“It's not your fault,” her homeroom teacher is saying to Marcia Parini. In a comforting tone. “It's not anyone's fault. We do what we can to instill respect and human values in our children. Here, too, in ethics class. Valentina is sick.” She shakes her head sadly. “And we all have to help her.”
“You admit that you wrote this?”
The school psychologist brandishes the manuscript pages the way district attorneys in the movies brandish incriminating evidence. The way she rolled them up and now is shaking them in front of her face makes some of the pages come loose from the manuscript.
“It's not finished,” says Valentina in an apologetic tone.
“And what do you have to say about the knife?” whimpers Marcia Parini. Her face has become a stiff mask in a color close to burgundy. The swelling brought on by her crying has made it impossible for her to open her eyes more than half an inch. Valentina has trouble believing she can really see through those tiny slits. Now that the box of tissues is empty a shiny glow of snot begins to condense under her nostrils. “Were you planning on using it? On someone at school?”
The three adult women stare at the girl. The sudden silence causes the normal school noises to come floating in through the windows. The screams of the girls in the school yard. The squeal of sneakers on the basketball court. The engines of passing cars. Even the far-off hum of the guard's television, two floors below. For some reason, the fact that life continues its normal course on the other side of the closed office doors astonishes Valentina. For a moment, it seems that nothing that is happening to her is real. That she's not in her homeroom teacher's office, and if she closes her eyes everything will disappear. And she'll be back in her bed, beneath the blankets, or maybe locked in a bathroom stall at school.
“I joined Stephen King's Spanish Fan Club,” says Valentina finally. Avoiding the three women's eyes. “They're all idiots. I only did it so they would send me the Publisher's Advance Excerpt….”
Marcia Parini's reaction is surprisingly quick and dead-on, considering her crisis state complete with sobbing and partial hyperventilation. Her arm flies out and grabs her daughter's closest ear. Valentina doesn't have time to duck. The homeroom teacher doesn't have time to stop her. On the other side of the desk, the school psychologist in charge of Valentina's case is too far away to stop her.
With her face transformed into a toothy mask of rage, Marcia twists her daughter's ear furiously. Making her green eyeglasses fall to the floor. Valentina lets out a scream that reverberates throughout the entire school.
CHAPTER 22. The Universe According to Hannah Linus
Seen from the high window of the hotel where Juan de la Cruz Saudade and Hannah Linus are staying, the storm looks like a living thing. Some sort of living turbulence that advances along the streets, blinded by rage and crashing into buildings. Seven floors below, the street has become a quick, shallow river that drags tons of twisted Christmas decorations and garbage bags. The entire world has turned a dark gray color except for the infinitesimal moments when lightning strikes. In those moments it turns a bluish white color. The few pedestrians that venture onto the street don't so much carry their umbrellas as they get dragged by them.
Juan de la Cruz Saudade is standing on the king-size bed of his hotel suite. Naked and posing in a way that makes you think of bodybuilders posing for bodybuilding magazines. Looking at his perfectly muscular and abundantly tattooed reflection in the room's full-length standing mirror. There is genuine admiration in his face as he looks at himself. There's admiration and there's something more. A blend of sexual desire and that hypnotic fascination with which we watch traffic accidents from car windows or pornographic films broadcast in the middle of the night. Bolts of lightning illuminate his perfect system of muscles and tattoos. The way the storm's electrical flashes illuminate his postures suggests camera flashes. Hanging between his legs, his penis also appears to be posing for a battery of invisible photographers. Partially erect and with something similar to a lazy smile on the glans.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Hannah Linus stretches on the other side of the king-size bed. “What's wrong with you? Are you ten years old?”
The position in which Hannah Linus is lying facedown on the other side of the bed suggests very recent and very frenetic sexual activity. Her blond hair, which is normally organized into two very straight symmetrical braids at either side of the nape of her neck, is now a sticky tangle of damp locks. A coital flush still covers entire areas of her body.
“A moment ago you weren't thinking I was ten years old.” Saudade makes that gesture characteristic of bodybuilders, flexing an arm held high with his gaze fixed on the bulging bicep. “When you asked me to do that thing again. That thing that broke the table.”
Hannah Linus rolls her eyes. She feels around for the pack of cigarettes on the night table. She takes one out and lights it with squinted eyes.
“I'm not tired,” says Saudade. Distractedly watching a figure with an umbrella being dragged by the fierce wind, seven floors below, on the other side of the window. “You don't have to feel bad about that. A lot of women get embarrassed. I mean, when they can't take any more. When they can't keep up with my pace. But there's no need to be embarrassed.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I understand.”
Hannah Linus takes a drag on her cigarette. The waves of postcoital tedium that overtake her now are almost overwhelming. In fact, sometimes the feelings of impatience and disgust provoked by being in the same space as a man with whom she has just had sex, or even just having to talk to him, are almost unbearable for her. She's not one of those women that need the approval or companionship of the male gender, nor does her self-esteem depend on arousing the male sexual appetite. She has no elements of dependence in her personality and she certainly feels no curiosity for the partially pleasant sensations similar to degradation that can be found in sex with socially or intellectually inferior men. In point of fact, Hannah Linus feels no conscious curiosity about anyone. She considers herself her favorite person and the model on which to gauge other's failings. The way other people fail to be like her is like the way flies hit the windowpane again and again. Hannah Linus yawns. That seems to be the essence of The Universe According to Hannah Linus: several million employees, taxi drivers and lovers that a Scandinavian divinity with turgid breasts and Hannah Linus's features has placed on the Earth for her to use and enjoy. Saudade isn't so different from the rest of the people, she says to herself with a sigh. Just stupider.
“We could call a whore,” Saudade is saying. Provoking rhythmic contractions of his abdominal musculature in front of the mirror and proudly contemplating how his muscles contract and expand. “That way you wouldn't get so tired. It's easier if there's two of you.”
“Call a whore if you want.” Hannah Linus stands up and stubs out the cigarette in the disposable ashtray on the night table. She checks the time on her cell phone. “You can stay with her. I have things to do.”
Saudade watches out of the corner of his eye as Hannah Linus walks with lazy steps toward the bathroom of the hotel suite. The suite bathroom is reached through a mirrored door located in the middle of an entire wall of mirrors. From the height of the bed where Saudade is, and through the doorjamb of the half-open door, a massage table and a platform with three steps leading to the Jacuzzi can be seen. Then he looks in the opposite direction. Toward the slightly elevated living room where a thirty-six-inch plasma screen is showing a loop of adult films. And toward the trail of clothes that leads from the suite's vestibule to the remains of the broken table in the living room. And there, in the middle of the stream of clothes, his gaze finds what he was looking for: Hannah Linus's bag. A vaguely wrinkled black leather Chanel bag with gold rings. The same bag that Hannah Linus keeps with her at all times and where she keeps the magnetic security codes of all the buildings she is responsible for. And then something surprising happens.