Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  When Rita came to the Cage some years later, progress had forced the little soul from El Clot to expand her business and spread the profits. After the renovation of the airport in 1968, when the Guardia Civil installed their sentry box inside the terminal and there were twice as many workers, plundering became much more difficult. Moreover, she was getting old. She’d almost been caught a couple of times—in her old age she sometimes got distracted—and once she’d almost had a heart attack. It dawned on her that she needed help. After meticulously studying everyone around her, the fads of her fellow workers and taking note of any lazy tendencies, the little soul decided that Leiva, Porras, and Sayago were the ones. The selection process adhered to her criteria of remaining in control, but it also deferred to a pious streak because, of all the airport staff, the three cleaners were the most needy. At breakfast on one particularly slow day she asked them to join her in a corner of the terrace of the café next to the runway and told them of her plan. She spoke in a mysteriously detached tone, and the sounds of planes taking off and landing drowned out her words . . . Every two or three days. Sweeping the terminal. She’d give an agreed-upon signal. One of them would come over with the biggest garbage bin. He’d start cleaning the passage behind the Cage, a spot where no one went. They’d wait a few minutes out of caution. She’d open the back door. An unclaimed bag would get in his way. He’d do his job and pick up the rubbish, the obstruction. Stow it in the garbage bin. Till the end of the day. They all knocked off at the same time. One would carry the bag. Concealing it. They’d share out the contents in the bus shelter, equal shares, according to their needs. But she’d always have first choice. She was the group’s ideologist.

  Porras and Leiva agreed to the plan without a moment’s hesitation. The watery gaze of the little soul, brimming with benevolence, had them convinced they weren’t breaking the law. They’d be heirs to Robin Hood. They’d steal from the rich who flew around in planes and give to the poor who went on foot, which is to say they’d keep the goodies for themselves. Sayago caressed the tips of his luxuriant moustache and announced that he wanted to think it over. For moral reasons. The little soul, who knew that the three friends were inseparable, said no. In or out. Now. Say yes and you won’t regret it. The woman’s energy disarmed him. Anyway, his younger daughter’s first communion was coming up, and he’d invited relatives from the village. He couldn’t stint. The lunch was going to be in a restaurant in the capital city. In Barcelona. Yes. In.

  Bovine-natured Leiva, a run-of-the-mill fellow, performed the first mission, a trial run with an empty suitcase, and it came off just as the little soul had planned. The subsequent missions were also accomplished without any problems, and they soon discovered the joys and benefits of the project. Whenever one of the three cleaners was pushing his broom in front of the Cage, the little soul flashed him a conspiratorial smile. If she’d been twenty years younger she would have fallen for Leiva and his slightly rustic parsimony. Porras was fast. He acted with the brazenness of someone who knows how to hot-wire and steal a car and was unfazed by the risk of getting caught. This made his two workmates very jumpy, but the little soul was proud of him. Sayago, in contrast, drove her crazy. When he was shifting the bag inside the bin everything went wrong and he kept fumbling and stumbling. Him and his badly dyed moustache! The man looked like a walrus.

  One day, the brother of the little soul from El Clot gave up his stall in the Els Encants market. Thenceforth, she kept plundering out of habit and as a sport. She gave her part of the booty to Caritas. Her unlawful suitcase trade made her feel alive. By the time she retired, Porras, Sayago, and Leiva were sufficiently well trained to keep the pillaging fires burning as an old Cage tradition that wasn’t to be lost. So they had to look for a replacement.

  Not long afterward, when the unclaimed (and unplundered) luggage was beginning to pile up dangerously in the Cage’s storeroom, the three friends chose Rita. They could see that she was innocent, slightly wild, and as malleable as soft bread. She’d just replaced Saint Carola from El Clot and hadn’t yet bonded with her workmates. Porras, young like she was, befriended her with a few jokes and then reeled her in. Rita accepted without giving it much thought, as if looting lost luggage was part of the Cage’s job description. She’d been on a rollercoaster for some months now and wasn’t bothered by vertigo. Didn’t pastry cooks eat all the cream they wanted; didn’t tailors’ children have free clothes? Well, it was exactly the same thing as far as she was concerned.

  The cleaners phoned Carola to inform her of their choice. The next day, the little soul from El Clot conscientiously came out to the airport to visit her old friends in the Cage. She missed them so much! They had no idea how bored she was at home! The lachrymose eyes got even more waterlogged, two pools of sadness. She’d brought a box of Birba cookies and a bottle of Aromes de Montserrat liqueur. They called over the three cleaners and the two men of the Guardia Civil and drank a toast out of plastic cups. Somebody introduced Rita as her replacement. The little soul, still angelic, looked her up and down and asked a few courtesy questions. Rita held her gaze throughout. Ten minutes earlier, she’d come across the wizened old lady in the ladies’ room. She’d been standing in front of the mirror, lips tightly compressed in a grimace of pain as she poured a liter of eyewash into each eye.

