Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  They did their best to console her. They offered her a handkerchief, stroked her hair, and told her she had to be a big strong girl. Rita was sixteen, and it was clear she was no longer a little girl. She was secretly cringing with embarrassment for everyone, her parents included. She resolutely dried her tears, for which the policemen were grateful. The other one, hard-boiled and with a gruffer voice, opened up a folder, took out a sheet of paper, and asked her if she had any brothers or sisters. No. Grandparents? No. Uncles or aunts? No. With each negative response, the good cop’s eyes grew misty. Distant relatives? Couldn’t she remember the name of some distant relative, even if they hadn’t met for years? There was no one, of course there was no one, but Rita suddenly realized that the question had the anxious ring of a last chance. When she hesitated for a few seconds, the good cop urged her on, reminding her that she was still a minor and that she couldn’t be left alone under these circumstances. There had to be somebody.

  “I’ve got a great-aunt who lives in Sagunto,” she lied. She chose Sagunto because she recalled that her grandparents had lived there years before. “She’s very old, but I phoned her this afternoon and she’s arriving by train tomorrow at midday.”

  The lie worked, and the policemen heaved a sigh of relief. They then asked her for a photograph of her parents and took her to Raquel’s, her best friend’s house. In recent months she’d slept there a couple of Saturday nights, and Leo and Raquel’s mother used to shop at the same stalls at the market. For Rita, the following days passed as if she were acting in a play. She remembers the show of mourning, the black clothes, the outpouring of sympathy, and how neighbours and friends fussed over her. Raquel’s parents treated her like a daughter, taking care of the formal procedures of grieving, and her friend behaved like a jealous sister.

  Since they had to wait for official confirmation of the deaths, the funeral didn’t take place until the Friday, six days after the accident. On the Thursday, the two policemen came back and handed Rita a document signed by the judge and covered with official seals. Then they asked her an odd question.

  “Now, dear, could you tell us whether, on the day of the unfortunate event, your daddy was wearing a wig or a hairpiece?”

  It happened that the only vestige of Conrad left after the crash was a scrap of his Alain Delon wig. The passengers’ luggage was burned in the crash or destroyed in the ensuing chaos but, several hours later, when the on-site investigators were trying to recover human remains that might help them to identify the victims, a fireman found a small piece of the wig. It was eighty meters from the wreckage, stuck to a charred patch of tarmac. He picked the thing up very carefully, believing at first that it was skin with hair on it, but when it was subsequently analyzed in the laboratory they found it was synthetic skin. Rita never got to see the singed tuft, but that final scrap of paternal vanity inspired her to pay one last tribute to her parents. One of the few decisions Conrad had taken with an eye to the future, and for which Leo always scolded him, had been to sign up for a life insurance policy with Union and Phoenix. There were no bodies to bury but, since the coffins and funerals had been paid for in advance, Rita wanted a proper ceremony. Just before the two empty caskets were taken from the apartment to the Saint Lazarus chapel where the funeral Mass was to be celebrated, she took her father’s collection of wigs and arranged them carefully in the upholstered interior of his coffin. There were ten all told, including the first one, which looked like a cross between a crash helmet and a trapper’s cap, and the splendid wig he’d bought for his wedding day. Thus displayed, they were like an exhibition representing the different stages of his life. Then, to honor her mother, she cut out a photo of Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature from one of her back issues of Garbo and placed it inside Leo’s coffin. The new Samson and Delilah.

  After the funeral, Rita took stock of the fact that she was all alone in the world. Now that it was imposed on her, the wish she had so often flirted with, longing for it to come true, suddenly lost its charm. She was the perfect orphan, and it took her more than a year to get used to her new circumstances. When she finally did, she was a different person.

  The big blow was dealt by her father. Not wanting to go to university, Rita had left school at fifteen. Since then, she’d hung around at home claiming she was seeking her vocation in the various courses she’d enrolled for, including teach-yourself knitting, teach-yourself French, and a correspondence course for congress and trade fair hostesses. She was so spoiled that everything bored her. However, the deaths of Conrad and Leo put an end to her idleness, and at nine o’clock one morning she opened up the doors of New Samson.

