Lost Luggage (18 page)

We know that Bundó enjoyed Carolina's outbursts but suffered in equal measure. It was 1967, more than a year since they'd been seeing each other intermittently, and their relationship had entered a new phase. Bundó stopped frequenting other prostitutes. This abstinence now meant that the La Ibérica trucks stopped more frequently on the road from Lyon to Saint-Étienne. While he went upstairs with Muriel, Gabriel and Petroli waited in the service station cafeteria. They ate
croque-monsieur
, as Bundó had recommended, and worked on the excuses they'd have to offer to Senyor Casellas to explain the delay. Carolina, meanwhile, had begun to incorporate Bundó's fabrications into Muriel's life. When a client got too heavy, she'd blow him away by telling him she was finishing a university degree in Lyon, that she had a brawny, evil-tempered
French boyfriend and that they were going to live in Paris very soon.

There were days when the to-ing and fro-ing between reality and fiction caught even Bundó off guard. Sometimes, when he was lucky enough to spend the whole night with her, he'd get into bed with Muriel (paying, because the brothel norms and the madame's monitoring required it) and would wake up in the morning lying next to Carolina. However familiar he was with her double identity, he wasn't spared a certain degree of anguish because of it, and, when he was back in the truck again, his two friends had to try to lift his spirits. Petroli, the most methodical of the three of them, advised him to take Carolina back to Barcelona, and the sooner the better. Nevertheless, since the beginning, since the first Saturday he'd stayed to sleep with her—as a friend—Carolina had warned Bundó that he should never make plans for the two of them, or try to convince her to do anything. She, and she alone, would decide about her future.

Bundó then plotted his own, more gradual strategy. The idea was to be patient and to swaddle Carolina in a mesh of gallantry that would make her see the light. He visited her with sexual devotion, brought her news of her parents (sweetened up, when necessary, to disguise the grayness), and presented her with objects he acquired through the moves. With each step he took, she ceded him a cubic millimeter of her future. They were vague references, comments made as if in passing and, for any one of us, would have been imperceptible in terms of any advance, but Bundó knew how to interpret them as a stimulus to keep going.

Early in 1969, after three years of dithering that threatened to go on forever, Bundó made a down payment on an apartment in a building that was going up in Via Favència in Barcelona. He put it in both their names. Here we have a sea change. When he eventually took possession of the keys, he left Senyora Rifà's boarding house and went to live there alone. Carolina approved of the change (and maybe even started to make plans), but it was very difficult for her to decide to return to Barcelona.

Before Christophe met her in the brasserie in Paris, we Christophers
had asked ourselves more than once: Did she really love Bundó? We had no right to do so, but we questioned her motives. We must confess that this uncertainty continued for some time after the lunch. Senyora Carolina, in her late fifties, friendly but distant, could only go back to that period of her life sheltered behind a shield of cynicism. This artifice didn't convince us, and, unjustly, we left Paris oppressed by feelings of frustration. Three weeks later, Christophe opened up his mailbox and found the following note. Read it and declare us guilty.

Mon cher
Christophe,

It is now some weeks since we had lunch together in Paris, and not a single day has gone by when I haven't reproached myself for that meeting. I should never have agreed to it. I talked too much. You shook up my memory as if it was a glass ball, and now the snowstorm won't go back to settling at the bottom. Don't blame yourself, though. In the last few days, thinking hard, I've realized the whole thing was a question of self-defense. It was so hard to get over Bundó's absence! The only way out, eventually and paradoxically, was to leave the brothel in the way I did. After moving to Paris and cutting myself off from the world for a while, I said yes to a man who was convinced that he loved me, and went off to live with him in the provinces, in just another anonymous city. Happiness doesn't exist but is only desired. You can desire it all your life and you'll never have enough. I'm not complaining, but I changed my life just as I would have done if I'd gone with him, with Bundó. It was the only way to survive.

