Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  I’m telling you about these three exemplary gentlemen, Christophers, not because I want to get off track but because there was a moment when their intervention was crucial to our lives. Yes, yours too, so take note. These three, Leiva, Sayago, and Porras, were important. And with all their scams they certainly deserve walk-on parts in this story. It will all come out in due course. Let me tell you now about the first time I set eyes on them. I must have been about seven. One day I was with Mom walking past Niepce’s, the photographer’s shop on the corner of Carrer Fontanella and Via Laietana, and we stopped for a moment to look at a big black-and-white photo, about a meter by a meter twenty, which was exhibited in the window.

  “Come on, where am I?” Mom said, showing me the photo. “Let’s see if you can find me.”

  I stared at the three rows of people, all of them very neat and tidy, without much idea of what she wanted me to find, but my eyes flew straight to the pale, ecstatic-looking face, almost like a candle flame, at the end of the top row on the left. A child’s fingerprint smeared the window.

  It was a carefully posed photograph of the airport workers, some fifty men and a dozen women, all dressed up in their Sunday best. Not long before, one of the bigwigs in the Ministry of Civil Aviation had announced his retirement and someone aspiring to succeed him got the idea of having the commemorative photo taken before the speeches took place and snacks were offered. They must have been very proud of the photograph at Niepce’s, or maybe they were obliged to show it through some personal commitment, because it remained in their window for years. It almost acquired the status of a public monument and became part of the city’s geography, like the sign for Werner’s music shop a couple of doors away, or the huge thermometer of Òptica Cottet in Portal de l’Àngel. My mother’s photo was surrounded by an unvarying constellation of studio portraits that were uniformly boring for most passersby: a class of law graduates from the University of Barcelona, all decked out in the mandatory gown and mortarboard; a pudding-faced Miss Barcelona 1977 wannabe wearing a tartan skirt; the sugary bliss of a laughing bride and groom on their wedding day.

  Studying the airport workers’ photo was one of my childhood pastimes. Whenever we were near Plaça Urquinaona I begged Mom to take me to Niepce’s so I could find her in the photo. For my entertainment, or perhaps because she felt compelled to do so, on our third or fourth viewing of the photograph she told me about Leiva, Sayago, and Porras, the three men fixed in the center of the middle row, just behind all the dignitaries flashing their medals.

  “You see that boy with the naughty face, just like yours?” she asked, and I nodded even though I couldn’t single out the one she meant. “That boy’s called Porras, and he worked with me at the airport. He used to come by motorbike every day, a Vespa, and, in winter, what with the cold and the wind in his face, his eyes would be teary all morning. As soon as he got to the airport he’d change into his working clothes and then come to see me in my booth. Sometimes, as a joke, he used to say he was crying over me because I didn’t love him and wouldn’t give him a kiss. But that’s not true: I did love him.”

  “Was he one of those friends who used to keep the lost suitcases?”

  “Yes. Porras and the other two next to him, Leiva and Sayago.”

  Leiva, standing behind the airport manager, seemed to be slyly examining his bald crown. The young Porras had his mouth slightly open as if he couldn’t contain his laughter, and, at his side, Sayago, of course, had subjected his moustache to some serious primping and was gazing into the camera with the gravitas of a great leader. Every time we stopped in front of that window—and it was often months between one visit and the next—Mom filled me in with a few more details about the lives of her three friends, or her own life at the airport.

  I was growing up and the photo was growing yellower.

  I don’t know when they removed that sun-bleached relic from Niepce’s window. One day, years later, I went past the shop, instinctively sought it out and realized it wasn’t there any more. My heart skipped a beat and feverish nostalgia flared inside me. You might think it’s absurd, but I stood there transfixed for ages. I longed for that photograph like you long for your favorite childhood toy, with that incredible power memory has when it completely swamps the present. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but that image of the airport formed a direct link with my previous state of darkness, the obscure eternity before I was born. Frozen at that particulat point in time, the photo contained a latent anxiety—my mother’s—the encoded, tentative knowledge of what was at stake for her now, and this had become my own special treasure. Also, behind the assembled group you could glimpse the airport corridors, cleaned and polished by Leiva, Sayago, and Porras. Those gleaming spaces would later reflect the disoriented footsteps of my future father—our father, Gabriel. A brief yet decisive moment, another sort of treasure.