  “Neither of my parents left a will, and I inherited the business, didn’t I? So the most logical thing was for me to take the helm,” Rita recalled years later. “All the fuss of the first few days bewildered me, and then it spurred me on. I’d helped out in the shop on occasion, but now I had to deal with all the ins and outs of the trade by myself. Clients came to pick up their orders, and I had to move half the storeroom to find them. The suppliers took advantage of my inexperience to palm off stock. Inside those four walls my father’s voice droned on, giving me nonstop advice. ‘The secret is to comb the wigs every day so they sit proudly on the heads of the mannequins,’ he said. ‘It’s very important to make sure that men, especially the older ones, lose their fear of trying on a wig. Leave them alone in front of the mirror. Give them privacy.’ I was so baffled and worried the first two weeks that I didn’t have time to decide whether I liked the work or not. The only thing I knew for sure was that when I cashed up before going home in the evening the numbers never squared. I studied the notebook where my father wrote down all the sales and purchases and didn’t understand the first thing. ‘You’ll have to take on an accountant,’ I reassured myself. One Friday, a formally dressed man with a briefcase—a salesman, I thought—came into the shop and, luckily (I can say it now), that was the end of it. It turned out that the gentleman wasn’t a salesman but a solicitor. He introduced himself and asked to see Senyor Conrad Manley. I told him that my father and mother had died very recently. He looked at me doubtfully. ‘This isn’t a joke, is it?’ I said no, it wasn’t. I was Conrad Manley’s daughter, and I was running the business now. He expressed his condolences and, looking even more serious, held out a piece of paper and then dealt the blow, ‘Senyoreta Manley, I suggest you find a good lawyer. I understand that you are in no way to blame, but your father, with all due respect, was a swindler. You will be served with the summons very soon.’ ”

  Oh, grandfather Conrad, what an imposter he was! Calling him a swindler, Christophers, is giving him kudos he doesn’t deserve. It would be more to the point to call him a bullshitter or even an utter crackpot. Rita was never really scared of her father. She knew him too well, but she had grown up with the fits of temper and attacks of fanaticism that would consume him for several days, after which he’d forget all about it with equal fervor.

  “Actually, I was a chip off the old block if you think about my fixation with starting dozens of correspondence courses and never finishing any,” Rita admits. “Completely out of the blue, for example, he’d get it into his head to make yogurt, and he’d fill the fridge with fermenting cultures. Or he’d spend a couple of weeks sending letters to all the newspapers complaining about the terrible state of the streets. Then there was a time when he sat down in front of the typewriter every night to work on his memoirs (which didn’t get past page twenty but he already had the title: Not a Dumb Hair on His Head).”

  A few days later, when the subpoena was delivered, Rita went to Raquel’s house and told her parents what had happened. Raquel’s father, who worked in a bank, found her a lawyer the following day. That afternoon they both came to New Samson to study the account books, the summons, and the suppliers’ bills of the past few months. Rita could hear them discussing the situation and arguing as they did the sums in the little office at the back. When they finally came out, the compassion on their faces betray
ed them.

  The two gentlemen explained to Rita what the figures revealed. The wig business had been heading for disaster for more than four months. Instead of looking for a reasonable solution, Conrad had opted for suicidal folly: He’d asked for a loan from the bank and had put up the shop as collateral. Maybe he’d intended to clear up his debts but, from what they’d seen, he hadn’t settled a single one. He’d spent almost half his remaining money on plane tickets and the hotel reservation in Paris. A travel agency bill they’d found crumpled up in the waste paper basket confirmed their suspicions.

  Conrad, as I’ve said, was impetuous, one of those people who is always all over the place, but this time his mental mayhem had got the upper hand. You could, perhaps, appreciate the touch of sick irony: The famous wholesaler who, he claimed, had invited them to Paris was in fact his biggest creditor.

