Lost Luggage (11 page)

This obsession with taxidermy even extended to the landing. Next to her door and with permission from the other residents of the building, who saw it as a touch of class that graced the whole house, Senyora Rifà had mounted the head of a wild goat, the kind that has spiraling, sharp-tipped horns. Once they'd earned their landlady's approval, the most faithful clients were let into the secret
of the goat: The semibared teeth of the beast guarded a copy of the key to the pension for latecomers and the absentminded.

The inhabitants of the pension took a while to get used to the disquieting presence of all these creatures. As they lingered at the table over coffee, tall stories were told about the poor quality of the taxidermy in some specimens. Hearing them, newcomers started scratching uneasily and, for some time afterward, their dreams were filled with bloated-bellied beasts and revolting flies buzzing around them.

Senyora Rifà also had a cat, a live cat. The animal, which had become unapproachable after the half-hearted caresses of so many hands—a sort of pension levy or toll—seemed to revel in startling people. Without any warning at all, after spending hours and hours sleeping on the sofa or immobile atop its favorite piece of furniture, it would let out a screech and leap onto the shoulder of whoever was nearest. The lodgers hated it, and the sentiment was mutual. Apart from the cat, which was the original furry occupant of the house, the invasion of animals, the motionless ones, had occurred in the days when one of Senyora Rifà's lodgers was a traveling salesman promoting Rioja wines. Gabriel and Bundó just missed out on meeting him, but some of the residents made it their business to induct them into the mystery. The gentleman in question, a widower with two daughters of more than marriageable age who were the bane of his existence, lived in the pension for almost four years, from 1954 to 1958. At first, he was there one week a month, just enough time to do the rounds of Barcelona's restaurants and businesses, but, after six months, his stays extended and, claiming a terrific amount of work, he was now spending twenty days in the boarding house and ten in Logroño. He and the landlady used the familiar
tu
and they enjoyed each other's company—on the mattress, every night. The happiest days in Senyora Rifà's life were those she spent as this man's concubine. She confessed this to Bundó on more than one anisette-soaked evening, whereupon he gave her his shoulder to cry on. In the end, the gentleman also endowed her with his stuffed-animal collection.

It seems that, thanks to some childhood memory related to an old Republican schoolteacher, the gentleman from Logroño was a
great lover of taxidermy. Every Friday afternoon he went off, like an explorer setting out on a hunt, to pay a visit to the taxidermist's that used to be in the Plaça Reial. He gazed and gazed again upon the exhibited items and, from time to time, when one of them stole his heart, spent a few pesetas and brought it home. Senyora Rifà tended to receive the new acquisition with a wrinkling of her nose—“dust and more dust,” she said to herself—but immediately set about looking for somewhere to put it. She saw each new adoption as a sign of permanence. As long as the animals were there, she reasoned—and it wasn't as if they were going to be escaping all by themselves some fine day—it would never occur to the gentleman from Logroño to leave her.

She was wrong, of course.

She was wrong because on her return from the market one September morning, that time of day when the house was empty and she listened to the serial on Ràdio Barcelona while she was cooking lunch, she found a folded piece of paper on the dining-room table. The gentleman from Logroño informed her, with immoderate stylistic flourishes, that he'd been obliged to hasten back to his home town. His two daughters, together and in concert, had attempted suicide. He'd write with further news as soon as he could. Lots of kisses, et cetera. Senyora Natàlia Rifà shuddered at the situation and felt sorry for the man. She then noticed the reek of Dandy Male and realized that the paper she was holding in her hands was perfumed. What a strange thing. Who would perfume such a sorrowful note unless he was soliciting forgiveness for something? She rushed to the room that the gentleman from Logroño still rented in order to keep up appearances and flung open his wardrobe. Empty. Fearing she was going to faint, Senyora Rifà flopped onto the bed. Immobile on top of a chest of drawers, a ferret mocked its landlady with a scornful leer.

In the first few weeks, Senyora Natàlia Rifà pinned her hopes on the stuffed zoo, but her longing for a letter postmarked Logroño gradually dwindled away to nothing. One evening at dinnertime, after two months of resisting renting out the man's room, she realized that looks of compassion were being exchanged between her
lodgers. She was an expert at deciphering the undercurrents running among them. She asked a few questions and was met by the same deadpan expressions, but, in the end, a young fellow from Berga, a notary's assistant and a blabbermouth by nature, couldn't stand it any longer: That very afternoon as he was returning from the courts he'd seen the gentleman from Logroño walking along carrer Trafalgar. He. Was. Accompanied. By. A. Floozy—if one might put it thus.

