Lost Luggage (54 page)

Gabriel's retreat—as we've seen—was sabotaged for the first time the day the orthopedic surgeon removed his cast. Many people experience a sort of reverential fear when they go to the doctor. In the waiting room, whether they've come to get their flu diagnosed or a prescription for some antibiotic, even the most serene or simple-minded individuals are infused with a feeling of solemnity that automatically evokes death. It has something to do with that white silence, the serious faces of the other patients, the calculus of the pain of others. In Gabriel's case, the visit had the opposite effect: He arrived there so alone, so without hope, so alienated that this atmosphere somehow managed to revive him.

Thenceforth, every time he had to go out and buy something, he took the occasion to go for a stroll. He put on his English shoes, which had now molded themselves to his feet, and wandered around the neighborhood. April had finally brought good weather, radiant mornings in which bare-legged girls welcomed the sun in short skirts, licking the first ice cream of the season. In the afternoon, if the good weather held out, Gabriel went down to spend an hour in Guineueta Park. Like a statue bearing witness to the passage of time, he sat on a bench with the pensioners and listened to their ailments (which made him feel better) and at the same time watched the children playing on the swings, studying their expressions and looking for them repeated in the faces of the mothers who were keeping an eye on them.

He was spending less and less time in front of the TV, which had now lost its novelty, and he was plucking up the courage to venture farther afield. In those days, the Canyelles neighborhood was still under construction, especially the part next to the mountain, Roquetes. If he felt like a bit of exercise, Gabriel picked his way through the havoc of Via Favència and headed up to Carrer Alcántara or Carrer Garellano, going higher and higher. Most of the streets were still dirt tracks, dusty in summer and perpetually boggy in winter. Solitary towers raised in the middle of vacant
ground carried power cables spreading out like a menacing spiderweb to supply the buildings. Some residents—most of them from Andalusia or Murcia—had cemented the few square meters in front of their houses, embellishing the little patio with the trilling of a caged goldfinch and a geranium planted in an old five-kilo olive can. At nightfall, now that spring was well advanced, they took some chairs outside and sat in the fresh air. The men smoked black tobacco and pretended they didn't give a damn about anything, and the women shrieked hysterically when they saw the shadow of a rat fleeing down the hill. Then they dashed to close the front door while their menfolk burst out in full-throated, complacent laughter.

Twice a week, midmorning, a van drove into the middle of one of the vacant lots. Two Gypsy women set out boxes full of clothes and loudly proclaimed their wares to customers. A bit further on, a few callow school-age kids mucked about with a ball while their older brothers hung around smoking and arguing about which motorbikes were easier to steal, the Bultaco or the Montesa. When he went on his walks, Gabriel gave all that a miss, heading farther and farther uphill till he reached the edge of a small pine forest. While stopping to catch his breath, he smoked a cigarette and contemplated the city. Rising ever higher, the cranes in the foreground loomed over the few hovels that were still hanging in there, while the skeletons of two or three blocks under construction cast threatening tiger-striped shadows over their corrugated asbestos—cement roofs. Beyond Via Favència, way below, the social-housing buildings lined up like domino tiles or a cement rib cage, their contours blurred in the pollution.

When he tired of this route, Gabriel went farther afield. He never used public transport. He was drawn to three squares that he could reach on foot, all of them named after places in the Balearic Islands. He walked to Plaça Llucmajor or continued further down to Plaça Sóller and, on a few occasions, even strode through Horta, going up Turó de la Peira and down again to Plaça Eivissa. The return route was always quicker. He was like a pup that strays beyond his regular patch and suddenly feels lost, but the walk
left him with a very agreeable aftertaste of adventure. These were parts of Barcelona that he'd seen in passing from the van, but he'd always had to keep a close eye on the traffic. Now he was like a foreigner mapping unexplored terrain.

