Lost Luggage (39 page)

Since Conrad couldn't bear the idea of his father seeing him in disguise, he and his mother resigned themselves to enduring this life of fearful deceit, furtive wigs, and café men's rooms for years, until Martí died or, if they were unlucky, until some client remarked on it in the barber's shop, unwittingly setting off a bomb. Nevertheless, the happy ending came long before anyone imagined: my great-grandfather kicked the bucket alone and unnoticed one Saturday evening when his son had been wearing the dead neighbor's wig for two years, and, except for him, the whole neighborhood was party to the secret.

It would have been eight o'clock at night. He'd closed up the barbershop and spent some time replenishing the bottles of Floïd aftershave, just as he did every week. When he applied the lotion he put on a great show, patting it briskly on his clients' faces, flapping a towel to fan them if they complained it was stinging, and they all believed this was a proper massage. In fact, my great-grandfather
used a concoction he bought wholesale. A chemist in Poble-Sec distilled it in his own garage, and every few weeks Martí climbed up to the foot of Montjuïc with two empty five-liter glass flagons. It seems that the blend achieved by the Poble-Sec chemist was very similar to the real Floïd, the main difference being that the counterfeit aftershave contained more pure alcohol.

When Dolors found him that Saturday at midnight, Martí was lying dead on the floor with his mouth twisted and eyes wide open. At his side lay one of the flagons, smashed to smithereens. The fake Floïd had spread across the floor, infusing the premises with its virile sickly-sweet fragrance.

“It stinks like the boxers' changing rooms at El Price,” remarked one of the Civil Guards supervising the death scene. “At least the gentleman's had a perfumed death. Every cloud has a silver lining . . .”

The forensic surgeon determined the cause of death as alcohol poisoning and cardiac arrest but no one ever found out what really killed Martí, the heart attack or excessive inhalation of his dodgy aftershave. Whatever the cause, it's a pity it was all so prosaic because, in hindsight, a frenzied death in a fit of rage after discovering the secret kept from him by his wife and son would have suited him better. I imagine a completely over-the-top scene, something hammed up by a bunch of amateur dramatics enthusiasts. I see my great-grandfather coming home from the café one Saturday evening—no need to change the day—walking past the La Paloma dance hall in Carrer del Tigre. I see Conrad, who's about to go inside with his friends, and I see the famous wig on his head, gleaming and drunk with hair spray. I see Martí looking at that head of hair from a distance with certain professional admiration and how, closer up, he sees that it's fake. His look, now one of revulsion, goes from the mane of hair to the face of the wig's owner, and then he realizes that it's Conrad, his son. I see the veins in his neck swelling and his eyes popping out of his head. I see how his legs and his whole body start trembling when he goes up to him from behind, reaching out his hand to tear the wig off. Now I see Conrad's look of surprise when he turns around, I see how the wig
flies after being grabbed by Martí, and I see Conrad's hands at his father's throat. And when the man falls to the ground, suffocated by his son, I hear the famous last words from a mouth twisted in a grimace as he loses consciousness: “Never trust a man who wears a wig!”

“Facts! Facts! Get to the airport!”

My brothers are complaining again because I'm having a ball inventing amazing death scenes. They're all worked up, shouting (as if they'd never blathered on) and demanding that I get to the point. Cool it, Christophers, I'm wrapping it up now. My great-grandmother Dolors didn't cry much over Martí's demise, just shed a few tears when receiving condolences and that's it. When the death notices were distributed around the neighborhood, the news spread fast and the apartment filled up with barbers from the guild and clients who came to pay their last respects. Conrad had also hung up a notice saying “Closed Owing to Bereavement” on the door of the barber's shop. No one knows whether he was devastated or happy.

Some memorable moments from the wake have been passed down to us thanks to Dolors's reminiscences. The barbers' guild printed an obituary notice to be distributed around the neighborhood and other barber's shops. Under my great-grandfather's name, like a family shield, they'd placed an emblem consisting of crossed scissors and comb. The former barber's shop owner, for whom Martí was a disciple, asked to view the body. He wept when they opened up the coffin but, seeing Martí lying there before him, couldn't resist whisking a tortoiseshell comb from his pocket and tidying up the corpse's venerable forelock, which was starting to wilt. It seems that there were mutterings about the funeral too. Conrad had at first decided to attend wigless in deference to his father's memory, but my great-grandmother was a very stubborn woman and didn't let up until she convinced him to wear it. After all, Martí was dead, and Conrad's wishes came first now. Martí's barber friends considered it a provocation, and, coming out of the
Our Lady of Carmen Church to express their condolences to the family, some of them looked askance at the wig, unable to disguise their contempt and anger.

This happened in 1949 when my grandfather was twenty years old. Now he only needed the reason for my mother's birth. Martí's sudden death was a big relief to Conrad and, as they say, he never had to take his wig off again. Three months after the uncomfortable funeral, and with the black mourning armband still in place on his left arm, Conrad sold his father's shampooing equipment, the mirrors, and the chairs to a barber who was setting up in Carrer Tallers, and opened a wig shop in the former barbershop.

He called it “New Samson Wigs,” and it sent shockwaves through the neighborhood. In the early days, Conrad received several anonymous letters threatening to scalp him of his leather pelt just like Indians did to palefaces in John Wayne films. The former owner of the barbershop, who now felt like an abandoned orphan with no chance of getting free haircuts in any other establishment, kicked up a huge fuss about this “betrayal of history” and demanded that Conrad return his signed photograph. The parish priest of the Our Lady of Carmen Church, in Carrer Sant Antoni, a faithful servant of the National Movement, stalked into the shop one afternoon and, with a crow-like expression of disdain and in a sinuous voice that would do justice to a Richelieu, informed him that the name of the shop was heresy, maybe even anathema or cause for excommunication. Conrad explained that, quite the contrary, the reference to Samson was his homage to the Holy Scriptures, and he won the day by promising the priest free wigs for Jesus and the apostles when the Easter Week procession came around.

