Lost Luggage (31 page)

“Like some species of sharks, which have to keep swimming. They even sleep while they're swimming because, if they stop, they suffocate and die,” Christophe offers by way of illustration.

That's what Gabriel's like. From the age of seventeen when he left the orphanage and went to the boarding house with Bundó, he always kept a couple of suitcases under his bed. One of them, made of cardboard, had been a gift from the nuns, a sort of passport to his future. They were his special cupboards, you might say. There was enough space in the two of them for his childhood treasures, a few school exercise books he'd taken from the House of Charity, a novel or two, photos of us, and the treasure from the moves. He aspired to fit his whole life into two suitcases. This light baggage of his combined perfectly with the La Ibérica trips, which made him feel like a nomad, and his temporary accommodation in the pension. Now you see me, now you don't. Gabriel should have been able to embody perpetual motion with minimal wear and tear but then, one February morning, he was stopped in his tracks and was unable to move again for a long time. He had almost three months of total inertia, we calculate, which must have been an eternity for him. The exact moment of his coming to a stop, so physical and so Newtonian, happened with a deafening screech, the kind that challenges the sound barrier and shudders
convulsively through you. The disaster meant that this was the last move. We'll try to stick with our story, which means we must now describe what happened without faintheartedness or faltering. It won't be easy.

Number 199. Barcelona-Hamburg.

February 14, 1972.

A deep, narrow, rectangular cardboard box with the words “Very Fragile” written on top. Thanks for the clue. Since Petroli's stayed behind to live in Germany, everything suggests that this time it will be divided up between Bundó and Gabriel. Once opened, it turns out to be the typical box of large, flat objects that don't fit anywhere else. Bundó's keeping a gold-framed mirror for the entrance to his apartment, and two paintings of woods in the autumn, which are signed S.B. Since, coincidentally, they're his own initials, Bundó's sure to say he painted them himself. The mirror's wrapped in two towels, embroidered with the same letters. So the pictures have been painted by the gentleman of the house. They're nice but you can see they were done by an amateur. Gabriel will keep an atlas of the world, a wooden tray with etchings representing tropical fruits, and two Slazenger tennis rackets. There's also an envelope with a couple of dusty X-rays of a broken wrist: The tennis-playing artist must have slipped during a game and would have spent some time not being able to paint. Even though no one wants them, Bundó says the X-rays can't be thrown away because that will bring bad luck.

What you've just read is the report from the last trip that Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli set out on together. The Pegaso's last parade. As always, our father detailed the division of the spoils, little knowing there would be no more. Perhaps he was a little self-conscious as he wrote because Move 200 was coming up and everyone knows that round numbers demand respect, yet it would be absurd to
scan his words for any sign of foreboding of what was about to happen, with the ink barely dry, a few hours later on the motorway. Then again, after coming at it from every angle, we Christophers are tempted to believe that, for quite some time, the three friends had unconsciously and reluctantly been heading for a point of no return. The future sucks us in with its uncertainty, but we call it destiny to simplify matters. When some calamity happens, we all do the same thing, don't we? We start looking for clues in the recent past in order to understand it, or even to justify it, as if we could somehow prevent the error or accident and go back to the natural order of cause and effect.

Sometimes, when we're together in the mezzanine apartment on Carrer Nàpols, we Christophers try to turn all these signs into certainties and branch out into all kinds of hypotheses. This, for example: It's highly probable that if the La Ibérica trips had continued that year, 1972, Gabriel would have moved heaven and earth to add another Christopher to the list. A little brother. This theory is supported by a certain biographical pattern: Christof was born in October 1965, while Christopher arrived in July 1967, and Christophe came along in February 1969. The rhythm tells us that every twenty months, more or less, our father was seduced by a girl and, after the nine mandatory months, these sporadic encounters brought forth another baby. We're sure, then, that sooner or later another European woman—Italian, Dutch, Swiss?—would have surrendered to his charms.

When we visited Petroli in Germany and told him about our theory, he thought it over for a few seconds and then, wrinkling his nose, countered it by saying that Gabriel had never planned to have children. These things happen, and that's that.

“Don't forget that your dad was a passive Don Juan,” he told us. “Bundó always paid to feel like a Don Juan. I was the libertine Don Juan Tenorio when I was chatting up and sweet-talking my melancholic little Spanish ladies (and here he quoted, ‘Down to the hovels I descended . . . up to the palaces I rose'). Your dad, however, obeyed the principle of least effort. In amorous matters, he simply couldn't say no. Ah, and he had an incredible ability to
hit the bull's-eye, as your presence in the world confirms. In having kids—can't you see?—he was the very opposite of a Don Juan.”

