Lost Luggage (36 page)

It must be said that the bedazzlement was mutual. Ángeles and Petroli spent two hours gazing into one another's eyes and engaging in mutual seduction with tales from the post-war years. (After that night, they swear, they were immune from the past and it was never again a topic of conversation. It was no longer necessary.) Meanwhile, Bundó and Gabriel, their bellies fit to burst, collapsed into two armchairs in a corner and nodded off. Eventually, Petroli came over, woke them up and, without any preliminaries, informed them, “I'm staying, guys.”

“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked.

“What I said. I'm staying. I'm not coming back with you. I've met the woman of my dreams. I've been trawling through places like this for years and now I know why. No, no, I'm not drunk. I know you won't believe me but that lady over there (no, don't turn around now!) is called Ángeles and we're made for each other. It's a gut feeling and you know I'm not into that kind of stuff. If it doesn't work out, I'll find my own way back. Please go without me.”

He spoke with such conviction that there was nothing they could say. Petroli was no braggart and neither was he desperate like Bundó, who'd been about to pull the plug on everything for his ten minutes at the Papillon. Petroli knew what he wanted. He called Ángeles over, introduced them, and then they rode off into the sunset . . . et cetera.

As Petroli confirmed, that night was the last time the three of them were together.

Bundó and Gabriel slumbered in the armchairs like a couple of angels. Petroli had paid the bill and asked the Asturians not to disturb them till closing time. After sweeping up, the last waiter came over and shook them awake, which took a while. They were fast asleep and, even when they opened their eyes, were slow to work out where they were. Then they remembered what had happened just before they dropped off: Petroli's decision. Did they dream it or was it real? The waiter politely turned them out and advised them that if they wanted a nice snug spot to spend the night they should go to the railway station—“the
Hauptbahnhof,
it's called”—which was very close, and the bar was open all night.

The air outside was so cold and damp that it woke them up like an icy-cold shower. After midnight and not a soul to be seen. They had to tread carefully to prevent slipping on the footpath.

“Is there blood coming out of my ears?” Bundó asked. “I can't feel them!”

“Hamburg is our Everest,” was our father's response.

They were walking huddled over in their too-thin anoraks and scarves. Though they'd been snoozing for four hours, their legs were heavy and their muscles felt as hard as rocks. They had two good strong coffees at the station in the company of three globetrotters and a gaggle of hippies. Then, half compelled by tradition, they rather listlessly opened up the rectangular box that had “gone astray” in the move. They divided up the loot as usual, and our father spent a few minutes updating his inventory in the notebook. Then they went back to the Pegaso.

Gabriel offered to drive. Now they were on the descent, he calculated that they could be in Frankfurt at about nine in the
morning, just in time to have breakfast with Sigrun and Christof. A surprise visit. In the first few kilometers, until the heating came on full, Petroli's absence was very noticeable: It was much warmer with three people squeezed up together in the cab. Bundó didn't take long to fall asleep and, with his snores as the soundtrack, our father gripped the steering wheel good and tight. Every motorway on earth looked ghostly on winter nights. He tuned into a German radio station. The announcer's voice kept him company and, though he didn't understand a word, he was under the impression that he was practising his German.

At half past six the sun came up in a gray sky heavy with low clouds. Shortly afterward Gabriel woke Bundó.

“Time to wake up,” he said. “We've just gone through Kassel. Frankfurt's not far.”

Bundó squirmed in his seat.

“No, no, no, we can't stop in Frankfurt. If we do that we won't get to France on time. Do you know what day it is today? It's the 14th of February, Saint Valentine's Day, lovers' day! I promised Carolina I'd visit her. You can't let me down!”

Gabriel took a few seconds to consider whether to fight over it or not. In the end, without answering except for a reluctant nod, he put his foot down on the accelerator. A few kilometers farther on, they drove past the Frankfurt exit. He hadn't had time to tell Sigrun he wanted to drop in so it wasn't all that serious. How many times in the future would he go back to that moment of doubt? How many times would he curse it?

