Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  Thank goodness for the snow, Christophers. It was seven o’clock in the morning and there wasn’t much traffic. A minute after the Pegaso left the road, a Turk driving a worn-out Mercedes understood the meaning of the lines traced by wheels on snow-covered asphalt. For some kilometers, for safety’s sake, he’d been trying to keep his wheels on the thick constant tracks made by the truck’s tires, but the straightness of the two parallel lines suddenly ended, swerving gracefully off toward the hard shoulder and disappearing into nothingness. He braked in time, resisting the impulse to follow the lines to the end, and stopped his car by the side of the road. Then he saw the wreck of the Pegaso beneath him, a dark patch smoking among the trees, and he ran down along the path the truck had opened up.

  “Alles in Ordnung? Hören Sie mich? Sagen Sie was!”

  In the retelling, Gabriel wasn’t sure whether he lost consciousness at this point, but the last thing he remembered from inside the truck was the face of this man, shocked, or numb with cold, looking at him through the window with his head upside down, opening his mouth to say something. The next thing he knew he was on the motorway, in an ambulance, surrounded by cars and emergency lights. A male nurse from the Red Cross was immobilizing his left arm—broken in two places near the elbow—and another one was cleaning the wounds on his face and neck with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. His forehead, nose, and one cheek were scored all over with scratches and cuts from shards of glass. The circumspect silence of the two nurses presaged the terrible news but, lying on the stretcher on his way to hospital, he asked one of the nurses about Bundó.

  “Mein Freund?”

  The nurse shook his head.

  He spent all that day and the next in a hospital in Kassel. First they took X-rays of his arm and set it in a cast. Then they kept him under observation. Frankfurt wasn’t far away, and we don’t know if he thought about phoning Sigrun or not. The fact is he didn’t. As I see it, Christophers, if he had phoned her we probably wouldn’t have come to this point, which we can now interpret as the very first sign of Gabriel’s long period of inactivity. Meanwhile, another ambulance had taken Bundó along the motorway to the hospital morgue. A crane had recovered the wreckage of the poor Pegaso, and the German police checked the vehicle’s papers. They identified the transport company, phoned Barcelona, and informed Senyor Casellas of the accident.

  Halfway through the afternoon when Gabriel was starting to feel cut off from everything, he was visited by the secretary of the Spanish consulate in Frankfurt. The man looked familiar. They’d done his move a couple of years earlier. After expressing his condolences over Bundó’s death, the secretary informed him that the consul—another former client of La Ibérica—had received a call from Senyor Casellas asking for help and advice. Naturally, Senyor Casellas wished to convey his support, express his sympathy because he knew Bundó was Gabriel’s best friend—and wish him a swift recovery. The secretary also informed him of some practical matters. The consulate had arranged for the German branch of La Ibérica’s insurance company to take charge of the wreckage of the truck, which was a complete write-off. If the doctors confirmed that he had no internal injuries, as they hoped, they’d reserved a seat for him on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Barcelona the day after next, on February 16th, in the morning. If he had no objection, the body of Senyor Serafí Bundó would be repatriated on the same flight and, needless to say, the consulate, prepared for such matters, would also supply an emergency coffin for the occasion.

  Gabriel heard the secretary out, agreeing mechanically or answering in monosyllables. Although he hated the situation he was in, the pen-pusher’s diplomatic smoothness was a help. The painkillers they’d given him were making him groggy, and his brain was grateful for the rest. Not thinking. Letting go. When the consular underling had taken his leave, however, memory crept into the lonely hospital room. When the secretary and his family had moved to Frankfurt, the three La Ibérica movers had mislaid a bag containing sports clothing. The shared booty was meager, mainly tracksuits, sneakers, tennis socks that nobody wanted, and swimming goggles. Although it was hardly his size, Bundó got it into his head that he wanted an apparently brand-new and aristocratic-looking man’s dressing gown, in navy-blue toweling and decorated with a shield on the breast pocket. Now, when he recognized the original owner, tall, slender, and mournful-looking, Gabriel had a flashback of Bundó wearing the dressing gown. He’d worn it for a while when they were living at the pension. He put it on when he came out of the shower or over his pajamas at night and the effect was hilarious. Since he was shorter than its original owner and on the tubby side, the dressing gown was a tight fit so he couldn’t quite keep it together with the belt and the two front corners trailed on the floor. When he was walking around in it, Gabriel used to say he looked like a king in a cape, a medieval king fed up with the rabble and about to condemn all the boarding-house riffraff to death. The vision brought a painful smile—tugging the stitches of one of his cuts—and then he slept, out of pure exhaustion.

