Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  “No, it might be too late on the way back. I have to see her now. I need to convince her to leave that fucking job of hers and come with me. Tomorrow, if possible. I have to tell her that one day Mireille will be in Barcelona too.”

  “You know you can’t say that. That’s never going to happen.” Gabriel was red with rage.

  “Well, then I’ll tell her something else. How would you like me to tell her that you’ve got a woman in Frankfurt and another one in London? And two more sons, to tip the balance.” He paused. “I’ve always been obliged to lie for you, Gabriel, to protect you, and I don’t get anything in return!”

  Our father—and this we know from Petroli—remained quiet and shot him a pitying look. Bundó forced a guilty smile, shocked at his own temerity. He would have understood it better if his best friend had thumped him, and hard. Behind the steering wheel and out of the corner of his eye, Petroli witnessed the silent massacre of thirty years of friendship and tried to stanch the bleeding.

  “Okay, we’ll stop for ten minutes at the Papillon,” he pronounced. “Ten minutes and that’s all. Just time for a fag. If you take any longer, Bundó, we’re leaving without you and you can go to hell.”

  Bundó thanked them in a tiny voice and went back to his brooding. They covered the remaining kilometers to the brothel without saying a word. Gabriel was still in a state of shock, staring ahead empty eyed. Trying to drown the silence, Petroli tuned into the international service on Spanish radio.

  “Ten minutes, Bundó. Six hundred seconds,” Petroli repeated as they pulled up in front of the Papillon. “We’re timing you.”

  Ten minutes later he started the truck, and Bundó shot like an arrow out of the brothel door. As they were having a smoke, Gabriel had thanked Petroli. Carolina waved at them from the top of the stairs, looking completely bewildered.

  “She’s giving me a date when I see her on the way back!” Bundó shouted as the Pegaso got underway. He was so excited his face had changed.

  “Did you tell her?” Gabriel asked without looking at him. He was staring at the road.

  “What?”

  “Have you told her anything? About Sigrun and Sarah and Mireille and the boys?”

  “Of course not! What do you take me for? A traitor?” Bundó exclaimed. “My friends, Carolina says that on the way back she’ll give me a date. You understand? The exact day she’s coming to live in Barcelona! We miss each other too much and we can’t go on like this.”

  He was so wound up he couldn’t keep still. Without further ado, he hugged Gabriel and ruffled his hair. It was his way of saying sorry. Our father broke free with a conciliatory shove, and Petroli gave three blasts of the horn.

  Once that stumbling block was behind them, the ascent to Hamburg was accomplished with a fairly typical series of difficulties and distractions, no different from those suffered during the best of times. When they reached Strasbourg the truck broke down and they had to stop to change the fan belt. In Germany, nearing Karlsruhe, they had dinner in a roadhouse that served venison stew every day. It was one thing after another.

  We Christophers would pay a fortune to be able to go back in time and witness one of those roadside dinners, to be with them inside the cab of the Pegaso, on a long trip. To join in with the chat, the rows, the jokes, to smell the stuffy stench of the cab and moan about that despot Senyor Casellas, to doze off and dream about the naked calendar girls. In short: to be one of them.

  We tell ourselves that with all the hours we’re spending tracking down our dad and his friends, we’re saving on psychologists’ fees. By learning about his circumstances, maybe we’ll be able to understand ourselves a little better. Anyway, if we are not to go on too long about this last journey, we’ll now take another short cut: As incredible as it may seem, that very day Petroli stayed behind to live in Hamburg.

  The last hours of the last move were especially punishing. After Hanover, the snow covering the motorway had frozen over and the truck made exasperatingly slow progress. They got to Hamburg at midday on Sunday, five hours later than planned and it took them another hour to locate the building where they had to unload. They’d been on the road for more than thirty hours. It was always the same thing, however: They could be at dropping point but the sight of the peak gave them a lift of new-found energy, which they invested in their final effort. That day in Hamburg, luck smiled on their final exertions: The German widow had contracted two strapping fellows to help them unload. Full of the Olympic spirit of Munich ’72, they demonstrated that they could have earned a place in the German weightlifting team. Between the five of them, then, they finished the job after dark, but still early enough to find a restaurant open. Observing the ritual that always marked the end of any move, they took off their work gear, had a quick wash, and got into some clean clothes. Before taking their leave of the brawny Germans, they asked if they knew of a good place nearby where they could eat and, out of some kind of proletarian intuition, the men told them how to get to the Asturian Center. Petroli couldn’t believe his luck. That one didn’t appear on any list!

