Valentina checks the time on the clock on her desk: it's eight thirty. The back of her head, which she's been hitting against the wall for quite a while, hurts. To be precise, it seems that the combination of the rhythmic motion and the pain is what helps to mitigate the feeling of danger. Now she leaps up from the bed and walks through the hallway holding her breath and clenching her fists tightly. Like those people in horror movies who walk through the hallway of an abandoned house seconds before someone bursts into the darkness of the hallway with a butcher's knife. From the doorway of the bathroom she sees her mother drying her hair in her mother's traditional hair-drying posture: leaning forward, sticking her butt out and moving her head alternately to dry the respective hair that hangs from one side of her head and the other. Valentina bites a knuckle with a pensive expression and observes her mother's ass. She's always found her mother's ass strange and unpleasant. Absurdly soft and flaccid. Tonight, however, she finds the sight of Marcia Parini's ass almost unbearable, and it conjures up all sorts of mental images of marine mammals. Once Valentina saw something on TV about marine mammals and ever since then she's been haunted by those images of greasy beings with mottled gray skin and horrifying warts.
Valentina goes into the bathroom with her face wrinkled in disgust. She kneels in front of the toilet and vomits a couple of streams of something liquid and bitter. Marcia Parini lifts up her head and looks at her daughter while still drying her hair.
“Did you stuff yourself with chocolate again?” she says. With the same simultaneously opaque and shrill voice that she uses to make herself heard over the blow-dryer. “It serves you right. Didn't I tell you to defrost yesterday's leftover lasagna?”
Valentina lifts the palm of one hand to indicate that she's okay and for a moment she has to repress the desire to hit her head against the edge of the toilet.
“You're going to be alone for a little while tonight.” Marcia Parini turns off the hair dryer and puts a tight dress on over her underwear. “If your grandmother calls, tell her I went to a Book Club meeting. You can watch TV, but just regular TV. No satellite stuff.” She looks in the mirror and adjusts the straps of the tight dress with her fingers. “And leave the lights on in the living room and stairway, the last time I almost broke my neck.”
Valentina proceeds to rinse out her mouth as her mother leaves the bathroom. Then she hears the clickety-clack of the high heels her mother wears when she goes out husband hunting and, a minute later, the noise of the door to the street closing.
Valentina Parini leans her head slightly and squints her eyes and concentrates on trying to hear Lucas Giraut's footsteps in the apartment upstairs. Sometimes she follows his itineraries through the house: from the sofa to the fridge, from the kitchen to the television, from the bed to the bath. When she's home alone with her mother, it comforts her to know that Lucas is in the apartment upstairs. Doing his usual routines, seated in front of the computer or simply reading his professional magazines about antiques. Tonight no footsteps are heard, or any other noise that would indicate that Lucas Giraut is in his apartment on the upper floor of the former ducal palace. In Valentina's opinion, Lucas Giraut isn't stupid like other people. In the moments when Valentina Parini isn't wishing with all her heart that her mother wasn't her mother, she wouldn't mind if Lucas married her.
At eleven thirty on the Night of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel, Valentina puts on her parka and goes out. She crosses the Plaza Sant Jaume with its stupid institutional crèche made entirely of recyclable materials and takes Ferran Street. At this time on a Friday night, the streets of the Gothic Quarter are filled with groups of drunk British and Irish tourists singing British and Irish songs and vomiting on the sidewalks. Although she walks with her head bowed and her hands in the pockets of the parka, several British and Irish tourists start following her, saying things in English and even trying to touch her. A couple of teenage Arab petty thieves try to corner her against a wall, but she stares at them and something in the way she stares at them makes them back up, terrified. When she finally gets to the Ramblas, the contrast makes them seem like a much more pleasant place. With their hordes of tourist families and sleepy policemen.
The entrance to the franchise store in the Plaza Catalunya where the Launch Party for Stephen King's New Novel is taking place has been decorated for the occasion with a gigantic promotional banner that has the title of Stephen King's new novel, WONDERFUL WORLD, above a stereotypically idyllic image of an American suburb. Valentina Parini goes up the escalator wringing her hands. The feeling of danger that she's been feeling all day seems to have solidified and concentrated around this moment and place. The moment she's been waiting for for weeks, but which for some reason seems to have transformed into a vortex of danger. Some of the customers of the franchise store move aside to let her pass.
When she gets to the floor where the bookstore is, she finds hundreds of Stephen King fans lined up in front of the counter where the first copies will soon be available for sale. The fans on line are mostly wearing promotional T-shirts and caps for different Stephen King novels and films, and heavy metal bands. One of the fans is wearing a full-body bunny costume, the kind they sell at the souvenir shops. Some of them look at Valentina with terrified expressions and move aside as she comes through. She advances with erratic steps to the end of the line.
A couple of minutes pass. A pair of salesgirls wearing the store's two-tone corporate vest hand out promotional T-shirts for WONDERFUL WORLD to the fans on line. With the same bucolic suburban scene and the same inscription, WONDERFUL WORLD, that adorns all the display stands and banderoles. When she gets to Valentina's spot in line, the employee looks at her with a concerned smile and offers her a large T-shirt.
“I only have sizes L and XL left,” the salesgirl starts to say, but she stops short when she sees Valentina's face. Who is now gnawing on the inside of her cheeks to mitigate the feeling of danger. “Okay, kid,” she adds in a slightly annoyed tone, “you don't have to get like that.”
One of the fans in the line is dressed as a zombie. He has white makeup on and his hair is covered in some sort of green gel and he has a fake scar on his neck that seems to be trying to indicate that he recently had his throat slit. Another of the fans on line has the frighteningly outdated hairstyle and pointy fake ears that characterize those born on the planet Vulcan. Some of the fans chat in low voices, as if they were in some sort of religious setting, and make jokes that can only be understood by Stephen King fans. Photographers, and even a couple of local television cameras, mill around the line taking photos of the fans. In her spot at the end of the line, Valentina Parini can feel her heart rate speeding up and she starts to see strange kaleidoscopic figures in the margins of her visual field. A minute later someone cuts a ribbon like the ones at the openings of official buildings and a burst of applause is heard accompanied by camera flashes. The line begins to advance as the first shoppers acquire their copies of Wonderful World. The first buyer holds his copy up over his head like people do when they've just won a sports trophy.