by Jordi Puntí
Five minutes later, when the doctor called him into the consulting room, Rita was coming up the stairs on her way to the ear, nose, and throat specialist. Since it had yielded good results with the oculist, she told the new nurse the same story she’d come up with the previous week. She’d come to meet a friend who hadn’t shown up yet. She had a bad earache and had lost her sense of balance. The nurse believed her, and Rita sat down to wait for her appointment—or disappointment?—with Gabriel.
Gabriel’s meeting with Dr. Sadurní lasted twenty minutes. From her vantage point in the waiting room, Rita could hear the doctor talking with another man, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying and didn’t suspect it was Gabriel. She kept her eyes on the door, and every time someone came in her heart gave a leap.
In the consulting room, Dr. Sadurní asked Gabriel to sit on an examination bed and looked at his ear, first with the naked eye and then with an instrument that resembled a cornet. Gabriel vaguely remembered the doctor from a previous checkup, which calmed him down. He was a friendly, well-mannered man, of the old school. He was over sixty, wore suspenders and an elegant tie, addressed his patients with the respectful second-person vós, and shouted (maybe because most of them came to him half deaf). He poked around inside Gabriel’s ear with a cotton swab. Gabriel couldn’t suppress his groans of pain and the doctor tried to ease it by repeating some mysterious sounds: “Berebé, berebé, berebé.”
After long years of experience and having tried multiple combinations, he’d reached the conclusion that by linking the vowel e with b and r he’d come up with the sound that most effectively soothed infected ears. He held an aluminum bowl under the ear and, with a syringe, flushed out the auditory canal with hydrogen peroxide.
“This is going to hurt for a second,” he warned.
Gabriel endured the gush of hydrogen peroxide with his shoulders hunched and eyes shut tight. He was paralyzed by the shock but, indeed, only a second later the pain vanished in a stream of liquid. His ear was unblocked and the new void was occupied by an exasperating jabbering noise.
“Berebé, berebé, berebé . . .”
The doctor touched his back so he’d stay still. Using another cotton swab, he took a sample of the pus that was now streaming from his ear and spread it on some white paper. It was lizard green with opalescent spots. He showed it to Gabriel like someone displaying a precious stone.
“You have a fine old infection here, my friend. One of the strangest I have ever seen. Six or seven cases in all the forty years of my career . . . What more can I say? Now, let me see where this is coming from so it doesn’t happen again.”
The doctor disinfected the ear and, with the aid of another cotton swab, daubed the auditory canal with some ointment. Then he covered it with gauze and adhesive tape. It was a spectacular bandage, but Gabriel was grateful for it because the beast inside his ear was now assuaged.
“Keep it protected from the air for five or six days,” the doctor ordered. “I’ll give you a prescription for an antibiotic and this ointment. Change the dressing every morning. Sleep without it, please. You’ll have a soiled pillowcase but that doesn’t matter. Ears also have a right to breathe and express themselves as well as to listen.”
Gabriel nodded automatically, as if waking up for the first time that morning. The doctor took the piece of paper with his sample of pus, sat down at his desk, and opened a very thick medical textbook. As he turned over the pages he kept nodding to himself. Then he took another big book and studied some photos.
“You have a very atypical acute inner-ear infection, as I told you,” he finally pronounced. “Your sinuses have gradually been clogging up with a rare chemical compound. Permit me a personal question: Has there been a recent death in your family, or some personal distress?”
It didn’t take Gabriel long to answer.
“Yes, a friend died. He was like a brother to me.”
“I imagined so. And when did he die?”
“Eighty-two days ago, today.”
“Goodness gracious. That is a long time. And, tell me, did you cry at all when he died?”
“No,” he answered sadly. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t been able to cry for him. There’s no way I can.”