Gabriel's forays into the outside world (which could also be seen as incursions into the inner world) frequently had a sentimental side: He saw himself as Bundó's surrogate, tracing out his routes in what would have been his natural habitat. He observed these places with the voracious eye of his friend strolling, let's say, arm-in-arm with Carolina one Sunday afternoon, and felt consoled. It was one way of not feeling like an intruder.

Immersed in his new routine and with the same ease with which he asked for a coffee in a bar, or greeted neighbors, or hung out his washing, Gabriel began to contemplate suicide. He wasn't an impulsive person, and the idea didn't appear out of the blue in a moment of weakness but slowly grew inside him like pebbles and sediment settling in a riverbed. In the end, on one normal, humdrum day, they block off the flow of water. Not even he would have been able to pinpoint the moment when the idea first came to him. In fact, looking back, it seemed to him that it was predestined. “Something like a factory defect,” I recall my mother saying when I asked her what that meant.

What happened was this. Late one afternoon at the end of March, El Tembleque came to visit him, and they had a beer in the bar downstairs. Besides bringing him up-to-date with the news from La Ibérica, his friend brought him a message from Senyor Casellas: The appropriate amount of time had now gone by since the accident, and they knew at the company that the doctor had given him the all-clear. If he didn't show up at work the following Monday he could consider himself dismissed. Alone in the apartment again, Gabriel weighed up the situation and realized that if he put going back to work on one side of the balance, there was something weighing more on the other side. He didn't immediately identify it, but it didn't take him long to work out what it was: nothing. In other words, he thought it would be easier to wipe himself off the map.

His eventual decision to kill himself took shape in ways that, if anything, were banal. Gabriel smoked a carton of Ducados every seven days. His cigarette consumption had gone up since he'd begun leading a sedentary life, but he tried to exercise some restraint by buying his supplies on a fixed day. Therefore, every Monday morning he went down to the tobacconist's to get the week's rations. The man in the shop, a Valencian who'd lost an eye in the war, always bent his ear for five minutes, clearly intent on rhapsodising over the latest deeds of Franco (who observed them from a photo hung up behind the counter), and then wrapped up his Ducados in a sheet of newspaper. The man read
La Vanguardia
, and that Monday he used the Entertainment page. Since he hadn't smoked since Sunday, Gabriel unwrapped the carton and lit up as soon as he got home. Then, ensconced on the sofa, he took the half-crumpled newspaper page and read this headline:

THE ACTOR JORGE MISTRAL COMMITS SUICIDE

He had been living in Mexico for some years

Although he didn't have much memory for names of actors, he knew who Jorge Mistral was, and the news gripped him. During one of their last moves in the Pegaso, the name had come up in a conversation with Bundó and Petroli. A news item on National Radio referred to the actor in reporting the death of his newborn daughter. After chatting about the tragedy, the three friends started talking about his films. Petroli had seen
Love Madness
, in which he appeared when he was very young and was what they called a promising actor. Bundó remembered one time when the House of Charity nuns had taken them to the Goya Cinema. They would have been about eleven or twelve and had seen
Anchor Button
, in which Jorge Mistral had a starring role and, after that, all the boys in the orphanage played at rescuing sinking ships and proclaimed that they wanted to be sailors when they grew up.

The newspaper, Gabriel noted, was from a few days earlier, Friday, April 21st. Jorge Mistral had killed himself on Thursday the twentieth. When he read the article he found that Jorge wasn't his real name. He was actually ca
lled Modesto Llosas Rosell. He'd shot himself in the head. He was fifty-one years old. He was Spanish but had lived in Mexico for many years. He'd left three letters, one for his wife; one for a friend, also an actor; and another for the coroner.

This information rekindled Gabriel's suicidal ambitions. He now began to imagine his disappearance and subsequent absence, although without yet introducing the gloomier logistical aspects of the story. What if that page was a sign? Years earlier he'd learned about his birth thanks to a newspaper page that had turned up by chance. These things happen. Well, now the page might be showing him the way to go. There was a certain symmetry in the whole thing that appealed to him.

