Lost Luggage (15 page)

Then Gabriel looked at him without looking at him, without taking his eyes off the road, and took him to task in his laconic way. “You're such jerk. What a bullshitter.”

Number 131. Barcelona-Geneva road-Frankfurt.

July 3, 1968.

With a lot of difficulty, because an employee from the Spanish consulate in Frankfurt had been told to monitor our movements—and this German spook certainly took the job seriously—we commandeer a dented box that looked half empty. Such a long trip, being forced to stop near Geneva to see Senyor Casellas's friends, and such a lousy reward. Inside the box are only a few dusty toys covered with cobwebs. The two spoiled brats, the boy and girl of about thirteen who were bored to death while we were organizing the move (we had to ask them to get off the sofa so we could take it down to the truck), must have played with them a long time ago. Petroli keeps the set of wooden skittles, for his nephew, he says. He also takes a bag full of cowboys and Indians and a wooden fort. Bundó's kept a tin frog after promising not to make it croak in the cab. He also took a Nancy doll dressed up as a Spanish soldier (heaven knows why he wants that). There's an album of stickers—complete—from the film
The Ten Commandments.
Bundó and Gabriel will give it to Senyora Rifà because she loves Charlton Heston, who plays Moses. Gabriel will take a sheriff costume that looks new and a ventriloquist's doll that's supposed to resemble some variety-hall artist, but, with the wide-brimmed hat it's wearing, it's more like a Chicago
gangster. The dummy's got a hole in its back and a stick inside it to make it move its mouth when it's speaking. He'll give both toys to C.

This enigmatic C, this attack of embarrassment on the part of our father—as if he was trying to shield us from his murky affairs—concealed the name of Christof. Thanks to geographical proximity and age, he was the lucky one who got the sheriff costume and the ventriloquist's dummy. While the posh brother and sister were discovering (if they ever did) in one neighborhood of Frankfurt that their neglected toys had vanished, a small Christof, in very different circumstances less than ten kilometers from where the theft occurred, was busy impressing his friends with a sheriff's star that shone so brightly you could see it a mile away, a Stetson hat that made his head look small, and a Bakelite Colt 49. The dummy, however, with its haughty air and big dark eyes, gave him nightmares and was banished to a corner cupboard. Some years went by before Christof remembered it and, having liberated it from exile, stuck his hand into its entrails.

Every time we choose an entry from the inventory and copy it down, all four brothers wish we could have taken part in one of those sessions of divvying up the spoils! We now know about it thanks to Petroli, who told us that, on the way home, with the truck emptied of furniture, the three friends would stop at the first roadside bar they found on the city outskirts and, out of the way of indiscreet eyes, they'd open up the booty and examine it. The ceremony filled them with excitement mingled with stabs of fear, as if it was always the first time, and, if the treasure was worthwhile, they felt very pleased with themselves, almost like real bandits or highwaymen. Afterward, with bloated egos, they'd go into the bar to celebrate it with a whisky or two and a cigar. At that point, Petroli used to feel obliged to pronounce a few words of contrition, after which a chortling Bundó followed suit, while Gabriel calculated an equitable distribution of their trophies. Before getting back on the road, Petroli would call the office in Barcelona to tell
them that the move had been accomplished without any problems and they were homeward bound.

The three friends presided over this ceremony with little remorse. If any of them was ever in danger of feeling guilty, the other two talked him out of it by reminding him that the goodies were a miserable tip in comparison with the hush-hush (and, they suspected, dangerous) favors they were doing for Senyor Casellas. Now, he was the real robber. It quite often happened that, taking advantage of some trip to Germany or eastern France, their boss would order them to depart from their route and head for the Swiss border. Once they'd reached a certain clearly specified point along the way, always close to a forest, they had to stop, turn off the engine, get out of the truck, and open the trailer doors. A couple of minutes later, some fellow dressed up like an alpine hiker would emerge from the trees and greet them with a nod of his head, after which he'd climb into the trailer. Then, with all the expertise of a professional burglar and clearly knowing where he had to look, he'd poke around in the neatly piled objects and furniture and, from some hiding place or other, would extract a very well-wrapped packet. It didn't weigh much and was about the size of an encyclopedia. Any idiot could see it contained bundles of banknotes. The man would then stow it in his backpack, acknowledge them once more with the ceremonious nod of a Swiss banker, and disappear into the trees again. Casellas's instructions stipulated that “once the small detour is complete and the item handed over,” the three friends had to get back into the cab and resume the journey as if nothing had happened.

“Another big shot with his back well covered,” Bundó used to say when they were back on the road again.

Petroli would then calculate. “With one of those packets the three of us would have enough to live off for a year, and I'd bet this truck on that if it was mine.”

“Or two years. Don't worry, one of these days we'll get to keep the loot,” Gabriel tended to add, sending shivers down three spines.

