Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  Outside in the street, Petroli read out some graffiti painted on the façade of the house: “Enragez-vous! What the hell does that mean?” As if in response, the distant buzz of a beehive thrummed down the street. A jittery concierge was waiting for them at the entrance. He received them by throwing the doors wide open. Although they’d been duly instructed, he informed them once again that the owners wouldn’t be arriving until Monday and they expected to find everything unloaded and deposited in the correct rooms, according to the floor plan he was giving them. Gabriel assented, saying he calculated that they could get the unloading done in five hours at the most, and then they’d head homeward. They wanted to be back in Barcelona on Saturday evening. That was the official line. The three friends had other plans, in fact. They’d agreed that if they finished too late and too tired, they’d sleep in the apartment. Who would turn down a night in Paris? They’d crash on the mattresses (no one needed to know), and the next day they’d go on to Clermont-Ferrand. Thanks to his taste for emigrants’ social centers, Petroli had met some people from Extremadura who’d been living in Clermont-Ferrand for fifteen years. Now terribly homesick, about to retire, and with their two children employed and off their hands, the couple had decided to return to Spain. They’d bought a little house in Sant Vicenç dels Horts. Since they wanted to take back the treasured furniture they’d been accumulating over the years, almost as a testimony to their efforts, Petroli had offered to do the move at cost price (without including it in La Ibérica’s books).

  Although the furniture only had to be taken up to the second floor, the three men were delighted to find that the building had a service elevator. After a long journey, the body was grateful for a little physical exercise, for a loosening-up of the muscles, but after that initial impulse, an elevator was essential. The bells of Saint-Médard church were striking five when they opened the trailer doors. If they wanted to finish before dark, they’d better hurry. The last stroke intensified the silence. They could only hear the muffled click-clack of billiard balls in a café on the other side of the road. There was no need to say it, but all three of them felt that, in their indifference to the world, those billiards players were their allies.

  While Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli uncoiled ropes and shook out blankets, closely monitored by the concierge, a few streets away Mireille, Justine, and their comrades had stopped on a corner and were swigging from a communal bottle of wine to soothe their throats. It may not have been a very scientific remedy, but you’ve got to look after your voice. They’d been at it for hours, bawling and screaming revolutionary slogans—and at times it even seemed like an amusing competition to see who could be the most original—and they still had hours of combat ahead of them. Today was going to be a great day. In fact, it was a great day already. In the morning they’d helped to paint banners and hang them all over the neighborhood and then, seeing that the police were taking up strategic positions, they’d set about digging up cobblestones. Someone even assured them that they’d find a beach underneath. Now they were on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rue Soufflot and the clamor brought them out in goose pimples. Justine climbed onto the shoulders of one of the boys and said that the demo stretched as far as the eye could see, yes, it went on forever. The tide of people swept them along. One minute they were all arm in arm, spanning the street from one side to the other, and the next they let go and were leaping all over the place for a few meters, shouting in unison, “Amnesty! Amnesty! Amnesty!” Demonstrators bellowing through megaphones repeated that the peaceful occupation of the Latin Quarter had been accomplished.

  At seven that afternoon, two hours later, Mireille’s group once again reached the nerve center of the revolt, Place de la Sorbonne. It was expected that the student leaders would be speaking. They were going to demand that the government release the young detainees from prison. By then, the La Ibérica trio had emptied half the trailer. All the cardboard boxes—except for one they’d randomly separated, as if absentmindedly—were up in the apartment, together with the lightest and most fragile objects. What remained now were a few cumbersome pieces of furniture, spring mattresses, wardrobes, armchairs, appliances . . . Earlier, however, they’d very carefully transported upstairs the mirror that was going to grace the dining room. And what a mirror that was! It was two meters wide, set in a frame of gilded mouldings, and it weighed a ton. They removed the blankets in which it was wrapped so they could get a better grip on it and eased it out of the truck. Once it was in the street, the mirror flashed with a series of lurching images of the overcast sky of that May evening, of closed windows, old houses, and the paved street. Then, in the distance, a commotion of cars, sirens, and heavy boots shattered the calm. Intrigued, the three workers stopped to listen. Gabriel peered into the mirror and saw movement reflected in its depths. At the end of the street, coming along Rue Tournefort, a group of policemen, now trotting, was heading for the university. The line of men was endless and so highly protected with helmets and shields that they looked like an army of samurai warriors.

