by Jordi Puntí
“As I always say, every wig in this shop has a head waiting for it.”
“Well, we’re not meant to go around with our heads exposed to the elements.”
“Whatever way you look at it, a wig makes a gentleman.”
One October morning, the props manager from the Romea Theatre turned up to buy wigs and false beards for Don Juan Tenorio, which was opening on All Saints’ Day. They were very happy with Conrad’s service, and the word got around in the profession. The theatres on Paral·lel soon became regular clients of New Samson. The dandies who’d once come to Martí’s barbershop for trims now returned to the shop, less conceited and more decrepit, sneaking in as if they were smuggling something and asking for a toupee to cover up their incipient bald spots. The same variety show stars that Conrad and his friends had spied on at the Arnau or El Molino now came to buy hair extensions for a number starring the Queen of Sheba surrounded by a gang of Solomons in diaphanous tunics, or for shows featuring some innocent little Valkyrie who, covering her bosom with long blond ringlets all the way to her waist, laid waste to a risqué song. With trembling hands and trying to stay calm, Conrad Manley combed their tresses in front of a mirror but, come Saturday, he put on a show of bravado for his friends, telling them tall stories that sounded like vaudeville scripts. Dolors, who kept him company in the shop in the afternoons, watched him attending to the girls and detected his lustful thoughts. Once they were alone, she tried to flush them out.
“If you want my advice, son, don’t get tangled up with one of those little ninnies. What sort of a woman gets up at midday and drinks champagne for breakfast?”
Conrad leaped to their defense. “I’ll listen to all the advice you want to give, Mother, but you know the client’s always right.” As he got to know them better, he’d discovered that behind their capricious façades these women were simple, rather unsophisticated girls who giggled at everything and were easy to talk to. They’d come from places like Úbeda, Ponferrada, or Albarracín and their worldly airs were nothing but a shield.
In any case, Dolors’s advice was futile, and Conrad finally fell into the claws of one such aspiring chorus girl. Her name was Leonor Carratalà, Leo, “a lioness seeking a tamer,” as she liked to present herself, and she’d come from Alcoi to triumph on Paral·lel. Her father owned a hatter’s shop, which Conrad took as an omen.
“Everyone knows that wigs and hats form a lasting alliance. There’s nothing like a good Panama hat, a straw hat, or a top hat to ensure the stability of a wig,” Conrad explained to his mother the day he introduced Leo.
Conrad courted Leo for some months under Dolors’s inquisitorial eye. The mother dreaded the day when she’d be gathering up the gnawed bones of a son who’d been devoured by a lioness. She only breathed freely again when they announced they were getting married. Leo left the stage, the boas, and the dance steps—it seems she wasn’t very good—and reserved her cabaret numbers for conjugal nights.
The photos that Rita has kept of the two of them are eccentric, even charming: a bow-legged, tense-looking little man with something like a newly landed flying saucer on his head standing next to a good-looking, buxom, wide-eyed woman several inches taller than he is. They might be the doppelgangers of Secret Agent 86—Maxwell Smart—and his wife.
“In a nutshell, my father was a pain in the neck and my mother a nitwit who did whatever he wanted,” Rita says when I force her to look at the photos. “They were only wig sellers but they had such airs and graces. Their feet never touched the ground. Dad said he’d fallen in love with Mom because she looked like Hedy Lamarr, who’d played Delilah in one of those old films. As if he bore the slightest resemblance to Victor Mature! There were times when their inanity was funny but, I assure you, there were other times when it was unbearable, especially for a spoilt brat like me. Anyway, perhaps they were made for each other. So it makes sense that they died together.”
On days like this my mother talks as if her life had been suspended in that April of 1967 when she’d just turned sixteen, as if she hadn’t known what to do with it after that. She’s back in her adolescent bedroom where we left her before, lying in bed, flipping through the latest issue of Garbo. Rita Manley Carratalà is turning the pages. Her parents Conrad and Leo are packing their bags. Meanwhile, Christophers, if you want, while they’re saying good-bye, we can fill in the first sixteen years of Rita’s life. (The Christophers are ecstatic but perhaps they’re being ironic.) Let’s begin then.