Okay, maybe he wasn't after a pan-European paternity, but we Christophers are certain that, wanting to or not, the passive Don Juan would have let himself get caught again that winter.

So, that's the situation before the disaster.

At the beginning of October 1971, after a delay of ten months and thirty panic attacks, Bundó was at last handed the keys to the apartment in Via Favència. On his first free Saturday he spent his small nest egg on some furniture, the most essential things. These items were delivered after ten days—by two moving men who, in the eyes of the international trucker were mere novices—and on the Sunday he and Gabriel took the DKV and moved in all the goods they'd lifted during the La Ibérica trips. Once the job was done, Bundó looked at the boxes scattered around the floor, the furniture still to be arranged, the bare bulbs, the curtainless windows, and, all of a sudden, these unprepossessing surroundings looked so familiar and cosy—he'd imagined them a thousand times before—that he decided to spend the night there.

“No sheets, just a blanket, I'll sleep on the new mattress, with the first ray of sun as my alarm . . .” he fantasized. “Like that time in Paris, remember? The welcome mat I got that day is packed in one of those boxes. It'll be the first thing I put in place because you'll always be welcome in my home.”

Bundó's impulses. Gabriel went along with it for a while but saw he was so excited about his apartment that it seemed a better idea to leave him to it. He gave him the keys to the van so he could return it to La Ibérica the next day and said he was going back to the boarding house.

“It's eight o'clock,” he said, looking at his watch. “If I don't get a move on I'll be late for dinner. You know how that puts La Rifà in a bad mood.”

For all his composure, there was no way he could disguise the lame excuse. The situation wasn't easy for him either. Gabriel knew it was the natural order of things and told himself that things were fine, but now—amazingly—for the first time in thirty years,
since they were toddlers in nappies, the two friends were no longer living under the same roof. For some time now, they'd been getting used to the peculiarities of the world, each in his own way, and life had embroiled them and swept them along unplanned paths. Of course it's no big deal because it happens to everyone and sometimes, late at night, they must have even joked about it, laughing so as not to cry: “Look at the fucking saints we turned out to be! One with three wives and three sons scattered around the world and the other courting a whore. Sorry, a
cocotte
 . . . yes,
cocotte
: That sounds better.” Given their background, it seemed inconceivable that Bundó and Gabriel would finally have to learn to live independently. It was as if Siamese twins, once separated, weren't twins any more, or even siblings.

When Gabriel left, Bundó went out onto the little dining room balcony and leaned over to look at the street. It was a seventh-floor apartment, and he immediately felt slightly dizzy. He gripped the rail. It was dark and, down below, the black, recently laid asphalt melted into the shadows of the night. The new street lights cast a patchy yellowish glow on the footpaths, which were still only half constructed. Tomorrow morning he'd be woken up by a cement mixer. A minute went by, and he heard the outside door closing, after which the figure of Gabriel moved off down the street toward the bus stop. He was walking with resolute steps. Bundó whistled a tune that had been their code since they were kids, another good-bye, but Gabriel can't have heard him because he didn't turn around. Trying not to think, Bundó looked for the van, spotted it, toy-sized in the street, and spat to see if he could hit it. The darkness engulfed his projectile at first-floor level. In the distance, toward the horizon, Barcelona's constellation of lights hypnotized him for a while. Carolina would be amazed when she saw it. It was cold. He went back into the dining room only to be ambushed by the stark realization of the change that he—and he alone—had brought about in his life. He'd been waiting for and fearing this moment for years and wasn't sure that he liked it. A strange uneasiness gripped his stomach, spread out everywhere and paralyzed him. His body immediately felt heavier, and the air
around him thickened, pressing on him as if the house needed to make a mold of him in order to recognize him. Though it wasn't a painful sensation, he would have given half his life to have Carolina with him. He would have hugged her tight, and, together, they would have shattered the quiet.

Now we've come to a thorny question: Ever since Bundó had embarked on the process of buying the apartment two years earlier, Carolina had been stonewalling about coming to live in Barcelona. Every time he visited her at the Papillon they inevitably talked about the apartment. She said she was dying for them to be together, to wake up at his side every morning and to get those stinking Frenchman out of her sight for ever—at which point Bundó begged her, for the love of God, not to go into details. Yet she seemed in no hurry to bring an end to that stage of her life. When Bundó tried to persuade her to be impetuous, to seize the day, to climb into the Pegaso and ride off into the sunset together, she said it wasn't enough just to close the door and walk away from the neon red of the big old building. She wasn't sure exactly what she wanted, but things were never that easy.

