Lost Luggage (20 page)

“Sex or gambling, I get it now. So that was the choice,” Cristoffini chips in. “What an edifying life our dear father led! Now I know who I take after.”

“No, with those people he didn't play for money. He didn't cheat either. As soon as he arrived Gabriel sat down at a table, took out his Spanish deck, his
baraja
, and shuffled the cards. The
majestic presence of the king of swords, or the perfidious presence of a knave (fuck you, Jack), was sufficient to fire up two or three emigrants and get a little game going. They played the time-honored games,
mus
,
remigio
, and
botifarra.
In the background, like a TV turned on in a bar, they could hear Petroli droning on as he bashed the ears of his compatriots. He was so over the top that the other card players didn't take long to start criticizing him, and then Gabriel had to leap to his defense because, well, that's what a little brother does. These visits weren't always so cosy. On some occasions, especially in France, it turned out that the emigrants' center had a more political orientation, marked by exiles and refugees from the Civil War, and then the two friends were welcomed as survivors of another time, heroes of the past still resisting in the inferno that was the workers' struggle in the motherland. Gabriel and Petroli then stuck out their chests, repeating the few basic things they knew about feudal oppression and denouncing the exploiter Casellas to the four winds. If they needed to back up their account, they recounted their long list of grievances about interminable moving jobs, wretched conditions, and subhuman wages. Gabriel also tended to remember the revolutionary sermons with which Lluís Salvans had indoctrinated them in the boarding house, even citing him as a reference in case there was some old anarchist present, some CNT or FAI militant who'd known him or who might know his whereabouts. The emigrants, somewhere between mournful and combative, heard them out and agreed with them. At this point, somebody would get out a guitar and they'd all start singing a few songs together to counter the distress. They'd jump from ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma' to ‘España Mi Emperaora', from a Republican song to ‘Asturias, Patria Querida'. In the end, they always sang a song about émigrés, toasted their new comrades in friendship, and raised their glasses to Franco's speedy death, for once and for fucking all.”

Cristoffini raises his left fist and hums the first few bars of the partisan song “Bella Ciao.” It's not clear whether it's in jest or not but, in any case, it's a dramatic gesture. Christof covers his mouth with his hand, but you can still hear the humming somewhere inside
him. When he's had enough of being asphyxiated, Cristoffini bites him. It looks for a moment as if the palm of Christof's hand is stained scarlet with drops of blood.

“Sigrun, my mother,” Christof resumes, trying to ignore him, “who was very active politically when she was young, recalls that Petroli and Gabriel got tired very quickly and would leave as soon as they could come up with a good excuse. Their long hours of driving left them too whacked to enjoy a session of libertarian anarchist theory. She knows that firsthand because it happens that the very day of the snowstorm, the day when Petroli and Gabriel opened the door of the Rüsselsheim social club, she'd gone with a friend to the Spanish workers' center.”

“Aha! About time! Gabriel's little critters are warming up for the race. Christof, advancing toward existential doubts about the future, isn't there yet but he's about to get there. Come on, tell us. Tell us.”

“First, I have to say that age and frustrations have colored my mother's memory. When she got pregnant, Sigrun was a twenty-one-year-old student. I won't bother you with her CV now except to say that she studied sociology at the University of Frankfurt, went to Habermas's classes, and was a member of the famous Socialist German Student Union. She'd even been at the odd students' dinner with Angela Davis and, if she hadn't had to feed me, she might even have got mixed up with the Baader-Meinhof Group in the end. After I was born, she started to work in a university library. She was an only child and needed the money. Her parents hadn't accepted the shameful pregnancy and her student grants weren't enough. She kept going to classes when she could but at a different pace, trying all the while to forget about Gabriel. But every time she managed to get him out of her head, he'd turn up again to top up her hope tank (
Entschuldigung
!). Sigrun was living in a vicious circle. When Dad finally stopped his intermittent visits and never came back, her love life turned into a parade of men. Long live sexual freedom! Names and faces have merged into an Identikit picture of those allegedly open-minded and critical young German men of the sixties. Yet it's a deceptive portrait:
What emerges is a serious, strange young fellow, politically committed or otherwise, with a big weakness for sexual contact but who unfailingly took to his heels when he discovered that the tender, well-read girl had her own homegrown son.”

