffic light, her arms crossed over her chest and her body leaned slightly forward and to one side the way people do when waiting for a taxi. Eric Yanel approaches her limping flamboyantly. It is one of those bright winter nights when the scattered stars and the positioning lights of planes in the sky generate metaphors of the Implacability of Cosmic Loneliness and the Possibility of Life Being Shortened by Cancer. Iris's fur coat and her tall, furry hat, in the urban landscape of wrought-iron garden gates and early-twentieth-century mansions, bestow the scene with the unmistakable quality of a romantic theater piece. Yanel left his jacket in the coat check.

“I'm ready to give it another try,” says Yanel. His panting creates misty little clouds of steam in the frozen air. “I mean fucking. Not that I really want to. I've already explained how bad the pressure and everything make me feel. But I can try. Really.”

There is a moment of silence. Iris's silhouette is genuinely romantic, with her arms crossed over her fur coat. Yanel is standing before her, turned to one side, with his back curved forward and one hand on his knee. A bit like a Russian soldier in a romantic play, wounded and leaned elegantly toward one of those Russian ladies.

“You can try.” Iris takes some sort of powder compact out of the pocket of her coat. She picks up a little bit of cocaine from inside of it with a key and sticks it into her nostril. Then she sniffs. “But not with me. I'm leaving you. Good-bye. We're not engaged anymore.” She lifts her eyebrows. “We're not even boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.”

“I swear things are going to change.” Yanel takes a wallet out of his pants pocket and starts rifling around inside it. “For real this time. I mean, not like the last time I told you things were going to change. You hear me? This time things are definitely going to change. My career is really going to take off. This time for real. I met someone. One of those eccentric millionaires. His name is Giraut.” He finally finds what he was looking for in his wallet. A business card. He pulls it out with trembling fingers and gives it to Iris. “He lives in a gigantic mansion. I've been there lots of times. A patron of the arts. A good friend of mine. He's going to produce a movie for me. As the star. Scriptwriter. Director. Whatever I want. You can be in it, too, of course.”

The vaguely orangish glow of the streetlights on the wrought-iron garden gates and early-twentieth-century mansions and Iris's Moscow-inspired silhouette intensify the atmosphere of a Russian romantic theater set. Like those orangish spotlights they project right onto the actors in romantic plays set on winter streets with streetlights painted onto the backdrop. Iris examines the card with an impatient expression.

“It doesn't say anything here about him being a film producer,” she says. “It says here: Lucas Giraut. Antiques Dealer. By Appointment Only.”

“You don't understand these things.” Yanel looks desperately at an empty taxi that approaches the stoplight where they are standing. “This guy is an intellectual. His family made a fortune off antiques. Oriental art. Old paintings of eclipses and stuff like that.”