Lost Luggage (32 page)

Four months before Muriel's immolation, Bundó, putting himself to the test of spending the first night in his new home, would have been grateful for the warm embers of the Papillon. The apartment in Via Favència had no heating, and he was freezing cold. Then again, for his own psychological convenience, he covered up for Carolina's absence by telling himself that the unexpected dread he felt in the place wasn't because of loneliness but the glacial reception offered by the rooms. How ungrateful can you get! Couldn't they see that he and Carolina would soon be filling them with life? They might have been more considerate. Bogged down in his excuses, Bundó went searching in one of the boxes and pulled out a wall thermometer made to look like the Pole Star, lifted from god-knows-who and god-knows-where. He left it on the ground next to the window and watched how the strip of mercury plunged to the bottom. Ten degrees! And the damp! At this rate he'd get pneumonia. He'd have to buy a heater. The glass in the windows was as flimsy as cigarette paper. He put on his anorak and stamped his feet to warm them up. Then he went into what was going to be the main bedroom and made himself a bed with a mattress on the floor and makeshift bedclothes consisting of all the blankets he possessed plus two bath towels. If he was still cold after all that he'd sleep with his clothes on. When he'd finished he looked at his watch and was surprised to see it was only half past nine. Time didn't move in that igloo. He decided that the best fuel for his body would be a glass of cognac, or two, and went out in search of a bar. He recalled having seen one as he was driving by in the van, further up the street on the corner of Carrer d'Almansa. When he got there, the owner was wiping down the bar. There was nobody else. He tapped at the glass door, making drinking gestures. The stone-faced owner nodded, yes, he could come in.

An hour later, with the fourth Veterano in his glass—the last,
too, because it really was closing time now—Bundó saw that there was a phone in one corner of the bar. He asked for a line and called Carolina. International phone calls cost the earth but he didn't care because he knew she wasn't going to pick up the phone. She'd be at the Papillon at this hour. He heard the beep on the line, the absence, but since the sound came from France, it made him feel closer to her. Then, without knowing why, he did something that wasn't remotely a good idea: He dialed the number of the boarding house. With the fourth ring Senyora Rifà picked up the receiver.

“Can I speak to Gabriel Delacruz, please?” Bundó said.

“Who's calling?”

“A friend . . . well, it's me, Bundó.”

“Good heavens, Bundó! Have you got lost or something?” the landlady asked. “I'll put him on.”

A few seconds went by. Through the earpiece he could hear some kind of racket in the background, an unusual hullabaloo for that hour of night in the boarding house. Then he remembered that the German mechanic, a lad who was setting up looms at the Can Fabra factory and was temporarily staying there, had told them he and his wife were about to have a baby, their first. He'd been on edge for some days but had promised them that when there was news they'd drink a toast to the new mother and his son or daughter. Bundó hung up before Gabriel got to the phone. He then managed to persuade the bar owner to serve him another cognac, come on, just one last one and then I'll go. He'd need it to deal with the cold. The night in the igloo was going to be a long one.

The next day Bundó turned up at La Ibérica, full of cold, with rings under his eyes and looking tired. Gabriel asked him about the call the night before, whether he'd hung up, or the line had been cut, or if it was a joke, but his friend didn't remember anything. A thick fog had fallen on the way back from the bar to the apartment. In the night, a burning in his stomach had countered the forlorn chill of the place.