Christof pauses to take in a deep breath. With a clout to the back of the neck he rouses Cristoffini, who's yawning, pretending to be dozing off.

“It's taken some years, then,” he resumes, “for Sigrun to separate the important experiences from those that simply served as distraction. Nowadays, her men, when there are men, don't look remotely like that portrait. Questions don't scare her any more, even coming from her son, and I've finally been able to half satisfy my curiosity. Here's the story. It happens that, in Rüsselsheim that January night of 1965, a bunch of Spaniards had got together in honor of one of their friends who'd just retired. He was from Galicia, had come to Germany more than a decade before, and, like many others at the gathering, worked in a car factory. A Republican through and through and committed to the workers' struggle, the man had exerted himself to learn German so he could be the union representative of his shop-floor compatriots. Everyone recognized him as a pioneer among the emigrants to Germany (an excuse, like many another, to crack open a few bottles of wine). At the time, Sigrun had got her first grant to study sociology and had just applied to become a member of the students' union. One of her classmates, a daughter of Spanish emigrants, invited her to the party. She'd definitely have a great time. If the Galician worker had a drink or two (and he liked a tipple), they'd get him to relive the brief, glorious interval of the Second Republic. The friend would translate the most important bits for her. When, appearing from nowhere, Petroli and Gabriel walked into the center, the older emigrants were singing the last bars of “El Himno de Riego.” Immediately afterward the Galician worker, choking with emotion, intoned a “Long Live the Republic!” and everybody applauded. In the silence that followed the two friends said good evening to all the people who were staring at them. Petroli instinctively rubbed his hands and added, “Quite a night, eh? And this is a great place
to be!” His comment offered them safe-conduct, and the thirty-odd people in the room welcomed them with open arms. They asked the usual questions, and the two truck drivers said what was expected of them. The night wouldn't have been especially noteworthy if it hadn't been for the fact that, an hour and a half later, having said their good-byes, they discovered that the temperature had plummeted to ten degrees below zero and the roads were buried beneath a layer of ice. Since they weren't going to be able to drive even five meters in the Pegaso, the emigrants rallied to organize accommodation. Two ladies who worked in a handkerchief factory vied over Petroli, one of them a widow from Altafulla and the other a spinster from near Manises (the widow won, of course, since she was the older of the two candidates). Gabriel accepted the offer of a shy, quiet girl. She was wearing a green wool scarf and matching cap and behaved with the unaccented assurance of one whose convictions have not yet been put to the test. She didn't know a word of Spanish but was attractive, and he was flattered by her insistence. Moreover, out of the whole group, she was the one that least intimidated him since she wasn't Spanish.

“Yes!” Cristoffini barges in. “What a great seducer our father was! Long live bad weather! Long live ice storms! Long live dumb love!”

“Sigrun and Gabriel spent those first hours like two strangers on a blind date. From Rüsselsheim to my mother's neighborhood on the outskirts of Frankfurt it was five S-Bahn stops. On the way, they used the little English they knew to ask the obvious questions, the ones that, luckily, need no more than a monosyllable in response. Are you a student? Have you been in Frankfurt before? Once they got to her apartment, small and untidy as befits a sociology student, Sigrun poured two glasses of wine and, while she was fixing the sofa bed, tried to offer some conversation. Gabriel's particular idiom must have given rise to a few funny misunderstandings. They laughed, gesticulated awkwardly and let themselves go, laughing even more. There was a pregnant pause. In Dad's memory of that night there were two candles on the kitchen table giving off just enough light to make the wine glow with a more
intimate red. Today's Sigrun, however, denies the whole thing, saying that's a cliché and she can't stand clichés. Whatever the case, I've never been able to take it any further than that. She won't play the game. We can only blow out the candles and leave the German student and expatriated truck driver in the dark. Let them get their act together.”

