Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  Carolina went mute. Gabriel clung to the receiver with a trembling hand and waited in silence. He could picture her. She’d been waiting all day, a nervous wreck in her room at the Papillon, fearing the worst. She’d been counting the hours, listening for the engine of the Pegaso rumbling into the parking lot, hoping Bundó would arrive before Saint Valentine’s Day was over. After a minute, her desperate sobbing got louder. Then, much later, came the tearful question: Where was he? She needed to see him. She couldn’t bear a single minute more without seeing him. Gabriel finally convinced her to go directly to Barcelona. On Wednesday morning they were going to take Bundó to Via Favència so they could keep the vigil in his home, as was right and proper.

  Shit, Christophers. What a terrible thing. Sorry it’s such a sad story, but it had to be told and now it’s done.

  Airport workers and the young man from the funeral home took the coffin off the plane and put it in the hearse. Then, prompted by the notary, Gabriel gave the driver the exact Via Favència address. Carolina would probably be in the apartment by now. When the notary and hearse had left, the two men of the Guardia Civil accompanied our father to the baggage collection area. In Frankfurt, they’d made him check in the black canvas bag containing Bundó’s personal effects and other items rescued from the Pegaso. They went to pick it up from the carousel, but it wasn’t there. All the passengers from his flight had gone. The red tape involved in getting the coffin out of the airport had taken up almost an hour, and the two policemen escorted him to the lost luggage office. The bag must have been taken there.

  Gabriel followed them robotically. He was so bereft of willpower, so knocked out, that he would have followed them all the way to hell that morning. As usual, the two Guardia Civil flirted with the girl in the office, telling some crude joke or other. Then they informed her that this gentleman had arrived on the flight from Frankfurt, after which, touching their three-cornered hats in a salute, they returned to their sentry box. Rita treated the passenger with professional formality but soon realized she wasn’t getting through. The man was in a bad way, consumed by some unidentifiable problem. His movements were sluggish, suggesting that any moment now he might stop in his tracks and never move again. The cast on his arm only accentuated his fragile appearance. She asked him to describe the bag. Gabriel was correct in saying it was black, black cloth. She made a note of that on the form and then asked for some document. It could be his passport or identity card. Then, with some support from his immobilized arm, Gabriel opened the folder containing the documents, some of which spilled on to the table. Rita picked up the first passport she saw.

  It was Bundó’s.

  She opened it at the page she needed and, as always, her eyes rushed to the date of birth: November 29, 1941. The world stood still and she almost screamed. She looked up, stared at the face of the vulnerable man, and read the date again: November. 29. 1941. She felt like somebody checking the numbers on a winning lottery ticket. Stifling her emotion, she flipped through the pages of the passport and saw all the customs stamps. To cap it all, he was a traveler. By the time she turned the last page she was all his. She’d do anything to get to know this stranger.

  Gabriel was totally out of it. Rita gripped the passport hard, without even looking at the photo—why would she need to if he was standing right in front of her?—and wrote down the name of the man of her dreams: Serafí Bundó Ventosa. How delightful it sounded! Her writing was wobbly, which made her realize she wasn’t paying enough attention to the man himself. She had to speak to him, hear his voice, learn more about him. Of course, the address! What if he wasn’t from Barcelona? She asked for his address, and Gabriel hesitated. He was so far away from everything, it was hard for him to collect his thoughts to the extent of knowing where he lived. If, indeed, he was still alive. Finally, he gave her the boarding house address. Ronda de Sant Antoni, number 70. In Barcelona? Yes. As she jotted it down, Rita realized it was very close to home. They were neighbors. “Less than two hundred steps apart,” she thought. To hide her excitement, and also to hurry things along, she said, “Ah, we live in the same neighborhood . . . I could bring you the bag myself, tomorrow, when it turns up.” Distracted, Gabriel agreed although he’d imagined they’d give it to him right away. Rita respected his shyness. She was dying to ask him more but, what with the turmoil of her emotions, nothing came to her. For the first time ever, she was afraid of intimidating a passenger. Trying to play for time, she asked him to sign the form. Gabriel produced some unintelligible scrawl and, before her astonished gaze, reclaimed the passport, turned on his heel with a mumbled good-bye, and shambled off. Rita took a while to react, and, when she did, calling out his name, he didn’t hear her. Instead of despairing, she took the form, reread the name and address, and let him go. It didn’t matter. She had the token. It was written in the stars that the black canvas bag would bring them together when it turned up the next day.