The moves listed for that day had them running around Barcelona in the DKV. Petroli was off work with sciatica, which he'd had for weeks without getting much better. His replacement was
El Tembleque. The two friends were laughing at his drollness all day long, reliving their early days at La Ibérica when he'd entertained them and taught them everything they knew. About to retire and jauntier than ever, El Tembleque had a flirtatious remark for every woman he found along the way, be they old, young, or shop-window mannequin; he blasted the horn, whistled, shouted through the window, as cheeky as any Neapolitan skirt-chaser; he greeted traffic cops as if he'd known them all his life and they owed him money. When it came to unloading, they saw that time hadn't refined his art of bullshitting: eight years on and the same old excuses. If perchance he bent over to pick up some packet, his bad leg wobbled with its usual vigor but, now, the good one, somewhat the worse for wear, had contracted the malady. Every bit of him seemed to be doing the twist, all over the place, come on everybody, as if he had springs instead of limbs. The move was long and tedious because they had to go from one office to another—a successful lawyer was moving his office from Plaça Urquinaona to Plaça Calvo Sotelo—but, when it was over and they were back in the DKV, El Tembleque reminded them that he'd been their mentor in larceny. With a knowing wink and roguish grin he pulled, from inside his jacket, a box full of brand-new Bic pens that he'd snaffled and gave them three each.

“To write love letters to your girlfriends, lads. It's about time you got yourselves a missus.”

Thanks to El Tembleque's irresistible center-stage presence, Bundó managed to keep a low profile that day and didn't talk much. Gabriel noted that he was a bit low and, when it came to saying good-bye, made a point of asking him what bus he had to catch to get from Poblenou to Via Favència.

“I'll come to the pension today,” Bundó replied. “I'm paid up for the rest of the week, and it's a pity to waste that. Anyway, the apartment is too cold. I'm going to buy a heater on Saturday.”

The words were balm to them both. After dinner, they went out for half an hour to have a coffee in Café Principal. They were done in, as they were every night, but going back to their old routine was a relief. Standing at the bar, they whiled away the time shooting
the breeze: You know, El Tembleque was getting old,
Dicen
was sure that Barca was going to do . . . whatever it was going to do, and before you know it, it'd be time to get Christmas lottery tickets. Then, out of the blue, Bundó blurted that Gabriel should come and live with him in the apartment in Via Favència.

“Just a few months, eh? Only till Carolina comes. I'm thinking about you. You can save on rent and have a change of air.”

Our father let him finish and answered at once, without the least hesitation. No; he wouldn't. He was absolutely sure. He was fine at Rifà's.

“I had to try,” Bundó admitted and went on to change the subject as if he hadn't said a word. His thoughts must have kept marching on, though, because when they were walking back to the boarding house shortly afterward, and now not even trying to conceal his need, he promised our dad that at least they'd spend Christmas day together and eat at his place. A party for three: the two of them plus Carolina. He'd buy a Christmas tree and decorate it and—no need to be embarrassed about it—they could sing the songs the nuns had taught them. They'd give each other presents too.

“Heaven help you if you didn't invite me!” Gabriel answered.

When we want to picture our father at the end of that October of 1971, the most compelling image we have is that of a plate spinner in a circus. His chief skill is balance. He's holding a flexible rod in the palm of each hand, with one resting on his forehead and another on his chin. He keeps the rods upright with the plates whirling around and around the tips. They're slowing down. Slower . . . slower. His movements are so minimal that the audience is getting nervous. At the very last moment when everyone's sure they're going to crash, he gets them spinning fast again, one after another, and things liven up once more.

Gabriel had learned to pace his relationships with his three equidistant women and three sons and, like a good plate spinner, he seemed to keep his cool. Of course, the rules of the game were in his favor: He had his base camp in Barcelona, where he led
a bachelor's existence and, thanks to the moving work, went to visit his families from time to time. He'd turn up about every three months—if we were lucky, more often. If one month it happened that he appeared twice, it suddenly seemed as if he was really living with us and the world was marvellous. It was hard to bear the waiting between visits, but our mothers learned not to carry on about it. They were young, brave, modern, emancipated. And they had us, the Christophers. In any case, we'd be naive if we thought that this family geography was ideal for our father and that he didn't suffer because of it. Rather, it was an unavoidable situation, although that doesn't free him from blame either. We, little kids of six, four, and two, cried when we saw him leaving and writhed with longing for him for hours on end—and he knew it. These were the arguments our mothers wielded over and over again to convince him not to get back in the damn Pegaso and to stay and live with us.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine that since Gabriel was so neglected when he was small, this insistence only encouraged him never to change. It made him feel loved. Yet, how would the women have reacted if they'd discovered that Gabriel was a spinner of the same illusions with other women and other sons? Sigrun, Sarah, Mireille, and Rita (who appeared later, but she counts as well) prefer not to go into that. They finally learned the truth after its being buried under shovelfuls of calculation, suspicions, resignation, and then indifference for so many years that it seems far-fetched, like those articles that are calculated to inspire incredulous awe in newspaper readers.
COOK MISTAKENLY SERVES GRANDFATHER'S ASHES AS CONDIMENT FOR SOUP, UNQUALIFIED LAWYER WINS TWO HUNDRED CONSECUTIVE CASES, MOVER HIDES FOR DECADES HIS RELATIONS WITH FOUR WOMEN AND FOUR SONS.

