Lost Luggage (10 page)

“Not much there. For my little girl. They'll be useful for her at school and all that.”

Gabriel and Bundó gave the bookends to the nuns at the home. For some days a sense of guilt gnawed at their stomachs, a legacy of their upbringing at the orphanage. After a while, though, when they were traveling around Europe and boxes and packets got sidetracked, were left lying in the truck, mislaid, or never loaded, this primordial guilt underwent a decisive shift. Excuses, justifications, and evasiveness had become their manifesto, and it only got better and better. If ever they thought about that original day, Bundó and Gabriel felt an ingenuous, almost cloying tenderness, just like memories of one's first girlfriend.

Though it may seem that the opposite is true, we're making progress with the life of our father. Things are getting complicated. The passage gets dark and narrow, there are doors with stuck hinges or a lock rusty from disuse, and when we try to open them they won't cooperate. If we spy a glimmer of light escaping under the door, a narrative thread too faint to follow up, we're assailed by a mixture of discouragement and doubt. Well, it's not easy to make our memories fit together, we say, trying to encourage each other. Here you have the Christophers—four sons of four sceptical mothers and only one escape-artist father—who are trying to reconstruct a common past. We've been striving to speak in a single voice for some time now, but we've decided that each one of us will eventually have his own chapter to let it all out. His turn for the solo. Meanwhile, we're all wondering:
Are
we getting anywhere? In moments of euphoria, when dates tie up, events dovetail, and witnesses are in agreement, we can discern some secret but we don't know what it is. It could very well be that we're wrong and it doesn't even exist, this secret or whatever it might be.

Things are getting complicated, as we say, because Gabriel and Bundó are finally on the verge of settling into the age without a name, and everyone knows that nothing in life is final.

“We're about to change into third gear,” says Christof smugly, but we other three remind him of the promise not to overdo the motorway and driving school metaphors.

Now we're flipping through the pages of the calendar at vertiginous speed, as if they've been caught by a blustery autumn wind, and we come to rest on a day in October 1958. We're at Llars Mundet. Evening. Gabriel and Bundó have been together at La Ibérica for about a year now and have just got back from work after a long day's labors. Today they've done a short but god-awful move, the kind that really does you in, from the Sant Gervasi neighborhood to a dump in the old city center. Narrow streets, obdurate stairways, tiny rooms. A widow and her good-for-nothing son can't make ends meet. Tears. And tomorrow, the same damn thing. The two friends have a quick wash and a liberal squirt of cologne to cover up the acrid stink of sweat. They're sitting on the beds in their shared room waiting for dinnertime. They're summoned to Sister Elvira's office. Off they go. Bundó's stomach is roaring loudly. They knock at the door, and from inside the energetic voice of the Mother Superior tells them to come in.

Another door opens for us.

The nun looked up and observed Gabriel and Bundó's entrance with a pang of tenderness. For more than ten years she'd watched these two boys growing up as if they were her own children. She'd fed them when they were small, seen them take their first communion, scolded them, and punished them for their own good. Now, as she contemplated the two of them, she could glimpse both the sheltered years of the House of Charity and the jungle-like future, full of the temptations they were going to find when they went out into the world. Her eyes glistened—it always happened when she had to deal with this situation—and, to take heart, she reminded herself that the two lads were working at her brother's trucking company. One way or another, everything was still in the family.

“I've asked you to come,” she said, “because I have to give you two bits of news. One good and one bad. Which do you want first?”

“The bad!” Bundó declared, but he really wanted to hear the good news first.

“The good,” Gabriel answered in chorus with Bundó although he really preferred to have the bad news first.

Before speaking, the nun paused for effect. “You've grown up,” she observed, adopting a solemn tone. “Time flies. You're seventeen years old now. Almost men. We've spoken with your teachers at the school and have decided that it's time for you to make your own way. Thanks be to God, you're now working and earning a wage, is that not so? And now you will have to learn how to manage your own money. There are other more needy children who require our attention. Bundó, Gabriel”—and here she paused—“at the end of the month you'll have to leave the home. That's the bad news.”

Their faces began to light up but they quickly masked it. So leaving, getting away, getting the hell away from the home—at last, at last!—was the bad news.

In a bid to buy time, Bundó said, “You're right, Sister. My bed's got too short and my feet stick out over the end.”

“And the good news?” Gabriel inquired.

We'll spare ourselves the nun's speech, which took the form of a sermon crammed with Mothers of God, prayers, and declarations of gratitude winging heavenward. And, indeed, the good news was very good. Thanks to their being orphans and, in particular, thanks to Senyor Casellas, who had a childhood friend in military headquarters—and this was big-time string-pulling—the two friends would be exempt from military service. At first, the good news impressed them less than the supposedly bad news—because they'd always seen military service as their ticket out of the home—but it took less than a minute for it all to fall into place. The shiny vision beyond the prison walls beckoned them, brighter than they'd ever imagined. They were unable to stifle a shout of freedom and couldn't stop laughing. In the midst of the frenzy, Bundó rushed over to the nun and planted kisses on both her
cheeks. The nun gave him a friendly shove—get away with you!—and blushed. Gabriel was tempted to imitate his friend but, at the last minute, merely opted for doing something awkward with his arms and making an affectionate bow in her direction (and one can't discard the possibility that he'd suddenly remembered the titillating tale starring Sister Mercedes).

Making a big deal out of the little kerfuffle because she had a secret penchant for this kind of familiarity, the Mother Superior straightened her coif, smoothed out the non-existent creases in her habit, and immediately set about putting a damper on things.

