by Jordi Puntí
Now, borne along by these recollections, we too can revisit the labyrinthine passageways of the House of Charity, the tiles disinfected with Zotal, and the little boy who walks along holding the hand of a nun who smells like candles. We too can recall the nighttime comings and goings of the orphans, their adventures and their punishments, the coarse poorhouse clothes, the children’s shrewdness in learning to fend for themselves. First, however, in order to make more sense of the whole thing and give it some perspective, we’re going to jump ahead about half a century. Hence, as if all our father’s journeys were merely a tangle of lines on a map of Europe, we shan’t move from Barcelona and we’ll enter the apartment in which he took refuge for more than ten years.
Cristòfol has the floor.
“Hang on,” Christof protests, “I think we need to give this a title. Let’s make it nice and solemn.”
Over to you, Cristòfol.
CARRER NÀPOLS
Very well. I’m thirty now, and it’s more than twenty-five years since I last saw my father. This sentence could sound tragic if I said it like one of those idiots you see flaunting their family dramas on television, but, in my case, it’s simply a fact expressed in terms of years. Precisely because we were so used to his absence, as we said before, I’m doing the calculations in order to stress the surprise—or rather the shock—of receiving the first news of him after so long. I refer to something so simple but so ambiguous as being able to trace his steps on a map of Barcelona. The call from the police came one morning just like any other. A policeman identified himself and then went on to ask me if I knew Senyor Gabriel Delacruz Expósito. It took me a few seconds to dredge up the name from the depths of my memory as I repeated it aloud.
“Yes, he’s my father,” I replied, “but we haven’t seen or heard from him in many years. We’d forgotten he existed.”
“Yes, I see. However, it is our duty to inform you that we have registered him as missing. Not dead, for the record, but missing. There have been no reported sightings of your father for a year. He hasn’t paid his rent or utility bills. The gas, water, and electricity were cut off some time ago. The landlord got in touch with us because he’s upset about not being paid. His complaint coincided with another one from the neighbors who’d been bothered for several days by a bad smell, like something dead. We took it seriously, entered the apartment, and found nobody there. Everything was in order. The neighbors, as you might imagine, are a hysterical lot. The point now is that you, as next of kin, will have to decide what you want to do: whether you want to pay the back rent and bills while you’re looking for him, or whether you think it’s better to remove his things and give up the apartment.”
While you’re looking for him.
“How did you find me?” It was the only question I managed to come up with.
“We didn’t have to look too hard. We found your name written on a piece of paper. He’d left it on the bedside table, like a kind of suicide note. He seems to have done it deliberately. Only it wasn’t a suicide note. There were three other names as well, but yours is the only one that appears in the registry office.”
A couple of days later, early in the morning so as to make the most of the daylight, I went to the police station to pick up the keys to the apartment. The policeman showed me the piece of paper torn from a notebook. The other names were, of course, those of the other three Christophers although, at that point, I didn’t know who they were or even if they were real names. It looked more like some sort of linguistic game. My father made no mention of the four mothers, not on that piece of paper anyway. The previous day, I’d explained the situation to my mother and asked her to come with me to the apartment, but she persuaded me to go alone.
“Aren’t you curious?”
“No. You can tell me about it.”
Her way of coping with sudden shock or disappointment was to feign indifference, which is what she always did when we started talking about my father.