The reality, needless to say, far exceeded the limits of any sensationalist newspaper headline. It was much more complicated. Our father worked hard to keep the lie at bay. He spent a fortune phoning us on a fixed day every week, always in the evening when he got back from work. Thanks to his distinctive cocktail of ill-learned languages, his conversation always sounded like jumbled fragments from two very different international congresses. His only perfectly
comprehensible sentences were those detailing places, days, and dates. “I arrive Londres, Saturday twelve in the morning, and go the Monday very early.” “
Nous serons à Paris le divendredi quinze.
” Well, there were the intimacies of farewells too. Our mothers don't want to talk about them but admit they sounded sincere and loving.

Gabriel was meticulous in assigning a different day to each family.

“For us it was Tuesday,” Christof said. “I remember that because we used to have dinner earlier. After I turned three, more or less, Mom taught me how to answer the phone and told me to say my name, ‘Christof.' I used to hear Dad's voice, his laughter, and I became tongue-tied with embarrassment.”

“Well, he phoned us on Thursdays,” Chris said.

“Wednesday, always Wednesday.”

We don't know whether our father jotted things down or whether he had a prodigious memory because nobody recalls him ever slipping up. Sigrun never heard herself being called Mireille, for example, and Rita was never turned into Sarah. Paris was never London and Christof was never Christophe, even though it was only a matter of a couple of letters and the intonation. From what our mothers tell us, his subconscious was equally orderly: He always knew where he was sleeping, and not even in his dreams in the different double beds did he ever betray himself by pronouncing the name of any of the women whose turn it wasn't.

However, Gabriel's cover was about to be blown, precisely because of the Christmas feast at Bundó's apartment. It was the first sign that the spinning plates could come crashing to the ground, and if one broke they all broke. In the years of his concubinage with Sigrun, Sarah, and Mireille, he'd managed to keep his Barcelona life a secret. You could say that, with a little help from Bundó and Petroli, he'd never expressly hidden anything from them but he had opted for evasion in some matters. He touched their hearts when he recalled his childhood in the orphanage. He spared no details when he talked about the job at La Ibérica: how he'd started to work there, how the owner ill-treated them, and how they took revenge by lifting stuff from the cargo they moved. They all knew that he and Bundó
lived in a boarding house in the center of the city. He'd told them the telephone number but on the condition that they only phoned in case of emergency. He'd given them a fairly accurate portrait of Senyora Rifà, embellishing it only with a few years and a few kilos, and had made them laugh with his stories of stuffed animals. According to him, the other boarders were fossils too. Thanks to such trivia, Gabriel had been able to mask his life behind veils of generalization. As the backdrop to his words, Barcelona emerged as a sordid, boring, and inhospitable city. The streets were ill lit, the poor lived in hovels, the sea was faraway and dirty, and muggers robbed the few tourists that ventured there. “Spain is different!” he told them, echoing the regime's propaganda with a craftiness they were unable to detect. On the far side of La Jonquera, Gabriel turned into a more active opponent of the Franco regime, fulminating against the dictator with not very natural but highly convincing fervor.