Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

Travers gets up from the armchair and stares at her.

“Oh,” he says in an amused tone, “that. It just means that something terrible is going to happen. It's the third sign that something terrible is going to happen.”

Iris thinks about it for a moment and then nods. Mr. Travers has already become a mere black silhouette with the gleam of the flames in the background. A ragged, swollen silhouette, with a tangle of long curls that fall. Iris puts her purse over her shoulder. She waves goodbye and closes the door behind her.

Lucas Giraut walks down the stairs that lead from his apartment on the upper floor of the former ducal palace to the door to the street, where someone has been ringing the doorbell for a minute already. The insistence of the ringer's ringing is the insistence of a lunatic. Although the door to the street is two large wooden doors with iron rivets, the door that opens is a smaller door inside one of them. The bell for the upstairs apartment where Giraut lives has a high-pitched sound that reverberates throughout the building. Unlike the much softer electronic buzzing sounds you hear when you ring most modern doorbells.

At the foot of the stairs, Giraut adjusts the lapels of his suit in an oblivious gesture, runs a hand through his hair and opens the small wooden door inside the larger ones. Eric Yanel smiles at him from the other side. He lifts a hand in greeting and gives Giraut a kick in the groin that makes him double over and leaves him on the ground, at the foot of the stairs.

“That's how I like it.” Yanel goes in and closes the door behind him. “Now we're starting to understand each other. No, really. I think that from now on we can begin to have a more satisfying relationship. More equal. You've got her upstairs, right? I wouldn't want to have come over to this shithole and find she had just gone out shopping. Or that's she's out fucking someone. Just when I come to take her back home,” he says. In spite of his impeccably clean and pressed white Paul Smith polo sweater and tweed trousers, certain physical changes that Yanel has undergone in the last few weeks are hard not to notice. His face is pale and soft and his eyes glassier than usual, and beneath his white Paul Smith sweater you can see the incipient but firm curve of a flabby belly that was never there before. Not to mention his hair. One could go on and on about the changes in his hair. “Well, what?” he says. With his hands on his hips. Watching as Giraut twists on the ground. “Are you going to just lie there? Because it doesn't seem very hospitable to me.”

Lucas Giraut's face is very red and his eyes are tightly shut and he's chewing on his lip. His style of twisting on the ground consists basically in rolling on his back with his body shriveled, and bringing his knees to his chest. Yanel grabs him by the collar of his cobalt blue Lino Rossi suit, pulls him up until he manages to get him somewhat vertical and pushes him upstairs. The staircase that goes up to Giraut's apartment is one of those marble staircases with a carved marble balustrade. The kind that make you think of women from days gone by with complicated evening gowns elegantly descending the stairs. Under the attentive gaze of a multitude of suitors with tuxedos and expectant faces. Yanel half escorts, half pushes and half drags his host up the stairs and into the living room of his apartment. Giraut, meanwhile, seems to be having trouble breathing.

Sitting on one of the living room's leather sofas, Iris Gonzalvo and Marcia Parini look up from the photo album that Marcia is showing Iris and stare at the two men who have just come in. The photos show Valentina Parini in various stages of her life. Lucas Giraut collapses into an armchair. Covering his crotch with his hands.

“Eric?” Iris Gonzalvo looks at Eric with a mix of surprise and commiseration. “What happened to your hair? You look horrible.” She raises a hand to her immaculate neck. “I think that's the most horrible hair I've ever seen in my life.”

Eric Yanel looks at himself in a silver-framed mirror on the wall in front of him. His hair is no longer long, blond and meticulously coiffed in some sort of French side wave. Like Johnny Hallyday's. Like Alain Delon's. Now it looks a little like a doll's fake hair, teased up with grime after months in a closet. It also looks like those old brooms that had very rigid fibers, made of something like straw. In the armchair, Lucas Giraut seems to be regaining a more or less normal breathing rate. It also looks like at some point in the last few weeks Yanel has picked up the habit of moving his lips when he's thinking or talking to himself. Without any sound coming out.

“No one understands how hard it is to be me.” Eric walks from one side of the living room to the other. He takes a cigarette out of a pack, but instead of lighting it he just puts it between his lips and puts the pack back in his pocket. His exceptionally glassy eyes are also filled with small inflamed capillaries. “Because of all the prejudices. The…what are they called?…the preconceived notions. The clichés about the acting profession. People think I spend my life in luxury hotels. Drinking expensive cocktails and sunbathing. That I have money for my every whim. That I go around in a private jet. I don't know what else. People think that women just throw themselves at me and that I'm incredibly happy.”

His cigarette is still not lit. Yanel is grabbing it with his fingers and bringing it to his mouth and sucking his cheeks in as if he were smoking. Even though it's not lit. The spatial pattern of his steps around the living room is like that mathematical symbol that can either be the number eight or infinity.

“People think I'm like Brad Pitt,” he continues. “Or like George Clooney. Maybe more like Brad Pitt. That my life is like some young handsome single actor's life who has no problems and luck smiling on him all the fucking time. Maybe more like Orlando Bloom. People think I'm on Capri. Or on the Côte d'Azur. People call me up and say, 'Shit, Yanel. How are you? Are you on the Côte d'Azur? I wish I was as lucky as you.' People,” he says in a vaguely melancholy tone. For a moment he seems to have lost his train of thought. He takes a drag on his unlit cigarette. “Well, that's not how it is. I may be handsome and well dressed, but my life sucks. I'm broke. I'm not on the Côte d'Azur. I'm in an idiot's apartment in a shithole of a neighborhood. But people don't like to hear that. People hate losers like me.”

“I don't find you that handsome,” says Marcia Parini with a calculating expression. “At most, kind of interesting.” Marcia inspects Yanel with one of those vertical looks that travel over someone's entire body and make you think vaguely of a scanner's sweep. One of those looks that are traditionally associated with sexual predation. “The clothes are fine. Maybe if you fixed yourself up a bit more.”

“I hate people,” continues Yanel. Looking at Giraut. Looking him up and down with something similar to scientific interest. Giraut is still in the same armchair. He no longer has his hands at his crotch. He no longer has difficulty breathing. The dark red color in his face is now limited to his cheeks and where he would have cheekbones if his face weren't so round and soft. “If you don't fulfill their expectations of you, people shit all over you. They leave you by the side of the road and shit all over you. Acquaintances. Friends. Agents. Girlfriends. Especially girlfriends. They leave home when you're taking a little nap and forget to mention that they're going. That is what people are like basically. Always ready to leave when you don't have a yacht docked on the Côte d'Azur. When you are having problems and your agent only calls you for ridiculous commercials. When the only part of you that people recognize is your armpit. When your debts are as big as the foreign debt of a small third-world country.” The pattern of his steps around the living room is still essentially identifiable with the number eight or the infinity symbol. Sporadically alternating with circular and spiral patterns. The general effect is vaguely hypnotic. “That's how people are. People are the ones who leave. They're equivalent terms. Everyone leaves. Girlfriends leave. The people that don't answer your calls are the ones who leave. People that don't call. People that don't want to lend you more money. People that don't offer you contracts.” He pauses again and for a moment it seems he is out of breath. He takes a long, deep drag on the unlit cigarette as if the cigarette could give him some oxygen. “People that don't say good morning in the stairway.”