Lost Luggage (57 page)

If it had ever sunk in, which is doubtful, Gabriel had forgotten that he had an appointment with the insurance company's ENT man precisely that Friday. Furniture movers going around in trucks don't have leather-bound diaries for writing these things down (they might steal them at times, but then they usually give them to somebody else). The procedure tended to be more pedestrian. Obliged by Senyor Casellas, Rebeca gave them the papers in question; they immediately mislaid them; two days before the doctor's appointment, Rebeca reminded them, and they slotted it into their immediate memory. But this time, Rebeca hadn't said anything to Gabriel because he no longer worked at La Ibérica. If the list of appointments no longer had any meaning for him after the accident, it meant everything to Rita, who'd rescued it and was clinging to it as if her life depended on it.

Yet, the fact remains that Gabriel woke up that Friday morning with a dreadful earache.

Since he'd got up and dressed, his ear had started suppurating, discharging a revolting green liquid that he stanched by wadding his ear with cotton puffs. It was nine in the morning. Unable to eat anything solid because each bite would have been torture, the truck driver Gabriel decided that his only option was to present himself at the Emergency Department of the insurance company's clinic and get them to stop the pain. He arrived there an hour later,
at ten o'clock, having changed buses twice to cross the city. The other passengers looked at him compassionately, and he felt that his ear was swelling with every blaze of pain. For the first time in all those months he'd wished he was in the La Ibérica van.

When Gabriel was entering the Clínica Plató, Rita was walking up Carrer Muntaner. It was still too early for the appointment noted on the piece of paper but, as on the previous Friday, she wanted to get there in good time and monitor the entrance. Gabriel looked for the receptionist and asked for the Emergency Department. They wanted to know what the problem was. When they saw his ear in such a state, so red and purulent, they sent him straight to the ear, nose, and throat specialist. Once he got there, the nurse asked him for his insurance company card and, on reading his name, told him they were expecting him. He'd come early but they'd put him through straight away so he didn't have to suffer any more. Gabriel told himself that such coincidences were pain-caused hallucinations.

Five minutes later, when the doctor called him into the consulting room, Rita was coming up the stairs on her way to the ear, nose, and throat specialist. Since it had yielded good results with the oculist, she told the new nurse the same story she'd come up with the previous week. She'd come to meet a friend who hadn't shown up yet. She had a bad earache and had lost her sense of balance. The nurse believed her, and Rita sat down to wait for her appointment—or disappointment?—with Gabriel.

Gabriel's meeting with Dr. Sadurní lasted twenty minutes. From her vantage point in the waiting room, Rita could hear the doctor talking with another man, but she couldn't make out what they were saying and didn't suspect it was Gabriel. She kept her eyes on the door, and every time someone came in her heart gave a leap.

In the consulting room, Dr. Sadurní asked Gabriel to sit on an examination bed and looked at his ear, first with the naked eye and then with an instrument that resembled a cornet. Gabriel vaguely remembered the doctor from a previous checkup, which calmed him down. He was a friendly, well-mannered man, of the
old school. He was over sixty, wore suspenders and an elegant tie, addressed his patients with the respectful second-person
vós,
and shouted (maybe because most of them came to him half deaf). He poked around inside Gabriel's ear with a cotton swab. Gabriel couldn't suppress his groans of pain and the doctor tried to ease it by repeating some mysterious sounds:
“Berebé, berebé, berebé.”

After long years of experience and having tried multiple combinations, he'd reached the conclusion that by linking the vowel
e
with
b
and
r
he'd come up with the sound that most effectively soothed infected ears. He held an aluminum bowl under the ear and, with a syringe, flushed out the auditory canal with hydrogen peroxide.

“This is going to hurt for a second,” he warned.

Gabriel endured the gush of hydrogen peroxide with his shoulders hunched and eyes shut tight. He was paralyzed by the shock but, indeed, only a second later the pain vanished in a stream of liquid. His ear was unblocked and the new void was occupied by an exasperating jabbering noise.

“Berebé, berebé, berebé . . .”

