Lost Luggage (34 page)

They used Thursday night to run an errand. Some months earlier, Justine, Mireille's best friend, had met a boy from Barcelona
at the university. He was spending some time in Paris, was smart, long-haired, a voracious reader of Lukács and the structuralists, highly dialectical, and wasn't sure whether to become a filmmaker or literary critic. Justine had attended a seminar discussing the divergences between Marxism and Maoism, and he'd been there too. The young man, a rather incoherent blusterer, had challenged a view she'd forcefully expressed. On the way out, she wanted to give a more nuanced account of a couple of points and the discussion adjourned to a bar. By the end of the night, since there was no way they were going to agree, they'd moved the debate to the area called praxis—in other words, between the sheets, in a room he was renting. Two days later, he'd had to return to Barcelona for family reasons, and Justine was dying to know what had become of him. So she asked Mireille if, in exchange for looking after Christophe that Christmas, she would take some books to the Barcelona dilettante and engage in a bit of busybodying.

Even now, thirty years on, Mireille gets exasperated when she remembers this story.

“Justine jotted down the address on a bit of paper. The boy had told her that, if she ever came to Barcelona, she'd find him in that bar every night before dinner.” We Christophers made our inquiries and discovered that it was the Boccaccio. “Gabriel had seen the name in the society section of some newspaper. It was in the swanky part of town, well away from the everyday world, and it was hard to imagine it as the kind of place where students met. As soon as we went inside and felt the eyes of the room turn and stare, we got it: This was a bar for trendy, pampered, daddies' boys! Some of them had even reached the stage of being daddies of daddies' boys! We've got them in Paris too: eternally young scions of good families playing at counterculture but, come the hour of reckoning, they have church weddings. That night, the progeny of Barcelona's elite were arranged around a long bar and draped on red velvet sofas. Seen from a distance, they all looked like versions of George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany's.
We asked a waiter if he knew Justine's friend. He jerked his head toward the back of the bar. The subject of our search was sitting with a group
of boys and girls holding forth. It must be said that all of them, and especially Justine's friend, radiated a natural optimism that you might describe as inherited. It was extremely easy for them to ignore the fact that they were living under a dictatorship. Maybe that's why they were dressed in a style that seemed to be de rigueur: the girls in vaguely oriental tunics, floaty dresses and miniskirts, and the boys in Lois jeans, Shetland wool sweaters, cotton shirts and, in some cases, a knitted tie. They laughed at everything and guzzled gin and tonic as if they'd just walked in from the desert. Two of the girls were smoking extra-long cigarettes. Gabriel opted to stand at the bar having a beer. I went over to the group and they all fell silent. I said the boy's name and handed him the packet of books saying, ‘From Justine in Paris.' He put two and two together and thanked me. One of the girls sitting next to him assumed an expression of boredom. The boy opened the parcel and, without paying much attention to its contents, handed the three books to his friends. He read the note inside the parcel. ‘Ah, so you're the famous Mireille,' he said. ‘Justine told me a lot about you . . . and that must be your Barcelona truck driver over there. Tell him to come here. Come on, let me invite you to a drink.' I went to get Gabriel. They made a space for us, and we sat with them for a while. I was the only foreigner but they were more than happy to switch to French. Now they were intrigued. They stared at us and asked questions, which someone translated into Spanish for Gabriel. He didn't say a word. The conversation was a string of banalities. They were trying hard to be brilliant and cosmopolitan, speaking in affected French, which made them come across as effete and pedantic. They'd been in New York not long before and were dropping Andy Warhol's name all the time. They told me, without a hint of a blush, that in Barcelona they were known as the ‘
gauche divine.
' Yes, that's right. In French. Just imagine! I asked them about the political situation and the latest student revolts. One of them raised his glass and very seriously proposed a toast to some comrades in the anti-Franco front called ‘Assemblea de Catalunya,' but the others seemed rather lukewarm. They followed suit mechanically. The choral clinking of ice cubes provided the clue: They'd installed
themselves in a fictional world and thought that their Boccaccio was the Flore, or Deux Magots, the meeting place of the intellectual vanguard of the left. It's true that every social class has its own forms of evasion. This made me want to wind them up a bit, to start asking about their families, what they did and if Franco had caused them any suffering, but someone butted in, saying we could go to dinner at another of their favorite haunts. A chic restaurant where they served omelets. How about that? Gabriel and I saw our chance to escape, and we left them to their little show. They were the masters of seduction and would soon find someone else to worship them. We wished each other Merry Christmas and knew that they would have forgotten all about us after a minute or two.”

“Lucy in the sky with diamonds . . .” Chris sings. His interruption makes sense. It's his crafty way of reminding us that we have yet to deliver the final detail of that evening. Gabriel and Mireille were at the door of the bar saying good-bye to Justine's friend when a girl came up from behind them and tapped Gabriel's shoulder.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” she asked. “Don't you recognize me?”

Gabriel had to dredge up the identity of the thin, angular face and cropped blond hair from the depths of his memory. He went back six years, to the ferry taking them to England and then recaptured the fleeting form of a naked girl riding a horse. Yes, it was Anna Miralpeix. It turned out that Anna was a cousin of Justine's friend. All in the family.

“What did you have in the end, a boy or girl?” Gabriel asked.

“A little girl. She's called Llúcia but we call her Lucy. She's five now and the cutest little thing in the world. Well, she's a bit naughty and never keeps still, that's for sure.”

“She must take after her mother. Does she like the sea?”

“She prefers animals, especially horses,” she said, winking.