1950. Conrad and Leo get married in the Our Lady of Carmen Church. Three days earlier Leo makes her last appearance in the Victòria Theatre where she’s a dancer in the show Madness of Love.
1951. Rita is born nine months later, almost certainly conceived in a Peníscola hotel. Fatal coincidences: my great-grandmother Dolors dies a week later (shower, slips).
1953. The wig sales continue apace. My grandparents buy new dining-room furniture. On Sundays they have lunch in a restaurant and go on excursions to Sant Joan les Fonts or, at Corpus Christi, to Sitges.
1956. Rita Manley Carratalà starts school, instructed by Sacred Heart nuns.
1964. Young people have long hair but it doesn’t affect New Samson. On the contrary, Conrad prefers to think that all those hairy people are turning up their noses at the barbers. It won’t be too many years before a couple of them, seborrheic singers, turn up at the shop looking for a wig to cover their premature baldness.
1967. April. For the first time in its history, New Samson closes for holidays, taking in the Easter break. Conrad Manley and his wife Leo Carratalà are going to Paris. They are booked into a room at the Ritz in Place Vendôme, and are going on a tourist trip around the City of Light. The Louvre, Versailles, the Seine by bateau-mouche. Then, after kissing them good-bye, their daughter Rita hears the front door closing. She’s still leafing listlessly through the latest issue of Garbo.
Rita kept leafing listlessly through the latest issue of Garbo. It was ten o’clock Saturday morning, and she didn’t know how to start spending her new-found freedom. The extraordinarily agreeable silence of the apartment urged her to stay in bed till midday. She could go back to sleep if she wanted, and, this time, her mother wouldn’t wake her up with the fuss she usually made on Saturdays—a symphony of raised blinds, dazzled protest, and screechy scolding. She tested her new situation by lazing around a bit more but eventually decided that she had to tell someone about it. She got out of bed and went to the table by the front door to phone her friend Raquel. As she was asking for the number from the operator she saw, lying next to the telephone, an envelope showing the name of a travel agency. She dropped the receiver back in its cradle, opened the envelope, and found her parents’ tickets inside: “Flight IB 1190. Barcelona-Paris,” she read. She cried out in surprise. She was barefoot and could feel the coldness of the tiles rising up, paralyzing her legs. She tried to work out how she could fix things, but the mere idea that her parents would miss the flight and mess up her week banished all possible thinking. Then she heard keys in the lock, and the door was flung open. It was Conrad. His face was contorted, lopsided, which always happened when he was in a state. Drops of sweat squeezed out from under the Alain Delon wig and ran down his temples.
“We were at Plaça d’Espanya, and the taxi had to turn around!” he shouted. “What a disaster!”
Before Rita could say a word, he grabbed the tickets from her hand and shot off again without closing the door.
“Hurry. You’ve still got time,” she called from the landing. “Bon voyage.”
“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh . . .!”
The hysterical wails of her father faded away in echoes rising up the stairwell. Rita shut the door proprietarily. Now the apartment was hers and hers alone. She returned to her room without phoning Raquel and flopped on her bed. The image of her parents making a scene in the taxi came to her and, as on so many other occasions, she saw them as a couple of twits. The conventional, drab world of their house contrasted with the elegance and good taste
she rediscovered in Garbo every week. Tony Franciosa, Ira von Fürstenberg, Sylvie Vartan, and Princess Soraya hadn’t been a good influence on her with their breezy responses to intrusive questions or their willingness to be photographed on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur. Rita was tormented by images of her parents wandering around the streets of Paris. She pictured them losing their way, or sitting in some modestly luxurious restaurant while Conrad, who thought he spoke French because he could say “seevooplay,” asked for the menu with the minidictionary in his hand like the buffoon that he was.