“Now I understand. It may seem strange to you but, over all this time, those unwept tears have ended up bringing on an infection, my friend. That is what happens. Tears come from some little sacs called lachrymal glands. The human body is very intelligent, you know. When you need to cry, the sac fills up but, if the tears fail to come out, then you end up with a surfeit of sodium and potassium that inflames the organs and destabilizes the whole system. You must help this ear and try to cry for your friend. It would be the best cure of all. Take this infection as if he were begging you to do it from the hereafter.”
After thanking Dr. Sadurní, a disoriented and serious-looking Gabriel walked out of the consulting room. You couldn’t say he was completely done for, not yet, but the doctor’s explanation had greatly unnerved him, and he was struggling to get his thoughts together. His inner battle gave him an erratic, distracted appearance, and, seeing him returning into the waiting room, Rita instantly recognized the Gabriel of the airport.
This broken man was screaming to be looked after.
He no longer had his arm in a cast, but the bulky dressing covering his ear made for a pathetic sight. The time had come. She clutched the folder and stood up trembling like a leaf, but Gabriel walked past her, unseeing.
That was okay. She understood. She followed him down the stairs (while in the background she could hear the doctor burbling to someone else, “Berebé, berebé, berebé . . .”), keeping a prudent distance. Now in the street, Gabriel trudged toward Carrer Muntaner. He couldn’t get the doctor’s words out of his head and was walking slower and slower. Rita had to stop so she wouldn’t bump into him. Gabriel was so absorbed that he wasn’t aware of anything else. Part of his being, the more rational part, refused to connect the earache with Bundó’s death, but then guilt won the day, accusing him of being utterly spineless and mean. A voice inside him, as if from beyond the grave, even ticked him off for considering suicide. What a coward! He was drowning. He was suffocating. He stumbled, and Rita thought she’d have to pick him up from the ground. Gabriel took a few more steps, crossed the road, and sat down on a bench in Plaça Adrià. It wasn’t the same one used by the couple eight days earlier but one more tucked away, half hidden by vegetation. Rita let him do his thing. She had to act with great care and, above all, not jeopardize anything. It looked as if Gabriel was calming down.
At that hour of the morning, Plaça Adrià was an oasis of calm.
Gradually, with his whole body juddering like the Pegaso engine when it refused to start, Gabriel started to weep. First, one big tear flooded his right eye and spilled over and then another one did the same in the left eye. The flow stopped for a few seconds and it seemed as if that would be all, but two more tears brimmed up, one in each eye, salty, lush and assertive.
If the engine continued to balk on the cold winter mornings of the North, Bundó used to yell. “Come on, get going, you bastard, don’t be such a wimp!”
The rush of tears was building up, and Gabriel couldn’t control the first spasms of his body. A high-pitched howl escaped him, soon to turn into a dirge.
“That’s it, that’s the way,” Bundó would bellow, “let yourself go! Show us what you’ve got, Pegaso!”
Then, doing honor to its name, it did its truck’s equivalent of pawing the ground, snorting, proudly huffing and puffing as Bundó laughed, joyfully thumping both hands on the steering wheel and looking at his friends to solicit their approval. Gabriel was now bellowing, bawling with his eyes and his whole body, which was convulsed with spasms.
When she judged that a judicious time had passed, Rita went to sit on the same bench, a little way away from him. He glanced at her with a woebegone expression. He didn’t stop crying. Now he couldn’t. His eyes were red and burning, hi
s cheeks lustrous with all the tears rolling down them. Rita held out a handkerchief, and he took it babbling some sort of gratitude. Rather than mopping up his tears, he used it to blow his nose so he could keep crying.