Now, Christophe, I'm going to tell you—tell all of you—something intimate that should release me from this pain, or at least ease it. Many years have gone by, but this is the most alive thing that is left to me of Bundó: He was the only man who was ever able to make me confuse sex and love. I hope you will forgive my frankness. The French say that every orgasm is a little death. Yet each visit from him gave me the gift of experiencing little births: He took me back for a few seconds
to that patch of perfect, inviolable darkness when you still haven't been born and the world expects nothing from you.

You see? Things are looking calmer inside the glass ball. I alarmed myself too much. The snowstorm was just a rain of confetti.

Give my best regards to your mother, please. Oh, Mireille! Tell her I often think about her.

I hope that you and your brothers will understand me when I make my final farewell now, with a kiss.

Your Carolina

P.S. They were your brothers,
n'est-ce pas,
those three Gabriels who were spying on me from the other side of the road when I got into the taxi in front of the restaurant? You are so alike!

Oh dear, she found us out. What more can we say?

Perhaps this is a sign. Maybe it's time for each one of us to speak for himself. Get ready, Christof: In keeping with strict biological order you have to start.

T
he first thing you have to do, before anything else, is beg my forgiveness. In front of everyone.”

“Beg your forgiveness? May I ask why?”

“Because you've known our brothers for months, Christof, and you haven't introduced me yet. You haven't invited me on any of your ‘research' trips, as you like to call them with your usual pedantry. As if Gabriel wasn't my father too. I bet you've never even mentioned me to them.” He lapses into reproachful silence. “You've never told them about me, have you?”

“There's no time for that now. Get it into your head that this is my turn, I'm the soloist in this concert and I have a lot to say. You should be grateful that I've let you come along this time.”

“So you're going to ignore me and hog the limelight . . . Have it your own way then. But don't complain later if I clam up and refuse to say a word. You're winding me up to the point of insurrection. Anyway, you haven't got a clue how to do a monologue. We always do our gigs together.”

“Okay, calm down. Christophers, listen: This is our brother Cristoffini. He was born in Italy—”

“—in a little village in Sicily, in the middle of the island, and don't make me go into any more detail. They haven't made me Favorite Son because they already have one, Don Vito. And don't make me go into details about that either. It all stays in the family.
We might share a father, Christophers, but I'm from a famous lineage on my mother's side,
capito
? I'm also the oldest of us five brothers, and, in case you haven't worked it out yet, that makes me the heir. When you four were born, I'd already spent years with this cardboard carcass”—he taps his head,
toc, toc
—“dragging it around the world, dressed up in my striped diplomat's suit and this hat that never goes out of fashion. If I look younger than you, it's because I'm immortal.”

Cristoffini's voice rasps out hoarse and asthmatic sounding, as if his vocal cords were made of esparto grass.

“Okay, perhaps I owe you an explanation. Cristoffini and I do shows at weekends. We go to nightclubs, matinee shows, birthday parties, wherever they ask for us. We have a go at the government and famous folk, and make people laugh. Sometimes Cristoffini gets stuck into the audience, and then I have to gag him to stop him from going too far. It's our pastime and, besides, we make a bit of extra cash.”

“Do you know what our publicity says? Christof and Cristoffini. I let him put his name first only because it sounds better like that. He gets to keep the loot (not much), and I get the fame (lots). How many years have we been doing our show, sonny?”

“More than fifteen. We made our debut when I was in high school, one of those Christmas festivals they put on, remember? Mom came every year, and Dad never came once. To tell the truth, we've been very
good company for one another over the years. Right, Cristoffini?”

Cristoffini lays his head on Christof's shoulder, making out that he's moved by his words, but his mocking expression betrays him. A lurid pink scar follows the contour of his left cheek.

