Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

Iris Gonzalvo lets her gaze wander around the room. Or, better put, around the closer parts of the room. The only ones she can really make out through her sunglasses. Her gaze finally lands on a painting above the fireplace.

“I see that you're not just a beauty.” Travers looks in the direction of her gaze. “You also have good taste. The truth is that that painting is one of the most important pieces in my collection. The Somnambulist in the Ambulance. I bet you are familiar with the artist's other works. This one is a copy, of course. Almost everything in this house is an extraordinary copy. I live in a palace of forgeries, isn't that funny?” He takes a sip on a glass identical to hers. He shrugs. “Of course, if they knew I had the original, I'd have Interpol coming in through the windows in ten minutes.”

Iris Gonzalvo focuses on looking at the painting. But from what she can tell, The Somnambulist in the Ambulance is nothing more than an abstract composition of colorful splotches. Some of the splotches look slightly like strobe lights, as if they had some relationship to an ambulance's warning lights. There's also a splotch in the middle that could be anthropomorphic, like the figure of someone lying down, but there's no way to be sure with sunglasses on.

Iris Gonzalvo rummages through her purse. She takes out a telephone connected to a satellite communication line.

“I have a secure line ready,” she says. “Impossible to trace. And encrypted, of course. It's new technology. I think it was first used in the war in Iraq. So we can get started whenever you want. My bosses are waiting on the other side of the line.”

Travers stares at her with an amused expression. His face is swollen like people with serious liver problems. Alcoholics with liquid retention issues. His eyes are so swollen that it looks like someone had been punching them. For a moment Iris Gonzalvo has the vision of the two crazy balding blond guys punching their boss in the eyes. And sitting him in the armchair in front of the cats with a glass of port in his hand to make him look like a vampire from a movie.

“I'm afraid there will be no negotiations today.” Travers's tone is affable and slightly paternalistic. “I'm sorry to disappoint you. But you have to be patient with me. Everything will go fine. But you have to put up with my idiosyncrasies. I suppose they've already told you that I'm fussy about details. Do you think I'm going to do business with you and just let you leave?” He stares at her and for a very brief moment there is a flash of sincerity in his gaze. “A woman like you? Remember that I can't go out on the street. My pleasures are very limited. Merely conversing with you fills me with a warmth I haven't felt in years. Besides”—he shrugs his shoulders—“I have a lot of things to explain to you. Don't you think?”

“To explain to me?” Iris Gonzalvo takes her pack of British cigarettes out of her purse with a distracted gesture. She puts one between her lips. “What do you have to explain to me?”

Travers looks at her with a shocked expression.

“What do I have to explain to you?” he says. “Well, everything. The meaning of everything. The reason that I am here and the reason why you are here, too. Or haven't you realized that you are now part of a story that you've become involved in purely by chance? And isn't it true that you've always felt distanced from who you really want to be? And don't you want to know how it all started?” He lifts his glass of port toward her, in a silent toast. “I have the answers. I am the person in this story who knows the answers.”

Iris Gonzalvo stares at Travers pensively while he lights her cigarette. In front of them, before the fire, one of the cats stretches out its entire body and opens its mouth in an unrealistically large yawn.

The taxi stops in front of a cement esplanade surrounded by blocks of housing projects. The sky is pink. That icy pink tone of certain winter dawns. The blocks of apartments are morphologically similar to giant tombstones or alien monoliths from prophetic films. The classic housing projects in every working-class suburb in every city in the world. From a pictorial point of view, the scene's only special feature is the fact that the alien monoliths of housing projects have taken on a truly pink tone under the first light of day.

After a moment the back door of the taxi opens. The cement esplanade has basketball hoops and multicolored graffiti on all of its vertical cement surfaces. The air smells of burnt garbage. Of wild dogs. Of boiling urban subcultures. A leg covered in a powder blue and white Umbro sweat suit emerges from the taxi, followed by another identical one. Finally the upper half of a body comes out. It bears certain overall structural similarities with the person formerly known as Juan de la Cruz Saudade. His face has a clear greenish hue. His eyes are two red stains of broken capillaries. His greasy hair is stuck to his head where he was leaning against the upholstered backseat of the cab. A still-smoking cigarette butt between his yellow fingers. Saudade burps and closes the door with a sneaker that bears traces of an unidentified brown liquid. The cabdriver heads off shouting something unintelligible through the open driver's-side window. Saudade remains there for a moment, observing the alien skyline of his neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, his heart swollen with pride, until he notices the smell of his fingers burning, singed by the cigarette's cherry. He tosses the butt absentmindedly. It is in moments like this when Juan de la Cruz Saudade, twenty-six years old, feels most intensely the intrinsic beauty of life.

In addition to cement esplanades with basketball hoops and blocks of apartments, Saudade's neighborhood on the outskirts of Barcelona has a lot of staircases and abrupt cliffs, which at this time of the early morning are lit by blinking streetlights. Approximately two out of every three streetlights stopped working a long time ago. Saudade goes up half a dozen of the staircases. He dodges water balloons and other projectiles that insomniacs toss from their windows and he stands on some sort of elevated platform above the neighborhood that also serves as the main access to his own block of apartments. Saudade's block is a low, squat concrete box eaten away by the elements that houses more than five hundred souls. The way Saudade walks is powerfully reminiscent of those movies about corpses brought back to life by viruses from outer space. Though, unlike people who have suffered some kind of injury to their lower extremities and walk dragging a leg, somehow Saudade seems to be dragging both legs. Finally he turns around the final bend covered in tribal graffiti and arrives at the door of his house.

The feeling of well-being and general satisfaction with life that Juan de la Cruz Saudade is experiencing in those moments doesn't quite have to do with the chemical substances he's taken, which alter his perception of many things in general. Nor is it related to the proximity of his bed and the prospect of raiding the fridge beforehand. His feeling of well-being has more to do with the firm conviction that he is full of positive qualities and endowed with an enormous talent for getting the most out of life and enjoying himself enormously in the process.

Saudade pees on some cardboard boxes that someone has piled up beside a row of city garbage Dumpsters. Peeing intensifies his pleasure. Then he takes the elevator up, using the seconds in front of the mirror covered with graffiti to readjust his Umbro sweat suit and run a hand distractedly through his hair. Ready to rejoin his family unit.

A minute later, Saudade has tried every one of his keys in the lock to his apartment and he is now alternately studying his set of keys, the door to his apartment and the signs that indicate the floor and apartment number. His puzzlement has clear Homeric connotations. He tries all the keys again, one after the other, and runs a fingertip over a lock that seems newer and shinier than the lock he remembers his apartment having. Of course, he is absolutely unaware of the Homeric connotations of his situation. A faint, throbbing headache stirs in his right temple. A good portion of his feelings of satisfaction about life and his overall optimism begin to dissipate as he alternates pushing on the bell with kicking the door with his right sneaker.