  A day and a half later, on the Wednesday morning when they came to take him to the airport, he was no longer befuddled. Without the painkillers turning his brain to mush, reality kicked in with piercing force. Every second without Bundó at his side drilled through his temples like Chinese water torture. The guilt tormented him. Under such a sky, the future could only get worse. He’d never been on a plane, but this fear was engulfed by other fears. A contest of fears. And it was only eight in the morning.

  From the hospital door, dressed in clothes they’d supplied, he saw two black cars pulling up. One was the hearse that had just picked up Bundó’s coffin. The other was driven by the consulate chauffeur, who got out and opened the back door, but Gabriel gave him to understand that he wanted to sit next to him in the front seat. He was no big shot. Once he was in the car, the chauffeur gave him a folder bearing the emblem of the Spanish consulate in Frankfurt and a black canvas bag. He opened it. Inside he found a few personal effects of Bundó’s and other things retrieved from the Pegaso, like a bottle opener and his sunglasses, still intact. They’d been useful once but now they made him angry. There was also a shirt and trousers belonging to Bundó, impeccably washed and ironed thanks to the good offices of the consulate staff. They were the clothes he’d changed into after the move to Hamburg, and Gabriel had some trouble identifying them. Bundó was a slave to his own fads, and that had been his favorite shirt for some months. They’d nicked it from a move to Bonn (Number 188), and he liked it, he said, because it had the three great qualities a working shirt should have in winter: Being made of flannel it was warm, it let him move freely because it was loose on him, and it didn’t show the dirt. That third reason wasn’t objective. Bundó was always covered in food stains, but he didn’t care. When Gabriel or Petroli pointed it out he laughed at them and started looking for geographical shapes in his stains—a tomato-sauce Italy, an aioli Iberian peninsula, a chocolate-ice-cream Africa. The flannel shirt was black-and-white herringbone, modern and very eye-catching, and the stains were fairly well camouflaged. Now, the sight of that shirt, so soft and neat with a starched collar, crushed Gabriel even more. It was as if they’d stolen the essence of his friend.

  To keep his mind off it, he opened the consulate folder. Someone, maybe the secretary himself, had put his plane ticket inside and, in a neat pile, the documents they’d been able to rescue from the cab. He found his passport and Bundó’s, the waybills, the Pegaso papers, his international driving licence, postcards nobody had written on, a few maps ripped at the edges (Bundó always folded them badly), a crumpled leaflet about the Via Favència apartments, Petroli’s list of Spanish emigrant centers, and several other documents. He flipped listlessly through the papers and was once again caught off guard by Bundó’s presence in all of them.

  Gabriel recognized his own handwriting on one scrap of paper. On it were a few sums from the day when they distracted themselves as they traveled by calculating how many kilometers they’d covered toge
ther in the Pegaso. Another newer sheet of paper bore the La Ibérica letterhead with its drawing of a truck crossing a map of Europe. Here, Gabriel read a series of dates, times, and doctors’ names. It had been typed up by the secretary, Rebeca, and, taking in the details, Gabriel felt the thrust of their perfidious dagger. They projected a future that would never exist for him and Bundó. Every two years La Ibérica’s drivers had to pass a medical checkup confirming they were fit to drive the trucks. The checkups were done in the insurance company clinic, and Rebeca arranged them two months in advance to fit in with the moving schedule. Bundó and Gabriel always did their checkups together. Senyor Casellas insisted on this, to kill two birds with one stone, he said, and to make sure they didn’t forget. The day they were getting ready to leave for Hamburg, about to commence fatal move number 199, Rebeca had called Gabriel into the office and handed him copies of her list.