As an antidote to these thoughts, Rita went back to leafing through the magazine. In its first pages, a soothsayer called Argos offered his weekly horoscope in two parts, His and Hers. She looked up her sign first—Cancer, the “Hers” part—and read the text. Argos recommended that she shouldn’t give up hope—a generalization, certainly,—and then declared that her week was clearly going to be very rich in affection and gifts. Rita took this mumbo jumbo very personally and then went to check what was happening with her parents. She’d always been amused by the fact that her mother, who was called Leo, should be a Leo. The horoscope was so vehement and apocalyptic that it startled her. “Jupiter is, right now, vexed with you ladies. Be as pleasant as possible. Avoid all family misunderstandings. Do not write. Keep away from anyone who might depress you. Do not travel.” The final warning made a terrible impression on Rita and, to allay it, to shoo it out of her mind, she turned the page and looked up Conrad’s sign, Gemini, the “His” section. It said: “Period of instability that you will manage with your prompt initiative. Avoid anything that could agitate you or upset you. Do not get discouraged. Ask your loved ones for advice. Enjoy yourself but without traveling far.” The two horoscopes fitted together like two halves of an orange.
“This Argos must be joking,” Rita told herself, and the fear that had frozen her blood for a couple of minutes slowly melted into the silence enfolding her. One of her neighbors who’d set about spring cleaning started to sing one of Adamo’s songs, about putting his hands on somebody’s waist.
Y mis manos en tu cintura . . .
As so often happens, as soon as adolescence hit, Rita had begun to scorn the boundless love of her parents. She needed space to breathe and so ripped apart the family cocoon. The same antics that had her roaring with laughter as a little girl, when Conrad used to play their special game with his wig, putting it on back to front or doffing it like a hat to greet her, now seemed so childish and corny that just thinking about it made her cringe. Leo’s solicitousness when she had to do her homework (not nagging like other mothers, and even helping her), or her tenacity in taking her daughter’s side against Conrad when Rita wanted more fashionable clothes—advantages that had made her daughter stand out from her friends some years earlier—had, more recently, started to look like signs of weakness—a weakness that Rita exploited. Rita’s inner life needed these minimal insurrections for its own survival and, on her more negative days, she succumbed to an ardent desire that her parents would suddenly die, both of them together. That they’d leave her to her own devices. Once the funeral was over, and the weeping done, she’d know how to take care of herself. These thoughts usually took the form of a euphoric but rather vague whim and were soon banished with a good dose of down-to-earth guilt. However, that Saturday morning, the coincidence of the horoscopes let her shrug off the guilt and play more freely with the idea. The stars have predicted it, she told herself.
Back in bed, Rita tried to get up but sloth got the better of her. Then, to banish her parents from her mind and feel she was part of the glittery world depicted in the magazine, she did something she remembered playfully years later: She took off her nightdress. The warmth of the sheets had her skin tingling with excitement.
I know that, for once, you won’t ask me to spare the details, Christophers, but I can’t get under the sheets with that ingenuous, wayward, naked Rita because even then, somehow, she was already my mother (the future is contained in the past, they say) so we’d be verging on incest, even if it’s only literary incest. And although nothing scandalizes today’s Rita, the Rita of those days might feel offended by so much disclosure. I’ll only say that, after a while, her eyelids began to droop and she went back to sleep. The wished-for death of her parents was diluted in the ether of her dreams.
Three hours went by. In those days, winter Saturdays in Barcelona advanced with the muffled calm of a geriatric home. Occasionally, the snuffling of a blocked vacuum cleaner two floors down or the sharp crack of a motorbike with fouled spark plugs in the street broke the silence for an instant and then accentuated it further. When Rita woke up hungry, with a rumbling belly, it took her half a minute to relocate herself in the world: This was her room, she was naked, and she was alone. She yawned three times in quick succession, cutting short the third one when a glance at her alarm clock revealed how late it was. She felt gleefully rebellious and undisciplined.
When I ask my mother to share those moments with me—she gets out of bed, walks around the apartment naked and confident, has breakfast and then a shower—she always says that they come back in a blur, as if everything happened underwater, in the depths of the sea, or behind frosted glass. It’s not surprising. Before getting under the shower, Rita turned on a portable radio that Conrad kept on one of the bathroom shelves. Every morning he shaved to the eight o’clock news on Radio Nacional, and Rita had to tune into another station to find some music. After a while she emerged from the bathtub—one of those old-fashioned truncated ones with a ledge—and dried her hair with a towel. The steamed-up mirror offered a foggy reflection of her face. And then, in the middle of this vapor-filled atmosphere, the announcer interrupted a song for an urgent newsflash.