That afternoon, he went back to the tobacconist's and asked the disabled veteran if he could leaf through the weekend newspapers. The man, who suspected everyone, looked at him out of the corner of his remaining eye but went to look for the back issues. A customer was a customer after all. On Saturday,
La Vanguardia
reported that the deceased Jorge Mistral had cancer but hardly anyone knew, not even his wife. On Sunday, a new article talked about all the messages of condolence from the actor's friends. It seemed that his will stipulated that he wanted to be cremated, but the family had preferred to bury him because, that way, they said, they could take flowers to his tomb. Gabriel asked the tobacconist if he could have the two pages—if necessary he'd buy more tobacco—and the man gave them to him.

On Tuesday he went down very early to get
La Vanguardia.
Standing there next to the kiosk, he opened up the newspaper and flipped through it looking for the Entertainment page, but there were no further revelations. He went back to buy it again on Wednesday. He wanted to know what Jorge Mistral had said in the letters he left behind. He read the Entertainment section attentively but found nothing and, having got through that, kept turning the pages. In the News in Brief section he found a headline that froze the blood in his veins:

GEORGE SANDERS TAKES HIS LIFE IN A CASTELLDEFELS HOTEL

Another actor. In this case, more space was given to the news, three columns accompanied by a photo of George Sanders with that bearing of his that had brought him so many roles as the enigmatic, always affable yet distant gentleman. The actor's face looked familiar, but Gabriel couldn't remember any of his films. The article included a reproduction of the note he'd left: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.” Another note, in Spanish, said. “Tell my sister. There's enough money to pay for everything.”

He'd written his good-bye in English, the writing slightly wobbly but still bearing a calligraphic beauty, and someone had translated it for publication in the newspaper. Gabriel pored over every word of the article, a man interpreting an oracle. George Sanders had killed himself in Room 3 of the Rey Don Jaime Hotel in Castelldefels. He'd washed down five phials of barbiturates with the help of a bottle of whisky. He'd arrived two days earlier from Palma de Mallorca—after selling his house there in January—and was to have left for Paris the following day. It seemed he'd hit a rough patch, was in low spirits, and was toying with the idea of buying a house by the sea in Castelldefels. (Who knows whether the palm trees along the coast, leaning at their half-wild angles, reminded him of Santa Monica or Venice Beach, or some other seashore near Los Angeles?) The news item was rounded off with a biographical note and a list of films that had made him famous. Gabriel recognized two titles—
All About Eve
and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
—but he wasn't sure whether he'd seen them. The next few days he'd keep an eye on the television programs. Sometimes when a famous actor died, Channel Two paid homage by showing a film.

In the next few hours he reorganized the facts to establish some kind of framework. Was it coincidence that George Sanders
and Jorge Mistral were actors and had the same first name? He didn't know where—most probably on the radio—he'd heard that one suicide often leads to another, like an epidemic. Perhaps George Sanders had made his decision—because it was a decision, a brave act—after hearing about the death of his colleague. If that was true, who would be next? What sign should he wait for? The next few days he was irresistibly drawn to the News in Brief pages. He was now buying
El Correo Catalán
as well as
La Vanguardia.
He sat at the dining-room table and read the two newspapers from start to finish. Over the next couple of days he was still gleaning new details—the pills Sanders had taken were Nembutal and Tranxene—but then the story dried up. With their callow pretensions of documenting the present, newspapers are the best proof yet that time is a tyrant that punishes with oblivion.

Not yet satisfied, he took the train to Castelldefels on Saturday and went to the Rey Don Jaime Hotel. He'd put on a jacket and tie, hoping to slip by unnoticed, but someone in reception was on to him at once and threw him out, shouting that they'd had enough of journalists. If he wanted to know anything else he should go to the police. Twenty minutes later, concealed in the middle of a group of German tourists, he came back in and slipped down a side corridor. When he got to Room 3, he found it was sealed off with yellow tape. He hesitated about whether to try to open it or not but then thought better of it. On the way home he mulled it over. What would have been the point? He'd never been a busybody and wasn't going to change now.