Lost Luggage (63 page)

Hearing that name, the magic word that sealed out brotherhood, the bundle relaxed and let out a laugh. He got it. Without wasting another moment, Christophe and Christof made their way to the car, opened up the trunk, and got Gabriel settled inside.

“Can you breathe okay?”

The bundle obediently indicated it could. Before closing the trunk, they told him they were putting him in there because it had to look like abduction, but that was the last spot of bother he was going to have from them. They got the engine started and tooted the horn as agreed. Chris, meanwhile, was still threatening the gamblers with the knife. He snapped his fingers again to get Manubens' attention and ordered him to pile up the money on the table. Then he took it and stuffed it in his pocket.

“Keep playing now,” he ordered, pointing the knife at them. He was starting to enjoy himself. “And don't move till you have finished the game. Understood?”

“A seguir jugando,”
Cristòfol translated,
“y que nadie se mueva hasta que haya terminado la partida. ¿Queda entendido?”

“So who the hell is this Bundó?” Miguélez dared to ask when they were on their way out.

“You wouldn't really want to know, Miguélez,” Cristòfol replied, still in Spanish. “Or you, Feijoo. Or you, Manubens. You wouldn't want to know, would you, Manubens?” The businessman let out a lily-livered “no,” beside himself because these strangers knew his name. “Naturally we know who you are, the lot of you. However, we are gentlemen, and, since you asked, I shall answer. Bundó is a code name. It's the cover for an international cartel that operates in the world's best casinos. In case you yokels hadn't noticed, this Delacruz is the crème de la crème. We've had our eye on him for a long time now, but you cretins had to go and muck things up. What a bunch of idiots! From now on, he'll be facing more spectacular
challenges. Monaco, Nice, Saint Petersburg, and maybe Las Vegas if he improves a bit . . .”

Feijoo and Miguélez's faces were pure poetry. The horn of the Opel sounded again with our signal. Chris snapped his fingers once more.

“Come on, let's go. Let's go!”

“Venga, vamos, vamos,”
Cristòfol was still translating, and, at the last moment, just as we were leaving the bar, he turned back and gave them one last blast, still in Spanish. “Ah, and for your own good, Feijoo and Miguélez, we don't want to hear any more stories about you harassing and bothering Delacruz. Or the Italian lady next door. He's ours now, and you've seen for yourselves that the German gentleman is itching for some action.”

We were over the moon on the short trip to Giuditta's apartment. We were shouting and clapping our hands in the car, pumped up with adrenaline, and guffawing to recall the whack Miguélez had taken. Despite all the excitement, Christof drove smoothly, trying to avoid any bumps. Now that we'd finally recovered Gabriel, we had to get him home safe and sound. We left the car in Giuditta's parking spot and opened up the trunk. Now we had him. Our father. Outlined in the blanket was a still but alert figure, a Houdini about to make his getaway.

“Don't worry, we're the good guys,” Cristòfol said, patting him. Since the bundle didn't move, he touched it again and asked, “Hey, can you breathe?”

The bundle could. We picked him up and all four of us carried him upstairs to the mezzanine still wrapped in the blanket. We were tickling him, and he was laughing. It may seem that this extra delay was an act of cruelty that a father doesn't deserve, but we Christophers believed it was essential. We'd agreed that we wanted to be reunited with Gabriel all together, at the same instant, and that he should experience it in the same way as we did.

Giuditta opened the door giving thanks to all the saints in heaven and all the Madonnas in the Italian calendar of saints'
days. We deposited our father in a sitting position on the couch, undid the ropes and sat in a semicircle before him.

The hulk shed the blanket and ropes with a few thrusts of its arms and then, from underneath, emerged Gabriel, our father. Sweaty and dishevelled, he reminded us of an actor who's just walked offstage and flops on to the couch in his dressing room to listen to the applause still echoing from the stalls.

“Thank-you,” he said at last, gazing at us one by one. “Thank-you very much.”

We won't be so crass now as to throw away in a few phrases what each of us experienced right then. Neither will we get carried away by our emotions. We Christophers deplore sentimentality—the legacy of an imperfect orphanhood, no doubt—and Gabriel . . . well, Gabriel had become immune many years earlier when he finally wept over Bundó's death, and his tear ducts had dried up forever.

Moreover, as we saw it, this had to be a beginning, not an ending.

But.

But, one day, during one of our first get-togethers, we Christophers had amused ourselves with quite a dicey game. Each of us had to describe, using a metaphor, the mixture of feelings he had regarding Gabriel. Someone, and it doesn't matter who, came up with an image that we all thought fitted the bill.

“Imagine that one day, because of something that life's served up, you're so desperate that you end up playing Russian roulette,” this Christopher said. “It's your turn. You're holding the revolver in your hands, you put one bullet in the cylinder (the one that might kill you), and you spin it. You place the muzzle against your temple and pull the trigger. You try to concentrate on that extremely brief shiver between yes and no. For me, Dad's absence is like the empty chamber of that revolver.

Click!

Click!

Click!

Click!

N
ow here's a nice thing: All four Christophers have the same memory of that moment, of the glorious day when the lines of past and present came together at last. Right now we are a memory for the future. The years will go by and we'll see each other perhaps more often or perhaps less often. Who knows? Each of us will construct his own narrative around this memory and inform it with whatever meaning suits him best, but what makes us proud, what makes true brothers of us, is that the origin of it will be the same for all of us. Yes, that's right: it's the present—Sunday morning.

