Javier Calvo - Wonderful World

“Is it grafted under your skin?” asks Valentina. The way she asks suggests that it isn't exactly a question. It doesn't exactly sound like a statement either. She runs her fingers over the recently drawn X and looks at her slightly ink-stained fingertips. “It's the mark of the rebels of the Resistance,” she adds with a pensive face. “They must have a hidden laboratory. I've seen the Captors.” Now she stares at Giraut. “They aren't hiding anymore. They don't care if we see them now. You can see them if you look through a window for a while and concentrate on the clouds. They don't look like angels. They look like those dinosaurs that had wings.”

Giraut sits back down at the table and signals for Iris to come over. Behind and above their heads, the security camera buzzes and rotates very slightly on its base, which is drilled into the wall. Iris picks up one of the drawings on the table and looks at it blankly. Valentina brings her fingers to her face and tries to rip off the tape holding down her white patch.

“This is Penny.” Giraut leans over the table to speak softly near Valentina's face. “She works with me now. We're going to get you out of here. Very soon. We have a plan. But you have to pretend that I'm your father. It is very important for you to remember that. You have to tell everyone who asks that your father came to visit you today. Your father and his second wife who came from Uruguay.”

He stops when he sees that Valentina has managed to tear off half of the tape strips. A good part of her eyebrow is now missing from her face and stuck to the tape.

“We are in a very powerful control center.” Valentina continues pulling on the tape. The skin on her face tenses and pulls away from her eye socket. There is no pain in her facial expression. Only the same mix of vacuity and determination. “The control centers are the only places they can communicate from. With their planet, I guess. Or with each other. You can see it's a control center because there are a few of them floating up above. Sometimes a lot more. Sometimes there are so many that if you see them from far away they look like a black cloud. And they can read our minds very easily here. It's like a transmission center.” She pulls brusquely a few times and gets the patch completely off. The skin underneath is red and has traces of the tape's adhesive substance. You can't really call what's left an eyebrow. “This is a transmitter.” She holds up the patch so Giraut and Iris can see it. “They can make them easily with their alien technology. Look at these strands here.”

Lucas Giraut looks at Valentina's eye with a frown. The girl's left eye no longer looks in the same direction as the right one. Now it seems like her left eye is always looking at some place outside her visual field. At some point perpetually located to one side of wherever she's looking. The movement of Valentina's recently uncovered eye gives Giraut a strange feeling. It's hard for him not to look at it, or for him to concentrate on other things. Valentina throws the patch on the floor and steps on it with her institutional slipper.

“You can see your things again.” Iris Gonzalvo picks up another drawing and looks at it thoughtfully. “When we get you out of here. We can go on a trip. Or you can go back to school if you want, or see your real father. Lucas told me you've never been on a trip. Since you were a little girl.”

Iris Gonzalvo sits one butt cheek onto the plastic table. The way she's sitting doesn't convey informality, nor any neglect of the details of her public image. It's more like the way certain singers from other decades would sit one butt cheek on their musical accompanist's piano. With that old-fashioned feline elegance.

“This is very boring,” says Valentina. “I have to spend all day drawing these stupid dogs. I look like a moron. But I have no choice. I have to keep my mind busy. Otherwise they can read my thoughts. If I draw what I'm really thinking about, they can learn more about me. So I draw these stupid dogs and try not to think about anything.” She picks up one of the drawings and stares at it with a calculating expression. “I copied them from a kid's book.”

Giraut stands up and walks to the window. The way he is standing in front of the window is: with his hands together behind his back. Looking at something that could be very close to the window, or very far away. In the novel Wonderful World, the characters that aren't mentally enslaved by the alien race known as the Captors carry out all sorts of repetitive mental activities to keep their minds empty and trick the alien mind readers. A group of boys from Portland, Maine, play video games during the hours they're on watch. While one of them stands guard at the window of the basement where they're hiding with a helmet protected by the Mark of the Resistance. Chuck Kimball, the main character, ends up perfecting the art of constructing models of historical buildings. A couple of old ladies in Augusta, Maine, play bridge all day and try to remain calm until they are found. A lot of the characters create games or mental routines during their workdays or when they have to venture out into the street, all the while hoping that someone from the Resistance will come to rescue them. Giraut doesn't remember there being anything in the novel about transmitters hidden in eye patches or threads of clothing.

“We only have one way out.” Valentina balls up a fistful of drawings of smiling dogs, tosses them into a wastepaper basket and picks up a new pile of white drawing paper. “Getting to a place out of the transmitters' reach. Like a deserted island. And starting the world over. Having kids and all that.”

Then she leans over the table and starts drawing again, with her brow furrowed and the tip of her tongue sticking out between her lips. With her left eye looking at some place located to the left of her visual field.

Iris Gonzalvo takes advantage of the privacy of her private compartment in the Talgo train to stretch out a slender leg, pull up her stocking and then do the same with the other leg. The first-class compartments of the Barcelona-Paris Talgo don't look like the private compartments of modern long-distance trains. They look like train compartments from the 1920s. The ones where sophisticated old ladies with fur stoles solved intricate murder cases before the disconcerted faces of police detectives. Iris finishes adjusting her stockings and is checking herself in the reflective surface on the inside of the compartment's glass door when the door opens with a heavy horizontal slide. Aníbal Manta stares at her with a frown as he holds the sliding door open with his enormous arms. His eyes still on her. Although his expression seems to be that of someone who has to go to the bathroom after holding it in for a long time, it is actually Manta's expression of intellectual effort that he usually uses to express some sort of suspicion. With his features drawn together and his brow awkwardly furrowed.

“Are you sure you have everything?” he says. “It's time to move.” The way he looks at Iris is that way people look at someone that has some sort of hospital gown sticking out from under their street clothes. Or someone that walks into a jewelry store with a guitar case. “Do you need us to go over it one more time?”

Iris takes a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and brings one to her lips. Then she leans forward and moves her butt along the seat until the tip of the cigarette is in reach of the lighter Aníbal Manta is holding out. This whole series of movements makes her breasts compress and project outward through the neckline of her blouse and makes her skirt retract to reveal most of her thighs. Manta lights her cigarette. Beneath his suspicious expression something else, something involuntary, appears. Some sort of spontaneous involuntary flicker of admiration. It isn't exactly an expression of sexual desire. It's more like that blend of admiration and confusion you can see in the faces of obese, introverted teenage boys when they look at explosively blooming teenage girls.