It's worth recalling that Carolina turned twenty-five in the autumn of 1971, by which time she'd spent six years doing roadside service. She'd learned to live with Muriel, her own personal Doctor Hyde, and loved her as if they were one person. Thanks to her alter ego, too, she'd acquired a cynical outlook on the world. Sitting at the bar in the wee hours, with cheap champagne in her glass and a croaky voice, Muriel used to say, “There are no good guys or bad guys here. We're all wallowing like pigs in shit. And we like it. Not because it's squalid but because it's ours. There's no choice: Either you freely admit it or you might as well go and hang yourself from the highest beam.” Recently, her status at the brothel had gained in prestige. With the arrival of new, untried girls, she worked fewer hours than before, which gave some solace to Bundó. Against the advice of the madame, she and a couple of coworkers had rented an apartment in Saint-Etienne and only went to the Papillon for the hours they were obliged to work. When there was a slack period, Muriel took aside the junior girls—among them two from
Spain, ingenuous, illiterate, and delightful—and instructed them in the art of faking it.

Nonetheless, this situation wasn't making her any happier. On the contrary. When the splendid, reserved Carolina, now well into her fifties, met Christophe in Paris, she talked about those decisive months without hesitation.

“Of course, it's very easy to say now,” Carolina told him, “but I wish I'd gone with Bundó to Barcelona when he first moved into the apartment. My problem was dithering. It happened to all of us in the Papillon. You can't begin to imagine what it was like: The brothel routine was crippling. It robbed you of your life. You're young, you try not to think about it and, to justify it, you send money to your parents every month. In my case, I sometimes had flashes of lucidity, often just after a visit from Bundó, and then I realized that the millstone around my neck was Muriel. I couldn't take her to Barcelona or anywhere else, but I couldn't leave her there, all alone and waiting for reincarnation in the other girls. These doubts consumed me, month after month, like when you don't dare go to the doctor's because you're afraid of what the tests will say, and so on and so forth, until it's too late. Then, not long after the disaster (and because of it), when my life no longer had any value—this is no exaggeration—one clear-eyed morning I got out of bed, knowing exactly what I had to do.” Carolina went quiet for a few seconds as if reconsidering what she was about to confess, but then continued in a more confidential tone. “I've never told anyone about this, Christophe, and I don't want it to go any further than you and if necessary your brothers. It was the end of that dreadful February, a weekday, midmorning, a time when I knew for sure that the Papillon would be closed and empty. I got up, after a sleepless night, my head teeming with thoughts, got dressed in my Muriel clothes, and phoned for a taxi. I put my Carolina clothes in a travel bag together with a few things I wanted to keep, especially gifts from Bundó. I wrote a note to my roommates telling them that a special job had come up in the Papillon (as sometimes happened) and that we'd see each other there that night. I got the taxi driver to take me to the gas station half a
kilometer from the brothel, and then asked him to leave. I filled an empty container I'd brought from the flat with three liters of gasoline. The guys at the station knew me so I told them it was for a client's car: He'd paid me to go there and bring him back the gasoline. “Who knows what the bastard wants to do with it! There are all kinds of brutes running loose in the world . . . !” I told them. Walking along the side of the road, as I'd done with Bundó the night I fell in love with him, I reached the Papillon. There were no cars going by, everything was in silence and the building seemed to be sleeping. There was a window at the back that opened into the storeroom and a space where the garbage from the bar was kept. The madame always left that window slightly open to let in a bit of fresh air to combat the permanent stink (tobacco, room freshener, disinfectant, sweat). It was closed again at midday by a woman who went there to clean, wash sheets, and take out the rubbish. It was child's play to open the roller blind using an old broomstick I found lying on the ground. I got inside and went up to the second floor where the bedrooms were. I splashed the petrol where it would burn best: curtains, sheets, rugs. I plugged in one of the electric radiators so that it would look like an accident if anyone investigated. I used the remaining gasoline to pour a stream running downstairs to the bar, which was riddled with woodworm. Then I set fire to the house. The whole place went up. Destruction on a biblical scale. I only just had time to strip down and throw Muriel's clothes and things into the flames. The heat was searing but it felt good on my skin. Still stark naked, I escaped through the window and, once outside, got dressed as Carolina. Then I left, making my way through the fields, crouching and not looking back until I got to the next village, where I took a bus to Paris. Just as we were leaving, we were overtaken by two fire engines and an ambulance. The column of smoke was visible in the distance. That afternoon, when the fire had razed the building to the ground and everything inside it was burnt to a cinder, the police certified that there were no victims and the firemen attributed it to a short circuit. The premises had been crying out for renovation for ages. Since the madame was nobody's fool, she decided it would be best to forget
about me, grab the insurance money, and not get embroiled in filing complaints or investigations, which wouldn't have been good for her at all. So everyone was happy. Farewell forever, Muriel.