The apartment Gabriel had abandoned was on a mezzanine in Carrer Nàpols, very near Carrer Almogàvers and Ciutadella Park. It was an ugly building, erected in the fifties, with a car repair workshop at street level. The policeman told me that they’d confirmed that my father had lived at that address for more than ten years. His choice wasn’t surprising if the idea was to become invisible. In the mid-eighties that part of the city was a run-down area with a listless, desolate air, not unlike an industrial estate. It had become a no-man’s-land. The Barcelona North bus station, which was not yet renovated, was falling apart in the middle of a large vacant lot where rats scratched around among used condoms. The court building, which was swarming with people in the morning, closed in the middle of the afternoon and slumbered in its own weighty shadow. In that part of Carrer Almogàvers there were only workshops and garages used by transport companies, and the trucks made everything stink of diesel. (Now I wonder whether Gabriel settled there because he liked the smell.) Whatever life there was in the area appeared after dark, in the form of transvestites who plied their trade on the street corners. With their painted faces, four-inch heels and skintight clothes, they drifted like zombies under the yellow glow of the streetlamps, trying to attract curb-crawling customers who, if they weren’t interested, were ordered in blood-curdling screeches to fuck off.
At precisely that time, I’d spent two academic years going to English classes at an academy in Passeig de Sant Joan, very close to the Arc de Triomf. Looking back, I’ve speculated more than once that, one of those winter evenings while I was killing time in the Bar Lleida before my class, I might have come across my father. Two pairs of roaming eyes meet for an instant and move on as each stranger returns to his own world. It could have happened, but I don’t find anything very comforting in this thought.
With a lawyer’s detachment, I opened the door of the apartment. I admit that my intentions were very hazy: have a look at the place, try to find some clue as to Gabriel’s whereabouts—it was years since I’d stopped calling him “Dad”—and forget about the whole thing, the sooner the better. I had no interest in looking for him and still less in paying his rent, which is what happened in the end, but now I’m jumping ahead. Although the apartment was cold and stuffy, I was struck by an odd sense of recognition. I now believe that it was intuition, almost part of my DNA, that I unconsciously projected onto those four walls.
As I started to move through the apartment, I felt reassured. As if I’d been doing it all my life, I raised one of the roller blinds in the dining room, and a little more light came in, a slanting brightness. A meter from the window, directly opposite, was the wall of a parking garage that had been constructed in the middle of the block. Gabriel’s absence could be felt in every corner of the apartment since dust lay thick on the furniture, giving it a ghostly air, but, for the record, it was neither depressing nor pathetic. There was no sense of that paralyzed—rather than peaceful—atmosphere that settles over the objects in a house when there’s been a sudden death. Rather the whole effect was that of a still life, a perfectly arranged composition. On the table in the living room, a dozen walnuts awaited sentence in a little raffia basket with the nutcracker executioner keeping them company. Next to them was a box of French matches and a half-burned candle stuck in the neck of a Coca-Cola bottle, ready for the nights when there were power cuts. A stainless-steel shoehorn had been suffering for an eternity as it teetered on the armrest of a black leatherette chair. A wall clock, stopped at three minutes past one, was fed up with getting the time right only twice a day and silently begged to be wound up.
I’m making an inventory of these superficial details—and I could offer a lot more—to give an idea of the lethargy that gripped the apartment. As I went from room to room, not touching a thing, I thought it expressed my father’s way of being in the world, as Mom and I had known him. Nothing important or revealing surfaced. Another idea came into my head, over the top for sure, but I still want to write it down: “Buried alive.” Feeling quite despondent, I wa
s on the point of leaving, closing the door and forgetting the whole thing. Then, all of a sudden, I remembered the piece of paper the policeman had found on the bedside table, which I interpreted as licence, an invitation even, to snoop. Why had he made a list of four names that were the same but different? Cristòfol, Christophe, Christopher, Christof, and their respective surnames. Why was I the first?
