Lost Luggage
Page 33
Opening bags and suitcases was the job Rita liked most. Often it was sufficient to undo a buckle or a knot, but sometimes they slashed open a fabric suitcase or even smashed the odd safety lock with a hammer. Then the contents were laid out in an orderly fashion on a long table in the hope of finding some sign of who the owner might be. Some of the Cage workers were revolted by the autopsy, put off by the unfamiliar smells emanating from a bag, or the strange ways of packing clothes, some of them dirty, or the chilly accusations from possessions whose privacy was violated. For Rita, in contrast, the operation was fascinating. It made her feel like a trainee detective. If no useful document was found in the luggage, she had a natural gift for turning up data that might be useful in the long run: a prescription matching a bottle of anti-depressants in a first-aid kit, an owner’s name inside the cover of a novel written in Italian, an ashtray and towels nicked from a hotel in Acapulco . . . If really valuable objects like watches and jewelery turned up, or if any bundle looked suspicious, they had to inform the Guardia Civil, who then took charge of the luggage until the owner was found.
Rita confesses that her inspections didn’t often end successfully, but she was certainly entertained by the task. She could regale us with a whole string of anecdotes that include, for example, cassocks and suspender belts in one bag (never reclaimed by the priest), a mummified monkey fetus and other articles of black magic, and then there was the gentleman from Galicia who’d emigrated to Chile and was going back after his holidays at home with a box full of dry bread for his chickens. She also recognizes now, all these years later, that her effectiveness was limited because she herself sabotaged it. As you’ll soon see, if the contents of a suitcase looked valuable, she returned it to the storeroom without a word to anyone, thus condemning it to oblivion in the depths of the Cage. Oblivion so absolute that, in the end, the piece of baggage melted away for ever.
Now, as you see, Christophers, Rita had no problems in adapting to a working existence. She threw herself into it with an enthusiasm that her workmates in the Cage found hard to explain. Her salary was nothing to write home about, but she could certainly get by while she waited to turn twenty-one and thus become eligible to receive the bounty of her parents’ life insurance policy, a tidy little pile.
Anyway, this portrait of Rita on February 16, 1972, just before Gabriel turns up in her life, would be incomplete if we didn’t take her off-duty hours into account. Since starting her job at the Cage, her private life had suffered. Inspecting suitcases satisfied, in an illusory way, the longing for adventure that befitted her age. Her timetable didn’t help either: She had to work one weekend in three and she wasn’t seeing her old friends so often. When they did go out together she realized that their priorities had diverged. She didn’t want to run away and travel the world like Raquel, who was now studying at the University of Barcelona, and neither did she dream of marrying the first fellow who crossed her path and having lots of children. “You’re okay. Your life’s sorted,” the more conformist among them said with a touch of envy that she never quite understood. Furthermore, stranded in the seclusion of her orphanhood, she hadn’t been able to change any aspect of her life. It was as if time had dropped anchor in that definitive Saturday afternoon, as she slumbered in her adolescent’s bedroom. In the early days of her solitude she emptied the wardrobes and took her parents’ clothes to the parish church, but that’s as far as it went. Too many memories and too much dust to get rid of. She kept the main bedroom shut off and in darkness, as if amputated from the rest of the house. When she cooked herself dinner she ate it sitting in the chair where she’d always sat.
“The truth of the matter,” Mom says, “is that I was twenty years old and about to become a premature spinster. Luckily your father turned up to save me.”
Or not so luckily. It had more to do with Garbo than Gabriel, I tell her. She accepts the provocation and responds with a wry smile. Within a few months, the job at the airport with all its ruses, fiddles, and pillaging had helped to ease the burden of being alone in the world. However, it didn’t encourage romance. Her workmates in the Cage were family men or too old and, as I said, her friends were either too mindless or too daredevil. Under these circumstances, the pages of Garbo became her only other escape. Every Friday afternoon she spent five pesetas on the new issue. Then she sat down for a snack in the bar La Valenciana, on the corner of Gran Via and Carrer Aribau, losing herself in its glamorous, starry world. Farah Diba spent all winter skiing in Saint Moritz with Maria Pia of Savoy doing her bit as friend and confidante, while Raquel Welch modeled the hairstyle for anyone who wanted to be fashionable. Rita wasn’t dreaming about white knights and neither was she naive enough to believe everything she read about that heavenly world. Nevertheless, these privileged women did reinforce her growing intuition that life is a battle of random forces and it’s better to meet it full on than try to run away.
