Lost Luggage (7 page)

We calculate that the pornographic chapter of their friendship lasted almost a year and a half. Each one wrote about forty stories, although, by the end, many of the characters cropped up again, and plots were rehashed. The pages were showing the wear and
tear of use and abuse. However crazy it may seem, both Gabriel and Bundó had decided that the best way to camouflage their stories was to tuck them into their Religious Instruction notebooks. Accordingly, the erotic tales always bore titles that wouldn't arouse the suspicions of any nun who might discover them, for example “Flowers of the Virgin of May,” “The Calvary of Father Salustio,” or “The Mystery of the Nails of Christ.”

When they began to work with the moving company, life in the outside world slowly replaced words and fantasy with the much more prosaic reality of ravenous sex. Nonetheless, we Christophers are convinced that their erotic library colored their relations with flesh-and-blood women. In any case, as they were rattling around Europe in the truck years later, the tricks of memory made them relive more than once that intimate bond between religion and sex, a mutual transaction, as if they were two sides of the same coin. Like most truckers, Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli had decorated the inside of the cabs with calendars of naked pinups. They were calendars from 1967, 1968, and 1969, a New Year gift from service stations in Germany and France, with a gallery of fecund Valkyries and coy sex-kittens posing on Pirelli tires or draped over the shining hood of a car that was always red. The three friends had seen them so often that they were at home with the presence of their paper harem. Homeward bound and approaching the border post at La Jonquera, however, they had to turn the calendars around and display the pictures they'd stuck on the back to disguise them. Devout scenes featuring His Holiness Paul VI or the Virgin of Montserrat then guided them along the straight-and-narrow of the badly cambered roads of Franco's Spain.

If we're going to make progress, we Christophers now need to return to Carrer Nàpols. The first time we four brothers met in Barcelona, incredulous, suspicious, and still dumbfounded by the revelations, Cristòfol showed us our father's mezzanine apartment.

It was one Saturday in May, a sunny spring day, and the three of us from the other side of the Pyrenees thought it was a gift from
the gods. We'd arranged to meet in a hotel restaurant in the center of town where Cristòfol had reserved rooms for us. We did the introductions and had lunch together. The first few hours were cordial, a sort of testing of the waters, but all four of us were too stiff and wary, and then there was the awkwardness about language, so we didn't quite manage to break the ice over lunch. The only meeting point was our father, but we talked about him as if he were a stranger to us (and he was), a capricious host who'd engineered a surprise get-together, and now we had to find out why. Midafternoon we walked through the Ribera neighborhood, stopped at the El Born market—the building now under lock and key—in honor of our father's first cries and, crossing Ciutadella Park, made our way to Carrer Nàpols.

We were silent and solemn as we went up the dark stairway leading to the mezzanine floor—as if someone had died and we had to go to the wake—and as soon as we entered Gabriel Delacruz Expósito's apartment (as the mailbox in the entrance failed to say) we began to recover our shared past. There was nothing mystical about this. It's just that the objects that he'd kept, set out by Cristòfol on the table, triggered memories, and the distances that separated us were whittled away. Four boys reliving anecdotes, obsessions, words, disappointments, and emotions. After three hours it was as if we'd known each other all our lives. Each one of us seized upon coincidences in the happy certainty that any mention was enough for the other three to endorse them unanimously. The game got us laughing. Since there was no light in the apartment, when it got dark we went off to find a café so that we could get on with our forensic examination. One thing led to another. At three in the morning a sleepy waiter kicked us out of the hotel bar.

After that first joint visit to the apartment in Carrer Nàpols, we agreed that the four of us would pay our father's overdue rent. A first step. This is how the apartment became a sort of social hub, the headquarters for our inquiries. Rita, who still refuses to set foot in the place, mocks us, saying that soon we're going to turn it into the Christophers Club, “a museum with a guard, dusty display cases, and red ropes blocking entry to the conjugal bedrooms.”

