Iris drops the Blockbuster bag and takes a look around her. With a frown. She opens the bedroom door and looks behind the sofa. She looks into the room with the exercise equipment and opens the bath curtain to see what's in the tub. Finally she opens the door to the walk-in closet and finds Eric Yanel sleeping inside the laundry basket. In his underwear and hugging a bottle of Macallan. She closes the door to the walk-in closet again. The television is playing a cava commercial that shows a boy dressed in old-fashioned clothes carrying a gigantic bottle of cava under his arm and looking at the camera with a malicious smile. Iris makes herself a Finlandia with tonic and places it on a tray next to eight very long and perfectly straight lines of cocaine. Then she takes out a DVD box of the eighth season of Friends from the Blockbuster bag and puts the first disc into the DVD player. She sits on the sofa with the tray on her lap and pushes the PLAY button on the remote.
* * *
Mr. Bocanegra, Show Business Impresario, is lounging in his chair with a napkin tied around his neck. Seated at a table in the restaurant where the Bocanegra family celebrates Christmas Eve every year. He is surrounded by his complex system of brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law and the expectant looks of half a dozen nieces and nephews, their eyes lit up with greed. A greed that Bocanegra has already been feeding for a couple of hours with the smiling transfer of plentiful one-hundred-and two-hundred-euro bills into the trembling hands of his nieces and nephews. Some of them are so anxious with greed that they have barely touched their desserts.
“Isn't it time to open presents?” Bocanegra wipes the sauce from his mustache with a corner of his napkin.
A roar of wild joy emanates from the throats of the half dozen children who are now running toward the Christmas tree under which a restaurant employee in uniform has placed all the Bocanegra family gifts. The employee in uniform moves away instinctively.
“You haven't spent a ton on presents for the kids again, have you?” one of Bocanegra's brothers asks Bocanegra, who is smiling beneath his mustache with quasi-parental pride.
Around the Christmas tree, Bocanegra's nieces and nephews are kicking aside all the gifts that aren't wrapped in the distinctive red and green paper that Mr. Bocanegra has his Christmas gifts wrapped in each year. Some of the adults seated at the table exchange uncomfortable looks. Mr. Bocanegra's nieces and nephews rapidly identify their gifts and tear off the red and green paper and shout with enthusiasm when they confirm that the professional sports equipment and portable technology that they have received this year are the most expensive models on the international market. There are more uncomfortable looks exchanged among the adults seated at the table. One of the nieces, kneeling beside the tree, cries with happiness as she hugs something that looks like a robot in the shape of a dog that has just come out of a box with Japanese writing on it. Another nephew screams with joy and pretends to play an electric guitar that he has just taken out of its case. At a sensible distance away from the group of children, the employee wearing the uniform of the exclusive uptown restaurant observes the scene with an element of horror in his smile.
* * *
Aníbal Manta is lying in his double bed with several large pillows behind his enormous back. With his reading glasses on. Carefully examining an Italian issue of the X-Men and consulting at regular intervals the Spanish-Italian/Italian-Spanish dictionary he bought a couple of days earlier in a downtown bookstore. His wife appears in the doorway of the bedroom with a bathrobe over her nightgown and a blender in her hand, one of those ones that look like miniature spaceships.
“I'm going over to the neighbors' house to return their blender,” says his wife. “I'm taking the keys in case I stay to chat and end up coming back late.” She smiles with a vaguely obsequious expression. “Just so you know.”
Manta looks at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It's ten past eleven. Manta sighs.
“I won't wait up, then,” he says in a soft voice.
“Good idea,” says his wife, who is already on her way to the door. “Don't wait up.” A couple of seconds later the sound of the door closing is heard.
Since he started reading the Italian X-Men comic that same afternoon after lunch, Manta has managed to decipher four and a half pages. Which, considering the comic has thirty-two pages, seems to indicate that his reading is going to take him at least the rest of the week. The deciphering process is hindered by the fact that Manta, who has suffered from severe dyslexia since childhood, has trouble finding the words in the dictionary. He is often forced to pause and try to remember the damn alphabetical order by counting on his fingers the way they taught him in the special school. On a few occasions his therapist has seemed willing to admit the idea that his dyslexia could be a result of the traumas he experienced during his childhood because of his excessive size and his schoolmates' taunting.