Then again, there was the matter of the horoscope. Not long after her parents’ funeral, as she was flipping through a new issue of Garbo, Rita recalled the exactitude with which this so-called Argos had anticipated the accident and her parents’ deaths. She read his predictions for Cancer and was amazed once again. “Days of unexpected changes. Be strong and the future will reward you,” he advised. She immediately wrote a letter to the astrologer congratulating him on his psychic powers. The man or woman hiding behind the pseudonym didn’t answer, but that didn’t discourage her. When she looked up the magazine’s address, she discovered that the editorial office was very close to home, in Carrer Tallers, number 62, and she turned up there one free afternoon asking to speak to “Senyor Argos.” The receptionist soon got rid of her. No, that was impossible. Nobody except for the director knew who was hiding behind the enigmatic name. Argos sent the copy by post every week but never put a return address on the envelope.
This aura of mystery only encouraged Rita and she obsessively analyzed her horoscope thereafter. On Fridays, even before leaving the kiosk, she opened the magazine at the horoscope page and read what he had to say about her life. Argos’s words were a fine example of an oracle’s wisdom: sufficiently imprecise and yet sufficiently personal to speak to her desires without provoking too many doubts. She gradually broadened her field of interest and asked her colleagues at the airport what sign they were. If she could see Porras and Sayago arguing over some stupid thing, or that Leiva was dragging his broom around in a way that looked too taciturn, she consulted the horoscope and always found a plausible explanation.
As tends to happen with such fixations, there came a time when Garbo’s weekly horoscope was no longer enough. Since she’d begun work at the airport, as Argos had predicted (“Professional News”), her life had become increasingly complex. Now she was dealing with more people than before and talking to strangers every day, so there were more possibilities for chance to play its part. She needed to be prepared for this, but Garbo’s soothsaying fell short of the mark.
One winter Saturday she stumbled upon the help she needed. Not long before, she’d lost her house keys—probably after dropping them in the street—and she decided to get the lock changed because she was worried about thieves. She wanted to make a copy of the new keys and then remembered that her mother always went to a locksmith in Avinguda de la Llum. In case you don’t know, Christophers, this was the name given to an underground gallery beneath Carrer Pelai, right next to Plaça de Catalunya. Clustered together in the artificial glare of its fluorescent light were the entrance to the railway station, a bar, a cinema and a few shops. Rita went down the steps next to Carrer Bergara and entered Avinguda de la Llum. Although it was Saturday afternoon there weren’t many people around. The air was thick and sweet, mingled with the aromas of fresh-baked biscuits and soot. Nicotine-yellow columns on either side made the long narrow corridor look like a burial crypt. Or the interior of a dinosaur’s trachea. She dodged the stragglers leaving the cinema, their eyes still adjusting to the light, and looked for the locksmith’s booth.
Rita returned twice more to Avinguda de la Llum. Jorgito the Magician needed to study her astrological profile. We don’t know how much she forked out for the whole thing—no doubt more than she should have—but she eventually came to see it as a good investment. The magician divided his predictions between three different areas: health, money, and love. Rita wasn’t concerned about health and money. However, she did want to know more about this very ambiguous, very strange thing called love. Therefore, after her third visit, she had a slightly better idea of her emotional fate. With his reading of the mutual attraction between certain signs of the zodiac and the planets influencing the ascendant, Jorgito the Magician was able to give her a detailed profile of her ideal man. A roaming adventurous spirit (the magician knew by now that Rita worked at the airport), without family ties (he’d been informed she was an orphan), born in Barcelona, or in Stockholm, Paris, or New York (all with direct flights to El Prat—what a coincidence) or within a hundred kilometers of these cities and, above all—and this was highly important; this was crucial!—his birth date had to be between November 10 and December 7, 1941. These two dates guaranteed perfect symbiosis between the ascendants of her and her future suitor’s zodiac signs.
No, Christophers, if you’re thinking I’m going to say that fits with Gabriel’s birth date, you’re dead wrong. That’s too easy. Chance isn’t so easily manipulated.
The following Monday, after her final visit to Jorgito the Magician—I can hardly bear to pronounce such a ridiculous name!—Rita had memorized the dates almost to saturation point. Her brain was running amok, repeating them again and again like some pop song you can’t get out of your head. When the first male client of the day approached the Cage, she went through the standard procedure and asked for his passport in order to fill out the form. He was a pleasant man, handsome, athletic-looking, about thirty years old, of reserved character, and Rita’s eyes raced to discover his date of birth. On seeing that it didn’t match her dates, that it was more than a year out, she was hit by the first of the day’s disappointments. There followed so many more, caused by so many men that, eventually, she almost took perverse pleasure in the experience. The mere possibility of success was the prize.
In the first months, until she got used to the recurring frustration, Rita was in a state of constant emotional turmoil. When she saw that the passenger’s birth date coincided with the days of November or December specified by the astrologer, even if the year was wrong, she prolonged the proceedings and delved into his personal life. Sometimes she got so carried away that she lost control and asked inappropriate questions.
“Oh yes, and are you married?” she’d say, adopting a scientific air, at which point her workmates looked up. Some observed her in amazement while others laughed at her boldness.
