by Jordi Puntí
His fixation lasted half a lifetime. Years later, when the Sant Adrià Bullfighting Club languished and the neighborhood associations joined up to have a stand at the April Fair in Barberà del Vallès, El Tembleque felt unappreciated and hung up his matador’s cape for the last time. Then, burning with Catalan nationalist fever, he became so enamoured with the country’s ancient tradition of human castles that he joined a group of castellers in the neighborhood, whereupon they promised him that, at the very least, he could have a place among the third-level group.
Thanks to the hours they spent in the DKV, Gabriel and Bundó ended up with doctorates in El Tembleque’s doomed biography. The bull D’Artañán had grown in the retelling to take on the dimensions and power of a beast from Hades. And according to El Tembleque, there were plenty of important people in the bullfighting world who—just imagine!—regularly begged him to leave the fucking moving business and get back into the ruedo like a real man. The two friends learned that these crocodile tears were only shed after a shot of sol y sombra, or two shots when necessary, even if that meant delivering the load an hour late and then having to invent some excuse and put up with Senyor Casellas’ wrath and insults.
El Tembleque could be a pain in the neck, sure, but Gabriel and Bundó preferred him to the rest of the workers.
“There were exceptions,” Dad explained to our mothers, “like Grandpa Cuniller and Tartana, old-timers who’d seen it all, but most of the workers were full of their own importance because they drove a DKV and we didn’t. On the days when Casellas sent us out as roustabouts in their vans, they carried on as if they were the right hand of the big boss. They yelled at us for the slightest mistake and often lectured us like puffed-up generals. Even when the conversation was relaxed and we were talking about women (a subject that, as mere fledglings, Bundó and I gladly joined in with), they’d give us an earful of their tacky Don Juan advice on everything, as heroes of the most amazing sexual exploits. What Tarzans! And if we didn’t show enough admiration, or if they caught us exchanging glances trying not to laugh (because we’d been sending them up outside of working hours), they took it badly and then they made our lives impossible when we were loading and unloading. You know what all that was about? They were boiling over with frustration and they didn’t have that combination of dreamer and Andalusian appeal that El Tembleque had.”
Here’s another example of that contrast. When they were driving around in the van, or stopped at the traffic lights, El Tembleque was the supreme master when it came to tooting the horn, leaning out the window, and flirting with girls in the street. He liked them all and had no inhibitions. His repertoire was imaginative, and he knew how to be saucy without causing any harm. At first the girl would act offended, but she always ended up smiling and sneaking a look at them out of the corner of her eye. Then there were drivers like Brauli or Baltanás who, trying to impress the youngsters Bundó and Gabriel, parroted lines they’d learned ages before from El Tembleque, but, lacking conviction, the words were just stale blather that only revealed their innate coarseness. Then the women scoffed at them or wouldn’t as much as look at them while the two friends cringed with embarrassment.
“They’re all tarts,” the driver would then say and, after a contemplative pause, “except for my wife, and she’s a saint.”
For us, the Christophers, and especially our mothers, El Tembleque is the only La Ibérica employee whose name survives with its qualities intact. Our mothers all agree when they recall the affection with which Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli spoke of the bullfighter trucker. Our father used to praise his absence of malice—“a really good guy”—and Petroli said that his greatest virtue, leaving aside the bulls, was that you always knew where you were with him. Bundó couldn’t resist imitating the spectacle of El Tembleque picking up a box or helping to heft some piece of furniture. Whenever he set about lifting up a load, the gored leg sent out rhythmic spasms that soon had his whole body jiggling like a wind-up toy. Shuddering with the weight he bore in his arms, his face contorted and neck so strained you could see all the muscles and tendons standing out, he looked as if he was going to fly apart any moment, like a marionette that’s suddenly lost the supportive tautness of its strings: one arm here, a leg there, belly on the ground, bits and pieces everywhere. It seems that, even when he’d deposited the box inside the truck, these convulsive tremors took a few more seconds to subside. Years later, as was to be expected, the same fits of trembling came over him when he was up on level three of one of the Sant Adrià human castles: a column with Saint Vitus’ Dance, threatening to bring the whole thing tumbling down.
