Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  In the beginning Gabriel complained that Bundó’s stories were too descriptive and not very exciting. He didn’t give a damn whether the blond, blue-eyed, very white-skinned girl had a missal, a hankie with her initials embroidered on it, and a framed picture of her dead parents all set out on a crocheted doily on her bedside table. He was dying to know what was going on under the sheets of that bed. When it was Gabriel’s turn, the first story he wrote for Bundó was very long, jumbled, overloaded in detail but short on flesh, and the hero was a guy called Serafín. Bundó read it locked in the bathroom, trembling with an unfamiliar kind of excitement. The sexual powers rather crudely attributed to him in the text turned him on immediately, but, even so, Bundó didn’t recognize himself. It might have been because one of the teachers at the House of Charity was also called Serafín, which made it hard for him to identify with the character. The next morning he asked his scribe to call the hero Bundó in the future, just the surname would do. Gabriel complied, and Bundó felt he was so well portrayed and so well shielded by that surname that he eliminated Serafí from his life thereafter (although the nuns, of course, called him Serafín and, in the odd case of misplaced maternal instinct, the diminutive Serafinín).

  After four or five attempts, the stories began to make progress. They really got into it. Though they always spoke Catalan together, they wrote in Spanish because they thought it was a more grown-up, more perverse language. They exchanged them furtively, and the risk of being discovered, even by the other kids in the orphanage, invested the whole thing with a forbidden air of mortal sin—as the priest who taught them religion called it—which made them feel more depraved, more like men. Thus transformed, in the isolation of the bathrooms or in bed, inside a tent improvised with a sheet, it was easier for them to get inside the hero’s character.

  A few minutes later, after drinking the amazing potion he’d concocted all by himself in the chemistry class, pulling a fast one on the teacher Don Marcelino, Bundó looked in the bathroom mirror and confirmed that his reflection wasn’t there. He’d done it! He was invisible, and his plan was going to work! He couldn’t see it, but he could feel that his dick was getting hard just at the thought of the pleasures in store for him. [ . . . ] Passing through the revolving door and now inside the Hotel Ritz, it was very easy for him to follow the beautiful girl from Siam, the daughter of a very rich Rajah, to her room. He was very impatient, so he tried touching her up in the elevator, feeling her big round boobs through her clothes, and she was smiling because he was tickling her and, thinking she was alone because Bundó was invisible, as you know, she stuck her finger up under her skirt. [ . . . ] Everything was looking good for Bundó, but when he went into the room with her, sticking close to her body so as not to arouse suspicion, he discovered that the Rajah’s daughter’s mother and sister, who was even more beautiful and pervy than she was, were inside waiting for her, both of them naked after having a bath together and good and ready for the fun and games they say Orientals like so much. Bundó, still invisible to human eyes, moved over to the cute and randy little bum of the mother and lovingly groped it . . .

  Well, that’s just a taste of it. At the end of the story, Bundó’s potion wears off and the three Asian beauties discover him, but they’re so enraptured that they choose not to betray him and to keep him as their private stud for ever and ever. For Bundó, this was one of Gabriel’s more successful stories.

  Sometimes, catching him in class with a dreamy expression, the teacher would yell, “Bundó, you’ve got your head in the clouds,” trying to shake him from his reverie.

  “Sorry, sir,” he’d answer at once, trying to look awake but thinking to himself, “No, I’m not in the clouds, sir. I’m in a palace in Siam and I’m never going to leave it.”

  Gabriel was shyer and more prone to feelings of guilt than Bundó. Sometimes, when he was well into it, jerking off, holding a wad of paper in his left hand as his right hand labored up and down, the phantom of Sister Mercedes appeared. She was the youngest nun and she berated him with a pained expression on her face, serious but not angry. He tried to close his eyes to make her go away but, when he finally came, those precious seconds of pleasure were cut short by a wave of guilt. One particularly difficult day, Gabriel confided in Bundó, who promised to sort out the problem. The next day, at review time, sitting in the House of Charity library, he wrote a special story. The climax is as follows:

  Sister Mercedes, dressed in her black habit, heard some telltale moans coming from the bathroom. She went inside and opened all the cubicle doors with her master key, one by one, and, there, behind the last door, was Gabriel jerking off. He had his eyes closed and, all of a sudden, almost at the greatest moment of pleasure, he opened them and saw Sister Mercedes standing there in front of him. He got a terrible shock, but then she went “Sssshh,” to indicate they shouldn’t make any noise. Gabriel’s only response was to hold out his arms and carefully lift up her black habit. Underneath it he discovered a suspender belt and some little pink panties like the Paralelo cabaret artists wear and, a bit higher up, some bare titties that were the most incredible ones he’d ever seen in his whole life. Sister Mercedes took him by the hand and led him to her room, where she revealed to him her best-kept secret: She led a double life, and at night-time she was on the game in Calle Conde del Asalto . . .

  An astounded Gabriel read the story that night and, as the sequence of lewd acts unfolded before his eyes, he got more and more excited and more and more terrified about what might happen if the nuns discovered him. The next day at lunchtime he went up behind Bundó and grabbed him by the neck.

  “Have you gone mad, or what?” he whispered in his ear. His friend smiled smugly. “I’m going to burn your story. I’m going to do it this afternoon, as soon as I can.”

  But night fell and Gabriel, still tormented and very jittery, locked himself in the bathroom again and reread the story. He didn’t burn it after all. Proof of that is the fact that we can still read it. How many times, consumed by feelings of criminality and guilt, would the adolescent have given a last-minute reprieve to those two pages, the match already burning in his hand? One puff. The flame goes out. Relief.

  In the end, Gabriel kept the story throughout his years at the House of Charity. It was his special treasure, the crown jewel of his collection. Since she was still young, Sister Mercedes was fortunately assigned to different tasks for the congregation and didn’t mix much with the orphanage children. Fortunately, we say, because every time he had to talk to her, Gabriel started gabbling and went as red as a tomato. She noticed and tried to help the terribly timid boy, showing affection with gentle caresses, but the cure was worse than the disease. There was a time when Gabriel turned to the story so often that he was convinced that the nun was his partner in crime and that the two of them had secretly fallen in love. When he learned about the effects these quixotic fantasies were having upon his friend, Bundó brought him down to earth by writing new stories that were set in places a long way from the orphanage, in much less salubrious surroundings: in the shantytown of Somorrostro, in the Sant Sebastià public baths, or in a Gypsy shack at the foot of Montjuïc.

  We calculate that the pornographic chapter of their friendship lasted almost a year and a half. Each one wrote about forty stories, although, by the end, many of the characters cropped up again, and plots were rehashed. The pages were showing the wear and tear of use and abuse. However crazy it may seem, both Gabriel and Bundó had decided that the best way to camouflage their stories was to tuck them into their Religious Instruction notebooks. Accordingly, the erotic tales always bore titles that wouldn’t arouse the suspicions of any nun who might discover them, for example “Flowers of the Virgin of May,” “The Calvary of Father Salustio,” or “The Mystery of the Nails of Christ.”

  When they began to work with the moving company, life in the outside world slowly replaced words and fantasy with the much more prosaic reality of ravenous sex. Nonetheless, we Christophers are convinced
that their erotic library colored their relations with flesh-and-blood women. In any case, as they were rattling around Europe in the truck years later, the tricks of memory made them relive more than once that intimate bond between religion and sex, a mutual transaction, as if they were two sides of the same coin. Like most truckers, Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli had decorated the inside of the cabs with calendars of naked pinups. They were calendars from 1967, 1968, and 1969, a New Year gift from service stations in Germany and France, with a gallery of fecund Valkyries and coy sex-kittens posing on Pirelli tires or draped over the shining hood of a car that was always red. The three friends had seen them so often that they were at home with the presence of their paper harem. Homeward bound and approaching the border post at La Jonquera, however, they had to turn the calendars around and display the pictures they’d stuck on the back to disguise them. Devout scenes featuring His Holiness Paul VI or the Virgin of Montserrat then guided them along the straight-and-narrow of the badly cambered roads of Franco’s Spain.