  Dates of medical examinations of Gabriel Delacruz and Serafí Bundó

  (Yes, I know it would be better to do it all in one day but it’s impossible.)

  Place: Transport Insurance Company. Clínica Platón, Calle Platón, 33.

  Thursday, April 20, 9 a.m. Blood test. It has to be done on an empty stomach—and that means no breakfast, Bundó.

  Friday, April 28, 10 a.m. Oculist. Doctor Trabal.

  Friday, May 5, 10:30 a.m. Ear, nose, and throat. Doctor Sadurní.

  Monday, May 8, 9 a.m. General checkup. Doctor Pacharán.

  Gabriel was gripped by the strange power of the papers, so painful yet so reassuring, and couldn’t stop fiddling with them until the car got on to the motorway. Then he took out the plane ticket, his passport and Bundó’s, and returned the folder to the black bag. A few kilometers farther on, when they were nearing the scene of the accident, Gabriel asked the driver to stop there.

  “Zwei minuts,” he said. “Es importante.”

  Slowly, finding it hard to keep his balance because of the unwieldy cast, he went down the slope alone. The chauffeur watched from the top. They’d taken the Pegaso away the day before, and all that was left now was a strip of razed vegetation and churned-up ground. Flattened bushes and a smattering of glass indicated the spot where the truck had stopped its downward slide. Beyond that, a layer of frozen snow covered everything. He went down a little farther. Here and there were scraps of metal, a fragment of a tire, a splinter from the rearview mirror. Why did he want to return to the scene of the accident? Three weeks later, still unable to cry, he told himself it was his first attempt to summon the tears. On the day itself, however, he tortured himself with a scathing thought: “The killer always returns to the scene of the crime.” The driver whistled from the top, signaling for him to come up. They were going to miss the plane. Gabriel lingered a moment longer. It was a bright day and the snow was melting in patches. Something was missing . . . With the tip of his shoe he poked at the ground among the fallen leaves. The chauffeur whistled again, now impatiently, and just as he was about to desist, to begin the retreat, his right foot hit something soft. That was it. He picked it up, pleased to find the black oilcloth notebook, the record of their thefts, the truest biography of his adventure on God’s earth with Bundó and Petroli.

  He got back into the car, and the funeral procession made its way to the airport.

  That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it, Christophers? “Facts!” you were saying. Well, now you’ve got facts. One after another, linked up and synchronized as if orchestrated by some capricious and mocking god. And we’re not done yet. Not by a long shot! Gabriel and Bundó’s body are flying to Barcelona. It’s the first time our father’s been on a plane, but he’s so overwhelmed by the facts—the facts!—that he’s not aware of anything. Meanwhile, at the airport, Rita’s well into another day at work in the Cage, as she called it.

  If you do the sums, you’ll realize that, by this February 16, 1972, Rita had been working at the airport for more than four years. Conrad and Leo were slowly filling the space she had reserved for them among her other memories. They had priority, of course, but they remained cut off, fixed in time, and mythologized somehow, as you’ll soon see. Along the way, motherless and fatherless, she’d discovered the security afforded by daily routine and a salary at the end of the month. Her working hours at the Lost Luggage Office had, from the very start, given momentum to her sense of independence. She was now used to waking up early and getting up by herself, for example. At seven she took a bus to the airport. Once there an hour later, she donned a uniform that made her feel like an air hostess and applied the lipstick that would frame her smile when, scrupulously following the instructions she’d been given, she began the day’s work of dealing with irate clients. Rita started as a novice but had mastered all the tricks of the trade within a couple of months. They’d chosen her for her youthful innocence and sweet angel face that disarmed the most belligerent members of the general public. Like everyone else who worked in the office, her first duty was to be the target of their wrath. The scapegoat. She had to listen to the passengers’ complaints and demands and make them believe that they’d been very unlucky, that such a thing rarely happened.