  “Vite, vite, vite!” The desperate concierge nagged them from inside the building. The three friends felt like thieves about to be caught red-handed. The mirror tilted slightly and the battleground scene vanished. As they climbed the stairs bearing the enormous weight—it didn’t fit in the service elevator—they heard a series of shots muted by distance.

  The first tear gas bomb fell about a hundred meters away from the position taken up by Mireille, Justine, and their group in Boulevard Saint-Michel. Held aloft by one youth, a placard bearing a portrait of Ho Chi Minh took the impact. News came from the corner of Rues Bonaparte and Saint-Sulpice that the police were charging. They weren’t expecting such a direct attack. Shortly afterward, another tear gas bomb was launched from Rue des Écoles. It spiraled down, from very high up, in a smoking orbit and people started pushing and shoving to get out of its range. They said that if you were unlucky enough you could get your face burned. Some of the young people caught in the thick of the smoke tried to disperse. Most of them covered their mouths with scarves and threw stones at the police, although they were only guessing at where les vaches had positioned themselves. In the midst of all the uproar, Mireille was scared for the first time, really scared. She could hear the booming voices of uniformed men on the other side of the street, and her legs felt wobbly. In order to take her mind off it, she forced herself to review the group’s instructions. In her cell they’d decided that, come what may, they had to stay in the street. If they were separated by the struggle, they’d regroup at ten that night in front of a bistro they all knew in Rue Danton. They were not to return to the apartment in the Place de la Contrescarpe. The police had stationed their men everywhere, some of them in civvies, and might discover them. In the last few hours they’d become more brutal in their methods of detention and weren’t fooling around, the bastards.

  The whistling of another tear gas bomb scattered them once more. In the ensuing tumult the two girls lost sight of their comrades. The screaming was deafening, and Mireille couldn’t understand what Justine was saying. Holding hands, they ran toward Rue Cujas but were suddenly caught up in an avalanche of people running from the opposite direction and were forced to separate. Justine, with more experience of demonstrations, turned tail and let herself be swept ahead by the human tide. Mireille struggled to follow a group of boys who were still moving against the tide and, like them, took refuge in the entrance to a building. Someone closed the door behind them. They crossed an inner courtyard and moved along a filthy passageway slippery with food scraps. She almost stepped on a rat that was hiding behind a bucket (and, full of revulsion, she had time to think, “Like me!”). At the end of the fetid tunnel, a girl opened another door a chink and peered out. All clear. Once in the street, they discovered that they were at one end of Rue Touiller. She breathed deeply, but no sooner had she filled her lungs than she again heard the sinister rumble of a police charge. “They’re trying to encircle us!” someone s
houted. Without knowing where she drew the strength from, Mireille ran across Rue Soufflot—glimpsing out of the corner of her eye the hulking Pantheon to her left, looming up like the back of a seated giant—and entered the first alley she found. She knew this territory and felt safer in its labyrinth. She was coming across fewer and fewer fleeing students. She thought about going back to the apartment, but a sense of loyalty pulsed through her and she started heading in the opposite direction. She turned into a street where time seemed to have stopped. She was tired and slackened her pace but was soon startled by a boy coming up behind her, yelling that she had to keep running. Les vaches were after them and would soon be at the corner. She started to run again, helter-skelter down Rue Lhomond and, before turning the corner, looked behind her. “Never look back,” her friends had warned, but she couldn’t help it. At the far end of the street a gendarme was yelling at her to stop and another was waving his truncheon. She ignored them and speeded up, zigzagging into Rue d’Ulm. The steps of the policeman echoed behind her. She turned into Rue de l’Estrapade, skidding, on the point of falling, her heart in her mouth, her brain deprived of oxygen. Dazed, as if she’d entered another dimension, she saw the La Ibérica truck parked just in front of her.

  Gabriel and Petroli had just unloaded a two-door wardrobe. Half a minute earlier, two students had dodged them and vanished down the street. Mireille stopped, not knowing what to do. She was panting heavily. Her terrified eyes fixed on Gabriel’s. She wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out. She looked back again for an instant. Then he understood, opened the wardrobe doors and, with a theatrical gesture befitting a Milière comedy, ushered her in. Mireille forced a heroine’s smile and leaped into the hideaway. Petroli was closing the doors as the silhouette of a gendarme shot around the corner.

