Lost Luggage (19 page)

“Don't go jumping to conclusions, Cristoffini. Listen and don't
interrupt me, please. Let's not start on that. First of all, if we went into the truck drivers' hostel that night, it was to do some research, even if you object to the word. Petroli had told us, the four flesh-and-blood Christophers, about the episode, and I wanted to check out the scene. I agree with you, it's a dump nowadays. Second, for your information, the only one who stayed in the Herz-As that night was Bundó. He couldn't resist. Sometimes his need to jump in the sack with an easy-going woman was almost a matter of life and death, like eating or sleeping, and it had the side effect of clearing his head. Though the sign of the hostel said Ace of Hearts, which must have called out to Gabriel's gambling instincts, he and Petroli opted for a more conventional alternative . . . and if you imagine for one moment that my mother, Sigrun, worked in the Herz-As, I'm sorry to disappoint you because she didn't.”

“It never as much as entered my head, Christof, I swear it. Mothers are sacred.”

Cristoffini blows a kiss off his fingertips. Christof's managed to read his mind, and, for a moment, Cristoffini's dummy face seems to be blushing. The scar on his cheek glows like a hot coal.

“So much the better.”

“Keep going. Come on, it's getting late. So far we've got Bundó in the Ace of Hearts chatting up a lady who could also be his mother but she isn't. That's clear. She's not his mother or anyone else's mother. Now we need to know what's happened with Gabriel, Petroli, and, more than anything else, the twitchy little critters that are wriggling around inside Gabriel's balls.”

Christof lights up. Normally he doesn't smoke but he uses it for effect and to draw out his words. He inhales then blows the smoke in Cristoffini's face. The latter shuts his eyes, coughing violently, about to split his backbone in two.

“People who spend their lives on the road, in a truck and a long way from home, need to be alone,” Christof resumes. “I call it a refuge. Most of all it's a mental refuge, though it's often dressed up as physical need. Locked in the cab day and night, running here and running there all over the map, they get fed up with each other in the end and are dying to escape for a while.”

“Like us two,” Cristoffini chimes in. “Like those times when you bed me down in my cardboard box (because he keeps me in a miserable cardboard box, Christophers!) and go off traveling without me.”

“If I remember rightly, the last time we had a Christophers' meeting in Barcelona I brought you along.”

“Yes, in your suitcase, keeping your underpants company. And you know very well that I've become claustrophobic with age! And then you're ashamed of me, which is the most horrible thing that can happen between brothers, and you don't let me leave the hotel . . .”

“Okay, that's enough talking about you. You're vanity personified. And now, if you'll be so good as to let me continue, we have an appointment with Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli.” Cristoffini's ready with his riposte but Christof won't have it. “As I was saying, after six months of traveling together, the three friends had learned to spot those extremely scarce golden opportunities for being alone, and to keep them for themselves. The repertoire included (real or invented) breakdowns of the truck, the breathers after getting rid of a whole truckload of stuff, fortuitous hitches like the customs office being closed at an international checkpoint, a detour because of road works, the ban in some countries against driving on Sundays, or a bad storm. On these occasions we've seen how Bundó rushes off to take refuge in the arms of the first tart he can find on terra firma. Our father Gabriel's refuge is still a mystery: complex, intangible, fleeting, and inaccessible all those years, it might well be that its only manifestation is here in these pages (like footsteps in the snow revealing the passage of an invisible man), and putting the last period in place will be the only way of giving it substance. Right, Christophers? As for Petroli, we know that he tended to prefer older women, but he also thought that paying prostitutes was cheating. He was more partial to the adventure of flirting with housewife-cum-mothers, even if it turned out badly. He admitted that his aspirations tended to be romantic, not to say utterly unrealistic, but the smallest sign of success was
so pleasing to him that it gave him the confidence of a Casanova, which lasted for several days.”

“Casanova? Petroli a Casanova?
Ma tu sei pazzo!
You really enjoy undermining the legend of my compatriot . . . Not even I”—and an indignant Cristoffini stretches out his neck and closes his eyes—“and take note of what I'm saying, I, who have spent many hours locked up in wardrobes or hiding under the beds of mistresses, trembling with fear that the cuckold's going to discover me (the Italian cuckolds are always little pricks), not even I can compare with the great Giacomo!”

Christof lets him prattle on.