We can't claim that they frequently carried out this operation
near the Swiss border but, thanks to its success—when the boss established that he wasn't running any risks—they certainly did it with increasing regularity. We should also explain that when they were carrying “the Czar's mail,” as Bundó liked to call it, in honor of a book he'd read,
Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar
, the Spanish border was wide open for them and they breezed through without their cargo being checked. The ad for La Ibérica emblazoned on the door of the Pegaso seemed to eliminate barriers, even when manned by the Guardia Civil. Somebody must have greased the palms of those uniformed Dobermans.

Compared with the funds that Senyor Casellas and company managed to deposit on Swiss soil over the ten years of European moves, the trinkets lifted by the three friends were very meager pickings indeed. Too meager. If they were exhibited together one day, more or less as Petroli had done in his home but multiplied by three, the whole collection would look like the contents of a flea market. Nonetheless, even in its entirety, that hoard of junk wouldn't be sufficient to account for the level of hysteria it induced among the victims of these thefts. Since it usually took them a while to notice the losses, the complaints would come in a few days after the move, when the family concerned was already installed in the new home and the three friends were loading up the Pegaso once again in Barcelona. The secretary, Rebeca, would take the call, coping with the first blast, after which she dutifully put it through to Senyor Casellas. The second blast must have been even more irate because, once it was over, the boss of La Ibérica would rush out of his office in a rage, his voice resounding around the garage.

“Petroli, Gabriel, Bundó! It's happened again! It's happened again! Scoundrels! Get into my office right now. Ipso facto!”

Incensed by the nagging suspicion that someone was making a fool of him, Senyor Casellas overdid the outrage and carried on like some head honcho in a comic book. Often, however, these explosions occurred when they were out with the truck again and then it was the secretary Rebeca who had to calm him down. He couldn't tell them off until some days later, by which time he'd
cooled down somewhat and Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli responded to his bluster by acting like simpletons. The repertoire of evasions, excuses, and alibis with which the three friends made a sucker of Senyor Casellas was wide-ranging and elaborate. Bundó, moreover, could adopt the face of an innocent child that would have disarmed the cruellest of torturers. The boss had a short memory and didn't file away the excuses from one occasion to refer to them on another. “Sorry, but this lost box was never loaded on our truck,” they informed him, sounding worried. “This accusation offends us, chief: We would never dream of stealing from the consular corps of Spain.” “And what if it was that hiker near the Swiss border? Well, goodness gracious, we should have kept a closer eye on him.” The reference to Swiss matters always had the effect of appeasing Senyor Casellas, who would then let them go with the stipulation that such losses must never be repeated.

“We keep these things out of pure self-preservation,” Gabriel said when he was telling our mothers about the stolen objects. “Years go by and we don't even look at them but we need to know they're there, inside such-and-such a cupboard or such-and-such a box. If we have an attack of pining or panic one day we can get them out, touch them for half a minute and then stow them away for a few more years. These personal objects conserve the past like a kind of relic that protects us from oblivion, which is the worst evil of all. Nobody wants to be forgotten. At one point there was a man living in Senyora Rifà's pension. He'd lost his house and his whole family in a fire, toward the end of the war. I've never known anyone so vulnerable. Apart from the pain of losing the family that loved him, he was completely helpless because he hadn't been able to save anything associated with his past. All his memories went up in smoke. When he talked about it he sounded crazy. His former life was only alive in his memory and with every day that went by, it faded a little more, like the colors of a painting dropped in a river.”

Our father's words suggest that he wasn't aware that his situation was quite similar to that of the man whose whole existence
had gone up in flames. The uncertain course his life had taken since the moment of his birth (foundling home, orphanage, boarding house) had left him with very few substantial memories, and yet he never seemed to complain. Who knows whether these appropriated objects didn't act as a sedative, or a balm. At the end of the day, this is the legacy we Christophers have received from our father. Lost suitcases, strayed packets, and boxes accidentally falling off a truck provided him with memories that weren't as unhappy. And now we, half scholars, half scavengers, are shamelessly poking around in the heart of things.

We've been driving around European roads for a while now. This might be a good point to stop and talk about Carolina, or Muriel. Her appearance in this story can be dated November 1965, during move Number 73 (we can date it with certainty), and it marked a turning point in the relationship of the three friends, especially between Bundó and Gabriel. We even believe that it had something to do with the general decline of the friendship, although the word “decline” is excessive perhaps, and Carolina is in no way directly responsible.

“Just to clarify, she was no Yoko Ono,” Christopher wishes to add.

When we visited Petroli that weekend in Germany, he made a huge effort to describe Bundó and Carolina-Muriel's relationship. He talked about their codependence, which was exacerbated to the point of physical pain when they weren't together (they had simultaneous migraines, even when they were hundreds of kilometers apart), and he recalled their joint projects, cut short—like almost everything that matters to us—by the tragedy that we're going to have to talk about one of these days. Nonetheless, we left Petroli's house with the sensation that he'd only skimmed over the story. Either his memory failed him that day, or the prudence that comes with age wouldn't allow him to relive certain emotions for fear of betraying them so many years later. This is understandable,
but, the thing is, we don't really trust his version. Anyway, we have the leading lady's account now.