  The lawyer’s conclusion was that Rita was set to lose everything. On his advice, therefore, she sold as much as she could, at a loss, before the month was out. An amateur dramatics group took the wigs, practically as a gift. A junk dealer from Carrer Tamarit bore off the furniture, the shelves, the mannequins, and the New Samson sign (and two decades later, in the early nineties, its luminous letters turned up at the Miró Foundation as part of an installation by a conceptual artist). By the time the judge ordered the premises to be sealed and handed over to the creditor bank, the space was only a nostalgic memory for a few nearby residents and clients, first as Martí Manley’s barbershop and then as Conrad Manley’s antagonistic New Samson. When she surrendered the keys to the bank officials, Rita wondered what would have happened to New Samson and to her and her parents after they returned from the trip to Paris. What would have become of them? What calamities would Conrad’s follies have brought about? A subversive idea, this time unintentional, began to take shape in her mind. Maybe the accident was a blessing in disguise.

  Meanwhile, in order to escape being sent to an orphanage, Rita had cultivated and embellished the lies surrounding her great-aunt from Sagunto. As the days went by, she learned to imagine her and to give her a body, a face, a name (Aunt Matilde). At first, she referred to her in conversations with the neighbors or when she was with Raquel’s parents, always portraying her as old and decrepit. “She’s got pains in her legs, and only goes out when she’s seeing the doctor,” Rita declared. “She came here to look after me, and now I’m the one who’s looking after her,” she claimed. The next step was to give her a voice. She practiced it when she was walking in the street so it would sound more natural at home. Aunt Matilde spoke Spanish and was deaf. Therefore the neighbors could hear her shouting through the open windows of the inside patio. Rita learned to invent conversations, trivial remarks, and even the odd argument. She’d position herself by the open kitchen window and yell, “What shall we have for lunch today, Aunt Matilde?” “Go to the market, dear, and get what we need for a chickpea stew . . . Bring me my purse.” If the phone rang, Aunt Matilde sometimes took the call and then handed the receiver to Rita. My mother never told anyone her secret, not even Raquel, as she was convinced that the smallest crack in her story would be her undoing. Anyway, Aunt Matilde kept her company and helped her to stay active and stave off loneliness.

  The farce lasted almost six months, until the autumn. Rita got by with the money from the New Samson sales plus some savings that Leo had kept in a drawer just in case, but that didn’t amount to much. She knew that when she came of age she’d get the money from the life insurance policy, a considerable sum but, meanwhile, she was poor or, more precisely, needy. Trying not to spend money, she stayed at home getting bored in front of the TV and eating only two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. Her reflection in the mirror stared back frail, wan, and exhausted. In her lowest moments she realized that if this went on much longer she’d be found out. Maybe that was what she needed. Then, when she was on the point of cracking up completely, a surprising stroke of luck stopped the downhill spiral and changed her life.

  Her guardian angel was the lawyer who’d informed her about the subpoena. And, yes, we should give his name. After all, although his turning up in the story is circumstantial, he did play a decisive role.

  “What was he called, Mom, do you remember?”

  “Of course I do. He was called . . . he was called . . . Carlos Bravo. It sounds like a singer’s name. But I called him Senyor Bravo. He had an office in Carrer Provença, near Rambla de Catalunya, above the Mauri pastry shop. He wasn’t far off retirement.”

  In his long, arduous journey through the courts, Senyor Bravo had become accustomed to dealing with charlatans and rotters as wily as sewer rats. Rita, the poor young girl who’d been left helpless and alone, was an exception, a victim, and he was fond of her. Not long after New Samson was impounded, Senyor Bravo phoned her one morning and asked her for a few details about her parents. If she gave him permission, he told her, he’d try to get some sort of compensation from Iberia or the airport. After all, somebody had to be responsible for the accident. Rita hung up and discussed it with Aunt Matilde—who told her to light a candle to Saint Rita, her patron saint and granter of impossible wishes—and never gave it another thought. Summer came, the August holidays went by, and one morning at the beginning of September Senyor Bravo phoned again.