The sun's just risen. The city's awake, and we haven't slept yet. We're exhausted, but struggling to prolong the excitement that has kept us going all night with clear heads and open eyes. At six this morning we took the decision to go out and get a bit of air, so we wandered down to Pla de Palau. Gabriel knows a bar there that serves breakfast at this early hour. All this palaver's made us hungry. Two young guys in tracksuits were running in Ciutadella Park, and a drunk was trying to arrange himself in the best position for sleeping off his hangover on a bench. In the distance we could hear the calls of the birds in the zoo as they were waking up with the first glimmers of light. As we passed El Born market we stopped for a moment and contemplated the silent structure. A dribble of light outlined the empty space giving it an air of transcendence. Cristòfol went over to the entrance and broke the silence with his imitation of the wails of a newborn baby, which
echoed like those of our father sixty years earlier. A startled pigeon flew out.

“Yes, yes, you're right,” Gabriel said by way of response. “You might say I was born here. It was my first cradle. But it's changed a lot over the years. You couldn't begin to imagine how.”

“And the salt cod seller?” we asked. “Did you ever see her again?”

“No, not that I know of. I lost track of her a long time ago but I've never stopped thinking about her. It's curious. If anyone asks me what my mother was like, I always describe that lady.”

Gabriel speaks confidently, without any attempt at evasion, looking us straight in the eye. There are some moments when we could say that his words are just seeking to comfort us, or pass a test. It's as if, shut away in the mezzanine apartment, he's been studying the clues and notes we left behind and is now trying to play the part of the character we gave him. Maybe he does it because he doesn't want to let us down any more, and we're grateful for that. Or perhaps it's just a product of our imagination, a residue of reluctance and disillusion that won't disappear overnight. Whatever the reason, we've been together more than seven hours, and we can now say that his rough edges have vanished.

As soon as we got to the apartment last night, Giuditta opened a bottle of champagne and we toasted our successful rescue. Then our exhilaration subsided, and we all went quiet. Where should we start? Who should speak? The silence threatened to asphyxiate us. Giuditta realized that she was in the way and went back to her place under some pretext. Then our father broke the ice.

“Look, boys, I'm not going to apologize. Too much time has gone by. I've often regretted what I did or, rather, what I wasn't able to do . . .” He stopped to see how we were reacting. He looked despondent, and the words came out faint and tired, as if they'd spent too many years aging in his craw. “Of course I'm happy to have you back again, but I'm also quite embarrassed that it had to happen like this. Things can't be changed now. If only they could . . . You can reproach me all you like, and you'd certainly be right to do so. But I won't ask for your forgiveness. It's been too long.”

“You're talking as if you've committed some sort of crime,” we said.

“And isn't it a crime? Abandoning your sons?”

“It depends how you look at it. Maybe, more than a crime, it's a sentence you've imposed on yourself.”

“Yes, but . . .”

It's impossible to reproduce the ensuing five-way conversation with all its ins and outs. Conventions failed us, and we felt awkward, unable to find the appropriate middle ground between intimacy and distance. Did we have to act like strangers or did the blood bond remove all barriers? We tested the waters. The most valuable and upsetting revelations alternated with conversation that was about as inane as any you'd come across in an elevator. We couldn't find the proper balance and teetered from the aggression of police-style interrogation to the distancing of diplomatic
froideur.
We tried to cover up uncomfortable silences with over-familiar remarks. Fortunately, as we kept talking the roller-coaster highs and lows started to level out. Then again, our jitteriness set off a babble of different languages that we vainly tried to harmonize. Our father answered us with his do-it-yourself linguistic skills, and at last we could hear, still intact, that cadence of his that had bewitched our mothers. Gabriel took it all more coolly than we did, without any dramatics, and resorted to his memories of us when we were small. Then, if one of his anecdotes made us laugh or got us feeling nostalgic, we responded at once by ticking him off. He counterattacked by asking about Sigrun, Sarah, Mireille, and Rita—if we'd told them anything, if they'd taken it well, if they hated him, or if we had some recent photo of them—and we gave in once again. It also happened that we four brothers were not always in agreement, and one would sometimes act offended and the other three would make fun of him. Or the opposite happened: A solitary laugh mocked three gawking faces. As the night progressed we confirmed that all alliances were possible. At one stage, one of the Christophers joined forces with Gabriel to keep his brothers in check.

“I must confess,” our father said in a moment of weakness,
“that I was more afraid of this meeting than happy about it. All my life I've imagined you cursing me to hell and back, wherever you were. I thought you wouldn't want to know any more about me.”

“You weren't far off,” we said. “Every one of us, before we knew each other, would have paid you back in contempt for all those years of silence. Even if it was just to avenge our mothers' suffering. But we were lucky enough to get together to look for you. Curiosity got the better of us and with each new discovery we were more and more susceptible to what we call the South Pacific syndrome.”

“What's that? I only know about the Stockholm syndrome.”

“Well, it's the opposite thing. We invented it ourselves. We call it the South Pacific syndrome because the Pacific Ocean is the antipodes of Stockholm. Stockholm syndrome is when the kidnapped person gets fond of the kidnapper, right? In our case you did the opposite of kidnapping us. You abandoned us. But while we were looking for you we grew fond of you, and now we want to know all about you.”

“All! You're not asking much . . .” Gabriel countered, playing for time. Suddenly he looked irresolute and scared. “But the thing is, I'm reserved by nature, and it's hard for me to talk for talking's sake. I'm not used to it. It would be better if you asked me what you want to know. That would be easier.”

We didn't need to think too long. We could have asked him “Why?”—short and to the point—and then let Gabriel head off wherever he wanted, but there was one question that preceded us. It was a question that defined our lives to the extent that we had the feeling it had been planned.