Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

Hannah Linus is opening her mouth in a tension-releasing yawn and moving an arm to hold her eye protector when her head hits something soft and flabby. Something that judging by the tactile sensation could very well be a butt. Hannah Linus frowns and raises a hand in apology. Her eye protector floats off across the thermal saltwater pool toward the edge lined with relaxing candles. Hannah Linus can't imagine who the idiot is who lined the pool with little candles. She curses in Swedish and makes her way through the floating bodies and the erect bodies of the aquatic therapists toward her eye protector.

Besides Hannah Linus, there are half a dozen clients of the SpaCenter floating in lethargic poses in the pool's salt water. Hannah Linus makes her way with difficulty through the salt water, following the green stain that the artificial waves carry farther and farther off. Through the fog that floats over the heated pool she thinks she can see someone signaling to her from the entrance to the dressing area. According to the Spa-Center's promotional brochure, salt water heated to the exact temperature of thirty-eight degrees Celsius supports most of the body's weight. The vertebrae and muscles relax more easily and the spine is freed from the force of earth's gravity. The complete holistic treatment lasts sixty minutes. And the heated salt water produces an optimum energy-conducting effect. Hannah Linus couldn't care less about what the Spa-Center's aquatic therapy promotional brochure says. Nor is she particularly interested in the emancipation of her muscular and skeletal systems. What she really wants is a place where everyone leaves her alone and where she can shut her eyes and imagine that she has rented an island paradise to get away from it all.

Around her, the aquatic therapists are leading the lethargic floating bodies through the pool with gentle motions and intermittent immersions. Hannah Linus finally traps the green stain that is her eye protector. A few steps away from her, framed by the candle's little flames, a Japanese master of Reiki therapy is laying his hands on a patient to transmit his flow of vital energy.

“Miss,” says someone from a corner of the pool. Hannah Linus squints her eyes to see through the fog. It is a young man with the official swimsuit of the Spa-Center chain, pointing with one finger to his diving watch. “Miss. I think your sixty minutes ended two minutes ago.”

Hannah Linus gathers her things from the locker and dries her hair vigorously with a towel. Then she knots the towel below her underarms and starts to walk toward the dressing rooms with her sports bag hanging from her shoulder. She is walking between the bubbling hydromassage pools when a shaved head with swimming goggles emerges suddenly from the bubbling surface of one of the pools. Causing some sort of heated wave that splatters the floor and walls. Hannah Linus stares with a frightened face at the guy now coming out of the hydromassage pool, leaning effortlessly on his muscular tattooed arms. The guy takes off his swimming goggles and looks at her with a wide smile. Hannah Linus is paralyzed with horror, her towel splattered with water and her sports bag hanging from her shoulder.

“You,” she manages to finally mutter. “What are you doing here?”

“Me?” Saudade points to his chest with his eyebrows widely arched. “Are you a client of this place, too?”

Hannah Linus sets off running through the hallway that leads to the dressing rooms, grabbing the upper edge of her towel with one hand and the strap of the sports bag with the other. Halfway there she slips and crashes into a middle-aged woman, who falls stiff as a board into one of the hydrotherapy pools. Hannah Linus doesn't turn to hear the complaining voices. Nor does she stop to avoid a cart of towels whose handler stares at her with a mix of hate and prudence. Saudade reaches her a few steps from the door to the women's dressing room. He grabs her by the arm and turns her toward his smiling face. Hannah Linus sticks a hand into her sports bag. She takes out a travel-size spray can and points it in Saudade's face.

“You can't imagine what this does,” she says through clenched teeth. “You can't imagine what it can do to your eyes.”

Saudade looks at the spray with a frown.

“Ecological hairspray,” he says. “You're gonna blind me with that?”

Hannah Linus looks down and reads the label on the spray can. She puts it back in her sports bag and takes out the personal self-defense spray that she bought a month ago, after she was attacked in her own office at the gallery. Saudade sighs.

“How dare you follow me,” she says. In a voice that is both low and tense. “Your wife put me in the hospital. You could have called to see how I was.”

“I came now to see how you are.” Saudade shrugs his shoulders. He looks Hannah Linus over with a vertical visual sweep. The kind of look usually associated with the first phases of a sexual advance. “And it looks like you're fine. Although it's hard to tell, with that towel on.”

A couple of people with the official swimsuits of the Spa-Center chain are attending to the middle-aged woman who was violently knocked into the hydromassage pool. Other clients of the spa franchise have gathered around the scene of the fall to check on the victim's state. Hannah Linus begins to experience that whole chain of sexual feelings that simultaneously produces a certain feeling of conceptual uneasiness. Saudade sticks a hand beneath the towel she has knotted below her underarms. Hannah Linus realizes that she has been holding up the personal self-defense spray for a minute, with the nozzle orifice not exactly pointing in Saudade's direction. Nor is she entirely sure that she's broken all the security seals necessary to be able to trigger it. The tension she is feeling isn't exactly the tension you feel when your personal safety is in danger. It's a tension of contrasting elements. It looks like they are finally taking the woman out of the hydromassage pool. Her face is very red and her swimming cap has shifted on the crown of her head in such a way that it now looks sort of like the Smurfs' flaccid, fallen hats.

Hannah Linus is experiencing a certain difficulty concentrating. Saudade is saying something about the fact of having an important professional career and a son at a difficult age. He is saying that his career and his son take up a lot of his time and barely leave him opportunities for socializing. Or for visiting people in the hospital.

“I'm going to call security,” she interrupts. Looking with something like curiosity at the hand he's placed beneath her towel, which is now playing with the elastic edge of her one-piece bathing suit. “And when I leave here I'm going to ask for a restraining order. For you and your crazy wife.”

“I had to pay the whole month's fee just for them to let me in,” says Saudade, with some sort of martyrological face. “If that doesn't show you I love you, I don't know what I have to do.”

The sexual feelings that Hannah Linus is now having manifest themselves in the form of small shivers and strange sensations that are like slight temperature changes and tingling in her middle section. Something located in the lower part of her spinal column. One of the reasons that Hannah Linus isn't good at communicating her sexual impulses, and experiences a feeling of conceptual uneasiness toward them, is the fact that her sexual responses usually seem to be mixed with ideas of submission and self-degradation in a violent context. With images of struggle and twisted arms. Of violent penetrations in underground parking lots. Hannah Linus has no idea why the dominant culture links violent penetrations with underground parking lots. The facilities of the Spa-Center Diagonal franchise are impregnated with a characteristic odor. A mix of dampness and bath salts and incense. The odor doesn't contribute to the sexual sensation but it does accentuate the strangeness of the situation. The knot that holds up Hannah Linus's towel below her underarms comes undone with a sigh and falls to the ground. The towel lies wrinkled at her feet. Imparting a certain atmosphere of classical mythology to the scene. The unveiling of the classic defenseless female. Her exposure to the forcefulness of the classical phallus. Leda and the Swan. The Rape of the Sabine Women. Hannah Linus sticks her hand beneath Saudade's swimsuit and grabs his penis. A group of Spa-Center clients, who are passing by at that moment, whistle and clap.