by Jordi Puntí
On Monday, Gabriel saw Rita to the bus stop and then returned to the Via Favència apartment. His first retreat to his winter quarters lasted just one day. The next day he slept at Rita’s again. The second retreat lasted two more days. Rita didn’t want to pressure him because she understood that he was delicate and insecure and could see that he needed to be alone. One night, Gabriel told her about his decline after Bundó’s death, without sparing her the episode of his would-be suicide. They both knew that, by turning up as she did, she’d foiled his plan to throw himself off the Columbus monument. (Some months later, by the way, with Rita now pregnant, Gabriel insisted on going up to the lookout at the top. They were going out to have a drink before lunch on a Sunday morning, and he thought it would be a good way to bury those distressing thoughts once and for all. When they were up in the cupola beneath the feet of the statue, contemplating from aloft the port, Montjuïc, and the Ramblas all decked out for Christmas, Gabriel realized that it wouldn’t have been easy to throw himself off the top. The windows had been reinforced. Then he said to Rita, “You know what? If it’s a boy, we should call him Cristòfol, like Columbus.” Convinced she had a boy in her belly, she thought it was a great idea and they called me Cristòfol thereafter.)
Mom says there was a period after my birth in which Gabriel spent a lot of time with us. Meanwhile, he tried going back to work at La Ibérica. His savings had run out, and Senyor Casellas took him back as a driver. He asked to do short trips with the DKV van, only around Barcelona and the province, but he gave up after a few weeks. He got tired more quickly than before, his broken arm often swelled up, and the routine reminded him too much of the good old days with Bundó. Seeing him so dejected, Senyor Casellas felt guilty and suggested he could go back to doing international moves. They’d just bought a new truck, and the trips were more comfortable now. Gabriel preferred not to and six months later left La Ibérica once again, this time for good. (We’ll have to assume that his return to the European motorways would have entailed too great a moral effort on his part, that of getting his other sons and women back.) He left the job without the safety net of any other employment. For a time he spent his days doing odd jobs here and there. A messenger in the neighborhood had a hernia, and Gabriel took over until he’d recovered from the operation, driving his 2CV van and delivering his packages, this time without keeping any. Just before I was born, Rita finally got the insurance money for the deaths of her parents and now had something put aside in the bank. One day she offered to buy him a vehicle so he could set up his own messenger service. He couldn’t imagine being a boss, not even of himself. Rita knew that lukewarm reaction: It was the same one she’d got a couple of times when, half jokingly, she’d suggested they could get married.
By autumn 1975, Gabriel was moving away from us. Then one day he left and that was the end of it. Rita never had any illusions that he’d come and live with us, but she had managed to drag some kind of family feeling out of him for a time. We went out for walks together, he carried me on his shoulders, he sang songs to me, and he seemed happy. Then his visits were further and further apart. At first, he’d turn up unexpectedly or would phone at the last minute to say he wasn’t coming. Rita had grudgingly got used to this maybe-maybe-not situation and accepted it out of love, but he must have been feeling guilty because eventually he preferred not to commit himself. No more of this on-such-and-such-a-day-we’ll-do-so-and-so. No, he preferred things to be more open, freer. When Rita asked him why it was so hard for him, he replied that the Via Favència apartment was too far away. It was almost in another city, another Barcelona, he said. Sometimes I wonder about this and think he’s not referring so much to space as to time. Perhaps, for him, living in Carrer del Tigre, a hundred meters from his old boarding house and almost next to the House of Charity, meant moving in the past. The set hadn’t changed much but the dramatis personae were different. Or maybe when he visited us he felt as if he was traveling into a future, a future that didn’t match the one he’d imagined.
Although Gabriel gave the impression of fading out slowly, we actually know the date of the last day he spent with us. It was the twentieth of November. Rita remembers it clearly because it’s the day Franco died. We hadn’t seen Dad for a week and that afternoon he turned up out of the blue. After dinner, when he and Rita had settled me down to sleep, they went down to the Principal, the café on the corner, to see what the atmosphere was like. The owners had put a radio on the bar. Every time the musical program was interrupted for a news bulletin, the whole place went silent and everyone listened. Some faces were tight and worried, but most of the clients and waiters punctuated the broadcaster’s grave utterances with sarcastic comments. He’s never going to kick the bucket, that fucking butcher. If he’s suffering so much they should kill him off now. Let’s hope the champagne hasn’t gone flat after so much waiting. He hasn’t died yet because hell doesn’t want him either.
