Lost Luggage (65 page)

“Look, Cristóbal,” Mother said, “these are your grandparents from Barcelona. Give them a kiss.”

They were Fernando's parents. I've forgotten their names. I do remember that when the lady bent down to give me a kiss I was scared because she was wearing very big earrings, like two gold pumpkins, and her face was masked with powder to cover up her wrinkles. I started to whimper again. The grandfather, in contrast, held out his hand as if I were a gentleman, and kept his distance.

“Next Sunday, God willing, Cristóbal, you'll meet your other grandparents, the ones who live in Matadepera,” Mother added, trying to calm me.

I could go on remembering similar scenes. Relatives and more relatives, friends and neighbors. All my life, as I've moved around
the world, I've come across the same sideways looks, the sly smiles and the hypocritical ones, the blunders and the misunderstandings. Now I understand better what was going on around me at the time. I could also give you a blow-by-blow description of the dizzy feelings of a little boy who is installed without any warning in a foreign land that he has to conquer at any price. But it's not worth it. What counts is how easy it is to get used to luxury when you're a kid, but also how it all turns out to be superfluous if you haven't felt loved, not even for five minutes.

El Tembleque, one of the truck drivers I worked with, used to say, “It's the working days that count. Weekends are a tip to squander.” After all the excitement of that Sunday, Monday showed me the other side of my new life. Now I think the three of us should have gone off for a week's vacation, escaped to some place where we could get used to being together, but Maribel and Fernando were in a hurry to get back to normal. In a well-off Bonanova family that meant I was soon spending more time with the maids than with my parents. Fernando worked all day, till late, and often came home after I'd gone to sleep. She, Mother, disappeared for hours on end into some room or other of the house to do what she called her “needlework.” For some mysterious reason I wasn't going to school yet so it was like a permanent holiday. Otilia looked after me, and I had so many toys I never got bored or fed up with being alone.

One afternoon, three or four days after I arrived, the two of us went down to the garden they had at the back of the house. I'd seen a swing from my bedroom window and was dying to try it. When we finished afternoon tea I made a scene and convinced Otilia to come down with me.

“Go and ask your mommy,” she said. “If she gives you her permission . . .”

No sooner had she said this than I ran all around the apartment looking for Mother. I called her, opened doors, and went into rooms I'd never seen before. The library, the drawing room, the guest room. I couldn't find her anywhere. Otilia ran after me but didn't manage to catch me. When I realized this, it turned into
a game. Hide-and-seek. The corners and tucked-away spots of the House of Charity had taught me all the tricks in the book. I gave her the slip and ran in the opposite direction. Then I opened a door into a narrow room, a sort of sewing room, and hurtled inside, crashing into Mother's skirt. I jumped back. She looked at me as if I were a thief, a wild beast, a ghost, and let out a cry of panic. I burst out laughing because I'd given her a fright, a kid's victory—Ha ha! Ha ha!—but the expression on her face got even darker. Luckily Otilia turned up just then.

“Cristóbal, Cristóbal, come here!” she shouted. “I'm sorry, madam.”

“Cristóbal? What Cristóbal?” she said, staring at me with an expression of shock. “It can't be . . .”

Otilia removed me immediately and, without asking permission or anything, took me down to the garden. It was starting to get dark, there was a cold wind and she put an overcoat on me. I swung up and down till my arm muscles started to ache. Otilia pushed me higher and higher and, as I flew up and down on the swing, something, I don't know exactly what, lifted from my shoulders. It was a kind of guilt that I'd made Mother tremble with fear.

Back in the apartment again, I took the coat off. When I tugged at one of its thick sleeves, I realized there was a rip in the elbow. I hadn't done it. No way. My first reaction was to cover it up with my hand because, if we made a hole or ripped our clothes when we were rolling around on the ground at the orphanage, the nuns pulled our ears and told us we'd have to darn them ourselves, like girls. Pretty quickly, though, I remembered that I didn't have to worry about that any more so I showed it to Otilia, sticking my finger in it.

“It wasn't me,” I said.

