“Perhaps you should rethink your idea,” says Giraut with a pensive expression. “I mean about reading your novel at the talent show. It could be dangerous. I think that by this point they must be watching you very closely. And don't say anything to your school psychologist about what you're writing. Or maybe tell her you're writing some other novel. One where you don't kill all your basketball teammates. One where there's no blood, or final massacre or heads bursting open or anything like that.” He shrugs his shoulders. “When psychologists hear those kinds of things, you're done for.”
The overweight girl is staring at them with her plump face. Shaking her head and gathering her features in an expression of intense displeasure. Some of the faces nearby turn to pay attention to the conversation taking place near the bench.
“You are horrible,” she says to Valentina Parini, pointing at her with an accusatory finger. “And so is this man. And I'm going to tell the principal everything.”
Valentina Parini readjusts her green plastic kid's glasses on her tiny nose with her index finger and gives the overweight girl an obscene gesture of an openly sexual nature. A gesture that any spectator would consider absolutely inappropriate to someone her age.
CHAPTER 11. Paintings of Deer
The dome of St. Peter's basilica and the vaguely extraterrestrial rooftops of the Vatican are outlined against the gray backdrop of the morning sky on the other side of the window of the hostel in the Piazza Navona where Aníbal Manta and Juan de la Cruz Saudade are staying under false names. Aníbal Manta lets his gaze wander through the room: starting at the paintings of deer that decorate the walls, then moving on to the frayed bedspreads on the two single beds and finally to the figures of Saudade and the Italian whore kneeling on the ground giving him a blow job accompanied by expert hand movements on his penis and testicles. Saudade's powder blue and white Umbro sweatpants are wrinkled around his ankles. Saudade, reflects Manta, has never been good at conversations that involve any kind of emotional communication. That's one of the reasons, perhaps the main one, why he's never liked Saudade. In the two years that he's known him, every time they have to do some job together — and their profession usually leads to long periods of forced cohabitation — every attempt that Manta has made to establish that kind of communication has been met by Saudade looking around distractedly. Or picking at his cuticles or nodding in a purely mechanical way while contemplating select parts of nearby female anatomies. Manta closes his eyes and tries to concentrate on the blow job the second Italian whore is giving him, as she kneels on the floor in front of his legs with his pants down around the ankles.
“There are some people that go around saying it's stupid to eat ice cream in the winter.” Saudade has his fingers tangled in the dyed hair of his prostitute and the way her head rocks back and forth suggests that Saudade could be rhythmically pushing her head toward his crotch. “I have just one thing to say to those people—” He makes a theatrical pause. “Fuck off. Right now, I'd say, it's winter.” He points with his chin to the vaguely extraterrestrial rooftops beyond the window. “And look at all the ice cream shops around here. Why are all those people sitting around wolfing down ice cream? Because they're total idiots? No, sir.” He shakes his head with a wise expression on his face. “It's about taste. The taste is the key. In this city they make the best ice cream I've had in my fucking life and the taste is the same in the winter or the summer. As far as I know. In any case, ice cream lasts better in the winter, it doesn't start to melt before you get a chance to finish it. Ha.” Saudade leans his head back and closes his eyes in that clichéd way porn actors do when they've got a woman kneeling in front of them giving them a blow job. It makes Manta a bit nervous that Saudade's penis, even when largely hidden by the prostitute's face and dyed hair, is clearly enormous. Certainly much larger than Manta's own penis. Manta's penis, even though it can't be considered small according to the standard measurements of the average adult penis, does seem proportionally small in relation to the size of Manta's body and the white soft sphere that is his belly. “I'm not saying that I'd rather be sitting here all day eating ice cream instead of being at home with my kid,” continues Saudade, with his fingers tangled in the prostitute's hair. “But fuck. This is the best ice cream I've eaten in my life. That's one thing they've got in this country. In this culture. These sons of bitches make such good ice cream that I could stay here for a few days just for the ice cream.”
The paintings that hang on the walls depict bucolic scenes in idyllic forest settings featuring herds of deer. There is something unpleasant about those paintings, thinks Manta. They all have dark red skies, skies that attempt to be dusky but are overwhelmingly unrealistic and look like some sort of postnuclear tragedy skies. The deer are out of proportion and some of them look more like dogs or other animals with deer antlers. The situation in which Manta finds himself right now, including the fact of having his pants at his ankles in a room where a prostitute is fellating Saudade's enormous, vigorous penis, gives him a familiar sensation of emotional stress. Traditionally he has never had any problem admitting that the stigma of his looks, along with his fondness for Marvel superheroes, makes up the historical basis of said sensation. A fondness that infantilizes him in the eyes of the world.
“Ice cream has always made me hard,” says Saudade, who has begun to move his hips back and forth to the rhythm of the head movements of his prostitute. “When I was a cop, we used to go to the whore-houses on Balmes Street,” he says. “Me and my partner. We used to show them our badges and act a little tough, you know. We weren't threatening or anything.” He shrugs his shoulders. “We just wanted to make them a little nervous. We'd have a few drinks and we'd pick out the hottest whores. There was one, I don't remember her name. One of those Russian whores, I guess, but not the skinny kind. Kind with big tits.” He raises his hands to his chest and mimes grabbing some invisible tits. “You'd sit on a great fucking sofa and they'd bring you the whore with her legs spread on a cart with wheels, like the kind they use to bring room service in hotels. With enormous scoops of ice cream on each tit. A couple different flavors with a cherry on top. And more ice cream and chocolate sauce on her pussy and ass.” He sighs with a vaguely nostalgic expression as the prostitute's head movements, now freed from the hands that grabbed her hair, become quicker and more precise. “Since then I can't control myself. Every time I see an ice cream sundae, I just see it and bam!” He punches the palm of his hand, making the whore jump. “Hard as a rock.”
Manta observes the brown envelope with the corporate logo of Arnold Layne Experts and the photographs strewn on the frayed bedspread. Since he has known him, Saudade has shown himself completely incapable of developing conversations that involve any type of emotional communication. Conversations like the ones that take place in most relationships of male camaraderie and professional friendship. The photographs strewn on the bedspread show a very dark man with plastic-framed glasses and a turtleneck sweater. His angular features and furtive expression in the photos, as he looks around worriedly and gets into a black car with tinted windows, make him look somewhat like a politically exiled pianist. Or perhaps an introverted chess player from the Eastern bloc. The brown corporate envelope the photographs came out of has a name written on it in capital letters in Mr. Bocanegra's unmistakably forceful handwriting: RAYMOND PANAKIAN. Manta closes his eyes again and tries to concentrate: in spite of several minutes of expert fellatio, his penis seems to have lost the desired degree of erection.