Rita was twitchy because they’d left me alone so they came back home. She turned on the TV to see if there were any new developments, but the hours dragged by hypnotically. They were just about to go to bed when they heard the pop of a champagne cork and the gleeful shouts of someone letting it all out. Infected by the neighbor’s joy and eagerness to celebrate, they poured a couple of glasses of wine and drank a toast. The fun and games woke me up. I was wide awake so I got out of bed and started playing with Mom and Dad. It was early in the morning and Rita, carried away by all the euphoria, dared to propose to Gabriel that he should come and live with us for once and for all. As always, he didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. Nothing could ever be definitive.
The previous day, Gabriel had arranged with the messenger that he’d do the early-morning delivery round with him. At six on the dot we heard the van’s horn tooting their agreed-upon signal from the street, and Dad left. Mom picked me up and we waved good-bye from the window.
“You’ve got one minute left, Cristòfol. Sorry.”
“Tick tock, tick tock . . .”
“I’m a loser, and I’m not what I appear to be . . .”
“Fuck off, Chris. Okay, that’s it, I’m finishing. Let’s see, short, short, like dictating a telegram. Gabriel. Distance. Silence. Days pass. Vanished. Doesn’t return. Stop.” Pause to breathe. “Rita. Tired. Too long. Scared. What happened to him? Desperate. Invents ridiculous political plots. But it’s just coincidence. Goes to his place. Never there. Disappointment. Gone for ever. Time heals all wounds. Stop.” Pause to breathe. “Me. I miss him. Mommy, where’s Daddy? I forget him. I turn three. I turn four, five, six. I forget him with rage. I hate him. Stop.” Pause to breathe. “One day, for the hell of it, we go to his apartment looking for him. Sold a while back, they tell us. We’re forced to forget him. Want to. Twenty years pass. Even more. Stop.” Another pause. “Police call. Us, the Christophers. We meet. We start looking. Now is now. Now. Present.”
“Time’s up!”
“Ouch! That’s inhuman. How cruel.”
“Thanks, Cristòfol.”
“Yes, thanks.”
We think we know the people around us and that we can anticipate their emotions, but that’s just an illusion. The inner life of a person is the most impenetrable secret in the world, an armor-plated chamber. During all this time we’ve been looking for Gabriel, all the hours we’ve spent tracing his movements until he disappeared off the face of the earth, we Christophers have wondered more than once: Do we really know him yet? But the question’s based on a fallacy. Although you can only live by moving forward, existence, any existence, only makes sense when you look back and try to understand it as a whole. We leave a biography behind, like the trail of a snake in the sand. Well, this is the comforting illusion that many people cling to. In the end, it’s not unlike the risky exercise of trying to interpret a dream. We take four or five scenes that we cling to just as we’re waking up, sensations we’re only able to recognize blearily, like flotsam after a shipwreck, and then we cobble them together with a narrative
thread, trying to make the end result comprehensible. But life’s different. What matters in any life is life itself, what we construct every day without being aware of it. That’s why, when we’re in the thick of them, most situations have no special meaning. The illusion of sense comes later. We sit in a café, talking with a friend, and we rationalize the past by looking back. We tidy it up. We make a virtue out of the necessity of understanding our days. This process isn’t very different, either, from scribbling a few clichés to sum up our summer vacation on a postcard and sending it last minute (so our parents and friends get it when we’ve already returned safe and sound). We reduce life to a few words, we simplify it, but its real meaning is complex, contradictory, and uncertain.
Sorry about all the philosophising. We Christophers have remarked more than once that, with these pages, we’ve saved ourselves quite a few sessions with the shrink. The whole thing becomes relevant now because yesterday, Saturday, at last—at last, indeed!—the line of the past and the line of the present came together, and all at once we realized just how brutal the experience of retracing Gabriel’s footsteps had been. We thought we knew it all but that was only in retrospect. Actually, we knew nothing.
The thing is, that on Tuesday night, with barely three days to maneuvre, Cristòfol called us to a new meeting.
