Wonderful World: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

Inside the break room, a young woman in underwear who is lying on a sofa watching television stares at him with an irate expression.

“Not in your wildest dreams,” she says. “I'm still aching from the last time. And that was more than a month ago.”

Saudade closes the door softly behind him while he lowers his Umbro sweatpants. The way he is able to carry out these two operations simultaneously indicates a degree of skill that defies the laws of physics. During the next five minutes, in the heart of the empire built by Mr. Bocanegra, on a corner of the Upper Ensanche flanked by glass buildings, a symphony of shrieks, thuds and the sounds of tearing lingerie fills one of the break rooms for female personnel. Then there is silence. Saudade leaves the room cautiously. He is fixing his hair with his fingers and rearranging his clothes when a hand rests on his shoulder, a hand larger and heavier than any other hand that Saudade has ever known. A hand that defies conventional ideas about the size a human hand can reach. Saudade observes the hand and then his gaze travels up the arm, as thick as a leg, that's attached to it, and finally lands on the body and then the head of Aníbal Manta.

“Where have you been?” says Aníbal Manta. There is something incongruous in his crew cut and hoop earring. Something that doesn't quite mesh with his gigantic body or his belly that looks like a hot air balloon. Or with his custom-made Italian suit. “Bocanegra wants you in his office right now.” Then he gestures with his thumb toward the stairs. “We'll talk about you leaving your work post again later.”

Saudade shrugs. He follows Aníbal Manta to an elevator with velvet walls and a crystal chandelier inside and then through a hall flanked by statues. The statues, as anyone who knows Bocanegra is aware, are Bocanegra's main passion outside of work. Although that last part requires a certain speculative effort, given that no one has ever seen Bocanegra not working. It's not an easy idea to imagine either. Saudade waits with his arms in the pockets of his sweatshirt in front of the door of Bocanegra's office while Aníbal Manta announces his arrival. His gaze lands on a marble statue that represents a bearded guy with no arms wearing a sheet. Saudade shakes his head. He can understand that there are statues so old that some pieces have fallen off. What ticks him off is that there are people so stupid that they keep making new statues without arms.

The door to Mr. Bocanegra's office opens. Aníbal Manta makes a sign for Saudade to enter. Saudade stares with a half smile at the superhero comic that Manta has rolled up in his suit coat pocket, long enough to make sure he's annoyed Manta, and then finally goes into the office. More statues. More expensive rugs. More velvet on the walls. Mr. Bocanegra is seated at his mahogany desk, leaning back while one of the female employees from the nightclub files the nails on one of his hands.

Saudade sits in a leather chair with arms.

“Did I say you could sit?” Mr. Bocanegra lifts his eyebrows. His gesture makes trembling wrinkles form all over his bald pate.

Saudade gets up from the leather chair.

“I must say I'm impressed.” Mr. Bocanegra nods appreciatively. He places his feet on the mahogany surface of his desk. “In the time I've had you here you've shown yourself to be, by far, the worst worker ever at The Dark Side of the Moon. And we've had some bad ones in the past.” He pauses. He sighs. “Even Aníbal is capable of doing two or three things well, if one is careful not to give him tasks that surpass his intellectual capabilities. But you, Saudade.” He stops and looks at Saudade, who is standing in the middle of the office without showing any special sign of paying attention. “You have shown yourself to be useful for absolutely nothing. And that impresses me.”

Saudade looks out of the corner of his eye toward the part of the office where Aníbal Manta is standing, very still, as if he were trying to camouflage himself among the office's statues. Manta's stance is reminiscent of that stance soccer players take when creating a barrier for the opposing team about to make a free kick. Standing at attention with their chins high and covering their groins with their hands. Saudade doesn't know why they've called him to Bocanegra's office today, but he knows it's not because of anything he's done wrong. After all, he's not tied to a chair with that idiot Manta breaking his fingers. In his opinion, they've called him here to give him a vacation. So he can devote himself full-time to some secret, highly lucrative job of a special nature.

“I've called you here to send you on a vacation,” says Bocanegra. Leaning his head to get a better view of the plunging neckline of the girl who is filing his nails. “I'm sure that everyone will be pleased to hear it. Especially the girls.” He pauses. The girl who is working on his nails rolls her eyes. “I need you to devote yourself full-time to a job that's just come up. A highly lucrative job. Of course, this conversation does not leave this office. I defer to the usual threats if you talk out of turn.”

Saudade clears his throat. The tip of the tongue of the girl who is filing Bocanegra's nails sticks out from between her lips in a gesture of concentration.

“You'll be working with Aníbal.” Bocanegra moves the tip of his shoe on top of the mahogany desk and examines it with his eyes gathered in search of scratches or dull spots. “We will also bring in Pavel and that idiot Yanel. In other words, the whole team.”

What's incongruous about Manta's appearance, about his crew cut and his hoop earring and the superhero comic book that sticks out of the pocket of his suit jacket, is the feeling that you are looking at a high school kid who's been subjected to some monstrous growth procedure through atomic radiation treatments.

