Lost Luggage (33 page)

Gradually, then, little by little, our mothers got the idea that Barcelona was a version of hell in which they never wanted to set foot. Through this prism, Gabriel's life at the boarding house could only be considered as a temporary arrangement, a waiting room en route to the future. The problem was that the future, and specifically the French future, got tired of waiting. One December morning, Mireille decided to get a bus ticket for Barcelona. This was a special service put on for Spanish workers who wanted to spend Christmas with their families, and the buses left mid-afternoon on Tuesday, the twenty-first. Mireille chose to leave Christophe with Justine, who had now hitched up with one of the old comrades from the commune. They'd both rocked his cradle when he was a baby and were well able to look after him.

“I was two years and nine months old. They had me dancing to Pink Floyd, and at night, after all the psychedelia, when I was totally hyped up, they gave me poppy tea with milk to make me sleep,” the hero of the story wishes to note.

After hours and hours on the road, which gave her a better understanding of Gabriel's hard life as a moving man, Mireille arrived at the stop in Plaça de la Universitat at one o'clock on Wednesday afternoon. Since this was a difficult time of year, what with all the
family reunions, the only return ticket she could get was for Saturday night. Three and a half days seemed pathetic but it would have been worse not to have seen Gabriel at all, and she hoped that her surprise visit would be his best Christmas present. She also hoped—in secret—that, finally, with this headstrong impulse brought on by some sort of faith in love, she'd be able to convince her man that they were made for one another and that his home was in Paris.

When she first set foot in the streets of Barcelona, the sunlight made her quiver with a strange feeling of optimism. It was ages since they'd seen such a sun in Paris. It had rained during the night, and, although the temperature was low, the light dappled the damp cobblestones and flashed gold from the buildings. She got into one of the taxis at the stand in the square and gave an address to the driver: Almogávares, 135. She knew the unpronounceable name by heart, after reading the Spanish version so many times on the Pegaso trailer. Seeing that she was a foreigner, the taxi driver treated her to a scenic tour of the city: He went along Gran Via, turning into Via Laietana, going down to the post office, after which he turned left toward Ciutadella Park. Along the way, Mireille absorbed every detail of the people passing by. Her gaze lingered on the sooty façades of the houses, the steamed-up windows of shops and bars, the streetlights crowned by a glittering long-tailed golden star, which was sure to be lit up at night. At the intersection with Avinguda de la Catedral, a policeman, decked out in festive regalia, was directing the traffic seated on a throne. Mireille marveled at all the gifts people were carrying in the street. The taxi driver saw her pleasure and smiled with something akin to pride in his city. He was tuned into a strange radio program, which seemed magical to Mireille: Children were ceaselessly singing a series of numbers—Christmas lottery results, as she later discovered—with the incantatory drone of prayer. As they passed Ciutadella Park she was enchanted by the pattern formed by the railings and the bare wintry trees behind them. A few streets farther on, where Poblenou morphed into a compact string of factories and warehouses, they overtook a mule-drawn cart laden with cabbages, lettuces, and sacks of potatoes. They stopped
in front of La Ibérica at half past one. Despite the generous tip she gave the taxi driver, Mireille found the ride incredibly cheap.

Senyor Casellas was in the middle of delivering a few edifying words to the workers in the garage. Just as he did every year, he had assembled the whole staff on December 22nd and was officiating at the Christmas bonus ceremony. While he'd stayed in his office listening to the Christmas lottery results on the radio, the drivers had spent the morning cleaning the premises, washing the vans and trucks and decorating their hoods with holly and a few shiny ribbons. Then they arranged them in a semicircle, as in a trade fair, and set up a nativity scene in the middle with some enormous figures (Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and Baby Jesus). Once the stage was set, Senyor Casellas summoned his workers with a blast of a horn and stood next to the nativity scene alongside his well-qualified secretary, Rebeca, and a priest sent by his sister from the orphanage. The show went as follows. In the affected Spanish they speak in the posh neighborhood of Bonanova, Senyor Casellas first gave them a sermon on the virtues of daily toil and the spirit of self-improvement, after which he reminded them that Christmas was a time of contemplation, family values, and thinking about Our Lord God. The priest nodded solemnly and then took the floor to lead the Hail Mary, which they all prayed aloud. Then he refreshed their memories, telling them yet again that these were Holy Days of Obligation. They were expected to go to Mass. Finally, with Rebeca's help, Senyor Casellas called out the workers one by one, wished them a Merry Christmas and handed over the envelopes with the Christmas bonus together with a Christmas box. Each one was treated to the usual paternalistic platitudes.