“I know, dear, don't you worry about it,” she answered. “It was probably already there. We'll sew it up and that will be that.”

“But who did it?” I asked.

“Nobody, love,” she replied after hesitating a moment. “It happened all by itself.”

Tomasa, the other maid, who was also the cook, told us that
my dinner was ready. Otilia took me to the bathroom to wash my hands with soap. She wanted to come in with me, but I wouldn't let her because I was a big boy now—in four days I'd learned to give orders like a pint-sized tyrant—and knew how to do it by myself. I washed them, then, and went to the kitchen where Otilia was waiting. The door was ajar, and I crept up to it without making a sound. I wanted to give the two maids a fright, like I'd done before with Mother. I was about to open the door when I realized they were talking in low voices, as if they were telling secrets. Of course I tried to eavesdrop.

“. . . So what did she do?”

“Nothing. She was really shocked. She nearly fainted. I think she thought it was the other one.”

“Oh, my God. Poor little boy.”

“That's because she pays too much attention to her husband. I tell you they've brought him too soon.”

“We can't get involved, Otilia. We're just here to be bossed around.”

“No, I'm not getting involved. But the little boy . . . Cristóbal!” she shouted then, “Dinner's ready!”

Just then I pushed the door open with a good loud yell, hoping to give them a fright. They both pretended to be scared out of their wits, trembling and rolling their eyes back, to make me happy.

That night it was Fernando who put me to bed and read me a story. Even though he was really into it, I recall that he didn't know how to read stories. He shouted too much and didn't like being interrupted with questions. So, instead of making you sleepy it left you more awake. I closed my eyes so he'd leave me alone. He turned out the light and left. In the darkness, as I was dropping off, I had a thought that crept into my dreams: “I'm not the first Cristóbal.”

The next morning, the idea came back more clearly and I told myself it wasn't a dream. The revelation was too much for a boy of seven, and I began to invent a story to explain it. I wasn't the first boy adopted by Fernando and Maribel. There was one before me, another Cristóbal, but he didn't love them enough so they sent
him back to the orphanage. Who could it have been? If I wanted to stay in that house, if I wanted Bundó to come too one day, I had to behave like a good son. I had to make them love me, just like the nuns had told me. In the grip of that desire, I was overcome by my strange sense of guilt about Mother for the next few days, but I didn't know why I felt guilty. Her very presence was enough to make me believe that I didn't deserve her. Whenever I managed to catch her in the apartment, always alone, silent, downcast, I did my best to make her happy. I sang her songs we'd learned at the orphanage, invited her to play with me, or asked her questions to make her speak. Sometimes I was able to get her to sing and even to coax an uninhibited little laugh out of her, and then that invisible weight was lifted from her shoulders, and I felt welcome and protected by the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.

“What's wrong, Mommy?” I asked in Catalan, as I ran my hand through her red hair, as if hoping some of the color would rub off.

“Nothing,” she answered in Catalan without realizing. “It will be all right, really it will.”

From then on, every new clue led to my discovery of the existence of the first Cristóbal. I did handwriting practice with Otilia and learned to write and read my new name. One morning when I was getting dressed I saw that, stitched into the neck of all my clothes, there was a name tag with words embroidered in colored letters. I slowly read them: Cristóbal Soldevila. In the orphanage we always inherited the well-worn, scruffy clothes of the bigger kids, and now all this was mine. I asked Otilia why they had my name on them, and she said it was for when I went to school, which would be soon, so the other kids didn't mistake my things for theirs. Later, I discovered that instead of patching up the overcoat—which the first Cristóbal must have ripped—they'd bought me a new one and sewn my name-tag into the neck.

