Wonderful World: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

“Not hot enough. And you're old. You must be twenty-five years old.”

“I'm nineteen.”

There is a moment of tense silence. The boss's office at the production company for hotel cable movies is one of those corporate offices where everything conveys the idea of impermanence. The only furniture is a table and two chairs. The computer on top of the table is a laptop. There is no decoration of any kind. The light comes from bulbs without lamp fixtures. The walls haven't been plastered since the last occupant left, so you can still see holes and marks where the wall was drilled to hold up furniture that is no longer there. The precise term in the jargon of that specialized market that refers to the type of films prepared and filmed in the industrial space where Iris is sitting in a robe smoking is not “low-budget film.” The precise term is “ultra-low-budget film.” Of which ideally two or three are shot a day. To reduce costs in rental equipment.

“Listen,” says the head of production. He makes a weary face designed to show that he is willing to be patient and agreeable beyond the requirements of his position. “It's fine to be ambitious, and if you feel young, that's great. That means you are on the inside. But you have to be realistic. We both know why you're here. You're here because your boyfriend hooks me up with coke and does a little job for me once in a while. Even though it's not nice to say that.” He shrugs his shoulders in a self-exonerating gesture. “So okay. If I see some change in your attitude, I don't see why we can't stay in touch. In spite of the fact that your boyfriend hasn't answered my calls this week and owes me money. But you and I are another story. The only thing I ask is a small gesture on your part.” He separates his thumb and index finger a little to make the universal sign of things small in size. Then he looks at his wristwatch. “I think we have one of the sets downstairs free.”

There is a moment of silence.

“After all, no one's going to know,” adds the head of production. “I mean it's like nothing ever happened.”

Iris Gonzalvo stands up purposefully. She leans forward a bit, above the low-budget table comprised of two sawhorses and an unvarnished top, and before the boss has time to say anything she puts out her cigarette on his cheek. With a skillful wrist movement that is both energetic and vaguely circular.

The head of production's scream echoes through the entire industrial building.

CHAPTER 13. Apartment 13

The same day that Aníbal Manta and Saudade arrive in Rome, Lucas Giraut waits for closing time at the offices of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD. He waits for all the workers to leave the building. Then he takes off the jacket of his cobalt blue Lino Rossi suit and loosens his tie and begins unscrewing one by one all the lightbulbs in his office on the mezzanine. The only lamp that he leaves on is the one right above the Italian Louis XV — style cartonnier that he uses as a desk. He puts the lightbulbs away in a cardboard box and puts the box in one of the not-secret drawers of the cartonnier. All the employees have gone and the security gates that look like bars on a medieval castle have been lowered, giving the building its ferociously protected off-hours look. The alarms are turned on. The lights are turned off except for the pilot lights connected to an independent generator and the sole lightbulb that Lucas Giraut has left on in his office. The circumstances, decides Lucas Giraut as he sticks a flashlight into his pants pocket, are propitious to begin his Filial Investigation of Apartment 13.

Lucas Giraut goes up the stairs that lead from the mezzanine to the upper floor of the headquarters of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD. A bulge in the shape of a flashlight can be seen in his pocket. During the last twenty years barely anything has been changed in this part of the building. The doors have been repainted several dozen times. The walls have been replastered and have changed color. The technological advances in terms of alarms are visible in the increasingly weaponlike look of the alarm box models. Increasingly more alarming. The locks on the metal doors have been replaced by numerical code readers with tiny little red and green lights to signal, respectively, the introduction of erroneous or correct codes.

Giraut arrives at the top of the stairs and the hallway lights up automatically in response to a movement sensor. He looks up and makes a distracted gesture with his hand toward the camera that's filming his movements from the roof. The hallway of the upper floor is one of those hallways you find in industrial warehouses. With concrete walls and floor. With numbered metal doors on both sides and with bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The last door of the concrete hallway, around the last bend, is the door to Apartment 13. Vague images of endless hallways and rooms crossed by fleeting silhouettes come to Giraut's mind. Memories of childhood notebooks filled with sketches of movable panels that open onto secret passageways between the walls. Finally he stops in front of the door marked with the number thirteen. He introduces the numerical code and waits for the tiny green light that means that the right code has been entered.