  Christof and Cristoffini have got ahead of us here, but now it’s time to go into detail. While Gabriel and Bundó dived into a trucker-size dish of Asturian pork-and-bean stew, the famous fabada, Petroli preferred to sit at the bar, have a glass of cider and enjoy a bit of conversation. Whenever his radar detected Spanish emigrants in his vicinity, all hunger and weariness vanished. Then someone introduced him to Ángeles and, in a space of a few seconds, his life changed. Completely.

  It must be said that the bedazzlement was mutual. Ángeles and Petroli spent two hours gazing into one another’s eyes and engaging in mutual seduction with tales from the post-war years. (After that night, they swear, they were immune from the past and it was never again a topic of conversation. It was no longer necessary.) Meanwhile, Bundó and Gabriel, their bellies fit to burst, collapsed into two armchairs in a corner and nodded off. Eventually, Petroli came over, woke them up and, without any preliminaries, informed them, “I’m staying, guys.”

  “What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.

  “What I said. I’m staying. I’m not coming back with you. I’ve met the woman of my dreams. I’ve been trawling through places like this for years and now I know why. No, no, I’m not drunk. I know you won’t believe me but that lady over there (no, don’t turn around now!) is called Ángeles and we’re made for each other. It’s a gut feeling and you know I’m not into that kind of stuff. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll find my own way back. Please go without me.”

  He spoke with such conviction that there was nothing they could say. Petroli was no braggart and neither was he desperate like Bundó, who’d been about to pull the plug on everything for his ten minutes at the Papillon. Petroli knew what he wanted. He called Ángeles over, introduced them, and then they rode off into the sunset . . . et cetera.

  As Petroli confirmed, that night was the last time the three of them were together.

  Bundó and Gabriel slumbered in the armchairs like a couple of angels. Petroli had paid the bill and asked the Asturians not to disturb them till closing time. After sweeping up, the last waiter came over and shook them awake, which took a while. They were fast asleep and, even when they opened their eyes, were slow to work out where they were. Then they remembered what had happened just before they dropped off: Petroli’s decision. Did they dream it or was it real? The waiter politely turned them out and advised them that if they wanted a nice snug spot to spend the night they should go to the railway station—“the Hauptbahnhof, it’s called”—which was very close, and the bar was open all night.

  The air outside was so cold and damp that it woke them up like an icy-cold shower. After midnight and not a soul to be seen. They had to tread carefully to prevent slipping on the footpath.

  “Is there blood coming out of my ears?” Bundó asked. “I can’t feel them!”

  “Hamburg is our Everest,” was our father’s response.

  They were walking h
uddled over in their too-thin anoraks and scarves. Though they’d been snoozing for four hours, their legs were heavy and their muscles felt as hard as rocks. They had two good strong coffees at the station in the company of three globetrotters and a gaggle of hippies. Then, half compelled by tradition, they rather listlessly opened up the rectangular box that had “gone astray” in the move. They divided up the loot as usual, and our father spent a few minutes updating his inventory in the notebook. Then they went back to the Pegaso.

  Gabriel offered to drive. Now they were on the descent, he calculated that they could be in Frankfurt at about nine in the morning, just in time to have breakfast with Sigrun and Christof. A surprise visit. In the first few kilometers, until the heating came on full, Petroli’s absence was very noticeable: It was much warmer with three people squeezed up together in the cab. Bundó didn’t take long to fall asleep and, with his snores as the soundtrack, our father gripped the steering wheel good and tight. Every motorway on earth looked ghostly on winter nights. He tuned into a German radio station. The announcer’s voice kept him company and, though he didn’t understand a word, he was under the impression that he was practising his German.