“I’ve got some interesting information,” he announced to us, one by one, “but I can’t tell you over the phone. It would take too long. You’ll have to trust me and come to Barcelona. Maybe I’m wrong and it will turn out to be a damp squib, but I think Saturday night’s going to be exciting.”
Our previous meeting, it’s worth recalling perhaps, had taken place only three weeks earlier and had turned up a few clues. The bartender at the Carambola confirmed that his boss, Feijoo, had been after Gabriel for months because of gambling debts. Didn’t look good. Another promising clue was the neighbor on the mezzanine floor in Carrer Nàpols, Giuditta the former circus artiste. When we visited her, Christopher had found the joker with the third eye hidden in the crevices of her sofa, but there was no way of interpreting the find. What should we think of this neighbor? Was she an ally or someone we had to keep an eye on? Gabriel could have mislaid the card months ago, during a friendly visit, or he might have surreptitiously hidden it because he saw he was cornered by someone, or he could even have done it later when Feijoo, Miguélez, and their henchmen were torturing him before the pitiless gaze of that Italian woman . . .
Cristòfol’s words were seductive and, needless to say, we other brothers gladly abandoned our respective solitary plans. Christof canceled a show he was doing with Cristoffini on Saturday afternoon: Some rich kid in Berlin had to go without a ventriloquist at his birthday party. Christophe had to correct some university exam papers, from second-year quantum mechanics, but it was so straightforward he could do it on the plane or when he was killing time (Christophe only sleeps four hours a night). Chris was supposed to be going to a record fair in Bristol on Sunday. He had an appointment with a client who wanted to buy the first Spanish edition of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” This was something of a rarity because they’d brought it out with this title and those of other songs such as “The Long and Winding Road” translated into Spanish: “Déjalo estar,” “El largo y tortuoso camino” . . . But in England there’s some fair or other devoted to the Beatles every weekend, and he’s pretty fed up with them so he told the client to wait however long it was going to take.
The sense of urgency that suddenly took over the quest for Gabriel predisposed us to adventure. Our planes took off from Berlin, London, and Paris, tracing elliptical red lines on the map of Europe that converged in Barcelona. We carried our hand luggage with the gravity of men on a secret mission. Yesterday, Saturday, at two in the afternoon when all four of us met as arranged in the lobby of our usual hotel, all we needed was a secret password, something cryptic and poetic like “The bees are pollinating the magnolias,” or “Bertie said all the whales have syphilis.”
The electric charge was with us all day and, indeed, the shock hit us some hours later. While we were having lunch in the hotel, Cristòfol brought us up to date.
“As we agreed, Christophers, I’ve been checking out the apartment these last few weeks. I hung around there, making sure there were no unwelcome developments, and then went back to wherever I’d come from. Tuesday night was the last time. The apartment was the same as always, with that stillness we all know but, when I left, I decided to go by the Carambola. I wasn’t expecting much, to tell you the truth, but there was nothing to lose by trying. I found the talkative bartender, but this time he was mute, and he wanted me mute too because as soon as he saw me coming in he put his finger to his lips. It had just turned seven in the evening, and the boss, Feijoo, wasn’t there. “He’ll be back any minute,” the bartender told me, as if he’d read my thoughts. “He’s gone to get some whisky from a warehouse over near Santa Coloma. It’s black market and cheaper for him. Go now. I’ll phone you as soon as I can . . .”
“Why do you need to phone me?” I asked trustingly.