Another afternoon, nearly two weeks after my arrival in the Soldevila mansion, I was rummaging around in a cupboard I hadn't checked out before and found a box full of musical instruments. Most of them were plastic, cheap imitations so kids could
discover whether they had musical leanings or not and parents could curse them as they covered their ears. I was so happy that I wanted to try them all, one by one. I played them for about half a minute to hear what they sounded like and laid them out on the ground as if they were an orchestra. I played some maracas, a flamenco guitar, a drum, and a xylophone. I took a canary-yellow trumpet from the bottom of the box and blew hard, but a muffled note came out of it. I tried again, with my eyes closed and cheeks puffed out but only succeeded in making my head spin. Then I had a look inside the trumpet, which was long and narrow, and my fingers felt something inside. I tugged at it and a rolled-up bit of paper came out. I forgot about the trumpet and smoothed out the paper, but it sprang back into a roll. When I managed to open it again, pinning it down with both hands, I was alarmed to see that it was a kid's drawing.

Give a box of colored pencils to any seven-year-old kid and tell him to draw his family. The result will be very like the drawing I found. The mother had flaming-orange hair, bright like the sun, and the father was waving hello with a big hand, while his other hand was little and glued to his body. The boy—the first Cristóbal—had drawn himself smaller, between the two of them. In the background was a house with a tree and a swing. A cloud of white smoke rose from the chimney.

When I understood that this was my predecessor's drawing, I quickly rolled it up again and tucked it back in the same hiding place in the trumpet. I realized that I had to do a better drawing and show it to Mother and Father. I called Otilia and asked where the box of colored pencils was, I wanted to do a picture of Fernando and Maribel.

I'm no good at drawing, never have been, and that was clear at the age of seven. I've got no patience for detail. Not that you could say that they taught us much at the House of Charity. When I finished the portrait of my new parents, I compared my drawing with that of the first Cristóbal. Mine—and there was no doubt about it—was not nearly as good as his. It was a very bad copy, really horrible.
I tore it out of the book, screwed it up into a ball and started a new one. After five minutes, Otilia called me to come for dinner, and I had to leave it.

While I was eating in the kitchen, Fernando arrived from the office and came to give me a kiss. On the days when he got home earlier, Mother liked me to sit with them at the table or play in the dining room. She wanted to have me near her, and I was pleased because it was a chance to make her happy. It also amused me to watch Fernando eating with only one hand. He was probably born disabled—but I'm not sure about that—and he managed the cutlery very well. He didn't like being helped. I'd realized this. When they had meat, always well cooked so it would be very tender, he cut it up first, using some scissors—very sharp scissors—and then he stuck his fork into it, like anybody else. That day, while I was with them, Fernando asked me how I'd been amusing myself during the day. I didn't know what to tell him. I'd done so many things they were all mixed up in my mind. Otilia, who was collecting the plates, answered for me, “What have you been doing, Cristóbal? Don't you remember? Well, he's been drawing, sir. He drew his mommy and daddy.”

“Aha! Hmmm,” Fernando said. “Mommy and Daddy! Let's see, let's see . . . Why don't you show us?”

I was only too keen to please them and make them happy. I ran to my room without a moment's hesitation and brought them the drawing done by the first Cristóbal, which was better than mine.

Mother had hardly said a word throughout dinner. I'd been watching her out of the corner of my eye because I was aware of her reserve. Her way of withdrawing from the world made me anxious. It was my fault. Ever since we'd arrived that first Saturday, her face had become more and more pinched. It was as if I could see it—as if it was my obligation to capture it—and Fernando couldn't. That night, the paleness of her skin contrasted even more than usual with the redness of her hair. I remember it very well because that was the last time I saw her. I went over and handed her the drawing.

“That's lovely . . .” she said as she unfolded it on the table, but
it didn't take her a second to see that it was the other Cristóbal's drawing. Mothers know, they know these things. She pushed it away in horror and tipped over her glass of wine. She closed her eyes and seemed to have stopped breathing. Then she said in an anguished, feeble voice, “I can't take any more, Fernando. Really. I can't pretend . . .”

Even a boy of seven could grasp the despair behind those words. I gulped a bit and, admitting defeat and feeling very miserable, said, “I know the other Cristóbal drew better, Mommy, but I promise I'll learn soon.”

She let out a long wail. She seemed to be gasping for air, and then she started to cry with her whole body, as if she was never going to stop. Her weeping affected me too, and I went sort of crazy. I didn't know whether to touch her or throw myself on the floor.