  At half past six the sun came up in a gray sky heavy with low clouds. Shortly afterward Gabriel woke Bundó.

  “Time to wake up,” he said. “We’ve just gone through Kassel. Frankfurt’s not far.”

  Bundó squirmed in his seat.

  “No, no, no, we can’t stop in Frankfurt. If we do that we won’t get to France on time. Do you know what day it is today? It’s the 14th of February, Saint Valentine’s Day, lovers’ day! I promised Carolina I’d visit her. You can’t let me down!”

  Gabriel took a few seconds to consider whether to fight over it or not. In the end, without answering except for a reluctant nod, he put his foot down on the accelerator. A few kilometers farther on, they drove past the Frankfurt exit. He hadn’t had time to tell Sigrun he wanted to drop in so it wasn’t all that serious. How many times in the future would he go back to that moment of doubt? How many times would he curse it?

  He kept driving.

  “We’ll pull over at the next service stop and have some breakfast if you want,” he said, “and then you can take the wheel.”

  Bundó snored in response. He’d dropped off again, so quickly that Gabriel wondered if he’d heard him speak just a moment before. After about twenty kilometers of a straight downhill run, the Pegaso was flying along, a winged horse. Gabriel noticed something like a grain of sand in his field of vision. An irresistible heaviness tipped his head forward. Then he fell asleep.

  Beyond the windshield, it was snowing heavily again.

  Part II

  ARRIVALS

  1

  * * *

  At the Airport

  CRISTÒFOL’S TURN

  In the spring of 1968, Barcelona airport’s hallways and departure lounges gleamed with the deceptive luster of ice. Although the Minister for Civil Aviation had inaugurated the new El Prat international terminal only a few weeks earlier, every day brought some new hitch. When the doors opened in the morning, the night-waxed marble floors dazzled, reflecting the walls stuccoed in the official beige of the time. However, when the passengers arrived, running for planes or wandering around bored by delays, dragging bags and suitcases and dropping smouldering cigarette butts, the floors soon lost their shine and began to show the wear and tear. By midday, the busiest areas put one in mind of a neglected tombstone, and the terminal took on the hostile feel of a vast, dingy mausoleum. One of the regime’s officials must have noticed it during a stopover, or wandering nervously around waiting for some VIP (vanishing footsteps and dark glasses), and the management very swiftly contracted three men with one sole mission: to sweep, mop, and make the airport shine as if it were going to be inaugurated by the Generalísimo himself every day.

  The trio were called Sayago, Leiva, and Porras, and the first time they laid eyes on each other was in the manager’s office where a calendar on his desk, advertising Iberia Airlines, showed Friday, June 21, 1968. Unprompted, the three workers stood in line, straight-backed, as if the shifty-looking manager were a commander about to inspect his troops. He spent five minutes instructing them how to do their jobs, informing them in passing that he’d once wanted to be a poet, and then ordered them to go and start cleaning at once. Yes, he knew they’d been told to start on Monday, but an Italian cardinal was arriving en route to Jerusalem that afternoon, and all kinds of religious and political dignitaries would be here to receive him. They had to give the airport’s marble floors the same spiritual aura as the Vatican basilica. It was their baptism of fire.

  Leiva, Porras, and Sayago ran off to get changed and attacked the cleaning with such zeal that they earned their ticket to heaven and eternal salvation that very same day. As it turned out, His Eminence didn’t set foot in the terminal, but that’s another story. When they knocked off that evening, they went to have a beer in the airport bar. They were completely done in, with cramps in their wrists from so much mopping. Like a shared secret, the exhaustion of their first day united them in brotherhood. Although they’d never met before, they lost no time in discovering their shared biographies. Sayago and Leiva were in their forties, lived in the Magòria neighborhood and had come to Barcelona at about the same time, some ten years earlier. Gradually, on their meal breaks or going home by bus, they discovered that they had both been born in the province of Jaén, in villages separated by just twenty kilometers of stony ground; that their wives worked as seamstresses for the same despotic mistress; that, with time, their homesickness had become increasingly abstract, although present in the same way that a distinctive freckle or birthmark you might have been vaguely proud of once was now so familiar that you didn’t notice it when you looked in the mirror.