  I’m not trying to be dramatic, as I said. When I got home that evening, I immediately told my mother that they’d taken the photo out of Niepce’s window. I expected her to be upset, that she’d share my dismay and that we could get indignant together but she wasn’t bothered at all. Her only response was to open one of the cupboards and poke around until she found a tin box in which she kept a lot of old papers: It turned out that she’d kept a smaller version of the photograph. They’d all been presented with a copy some days after the farewell party—their reward for having taken part in the farce—but she’d never shown it to me because she wanted to preserve the magic of visiting the shop window. Then she’d forgotten all about it. Years later, it looked at first glance like one of those images of pilgrims going to Lourdes: a flock of people, all of them crippled, ill, or in mourning, anointed by the holy light of the Virgin Mary’s blessing and having their picture taken to record it. Crutches, candles, and clerics. My mother, up there in the top left-hand corner, could have played the role of a levitating Virgin perfectly. I told her that, and she let out a dry laugh tinged with bitterness, the product of passing years and disappointments. And two glasses of whisky a day.

  I went back to the photo and looked again at her once youthful face.

  “How old were you here?”

  “You know very well.”

  “No, come on, how old were you?”

  “Work it out. Twenty-one or twenty-two. With a head full of mad ideas.”

  Her face looked so different from all the others. I stared at the group. Four bosses with brilliantined hair in the front row and a contingent of mousy men around them, all doing their best to conceal aching feet, worries about bills waiting to be paid, and the disagreeable taste of tap water. And in the middle of them all Mom’s three friends: Sayago, Leiva, and Porras.

  When she saw how curious I was, she took the photo from my hands and stared at it. Then she said, “Do you know that you’re kind of here too?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, it was that very morning that I realized I was pregnant. Just before they took the photo I threw up in the bathroom. That’s why I’m so pale. The next day I went to the gynecologist . . .”

  I kept the photo.

  “To the airport! To the airport! Hurry up!”

  They’re my brothers and they’re impatient. They’ve been bugging me for a while now with their cries and their cursing, half joking, half serious, prodding me at every step because I’m younger than them and they think they can get me to do what they want. Now that I’m at the wheel, they want me to speed through this story like a lunatic taxi driver, skidding around corners, taking short cuts down side streets and racing through red lights. Faster, faster, we’ll leave you a good tip. Come on, spare us the details and get us to the airport. Hurry, hurry! But our father’s adventures can’t be hurried. On the contrary, they’re stuck in the gray calm of a February morning on the tarmac next to an airplane. And, what’s more, my brothers know it.

  All of us want to come up with the improbable mathematical formula for one father and four mothers dotted around Europe. Fine, but it’s my gig
now. You’ve had your turns, Christophers, and you’ve certainly made the most of them. Now it’s me, brothers, son of Rita Manley Carratalà, who decides how far back we have to go. You can be choir and orchestra. My applauding audience. Once again, we have to do the run-up so we can jump, and that’s why I’m going back to April 1967 (and earlier if need be), when Rita had just turned sixteen and her room—off-limits to her parents—was a teenage chamber of horrors. Her hang-ups, dreams, disappointments, fantasies, and demons resided there day and night and, if you weren’t immune, as her friends were, five minutes in that bedroom would have your head spinning. She decorated its walls with a collection of photos of her musical idols, stuck up all over the place at odd angles, striving for a more funky effect. Here in the privacy of her den, she listened nonstop to a Zenith radio with the volume on full blast and a bent antenna that struggled to pick up the sound waves by leaning toward the light coming in through the window, as if it worked by photosynthesis. Dozens of perfume samples, eye shadows, lipsticks, and other makeup products stolen from Wella and Avon demonstrations were neatly arranged into a miniature glass-and-plastic city on top of an old writing desk. Languishing in one corner with a few dusty balls of wool was a knitting machine that had been loaned to her when she’d signed up for one of the long-distance learning courses offered by the Center for Culture and Knowledge. It had kept Rita amused for six whole weeks the previous winter, as attested by fifteen centimeters of a red pullover hanging from its jaws (two centimeters before the white deer that was supposed to adorn it grew legs).