  With this fantastic trick, Christophers, Mireille entered Gabriel’s world.

  They were about to pick up the wardrobe—there was no time to be wasted—when the gendarme stopped in front of them. Pouring with sweat, his face twitching with rage, truncheon in hand, he asked where the girl had gone. Gabriel and Petroli shrugged, pretending they didn’t understand, and this riled the cop even more. He repeated his question, shouting this time, giving the wardrobe a good thump with his truncheon (and, inside, Mireille shrank into the corner that seemed furthest away). Bundó now joined the group. He didn’t really know what was going on, but he detested French police, more for being French than cops. He pointed at the wardrobe and said, “Yeah, right, man, bash it, why don’t you! We’ve got people inside there, you reckon.”

  The gendarme looked him over with an expression of disdain. Gabriel and Petroli were petrified. Without deigning to answer, the gendarme whacked the wardrobe a few more times, not so hard now but as if marking the beat of his ruminations. Then, with perfect timing, the concierge appeared from behind the wardrobe and in conciliatory, very persuasive French, told the gendarme that the girl had run down the street and turned left.

  “She was very tired. You’ll catch her easily!” he drove his point home when the gendarme was already racing off. Then he aimed a killer look at the truckers and, clapping his hands, repeated his favorite refrain: “Vite, vite, vite!”

  Soon they were enveloped in the same thick calm as before. Once again they could hear the chatter of billiard balls coming from the café on the other side of the street and the jolly click-clack of a cannon shot.

  Number 126. Barcelona-Paris.

  May 11, 1968.

  We got the box of sundries. There’s one every move. It’s always the last one the owners seal up. It contains all the odds and ends scattered around the house and things overlooked until the last minute. It tends to be knickknacks, but today it’s not bad. Petroli gets a box of cigars and says he’ll give the gold bands to El Tembleque, who collects them; he also gets a glass display case with six tropical butterflies, a book called A Healthy Sex Life, and a chipped ceramic statuette of dogs attacking a hunter. Bundó’s taken a mat that says “Welcome” for the entrance to his apartment in Via Favència, a collection of university field hockey pennants—he’ll hang them in his room and say he’s well educated—and some sunglasses like the ones José Luis Barcelona wears when he’s hosting that variety show of his on TV. Gabriel gets a new teddy bear and a battery-operated cassette player. It comes with tapes of María Dolores Pradera, Pau Casals, and Xavier Cugat and his orchestra. We also broke open a Domund Missions money box in the form of a black boy’s head and we’ll spend the fifty pesetas inside on a bottle of French brandy.

  How many times has my mother told me about the episode of the wardrobe? She closes her eyes, I guess to relive the darkness inside it, and now she’s recalling it once more for you, Christophers.

  It turned out that the three La Ibérica workers didn’t release her from her hiding place. Afraid that another straggling gendarme might appear, or because some sense of propriety made them want to do the job properly, they didn’t open the doors and let Mireille reemerge into the light of day, but carried the occupied wardrobe up the stairs. The trip didn’t last long. “Twenty-six steps exactly, at a snail’s pace. I counted them later, when I left.” But it was enough for my mom to fall in love with Gabriel. Direct quote. Paralyzed by fear and embarrassment inside that sort of mobile confessional, she had her laywoman’s epiphany: She’d been saved by the Working Class. While students like her were demonstrating for an egalitarian world where everyone can grow up with the same opportunities, those comrades had to keep working, enslaved to some bloodsucking boss. By saving her from the gendarme, she said, they’d returned the favor. So here we have the best possible example of the alliance between culture and labor that the students were demanding!

  “Don’t forget that I was only twenty years old with a head full of doctrines and proclamations,” Mireille emphasises. “Inside the wardrobe it was so dark that I saw the light. That’s all there was to it. Ah, yes, and one more thing you need to remember, which is infinitely more decisive: Gabriel was so attractive! Your dad was a seducer like few others, Christophe. What a pity you didn’t inherit that quality. A passive seducer. Ask his other women if you don’t believe me . . . Without the slightest effort, only with that half-inhibited presence of his, your father had me wrapped around his little finger in no time at all.”