The Filial Investigation Operation has begun.

Lucas Giraut turns on the flashlight and the beam of light runs over the inside of Apartment 13. Dust covers the floor and all the furniture. He closes the door behind him. The apartment consists of a room with a double bed stuck to the wall, a television, a built-in closet, and a couple of dressers. A door at the back of the room leads to a tiny bathroom with a shower that barely has room for one person. There are no windows. None of his father's secret places ever have any windows. Due to an undiagnosed pathology that was referred to within the family as his window problem. The air in the room comes from a few vents by the ceiling that are different from the rest of the building's vents and which vaguely resemble half-open mouths.

Lucas Giraut sits on the bed and runs a hand along the dusty bedspread. Sitting in this space without any natural light or windows somehow comforts him. In a certain way, he has always believed that he understood what was happening to his father. The secret inner mechanics of his difficulty with windows and daylight. What lay hidden behind his so-called window problem. The feeling of calm. That feeling of power you get from locking the world out completely.

Seated on the dusty bed, Lucas Giraut moves the flashlight beam over the room's walls and furniture. It's strange that he spent his whole childhood filling notebooks with drawings and notes about Apartment 13. Recording his recurring dreams about that apartment. Perfectly detailed dreams accompanied by all sorts of explanations and diagrams. The first phase of drawings, from his preteen years, depicted Apartment 13 as a complex system of rooms and hallways with varying layouts. According to the annotations, the apartment had no windows and the walls were covered with red velvet curtains. The annotations indicated that most of the rooms had crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. And wing chairs with extensions that folded out to rest your feet on and free-standing gold ashtrays beside the arms. The large majority of butts in said ashtrays were cigar butts. There also seemed to be coatracks all around, filled with jackets and coats. Hundreds of coats, both women's and men's. Coats accompanied by hats and by canes and by other old-fashioned garments that Lucas Giraut as a child was unable to identify. Nor could he understand why there were so many coats and jackets.

After half an hour of Lucas's rummaging around, all the contents of Apartment 13's closet and drawers are carefully laid out on the dusty bedspread. Lucas Giraut has separated out to one side and classified into three groups those objects that he judges most relevant to his search:

1. A dozen cassette tapes of old British rock from the seventies. In Search of Space and Space Ritual by Hawkwind. Tales from Topographic Oceans by Yes, The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, and Islands by King Crimson.

2. A postcard showing the Brighton Marine Palace and Pier with the strange domes and towers of its amusement park. Writ ten on the back it says: “COMMEMORATIVE ACTS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE DOWN WITH THE SUN SOCIETY. ENGLAND (WE THINK), 1970.” And another postcard, which shows a pink hot-air pig floating over an industrial sky, which says: “THE DOWN WITH THE SUN SOCIETY PROMISES TO PARTY EVERY NIGHT AND SLEEP ALL DAY FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. DOWN WITH THE SUN. SIGNED: THE DOWN WITH THE SUN SOCIETY.” The two postcards are written in large, loopy script surrounded by drawings of flowers, planets, and moons.

3. An obviously old black-and-white photograph showing three young men about twenty years old with long hair, various styles of facial hair, and clothing that's predominately denim, suede, and leather. The three young men have their arms around each other's shoulders in a gesture of male camaraderie.

Seated on the dusty bedspread, Lucas Giraut takes a cigarette out of his gold cigarette case embossed with his initials and lights it with a pensive expression. The young man on the left side of the photograph is his father. A barely postadolescent version of his father, with a strangely skinny and long version of his father's face with splotches on both cheeks that look like acne outbreaks. The young man in the middle of the photograph wears a leopard-print fur coat that looks strikingly feminine next to the leather and denim jackets of the other two. His face doesn't yet show any signs of balding or of a mustache, but it does show the same ineffable element of cruelty that Lucas Giraut recognizes as Mr. Bocanegra's. The young man to the right of the photograph must be the same age as the other two and also wears his hair long. His, however, is curly as opposed to Lorenzo Giraut's exaggeratedly straight hair and not-yet-balding Mr. Bocanegra's wavy hair. His face is strangely attractive despite not having a particularly harmonious set of features. Lucas turns the photograph over to examine the back. It is blank.