He has only one panel left on page five when the doorbell rings, twice, two long and incredibly high-pitched rings in the silence of the apartment. Manta takes off his reading glasses and stands up stealthily. He looks at the alarm clock. It's already past midnight. He walks barefoot toward the hall closet and takes out a three-foot-long iron bar with his initials written in permanent marker on one side. He tiptoes toward the door while two more nervous rings buzz.
“Whoever you are,” says Manta through his teeth, trying to see into the door's peephole, “you're gonna get it.”
Manta unlocks the lock and opens the door with the iron bar ready in his other hand. It takes him a second to recognize the messed-up individual who is standing on the other side of the door. His face is familiar. In spite of the dried blood and bruises. And the hair that falls in bloody dangling bits. The hair is definitely familiar. Manta frowns. The individual brings together two crudely bandaged hands in front of his bloodstained sweater in the universal sign for begging.
“You gots to help me,” says Pavel, his pleading hands together at his chest. “I'm in really serious trouble,” he says, but he has to stop talking to lift his arms and protect his head from the iron bar coming toward him. “Wait.”
Manta chases Pavel on the landing, hitting him on the arms and back.
* * *
The eighth season of Friends is a terribly complex amalgam of implied psycho-emotional references, relationships tainted by traces of lust and the complex forms of reproduction associated with heterodox sexualities. Iris Gonzalvo leans forward to snort a line of cocaine and uses the FAST FORWARD button on her remote to skip the parts that are less relevant to her grasp of the show's psycho-emotional drama. At the end of the seventh season, Monica and Chandler had finally managed to consecrate their love at the altar. After the fleeting intrigue triggered by Chandler's disappearance the night before the wedding. While still far from consolidating his relationship with Rachel, Ross had finally managed to establish a fairly satisfactory rapport with his son, Ben, whose mother, Carol, had divorced Ross in one of the early seasons after discovering that she was a lesbian. In a last unexpected twist, Phoebe and Rachel find out that one of the show's female characters is pregnant. Iris thinks she hears knocking on the door of the walk-in closet coming from inside, but she can't be sure because there are firecrackers going off in the street. The eighth season, as is customary in Friends, begins right where the previous one left off. In this case, minutes after Monica and Chandler's wedding. In which the best man was Joey dressed in a World War I uniform for an upcoming role. As the first few episodes play out, the cliffhangers from the previous season are resolved. Rachel turns out to be the one who's pregnant and Ross, after maintaining the suspense for a while, admits that he is the father. Yet not even the child they are about to have can bring them together. Instead they both continue going out with other people and Ross hooks up with a girl named Mona that Iris doesn't like at all. As the season progresses and the lines of cocaine disappear from the tray, things get complicated because stupid old Joey falls in love with Rachel. Iris isn't sure if she likes this new plot twist. Friends provokes complex networks of identification and repulsion in Iris. Of the three female leads, she doesn't think she has much in common with Monica, although she finds her the best-looking by far and the one she would sleep with if she were to have a lesbian relationship within the world of the show. Rachel is pretty stuck up and not very cute, although Iris admits that they share certain traits, while Phoebe is clearly just too histrionic. She has fucked the three male leads many times in her imagination, together and separately, although Joey is the one that she finds most sexually attractive and he would be her favorite if only he wasn't such a pinhead. In general, Iris considers herself a compendium of the virtues of the three female leads, without any of their snotty, stuck-up nonsense. It's true that the girls in Friends seem to live better than her, but that's because Iris hasn't yet achieved Fame and Success in Life. After half a dozen episodes, she doesn't hear firecrackers in the street anymore. The lines of cocaine have vanished and been replaced. The Finlandia with tonic on the tray is the fourth Finlandia with tonic. Iris isn't sure if she likes that Joey is going out with Rachel. The whole point of Friends is that Rachel ends up married to Ross. Iris has no doubt that she's going to achieve Fame and Success in Life very shortly. In fact, she's completely sure that the coming year will be the year she achieves Fame and Success in Life. Iris doesn't know exactly how she knows these things, but she knows she knows them, and that's good enough for her. Iris isn't like other people, thinks Iris. The eighth season of Friends is known for the appearance of a good handful of Hollywood stars as supporting characters in the series. Brad Pitt appears in the eighth season of Friends. So do Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn, both as guys Phoebe is dating, something Iris finds pretty unrealistic. It is completely silent now on the streets of Barcelona as Iris continues using the PLAY and FAST FORWARD buttons to watch her favorite show. A sound similar to a moo comes out of the walk-in closet where Eric Yanel seems to be unconscious inside the laundry basket.