While I was waiting for his answer I checked out the clientele. A boy and a girl, half barricaded behind high-school folders and books, were holding hands at the most out-of-the-way table. A granddad nodding off in front of the TV seemed to be agreeing with everything the voluptuous presenter had to say. Two girls drinking Coca-Cola at another table were turning the pages of a wedding-dress catalog. The one facing me hadn’t stopped staring at me since I walked in. Since the bartender was still dithering and taking his time about answering, she got up and came over. She was young and attractive but with a sly look she couldn’t hide. I noticed her apron, which was longer than the skirt she was wearing underneath, and deduced she must be the lady of the bar, Feijoo’s wife, the bartender’s lover. “Hi,” she said, giving me the once-over. Then she nodded and asked, “Did you tell him or not?” She had a husky, very sexy voice. It was evident that she had him wrapped around her little finger. Still unwilling to talk, he said, “You keep out of it . . .” but she cut in, “Either you tell him or I do. He has to help us, doesn’t he . . .” and, sashaying back to the table, she demonstrated the art of butt wiggling in five meters. “What have you got to tell me? Why do I have to help you?” I asked. Then the bartender told me that two days earlier he’d overhead a conversation between Feijoo and Miguélez, the retired cop. They were talking about someone called Manubens, a well-heeled businessman who likes gambling. They’d organized a game for Saturday night (which is to say tonight, Christophers). The bartender said the stakes are very high. And that Miguélez, Feijoo, and another member of the gang wanted to clean him out, right down to the last cent. I asked the same thing that you would have asked, Christophers: What’s that got to do with Gabriel? Then he came out with it, in these exact words: “I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with him or not, but the thing is, his name came up in the conversation. Miguélez, who doesn’t mess around, was talking about the ‘Delacruz system’ for getting their hands on Manubens’ brass. What he actually said was, ‘Don’t worry, Feijoo. If we apply the Delacruz system we’ll take him to the cleaners, and then he killed himself laughing at his own wit. I tell you, it’s got something to do with this Gabriel . . .”
“And did Miguélez say anything about using the pistol?” I asked, but he denied it. No, no way. Feijoo himself told him not to bring the pistol. It wasn’t necessary and, anyway, Manubens would take fright.”
All four of us agreed that the bartender’s words were the most substantial lead we’d had in the last few months. Now, the main riddle was summed up in the words “Delacruz system” that Miguélez referred to with such conviction. Was it simply a trick of our father’s that had inspired them (teachers always spawn deplorable students) or, out of some kind of unlikely sympathy, would he be playing cards there in person? We tried to figure it out, but our guesses weren’t brilliant enough. Any insight we might have had about Gabriel had dried up out of pure exhaustion. The on
ly way to know what was going on, then, was to turn up at the bar. The bartender finished by telling Cristòfol that the big game was beginning at eleven. We had to work out a strategy.
At four in the afternoon, after lunch, we got a taxi to the Arc de Triomf. Once there, since we didn’t trust the Italian neighbor, we separated to take different routes and got to the building four minutes apart, one after the other. The idea was to go up to the apartment without making any noise on the stairs or landing so she wouldn’t suspect we were there. Cristòfol, who had the keys, went in first and left the door ajar. Then the rest of us sneaked up just as carefully. Chris had brought a bottle of Scotch and we decided to have a tipple. We had to wait seven hours before going into action and, if we were able to make it last over the course of the afternoon, it would give us the sangfroid and daring we were going to need that night. We sat around the dining-room table and discussed what we had to do. We spoke in the hushed conspiratorial tones that plot hatching requires. Christophe, using the time to correct exam papers, came up with a conservative option: We should monitor the door of the bar, starting one hour before they were due to meet. Thus, the first thing we’d find out was whether Gabriel was one of the cardsharps or not. Chris offered to go into the lion’s den—they didn’t know him in the bar—and keep an eye on things from inside. Cristòfol jotted down all the suggestions, as if taking minutes, and reminded us that we had to proceed with care. We knew from the bartender that those guys could be dangerous. Christof drew a map of the zone where the bar was located so we could identify our lookout points later on. He was also very alert to noises outside the apartment. If we heard any rustling on the landing, however slight it was, he rushed on tiptoes to the door and looked through the peephole.
We were in the thick of our summit when we were alerted by a crunch of old wood, which immediately turned into scrabbling noises like an animal scratching at a door. It came from the bedroom. We were amazed. Chris got up slowly, picked up his glass of whisky and downed it in one gulp. The rest of us copied him. With extreme caution, we peered into the bedroom, but there was no one in sight. We went in. Using gestures picked up from some TV crime series, Christof pointed at the half-open window and we all nodded. The noises seemed to be coming from outside. Whoever it was, we’d catch him red-handed. We stood there in silence, peering at the raised blind and the curtains waving gently in the breeze. Then we ruled out the window as the source of the noise. The vibrations were coming from inside the walls themselves, or from beneath the floor, like a geyser about to blow. The moment we realized that the sounds were being made inside the wardrobe, they stopped.