  With the door of her room slightly ajar that Saturday morning, Rita was lolling in bed, savoring the chaos of her parents flapping around the house. They were opening cupboards, shoving clothes in suitcases, arguing incessantly over stupid things blown out of proportion by overwrought nerves. It was music to her ears: This was the first time that her parents were going on a trip without her, and they were leaving her alone for seven whole days. From Saturday to Saturday—168 hours—10,080 minutes—604,800 seconds of adult freedom that she was already starting to breathe through the chink of her bedroom door. These seven days were a chance for Rita to get up to all the mischief and sins she could possibly imagine—all in fact very innocent—and she’d still have time for the misdeeds she hadn’t dared to dream up. Who would have thought it? Her friends envied her for having such modern-minded parents, and she, only daughter of only children, pampered and overprotected to the point of pain, was enjoying the potential of their absence for the very first time.

  One evening her father had come home from the shop beaming from ear to ear. At dinnertime he opened a just-in-case bottle of champagne he’d been keeping in the refrigerator and extracted from his pocket two plane tickets to Paris plus a reservation at the Hotel Ritz in Place Vendôme. His hands trembled with excitement, and, as always when he was worked up, his face took on a mulish expression that made him look like one of those stuffed toys in a firing-range booth at a fair. Then he explained what it was all about. His main wig supplier, a Paris wholesaler, wanted to express his gratitude with this luxury getaway because he’d bought wig number two thousand with his last order. Rita’s parents—my grandparents—Conrad Manley and Leo Carratalà had never been out of Spain. Their honeymoon, twenty years earlier, had taken them to Valencia and Alicante to visit a whole string of her relatives. A wooden key ring from the Ordesa National Park, hanging at the entrance to the apartment, was a memento of holidays a decade ago in the Aragonese Pyrenees. That was about it. For them, Paris had always been their dream city, a romantic idyll summed up in four clichés: the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the Louvre, and the wigs of Louis XVI!

  Lying in bed, Rita listened intently to the upheaval as she leafed through the most recent issue of Garbo. In the living room, her father was busy combing two wigs, the one he was going to wear and the one he was going to pack in his suitcase as a spare. On the mannequin’s head they were both combed in the same way, with the parting on the left, but the spare wig was more daring because the hair was four centimeters longer and ended in tiny curls that were very difficult to achieve. More Belmondo and less Delon, let’s say. Combing away, as carefully as if it was his own hair, Conrad Manley was talking to himself, raising his voice from time to time.

  “Ah, if only that damn fool father of mine was still here!” he cried sarcastically. “I’d tell him to his face, ‘Look where wigs are taking us! They’re taking us to Paris!’ ”

  Every time he referred to his father, his dome—shiny and baby soft thanks to all the creams and lotions he applied—tensed and then turned scarlet. Even when he was “dressed” in a wig, as he liked to say, and you couldn’t see it, the skin underneath took on the purplish hue of a young eggplant, just visible at his false hairline. This wasn’t surprising, however. My grandfather Conrad and his father Martí loathed one another, compulsively, and judging from my grandfather’s words years later, the hatred endured beyond Martí’s death. It seems that their mutual dislike began very early, when my grandfather had to leave school and was put to work, and it was so intense that they ended up as physical opposites, night and day.

