Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

The three men look at each other for a moment.

“But what the fuck is this?” says Mr. Bocanegra.

“I think he's committing suicide.” Aníbal Manta scratches his head pensively.

Yanel looks at them with his face blue and his eyes bulging. Still kicking.

“There'll be no suicide,” says Mr. Bocanegra in a firm tone. “And much less on such a happy night. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, for fuck's sake. And you”—he points at Yanel with his cigar—“still owe me money. So don't even think about trying to get over.”

Mr. Bocanegra leaves the room with an indignant air. Aníbal Manta sighs and carefully tries to get closer to Yanel. Trying to avoid his frenetic kicking.

Christmas in Barcelona looks like a story by Stephen King. Not exactly because of the combination of Christmas lights, streetlamps lit up in the early evening, shop windows and corporate signs. A combination that's yellow and doesn't cast a single shadow. Not because of the institutional carols that hundreds of public-address speakers simultaneously emit. Not because of the hordes of people crossing Diagonal and other avenues, loaded down with bags from the big department stores either. It's their faces. The happy faces you see on people. The way the children laugh and run through the streets, and their parents' tired but happy faces. Like in those Stephen King novels where entire towns are controlled by a Central Intelligence. Those novels where one of the main characters, who's immune to the central control, runs through the streets shouting and crashing into hordes of happy-faced pedestrians. And suddenly, as soon as the sun sets behind the hills, the people begin to disappear. The streets are deserted in mere minutes. Like in those novels by Stephen King about mind control where night falls and wild dogs take over the city.

Iris Gonzalvo drives her brick red Alfa Romeo through the deserted blocks of the Upper Ensanche. With her wrist leaning on the upper curve of the steering wheel, and the car's interior flooded with an analgesic blend of music at top volume and cigarette smoke. She reaches into the purse on the adjoining seat and pulls out her key chain equipped with some sort of miniature remote control that opens the door to the garage. Without ever looking in the direction of the purse or the key chain, her gaze fixed on the deserted street in front of the Alfa Romeo. When she gets to the corner where her parking garage and her apartment are she makes an abrupt turn, causing a lingering family of holiday shoppers to scatter in every direction, shouting and dropping their bags full of gifts.

Once she's parked, Iris turns off the music and grabs the Blockbuster bag that's on the backseat. She goes up the stairs awash in yellow light that leads to her apartment and puts the high-security key into the lock. The kind of Stephen King novels that the staircase leading from the garage to the apartment is reminiscent of are those zombie novels where there's a couple of zombies lying in wait in a parking lot staircase. When Iris enters the apartment, there's a commercial on TV for a channel in which several famous people are toasting with cava. The way they're staring at the camera makes them look like they're being controlled by some Central Intelligence. With enormous smiles. And dubious expressions of clichéd enthusiasm.

Iris drops the Blockbuster bag and takes a look around her. With a frown. She opens the bedroom door and looks behind the sofa. She looks into the room with the exercise equipment and opens the bath curtain to see what's in the tub. Finally she opens the door to the walk-in closet and finds Eric Yanel sleeping inside the laundry basket. In his underwear and hugging a bottle of Macallan. She closes the door to the walk-in closet again. The television is playing a cava commercial that shows a boy dressed in old-fashioned clothes carrying a gigantic bottle of cava under his arm and looking at the camera with a malicious smile. Iris makes herself a Finlandia with tonic and places it on a tray next to eight very long and perfectly straight lines of cocaine. Then she takes out a DVD box of the eighth season of Friends from the Blockbuster bag and puts the first disc into the DVD player. She sits on the sofa with the tray on her lap and pushes the PLAY button on the remote.

* * *

Mr. Bocanegra, Show Business Impresario, is lounging in his chair with a napkin tied around his neck. Seated at a table in the restaurant where the Bocanegra family celebrates Christmas Eve every year. He is surrounded by his complex system of brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law and the expectant looks of half a dozen nieces and nephews, their eyes lit up with greed. A greed that Bocanegra has already been feeding for a couple of hours with the smiling transfer of plentiful one-hundred-and two-hundred-euro bills into the trembling hands of his nieces and nephews. Some of them are so anxious with greed that they have barely touched their desserts.

“Isn't it time to open presents?” Bocanegra wipes the sauce from his mustache with a corner of his napkin.

A roar of wild joy emanates from the throats of the half dozen children who are now running toward the Christmas tree under which a restaurant employee in uniform has placed all the Bocanegra family gifts. The employee in uniform moves away instinctively.

“You haven't spent a ton on presents for the kids again, have you?” one of Bocanegra's brothers asks Bocanegra, who is smiling beneath his mustache with quasi-parental pride.

Around the Christmas tree, Bocanegra's nieces and nephews are kicking aside all the gifts that aren't wrapped in the distinctive red and green paper that Mr. Bocanegra has his Christmas gifts wrapped in each year. Some of the adults seated at the table exchange uncomfortable looks. Mr. Bocanegra's nieces and nephews rapidly identify their gifts and tear off the red and green paper and shout with enthusiasm when they confirm that the professional sports equipment and portable technology that they have received this year are the most expensive models on the international market. There are more uncomfortable looks exchanged among the adults seated at the table. One of the nieces, kneeling beside the tree, cries with happiness as she hugs something that looks like a robot in the shape of a dog that has just come out of a box with Japanese writing on it. Another nephew screams with joy and pretends to play an electric guitar that he has just taken out of its case. At a sensible distance away from the group of children, the employee wearing the uniform of the exclusive uptown restaurant observes the scene with an element of horror in his smile.

* * *

Aníbal Manta is lying in his double bed with several large pillows behind his enormous back. With his reading glasses on. Carefully examining an Italian issue of the X-Men and consulting at regular intervals the Spanish-Italian/Italian-Spanish dictionary he bought a couple of days earlier in a downtown bookstore. His wife appears in the doorway of the bedroom with a bathrobe over her nightgown and a blender in her hand, one of those ones that look like miniature spaceships.

“I'm going over to the neighbors' house to return their blender,” says his wife. “I'm taking the keys in case I stay to chat and end up coming back late.” She smiles with a vaguely obsequious expression. “Just so you know.”

Manta looks at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It's ten past eleven. Manta sighs.

“I won't wait up, then,” he says in a soft voice.

“Good idea,” says his wife, who is already on her way to the door. “Don't wait up.” A couple of seconds later the sound of the door closing is heard.

Since he started reading the Italian X-Men comic that same afternoon after lunch, Manta has managed to decipher four and a half pages. Which, considering the comic has thirty-two pages, seems to indicate that his reading is going to take him at least the rest of the week. The deciphering process is hindered by the fact that Manta, who has suffered from severe dyslexia since childhood, has trouble finding the words in the dictionary. He is often forced to pause and try to remember the damn alphabetical order by counting on his fingers the way they taught him in the special school. On a few occasions his therapist has seemed willing to admit the idea that his dyslexia could be a result of the traumas he experienced during his childhood because of his excessive size and his schoolmates' taunting.