  Sayago, who sported a bushy moustache and well-trimmed beard as a kind of personal trademark, loved unearthing things he had in common with Leiva and could be a pain in the neck with his barrage of questions. “So what was the name of your teacher at school? It wasn’t that bastard Paredes, was it? In those days the teachers went from one village to another . . .” No, no, he’d grown up with señorita Rosario and she gave them aniseed sweets when they behaved—at least during the six years he’d gone to school. Leiva was grubby but a good fellow. He ran his hand through his long, greasy hair and forced himself to dig up details of his life that the present had managed to bury beneath a large shovelful of reality. Sometimes, out of sheer laziness or not wanting to disappoint Sayago, he lied: Yes, of course he remembered that family of actors that came through the provincial villages every spring, with that girl who was more of a woman every year and showing more and more thigh, with her father keeping an eye on her from the stage . . .

  Porras was a lot younger. He’d just turned seventeen. He was of slight build and somewhat lackadaisical, as if thinking was too much effort and he’d rather let himself be guided by fate. He lived—or rather slept—in the Verdum neighborhood, on the other side of Barcelona, with his mother, two brothers, and a sister. They’d been in a rented apartment for four years, ever since they arrived from Murcia. Porras was fed up with getting clobbered at school by a bunch of misfits who’d made him their scapegoat and by screwed-up frustrated teachers, so his older brother, who was working in the airport as a bartender, got him a job there as well. Every day, they got up at seven and crossed the city on the brother’s Vespa, which he’d bought with his first pay packet on July 18th.

  Despite their difference in age, Porras got on well with Sayago and Leiva from day one. Since he had no dad, they treated him with paternal concern but without the responsibilities imposed by blood ties. More than a son, Porras was a younger version of themselves, and they occasionally flirted with the possibility of starting life all over again, without the dead weight of so many forgettable years. Moreover, there was another detail that united them: None of them had ever traveled by plane. Every day they witnessed dozens of planes taking off and l
anding, heard them jolting along the runways when they hit the ground, the fleeting whistle when they lifted off. But, for them, these mammoth inventions were as fantastic as prehistoric animals.

  I love these three guys! Leiva, Sayago, and Porras. My mother was with them at the airport for about ten years. They were very good friends. From the booth where she attended irate passengers who’d lost their luggage, Rita saw them going past her window from time to time and, when she didn’t have any clients, she beckoned them over to gossip.

  She told me that by February 1972, which is when this story really gets going, the officious airport manager was pushing up daisies after a sudden heart attack, and his books of poems were selling at cost at the Sant Antoni market. The three friends were still sweeping and mopping Barcelona airport from one end to the other, striving for perfection. The ties of friendship had become inextricably knotted. It was almost material for the final scene of a tragicomedy. It was some time since Leiva’s and Sayago’s wives had left their nasty boss and set up with their own sewing machines. In addition, the two couples went out dancing together every Sunday afternoon. Many Mondays the men had nothing left to talk about, but that didn’t worry them in the least. Sayago had stopped interrogating Leiva, who’d put on twelve kilos, three per year, and still didn’t bother to comb his hair in the airport changing rooms when they got ready for work or to go home. Sayago’s questions were now aimed at Porras, who was courting his seventeen-year-old daughter. Every afternoon after work the boy got on the Vespa he’d inherited from his brother, went to pick her up at the household-goods shop where she worked, and took her home a couple of hours later. The following morning, Sayago, taking advantage of running into him in a corridor, or deliberately seeking him out, would corner him with a barrage of questions. Where had they been the previous evening? What were they doing in the bedroom and why had they closed the door? Did they have any plans? He was terrified at the prospect of becoming a premature grandfather, and you could tell when he was nervous because he kept touching the tips of his moustache. Leiva, meanwhile, looked on from a distance, thanking God that he and his wife had only had boys—two—and no daughter.