This is slightly over the top. We're not father worshippers, not us. You could even say that if we've ganged up to find him it's got more to do with satisfying our curiosity than concern for him. Right now, if we set our minds to it, we could reel off a whole catalogue of shared grudges just as effortlessly as we're weaving together our childhood memories. And, needless to say, all of us, each one of his own accord and without discussing it, have more than once been tempted to throw in the towel. It would be very easy right now to pretend that Gabriel no longer exists. We've had many years of training for that.

“He's a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land . . .” Chris intones as if capturing our thoughts.

What is it that impels us to look for him, then? We might say it's the urge to complete an impossible family portrait of our father. During that first visit when we all went together to the apartment, we were entranced by the clues that our meticulous examination of Gabriel's belongings threw up; they proved impossible to ignore. One parcel contained ten brand-new packs of cards, all wrapped up in cellophane. Three carefully piled boxes held a jumble of improbable objects, painstakingly stowed away so as to make the best use of the space: a tortoiseshell comb, a ceramic figure representing Actaeon and his hounds, a teakwood paperweight, the shell of a tortoise, a radio-cassette player, a tape of María Dolores Pradera and another one of Xavier Cugat's orchestra, a foldout postcard book with pictures of London, a toy camera, some Swiss nail clippers, a collection of casino chips from Monte Carlo for playing poker . . .

The only link that could be established between all these knickknacks was, of course, our father's peripatetic existence. For some years—and we're jumping ahead now—Bundó, Gabriel, and Petroli retained some souvenir from every move they did. A box, a bag, a suitcase went astray by accident, and they shared it out like good brothers. They knew it was an offence but had made the excuse that it was social justice, portraying it as a well-deserved tip after so many hours of nonstop toil in conditions close to slavery. Anyway, who hasn't lost a box during a move? It's a fact of life.

Gabriel had confessed these thefts to our mothers, with the nonchalance of a Robin Hood, and even made us beneficiaries. Thanks to one of Cristòfol's finds, we were better able to follow the course of those years. In a shoebox, nestling among restaurant cards, city maps, and road atlases, was a black oilcloth notebook. It had a clandestine look about it and was somewhat battered by use. In it Gabriel had noted down the contents of each of the cases, boxes, and trunks they'd taken as booty from their moving jobs. Since he was a diligent person, there was nothing missing in the notebook: the route, date, and an itemization of everything that had been plundered, which they divvied up like proper pirates.

This highway robbers' existence, if you'll permit us the expression, afforded something close to an idyllic lifestyle for Gabriel and Bundó. It was idyllic because it compensated both of them for the instability of their early adolescence, while establishing them in a sort of itinerant paradise. Before talking about that, however, we have to get through a period of apprenticeship of hellish proportions.

It was the beginning of 1958, and Bundó and Gabriel were sixteen. The orphanage had moved to an establishment known as Llars Mundet, as had been planned for some time, and the change was very unsettling. The new institution, located high up in Vall d'Hebrón, was a mammoth construction, built a long way from everything, a whole city in itself that obliged them to turn their backs on Barcelona. Within four weeks of the opening of the new building, they were longing for the labyrinthine passageways of the House of Charity. Now, from a distance, they were tormented by the conviction they were missing out on a world contained in the noisy vice-ridden maze of streets beyond the orphanage. So, what on earth were they doing up there, in that mountainous semiwilderness? A few pensioners from a nearby old people's home wandered around filling their lungs with fresh air, and the younger kids had more space for playing outside, but what about these two? “This is the Wild West,” they said and frittered away their time trapping lizards, improving their aim by throwing stones at an old tin, or plotting heroic escapes. Their indolence horrified the nuns,
who wasted no time in finding a remedy. Since the boys were not especially brilliant students and, more importantly, because there was no family to take them in, the Mother Superior decided that they were old enough to leave their studies and get a job.

