Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  That’s about it, Christophers. Chris needed reams of pages. I’m a bit more modest. I just have to tie up a few loose ends.

  Yes, Gabriel stayed with Mireille till early morning. Just the two of them in the apartment. Don’t get too worked up. Whatever comparison you were thinking of making between the ruckus that night in the Latin Quarter and what happened under the sheets in the commune in the Place de la Contrescarpe, I’ve certainly beaten you to it. As for Gabriel, our father, he was certainly a situationist! He had an amazing talent for being in the right place at the right time.

  He went back to the apartment in Rue de l’Estrapade before daybreak. Mireille had only let him leave after making him promise that he’d think about emigrating to Paris—she called it going into exile. The streets wore an air of devastation. Uprooted cobblestones, broken lampposts, a lost shoe here, a singed placard there. Sirens and shouting could still be heard in the distance, coming from the direction of the Seine. Gabriel slipped around the edge of the battlefield, a fleeting shadow, like an agent provocateur. Not far from the building, another shadow started moving toward him. They stopped and stared at each other for a few seconds.

  “Gabriel!” the shadow whispered at last.

  “Fucking hell, Petroli, it’s you,” he replied.

  This time she was from Murcia. He’d succumbed to the charms of a woman from Murcia.

  At nine, after four hours’ sleep and breakfast in a café on Boulevard Raspail, they went to get the Pegaso. Bundó, the most awake of the three, phoned Senyor Casellas, who was spending the weekend at his beach house in Caldetes. He informed him that the gendarmes had immobilized the vehicle all night because of the demonstrations but they’d be letting them go soon. He hung up in the middle of the boss’s railing and cursing, savoring the privilege of getting him out of bed on a Saturday morning, and with bad news too.

  Opposite Montparnasse cemetery, before they got moving again, the three friends divided up the box that had gone astray. Two and a half months later, on another trip to Paris one Saturday at the end of July, Gabriel rushed to visit Mireille. In his second visit to the commune in the Place de la Contrescarpe, Mom asked him again if he’d go into “exile” with her in Paris. Trying to convince him, she informed him she was pregnant. Her belly was still flat, and, with the flowing dress she was wearing, you couldn’t tell.

  “Is it mine? C’est à moi?” He asked at once, as excited as if it were the first time. They were with her roommates, sitting in a circle on the floor. Gabriel had just been introduced. He was preceded by his working-class fame, and Justine and the others, thrilled to bits, couldn’t take their eyes off him. They were smoking and drinking wine. It was midday. The windows were open. They were listening to music on the radio. With summer and the end of term the student revolts had fizzled out, in Paris at least.

  “Yes, it’s yours,” Mireille told him, “but you should know it’s going to be everybody’s. We’ll all be the mothers and fathers of this baby. You too. It’s a child of the revolution.”

  Mireille kissed him on the mouth, clinging to him as the others applauded. When she’d finished, Gabriel remained silent. He was listening to the radio, to a song that the presenter had just introduced. He raised a finger so the others would listen too. They all looked at him.

  Puis il a plu sur cette plage

  Et dans cet orage elle a disparu . . .

  Et j’ai crié, crié, Aline, pour qu’elle revienne

  Et j’ai pleuré, pleuré, oh! j’avais trop de peine . . .

  “This song . . .” he said, “this song is very beautiful. Let’s do something, Mireille. If it’s a girl, we’ll name her like the girl in the song . . .”

  “And what if he’s a boy?” she inquired giggling.

  “Well, if he’s a boy, like the singer!”

  Everyone laughed at the joke but, when I was born, Gabriel reminded Mireille of the conversation and, of course, she listened to him.

  Yes, the song was “Aline,” a hit at that time, and the singer was called Christophe.

  Gabriel, the perfect situationist.

  11

  * * *

  The Last Move

  And then,” Christophe said with a mysterious air, “Gabriel woke up in his boarding-house bed. The sheets were wet and he realized that the whole Paris adventure was a dream.”

  “. . .”

  “. . .”

  “. . .”

  “No. Hey no! It’s a joke! Don’t look at me like that, Christophers. Everything I’ve said is true. Honestly.”

  We’re in the mezzanine apartment in Carrer Nàpols, in the middle of one of our “spiritualist sessions,” as Rita likes to call them, and we’re going crazy. Literally. Sometimes it’s as if we’re possessed by Gabriel’s volatile spirit, as if these walls that protected him are taking over our minds. Each meeting of the Christophers Club only makes us more obsessed. We’re reeling in our father, as detectives say in films, but we never nab him. The step-by-step description we have of his movements often leaves us wanting more. Although we include in our account all kinds of people that he dealt with—and there are a lot of them—we still can’t make him any more three-dimensional or bring him any closer. On the contrary, Gabriel seems to enjoy disappearing into the crowd so that no one will notice him.

  “Get back, get back, get back . . . to where you once belonged!”