Sometimes, when he turned up to work with his head befogged by recollections of his bullfighting days, or woozy after a night of too much sol y sombra, El Tembleque used to let Gabriel or Bundó drive the van while he dozed in the front seat. Since they didn’t yet have a license, the two friends celebrated this as if they’d won the lottery and divided up the route, half each. These were always trips within Barcelona and, if El Tembleque was fast asleep (they could tell by the deep rumble of his snores), they’d take a longer route or make a detour when they saw they were getting close to their destination. Sometimes, with the excuse of getting in some driving practice, they’d venture into one of the neighborhoods with higgledy-piggledy streets, like Sants or Sant Andreu, so they could practise maneuvering in tight angles. The only hitch with this was when they got to the house where the move was happening: Fast asleep, El Tembleque wouldn’t wake up, despite the most brutal tactics. They could torture him by tickling, or shouting in his ear that their cargo was on fire in the back of the truck, or telling him that a procession of naked majorettes was coming down the street, without him showing the slightest sign of emerging from his slumbers. Needless to say, he always woke up when Gabriel and Bundó had already dealt with more than half the load.
And now that we have introduced El Tembleque, we need to go back to the day when, under his patronage, Gabriel and Bundó kept their first box. (We could also say “stole,” but that has an accusatory ring that we don’t like and that doesn’t suit our purposes; or “side-tracked,” which was Gabriel’s favorite word; or “mislaid,” which was how the matter appeared officially in the reports for Senyor Casellas). In any case, the very first, half-involuntary theft never appeared in the notebook in which our father recorded all the loot from the moves, but it did inaugurate a tradition that would bring them moments of great happiness.
As happens with most tribal rituals, the initiation in pillage was supervised by a champion, none other than El Tembleque. Let us locate ourselves. The departure point of that job was Madrid. An out-of-favor bigwig from the Banco Zaragozano had been transferred to the branch office in Barcelona. Although he’d been sent into exile, his destination was an apartment in Via Laietana, high up, ostentatious and boasting more rooms than the Prado Museum. The previous day, the three workers had loaded up the truck in the capital and, at nightfall after a strength-gathering dinner in a Zaragoza roadhouse, they bought some adoquines, the large cobblestone-shaped toffees they make in Catalayud, and set off again. El Tembleque drove all night without stopping while Bundó and Gabriel slept beside him. In order to stay awake, he listened to the radio, tried to nibble the toffees, and smoked his Tres Carabelas cigars with the window half open. All at once. By the time they got to the top of the hill at El Bruc, the lines on the road were going blurry on him so he stopped the truck and asked the two friends to take over for a while. He’d have a nap and take the wheel again before they got to the hill at l’Ordal. They couldn’t wake him up. Gabriel and Bundó took turns at driving, commending themselves to God and praying that the Guardia Civil wouldn’t appear to stop them. They went through l’Ordal, down to Martorell, entered Barcelona, and stopped the truck in front of the building in Via Laietana at about ten o’clock in the morning. El Tembleque hadn’t as much as twitched the whole trip (except in Gran Via, as they passed the Las Arenas bullring, when his slumbers had been disturbed for
about thirty seconds by a few bovine snuffles), and, if it wasn’t for his sunken chest rising and falling as he breathed, they would have sworn he was dead.
El Tembleque vegetated for a couple more hours and woke up when most of the work was done. The building had a service elevator at the foot of the stairs, and Bundó and Gabriel had made good progress with the more hulking bits of furniture and objects. In keeping with the reversible order of the move—the last thing loaded is the first to be unloaded—by the time El Tembleque joined them they’d already started to remove the cardboard boxes piled at the back of the trailer, all of them the same. It was clear that El Tembleque had woken up because, while the two of them were mechanically picking up the boxes like a couple of somnambulists, the man wouldn’t shut up. Each time they passed on a box in the chain he’d come out with some random comment.