  If we’re going to make progress, we Christophers now need to return to Carrer Nàpols. The first time we four brothers met in Barcelona, incredulous, suspicious, and still dumbfounded by the revelations, Cristòfol showed us our father’s mezzanine apartment.

  It was one Saturday in May, a sunny spring day, and the three of us from the other side of the Pyrenees thought it was a gift from the gods. We’d arranged to meet in a hotel restaurant in the center of town where Cristòfol had reserved rooms for us. We did the introductions and had lunch together. The first few hours were cordial, a sort of testing of the waters, but all four of us were too stiff and wary, and then there was the awkwardness about language, so we didn’t quite manage to break the ice over lunch. The only meeting point was our father, but we talked about him as if he were a stranger to us (and he was), a capricious host who’d engineered a surprise get-together, and now we had to find out why. Midafternoon we walked through the Ribera neighborhood, stopped at the El Born market—the building now under lock and key—in honor of our father’s first cries and, crossing Ciutadella Park, made our way to Carrer Nàpols.

  We were silent and solemn as we went up the dark stairway leading to the mezzanine floor—as if someone had died and we had to go to the wake—and as soon as we entered Gabriel Delacruz Expósito’s apartment (as the mailbox in the entrance failed to say) we began to recover our shared past. There was nothing mystical about this. It’s just that the objects that he’d kept, set out by Cristòfol on the table, triggered memories, and the distances that separated us were whittled away. Four boys reliving anecdotes, obsessions, words, disappointments, and emotions. After three hours it was as if we’d known each other all our lives. Each one of us seized upon coincidences in the happy certainty that any mention was enough for the other three to endorse them unanimously. The game got us laughing. Since there was no light in the apartment, when it got dark we went off to find a café so that we could get on with our forensic examination. One thing led to another. At three in the morning a sleepy waiter kicked us out of the hotel bar.

  After that first joint visit to the apartment in Carrer Nàpols, we agreed that the four of us would pay our father’s overdue rent. A first step. This is how the apartment became a sort of social hub, the headquarters for our inquiries. Rita, who still refuses to set foot in the place, mocks us, saying that soon we’re going to turn it into the Christophers Club, “a museum with a guard, dusty display cases, and red ropes blocking entry to the conjugal bedrooms.”

  This is slightly over the top. We’re not father worshippers, not us. You could even say that if we’ve ganged up to find him it’s got more to do with satisfying our curiosity than concern for him. Right now, if we set our minds to it, we could reel off a whole catalogue of shared grudges just as effortlessly as we’re weaving together our childhood memories. And, needless to say, all of us, each one of his own accord and without discussing it, have more than once been tempted to throw in the towel. It would be very easy right now to pretend that Gabriel no longer exists. We’ve had many years of training for that.

  “He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land . . .” Chris intones as if capturing our thoughts.

  What is it that impels us to look for him, then? We might say it’s the urge to complete an impossible family portrait of our father. During that first visit when we all went together to the apartment, we were entranced by the clues that our meticulous examination of Gabriel’s belongings threw up; they proved impossible to ignore. One parcel contained ten brand-new packs of cards, all wrapped up in cellophane. Three carefully piled boxes held a jumble of improbable objects, painstakingly stowed away so as to make the best use of the space: a tortoiseshell comb, a ceramic figure representing Actaeon and his hounds, a teakwood paperweight, the shell of a tortoise, a radio-cassette player, a tape of María Dolores Pradera and another one of Xavier Cugat’s orchestra, a foldout postcard book with pictures of London, a toy camera, some Swiss nail clippers, a collection of casino chips from Monte Carlo for playing poker . . .

  The only link that could be established between all these knickknacks was, of course, our father’s peripatetic existence. For some years—and we’re jumping ahead now—Bundó, Gabriel, and Petroli retained some souvenir from every move they did. A box, a bag, a suitcase went astray by accident, and they shared it out like good brothers. They knew it was an offence but had made the excuse that it was social justice, portraying it as a well-deserved tip after so many hours of nonstop toil in conditions close to slavery. Anyway, who hasn’t lost a box during a move? It’s a fact of life.

