Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

The pages of today's La Vanguardia are filled with photographs of gigantic waves in the Pacific. Koldo Cruz pays particular attention to the Business and Sports sections, which usually occupy the final pages in most of the world's newspapers. Every once in a while he looks up to inspect the people that come in and out. Due to the nature of his line of work, Koldo Cruz is always on the alert for the presence of strangers in his immediate personal surroundings. Especially since the bombing. And since that guy snuck into his house less than a month ago. There is a young guy with a basketball cap and sunglasses that he's never seen in the café before. Reading a book at an out-of-the-way table. Cruz is reading the Sports and Business sections and looking up once in a while to check him out above the upper edge of the newspaper. Something about the young man is familiar. Familiar in a strange way. As if his face were a face that came floating back from Koldo Cruz's youth. A mostly hairless face, from what Cruz can see from his bar stool. A soft face with big cheeks and blond, somewhat long hair sticking out from beneath his basketball cap. And who the hell wears a basketball cap with a ten-thousand-euro Lino Rossi suit?

Ten minutes later, Koldo Cruz eats his last olive, takes a last sip of his Macallan and makes his daily call to the foreman of his group of Russian employees. On his way to the door of the Caipirinha café-bar, he twists his head a bit to get a better look at the young man with the cap and sunglasses. Now that he's closer he can see that the novel the young man is reading is a Stephen King novel. And that he's reading it with an expression of intense concentration behind his sunglasses.

Lucas Giraut lets five minutes pass before closing his copy of Wonderful World and leaving it on the table. Koldo Cruz's daily activities are so firmly dictated by tradition that he barely had to look up to be sure he had him in front of him. Ensconced as always on his bar stool as if he owned the bar, exercising his authority over the stool and over the rest of the place. Then Lucas leans over to rummage through his bag located beneath the table and takes out the Highly Secret Accounting Ledger he found in Apartment 13. He pages through it distractedly and tears out a page completely filled with his father's small, neat handwriting. Then he takes out a blank sheet of paper and writes down the note he has been mentally preparing for a couple of days. The note is succinct and has no exact instructions. Both the vocabulary and the tone have been conscientiously chosen to not sound too threatening, yet at the same time transmit an air of absolute confidence. Lastly he sticks the note and the page from the Highly Secret Ledger into an envelope and seals it after peeling off the paper covering the self-adhesive strip. On the front of the envelope he simply writes Koldo Cruz's name.

A minute later he leaves the Caipirinha café-bar and crosses the street. He passes in front of the newspaper stand, where a woman with many dogs on leashes is chatting with the bored-looking guy who runs the stand. He walks up to the house with the electrified perimeter at the end of the street and stops in front of the wrought-iron gate. The scrupulously polished gold plaque on the gate reads “UMMAGUMMA 2.” A bit farther up he can see the remains of a security camera that someone seems to have beaten with a blunt object. Giraut lifts up the top of Koldo Cruz's personal mailbox and sticks the envelope inside. Without noticing the black Volvo parked on the same block where someone is watching his movements with binoculars. Within Koldo Cruz's electrically delineated yard there are half a dozen workers installing bars on the windows of the first floor. Giraut looks through the bars of the door and sees a very pale young woman with dark glasses who seems to be supervising their work. Then he readjusts his cap on his head and heads off down the street. Once again passing the black Volvo, which has a slight rhythmic vibration coming from inside it, like the vibrations you feel near the dance floor in a disco.

Inside the black Volvo, moving his head rhythmically to the beat of the strictly percussive dance music that comes out of his compact disc player, Juan de la Cruz Saudade watches Giraut with a satisfied expression. With one of those smiles that you only see on the faces of people who think they were born under a lucky star. With the neck of a bottle of Finlandia sticking out of the glove compartment. Saudade folds the fingers of one hand and points it at Giraut's increasingly faraway back, imitating the barrel and hammer of a pistol.

“Bang,” he says. And he moves his hand brusquely to indicate firing his finger pistol.

Strictly speaking, Barcelona is nothing like the idea that Pavel had of Barcelona before getting onto the airplane that took him there. In general, he finds it gray and filled with cars and ugly people. Not to mention those fat little ladies with their short hair dyed ridiculous colors that go around staring at everyone with hateful expressions. He's not crazy about the Paseo de Gracia either. The brochure in Russian he brought with him in his suitcase said that the Paseo de Gracia is “an art nouveau architectural gem.” Pavel spent a morning sitting on a strange-looking bench on the Paseo de Gracia looking at people and buildings. The most interesting thing he saw were the butts of the female tourists that passed by, their necks twisted upward to admire the building façades. And whose idea was it to paint the taxis yellow and black? A very overrated city, is what Pavel would say if anyone ever asked him. Which hasn't happened yet.

Pavel leaves the Russian book he's reading on the bar of his favorite spot on the Rambla del Raval and looks out of the corner of his eye at the butt of a black woman who is standing beside him. A big soft butt. Ample in every direction. The type of urban landscape that Pavel likes is the kind you see in the postcards of Jamaica he has tacked up near his bed. Short, brightly painted wooden houses with people sitting in some kind of garden chairs in front of the open doors. Colors that make you think of parrots or other tropical bird species. Black women in minishorts strutting among the men with a certain high and mighty attitude. The fact that the Jamaican men in the postcards pay no special attention to the women that parade around in minishorts arouses the suspicion in Pavel's mind that black women in minishorts are a species sufficiently plentiful in Jamaica so as not to be a highly prized asset. So that it doesn't seem preposterous to imagine nocturnal scenes starring Pavel and a black woman with an abundant ass touching each other in front of a fireplace. That is, if there are fireplaces in Jamaica. Pavel's not sure. There's no indication in the postcards. He raises a hand to his increasingly satisfactory dreadlocks in a flirty gesture. He is sure about the palm trees. There are palm trees in practically every postcard of Jamaica that he has in his room. Palm trees are one of the main reasons that Pavel likes to come to the Rambla del Raval and the seaside at dusk. The palm trees and the black women. Another image of Jamaica that often comes into his head is one of him beneath a waterfall in a jungle setting. He's not sure exactly why. One of those small waterfalls that often appear in television ads for soap. In the image, he is beneath the cascading crystal-clear water with his eyes closed, drinking water from a vaguely spiral mollusk shell. It is impossible to know where the image comes from.

The black woman with the ample ass walks to the jukebox with the black man that accompanies her and they both start to flip through the record selection system. A large part of the clientele of the bar is black people. Pavel picks up the package, which is shaped like a box that holds a tie, from the bar and starts to unwrap the Christmas gift wrap. The same gift wrap that his sister's Christmas gifts come in every year. It doesn't seem his sister is very good at wrapping gifts. The paper is always wrinkled and dented and the pieces of Scotch tape are irregular and in the wrong places. The book that Pavel is reading is one of those Russian pornographic novels they sell in the neighborhood Russian bookstore. In paperback editions with unpleasant stains on the part of the pages that you turn. It's unclear how his sister manages to have the same gift wrap every year. With snowmen and candy canes and some sort of little Christmas goblins printed on it. This year's tie is deep red and blue and has some sort of heraldic crest on it. It takes Pavel a minute to realize that it's a tie with one of the local soccer teams' colors. The kind designed to show one's allegiance to said team. He sighs and sticks the tie in the pocket of his combat pants.