  Gabriel followed the arrows pointing to the exit. On the other side of the terminal, the farthest point from the Cage, he walked past the last carousel. A lonely bag was going around and around. He went over. Although it looked the same, it wasn’t his bag but, at the time, his mind wasn’t functioning properly. He recognized it only because there was no other bag. Not understanding anything, not wondering about anything, he picked it up and went outside to be met by Senyor Casellas. The two men of the Guardia Civil saluted him awkwardly from their sentry box.

  3

  * * *

  Mysteries and Swoonings

  Vati. Daddy. Papa. Pare. Is that what we called him? Did we ever get used to it? Did we stop thinking about him all those years ago? Our work’s piling up. We have to trust our mothers’ word. When we ask them about it, they say Gabriel liked us calling him that, was proud of it, asked for it, but admit that we almost always referred to him in the context of his distance or absence. Where’s Daddy? Daddy’s coming tomorrow. Come on, listen to the telephone. Daddy wants to say hello. No, Daddy’s not here now. You want to know when Daddy’s coming, little one? We could make a list of all the excuses and lies our mothers had to invent once he’d stopped visiting us, but those pages would be too sad.

  Yes, our work’s piling up. It could well be that our zeal for pinning down the past is an instinctive reaction to our loss, our protection against the uncertainties of the future. Now that we Christophers have got used to hanging around in February 1972—“mea culpa,” Cristòfol concedes—the present is rebeling and wants a share of the limelight. We fixed the date for our next meeting in Barcelona. At two o’clock on Friday we met for lunch in Can Soteras, a restaurant on Avinguda Diagonal frequented by Senyor Casellas thirty years ago when he wanted to impress some client or other. After that, we walked down Passeig de Sant Joan to the Arc de Triomf and then to Carrer Nàpols. It was a long time since we’d been in the mezzanine apartment. The weekend plan was to follow the trail of Gabriel’s movements around the neighborhood. While we were having lunch, Christof came up with some news that impressed us all: He and Cristoffini had located a truck cemetery on the outskirts of Kassel. Thanks to the Spanish license plate, they’d then discovered the poor Pegaso’s wreckage on the edge of the dump. After more than twenty-five years, the cab was more or less holding its own. It was full of rust holes, and the inside was a forest of moss and dead leaves. Its wheels, windshield, lights, and steering wheel were gone. Rain had rotted the seats. Naturally they took photos of it. They even climbed up inside it and, contorting themselves, squeezed into the driver’s seat and touched what remained of the gear stick. They rummaged around and found almost nothing. The truck cemetery owner said that if they wanted what was left of the Pegaso he’d give it to them. Cristoffini was all for it, but Christof’s good sense won the day and they left with the license plate, a miraculously intact 1972 Pirelli calendar, and a cracked hand mirror that had well and truly used up its requisite seven years of bad luck. How many times would it have reflected Bundó’s face when he was sprucing up to visit the Pa
pillon?

  We were still amusing ourselves with our speculating when we got to the mezzanine floor. Cristòfol opened the door. We went in and spread out around the apartment as if it was ours. Christof went to the bathroom, Chris raised the blind of the dining-room window, Christophe went into the kitchen, and Cristòfol went into the study to get some papers. Perhaps not in that exact order, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that the apartment suddenly went quiet. We regrouped in the dining room a moment later. We walked on tiptoe and we all looked as if we’d seen a ghost. We had no evidence—no dirty plate in the kitchen sink, no ashtray with a couple of butts in it in the study—but we were all certain that somebody had been there. I don’t know what it was but there was something, some detail we’d picked up at a glance, some strange noise . . . As if we needed confirmation, Christophe put a finger to his lips, “Ssh,” then pointed at the bedroom door. Closed. We always left an inside window half open to ventilate the rooms, but there couldn’t have been any draughts. And doors don’t close by themselves. We looked at each other and all thought the same thing: Had we finally found our father, now, and here? We were loath to admit it, but the idea didn’t appeal. We’d spent so many hours rewriting his biography that we imagined a rather more dramatic ending.