  Now, Christophers, be warned, here comes another flashback. On his return from the war—where he’d pretended to be fighting with the Republicans until it seemed better to go over to the Nationals—my great-grandfather Martí went to work in a barber’s shop on Ronda de Sant Pau near Avinguda Paral·lel, in the same establishment that my grandfather turned into a wig shop years later. Before the war, Martí Manley had worked delivering merchandise for some of the stalls in the Sant Antoni market but, when he was sent to the front, he’d learned to skive off by becoming a barber, having a lot of fun killing lice with a safety razor and shaving heads as if he was getting rid of a few dead leaves. The soldiers didn’t complain. By the time he got to shave and cut the hair of some of the top brass, he’d learned to keep a steady hand and to govern the scissors, avoiding any disasters that might have sent him directly to the lockup.

  The military experience wasn’t very useful except when it came to showing who was boss in the barber’s shop. He was secretive and tight-lipped at home, as if his time at the front had left him emotionless, but with scissors and a comb in his hands he was quite a different man, one who’d mastered every register of futile conversation. He spoke to his clients, looking them in the eye in the mirror, knowing how to crack a joke and how to concede they were right about everything without coming across as an ass-licker. Sometimes the particular shape of a skull, an ear, a shaven nape, or the trusting client who tipped his head back offering a clear shot at his carotid reminded him of the fraternal bond he’d known at the front. It was such a natural, innocent feeling that he’d spend the next few minutes missing the war.

  Three years after he started work the real boss retired, and Martí Manley bought the business at a very low price, although he did sign a document promising he’d hang a photo of the former owner on the wall so his oldest clients wouldn’t forget him, and did offer him all the services of the establishment free of charge, including the final tidy-up before he was buried. Instead of paying an apprentice, Martí made Conrad leave school and start at the barber’s shop one Monday morning. To make it less traumatic, my great-grandmother Dolors, who secretly abhorred her husband’s decision, bought Conrad a white coat and had his name embroidered on the pocket. It was 1944. My grandfather Conrad was fifteen with a downy moustache and beard that grew in patches, making shaving difficult. Quite a portent.

  The business was slowly making a name for itself in the neighborhood. Not a day went by without some stranger coming in for the first time, and often returning after a few weeks. Since it was near the theaters in Avinguda Paral·lel, Martí soon acquired some very elegant clients, gentlemen who dropped in before a show for a trim, a shave, or to get their sideburns touched up. They often appeared in magazines, and their signed photos were starting to keep the old owner company on the wall. When they went out into the street, coiffed in a cloud of
hair spray and wafting a trail of scented lotion behind them, Martí Manley puffed out his chest and shot a quick self-conscious look at himself in the mirror. He was a happy man.

  Then, only a year and a half after he started to work as an apprentice, due to heaven knows what variety of genetic plot, Conrad Manley’s hair started to fall out. At first, like all maladies, this one manifested itself with a few random symptoms. Four jet-black hairs on a pillow when he woke up; a tuft tangled in a comb; a clump blocking the drain in the bath. Soon, however, its virulence spread all over the crown of his head, denuding the whole region in a matter of weeks. When he realized what was happening, Conrad tried to cover it up by combing his hair backward because he knew his father would feel betrayed by the wasteland. Martí was convinced that a great part of the business’s success was attributable to the image offered by the barber—an aesthetic model to emulate—and every day, before opening, he attended to his mane of hair with morbid devotion. Nature had been generous with him, and a great lock rose above his forehead, a lordly presence evoking the glass canopy of Hotel Colon. It inspired respect.

  For all Conrad’s efforts to hide the calamity, the ravaged zone kept growing. Surprisingly, a potion bought from a pharmacist in Carrer Unió, stinking like a sewer and fecal yellow in color, which he had to slather over his head and cover with a hairnet before going to sleep, gave him not only an assortment of ill-smelling nightmares but also three weeks’ hope. Once the respite ended, though, his hair seemed even more panicked and opted for mass suicide.