Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

Iris gestures to the taxi with her hand. The taxi slows down and finally stops in front of her.

“You can't leave me.” Yanel tries to take a cigarette out of a pack but his hand is shaky and several cigarettes fall onto the sidewalk. “I gave you everything you have. You owe me your career.” He pauses. “If you leave me I could kill you,” he adds in a dubious tone.

Eric Yanel watches as the taxi drives off with Iris inside, showing him her middle finger through the window. Then he starts to head off down the street, dragging his leg.

The Day of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel is coming to an end. The rays of late-afternoon sun fall through the balconies of the Gothic Quarter like the incandescent ashes of a silent fire. The chromatic range of the late-afternoon sun on the roofs also suggests that something is burning in some part of the sky.

Valentina Parini is sitting with her legs crossed on her bed in her bedroom on the first floor of the Palau de la Mar Fosca. Experiencing a feeling of imminent danger. The Christmas sounds filtering through the wall and closed windows of the former palace not only fail to dispel the feeling of danger but seem to increase it. A few hours ago Valentina Parini discovered that she can only mitigate the feeling of danger by sitting with her legs crossed at the head of her bed and rocking backward rhythmically so that the back of her head hits the wall.

“Tina?” calls her mother from the bathroom where she is blow-drying her hair during the preparatory phase of her Friday-night Husband Hunting Expedition. “Will you come here for a minute?”

In front of her bed, in a niche of the wall that Marcia Parini thinks looks too much like an altar, is the broken alarm clock that Valentina Parini was carrying in her hand the last time she saw her father. The last day she ever saw her father. When she went out into the street looking for him so he could fix the broken alarm clock and she found him putting his last packed-up belongings into the trunk of his car. And she stayed there, with the broken alarm clock in her hand, planted in the doorway of the former ducal palace, while her father just said good-bye with a nervous smile, got into the car as fast as he could and drove off, never to return. The day when things really started to go bad in Valentina Parini's life. Not to say that they were good before.

“Valentina?” Her mother's voice sounds somewhat opaque and at the same time somewhat shrill from inside the blow-dryer's aerial sound cushion. “Remember what we talked about, about having your head in the clouds.”

The feeling of danger that Valentina Parini is experiencing tonight, which forces her for some reason to rock back and forth and hit the back of her head against the wall, began at some point this morning. At first she didn't pay it much attention. At first it wasn't much more than some kind of pins and needles. Like the feeling you might be being watched. It got worse at lunchtime and during her afternoon classes, until her hands were too rigid to hold a spoon or a pen. Later, at home, the feeling became incredibly urgent. Like someone aiming at your head with a loaded weapon.

Valentina checks the time on the clock on her desk: it's eight thirty. The back of her head, which she's been hitting against the wall for quite a while, hurts. To be precise, it seems that the combination of the rhythmic motion and the pain is what helps to mitigate the feeling of danger. Now she leaps up from the bed and walks through the hallway holding her breath and clenching her fists tightly. Like those people in horror movies who walk through the hallway of an abandoned house seconds before someone bursts into the darkness of the hallway with a butcher's knife. From the doorway of the bathroom she sees her mother drying her hair in her mother's traditional hair-drying posture: leaning forward, sticking her butt out and moving her head alternately to dry the respective hair that hangs from one side of her head and the other. Valentina bites a knuckle with a pensive expression and observes her mother's ass. She's always found her mother's ass strange and unpleasant. Absurdly soft and flaccid. Tonight, however, she finds the sight of Marcia Parini's ass almost unbearable, and it conjures up all sorts of mental images of marine mammals. Once Valentina saw something on TV about marine mammals and ever since then she's been haunted by those images of greasy beings with mottled gray skin and horrifying warts.

Valentina goes into the bathroom with her face wrinkled in disgust. She kneels in front of the toilet and vomits a couple of streams of something liquid and bitter. Marcia Parini lifts up her head and looks at her daughter while still drying her hair.

“Did you stuff yourself with chocolate again?” she says. With the same simultaneously opaque and shrill voice that she uses to make herself heard over the blow-dryer. “It serves you right. Didn't I tell you to defrost yesterday's leftover lasagna?”

Valentina lifts the palm of one hand to indicate that she's okay and for a moment she has to repress the desire to hit her head against the edge of the toilet.

“You're going to be alone for a little while tonight.” Marcia Parini turns off the hair dryer and puts a tight dress on over her underwear. “If your grandmother calls, tell her I went to a Book Club meeting. You can watch TV, but just regular TV. No satellite stuff.” She looks in the mirror and adjusts the straps of the tight dress with her fingers. “And leave the lights on in the living room and stairway, the last time I almost broke my neck.”

Valentina proceeds to rinse out her mouth as her mother leaves the bathroom. Then she hears the clickety-clack of the high heels her mother wears when she goes out husband hunting and, a minute later, the noise of the door to the street closing.

Valentina Parini leans her head slightly and squints her eyes and concentrates on trying to hear Lucas Giraut's footsteps in the apartment upstairs. Sometimes she follows his itineraries through the house: from the sofa to the fridge, from the kitchen to the television, from the bed to the bath. When she's home alone with her mother, it comforts her to know that Lucas is in the apartment upstairs. Doing his usual routines, seated in front of the computer or simply reading his professional magazines about antiques. Tonight no footsteps are heard, or any other noise that would indicate that Lucas Giraut is in his apartment on the upper floor of the former ducal palace. In Valentina's opinion, Lucas Giraut isn't stupid like other people. In the moments when Valentina Parini isn't wishing with all her heart that her mother wasn't her mother, she wouldn't mind if Lucas married her.

At eleven thirty on the Night of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel, Valentina puts on her parka and goes out. She crosses the Plaza Sant Jaume with its stupid institutional crèche made entirely of recyclable materials and takes Ferran Street. At this time on a Friday night, the streets of the Gothic Quarter are filled with groups of drunk British and Irish tourists singing British and Irish songs and vomiting on the sidewalks. Although she walks with her head bowed and her hands in the pockets of the parka, several British and Irish tourists start following her, saying things in English and even trying to touch her. A couple of teenage Arab petty thieves try to corner her against a wall, but she stares at them and something in the way she stares at them makes them back up, terrified. When she finally gets to the Ramblas, the contrast makes them seem like a much more pleasant place. With their hordes of tourist families and sleepy policemen.

The entrance to the franchise store in the Plaza Catalunya where the Launch Party for Stephen King's New Novel is taking place has been decorated for the occasion with a gigantic promotional banner that has the title of Stephen King's new novel, WONDERFUL WORLD, above a stereotypically idyllic image of an American suburb. Valentina Parini goes up the escalator wringing her hands. The feeling of danger that she's been feeling all day seems to have solidified and concentrated around this moment and place. The moment she's been waiting for for weeks, but which for some reason seems to have transformed into a vortex of danger. Some of the customers of the franchise store move aside to let her pass.