“These boxes smell of money.” He sniffed. “Don’t you notice it?”
“Lovely apartment, eh? You can see that these folks have got a lot of dough.”
“Come on, boy, shake a leg. The reward’s the rest of the day in bed.”
“Want a toffee, Bundó? We’ve still got some in the cab.”
“They’re hard but good for strengthening the jaws, these damn toffees.”
“Soy minero, y me quito las penas . . .” Now the singing miner, he’s drowning his sorrows in wine, beer, and rum.
“Well, I’m telling you these boxes smell like money. Get a whiff, get a whiff.”
Gabriel took the last box from El Tembleque’s unsteady hands. The trailer now only contained ropes, pulleys, and a few blankets they’d used to wrap up lamps and other fragile objects.
“See you later, alligator . . . In a while, crocodile.”
Then they went up to the apartment to get the delivery note signed. One of Senyor Casellas’s clerks was in charge of collecting the payment later. They found the banker’s wife in one of the rooms counting boxes.
“I count fifty-two boxes,” she said.
According to the delivery note, they’d been entrusted with fifty-three boxes in Madrid.
“That’s impossible, madam. You must have lost count . . .” El Tembleque replied. The two young men, El Tembleque, and the lady of the house started counting all over again. They checked all the boxes scattered in disorderly piles throughout the residence, each one starting at a different point. The numbers mingled in the air as if at a fish auction.
“I make it fifty-four,” said Bundó. “One more than there are supposed to be.”
“Come on! I get fifty-three boxes and that’s the right number.”
“Well, I get fifty-two,” Gabriel weighed in. El Tembleque shot him a killer look.
“And . . . fifty-three. You’re right. Fifty-three. They’re all there,” the lady said and duly signed the delivery note.
Down in the street again, before heading back to the La Ibérica warehouse, they finished the job of picking up the ropes and folding the blankets.
“Fucking hell! The missing box,” Bundó shouted, after picking up a blanket strategically positioned in one corner.
“I’ll take it up . . .” Gabriel offered.
“No, you won’t, sweetheart,” El Tembleque interrupted him. “Isn’t the delivery note nice and signed? Well, there’s no missing box here. These people are rolling in dough. They’re from the Banco Zaragozano.”
The next morning, as soon as he arrived at La Ibérica, El Tembleque called the two friends and presented them with a pair of matching bookends, one each, reproductions in polychrome wood of the famous Egyptian Seated Scribe. He informed them that, as his share of the box, he’d only kept an illustrated dictionary and the three almanacs from 1956, 1957, and 1958.
“Not much there. For my little girl. They’ll be useful for her at school and all that.”
Gabriel and Bundó gave the bookends to the nuns at the home. For some days a sense of guilt gnawed at their stomachs, a legacy of their upbringing at the orphanage. After a while, though, when they were traveling around Europe and boxes and packets got sidetracked, were left lying in the truck, mislaid, or never loaded, this primordial guilt underwent a decisive shift. Excuses, justifications, and evasiveness had become their manifesto, and it only got better and better. If ever they thought about that original day, Bundó and Gabriel felt an ingenuous, almost cloying tenderness, just like memories of one’s first girlfriend.
Though it may seem that the opposite is true, we’re making progress with the life of our father. Things are getting complicated. The passage gets dark and narrow, there are doors with stuck hinges or a lock rusty from disuse, and when we try to open them they won’t cooperate. If we spy a glimmer of light escaping under the door, a narrative thread too faint to follow up, we’re assailed by a mixture of discouragement and doubt. Well, it’s not easy to make our memories fit together, we say, trying to encourage each other. Here you have the Christophers—four sons of four sceptical mothers and only one escape-artist father—who are trying to reconstruct a common past. We’ve been striving to speak in a single voice for some time now, but we’ve decided that each one of us will eventually have his own chapter to let it all out. His turn for the solo. Meanwhile, we’re all wondering: Are we getting anywhere? In moments of euphoria, when dates tie up, events dovetail, and witnesses are in agreement, we can discern some secret but we don’t know what it is. It could very well be that we’re wrong and it doesn’t even exist, this secret or whatever it might be.