“I know you're messing with me, as usual.” With a well-aimed shove, Christof extricates himself from Christoffini's embrace. “Sometimes I think you don't know how to tell the difference between truth and fiction. It's one thing for you to play the cynic in our show—we've agreed that's your role—but it's quite another for you to do it when you're with the family. I'm sure my brothers—our brothers—know what I mean when I say that we've been very good company for one another. Christophers, I'm referring to that sadness that used to descend on us all of a sudden. We've already talked about it, right? When we were about eleven or twelve. You come home from school in winter. You're all alone because Mom's at work and there's no news of Dad. You look at yourself in the hall mirror while you're taking off your coat and scarf, and, all of a sudden, the face of the boy, numb with cold, is darkening with distress. That loneliness didn't last long, but it was absolutely searing! It came out of you, and it died in the image in the mirror. It was only natural that we wanted to exchange that reflection for a brother who would have helped to fill the silences.”

“If you'd woken me up sooner from my slumbers in that box, you might have saved yourself all that.”

“I've apologized for that millions of times,” Christof says in a stage whisper. “Don't make me repeat it in front of my brothers. Now let me talk about our father, which is why we're here.”

“
Va bene,
” Cristoffini says condescendingly. He closes his eyes and nods encouragingly, like a priest about to hear a confession. “Where are you going to start?”

“Well, I could say that when I saw Dad for the first time I was over a year old and he didn't even know I existed. His appearance made a huge impression on me, and maybe that's why it's so prominent among what I like to think are my first memories. We're standing by the front door, and this tall, thin man picks me up with inexpert hands. No one says a word. I look at my mother, wanting her to comfort me, but she's so shocked I don't recognize her and then I start howling.”

“Just a moment, just a moment. Wind the tape back, and get inside your mother's belly, please. If necessary go back as far as the
coglioni di tuo padre.
We want to know all the details.”

“If you insist . . .” Christof looks gratified. “Then I'll have to go back to January 15, 1965, during a move La Ibérica did to Bonn. In the catalogue of pilferage it would appear as Number 47, I'd say, and the pickings were notable for a collection of zarzuela records. At about two in the afternoon, after unloading in the capital of West Germany, Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli set out on their
homeward journey, but near Koblenz something like a thick white eiderdown wadded the sky. Less than ten kilometers down the road they were slap-bang in the middle of a snowstorm of biblical proportions.” Cristoffini makes the sign of the cross. “They'd got through similar difficulties on other occasions, but this time it was a return trip. With an empty trailer and no ballast, the truck slithered on the asphalt like an elephant on an ice rink. They followed the motorway along the Rhine for a few more kilometers to see if the ominous whiteness in the sky was going to clear, but when they got near Mainz and Wiesbaden, they gave up. It was getting dark, and the only landscape they could make out, increasingly enshrouded in snow, filled them with a very Germanic state of anxiety. Bundó, with his talent for finding good roadside hostels, recalled that some German truck drivers had been singing the praises of a place near Mainz. In those days before Bundó met Muriel-Carolina, he enjoyed chatting with other truck drivers in service areas and exchanging recommendations for the best motels and brothels along the European transport routes. Since he was meticulous about these matters, he marked them with a red cross on the map, writing the names alongside them.”

“Hang on, Christof,” Cristoffini interjected. “A hostel, near Mainz? Don't tell me it was the Herz-As, that Ace of Hearts dive you dragged me into so you could have a beer when we were on our way back from a gig in Frankfurt?” Christof nods resignedly. “I thought so. How decadent! The stench of spilled beer! Those wooden benches and walls must be caked with thirty years of truck drivers' vomit, including our father's and his friends'. And the ladies who were tempting us at the bar (me more than you)—
Madonna!
—they've been at it for three decades . . .” He shuts up for a moment, nodding and pondering in silence. “In other words, to go back to that original night, a mere snowstorm provided the perfect excuse for the three friends to take refuge under the well-warmed eiderdowns of those
meretrici.
And, meanwhile, Gabriel's spermatozoa, poor little things, were preparing for the great race of their lives.”