“By courtesy of Kelvinator and the program ‘I Like Life!’ we now bring you an important news bulletin. A few minutes ago at Barcelona’s El Prat Airport, and due to circumstances that are as yet unexplained”—the voice announced, suddenly mournful—“an Iberian Airlines aircraft left the runway as it was taking off and caught fire after colliding with a delivery truck. According to airport sources, the flight concerned was Iberia 1190 with the destination of Paris Orly Airport in France. It is not yet known whether there are any survivors. The airline company, now working with the Red Cross, has asked relatives and all those affected to contact the authorities at the following telephone number . . .”
From those blurry moments Rita is only able to recall one detail with any precision: In the midst of the chaos, the impact of the news, and as her eyes filled with tears, she wrote the telephone number in the condensed steam on the bathroom mirror so she wouldn’t forget it. Some minutes later, as the numbers were dripping away, she called Iberia and shrieked the names of her parents.
“Excuse me, could you spell your father’s name, young lady?” a Red Cross voice asked. “N for Navarra . . . A for Alicante . . .”
“No, no! Manley! Conrado Manley. With M . . . for mortal, A . . . for accident, N . . . for . . . nobody . . .”
2
* * *
In the Cage
CRISTÒFOL’S TURN CONTINUES
Instead of their romantic dream holiday in Paris, Conrad and Leo’s destination was the Montjuïc cemetery of Barcelona, a humbler but equally beautiful Père Lachaise. Christophers, if you feel like visiting it some day (and it’s only a suggestion), ask for section one at the entrance and then look for the tombs of the anarchists Durruti and Ascaso. Turn to face the landscape of pines and trucks dissolving in a haze of sea mist with the commercial port in the background. Then walk twenty meters to your right and you’ll find the niche containing the coffins of my maternal grandparents. Read the tombstone: Those names and dates are their only material presence in this world because almost nothing was left of their bodily trappings—as the spiritualists might say—after the accident.
My mother says that a dozen people died and about a hundred were injured. In those days planes didn’t have black boxes so the official ve
rsion of events was constructed from the testimony of survivors—the pilots among them—and data supplied by the control tower. The authorities established that, just when the plane began accelerating to take off, a tire burst and the plane skidded across the runway. The pilot managed to regain control by reducing the speed but, at the last minute when it seemed that the whole thing was going to be no more than a fright, its tail end hit a tanker that appeared from nowhere. It all seemed to happen in slow motion, but the plane broke in two as a result of the impact—a clean break, as if chopped by a guillotine—and the tail immediately burst into flames. “Amid general hysteria,” the journalists reported, “the explosion instantly engulfed the unfortunate passengers sitting in the rear seats.” Grandfather Conrad, on the advice of some know-all neighbor, had moved heaven and earth to make sure that he and my grandmother were sitting in the tail section. “He says it’s the safest place because it’s farthest from the engines. This business of aerodynamics is very complicated,” he pronounced, trying to reassure himself.
The first phone call after she came out of the shower gave Rita little cause for hope. Choosing her words carefully, the woman from the Red Cross told her not to despair but her parents’ names were on the list of more-than-probable victims. Rita provided the necessary details and waited for news. Confined to her room out of some sort of superstition, she lay on her bed listening to the radio. The phone rang several times, but she had neither the will nor the strength to take any more calls. Some hours later two policemen knocked at the door. It may sound like a cliché, but my mother remembers them as a pair of grim old men in crumpled uniforms, with the mandatory moustaches. One, apparently the more affable of the two, spoke to her in a fluting, childlike voice, informing her that her parents had been in a plane accident at the airport and that, as she now knew, they’d “gone to heaven.” Rita had spent the whole afternoon telling herself she had to be strong, but the policeman’s words made her feel like a little girl, and she started to cry.