“Listen to the sound of gently falling rain, Christophers. Now you can see why I haven't introduced him to you before now, right? He might say he's our older brother but he's unpresentable!” Christof looks upset for a few moments but then realizes he's losing it and tries to calm down. “Anyway, he doesn't give a damn. He always carries on like this, and I'm not going to let him rattle me. As I was saying, outside of Spain, Petroli turned into a sort of Casanova, yes, and he always took refuge in nostalgia. For some sentimental reason, he could only find peace when surrounded by his fellow Spaniards. Thus, with the same devotion that Bundó put into his highway harems, Petroli sought Spanish emigrant associations scattered across Central Europe. It all began with a childhood friend of his who'd emigrated to the south of Germany to work in a metallurgical plant. For the first few summers after that they continued to meet up whenever they went back to the village to visit their parents, but, after the old people died, Petroli lost sight of him. Years later, one day when they were passing close to where his friend lived, he called in to say hello. While Gabriel and Bundó waited in the cab playing cards, the friend took him to have a glass of wine at the Spanish Workers' Center. He showed Petroli photos of his wife and German-born kids. For want of practice, his Catalan had lost its native accent. That long half hour of conversation, although it teetered on the brink of sorrow, lifted Petroli's spirits for the rest of the trip. Thereafter, without needing
the excuse of finding a friend, he turned to anyone who would listen in these receptacles of melancholy. He'd walk in glum, unload his troubles onto the first Spaniard he found, and come out a new man. Very occasionally, when his art of seduction worked, he managed to leave the place with some liberated Iberian lady wanting a bit of fun. As you can imagine, it wasn't long before he could rattle off by heart every club, association, and center where the emigrant workers met. Do you remember, Christophers, what Petroli said when we went to visit him? ‘Those people with their ordinary concerns, ambitions, and attacks of homesickness, made me feel I was in good company. I was almost in the same boat. The only difference was that my frustration didn't stay still and my adopted country was everywhere and nowhere.' Petroli's round included associations of Catalans, Galicians, Extremadurans, and Aragonese. They had evocative names like Centro García Lorca, Hogar del Maño, and La Santa Espina, and they always appeared in industrial cities cut from the same pattern. Eindhoven, Mannheim, Reading, Béziers, Kaiserslautern. Neighborhoods with factories and chimneys, cheap housing, and milky skies.”

“That's enough. You just want to make us cry, Christof. I hope, for your own good,” says Cristoffini, fingering a bump on his jacket at about rib level, “that you're not about to do something daft like singing one of those hymns along the lines of ‘Oh, I shall never see again the sunny shores of my land . . . Oh, how I long for you, little birds and my garden's flowers' . . . We agree that going to another country to work must have been a drama for all those people but, fuck it, goddammit, let's not lose sight of Franco's Spain, which wasn't exactly a variety show in the fifties.”

“No, I didn't want get folksy or overdo the pathos. On the contrary. What I wanted to tell you was precisely (before this parasite butted in as usual) that today's Petroli, the pensioner in the north of Germany, is convinced that time proved him right and that his fixation with the emigrants' centers sorted out his life, but that's only partly true. The fact is that, after several years of running around in the truck (by February 1972 to be precise), Petroli was well known among the emigrants, to the point of being a caricature.
Everywhere he went, they all knew his troubles and complaints and took pains to avoid him. The thousands of kilometers he'd swallowed up had begun to dampen his spirits and age him prematurely. Then, on a visit to the Asturian Center in Hamburg, which we might describe as routine, he met Ángeles. The mutual attraction was so immediate and electric that, first thing next morning, without a second thought, he phoned Senyor Casellas and, amid bursts of demented laughter, announced that he was leaving the job. Gabriel and Bundó were already on their way back to Barcelona. Casellas tried to dissuade him, appealing first to his responsibilities and then tempting him with the prospect of a raise. Petroli, however, wasn't in the least embarrassed about pronouncing the word . . .”

“What word?”

“The word. You know what it is.”

“No, I don't. Go on, say it. I want to hear it.”

“You just want to mess with me, I know.”

“I'm telling you I won't. Promise. What word?”

“Love. Love. He told Casellas he'd found the love of his life.”

“Ooooooh! Che bello! L'amore!”

