Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

The stewardess stops in front of the British Airways ticketing offices. Which are still closed. A sign says that the ticket service opens at nine thirty, Monday through Friday. The stewardess opens a side door to the offices with a magnetic key shaped like a credit card and asks him into some sort of waiting room. The seats are covered in the British Airways corporate color scheme. There are no ashtrays. There is no piped-in Muzak. There are piles of magazines on the small glass tables. And a man sitting in one of the seats reading a magazine. Pavel sits across from the other waiting passenger and takes a copy of German for Dummies out of his back pocket. The stewardess leaves through the other door. The face of the man sitting across from Pavel is covered by the magazine he's reading. Pavel is practicing pronunciation in his head, moving his lips to silently articulate the phrases Ich bin ein Ausländer and Wo ist die Diskothek, when he thinks to look up. The magazine the man sitting in front of him is reading is a magazine about cars. Pavel's teach yourself German book falls to the floor.

“Don't get mad.” Commissioner Farina lowers the magazine he's reading and puts it in his jacket pocket. With a sleepy, happy expression. “We thought about nabbing you when you got home yesterday, but it turns out that the French had put out an arrest warrant on the idiot that bought the jewelry from you. You gotta make nice with the neighbors.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Anyway, we didn't want to rob you of all these hours of anticipation. The wonderful night you just had. These hours of happiness courtesy of the Barcelona Police Force.” He mimes putting a medal on the front of his shirt. Commissioner Farina's shirt, just like the rest of his clothing, looks like it was bought out of a catalogue on one of his coffee breaks. “We love you, Bob Marley. By the way.” He takes a quick look at Pavel's attire. “Someone should have told you that Germans don't wear shoes like that.”

Pavel looks down at his rented Italian shoes with the tips slightly pointed outward and the teach yourself German book between them. The carpet in front of the seat is full of round black cigarette burns that look a bit like coffee beans. Or maybe coffee beans in negative. Pavel rubs his temples with his index finger and thumb. The thoughts that come to his mind are once again alarmingly out of sync with any type of Rastafarian teaching.

Iris Gonzalvo lights a postcoital cigarette with her eyes squinted and her mouth a bit twisted. The way people light cigarettes when they are lying horizontally on sweaty, messy beds. Especially postcoital cigarettes. She blows out the first mouthful of smoke and turns her head to look at Lucas Giraut, who is lying beside her. Naked except for his socks.

“That was horrible,” she says. “Probably the worst I've ever had. I didn't feel a thing. Not to mention how boring and quick it was. I was about to grab a magazine. Didn't anyone tell you no one fucks in that position anymore? Drops of sweat were falling on my face.”

Iris Gonzalvo brings the cigarette to her lips again. In spite of everything she's saying, Giraut can't see any element of irritation or resentment in her face. He also doesn't see that amused expression people have when telling funny sexual anecdotes to a unisex group of their peers.

“I've never seen anyone so inflexible,” she says. “Or who seemed so close to having a heart attack.”

From the bed, lying faceup, Giraut can see the wooden beams and the high, slightly vaulted ceiling of what was, in its day, a room in a duke's palace. Maybe a duke's bedroom, or a duke's library. Or a duke's bathroom. Or a duke's fishing trophy room. Giraut imagines the bedroom he's in with the walls covered in fishing trophies and photographs of fishing expeditions. With taxidermied fish mounted on plaques. With six-and-a-half-foot-long swordfish. With the largest red tuna ever fished from the Mediterranean. With black-and-white photographs showing people with many-pocketed vests. A shiver runs down his back.

“I'm really sorry.” Lucas Giraut takes the cigarette Iris Gonzalvo offers him between two fingers. “I guess you're used to doing it with another kind of man.”

Iris Gonzalvo stares at Lucas Giraut as if she doesn't understand. Giraut shrugs. In his opinion, sex requires an intensity of physical effort and vigor practically incomprehensible in relation to the ephemeral and ineffable nature of its gratification. Not to mention the foreplay. Not to mention how hard it is to do it all well and give your sexual partner the satisfaction that guarantees her desire to retain you as a sexual partner. It's a mystery to Lucas Giraut how people manage to resolve sexual situations and keep their partners. None of that diminishes Iris Gonzalvo's sexual appeal. Which is undeniable.

“Did you screw that girl?” Iris Gonzalvo lifts up one leg in a right angle over her body and is running a fingernail over the tiny imperfections on her legs left by the waxing. “If you did, you can tell me. I've seen it all. You wouldn't be the first guy I know who did something like that. I mean fucking twelve-year-old girls.”

Giraut takes a pensive drag on the cigarette and hands it back to his sexual partner. He isn't entirely sure why Iris Gonzalvo has a perfectly smoothly shaved pubis. In a way that doesn't at all suggest childlike associations. Nor does he really understand how she ended up with all those tattoos on her most private parts. It doesn't seem very likely that she just went into a tattoo parlor and took off all her clothes and pointed to her private parts and then lay down to wait for them to do them. Although he admits to himself that he could be wrong about that.

“Everyone thinks I did.” Giraut blows out a mouthful of smoke. “Except Marcia, I guess. The girl's mother. Valentina says that her mother wants to marry me. Nothing sexual has ever happened between us. I mean with the daughter. Well, or with the mother either. We like to sit and talk in the courtyard. Sometimes in the winter we put out one of those portable heaters. We make up stories. Like for example that we're very powerful and can kill people. People that annoy us or people we hate. People like my mother and her lawyer. Valentina is a very special girl. She wants to be a writer. She's very smart. She could get the best grades in her school, but she wants to get bad grades. That's the kind of person she is. Special. Sometimes she gets really angry. I mean she has nervous fits. Now the doctors say that she has schizophrenia, but I don't believe it. I think she's angry. And growing up. Growing up isn't easy. It wasn't for me.” He pauses and looks at Iris Gonzalvo's leg, lifted in a right angle. Iris is flexible and slender and one would have to have a screw loose to say that she wasn't exceptionally sexually attractive. “One time at school she said she saw a man throw himself into the garbage incinerator in the basement. The police came and they emptied out the incinerator and examined the remains and they even said they had found a piece of the man's bone. Later they realized it was a chicken bone. That was when they put her into therapy. And she's been in therapy since she was eight years old. It's hard to explain why she does those things.”

Iris Gonzalvo lowers her leg to the bed. She turns on her side and leans on one elbow. Looking at Lucas Giraut.

“I don't know why I like you,” she says. The position in which she is lying and leaning on one elbow doesn't allow her to shrug, but she moves her neck in a way that looks like a shrug or at least gives the same feeling. “You're weird and not very handsome and terrible in bed. I've never seen anything like it. But I think I like you. I'm not sure if I remember the last time this happened. I've gone out with so many maniacs and so many losers that I don't even care that you're weird. And I don't mean that we're going out or anything like that. In case you thought that's what I said.”