In his bedroom, I opened the drawers of the bedside table and didn’t find anything interesting. Next to the bed was a wardrobe with three doors and a full-length mirror. The first concealed a series of shelves piled with sheets, towels, and blankets. I felt around in them in case he’d hidden anything there (as people tend to do) but only pulled out two lavender sachets that had lost their fragrance. Behind the second door were my father’s clothes. A collection of shirts, pullovers, jackets, and trousers, most of them very old, were hanging there, devoid of all hope. On the floor, looking ill at ease, were several pairs of shoes. A few bare coat hangers, like fleshless collarbones, gave the impression that he’d only taken a couple of changes of clothes. I ran my hand over his clothes as if trying to express solidarity, and, just then, a jacket caught my eye. It was suede, old, with worn elbows. I remembered that Dad often wore it when he visited us. I took it off the hanger to look at it again and smell it, as I used to do when I was a kid but, when I brought it to my nose, something fell to the floor—a bit of paper. I bent over to pick it up and was very surprised to find a poker card, an ace of clubs. I put it in one of the pockets and went to hang the jacket up again. As I was returning it to its place, another card fell out of a different jacket. This time it was the king of hearts. I grabbed five or six items of clothing and gave them a good shake. More cards fell out. I picked them up. They were all aces, kings, queens, and jacks. Some were repeated. Then I had a thought. I took out another jacket and carefully examined the sleeves. The end of the left sleeve had been painstakingly unstitched, and there inside, between cloth and lining, a proud but biddable king of diamonds was exiled.
I was so fascinated by the discovery that I decided, then and there, that I wanted to find my father come what may. I began to rummage systematically through every cupboard, every shelf, and every drawer. (In my place, you’d have done the same, wouldn’t you, Christophers?) I pried into every corner of the kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. Tucked away in a dark corner of the apartment, I found a sort of junk room, some six meters square and full of shelves. A forty-watt lightbulb hung from the ceiling. I tried the switch, but it didn’t work, of course, as the power supply had been cut off. I went to get a candle. In the flickering light, the room looked like an air-raid shelter. I felt like a detective. My father had stored his memories in that space, which was as minuscule and crammed full of things as the cab of a truck. It’s not that he was a meticulous man, or especially nostalgic. It would make more sense to explain this hoard as the result of a nomadic life. You wouldn’t have to be a genius to figure out that the belongings that Gabriel had kept after spending half his life on the move constituted an essential part of his biography.
Making the most of the daylight, I took a number of cardboard boxes into the dining room and opened them one by one. I was so engrossed by what I discovered that the hours slipped by until it got dark. Every time I stumbled across some relevant document, or memory-laden object, I left it out on the table to study in more detail later. Thus, clues slowly emerged with mounting intrigue that seemed calculated on my father’s part. A black folder bearing the emblem of the Spanish consulate in Frankfurt kept all his expired driving licenses, for example, and passports with pages stamped by customs officials of a good many countries in Europe. In one brass box, advertising Cola Cao with little drawings of African children, he’d tucked away about twenty letters that he’d exchanged with Petroli after they both left trucking and no longer saw each other. Underneath them, yellow with age, was a pile of scraps of paper from another sort of correspondence: the erotic tales that he and Bundó had written for each other in the House of Charity when they were kids.
Another folder—this is it, this is it, this is it!—held a pile of documents concerning the four of us. Names, addresses, copies of birth certificates, photos of our mothers and of us, drawings we did when we were small, which he had taken with him as mementos . . . It must be said that this folder was the one most battered by use (and I mention this without any filial vanity). Amazed, I set about leafing through its contents and couldn’t stop. It wasn’t long before the other three names on the policeman’s list appeared before my eyes. Christof, Christophe, Christopher . . . It seemed to be some kind of joke. I went to look for a blank sheet of paper and a pen and jotted down all the details that might make the revelations more plausible. The more I learned, the more the enigma of Gabriel grew.
That evening, as I was going over to my mother’s place by the club Metro, stunned and disturbed because, among other things, I’d discovered that I had three half-brothers scattered across Europe, a memory from my childhood came—or burst—into my head. It was the image of a man—my father—who sometimes, for all his apparent composure, couldn’t stop touching the edge of his left sleeve with his right hand. A swift, mechanical gesture, not natural, a sort of tic.
3
* * *
Imperfect Orphans
So are we orphans then?”
“All four of us are the only sons of an only son. And an only daughter. You could say that the whole time we were unaware of each others’ existence—we were orphaned of brothers, if such a thing is possible.”