Three hours went by, no exaggeration, during which Gabriel wept in all possible registers as if, that way, he could sum up his life at Bundó’s side. He wailed like a baby in diapers wanting the breast. He shed the crocodile tears of the kid up to no good. He whimpered like an adolescent blubbering over the pains of love, and like the adult who swallows his tears pretending to have a cold. He cried like you cry in the cinema watching a drama in the dark, cried like you cry on the soccer field, in front of everyone, when your team loses the final. He cried with rage, sorrow, physical pain, and seeking compassion. He cried without knowing why, out of pure depression, cried like a crybaby, for pleasure too, re-creating himself in it. He yelped like a beaten dog. He got the hiccups from so much crying. He roared, he lamented, he whimpered. His chest hurt, the muscles of his face hurt, and his eyelids were burning. When he tried to catch his breath, he sniveled for a while. When it seemed he’d run out of tears, he only had to think of Bundó and the depths of his eyes rewarded him with a few more liters.
Three hours went by, I say. If he’d collected all those tears, dried them, and extracted the salt, he could have seasoned his meals to the end of his days.
Rita remained at his side. Some time earlier she’d started to cry too, letting out the tension and fears of all those months, the weariness of so many futile kilometers covered in Barcelona. That corner of Plaça Adrià was a vale of tears, a cryodrome.
All at once it started to rain, a shower of fine, gentle drops and, to both of them, this seemed the most logical corollary. Even meteorology was joining in. Finally, Rita picked up the folder and handed it to Gabriel. He opened it, recognized the papers, maps, Bundó’s lists, and, therein, found yet another reason for crying. After a while, he turned to her and asked, “Why are you crying?”
“I’m crying with happiness. Because we’ve found each other at last. And you?”
“I’m crying for a friend who was called Bundó.”
At this point, Christophers, will you permit me a devious maneuvre that sums up everything that happened next? This is it: We could take a leap ahead in time and all that weeping, all those rivers and streams of tears could be concentrated in one single outpouring, that of my bawling when I shattered the silence of my first second of life, just after the midwife smacked my little bottom. Nine months plus five or six days had gone by.
6
* * *
The Fifth Mother
It’s a pity that human beings aren’t born well informed, with a fully stocked and operational memory from their first breath of life. Right now, for example, when we’re trying to describe Gabriel’s relationships with our mothers, we’d find such a gift most useful. We’d be able to recall exactly what happened on the days when he came to visit us and stayed in our homes. What confidences they shared, when they fought and why, and whether they ever felt like a proper couple. In short, whether they ever managed to make their relationship seem normal. (They didn’t, of course, since Gabriel did nothing to foster the mature feelings that are necessary when two people live together.) On the other hand, since the four of us were too young to understand anything, we have to trust what Sigrun, Mireille, Sarah, and Rita have chosen to tell us. It’s a telling sign that all four mothers portray Gabriel as a good man, independent, evasive, and certainly not someone to have and to hold. A sweet affliction, they say, a bitter gift.
Let’s indulge in a touch of filial vanity, Mothers. If we four didn’t exist, it’s probable that Gabriel, progenitor of the Christophers, would be no more than a minor footnote in your stories, testament to an age of sexual joys and amorous doubts that you’d sometimes remember with pride and sometimes with contempt—like so many other things in life.
Someone looking at the story from outside will ask perhaps: Was there anyone else afterward? Yes, of course, all four of them met other men, but none of them could ever replace Gabriel, so they have no place here.
The main purpose of our meetings has been, and still is, keeping on our father’s trail. Only we four are with him, about him, for him, against him (add all the prepositions you wish) and hence our mothers are not included. They, it must be said, are very happy with our decision.
As we made clear from the outset, Bundó’s traumatic death put an end to our father’s journeys, and he never visited us again. Maybe the fact that our mothers took it fairly well and ended up forgetting him—each in her own way—reveals the fragility of their relationships with Gabriel. At the end of the day, they never stopped being single moms and living as such.
We could say that if the accident in the Pegaso hadn’t happened early that Saint Valentine’s morning, everything would have turned out differently, but that won’t get us very far. It’s better to be pragmatic and accept that the situation would eventually have become unsustainable for Gabriel. The deceit would have eventually become rotten to the core.
“At last the secret is out!” as the poem says. Per fi s’ha revelat el secret. Enfin le secret est percé. Das Geheimnis ist gelüftet.