  It’s not Chris singing these Beatles lyrics as one might expect, but Christof. Cristoffini joins in for the chorus and they’re both out of tune. They’re tiptoeing around the apartment (well, Christof’s tiptoeing, and Cristoffini’s clinging to his neck as usual), opening doors with a flourish as if they’re going to find our father hiding behind them. “Get back, come on, get back, get back, for once and for fucking all, to where you once belonged.” You see? Even in the songs we choose we’re directionless. If we’re sure about anything, after so many months of reconstructing his life, it’s that Gabriel never belonged anywhere. Most people need to have a place where they can put down roots. It might be in some isolated corner of the map, or in the chaotic center of some city, surrounded by pneumatic drills and traffic noise. Other people might be nearby or far away, but we always need some corner of the world where we feel alive. There are other people, in contrast, who are incapable of staying still, and their home ends up being movement itself, constant, routine flight with no destination.

  “Like some species of sharks, which have to keep swimming. They even sleep while they’re swimming because, if they stop, they suffocate and die,” Christophe offers by way of illustration.

  That’s what Gabriel’s like. From the age of seventeen when he left the orphanage and went to the boarding house with Bundó, he always kept a couple of suitcases under his bed. One of them, made of cardboard, had been a gift from the nuns, a sort of passport to his future. They were his special cupboards, you might say. There was enough space in the two of them for his childhood treasures, a few school exercise books he’d taken from the House of Charity, a novel or two, photos of us, and the treasure from the moves. He aspired to fit his whole life into two suitcases. This light baggage of his combined perfectly with the La Ibérica trips, which made him feel like a nomad, and his temporary accommodation in the pension. Now you see me, now you don’t. Gabriel should have been able to embody perpetual motion with minimal wear and tear but then, one February morning, he was stopped in his tracks and was unable to move again for a long time. He had almost three months of total inertia, we calculate, which must have been an eternity for him. The exact moment of his coming to a stop, so physical and so Newtonian, happened with a deafening screech, the kind that challenges the sound barrier and shudders convulsively through you. The disaster meant that this was the last move. We’ll try to stick with our story, which means we must now describe what happened without faintheartedness or faltering. It won’t be easy.

  Number 199. Barcelona-Hamburg.

  February 14, 1972.

  A deep, narrow, rectangu
lar cardboard box with the words “Very Fragile” written on top. Thanks for the clue. Since Petroli’s stayed behind to live in Germany, everything suggests that this time it will be divided up between Bundó and Gabriel. Once opened, it turns out to be the typical box of large, flat objects that don’t fit anywhere else. Bundó’s keeping a gold-framed mirror for the entrance to his apartment, and two paintings of woods in the autumn, which are signed S.B. Since, coincidentally, they’re his own initials, Bundó’s sure to say he painted them himself. The mirror’s wrapped in two towels, embroidered with the same letters. So the pictures have been painted by the gentleman of the house. They’re nice but you can see they were done by an amateur. Gabriel will keep an atlas of the world, a wooden tray with etchings representing tropical fruits, and two Slazenger tennis rackets. There’s also an envelope with a couple of dusty X-rays of a broken wrist: The tennis-playing artist must have slipped during a game and would have spent some time not being able to paint. Even though no one wants them, Bundó says the X-rays can’t be thrown away because that will bring bad luck.

  What you’ve just read is the report from the last trip that Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli set out on together. The Pegaso’s last parade. As always, our father detailed the division of the spoils, little knowing there would be no more. Perhaps he was a little self-conscious as he wrote because Move 200 was coming up and everyone knows that round numbers demand respect, yet it would be absurd to scan his words for any sign of foreboding of what was about to happen, with the ink barely dry, a few hours later on the motorway. Then again, after coming at it from every angle, we Christophers are tempted to believe that, for quite some time, the three friends had unconsciously and reluctantly been heading for a point of no return. The future sucks us in with its uncertainty, but we call it destiny to simplify matters. When some calamity happens, we all do the same thing, don’t we? We start looking for clues in the recent past in order to understand it, or even to justify it, as if we could somehow prevent the error or accident and go back to the natural order of cause and effect.

  Sometimes, when we’re together in the mezzanine apartment on Carrer Nàpols, we Christophers try to turn all these signs into certainties and branch out into all kinds of hypotheses. This, for example: It’s highly probable that if the La Ibérica trips had continued that year, 1972, Gabriel would have moved heaven and earth to add another Christopher to the list. A little brother. This theory is supported by a certain biographical pattern: Christof was born in October 1965, while Christopher arrived in July 1967, and Christophe came along in February 1969. The rhythm tells us that every twenty months, more or less, our father was seduced by a girl and, after the nine mandatory months, these sporadic encounters brought forth another baby. We’re sure, then, that sooner or later another European woman—Italian, Dutch, Swiss?—would have surrendered to his charms.

  When we visited Petroli in Germany and told him about our theory, he thought it over for a few seconds and then, wrinkling his nose, countered it by saying that Gabriel had never planned to have children. These things happen, and that’s that.