  “Do you remember me, Senyoreta Manley?” he asked. “Carlos Bravo. I have good news for you, I believe. I’ve been making some inquiries and telephone calls to see if we can get compensation for what happened to your parents, but we haven’t had much luck. Iberia will pay some indemnity for damages, but, I warn you, it’s a pitiful sum. It’s better than nothing, of course, but I hoped to get you a lot more. In any case, I spoke to the people at the airport’s legal services, and, although they’re under no obligation to pay anything, they were moved by your case and they’ve come up with a proposal. It happens that, with the extensions they’re doing to the terminal at El Prat, they need to fill some new positions. If you’re interested in applying, and I most heartily advise you to do so, you have a job. I don’t know what area it is in but they’ve assured me that the salary is adequate and there are good possibilities for promotion.”

  Thus it was that, a few months later, just before her seventeenth birthday in January 1968, Rita started work at Barcelona airport. It was a tender age, which possibly worked in her favor since her job was to deal with indignant passengers at the Lost Luggage Office.

  As for Aunt Matilde, she packed her bags that very afternoon, and without saying good-bye to anyone, not even to Rita, she went back to Sagunto for the rest of her days.

  Thanks, Christophers, for allowing me to rescue these family dramas and antics from oblivion. Scissors and wigs. And now that we’ve left Rita working at the airport (we’re getting closer and closer, as you can see) and with a brighter future ahead of her, we have to go back to Germany again. I know we don’t want to return there, but that Saint Valentine’s Day morning of February 14, 1972, is calling.

  It was snowing heavily again, right? Bundó was asleep. The Pegaso driven by Gabriel was roaring down the motorway . . .

  Months later, after he’d met my mother and was still unsure about whether to pick up the pieces of his life, Gabriel poured out the whole story of the disaster. How long must he have been asleep at the wheel? Eight, ten seconds? Ten seconds at the most. Close your eyes and count to ten, Christophers. It’s nothing, but it’s also an eternity. It was enough for the truck to veer to the right, leave the road and, borne along by the thrust of its downhill run, hurtle about fifteen meters down a wooded slope. Gabriel remembered opening his eyes in the middle of a tremendous din, sounds he’d never heard before, and screaming in terror. The first image he had when he relived that moment was of a torrent of water washing over his face with supernatural force. Before the accident, our father had dreamed one night that he and his friends went off a bridge and fell into a river with the truck. The smashing of glass, the cracking of branches, the rain of mud, the confusion that had sprung from nowhere
. . . In the accident itself, all these elements eclipsed the nightmare.

  When the Pegaso finally came to a halt, in an almost vertical position with the cab squashed underneath, Gabriel took some seconds to get his thoughts together. His left arm, trapped between two creases in the buckled door, sent out the initial jabs of pain. He understood they’d had an accident. Fucking hell, he’d gone to sleep. While his brain was gaining consciousness, his right hand automatically groped for the ignition key and he turned the engine off. A wheel stopped revolving in emptiness. Then he understood the all-pervading silence, the false, intrusive, grotesque silence and immediately realized that Bundó was dead. He couldn’t see him. One of his eyes was veiled with blood. He shouted.

  “Bundó! Bundó! Wake up! Fuck!”

  The right side of the cab was less damaged by the impact. Though his posture looked uncomfortable, Bundó lay with his head resting on the door, the way he usually slept. Eyes closed. Three or four small cuts on his face were bleeding. Only one detail was different: the strange position of his neck, an impossible angle. Gabriel shook his friend’s body three or four times. Submitting to defeat, he clutched Bundó’s hand, trying to transmit life to him. Then he, too, was still.

  He didn’t deserve anything more.

  Incomprehensible shouts, coming closer and closer, briefly shook him from his concussion and kept him hazily awake.