The encounter with the “divine left” of Barcelona was offset, or at least found its antidote the next day, with Christmas dinner at Bundó's apartment—or perhaps we should say Bundó and Carolina's apartment—even if it's only for the first and last time. If Gabriel and Bundó had been alone they would have had a Catalan-style
Christmas lunch on December 25th, but the presence of the two girls meant that they celebrated with a dinner on Christmas Eve instead. Carolina had arrived the day before, also by coach, and had taken possession of the apartment in a matter of a few hours. Gabriel couldn't believe his eyes. This bore no relation to the desolate place he'd left on the verge of depression that first night. It had only taken a few finishing touches and a dash of good taste to transform it. Bundó, of course, was exultant. Still in her apron, Carolina emerged from the kitchen to greet them, as if she'd been doing it all her life. The smell of chestnut-stuffed turkey browning in the oven wafted through the apartment, perfuming it with a kind of domestic warmth that all four of them—for different reasons—identified with an idea of happiness. Since this was something unknown to them and they weren't oppressed by nostalgia for earlier Christmases, they forged a special bond over the course of that night, so unique and unrepeatable that they never experienced it again. If they believed in some god, it would have been the essence of that Christmas.

They were ablaze with happiness all night. Carolina and Mireille took to each other immediately. They were both wearing
minijupes
and high boots. They smoked the same brand of cigarettes. They'd grown up in fits and starts. They spoke French together, and when Bundó and Gabriel moaned about not understanding them they carried on like a pair of affluent expatriates, teasing them and treating them with exaggerated haughtiness. Behind the fun and games, however, if the friendship gelled it was thanks to the secrets kept by their boyfriends: Bundó had never told Carolina that Gabriel had two other women and two more sons in England and Germany.

When the turkey was reduced to a carcass, they had the mandatory Catalan
torrons
for dessert and proposed their toasts with French champagne nicked by Gabriel and Bundó on a recent trip. Some days earlier they'd agreed to buy gifts. As they opened them, Carolina and Mireille joked that they couldn't accept anything that came from a move. It wouldn't be ethical at Christmas, they chided. Then Bundó, who'd drunk more than the others, started singing carols, making up the words if he didn't know them, and Carolina and Gabriel joined in. Mireille tried to remember something
in French, from her childhood, and Carolina joined in with her too. They turned out the lights and sang in the subtle flickering of candles and disco-style flashes of the Christmas tree lights. Lacking the traditional
zambomba
drum to accompany the carols, Bundó was in such high spirits that he improvised by grabbing a bottle of anis and kept the beat going by rattling a knife up and down the knobbly glass. The two girls couldn't stop giggling and had tears pouring down their faces, to which Bundó responded by clowning even more. He was out of control, prancing around the living room, sweaty, with his shirt hanging out, scraping away at his anis bottle. He was the picture of contentment. The victory of the present.

Gabriel, more contained, was also laughing at his antics. Later, when only memory remained, of all the Bundó's he'd known, he'd remember precisely that Bundó of that Christmas Eve. Day after day after day. The only way to bear the pain was by celebrating past happiness.

We've been going on too long, haven't we? We Christophers do go on too long. So what else is new? We've been putting off the Pegaso's last ride for a while now, as if the fact of not talking about it could change the course of history, but that's enough beating about the bush. We're now so well schooled that we could reconstruct in real time—on a scale of one to one—everything that happened between that Christmas Eve and that February 14th, that sad Saint Valentine's Day. But this isn't a good idea. If we want to make progress in our search for our father, we'll have to go back to that awful time for once and for fucking all. We'll need to take a few shortcuts in order to get ahead. For example, although they became great friends that Christmas Eve, Mireille and Carolina never saw each other again.

The next day, Gabriel and Mireille spent a lazy morning in the Falcon Room. They'd woken up with brutal hangovers, and every word they pronounced echoed in a drum-roll crescendo in their heads,
rum pum pum pum.
The throbbing alcohol-steeped nausea demanded darkness and silence, and they didn't speak any more
about their future. If they'd known that these were going to be the last hours they'd be together as a couple, they probably would have made better use of the time.

As the afternoon advanced, Senyora Rifà heard that they'd got up and offered them a couple of plates of noodle-and-meatball soup left over from Christmas lunch. The broth was warming and hearty, and it revived them a little, if only enough to get them to understand that the coach was leaving for Paris in a couple of hours, at eight o'clock. As Mireille was packing her bag, Senyora Rifà knocked at the door and presented her with the stuffed humming-bird. She'd dusted down the iridescent feathers, and the vibrant patina of colors brightened up the farewell and the journey home.

“Take good care of it for me,” the landlady said in French. “Ah, and come back for Gabriel some day. I love him a lot, but if he stays in this house too much longer he'll end up as a dried animal like all the rest.”

The hummingbird at least still resides in Mireille's house in Paris. As for our father, well, as you'll understand, we don't know how he reacted to her absence. This was the first time he'd tasted the medicine he'd so often doled out to our mothers. For the first time, he was the one who said good-bye, the one who stood there quietly and went home to face loneliness. We Christophers imagine that this new situation caught him unawares. To cap it all, a few days later he had to deal with another tricky situation. Carolina had stayed in Barcelona for a whole week, until New Year, and went back to France on January 1st. The Papillon needed Muriel. At the beginning of her stay they'd agreed, and she'd promised too, that she'd come to live with him in Barcelona very soon, but Bundó took her departure badly. The commitment Carolina had made soon amounted to nothing. He was unmanned by his fear that she'd go back on her word and was consequently tormented by renewed attacks of jealousy over all the Frogs who were paying for her favors. It made him ill.