He kept driving.

“We'll pull over at the next service stop and have some breakfast if you want,” he said, “and then you can take the wheel.”

Bundó snored in response. He'd dropped off again, so quickly that Gabriel wondered if he'd heard him speak just a moment before. After about twenty kilometers of a straight downhill run, the Pegaso was flying along, a winged horse. Gabriel noticed something like a grain of sand in his field of vision. An irresistible heaviness tipped his head forward. Then he fell asleep.

Beyond the windshield, it was snowing heavily again.

I
n the spring of 1968, Barcelona airport's hallways and departure lounges gleamed with the deceptive luster of ice. Although the Minister for Civil Aviation had inaugurated the new El Prat international terminal only a few weeks earlier, every day brought some new hitch. When the doors opened in the morning, the night-waxed marble floors dazzled, reflecting the walls stuccoed in the official beige of the time. However, when the passengers arrived, running for planes or wandering around bored by delays, dragging bags and suitcases and dropping smouldering cigarette butts, the floors soon lost their shine and began to show the wear and tear. By midday, the busiest areas put one in mind of a neglected tombstone, and the terminal took on the hostile feel of a vast, dingy mausoleum. One of the regime's officials must have noticed it during a stopover, or wandering nervously around waiting for some VIP (vanishing footsteps and dark glasses), and the management very swiftly contracted three men with one sole mission: to sweep, mop, and make the airport shine as if it were going to be inaugurated by the Generalísimo himself every day.

The trio were called Sayago, Leiva, and Porras, and the first time they laid eyes on each other was in the manager's office where a calendar on his desk, advertising Iberia Airlines, showed Friday, June 21, 1968. Unprompted, the three workers stood in line, straight-backed, as if the shifty-looking manager were a
commander about to inspect his troops. He spent five minutes instructing them how to do their jobs, informing them in passing that he'd once wanted to be a poet, and then ordered them to go and start cleaning at once. Yes, he knew they'd been told to start on Monday, but an Italian cardinal was arriving en route to Jerusalem that afternoon, and all kinds of religious and political dignitaries would be here to receive him. They had to give the airport's marble floors the same spiritual aura as the Vatican basilica. It was their baptism of fire.

Leiva, Porras, and Sayago ran off to get changed and attacked the cleaning with such zeal that they earned their ticket to heaven and eternal salvation that very same day. As it turned out, His Eminence didn't set foot in the terminal, but that's another story. When they knocked off that evening, they went to have a beer in the airport bar. They were completely done in, with cramps in their wrists from so much mopping. Like a shared secret, the exhaustion of their first day united them in brotherhood. Although they'd never met before, they lost no time in discovering their shared biographies. Sayago and Leiva were in their forties, lived in the Magòria neighborhood and had come to Barcelona at about the same time, some ten years earlier. Gradually, on their meal breaks or going home by bus, they discovered that they had both been born in the province of Jaén, in villages separated by just twenty kilometers of stony ground; that their wives worked as seamstresses for the same despotic mistress; that, with time, their homesickness had become increasingly abstract, although present in the same way that a distinctive freckle or birthmark you might have been vaguely proud of once was now so familiar that you didn't notice it when you looked in the mirror.

Sayago, who sported a bushy moustache and well-trimmed beard as a kind of personal trademark, loved unearthing things he had in common with Leiva and could be a pain in the neck with his barrage of questions. “So what was the name of your teacher at school? It wasn't that bastard Paredes, was it? In those days the teachers went from one village to another . . .” No, no, he'd grown up with señorita Rosario and she gave them aniseed sweets when
they behaved—at least during the six years he'd gone to school. Leiva was grubby but a good fellow. He ran his hand through his long, greasy hair and forced himself to dig up details of his life that the present had managed to bury beneath a large shovelful of reality. Sometimes, out of sheer laziness or not wanting to disappoint Sayago, he lied: Yes, of course he remembered that family of actors that came through the provincial villages every spring, with that girl who was more of a woman every year and showing more and more thigh, with her father keeping an eye on her from the stage . . .