Senyora Rifà immediately started putting him down. Just what you'd expect from a good-for-nothing who owes me money. That's the kind of thing that happens in Barcelona. When she was a child her family, God-fearing people, had always taught her to repress any show of feelings. The next day she squeezed another bed into the vacated room and filled it with two new heaven-sent boarders, Gabriel and Bundó. This convinced her that she was starting a new chapter. The very same day she moved some of the animals around and threw one out, but only one. She got rid of a poor raccoon that had traveled halfway around the world only to end up in the garbage, and all because it too painfully reminded her, with the mask around its glassy eyes, of the gentleman from Logroño, whose expression darkened every time he started carping about the problem of his unmarried daughters.

From that day onward, Senyora Rifà got into the habit of naming the rooms according to the animals they housed. The Badger Room. The Woodcock Room. The Lizard Room. Bundó and Gabriel entered the pension occupying the Ferret Room, a modest two-person room but with the small luxury of a window opening into the light well. In the summer one was grateful for the little bit of air that came in. Senyora Rifà rented them the room for a ridiculously low price. She was in a hurry to fill it with life again. Furthermore, since they were so busy with the moving, always traveling about, they came to an agreement that they'd never have lunch in the boarding house.

When our mothers asked about where he lived in Barcelona, our father didn't deceive them and told them about the pension, although he never elaborated on specific details of the neighborhood, the rooms, or what kind of life people led there. He and Bundó were in the boarding house for many years—first sharing a room,
then, after a while, each with his own room—and the six rooms of the house were jumbled up in his memory as an indivisible whole. A bed, a wardrobe, a chair, a bedside table, maybe a mirror and a washbasin, and the stuffed animal. Senyora Rifà established a sort of hierarchy, or lineage based on length of stay in the pension, so if a lodger decided to leave or if he died (something that also happened), the next on the list had the right to move into the empty room. Gabriel went through the whole process of these minimoves, from room to room, until coming to occupy the best of the lot, the Falcon Room—although, at this point, we can't confirm whether he got to the one that was really the best, which was the landlady's. When all's said and done, the arrangements imposed by Senyora Rifà were not so different from the way of life in the orphanage and the two youths weren't really bothered by them. If they knuckled under it was because they didn't want to upset her.

Then again, living with the other inhabitants of the house helped them to get settled in the new world. The two friends spent the better part of the day with the workers at La Ibérica. Hours of toil in that particular microcosm dulled their thoughts but conversation with the other lodgers, over dinner or waiting to proceed to the dining room, often had the effect of jolting their brains into action. The cement was still wet and the footsteps thereon were forcibly imprinted. Bits of advice given, anecdotes and overly emphatic statements stirred them up. Faced with some new comment, they'd be immoderately irritated or they'd laugh as they savored the pleasures of a private joke and knowing looks. Although the friendship that had united them since their early childhood always remained staunch, Gabriel and Bundó learned in the boarding house that there was nothing wrong with having differing opinions. Besides, their age without a name still provided a safety net.

It would be impossible to reproduce the list of transient and long-term tenants our father consorted with in the boarding house. If we do the sums, the figure skyrockets. At the end of the sixties, by which time we'd been born and he was visiting us from time to time—in Paris, Frankfurt, and London—Senyora Rifà's establishment had been his fixed address for more than ten years. More
than ten years: mind-boggling. In 1969 Bundó used his nest egg to make a down payment on a public housing apartment. A year and a half later he moved into it. Gabriel, however, didn't follow suit. He was comfortable in the imperfect nomadic existence that combined truck journeys around Europe and the ever-provisional hospitality of a pension, and was loath to abandon the status quo.

“It's as if all the to-ing and fro-ing of the boarding house, all those people coming in and going out, just like him, prolonged the pleasurable sensation of always being on the move,” Christof remarked.

“We're Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We hope you will enjoy the show . . .”

Okay, Chris, we get the drift. In that lonely hearts club, Bundó and our father met all sorts of people. The place must have been frequented by friendly types and show-offs, misers and depressives, timid souls and loudmouths, swindlers and jokers. For some years, there'd been periods in which the city had started buzzing again, as it had done before the war, with the agitation of an anthill. There were weeks—though not many—in which the jittery energy of the outside world permeated the pension. Tenants came and left. Senyora Rifà got fed up with washing sheets and towels. A grudging Barcelona woke up in a bad mood, and thick and sore headed from nightmares, but the frenetic activity didn't ease up for a single moment. In the streets, trams and buses and trucks and cars and people tweaked the nerves of the city and, eventually, the city reacted.