  Upstairs in the apartment, Petroli opened the doors of the wardrobe, and Bundó gave her his hand to help her out. Mireille, dumb-founded, stared at the three men with all the bafflement of the noble savage contemplating other human beings for the first time. They asked if she was okay. Bundó did an imitation of the incensed gendarme, and they all laughed. Gabriel made the introductions. This was really the icing on the cake. Besides being oppressed truck drivers, these three Herculean creatures were Spaniards who eked out a living under the boot of the Franco dictatorship. They kept working, leaving her to her musings. By the time Gabriel came upstairs again, lugging a washing machine with Bundó’s help, Mireille was in love with him. He took some time to realize it.

  They finished the move as the clock struck nine. The three men had a wash and changed their clothes. It had been a very long day for them, but their reward was waiting. “Paris la nuit,” they shouted in mangled French. The concierge came up to check that the apartment was all in order, signed the docket, and closed the door. Mireille wanted to stay with them for precaution’s sake. She felt safer, she said. They went downstairs together. When the little man wished them a good trip home, each one played out his or her part, as planned. After an emotional farewell, Mireille went off down the street. The three drivers climbed into the Pegaso and left too. When they turned into Rue Lhomond, the girl was waiting for them, beaming from ear to ear. The truck stopped, and Petroli and Gabriel got out. Bundó had keys to the apartment. Now he’d go and look for somewhere to park—Mireille recommended the area around Montparnasse cemetery—and then come back on foot. The quarrel with Muriel that morning had shaken him up, and he was in no mood for fun and games. He might s
top somewhere for a beer and a sandwich—maybe not even that. Petroli had his night planned. A while ago, some emigrants had told him about a bar that wasn’t too far away, Le Buci, quite near the Odéon. They’d marked the spot with a cross on the map. If it had been a Thursday or a Sunday, he would have gone to Avenue de Wagram, which was where all the Spaniards got together. The other days of the week, Le Buci was the best place in Paris for hobnobbing with one’s compatriots. He’d try to dodge the demonstrations, cross Saint-Germain and find the bar. Since he was very tired, he’d have a beer and come back straight away to sleep—unless, of course, some homesick lady from Córdoba or Salamanca claimed him.

  Mireille convinced Gabriel to accompany her to the bistro in Rue Danton. If they hurried they’d be there in time for the ten o’clock regrouping. She was dying to show him off to Justine and the rest of them.

  “With that parting in his hair, his wide-legged trousers and leather jacket, Gabriel was the living image of a unionist dressed up in his Sunday best for the strike,” Mom recalled after I begged her to tell me the story. “He agreed to come with me but wasn’t very keen. He wanted to do a tourist route through the neighborhood as far as Notre-Dame, but I told him that we were the tourists now, us, the students. While we walked along at a good pace, I told him all about the insurgency that afternoon and what we were demanding. I pronounced the words slowly so he’d understand. He nodded politely, but it was clear he wasn’t interested. As we approached Rue des Écoles, the shouting got louder. We walked through clouds of smoke, which made our eyes sting. I wanted to convey to Gabriel the euphoria of being right there, right then. The importance of being there with him. Then floods of people started pouring around the corner from Saint-Germain. Without a moment’s hesitation, I took him by the hand and we ran with them. I was exultant. After a few meters he stopped and pulled us into another street. ‘Are you too tired?’ I asked, feeling a bit let down. ‘Yes, but it’s not that. If the police catch me, I’ll have problems. My passport says I’m Spanish. They’d send me back to my country, and I’d automatically be a political prisoner.’ His fear touched me, of course. ‘So why don’t you stay here?’ I blurted out in all my naivety. ‘Don’t go back to Spain. My friends will find you a job . . . You could stay with us. You even babble a bit of French.’ He forced a smile and spent a few seconds searching for the exact words he needed. ‘Thanks, but it’s not possible. I’m one of those people who can’t stay long in any one place.’ His answer was so surprising that alarm bells should have rung, but I’d emerged from a wardrobe that evening, like someone coming out of a time machine into another dimension, and the only thing that occurred to me was, ‘Let’s go back and hide at my place, then. I live nearby. I’ll show you the rest of the neighborhood on the way.’ ”