“You're disgusting, Cristoffini, and you've got no soul. If the devil appeared one day wanting to buy it, you'd have nothing to sell him. You're empty inside. You're a bottomless pit. A glacier, an abyss that gobbles up everything . . . Shall I go on?”

“Well, do you know what I think?” Cristoffini counterattacks, demonstrating that criticism is water off a duck's back to him. “If I don't have a soul it's because you stole it when you were a kid. Every time you stuck your hand inside me without the slightest qualm, just like you're doing now, you took a pinch of my soul and kept it for yourself. You're a thief. You're worse than a thief!” He pauses to let the venom take effect. “Is that what you want? Shall we get out our dirty laundry and show it to our brothers?”

Christof's been stopped in his tracks. With drooping shoulders and a lost look in his eye, he's turned into a lifeless dummy. Cristoffini raises a haughty head, lie a newly crowned king, savouring his victory. When the silence starts to weigh too heavily, he taps
Christof's shoulder as if trying to snap him out of a daydream. It's a defiant gesture.

“Come on, stop carrying on like a baby, little brother. Don't get cross. We're dying to hear what you've got to say. You were saying that Petroli fell in love with Ángeles . . .”

“Yes, I was saying that he met her in one of those emigrants' places,” Christof says self-consciously, “but what I wanted to remark on is that, apart from that detail, you won't find anything else that matches Petroli's normal erotic ambitions: She wasn't older than him, she didn't carry on every five minutes about being homesick for her motherland, and neither did she want to return to Oviedo.”

“Very good. Have you finished, Barbara Cartland? Sorry, sorry . . .” From Christof's deflated reaction Cristoffini realizes that sarcasm is no longer seemly. “I just want to ask you one thing. What does Petroli's sentimental life have to do with the famous day of the snowstorm, which is what concerns us right now?”

“Everything, Cristoffini, everything. Let's see if you get it. Life's full of surprises and that's what's so great about it. Right, Christophers?” Christof wants supporters. “If there's one thing we've confirmed since we began following the trail left by our father, it's that our lives (everybody's lives) are capriciously entwined and knotted together, sometimes playfully and, more often than not, in an impossible twist. Try to follow a strand from the end, undo all the knots to observe each thread separately, and you'll soon find out that it's totally useless. At the moment of birth we're already tangled like wool. In the end, the paradox is that a life as solitary as Gabriel's could have been braided with so many different people. So, in our father's case, the skein of realities and dreams that is the stuff of intimate life starts to become dangerously snarled up the day of the big snowfall in Mainz.”

“Translate that for us, please. All this philosophy's making my head spin . . .” Christoffini makes his point by twisting his neck in a way that is horrible to watch.

“Well that evening, with the same speed with which Bundó located the Ace of Hearts, Petroli consulted his list of emigrants'
centers in Germany. The highly industrialized bank of the Rhine and the environs of Frankfurt were teeming with them and he soon discovered that there was a Spanish workers' center in a place called Rüsselsheim. The town was about ten kilometers away from the motorway. In other words, it was worth taking a chance. Since night was falling and Gabriel had a better sense of direction in the dark, Petroli asked him if he wanted to come along too.

“And poor Gabriel had to choose between the bitch and life's-a-bitch,” Christoffini added.

“You and your wordplay. Oh, we think you're so witty . . . My guess is that on those occasions what often happened was that our dad really wanted to be left alone. Any roadside snack bar was fine by him, however inhospitable it was. He'd have something to eat and then, while he was having his coffee and a smoke, he'd get out his cards and play solitaire until it was time to go back to the truck. If the other two still hadn't arrived, he'd tune into some music on the radio, stretch out on the bunk, and try to get some sleep. That was fine by him because he tended to take the wheel after dinner. He said it helped his digestion. Sometimes, however, if he didn't feel like being alone or if it was too cold to wait inside the cab of the Pegaso, he went along with one of his friends' proposals. He tried to be evenhanded, and it wasn't unusual for him to flip a coin. The sexual excursions with Bundó were flavored with a joviality that made him relive his adolescence. Furthermore, by keeping him company he could also keep an eye on his wallet. Carried away by euphoria, his soul mate had an immoderate capacity for gratitude and leaving lavish tips for the ladies (without thinking, of course, of the abyss that separated pesetas from francs, marks, and pounds). Then again, Petroli's visits to partners in melancholy offered Gabriel the chance to play cards . . .”