Eric Yanel begins to shiver. At the center of a circle of glasses of water and solicitous offers of medical help. His lower jaw seems to be out of joint and trembling at the same time. In spite of what he said a few minutes ago, it's not entirely true that he has no problem getting satisfactory erections in private. He has actually begun to have problems with the very idea of an erection. The erection as the central distinctive element of the male condition. Yanel has been feeling an unpleasant pressure on his male psyche for months now. He doesn't like to think about his penis and when he does, it's with certain anxiety. He avoids looking at his penis when he showers. Which has been creating a sort of blind spot in his showers. A blind spot located at the height of his crotch. To draw his attention away from it, Yanel has put a portable compact disc player in the bathroom and he sings along to commercial pop songs from the eighties while he showers. Eric Yanel's favorite pop singer is Madonna. Particularly her records from the eighties. The rest of the time, Yanel attributes his general lack of interest in phallic sex to his fiancée's phallic obsession, and the stress that obsession generates in him. On a couple of recent occasions he has paid prostitutes to have them masturbate in front of him, or to let him lick their anuses or vaginas.
After a moment of paralysis, Yanel blinks. In that surprised way people who've just come out of a trance blink. He stammers out something unintelligible about his knee and starts to limp as fast as he can through the guests.
Yanel reaches Iris at the corner of the Pedralbes street where Iris is standing in front of a traffic light, her arms crossed over her chest and her body leaned slightly forward and to one side the way people do when waiting for a taxi. Eric Yanel approaches her limping flamboyantly. It is one of those bright winter nights when the scattered stars and the positioning lights of planes in the sky generate metaphors of the Implacability of Cosmic Loneliness and the Possibility of Life Being Shortened by Cancer. Iris's fur coat and her tall, furry hat, in the urban landscape of wrought-iron garden gates and early-twentieth-century mansions, bestow the scene with the unmistakable quality of a romantic theater piece. Yanel left his jacket in the coat check.
“I'm ready to give it another try,” says Yanel. His panting creates misty little clouds of steam in the frozen air. “I mean fucking. Not that I really want to. I've already explained how bad the pressure and everything make me feel. But I can try. Really.”
There is a moment of silence. Iris's silhouette is genuinely romantic, with her arms crossed over her fur coat. Yanel is standing before her, turned to one side, with his back curved forward and one hand on his knee. A bit like a Russian soldier in a romantic play, wounded and leaned elegantly toward one of those Russian ladies.
“You can try.” Iris takes some sort of powder compact out of the pocket of her coat. She picks up a little bit of cocaine from inside of it with a key and sticks it into her nostril. Then she sniffs. “But not with me. I'm leaving you. Good-bye. We're not engaged anymore.” She lifts her eyebrows. “We're not even boyfriend and girlfriend anymore.”
“I swear things are going to change.” Yanel takes a wallet out of his pants pocket and starts rifling around inside it. “For real this time. I mean, not like the last time I told you things were going to change. You hear me? This time things are definitely going to change. My career is really going to take off. This time for real. I met someone. One of those eccentric millionaires. His name is Giraut.” He finally finds what he was looking for in his wallet. A business card. He pulls it out with trembling fingers and gives it to Iris. “He lives in a gigantic mansion. I've been there lots of times. A patron of the arts. A good friend of mine. He's going to produce a movie for me. As the star. Scriptwriter. Director. Whatever I want. You can be in it, too, of course.”
The vaguely orangish glow of the streetlights on the wrought-iron garden gates and early-twentieth-century mansions and Iris's Moscow-inspired silhouette intensify the atmosphere of a Russian romantic theater set. Like those orangish spotlights they project right onto the actors in romantic plays set on winter streets with streetlights painted onto the backdrop. Iris examines the card with an impatient expression.
“It doesn't say anything here about him being a film producer,” she says. “It says here: Lucas Giraut. Antiques Dealer. By Appointment Only.”
“You don't understand these things.” Yanel looks desperately at an empty taxi that approaches the stoplight where they are standing. “This guy is an intellectual. His family made a fortune off antiques. Oriental art. Old paintings of eclipses and stuff like that.”
Iris gestures to the taxi with her hand. The taxi slows down and finally stops in front of her.
“You can't leave me.” Yanel tries to take a cigarette out of a pack but his hand is shaky and several cigarettes fall onto the sidewalk. “I gave you everything you have. You owe me your career.” He pauses. “If you leave me I could kill you,” he adds in a dubious tone.
Eric Yanel watches as the taxi drives off with Iris inside, showing him her middle finger through the window. Then he starts to head off down the street, dragging his leg.
CHAPTER 27. The Day of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel
The Day of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel is coming to an end. The rays of late-afternoon sun fall through the balconies of the Gothic Quarter like the incandescent ashes of a silent fire. The chromatic range of the late-afternoon sun on the roofs also suggests that something is burning in some part of the sky.
Valentina Parini is sitting with her legs crossed on her bed in her bedroom on the first floor of the Palau de la Mar Fosca. Experiencing a feeling of imminent danger. The Christmas sounds filtering through the wall and closed windows of the former palace not only fail to dispel the feeling of danger but seem to increase it. A few hours ago Valentina Parini discovered that she can only mitigate the feeling of danger by sitting with her legs crossed at the head of her bed and rocking backward rhythmically so that the back of her head hits the wall.
“Tina?” calls her mother from the bathroom where she is blow-drying her hair during the preparatory phase of her Friday-night Husband Hunting Expedition. “Will you come here for a minute?”
In front of her bed, in a niche of the wall that Marcia Parini thinks looks too much like an altar, is the broken alarm clock that Valentina Parini was carrying in her hand the last time she saw her father. The last day she ever saw her father. When she went out into the street looking for him so he could fix the broken alarm clock and she found him putting his last packed-up belongings into the trunk of his car. And she stayed there, with the broken alarm clock in her hand, planted in the doorway of the former ducal palace, while her father just said good-bye with a nervous smile, got into the car as fast as he could and drove off, never to return. The day when things really started to go bad in Valentina Parini's life. Not to say that they were good before.
“Valentina?” Her mother's voice sounds somewhat opaque and at the same time somewhat shrill from inside the blow-dryer's aerial sound cushion. “Remember what we talked about, about having your head in the clouds.”
The feeling of danger that Valentina Parini is experiencing tonight, which forces her for some reason to rock back and forth and hit the back of her head against the wall, began at some point this morning. At first she didn't pay it much attention. At first it wasn't much more than some kind of pins and needles. Like the feeling you might be being watched. It got worse at lunchtime and during her afternoon classes, until her hands were too rigid to hold a spoon or a pen. Later, at home, the feeling became incredibly urgent. Like someone aiming at your head with a loaded weapon.