The doctor touched his back so he'd stay still. Using another cotton swab, he took a sample of the pus that was now streaming from his ear and spread it on some white paper. It was lizard green with opalescent spots. He showed it to Gabriel like someone displaying a precious stone.

“You have a fine old infection here, my friend. One of the strangest I have ever seen. Six or seven cases in all the forty years of my career . . . What more can I say? Now, let me see where this is coming from so it doesn't happen again.”

The doctor disinfected the ear and, with the aid of another cotton swab, daubed the auditory canal with some ointment. Then he covered it with gauze and adhesive tape. It was a spectacular bandage, but Gabriel was grateful for it because the beast inside his ear was now assuaged.

“Keep it protected from the air for five or six days,” the doctor ordered. “I'll give you a prescription for an antibiotic and this ointment. Change the dressing every morning. Sleep without it,
please. You'll have a soiled pillowcase but that doesn't matter. Ears also have a right to breathe and express themselves as well as to listen.”

Gabriel nodded automatically, as if waking up for the first time that morning. The doctor took the piece of paper with his sample of pus, sat down at his desk, and opened a very thick medical textbook. As he turned over the pages he kept nodding to himself. Then he took another big book and studied some photos.

“You have a very atypical acute inner-ear infection, as I told you,” he finally pronounced. “Your sinuses have gradually been clogging up with a rare chemical compound. Permit me a personal question: Has there been a recent death in your family, or some personal distress?”

It didn't take Gabriel long to answer.

“Yes, a friend died. He was like a brother to me.”

“I imagined so. And when did he die?”

“Eighty-two days ago, today.”

“Goodness gracious. That is a long time. And, tell me, did you cry at all when he died?”

“No,” he answered sadly. “To tell you the truth, I haven't been able to cry for him. There's no way I can.”

“Now I understand. It may seem strange to you but, over all this time, those unwept tears have ended up bringing on an infection, my friend. That is what happens. Tears come from some little sacs called lachrymal glands. The human body is very intelligent, you know. When you need to cry, the sac fills up but, if the tears fail to come out, then you end up with a surfeit of sodium and potassium that inflames the organs and destabilizes the whole system. You must help this ear and try to cry for your friend. It would be the best cure of all. Take this infection as if he were begging you to do it from the hereafter.”

After thanking Dr. Sadurní, a disoriented and serious-looking Gabriel walked out of the consulting room. You couldn't say he was completely done for, not yet, but the doctor's explanation had greatly unnerved him, and he was struggling to get his thoughts together. His inner battle gave him an erratic, distracted appearance,
and, seeing him returning into the waiting room, Rita instantly recognized the Gabriel of the airport.

This broken man was screaming to be looked after.

He no longer had his arm in a cast, but the bulky dressing covering his ear made for a pathetic sight. The time had come. She clutched the folder and stood up trembling like a leaf, but Gabriel walked past her, unseeing.

That was okay. She understood. She followed him down the stairs (while in the background she could hear the doctor burbling to someone else,
“Berebé, berebé, berebé . . .”
), keeping a prudent distance. Now in the street, Gabriel trudged toward Carrer Muntaner. He couldn't get the doctor's words out of his head and was walking slower and slower. Rita had to stop so she wouldn't bump into him. Gabriel was so absorbed that he wasn't aware of anything else. Part of his being, the more rational part, refused to connect the earache with Bundó's death, but then guilt won the day, accusing him of being utterly spineless and mean. A voice inside him, as if from beyond the grave, even ticked him off for considering suicide. What a coward! He was drowning. He was suffocating. He stumbled, and Rita thought she'd have to pick him up from the ground. Gabriel took a few more steps, crossed the road, and sat down on a bench in Plaça Adrià. It wasn't the same one used by the couple eight days earlier but one more tucked away, half hidden by vegetation. Rita let him do his thing. She had to act with great care and, above all, not jeopardize anything. It looked as if Gabriel was calming down.

At that hour of the morning, Plaça Adrià was an oasis of calm.

Gradually, with his whole body juddering like the Pegaso engine when it refused to start, Gabriel started to weep. First, one big tear flooded his right eye and spilled over and then another one did the same in the left eye. The flow stopped for a few seconds and it seemed as if that would be all, but two more tears brimmed up, one in each eye, salty, lush and assertive.