  Gabriel had confessed these thefts to our mothers, with the nonchalance of a Robin Hood, and even made us beneficiaries. Thanks to one of Cristòfol’s finds, we were better able to follow the course of those years. In a shoebox, nestling among restaurant cards, city maps, and road atlases, was a black oilcloth notebook. It had a clandestine look about it and was somewhat battered by use. In it Gabriel had noted down the contents of each of the cases, boxes, and trunks they’d taken as booty from their moving jobs. Since he was a diligent person, there was nothing missing in the notebook: the route, date, and an itemization of everything that had been plundered, which they divvied up like proper pirates.

  This highway robbers’ existence, if you’ll permit us the expression, afforded something close to an idyllic lifestyle for Gabriel and Bundó. It was idyllic because it compensated both of them for the instability of their early adolescence, while establishing them in a sort of itinerant paradise. Before talking about that, however, we have to get through a period of apprenticeship of hellish proportions.

  It was the beginning of 1958, and Bundó and Gabriel were sixteen. The orphanage had moved to an establishment known as Llars Mundet, as had been planned for some time, and the change was very unsettling. The new institution, located high up in Vall d’Hebrón, was a mammoth construction, built a long way from everything, a whole city in itself that obliged them to turn their backs on Barcelona. Within four weeks of the opening of the new building, they were longing for the labyrinthine passageways of the House of Charity. Now, from a distance, they were tormented by the conviction they were missing out on a world contained in the noisy vice-ridden maze of streets beyond the orphanage. So, what on earth were they doing up there, in that mountainous semiwilderness? A few pensioners from a nearby old people’s home wandered around filling their lungs with fresh air, and the younger kids had more space for playing outside, but what about these two? “This is the Wild West,” they said and frittered away their time trapping lizards, improving their aim by throwing stones at an old tin, or plotting heroic escapes. Their indolence horrified the nuns, who wasted no time in finding a remedy. Since the boys were not especially brilliant students and, more importantly, because there was no family to take them in, the Mother Superior decided that they were old enough to leave their studies and get a job.

  Gabriel wrote Spanish without too many spelling errors so he went off
to be apprenticed to a typesetter in the House of Charity printing press. It didn’t take him long to realize he didn’t like the job. His main task was removing the residue of dry ink from the pieces of lead type that had gone through the printer. Sometimes they told him to stow the wooden pieces they used for titles in their correct boxes. At first he found it entertaining enough, not unlike doing a jigsaw puzzle—F with the Fs, B with the Bs . . . but it wasn’t very exciting, and the supervisor often shouted at him to hurry up. “Move it, boy!” Only occasionally, as a consolation prize, did they let him compose half a column of news or a few ads paid for by the word, but, since the dingy place was airless and he was weak and malnourished, the upside-down letters made his head spin and brought on attacks of queasiness. He was locked up in the printers twelve hours a day, from seven to seven and, in addition, he had to work Saturdays and Sundays twice a month because the Monday newspaper Hoja del Lunes was printed in the House of Charity. After work he would have liked to amuse himself for a while in his old neighborhood and, now that they gave him a bit more freedom, to venture on to the Rambla, or beyond Plaça de la Universitat into Carrer Aribau. But he had to run to get the tram and bus, crossing the whole of Barcelona to get to Llars Mundet. The nuns were very strict about punctuality and, if he got back late, they wouldn’t give him dinner. To add insult to injury, he got a good reprimand as well.

  One evening, as the tram climbed Carrer Dos de Maig and the sooty façades were lit up by the flashes of electrical sparks, he noticed that two young girls were pointing at him and laughing. He instinctively looked at his reflection in the window and didn’t recognize himself in the face staring back at him. There was an inky moustache under the nose, and in the masked features he saw a dejected, shabby man. All of a sudden he saw himself twenty years later, doing the same commute, and this made him unhappier still. “This must be what it’s like to grow up,” he resignedly told himself. A series of flashes from the overhead wires shook him from his reverie, and the reflection vanished from the window.