“No, I’m not married,” the passenger replied indignantly. “And, frankly, I don’t see what that’s got to do with my lost luggage.”
“Indeed it is connected,” she answered. “If you were married, it’s quite likely that your wife would have packed the bag and put an address tag on it. Women are always more farsighted.”
Every comment, every reaction helped her to construct the image of her ideal man. To yearn for him, too, without even knowing him. One day, for example, she attended to a young woman from Mallorca who’d lost her bag. She asked for her identity card, as she did with everyone, and automatically checked the date of birth. November 11, 1941! With a fluttering heart and in a state of great agitation, she treated the woman so effusively that she took fright. Rita says she’d never been so close to her target and immediately felt attracted to the stranger even if she wasn’t a man, but she lost her chance to probe any further because the woman went off somewhat confused and with the uneasy sensation that she’d revealed half her life to a stranger. Two days later the bag turned up, and Rita dealt with it personally. She locked herself in the autopsy room and examined its contents with great care: two floral dresses, underwear, a makeup bag with beauty creams, some beach shoes, an Ursula Andress–style bikini, a novel by Françoise Sagan . . . Rita stared at it all with idiotic devotion but suddenly understood that these things didn’t make her feel any love for the woman. On the contrary, like the belongings of an older sister who’d had better luck in life, they only aroused uneasy feelings of unjustified envy. She put everything back in the bag before getting it sent to the woman’s address but, at the last minute, she had a slight change of heart and kept the bikini. Out of spite. When she got home that evening she tried it on. It looked good in the mirror, tailor-made for her, but when she mimicked Ursula Andress’s goddess pose in that James Bond film (she’d cut out the photo from an old issue of Garbo) her bravado collapsed into pathetic farce. She felt sorry for herself.
Rita kept waiting for the man the stars had decreed for her, but a thousand similar obstacles and disappointments lay ahead. Within the security of the Cage she learned not to get excited about it. Her fantasy lost some of its luster with each setback. The tricks of the calendar seemed less cruel, and, in time, some near misses even brightened up her day. Then, without any warning, as tends to happen with tempests, tragedies, and miracles, the glorious day of February 16, 1972, came along.
The plane slowed, the wheels touched the ground with a shudder and Gabriel inhaled deeply several times, as if he’d been holding his breath for the two long hours of the flight. Never again. It was the first and last time he ever traveled by plane. His truck driver’s body was accustomed to the vibrations of engine and asphalt, when the wheels transmitted to his legs the throbbing of the road, gravity and movement and his hands gripped a steering wheel. How can you drive a vehicle that’s suspended in the air? Really, how could anyone want to do that? They’d given him a window seat next to the right-hand wing. He’d never liked birds.
The melodious voice of one of the hostesses welcomed them to Barcelona airport. Now that they were returning home, the image of Bundó lying in his coffin came to him again. They’d closed his eyes and concealed his wounds with makeup. The German customs police had made Gabriel identify him and then sign the necessary papers. Nevertheless, over the last few days, from the moment of the accident and, in particular, in the hospital Gabriel had not really faced up to the reality of his friend’s death. Now that they were coming back to the point of departure, the origin of it all, he noticed how this new absence weighed on him and how differently he felt. The plane came to a stop. An unbearable heaviness churned in his stomach, like a bag of cement in a mixer. The last move to Hamburg, their final leave-taking from Petroli, and even the peaceful image of Bundó sleeping in the cab were distant memories with all the incongruence of make-believe. The passengers around him prepared to disembark, but he was paralyzed. He’d never be able to get up
from that seat. A hostess tapped him gently on the shoulder. He was the last to leave the plane. Outside, he could see two members of the Guardia Civil and a hearse waiting for him on the tarmac.
Repatriating a corpse means entering a bureaucratic nightmare. The two men of the Guardia Civil were accompanied by a notary sent by La Ibérica’s insurance company and someone from the funeral home. On that dark, overcast, typical February morning, the four men stood motionless next to the black hearse, a sinister tableau that would bring anyone out in goose pimples. It was as if everything had been prepared for a duel in which Gabriel had been challenged to fight. The notary requested the copies of papers given to Gabriel by the German police and, after checking them and signing them, handed them to the Guardia Civil. He then informed Gabriel that Senyor Casellas had come to meet him. He was greatly distressed and waiting at the international arrivals door. Given the absence of any family members, if he had no objections, they’d decided that Bundó’s funeral would be held the following afternoon in the El Vendrell parish church. Gabriel said yes to everything. After the service they’d go to the cemetery and lay him to rest next to his parents.
On the evening of that first day in the hospital in Kassel, Gabriel, in a moment of lucidity, realized that he had to phone Carolina. It had to be him, had to be his voice that pronounced the dreadful words.
“Something terrible happened this morning, Carolina. We had an accident. I’m so sorry. Poor Bundó is dead.”