  “Don’t forget that your dad was a passive Don Juan,” he told us. “Bundó always paid to feel like a Don Juan. I was the libertine Don Juan Tenorio when I was chatting up and sweet-talking my melancholic little Spanish ladies (and here he quoted, ‘Down to the hovels I descended . . . up to the palaces I rose’). Your dad, however, obeyed the principle of least effort. In amorous matters, he simply couldn’t say no. Ah, and he had an incredible ability to hit the bull’s-eye, as your presence in the world confirms. In having kids—can’t you see?—he was the very opposite of a Don Juan.”

  Okay, maybe he wasn’t after a pan-European paternity, but we Christophers are certain that, wanting to or not, the passive Don Juan would have let himself get caught again that winter.

  So, that’s the situation before the disaster.

  At the beginning of October 1971, after a delay of ten months and thirty panic attacks, Bundó was at last handed the keys to the apartment in Via Favència. On his first free Saturday he spent his small nest egg on some furniture, the most essential things. These items were delivered after ten days—by two moving men who, in the eyes of the international trucker were mere novices—and on the Sunday he and Gabriel took the DKV and moved in all the goods they’d lifted during the La Ibérica trips. Once the job was done, Bundó looked at the boxes scattered around the floor, the furniture still to be arranged, the bare bulbs, the curtainless windows, and, all of a sudden, these unprepossessing surroundings looked so familiar and cosy—he’d imagined them a thousand times before—that he decided to spend the night there.

  “No sheets, just a blanket, I’ll sleep on the new mattress, with the first ray of sun as my alarm . . .” he fantasized. “Like that time in Paris, remember? The welcome mat I got that day is packed in one of those boxes. It’ll be the first thing I put in place because you’ll always be welcome in my home.”

  Bundó’s impulses. Gabriel went along with it for a while but saw he was so excited about his apartment that it seemed a better idea to leave him to it. He gave him the keys to the van so he could return it to La Ibérica the next day and said he was going back to the boarding house.

  “It’s eight o’clock,” he said, looking at his watch. “If I don’t get a move on I’ll be late for dinner. You know how that puts La Rifà in a bad mood.”

  For all his composure, there was no way he could disguise the lame excuse. The situation wasn’t easy for him either. Gabriel knew it was the natural order of things and told himself that things were fine, but now—amazingly—for the first time in thirty years, since they were toddlers in nappies, the two friends were no longer living under the same roof. For some time now, they’d been getting used to the peculiarities of the world, each in his own way, and life had embroiled them and swept them along unplanned paths. Of course it’s no big deal because it happens to everyone and sometimes, late at night, they must have even joked about it, laughing so as not to cry: “Look at the fucking saints we turned out to be! One with three wives and three sons scattered around the world and the other courting a whore. Sorry, a cocotte . . . yes, cocotte: That sounds better.” Given their background, it seemed inconceivable that Bundó and Gabriel would finally have to learn to live independently. It was as if Siamese twins, once separated, weren’t twins any more, or even siblings.

  When Gabriel left, Bundó went out onto the little dining room balcony and leaned over to look at the street. It was a seventh-floor apartment, and he immediately felt slightly dizzy. He gripped the rail. It was dark and, down below, the black, recently laid asphalt melted into the shadows of the night. The new street lights cast a patchy yellowish glow on the footpaths, which were still only half constructed. Tomorrow morning he’d be woken up by a cement mixer. A minute went by, and he heard the outside door closing, after which the figure of Gabriel moved off down the street toward the bus stop. He was walking with resolute steps. Bundó whistled a tune that had been their code since they were kids, another good-bye, but Gabriel can’t have heard him because he didn’t turn around. Trying not to think, Bundó looked for the van, spotted it, toy-sized in the street, and spat to see if he could hit it. The darkness engulfed his projectile at first-floor level. In the distance, toward the horizon, Barcelona’s constellation of lights hypnotized him for a while. Carolina would be amazed when she saw it. It was cold. He went back into the dining room only to be ambushed by the stark realization of the change that he—and he alone—had brought about in his life. He’d been waiting for and fearing this moment for years and wasn’t sure that he liked it. A strange uneasiness gripped his stomach, spread out everywhere and paralyzed him. His body immediately felt heavier, and the air around him thickened, pressing on him as if the house needed to make a mold of him in order to recognize him. Though it wasn’t a painful sensation, he would have given half his life to have Carolina with him. He would have hugged her tight, and, together, they would have shattered
the quiet.

  Now we’ve come to a thorny question: Ever since Bundó had embarked on the process of buying the apartment two years earlier, Carolina had been stonewalling about coming to live in Barcelona. Every time he visited her at the Papillon they inevitably talked about the apartment. She said she was dying for them to be together, to wake up at his side every morning and to get those stinking Frenchman out of her sight for ever—at which point Bundó begged her, for the love of God, not to go into details. Yet she seemed in no hurry to bring an end to that stage of her life. When Bundó tried to persuade her to be impetuous, to seize the day, to climb into the Pegaso and ride off into the sunset together, she said it wasn’t enough just to close the door and walk away from the neon red of the big old building. She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted, but things were never that easy.