“How's that leg of yours, Tembleque? Still bothering you? It wouldn't be varicose veins, by any chance? Because we're at that age now . . .”

“This is for you, Petroli. Tuck it away good and safe. You never know what life's going to bring.”

“Bundó, Bundó . . . let's see if he remembers the sisters at the Mundet home and gives them a little present. What could a paragon of modesty like yourself do with all this money?”

“Delacruz. Ah, Delacruz, here you are. If a banknote's gone missing, it must have got lost in some move or other . . . I'd count them if I were you.”

Mireille, as yet unseen, witnessed the pantomime from the entrance to the garage, taking stock of the revulsion she felt for this man who, with those porky cheeks, could only be the fascist Casellas. Finally, priest and boss started to sing the carol “The Little Drummer Boy,” which concluded the show every year, and the workers diffidently sang along. As the last “rum, pum, pum, pum” was fading, Mireille took a few steps, moving into the half-lit premises. Gabriel was the first to see her, silhouetted against the daylight with her bag on the ground, and recognized her immediately. He left the group and went over to her without making any attempt to hide his astonishment, but without getting flustered either. For years he'd been working out in his mind how he'd manage such an eventuality if it should ever arise. He hugged her and gave her a kiss. Behind him he could hear the shouts and whistling of his colleagues, with Bundó's voice in the middle of it all shouting, “
Oh, là là
!”

“Goodness gracious, Delacruz, you've certainly held your tongue about this,” said Senyor Casellas as he came across. Holding out a limp hand with podgy fingers, he asked Mireille, “To what do we owe such an honor?”

Gabriel introduced them. The boss puffed up like a peacock in front of the girl but frowned as soon as he heard her name and realized that she was French. It was a curt, instinctive gesture as if in one tenth of a second he'd divined the source of all La Ibérica's problems on the other side of the Spanish border. Lost packages, delays, excuses, clients' complaints. Mireille's attitude, remote, with nothing servile about it, didn't help. A malign angel of silence flew overhead, its spell only broken by the pop of a champagne cork. Infused once again with Christmas spirit, Senyor Casellas scurried off to get a glass so he could propose the toast and invited Mireille to celebrate Christmas with them, with the great La Ibérica family. He made a mental note that, once the holidays were over, he'd interrogate Bundó—the most biddable of the three friends—about Delacruz's little French girlfriend.

When he left them alone, Mireille turned to Gabriel and, whispering in his ear with a tickly voice, asked, “Your boss doesn't know that Christophe exists, does he?”

“Are you mad?” Gabriel replied. “If he discovered that you and I have a kid out of wedlock, he'd get that fucking priest to excommunicate me on the spot. I wouldn't put it past him to sack me.”

“Well, maybe I should have turned up with our boy and put on a show,” Mireille said naughtily.

“Or maybe the solution would be for us to get married one of these days,” he pronounced.

It was a risky response, a flight into the future, and Mireille burst out laughing. Ha! Get married! Never in her worst nightmares would she succumb to the temptation of this macho, bourgeois, outdated institution called marriage. One day they could live together, in Paris, Barcelona, or wherever, without having to give any explanations to anyone. If they were both committed that was enough. Didn't he agree? She lit one of her Gauloises in order to do something with her hands. Gabriel blurted out “yes” with no wish to stir things up. That was the end of the matter.

Today, Mireille sighs and remembers that moment. She feels flattered by the proposal, as if Gabriel had taken her unawares by entering through her emotional back door. Some time later, now back in Paris, alone with Christophe once more, a new thought started to niggle. “I wouldn't know how to describe it. It was that sense you have when you suspect that someone's pulling the wool over your eyes but there's no way you can prove it.”

