CHAPTER 23. Universal Sign Language for Food
Aníbal Manta looks up from his X-Men comic book and studies Raymond Panakian's figure from a distance. Panakian is sitting on his wicker chair in front of the painting he's already been working on for four days. Aníbal Manta's stomach is growling. He's in a bad mood and his stomach is growling and he doesn't have the faintest idea how someone can spend four whole days working on the same painting. And it's not like the painting is any great shakes either, in his opinion. He claps his comic book shut. He stretches his arms in his chair and lets out a long and noisy yawn while his stomach continues growling. The chair he's sitting in isn't a wicker chair. It's one of those metal fold-up chairs that after an hour cause intense pain in the middle of his butt. He looks at his watch. The warehouse of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD., is completely silent in the midafternoon. There is a compact disc of Jamaican music in Bob Marley's stereo system, which belonged to Bob Marley before he disappeared, but putting it on is completely out of the question because it skips and the music turns into a series of bursts of labored and irritating hiccups.
Manta stands up. His degree of boredom and uneasiness is dangerously close to that degree of boredom and uneasiness that makes people do inexplicable things. The temptation to go over to where Panakian is working and kick out a leg of his chair and knock it to the floor, for example, is a temptation that Manta finds inexplicably difficult to resist.
And it doesn't seem that things are going to change until the very day of the job in the gallery. Every morning at nine sharp Raymond Panakian sits on his wicker chair with his little pots of paint and his palette and his blue work coveralls like the blue coveralls people wear to work in car repair shops or in industrial plants, people who work nonstop until eleven at night. Beneath the light of a small lamp that emits a strange blue shine. Yanel comes to watch him in the mornings and Manta usually arrives at three to relieve him. Six or seven hours watching a guy sitting in a wicker chair copy a little painting from an illustration he has stuck to one side with thumbtacks. There's no cure for that level of boredom. No supply of comic books can alleviate it. The X-Men one he has in his hand, for example, he's already read six times. For the first time in his life, Manta has the feeling that the X-Men comic books from the classic period could be something other than half an hour of fascinated contemplation and unrivaled aesthetic experience.
Panakian doesn't turn to look at him or make any movement that seems to acknowledge that Manta has stood up. His blue work coveralls with paint splotches over his turtleneck sweater make him look like a worker from another era, one in which human faith in socialist utopias hasn't yet waned. Manta doesn't have any idea what damn language the guy speaks.
Manta walks around the warehouse three times and smokes a cigarette. What he'd really like to do is head over to the supermarket two blocks away and buy some food to eat during the rest of his endless shift. The end of the workday in the warehouse isn't marked by any hour in particular or any visible progress in the work. The workday simply ends when Panakian gets up from the wicker chair and washes out his brushes and walks over to the exit and waits there. If that weren't enough, the security conditions in the warehouse don't allow Manta to leave him alone for even a minute. Not even to go to the supermarket. Every time he goes to the bathroom in the upper floor of the warehouse, Manta has instructions to handcuff Panakian's wrist to a pipe.
After pacing the warehouse three times, Manta throws his cigarette butt to the floor, stands right behind Panakian and looks over his shoulder at the half-painted picture. With his brow furrowed.
Aníbal Manta has his reservations about the second St. Kieran panel, which is the one Panakian is copying now. In narrative terms it could be a continuation of the one he was copying last week, the one with the guys falling through cracks in the ground. Or not. After all, Manta is a seasoned comic book reader. The second painting has very small figures in the lower part, but mostly seems to be a representation of the canopy of heaven. A black sun in the middle of a black sky. The sun is a simple black sphere surrounded by a crown of dying flames. Overall it's quite strange. The sky isn't black like the black sky in nocturnal pictorial representations. It is a much more absolute black. Without stars. Without night clouds and without any nuances of any kind. It is a black that seems to absorb one's gaze in a fateful way. A black that's more like no sky at all. On the Earth below, there are columns of smoke and fire. The little figures seem to be fleeing. Not in any specific direction, but in every direction. If you look closely, you can see terrified expressions on their little faces.
“Fuck it,” says Manta after a minute of contemplation. His stomach lets out an enthusiastic growl. “I could give two shits.”
Panakian doesn't look up from his work when he hears Manta cursing. Manta grabs him by the shoulder and shakes him. Panakian stares at him with his glasses that look like they should be on a pianist or a political refugee chess player. Like those glasses devoid of any traces of style that the state gave out free to the citizens of socialist countries.
“Let's go find some grub.” Manta brings together all the fingertips of one hand and points to his mouth several times with the joined fingertips. Then he rubs his belly. Then he points at Panakian. That should be enough, he thinks. It's possible that he's incapable of saying, “You're an asshole and when we finish this job I'm going to beat you so hard your own mother won't even recognize you” using just his hands, but if there's one thing Manta is an expert in it's the Universal Sign Language for food. “Both of us. Come on. You're coming with me. And no funny stuff. At the first sign of anything funny, I bring you back here and break your leg. As far as I know, you don't need two legs to paint that eyesore.”
Manta pushes Panakian out of the warehouse and locks its metal shutter and stares at Panakian in the middle of the parking lot. He opens his jacket to show Panakian a pistol and waits for Panakian to nod. Then he pushes him to the sidewalk.
The fresh winter air on the street fills Manta with optimism and a generic will to live. Next to him, Panakian shivers and his teeth chatter. They walk a couple of blocks and go into one of those supermarkets bathed in a fluorescent glow from above that makes you think of the light paradise must be bathed in. Manta grabs a plastic basket and pushes Panakian through the aisle that leads to the canned goods section.
“Take a good look, asshole.” Manta sticks two bags of crinkle-cut potato chips with monosodium glutamate into his shopping basket. “The wonders of capitalism. I bet you don't have places like this in the piece of shit country you come from.”
Manta pulls on Panakian's arm and pushes him through the aisles of the different sections of the supermarket bathed in heavenly light. For a moment, and without really knowing why, the idea comes into his head that the supermarket light from above is the opposite of the black of the painting's black sky. Next to the crinkle-cut chips he puts six cans of beer into his basket, and a package of boiled ham slices, bread with six kinds of seeds, blue cheese, green olives stuffed with anchovies, a family-size bottle of Coca-Cola, Oreo cookies, a bag of freshly made muffins and, after some hesitation, a precooked roast chicken wrapped in some sort of very taut plastic second skin. The plastic basket threatens to overflow. In the canned goods section, Manta turns and looks at Panakian with an expression of theatrical adoration and a can of cockles in his hand.
“Look at this, loser.” He brings the can of cockles less than two inches from Panakian's face. “Cockles. The best invention in the history of mankind. I take my hat off to the fucking genius who thought up taking these guys out of the sea and sticking them in a can.”