“Imperfect orphans.”
“After Cristòfol’s phone call, when I discovered I had three half-brothers, I imagined we’d be united by some sort of birthmark. A secret sign that Dad had tattooed on us in the cradle so we could identify each other, like those abandoned princes in stories. I’ve got one of those marks, a sort of scar on my right shoulder. It looks like the silhouette of a running greyhound with very thin legs. Do you have that by any chance?”
“No.”
“No.”
“Well, I do, but it’s on my left buttock and it’s not a scar but a mark on my skin, a proper birthmark, and it’s not in the shape of a dog. When I was a little kid and Mom was bathing me she said it looked like sails on a boat and the freckles were splashes of water, but I see a bat with outstretched wings.”
“Ah, if we’re talking about marks, I’ve got one but it’s on my chest, like the tail of a comet in orbit around my right nipple.”
“By the way, what presents did he bring you when he came to visit? Once he gave me a toy ukulele.”
“I got a plastic drum kit. The snare was missing so I used an empty detergent box.”
“Lucky you! I was desperate to have a drum kit. But he only brought me one of those really basic pianos with eight notes. I got bored with it right away.”
“I got what I’d call the leftovers. By the time I came into the world, Dad was settled in Barcelona and he wasn’t visiting you all any more. Sometimes, when he came to see Mom and me, he’d look through his things and bring me a present. He gave me a microphone that didn’t work. The batteries had corroded and were stuck inside the casing, but I played with it anyway. When my friends wouldn’t let me play soccer with them because they said I wasn’t good enough, I used to broadcast the matches live, using the mike.”
“Don’t feel too badly done by, Cristòfol. After all, you were with Dad when the rest of us were missing him. Anyway, now that I think about it, those four musical presents must have been from the same move. From four rich brothers.”
“Ah, and another thing: All the kids at school used to brag about their dads. If I had a fight with anyone, his dad was going to come and cut off my head with his saw (carpenter), ram his hoe into my chest (farmer), or rip off my ear with a wrench (mechanic). When they asked me what mine did, first of all I told them I wasn’t allowed to say and then, lowering my voice, I’d tell them the secret: My dad was a spy. He traveled all around Europe in a furniture tru
ck, but that was his cover. The lie gave me kudos.”
“Well, I used to say that my dad pissed off one fine day and Scotland Yard was looking for him, that he was one of the Great Train Robbers, and that one day he’d be back, loaded with jewels. That made me popular too, but Mum used to get mad when I said it because the other parents complained afterward.”
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So are we orphans, then? No, we’re not orphans. Not yet. Anyway, if we claimed we were, we’d be carrying on like spoiled brats, as if we were somehow trying to relive the hardships suffered by our father as a kid while sparing ourselves the feeling of defenselessness he must have endured all those years. Sometimes when the four of us are talking about it, we come to the conclusion that everything that came later—his life on the truck, being continually on the move, and his pathological secrecy when he left the motorways and hid away from the world—is simply a result of his unfortunate childhood. But when he used to recall his youth, Dad wasn’t self-pitying or bitter or holier-than-thou. He accepted it as his lot, and that was that.
Let’s imagine, for example, that fearful, withdrawn little boy who went into the House of Charity in 1945. Just before his fourth birthday. Though he didn’t know it, he still bore the stigma of being a “child of war.” Heaven knows where all those abandoned children have come from, people said. Harlots, single mothers, naive or shameless maids who’d got pregnant . . . Or, worst of all, they might be the spawn of those red separatists who died on the front. The devil’s blood ran in their veins. In the light of which the orphanage wouldn’t have been such a terrible fate.
The nuns managed everyday life in the orphanage, and a couple of lay teachers were employed for the older kids. The little ones like our father grew up in an atmosphere of Catholic piety. It seems that mealtimes, for example, turned into religious instruction classes in which the nuns thickened the gruel with the lives of the saints.