Lucas Giraut's first childhood drawings of Apartment 13 included marks on the apartment's shifting internal geography indicating possible sightings of people. The sightings were never clear enough for him to be sure that they weren't just optical illusions. The most conducive places for those types of sightings were the mirrors and the doorways.

Holding the back end of the flashlight between his teeth, Giraut puts the photograph into his pocket. There is something about the Filial Investigation Operation that gives him an indescribable feeling of indecisiveness. Like the feeling of sitting in front of a magic desk for the first time. Contemplating the apparently normal knobs of its drawers and its apparently normal surfaces and mentally gauging the measurements in search of ghostly spaces. He looks up and examines the walls. The paint that camouflages the plaster that camouflages the concrete. The vents that are different from the other vents in the building, more like defiant mouths. Giraut stands up on the bed and works the vent above it until it comes loose. He places it carefully on the bed and sticks his arm through the ventilation shaft. Feeling around. With his gaze lost in the distance. In that way that people look out into the distance when they are blindly feeling around in something whose inside they can't see. Finally he pulls something out of the hole. Some kind of book. He pulls it out in a small cloud of dust and he stares at it. In that precise moment the cell phone in his pocket rings.

“Lucas?” says his mother's voice when he answers. In a tone that indicates she's in one of her Moods. A tone of voice like the crunch of a solid roof splitting beneath the weight of a hundred-year-old tree. “What the hell do you think you are doing?” Behind her rhetorical pause, Lucas Giraut can feel her crackling fury in the form of an electric tingling that raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. “You're my son. What I am supposed to do with you?”

In Lucas Giraut's later childhood drawings of Apartment 13, its internal geography became even more complex. The apartment grew in size and for the first time the annotations suggested that it could have several levels, or at least one additional level, located between the ceiling of the apartment and the building's roof. That hypothetical space, based on certain differences between the measurements that Lucas had made on the outside and on the inside of the building, was dubbed the Highly Secret Level.

“Mom?” Lucas blows on the book to get the dust off and examines its black cover. He opens it and looks at the first few pages and recognizes his father's handwriting. The book consists of a succession of accounting entries, with their corresponding dates and amounts. The first dates are from the late seventies. “I'm the president of my father's company. I'm the primary stockholder. And that means I decide what the strategies are for the International Division.” He blinks while still turning the pages of the accounting ledger. “Or for any other division, of course.”

“Don't be stupid.” Estefanía Giraut's tone of voice during her Moods is powerfully reminiscent of the sound a hundred-year-old tree makes in splitting a solid roof in half and then splitting the floor of the house's upper story, causing the entire structure to collapse. “You're going to meet with Fonseca in your office on Tuesday. And neither of you is coming out of that damn office until you've signed the documents for the restructuring plan.”

“What about Christmas dinner?” Lucas Giraut turns the pages faster and faster. “You should let me arrange Christmas dinner, Mom. I think I can get fifty guests.”

Some of the transactions recorded in the accounting ledger he holds in his hands have the initials K.C. written beside them. The initials are repeated several times on each page and appear on every one of the pages. Some of the amounts that appear beside the initials K.C. are so high that Lucas Giraut feels a touch of vertigo, as if he were looking over the edge of a very deep well and watching as little bits of rubble fall to the bottom.

“I know exactly what you're doing,” says Estefanía Giraut. In a tone of voice that makes one think of pieces of broken jet fuselage cleanly splitting solid roofs. “You can't hide anything from me. And I warn you that things always turn out the way I want them to. It's never been any other way. So don't even bother trying,” she says conclusively, and the loud crash he hears right before the line is cut off allows Lucas to clearly visualize his mother violently slamming down her office phone.