  Chris, the most unflappable brother, carefully opened the door. The rest of us peeped in from behind him. The light filtering in through the curtains gradually revealed there was no one in the bedroom.

  Our subsequent exploration of the apartment led us to the conclusion that the intruder had been Gabriel. Who else, otherwise? The front door was intact, nobody had forced it and, since he was such a solitary soul, we surmised that only he had the key. It looked as if he’d spent a night here, or at least a few hours, because the blanket was slightly rumpled although the bed was still made (he might have slept in his clothes). The wardrobe door was shut, and its bare interior revealed that he’d taken all his clothes, including the cardsharp’s jacket and shirts. Now other questions were begging to be asked: Had he really decided to leave for good? And right now? Yet it was difficult to believe that he’d forsake his belongings. Those objects that our father kept as his treasure (or a life sentence) had always been with him and, paradoxically, had given him the only anchor he’d needed. Once again, we sifted through the boxes and folders he kept in the study to see if we could find some clue as to his fate. Everything was in order, in place, hadn’t been touched, and the only items we found to be missing were his new packs of poker cards, still wrapped in cellophane. In our inventory that first day we’d counted twelve and now he’d taken the lot.

  More clues. We Christophers had taken over an empty shelf in the junk room where we kept everything that our inquiries yielded. There was a notepad detailing the La Ibérica trips; papers and letters from Carolina; a tape recorder with the tapes we’d made with Petroli; the objects we’d so despicably lifted from Petroli’s house . . . At first it looked as if Gabriel hadn’t moved anything. Then it seemed—but this was impossible—that the things were tidier, dusted, as if he’d seen to it himself.

  More clues, more clues. On our previous visit to Carrer Nàpols, we’d left an envelope with our photos in it on the dining-room table. We’d taken them the summer that we’d met up in London. There were photos of London Fields, the house where Chris and Sarah lived in Martello Street (which our father visited several times), of us four toasting each other with pints in the pub. We’d made some extra copies and planned to send them to Carolina and Petroli as a thank-you for helping us. From the dust marks on the table and the position of one of the chairs, we deduced that our father had sat down to look at them. We checked to see if any were missing and, although we weren’t sure, we suspected he’d taken one featuring the four of us. Or was that wishful thinking?

  Over dinner that evening we pooled our ideas. Okay, we weren’t certain that the intruder had been Gabriel, but it seemed the most logical explanation and it helped us to believe he was alive. We had no choice but to cling to our theory. In that case, he knew that we four brothers had met up and were looking for him. He knew that we were crazy enough to get together every so often in Barcelona. That we’d turned the mezzanine apartment in Carrer Nàpols into the headquarters of the unlikely Christophers Club. We considered all the facts and told ourselves we were on the right track and yet, since this was about our father, we also knew it would be a good idea to nip any optimism in the bud. He was the one who’d started it all by leaving a list of our names on the bedside table, right? It looked like a calculated decision aimed at making sure everything would proceed step by step. That’s why it would be naive of us to expect that he was going to pop up all of a sudden, just like that. Right from the start we’d understood that our father hadn’t disappeared overnight—Abracadabra!—but had crumbled apart, little by little. So, maybe the reverse was happening now, and, instead of suddenly turning up, he was sending us signs, enticing us with clues to keep looking for him.

  Mixed up with all the tension of the day, the exhaustion—and a few bottles of wine—these conclusions had us all waxing lyrical. We wondered what would happen to the Christophers when we found our father. Would our lives change? Would we go on seeing each other? It might be better to let the whole thing go and just celebrate our friendship. To hell with Dad. Christof, the most melodramatic (and drunkest), gabbled on about how we had to have a brothers’ pact but didn’t specify what that meant. Chris retired to a solitary corner as if he could conjure up through silence some idea of the future. Cristòfol wondered what was more important, the quest itself or success, the end or the means, and Christophe wound him up by expounding on theories of risk and consequence.