Apart from this initial folly, Mireille's stay in Barcelona went by serenely. Gabriel took her to the pension that afternoon and introduced her to Senyora Rifà. At first the landlady behaved with a severity and restraint that were bordering on offensive—or maybe she was jealous?—but she gradually softened up. She spoke quite good French as she'd studied and spoken it with the Claretian Sisters in Vic, and Mireille had the presence of mind to praise her after a couple of sentences. Senyora Rifà lowered her guard and soon took a shine to her. They conversed, leaping from one topic to another, from Edith Piaf to Grace of Monaco, from the
Eiffel Tower to recipes for hare
à la róyale.
Senyora Rifà gave her a guided tour of the pension, telling her, now embellished with a certain note of derision, the story of the gentleman from Logroño and the stuffed animals. Mireille giggled, complicitly. Only French women know how to laugh at the love woes of others without looking bad. She took a great fancy to the lustrous-plumed humming-bird, now in its sixteenth year of captivity behind the glass of the dining-room cabinet, and the landlady told her it was her favorite piece too. At one point when Mireille excused herself to go to the bathroom, Senyora Rifà lowered her voice and congratulated Gabriel. She liked the girl. She could see she had character. “A girl you can bring home,” she might have said if she'd been his mother. Taking everything into account and in recognition of all the years Gabriel had spent under her roof, the landlady made an exception and let her stay. She would be the first woman in two decades who, apart from Natàlia Rifà herself, had spent the night there.

Toward evening, when it was getting dark, Gabriel took Mireille out to show her the neighborhood. They went first to the House of Charity and walked around its high walls of blackened ashlars. Most of the streetlamps were either not working or broken, and the building loomed up with the horror of a medieval prison. It has triggered childhood nightmares in Gabriel more than once. (Mireille embraced him.) Then, strolling along Carrer Elisabets, they reached the Ramblas. A few strands of little colored lights had been strung up across the street and, seen from the top end at Rambla de Canaletes, they sparkled in the distance, conjuring up an image of an endless marquee crammed full of people. They decided to walk down to the bottom. Hundreds of people laden with bags and packages were heading for the top and they felt as if they were swimming against the tide. A little lower down, now level with the Liceu opera house, there was a sudden change of direction and, like them, everyone was now heading downward toward the statue of Columbus. In some sections they were accompanied by the stirring strains of a brass band. As they walked along, Mireille absorbed every single detail of their descent: the painted panels illustrating the westerns and cops-and-robbers films they were showing in the cinema nicknamed
Can Pistoles; the shouts of the shoeshine boys—
¡limpia!
—and the startling sight of the local drunk known as the “Sheriff of the Rambla” who, by that hour, was well and truly sozzled; the newspaper kiosks; birds cheeping in their cages; the flower sellers . . . They stopped at Café Moka for a beer in memory of the revolutionaries—Mireille had read Orwell not long before. They strolled along hand in hand and, for the first time in his life, Gabriel felt an inner calm. The company of his French girlfriend suddenly made him feel that his milieu wasn't totally alien to him. He was enjoying showing it to her, as something that was his. Near the end of the Rambla they turned into Carrer Escudellers and went to have dinner at Los Caracoles. Mireille was full of admiration for the display of spit-roasting chickens at the entrance and went over as if to warm her hands. A charming waiter with glossy hair and a stained apron assumed they were both French tourists—Gabriel had no wish to set him straight—and invited Mireille to choose the chicken that most appealed to her. The waiter immediately marked its thigh with a red-hot poker so they'd recognize it when it came to their table.

La Ibérica was closed for the holidays on the Thursday and, of course, Friday, which was Christmas Eve. These were days for company accounting, for closing the year's books, and people weren't moving house. Mireille and Gabriel divided the daylight hours between the Falcon Room and walks around Barcelona. Mireille, who's never since wanted to come back, has only a blurry memory of what she saw in those two days. Too many experiences to recall them all. She'll only say they stopped in a market, but she doesn't know if it was La Boqueria or Sant Antoni. She'll say they went up a mountain (Montjuïc or Parc Güell?). She'll say they walked through a square with palm trees and went to drink vermouth in a bar (Glaciar? Ambos Mundos?) and then—and this she does remember—they walked to the zoo because Gabriel wanted to show her a white gorilla, so cute, just like a giant teddy. She also remembers going to a Christmas street fair and, since they must have been feeling guilty, they bought presents for Christophe.