One Sunday morning when we four Christophers were wandering around the Sant Antoni neighborhood looking for signs of those times, we went to the second-hand book market and bought a book of photos from those years.

“And what if we stumble across a photo where, in the background, in a corner or sneaking by, Bundó and Dad appear?” we joked.

It didn't happen. It was unlikely that they would have been captured in those days because they were never still. The photos in the book were printed in high-contrast black and white. The larger ones were very grainy. The first image of the book, probably taken midafternoon from the foot of Mount Tibidabo, shows the whole city spread out from the port and the mountain of Montjuïc to the
chimneys of Sant Adrià. Veiled by sea mist, it is an incandescent mirage. Then the photographer got down to particulars and captured a thousand and one details of daily life. In those pages, where night fell just as easily as dawn broke, there was a place for everybody. From the society debuts of young ladies from good families to equestrian events at the Polo Club; from the farriers near the old slaughterhouse to the beer guzzlers in the Plaça Reial; from the raffles and fun and games at the festival of Gràcia to the procession on Saint Eulalia's Day with traffic cops all decked out in feathered helmets; from the white squares after the great snowfall of '62 to the skeletons of public housing blocks being constructed in La Verneda and the shanties of Montjuïc. If we are to stay hot on the heels of our father, then, we're obliged to plunge in among the throng and stop the shifting shadows. We tried to get inside each photo, breathing in its odors and listening to its cries. We really did try.

While inner courtyards filled up with the rankness of boiled cabbage, the concierges of the buildings in the Eixample neighborhood listened to the radio and cursed under their breath. The whores in the Barri Xino straightened their bra straps and touched up their cheap makeup. Shopkeepers decorated their windows with castles built of canned foods. Doormen nodded sleepily inside their vestibules. As piss fermented and stained the cobblestones, a small girl ate lupine beans next to a fountain. A soldier on leave bought flowers for a little seamstress at one of the stalls on La Rambla. An old man in pajamas came out on to his balcony and scratched his balls. A kid in an undershirt killed rats with a catapult. Sea air blew up from the port to caress the legs of a girl in a short, not-quite-knee-length skirt. A tiny man dressed in a white work coat with a threadbare jacket on top sidled through an alley, trying to conceal a well-wrapped packet . . .

“Now. Now, yes! Stop here!”

This scraggy little man with permanently floury hair was a baker's assistant called Lluís Salvans, and he lived in Senyora Rifà's boarding house. Although this is only conjecture, we'd say that the packet, wrapped in brown paper and about the size of a thick book, probably contained incendiary leaflets that were about to be distributed
at the entrance to one of the markets, or at the exit door of the Liceu opera house, or in the middle of Plaça de Catalunya. Salvans was, for a time, the most enigmatic lodger in the pension (a reputation inherited by Gabriel when he eventually disappeared). He always seemed to be fleeing from something and was wary of the other tenants. If he met anyone in the hallway he didn't shun conversation but preferred to conduct it in conspiratorial whispers. The strange nature of his job only added to the mystery. Since he worked the night shift in a bakery in Carrer Hospital, he only coincided with the other residents on his days off, which is to say Saturdays and religious holidays. On these occasions he often left the table after dinner, went out the door and let ten seconds go by, waiting in the hallway—like one of the stuffed animals—after which he made a surprise, theatrical reentry into the dining room to see if he could catch anybody criticizing him or conspiring against him. The other lodgers knew what he was up to and were always on the alert for his reappearance. When he burst in again they stared at him in silence, trying hard not to laugh when they saw his face darkening with rage. The trail of Salvans and his neuroses peters out on the other side of the French border at the end of the sixties. His surname appears in the odd history book, interred in the mass grave of footnotes. From what we've been able to ascertain, which isn't much, he must have kept up some kind of contact with what remained of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT and sometimes took part in subversive activities. A couple of times when she was sweeping his room Senyora Rifà found books that looked as if they ought to be prohibited stashed under his bed. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta . . . these too-Russian or too-dangerous names made her suspicious and apprehensive. Salvans bought her silence by presenting her with a kilo loaf of bread every morning, still hot from the oven.