“You must be eternally grateful to God and to Senyor Casellas, in that order, for what they have done for you,” she said, shifting from Catalan to Spanish to give more gravity to her words. “In fact, it's not entirely true that you have been exempted from military service: You're going to enter the ranks, so to say, of La Ibérica moving company and it is my expectation that you will serve Senyor Casellas with the same devotion as our soldiers serve the fatherland and General Franco.”

Only a few months earlier, declaring that Spain represented “unity of destiny in the universal,” Franco had presented the principles of the National Movement, and the Mother Superior had learned them by heart. The two boys cagily agreed with her pronouncements. As they heard her out, Gabriel mentally drew a fine moustache on the nun's pasty face and realized that she and Senyor Casellas were like two peas in a pod.

And now, if we may, we'll close the doors of the House of Charity and Llars Mundet forever.

D
estiny, playful and mischievous as a puppy, landed Gabriel and Bundó in a boarding house. Whenever a youngster left the orphanage, the nuns made inquiries as to whether there were any relatives, even distant ones, with a view to handing over responsibility to the family. This time, however, they'd known for years that the two friends were alone. They let them leave, then, with the recommendation that they should install themselves in some economical, but above all decent, lodgings. Gabriel and Bundó didn't need to be told twice. Acting on the advice of Grandpa Cuniller at La Ibérica, who'd spent more than half his life in boarding houses, they opted for a room with two beds in an establishment on the Ronda de Sant Antoni. The building was on the corner of Carrer Sant Gil, just a few steps from the local market, although the main reason for choosing that particular place was that it was very close to the House of Charity. They only had to walk along Carrer Ferlandina to get to one of its entrances, the one opening into the Nadal i Dou courtyard. It's not that the two friends were yearning to hang around their old orphanage again—indeed Gabriel had fled from the printers with the guilty conscience of a deserter—but they had a sense of going back to the neighborhood where they'd grown up. They wiped the slate clean of the time they'd spent in exile in Llars Munder and were at last able to satisfy an urge that had been repressed since early adolescence. They almost swooned at the thought of the bittersweet
perfume of the streets of the red-light district, the Barri Xino, at nightfall. Now free of the nuns' vigilance, they were longing to roam its most notorious corners, and nothing would deprive them of the thrill of these so-often-imagined attractions.

It was autumn 1958, and the boarding house captured perfectly the frontier spirit of that part of Barcelona: It overlooked the cramped spaces of the Barri Xino at the back, while its front door opened on to the Ronda de Sant Antoni with its ambience of a Parisian boulevard. The establishment occupied the whole of the spacious second floor of a four-story building, and it had a well-lit living room thanks to the glassed-in balcony overlooking the street, but its interior offered much less than what the façade promised. This was a modest boarding house, in the shape of a funnel and organized around a long passageway. There were six dark bedrooms with high ceilings and fake moldings, a bathroom with a translucent door—on the other side of which you could always make out gelatinous shadows—and a separate toilet in a narrow little room. The landlady's kitchen and bedroom were set apart, a kind of secret annex that was off-limits to the lodgers and, immediately after that, the apartment widened out into the luminous living-cum-dining room that looked on to the Ronda.

With no known name beyond the dented sign at the entrance—“Pension. Travelers and Long-term. Second Floor”—the boarding house belonged to a Senyora Rifà, who hailed from the plain near Vic. A petite energetic woman, a human dynamo, Senyora Natàlia Rifà had inherited the business ten years earlier from a first cousin of her mother's. A spinster, well over fifty, suspicious and coquettish by nature, she scurried around her domain as if there was a constant danger of one of the rooms being set on fire. Notwithstanding all the disappointments she had borne, she hadn't renounced the pleasure of a little primping and preening every morning, and she had great faith in a corset that made her backside look misshapen. Her boarders only ever saw her in a dressing gown when she went into the kitchen. She always got dressed up to serve the food at mealtimes. She was clean and required the lodgers to be clean too and, if she saw that they had a future in her house, she educated
them in all-around tidiness. She cooked passably well, which is to say not stinting on the salt but without much joy, and that might be why she only accepted men in her pension—because she knew they were easier to please.

The second floor of the building in Ronda de Sant Antoni hadn't been renovated since well before the Civil War. The walls sweated in summer and patches of damp, which took ages to vanish, appeared in some rooms after rain (and an insanely superstitious student from Jaca saw faces in them). The furniture creaked with age and the kitchen utensils were blackened by fire. This rather fusty atmosphere was accentuated by the most outlandish feature of the house: its collection of stuffed animals.

Birds, Canidae, rodents, or members of the feline species: each room exhibited its own variety of embalmed creature. It was a veritable natural history museum. In the vestibule, crouched in semi-ambush above the coat and hat rack, a shiny-pelted fox stood sentry: You can come in; you can't come in. On the floor, beside the umbrella stand, a kindly looking dalmatian kept it company, sitting up on its back legs, apparently soliciting caresses from anyone entering or leaving. A squirrel with its tail all fluffed up like a feather duster and on its way up the bookcase in the hallway propped up the volumes of
Reader's Digest Selections
(the landlady had also inherited the subscription). In the display cabinet in the dining room, a sky-blue parrot and a multihued cockatoo with permanently open beaks chattered incessantly, miming the most frequently used words of the occupants of the house. In a different corner of the same cabinet, a hummingbird with iridescent feathers, its wings whirring in perpetual still motion, imbibed at an exotic plastic flower. On top of an old cocktail cabinet, a genet with its mouth half open sighed over such succulent prey.