  “Early in the morning,” my mother told me, reminiscing about those times, “I used to get the more fuddled, better-mannered passengers. They’d just staggered off a transatlantic flight, disoriented with jet lag, not knowing whether it was day or night, and then they discovered that the company had lost their bags. As I tried to get them to understand that their luggage was still in Buenos Aires or New York, and that it would come without fail the next day, on the next flight, they slumped over the counter and answered listlessly. Their eyes were half shut with fatigue. It was incredibly difficult to get them to fill out the form, but, after that, most of them wandered off, resigned and uncomplaining. You have to understand, it was different then. Now any Tom, Dick, and Harry can travel, but not in those days. The tickets were expensive, and the passengers got princely treatment from the airline companies . . . The businessmen started arriving after eleven, most of them with a young secretary. You could tell from their mood if the girl was also on bedroom duty. If they were foreigners, one of my colleagues who spoke a bit of English took my place. If they were South Americans or Spanish, I dealt with them. Needless to say, I always got the worst ones. Such airs and graces these idiots had! It was so obvious that the Franco regime had filled their pockets, and I say pockets because they didn’t even carry a wallet but went around with bundles of notes held together with a rubber band. Uptight and boorish, they were escaping for a few days from their dingy cities and towns, believing that they’d be met in Barcelona with a red carpet and everyone bowing and scraping. Often, the only way to calm them down was to solicit the support of the secretary. “I wish to apologize in the name of the airline company, Mr. So-and-So. I cannot tell you how much we regret the inconvenience caused to you and your wife,’ I used to say and, if necessary, resorted to the double whammy. ‘Goodness me, you wouldn’t be on your honeymoon, would you? You seem so much in love . . .’ The men always went red or got tangled up in a thousand explanations, and then the women took over. Without denying anything, they gave me the name of the hotel where we could send the luggage once we’d recovered it and graciously accepted the vanity case we presented them with. Some of them even winked at me when they said good-bye, like coconspirators. After midday, tourists and other travelers who’d had to come to Barcelona for whatever reason replaced the businessmen. These were people who’d boarded the plane with a problem and who, on disembarking, found they had two. Lunchtime was coming up and, instead of being in a restaurant or back at home, they had to line up to reclaim a lost suitcase. These were the most difficult hours. The atmosphere in the terminal was charged, and everybody was more irritable. Then, if someone raised his or her voice unnecessarily, or insisted on calling the Guardia Civil, I had to resort to my secret strategy, my private commemoration of Leo and Conrad. ‘Please don’t let it upset you so much,’ I’d quietly tell the complaining individual. ‘I
t could have been worse . . .’ At this point I threw in a dramatic pause, adopting my orphan’s pose, after which I added, ‘Like with my parents.’ The rest of the sentence was left dangling in the air, and the client, without fail, took the bait after a couple of seconds. ‘And what happened to your parents, young lady, may I ask?’ By now the tone had mellowed. Then I only had to mention the accident (which everybody remembered), sparing no gory details, and ending with a stagy lie. ‘You might remember me because I appeared in that news program about the accident. I was the lost-looking girl in the cemetery while the voice-over announced that the disaster took a large number of innocent lives and left a trail of disconsolate orphans in its wake.’ The news program never existed, of course, but I always won them over, I can assure you.”

  The claims office was hidden away in an ill-lit corner of the airport, on the ground floor behind the baggage carousels. It had two windows and a desk for attending to the public. Inside, behind a permanently closed door, was a large room crammed to the ceiling with lost suitcases, boxes, bundles, and all sorts of mind-boggling things. Four people worked each shift, two attending to the passengers and two in the storeroom. Rita called the office the Cage, not so much because of the daily claustrophobia and confinement but because, for her, it evoked the animal kingdom.

  “When we’re attending to the passengers we sound like parrots,” she used to say.

  After some months of dealing with the public, she was instructed in the other two occupations of the Cage, which took place in the back room. First, they had to put in order and write a description of the ownerless bags, which Rita thought was the most boring task. When an item was left behind, dizzy after a hundred rounds on the carousel, one of the airport workers picked it up and delivered it to the Cage. The person in charge that shift then produced a basic description: size, color, weight, and other external details that might help with identification. If the piece bore a label with a name and address, or if it was claimed by telephone the same day, the next flight took it to wherever it had to go. However, if it was still unclaimed after a week, it went into the storeroom and was then ready for an “autopsy,” as the denizens of the Cage called it.