Porras was a lot younger. He'd just turned seventeen. He was of slight build and somewhat lackadaisical, as if thinking was too much effort and he'd rather let himself be guided by fate. He lived—or rather slept—in the Verdum neighborhood, on the other side of Barcelona, with his mother, two brothers, and a sister. They'd been in a rented apartment for four years, ever since they arrived from Murcia. Porras was fed up with getting clobbered at school by a bunch of misfits who'd made him their scapegoat and by screwed-up frustrated teachers, so his older brother, who was working in the airport as a bartender, got him a job there as well. Every day, they got up at seven and crossed the city on the brother's Vespa, which he'd bought with his first pay packet on July 18th.

Despite their difference in age, Porras got on well with Sayago and Leiva from day one. Since he had no dad, they treated him with paternal concern but without the responsibilities imposed by blood ties. More than a son, Porras was a younger version of themselves, and they occasionally flirted with the possibility of starting life all over again, without the dead weight of so many forgettable years. Moreover, there was another detail that united them: None of them had ever traveled by plane. Every day they witnessed dozens of planes taking off and landing, heard them jolting along the runways when they hit the ground, the fleeting whistle when they lifted off. But, for them, these mammoth inventions were as fantastic as prehistoric animals.

I love these three guys! Leiva, Sayago, and Porras. My mother was with them at the airport for about ten years. They were very
good friends. From the booth where she attended irate passengers who'd lost their luggage, Rita saw them going past her window from time to time and, when she didn't have any clients, she beckoned them over to gossip.

She told me that by February 1972, which is when this story really gets going, the officious airport manager was pushing up daisies after a sudden heart attack, and his books of poems were selling at cost at the Sant Antoni market. The three friends were still sweeping and mopping Barcelona airport from one end to the other, striving for perfection. The ties of friendship had become inextricably knotted. It was almost material for the final scene of a tragicomedy. It was some time since Leiva's and Sayago's wives had left their nasty boss and set up with their own sewing machines. In addition, the two couples went out dancing together every Sunday afternoon. Many Mondays the men had nothing left to talk about, but that didn't worry them in the least. Sayago had stopped interrogating Leiva, who'd put on twelve kilos, three per year, and still didn't bother to comb his hair in the airport changing rooms when they got ready for work or to go home. Sayago's questions were now aimed at Porras, who was courting his seventeen-year-old daughter. Every afternoon after work the boy got on the Vespa he'd inherited from his brother, went to pick her up at the household-goods shop where she worked, and took her home a couple of hours later. The following morning, Sayago, taking advantage of running into him in a corridor, or deliberately seeking him out, would corner him with a barrage of questions. Where had they been the previous evening? What were they doing in the bedroom and why had they closed the door? Did they have any plans? He was terrified at the prospect of becoming a premature grandfather, and you could tell when he was nervous because he kept touching the tips of his moustache. Leiva, meanwhile, looked on from a distance, thanking God that he and his wife had only had boys—two—and no daughter.

I'm telling you about these three exemplary gentlemen, Christophers, not because I want to get off track but because there was a moment when their intervention was crucial to our lives. Yes,
yours too, so take note. These three, Leiva, Sayago, and Porras, were important. And with all their scams they certainly deserve walk-on parts in this story. It will all come out in due course. Let me tell you now about the first time I set eyes on them. I must have been about seven. One day I was with Mom walking past Niepce's, the photographer's shop on the corner of Carrer Fontanella and Via Laietana, and we stopped for a moment to look at a big black-and-white photo, about a meter by a meter twenty, which was exhibited in the window.

“Come on, where am I?” Mom said, showing me the photo. “Let's see if you can find me.”

I stared at the three rows of people, all of them very neat and tidy, without much idea of what she wanted me to find, but my eyes flew straight to the pale, ecstatic-looking face, almost like a candle flame, at the end of the top row on the left. A child's fingerprint smeared the window.