“No, no, no, the one who's got to get his act together is you, Christof. Come on, it's about you! Go ahead, waggle your little tail. That's what the chosen spermatozoon's supposed to do. Come on! Are you going to leave it to my imagination?”

“No way!”

“While they're talking about this and that,” says Cristoffini, trying to imitate Christof's unhurried way of speaking, “the clock's moved on to three in the morning. They're both thinking that body language would be the best way to make themselves understood. Gabriel and Sigrun say goodnight, gazing into one another's eyes . . .”

“I said no! Stop that. We're now going to take a leap forward to one year and ten months later.”

“What a party pooper! That's cheating.”

“November 1966,” Christof bellows in order to retake the floor. “I've been born. I'm already walking. I'm curious. I wreck things. I'm really cute. Mom works, studies, reads, prepares my bottles, and changes my nappies, so she's got no time for anything else. Weekends come around like a blessing for us both because then we can be together and play. It's Friday afternoon and we're at home, half an hour after she's picked me up at the day-care center. She hasn't even taken her coat off when there's a ring at the doorbell. She opens the door and it's Gabriel, my father. She recognizes him at once but is dumbstruck. They look at each other. “We've just done another move to Frankfurt,” he attempts to explain, “and we finished early. I had your address written down and thought I'd come and visit you. It's been such a long time.” Mom asked him in at once—“
Komm' rein
”—and then there's a sort of déjà vu replay of their first night: In the narrow entrance they're both taking off their coats at the same time and getting in each other's way, but
it's a pleasurable obstruction. The main difference is that I enter the scene, toddling in from the kitchen to stand staring at the tall, thin man rooted to the ground before me. Then Mom says, ‘Gabriel, this is your son. He was born in October. Last year.' Sigrun explains things in her beginner's Spanish. All those months, in her free time, she's been learning the language using a Berlitz manual and records.”

“Hang on, hang on,” Cristoffini springs into action again. “How could Gabriel be sure you were his son?”

“That's exactly what he asked her shortly afterward, once he'd got over his stupefaction. You've got to understand, he was only dropping in for a visit. Maybe with some sexual expectation, let's not deceive ourselves, but without any intention of perpetuating things. ‘Don't get me wrong,' he said making himself understood, ‘but how do you know he's my son?' They'd put me to bed by then. There were a thousand ways of answering his question, from drama to sarcasm, but Sigrun chose the following: ‘Because his name is Christof.' That put an end to any doubts. ‘Don't worry. No obligations,' she soothed him, seeing how his face had changed. ‘But, well, I'm really pleased,' he stammered. According to Mom, he seemed very touched, and they at once set about celebrating his paternity. Now, we have to go back for a moment to that first night, to confirm that the mystery of the Christophers goes back a long way. The candlelight dances in the wine glasses (we accept that, Mom), and the words and gestures come out enhanced by the alcohol. The impossible conversation careens from one subject to another, and Sigrun asks Gabriel if he has children. He pats his pockets, as if his wallet's been nicked, and hastens to say, ‘No, no children.' Later, however, he tells her that, if it did happen some day, if he did have a son, he would want to call him Cristòfol or Cristóbal. He picks up a pencil and notepad that Sigrun has on the table and writes the Catalan and Spanish names. She follows suit and writes the name in its German version below: Christof. We were right at the crux of the matter, Christophers, we were so hot on the trail, but my mother didn't ask the right question: Why did he like that name? Instead, she said, ‘And what if it's a girl?'
Then he said, ‘Sigrun, like you.' Oh, the art of seduction, how it tames us!”

After that final exclamation, Christof and Cristoffini fall silent. Cristoffini has apparently been waylaid by some thought.

“Which is to say that, basically, you're a mistake,” he finally remarks. “I always thought so.”

Christof lights up another cigarette.

“Or a bull's-eye. Depends on how you look at it. Before meeting the other Christophers, I might have been an error, the arithmetical error of a girl who miscounted when it came to taking the pill. But now that the four of us have met, our life has become a bull's-eye.”