  The little soul was all smiles. In front of Leiva, Porras, and Sayago, who were hanging on her every word, she said, “You’ll do a very good job, Rita. Dealing with people, colleagues in the terminal . . . This is very enriching work.” She smirked, looking straight at Rita.

  That evening, when she got home and took off her coat, Rita felt something in her pocket. It was a bottle of eyewash.

  Christophers, in defense of my mother, I hasten to say that she never resorted to eyewash to soften up pissed-off passengers. Rita, as I said before, had sufficient character to update the little soul’s methods and was well able to wring out the pity with her own tragic tale. Yet she was a worthy successor in the business of lost luggage. I can attest to that because I have personal experience of it. My childhood wardrobe mainly came from suitcases that had been flown in from half the countries around the world. Since Leiva’s and Sayago’s offspring were quite a bit older, Mom took all the kids’ clothing. I remember some Tyrolean lederhosen; a T-shirt with a drawing of the Aristocats orchestra with the English words “That’s Entertainment,” which Dad translated for me; some extremely shiny patent leather boots, which the kids at school said were girls’ boots (and they were probably right); a sailor suit; a tweed jacket with very long sleeves that made my wrists itchy; some Nike sneakers, the ones with the blue stripe, straight from the United States, which made me the most popular kid at school for a time.

  Rita felt fulfilled with her daily exploits at the airport. More than a job, it was her life. Proof of that was my birth. At first she decided not to keep working and that she’d devote herself body and soul to raising me. Gabriel’s intermittent presence at home, especially during my first weeks in this world, nourished the fantasy of having a family, and she told herself that this was what she wanted. Soon, however, the scales fell from her eyes. After a period in which she was entirely content with contemplating me sleeping, boredom loomed and she moved heaven and earth to persuade her boss to let her go back to the Cage. In this era of earth mothers, more than one of her female workmates thought she was irresponsible and a bad parent. She disarmed them by singing the praises of powdered milk, which had come into fashion thanks to the younger pediatricians. Bottles freed women from the bondage of breastfeeding! The fact is that Rita went off to work early in the morning secure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t be going hungry. The days when Dad had slept at our place he looked after me. Otherwise Mom left me with a dependable neighbor. More than a couple of times, when all else failed, she had to bring me to the Cage. Then she went into the back room, opened up an unclaimed suitcase, improvised a bed with the spare clothes it contained as a blanket, and settled me down to sleep. It seems t
hat I didn’t protest at all and slept even more soundly there than I did at home. When I woke up crying and hungry, Mom got some water boiled—the men of the Guardia Civil had a portable gas burner in the sentry box—and gave me my bottle while attending to fractious passengers who’d lost their luggage. My blissful expression helped to placate them.

  Perhaps it’s because luggage occasionally doubled as my cradle that one of my earliest memories, from when I was tiny, was Mom coming home with a suitcase in her hand. The mere sight of it made me drowsy, and I’d start to yawn. Although she always brought it with her from the Barcelona airport she could have been returning from a journey anywhere in the world. She’d put the bag down in a corner, take her shoes off, sit down with me on the sofa, and cover me with kisses. There were some weeks when unopened suitcases piled up in the entrance. Then, when Dad came to visit us, they had fun opening them together. Mom already knew what was inside—she’d previously divided up the stuff with Leiva, Sayago, and Porras—but she liked to ratchet up the excitement so she could pass it on to Dad and me. Years later, as an adult recalling what I’d taken to be a cosy family atmosphere, I realized that it had another dimension. For those two, the game of opening suitcases was sexy, suffused with eroticism, foreplay, if you like. I’m serious about this: After all, what had brought them together in the beginning was precisely a piece of lost luggage.

  Now that we’re talking about the eroticism of suitcases, let’s get back to Rita and Gabriel again. Shall we return to February 1972 when Rita was pining for a black cloth bag, just one bag, the object that would take her straight to Gabriel?

  So let’s do a recap.

  I wasn’t born yet.

  Christof was six, living in Frankfurt with Sigrun and, when he felt lonely, he shared his troubles with a ventriloquist’s dummy. They were almost like brothers: Either they were inseparable or they were scrapping over any stupid thing. On the latter occasions, the dummy used to torture Christof by telling him his dad was never coming back.

  Christopher hadn’t seen Gabriel for three months. He was four and a half. At nursery school he made a clay figure, which he later presented to Sarah. It was meant to be a moving truck, with a very big trailer and two little figures—him and his mom—in the cab and ready to go.

  Christophe had just turned three. Mireille had spent the previous Christmas in Barcelona. Sometimes when she was missing Gabriel she’d settle Christophe in her lap and tell him things about the city. They’d go and live there one day. She could get a job in the French bookshop. When daddy came back, soon, yes, soon, she might suggest it to him. Christophe didn’t understand what she was going on about, of course, but says that kids interpret these things in their own way.