Things are getting complicated, as we say, because Gabriel and Bundó are finally on the verge of settling into the age without a name, and everyone knows that nothing in life is final.
“We’re about to change into third gear,” says Christof smugly, but we other three remind him of the promise not to overdo the motorway and driving school metaphors.
Now we’re flipping through the pages of the calendar at vertiginous speed, as if they’ve been caught by a blustery autumn wind, and we come to rest on a day in October 1958. We’re at Llars Mundet. Evening. Gabriel and Bundó have been together at La Ibérica for about a year now and have just got back from work after a long day’s labors. Today they’ve done a short but god-awful move, the kind that really does you in, from the Sant Gervasi neighborhood to a dump in the old city center. Narrow streets, obdurate stairways, tiny rooms. A widow and her good-for-nothing son can’t make ends meet. Tears. And tomorrow, the same damn thing. The two friends have a quick wash and a liberal squirt of cologne to cover up the acrid stink of sweat. They’re sitting on the beds in their shared room waiting for dinnertime. They’re summoned to Sister Elvira’s office. Off they go. Bundó’s stomach is roaring loudly. They knock at the door, and from inside the energetic voice of the Mother Superior tells them to come in.
Another door opens for us.
The nun looked up and observed Gabriel and Bundó’s entrance with a pang of tenderness. For more than ten years she’d watched these two boys growing up as if they were her own children. She’d fed them when they were small, seen them take their first communion, scolded them, and punished them for their own good. Now, as she contemplated the two of them, she could glimpse both the sheltered years of the House of Charity and the jungle-like future, full of the temptations they were going to find when they went out into the world. Her eyes glistened—it always happened when she had to deal with this situation—and, to take heart, she reminded herself that the two lads were working at her brother’s trucking company. One way or another, everything was still in the family.
“I’ve asked you to come,” she said, “because I have to give you two bits of news. One good and one bad. Which do you want first?”
“The bad!” Bundó declared, but he really wanted to hear the good news first.
“The good,” Gabriel answered in chorus with Bundó although he really preferred to have the bad news first.
Before speaking, the nun paused for effect. “You’ve grown up,” she observed, adopting a solemn tone. “Time flies. You’re seventeen ye
ars old now. Almost men. We’ve spoken with your teachers at the school and have decided that it’s time for you to make your own way. Thanks be to God, you’re now working and earning a wage, is that not so? And now you will have to learn how to manage your own money. There are other more needy children who require our attention. Bundó, Gabriel”—and here she paused—“at the end of the month you’ll have to leave the home. That’s the bad news.”
Their faces began to light up but they quickly masked it. So leaving, getting away, getting the hell away from the home—at last, at last!—was the bad news.
In a bid to buy time, Bundó said, “You’re right, Sister. My bed’s got too short and my feet stick out over the end.”
“And the good news?” Gabriel inquired.
We’ll spare ourselves the nun’s speech, which took the form of a sermon crammed with Mothers of God, prayers, and declarations of gratitude winging heavenward. And, indeed, the good news was very good. Thanks to their being orphans and, in particular, thanks to Senyor Casellas, who had a childhood friend in military headquarters—and this was big-time string-pulling—the two friends would be exempt from military service. At first, the good news impressed them less than the supposedly bad news—because they’d always seen military service as their ticket out of the home—but it took less than a minute for it all to fall into place. The shiny vision beyond the prison walls beckoned them, brighter than they’d ever imagined. They were unable to stifle a shout of freedom and couldn’t stop laughing. In the midst of the frenzy, Bundó rushed over to the nun and planted kisses on both her cheeks. The nun gave him a friendly shove—get away with you!—and blushed. Gabriel was tempted to imitate his friend but, at the last minute, merely opted for doing something awkward with his arms and making an affectionate bow in her direction (and one can’t discard the possibility that he’d suddenly remembered the titillating tale starring Sister Mercedes).