Without intending to, Gabriel had emerged again after some months of not visiting his trans-Pyrenean sons and women. On the face of it, the meeting with Rita in Barcelona and the birth of Cristòfol should have been his big chance to hang up his spurs. Just one family, just one city. However, it didn’t take long for Gabriel to realize that he was no good at conventions, and he went back to his old solitary ways. Rita sums it up very well—“when the present prevailed”—but, once again, Cristòfol asks permission to fill us in on those early times.
You’ve got five minutes, Cristòfol, and that’s it. Ready, set, go!
Thank-you for your boundless generosity, Christophers. Let me say, to begin with, that Gabriel never lived with us in Carrer del Tigre. He spent many nights and days there looking after the tiny tot that was me. Rita says he even learned to change my diapers. How about that?
“Just a moment. Excuse me. He changed my diapers, too, when he had to,” Christof interrupts.
“And mine.”
“And mine.”
Okay, so there’s nothing original about me. But let’s see who can do better than this: When I was about four months old, my mom went back to work at the airport, and there were some weeks when Gabriel stayed over every day. Every single day. A whole week. Day and night. How about that? Yet, for all his perseverance, he never saw our place as his home. Just to make things clear, his name never appeared on our mailbox. This family ambiguity didn’t bother Rita at first. It was in the seventies, Franco was still dying (without finishing the job properly), and Danish pediatric theory was all the rage among young mothers. Besides, as a militant orphan, Rita didn’t set much store by parental authority and liked the idea that I should grow up slightly, ever so slightly neglected. I imagine that she got used to Gabriel’s intermittency in those days. His comings and goings fitted into a certain lifestyle and should be seen as the counterpoint to the total, passionate surrender with which he gave himself to her when they were together.
You recognize the situation, don’t you Christophers? I’m sure he acted like that with your mothers too: It was as if he was eternally grateful to them and knew that he was making up for long hours of absence and waiting with his brief presence. Although it was never made explicit, this modus operandi worked from the very beginning and he got better and better at it . . .
“Words are flowing out . . . like endless rain . . .”
“You see what happens when you start going on about yourself? You’re provoking him. We agreed on five minutes, Cristòfol.”
“We know the score . . .”
Okay, okay. I’ll be brief. At their meeting in the vale of tears, Rita told Gabriel that she’d been looking for him ever since he’d lost a bag and tried to reclaim it at the airport. Eighty days earlier. Gabriel didn�
��t remember her, but the girl’s courage touched his heart, and he let himself be adopted. Make note of that expression because I think it’s crucial, Christophers: He let himself be adopted. The long crying session had dried his mouth and he was thirsty and hungry. They had something to eat and drink in some bar or other. They talked with their mouths full. Rita was delighted to describe her nighttime vigil in Via Favència, how cold she’d been as she kept watch. There was not a trace of reproach in her words. Instead of seeing her as a lunatic or recoiling in panic, Gabriel was grateful that someone had been thinking about him during those dark days. They laughed when he recalled that he’d heard the doorbell from inside the apartment but didn’t have it in him to do anything. Yes, they laughed. “It was better like that,” Rita thought. “All’s well that ends well, right?” The blind date orchestrated by Bundó from the great blue yonder was working fine.
That night Gabriel didn’t sleep in the Via Favència apartment, and his ear suppurated on a new pillow. Rita fixed him another dressing the next day. Thanks to all the tears shed for Bundó, his ear was on the mend. On Saturday and Sunday they didn’t leave the apartment. They stayed in bed and reconstructed their separate pasts, leaping from one story to another. Conrad and Leo’s plane accident. The Pegaso accident. We should assume that Gabriel was more selective and chose what he could say and what he couldn’t. They were thrilled to discover what they had in common when he told her about the La Ibérica pilfering racket.
“We filched a suitcase, or box, or packet from every move . . .” “Really? We do exactly the same at the airport! We keep lost suitcases. We’re soul mates.” “Yes, we are.”