  Feeling the need to banish gloomy portents, someone had the good sense to propose a toast to our mothers.

  That night the four of us went to sleep well and truly addled, Cristòfol at his place and the visiting Christophers at the hotel where we always stayed. The next day, Saturday, we overplayed our hangovers—come on, admit it—and pretended to forget our fit of psychodrama. The new developments were pushing us to act. At breakfast time, Christophe came down from his room with a surprise that, what with all the chatter the day before, he’d forgotten to show us. It wasn’t as spectacular an offering as Christof’s wreckage of the Pegaso, but it immediately became very important. A friend of his from the University of Paris, in the Department of Computer Applications in Physics, had been working on a project to create highly accurate computer-enhanced portraits. Their precision was so impressive that the French secret services bought the program. Christophe had given his friend a photo of our father, the most recent one we had, from 1975, and the computer came up with a sketch of how he might look today. The friend had handed him a sealed envelope on which he’d ironically written “Top Secret,” but Christophe preferred not to look at it until we were all together. It was quite a surprise. We decided to open it with due solemnity, after breakfast, and in the meantime we nursed our headaches with strong coffee and puerile conversation.

  “Will we recognize him, do you think? I’ve imagined him so often . . .”

  “The facial structure doesn’t change much, my IT friend tells me.”

  “Yes, but don’t forget he turned sixty in 2001 . . .”

  “So, now he’d be about to retire. That’s if he ever went back to work.”

  “What if he’s got white hair?”

  “What if he’s got fatter?”

  “Or thinner . . . Maybe he doesn’t eat much.”

  “You’re so annoying! The computer can’t know all that. It just does a sketch of the face. The program starts out from the logical evolution of the three most prominent features. Nose, ears, mouth . . .”

  “Ah, I get it: It’ll be like a prison mugshot.”

  “All computer-enhanced portraits look like prison mugshots.”

  Since the conversation was going nowhere, Christophe asked for silence. Then he opened the envelope, and the portrait was revealed.

  The
impression it made on us was enormous. It was him and it wasn’t him. We looked at that face, with so little that was personal about it, and were fascinated to recognize Gabriel in it, although his proximity was unsettling. But it was him, yes. He would certainly look like that. Together with aging his features, the computer had cleverly given him a gentle stare—the elusive warmth the four of us had known when we were little. He gazed at us out of the sheet of paper, as if trying to convey how bad he felt about the situation.

  We made photocopies of the portrait. We went back to the mezzanine apartment—where everything was as we’d left it the day before—got out a map and divided up the neighborhood. The grid layout of the Eixample zone made the task easier. Our idea was to go into shops and bars and ask people if they recognized this man. It was quite likely that they’d seen Gabriel, that he’d been walking these streets in the last few days, and any information they could give us, however tenuous, would be a great help. We separated at the street door, agreeing to meet up in the same place in two hours’ time.

  “Let’s synchronize our watches,” Cristòfol said. We were acting like kids pretending to be detectives, so excited by the game that our hearts were thumping.

  Most of the people we spoke to looked at the portrait and said they’d never seen him. We asked them to try to remember, to imagine him: a tall, thin man of some sixty years, retiring by nature, a good man. Perhaps he used to come to the shop a while ago, or maybe they’d seen him recently. Some gave it a bit more thought, as if they were doing us a favor, and then said no. When they realized we were foreigners—except for Cristòfol—a few people started asking questions. Is he a terrorist? Did someone kill him? Has he disappeared? Are you from Interpol?

  Not everything turned out to be so predictable, however. Chris spoke with the man from a kiosk in Passeig de Pujades, near Carrer Nàpols, and he recognized our father as an old client. He bought a newspaper every Saturday and Sunday. Only the newspaper? No, there was a time when he was buying a BBC English course in installments (Chris smiled), but he’d tired of it after some months. When had he stopped going there? A year ago, the kiosk man guessed, maybe more. He offered to stick the portrait up in his kiosk so people could see it, but we preferred to keep it private.