Gabriel wrote Spanish without too many spelling errors so he went off to be apprenticed to a typesetter in the House of Charity printing press. It didn't take him long to realize he didn't like the job. His main task was removing the residue of dry ink from the pieces of lead type that had gone through the printer. Sometimes they told him to stow the wooden pieces they used for titles in their correct boxes. At first he found it entertaining enough, not unlike doing a jigsaw puzzle—
F
with the
F
s,
B
with the
B
s . . . but it wasn't very exciting, and the supervisor often shouted at him to hurry up. “Move it, boy!” Only occasionally, as a consolation prize, did they let him compose half a column of news or a few ads paid for by the word, but, since the dingy place was airless and he was weak and malnourished, the upside-down letters made his head spin and brought on attacks of queasiness. He was locked up in the printers twelve hours a day, from seven to seven and, in addition, he had to work Saturdays and Sundays twice a month because the Monday newspaper
Hoja del Lunes
was printed in the House of Charity. After work he would have liked to amuse himself for a while in his old neighborhood and, now that they gave him a bit more freedom, to venture on to the Rambla, or beyond Plaça de la Universitat into Carrer Aribau. But he had to run to get the tram and bus, crossing the whole of Barcelona to get to Llars Mundet. The nuns were very strict about punctuality and, if he got back late, they wouldn't give him dinner. To add insult to injury, he got a good reprimand as well.

One evening, as the tram climbed Carrer Dos de Maig and the sooty façades were lit up by the flashes of electrical sparks, he noticed that two young girls were pointing at him and laughing. He instinctively looked at his reflection in the window and didn't recognize himself in the face staring back at him. There was an inky moustache under the nose, and in the masked features he saw a dejected, shabby man. All of a sudden he saw himself twenty years
later, doing the same commute, and this made him unhappier still. “This must be what it's like to grow up,” he resignedly told himself. A series of flashes from the overhead wires shook him from his reverie, and the reflection vanished from the window.

Bundó was more fortunate. It must be said that his sturdy build and resolute air in the face of life's surprises were a help. The Mother Superior, Sister Elvira, came from a well-heeled family of the Bonanova neighborhood. While she harbored a few pangs of conscience, her parents and siblings had repositioned themselves with surprising ease after all the upheaval of war and, ever since their kind of people had been in charge, had set about reestablishing the old order of things, which had worked so well in their favor. Needless to say, in January 1939, after two long years of eking out an existence in a property on the outskirts of Barcelona, in hiding and shitting themselves with fright, without any maids and grudgingly rationing their breakfast coffee, they'd been the first to hang a white sheet from the balcony of their apartment and to go down to Avinguda Diagonal, all of them together, to cheer on Franco's troops as they marched by in their victory parade. Robert Casellas, Sister Elvira's older brother, had inherited the family business and had to get it going again from scratch. Every July 18, on the anniversary of the start of the Civil War, he celebrated the godsend by making a generous donation to the House of Charity. By this we mean big money. He saw it as the best way of earning himself a privileged place in heaven. In return for the favor, he sometimes asked his sister to send him the odd boy to lug stuff for his moving company. He wanted them brawny, without any bad habits, and orphans because then they wouldn't bother him with family celebrations. This was the fate of the young Bundó.

The company was called La Ibérica Transport and Moving. The offices and garage were in Carrer Almogàvers, very close to Rambla del Poblenou. Three DKV vans and three Pegaso trucks, all boxy and gleaming, slept on the premises. The DKVs were used for the simpler jobs and rarely ventured outside the province, while the trucks were assigned the big moves and, when necessary, traveled from Barcelona all over Spain. The collectivizations of 1937 had
stripped the company of men and machines, but Robert Casellas had got them back after some slick wheeling and dealing with the Ministry of Transport. His pride and joy, all six vehicles looked practically new, and he could spend hours and hours gazing at the shiny beasts with paternal love. When they came back to roost after a move, he'd have them washed and buffed by the latest arrivals among his workers until they looked as if they'd just rolled off the assembly line.