If the engine continued to balk on the cold winter mornings of the North, Bundó used to yell. “Come on, get going, you bastard, don't be such a wimp!”

The rush of tears was building up, and Gabriel couldn't control the first spasms of his body. A high-pitched howl escaped him, soon to turn into a dirge.

“That's it, that's the way,” Bundó would bellow, “let yourself go! Show us what you've got, Pegaso!”

Then, doing honor to its name, it did its truck's equivalent of pawing the ground, snorting, proudly huffing and puffing as Bundó laughed, joyfully thumping both hands on the steering wheel and looking at his friends to solicit their approval. Gabriel was now bellowing, bawling with his eyes and his whole body, which was convulsed with spasms.

When she judged that a judicious time had passed, Rita went to sit on the same bench, a little way away from him. He glanced at her with a woebegone expression. He didn't stop crying. Now he couldn't. His eyes were red and burning, his cheeks lustrous with all the tears rolling down them. Rita held out a handkerchief, and he took it babbling some sort of gratitude. Rather than mopping up his tears, he used it to blow his nose so he could keep crying.

Three hours went by, no exaggeration, during which Gabriel wept in all possible registers as if, that way, he could sum up his life at Bundó's side. He wailed like a baby in diapers wanting the breast. He shed the crocodile tears of the kid up to no good. He whimpered like an adolescent blubbering over the pains of love, and like the adult who swallows his tears pretending to have a cold. He cried like you cry in the cinema watching a drama in the dark, cried like you cry on the soccer field, in front of everyone, when your team loses the final. He cried with rage, sorrow, physical pain, and seeking compassion. He cried without knowing why, out of pure depression, cried like a crybaby, for pleasure too, re-creating himself in it. He yelped like a beaten dog. He got the hiccups from so much crying. He roared, he lamented, he whimpered. His chest hurt, the muscles of his face hurt, and his eyelids were burning. When he tried to catch his breath, he sniveled for a while. When it seemed he'd run out of tears, he only had to think of Bundó and the depths of his eyes rewarded him with a few more liters.

Three hours went by, I say. If he'd collected all those tears,
dried them, and extracted the salt, he could have seasoned his meals to the end of his days.

Rita remained at his side. Some time earlier she'd started to cry too, letting out the tension and fears of all those months, the weariness of so many futile kilometers covered in Barcelona. That corner of Plaça Adrià was a vale of tears, a cryodrome.

All at once it started to rain, a shower of fine, gentle drops and, to both of them, this seemed the most logical corollary. Even meteorology was joining in. Finally, Rita picked up the folder and handed it to Gabriel. He opened it, recognized the papers, maps, Bundó's lists, and, therein, found yet another reason for crying. After a while, he turned to her and asked, “Why are you crying?”

“I'm crying with happiness. Because we've found each other at last. And you?”

“I'm crying for a friend who was called Bundó.”

At this point, Christophers, will you permit me a devious maneuvre that sums up everything that happened next? This is it: We could take a leap ahead in time and all that weeping, all those rivers and streams of tears could be concentrated in one single outpouring, that of my bawling when I shattered the silence of my first second of life, just after the midwife smacked my little bottom. Nine months plus five or six days had gone by.

I
t's a pity that human beings aren't born well informed, with a fully stocked and operational memory from their first breath of life. Right now, for example, when we're trying to describe Gabriel's relationships with our mothers, we'd find such a gift most useful. We'd be able to recall exactly what happened on the days when he came to visit us and stayed in our homes. What confidences they shared, when they fought and why, and whether they ever felt like a proper couple. In short, whether they ever managed to make their relationship seem normal. (They didn't, of course, since Gabriel did nothing to foster the mature feelings that are necessary when two people live together.) On the other hand, since the four of us were too young to understand anything, we have to trust what Sigrun, Mireille, Sarah, and Rita have chosen to tell us. It's a telling sign that all four mothers portray Gabriel as a good man, independent, evasive, and certainly not someone to have and to hold. A sweet affliction, they say, a bitter gift.