Saudade looks at Bocanegra and bares his teeth in a horrible expression that, against all common sense, seems to be his way of smiling.

CHAPTER 6. Major Players

A thick blue cloud of dry ice swells and hisses around the sports car whose door Eric Yanel is struggling to open. The car's roof and doors are printed with the corporate logos of an international cigarette brand. Eric Yanel kicks the inside of the printed door. One of those patently pointless kicks people do when they are starting to lose their patience. The location of the cigarette ad shoot is a field of epic proportions, in that stereotypical way that fields are epic in television commercials. Three advertising models, in winter coats beneath which they seem to be wearing nothing at all, stand about six feet away from the sports car, waiting for orders from the director's assistant. Making those noises with their mouths that people make to show that they're cold. Standing next to the camera, with a half-eaten doughnut in his hand, one of the technicians on the shoot looks with a frown at the hissing cloud of dry ice that is moving at top speed toward the area where the crew and cars and the catering van are.

“That thing is going to gas us,” he says, wiping doughnut crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Stop the smoke machine!” shouts someone with a megaphone.

The camera mounted on a complex system of rails and cranes follows Yanel's movements as he finally gets the door open and comes out dressed in a race car driver's helmet, boots and jumpsuit. He walks up to the nose of the car and sits on it with a certain stiffness. His race car driver jumpsuit and his helmet and his boots are all covered with the corporate logos of the international cigarette brand. At the director's assistant's order, the models with the coats on let them drop simultaneously and enter the scene dressed only in tiny bikinis and high heels. They place themselves on their marks next to Yanel, smile widely and begin caressing his shoulders while looking at the camera. Yanel takes off the helmet, shakes his blond locks in the morning wind and pulls a pack of the sponsor's brand of cigarettes out of one of the pockets of his jumpsuit. He lights a cigarette and exhales a mouthful of smoke that the wind sends treacherously back into his eyes.

“Cut!” shouts the director's assistant.

Iris Gonzalvo drums her fingers on the containing fence that surrounds the location, which the blue, sickly sweet smelling smoke from the dry ice machine is now starting to reach. She takes a drag on her cigarette and watches with a frown as someone runs through the epic-sized field toward the three models and puts their coats over their shoulders. Eric Yanel is laughing now with his perfect teeth, still seated on the nose of the car, and he offers the sponsor's brand of cigarettes to the three models. Iris Gonzalvo wears a plaid Prada coat, a head scarf knotted beneath her chin and dark glasses with enormous and strikingly rectangular frames, in that way that sunglass frames were only strikingly rectangular before 1976. She lifts her chin and moves her head and gazes with a neutral expression at the still-distant object that is approaching on the highway that skirts the epic-sized field. Headed for where the shoot is taking place.

“I thought those things were illegal.”

Iris Gonzalvo points with her cigarette at the group composed of Eric Yanel, who now carries the corporate helmet jauntily beneath his arm, and the three models, whose nude legs are visible below their coats. Even though she is too far away, Iris thinks she can see the goose bumps the cold is making on the three models' skin.

“They are illegal,” says the guy leaning on the containing fence next to Iris Gonzalvo. A middle-aged guy with long silvery hair and a leather jacket. “It's a commercial for the Asian market. They haven't banned cigarette commercials there yet. I don't think they will. Smoking is their favorite thing in Asia.” The guy gazes at the women's nude legs like an atomic scientist would gaze at the reading from a particle accelerator. “Smoking and blond women. And those strange number puzzles.”

Iris Gonzalvo covers her mouth with a handkerchief and looks at something beyond the cigarette commercial location. Something near the highway that skirts the stereotypical epic field. The object that a moment ago was approaching has now become a two-seater Jaguar with a folding convertible hood and personalized hubcaps.

“So you're saying that this commercial won't be shown in Spain? Ever?” she asks, her voice slightly distorted by the handkerchief that covers her nose and mouth. Most of the people on her side of the containing fence are now covering their noses and mouths to protect themselves from the blue carbonic smoke that floats over toward them. Others are waving one hand in front of their faces or simply coughing into their fists. “Or anywhere else in Europe?”

“They'd be more likely to air heroin commercials.” The guy squints to see through the cloud of dry ice. “Given the new European regulations. Your boyfriend's going to be seen by Chinese folks. Koreans. That kind of people.” He looks at Iris Gonzalvo out of the corner of his eye. “Because he is your boyfriend, right?”

The convertible Jaguar parks about a third of a mile from the location where the ad is being shot and after a moment a couple of vaguely human-looking individuals come out of it. Looking like they've suffered some type of hypertrophy over their entire bodies. Between the two of them, they must add up to some six hundred and fifty pounds of fat, atrophied muscle, sweaty faces and expensive Italian suits. With matching Italian loafers. One of them wears a long-haired fur coat that is clearly a woman's coat. The other locks the Jaguar's doors by pushing a button on his infrared key ring and the tune the infrared key ring emits to confirm that they are locked is the chorus to Pink Floyd's “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II.”