  I wasn’t born yet, as I say. They hadn’t conceived me. Mom and Dad hadn’t even met. If I could imagine myself as some object, or could be endowed with some sort of physical presence before the idea of my existence actually took shape, then I was that ownerless bag. Or, to rephrase it, that bag, on its way through heaven knows what airport, contained a good part of Rita’s future.

  On the Friday, the day after Bundó’s funeral, Rita went to work as if nothing had happened. She was never ill and, if she’d wanted to, she could have phoned in to say she still felt weak after her fainting fit and was going to spend the day at home. They would have understood. But she was driven by her need to retrieve Gabriel’s bag. She’d woken up earlier than on other days, unable to go back to sleep because she was so keyed up. Standing in front of her open wardrobe, about to get dressed, she was beginning to get some idea of what was happening. So should she wear black in mourning for poor Serafí Bundó or choose something bright and cheerful to celebrate the fact that her Gabriel had risen from the dead? The two feelings canceled each other out. She chose a bit of each, and headed for the airport.

  Having to change into her drab navy-blue uniform soon brought her down to earth. First of all, of course, she checked the register to see if anyone had turned in the damn bag, but there was no sign of it. She wasted the whole day fruitlessly looking for it. She pretended she was cataloging newly arrived pieces of luggage, but actually she was checking all the bags in the storeroom, one by one, in case someone had put Gabriel’s bag in the wrong place. At midday, beside herself, she phoned the Lufthansa office in Madrid. She recited the claim number (she knew it by heart), and they assured her that the bag had been sent two days earlier and they should have received it in Barcelona by now. She rudely hung up on them.

  There’s a problem with the past, Christophers: It’s untouchable, and nobody can change it. Since we can only observe it from a distance we are, however, granted the gift of omniscience. So, we might be mere spectators but we’re everywhere at once and able to admire the artful designs of crossed paths. We now know that while Rita was getting dressed that morning, trying to recover from a difficult night, only three hundred meters away Gabriel was waking up for the last time in his boarding-house bed, under the steely gaze of the stuffed falcon. While Rita was rummaging through dozens of pieces of alien luggage, Gabriel was trying to stuff all his belongings into his two trusty suitcases, plus a couple of bags and a few cardboard boxes. While Rita was returning home with disappointment written all over her face, Gabriel plonked the last box into El Tembleque’s van, and the two of them climbed up through the streets of the Eixample, up, up, up, on their way to Via Favència. While Rita . . .

  The clock struck five, and Rita left the airport. Sitting on the bus taking her into the city center, she told herself she couldn’t go on like this. With or without the bag, she had to go directly to the pension, speak to Gabriel, and clear up the misunderstanding. Were you in any doubt, Christophers? She walked down Carrer Tallers and then Carrer Valdonzella till she got to Ronda de Sant Antoni. She strode along with all the verve of someone who knows she has a plan. The dying February sun smoothed over the angles of the houses, aging their façades. With its windows still in darkness, the pension building looked dilapidated and uninhabited. The door was open, and she slipped inside the ghostly house. Someone from the top floor turned the stairway light on and started coming down whistling the march from The Bridge on the River Kwai. She rushed up so as not to meet him. The mountain goat received her with an irked expression as it had done two days earlier, but this time she wasn’t going to be intimidated. She rang the bell. Without the bag as a foil, she’d rehearsed all kinds of excuses so she could speak to Gabriel but didn’t get to put them into practice. Senyora Rifà recognized her at once and invited her in.

  “I was expecting you,” she said. Untrue, perhaps, but her words made uncanny sense. Rita suddenly felt uncomfortable, as if someone were spying on her from a hiding place. Senyora Rifà turned on the hallway light, revealing the gallery of stuffed beasts. “Come in, do come in. Let’s have a cup of coffee and chat about Bundó and Gabriel.”

  “Is Senyor Delacruz in? I need to see him right away.” Rita was speaking softly as if she was in an old folks’ home. She was walking close behind the landlady. The floor vibrated and expensive glassware tinkled in display cabinets. One of the hallway doors was slightly open, and, walking by, she glimpsed a man lying on a bed. He was reading a newspaper in this improbable posture, and she couldn’t see his face.

  Senyora Rifà’s only answer was to stop in front of a door and throw it wide open. The room was empty.

  “Gabriel’s flown the nest, dearie,” she said laconically. You could hear a quaver of disappointment in her voice. “It was high time he moved on to warmer climes, if you want my opinion. As far as I’m concerned he could have stayed here till he grew old but, for him it’s better like this.”

  Rita went into the room and stood quietly in its shadows. “The nearer you get, the farther away you get,” she dared to think. From the threshold, Senyora Rifà went into room-showing mode and turned on the light. The space, so stark and bare, made Rita shudder. That afternoon, things were getting clearer and clearer in the form of a string of disappointments. The wool matt
ress, rolled up like a cannellone, was waiting to be beaten. The wardrobe door swung halfway open, all by itself, in a gesture of surrender. On the bedside table, several thick rings testified to a bleary night. Cognac for sure. There was nothing else, no other sign of life that might lead anyone to imagine that somebody had slept in that lair the previous night.