In their zeal to erase any trace of Martí, Conrad and his mother transformed the old barbershop from top to bottom. It was as if the cut hair that was once been strewn around the floor had colonized every corner of the place: There were wigs in the front window, majestically crowning the heads of mannequins that looked like royal busts, wigs on the shelves, wigs on the work table ready to be combed, wigs of every size, with golden curls, long jet-black
tresses, or white powdered hair. The only thing mother and son had failed to eliminate was the cloying smell of fake Floïd, which, since the Saturday of Martí's demise, had seeped into the walls. Despite all the changes, the odd absentminded client occasionally wandered in and asked for Martí. In his wig palace, Conrad had toughened up, and he couldn't stand being reminded of the old days so, brandishing whatever wig he happened to be working on right then, like a guillotined head, or Samson's locks in the hands of Delilah, he went berserk and kicked him out, yelling from the door, “Here we don't keep anybody's hair. Here we sell hair!”

In that 1950s city of soot and rags, in that diminished and fearful city called Barcelona, most people saw the New Samson wig shop as an extravagance that would soon be pulling down its shutters for once and for all, but, just when it had lost the gleam of novelty and people forgot all about it—when it blurred into the life of the street—business started to pick up. Conrad was affable to the point of being unctuous and, once he'd sussed out what kind of client he was dealing with, whether the person was timid or vain, he'd come out with one of his lines.

“As I always say, every wig in this shop has a head waiting for it.”

“Well, we're not meant to go around with our heads exposed to the elements.”

“Whatever way you look at it, a wig makes a gentleman.”

One October morning, the props manager from the Romea Theatre turned up to buy wigs and false beards for
Don Juan Tenorio
, which was opening on All Saints' Day. They were very happy with Conrad's service, and the word got around in the profession. The theatres on Paral·lel soon became regular clients of New Samson. The dandies who'd once come to Martí's barbershop for trims now returned to the shop, less conceited and more decrepit, sneaking in as if they were smuggling something and asking for a toupee to cover up their incipient bald spots. The same variety show stars that Conrad and his friends had spied on at the Arnau or El Molino now came to buy hair extensions for a number starring the Queen of Sheba surrounded by a gang of Solomons
in diaphanous tunics, or for shows featuring some innocent little Valkyrie who, covering her bosom with long blond ringlets all the way to her waist, laid waste to a risqué song. With trembling hands and trying to stay calm, Conrad Manley combed their tresses in front of a mirror but, come Saturday, he put on a show of bravado for his friends, telling them tall stories that sounded like vaudeville scripts. Dolors, who kept him company in the shop in the afternoons, watched him attending to the girls and detected his lustful thoughts. Once they were alone, she tried to flush them out.

“If you want my advice, son, don't get tangled up with one of those little ninnies. What sort of a woman gets up at midday and drinks champagne for breakfast?”

Conrad leaped to their defense. “I'll listen to all the advice you want to give, Mother, but you know the client's always right.” As he got to know them better, he'd discovered that behind their capricious façades these women were simple, rather unsophisticated girls who giggled at everything and were easy to talk to. They'd come from places like Úbeda, Ponferrada, or Albarracín and their worldly airs were nothing but a shield.

In any case, Dolors's advice was futile, and Conrad finally fell into the claws of one such aspiring chorus girl. Her name was Leonor Carratalà, Leo, “a lioness seeking a tamer,” as she liked to present herself, and she'd come from Alcoi to triumph on Paral·lel. Her father owned a hatter's shop, which Conrad took as an omen.

“Everyone knows that wigs and hats form a lasting alliance. There's nothing like a good Panama hat, a straw hat, or a top hat to ensure the stability of a wig,” Conrad explained to his mother the day he introduced Leo.

Conrad courted Leo for some months under Dolors's inquisitorial eye. The mother dreaded the day when she'd be gathering up the gnawed bones of a son who'd been devoured by a lioness. She only breathed freely again when they announced they were getting married. Leo left the stage, the boas, and the dance steps—it seems she wasn't very good—and reserved her cabaret numbers for conjugal nights.

The photos that Rita has kept of the two of them are eccentric,
even charming: a bow-legged, tense-looking little man with something like a newly landed flying saucer on his head standing next to a good-looking, buxom, wide-eyed woman several inches taller than he is. They might be the doppelgangers of Secret Agent 86—Maxwell Smart—and his wife.

“In a nutshell, my father was a pain in the neck and my mother a nitwit who did whatever he wanted,” Rita says when I force her to look at the photos. “They were only wig sellers but they had such airs and graces. Their feet never touched the ground. Dad said he'd fallen in love with Mom because she looked like Hedy Lamarr, who'd played Delilah in one of those old films. As if he bore the slightest resemblance to Victor Mature! There were times when their inanity was funny but, I assure you, there were other times when it was unbearable, especially for a spoilt brat like me. Anyway, perhaps they were made for each other. So it makes sense that they died together.”

On days like this my mother talks as if her life had been suspended in that April of 1967 when she'd just turned sixteen, as if she hadn't known what to do with it after that. She's back in her adolescent bedroom where we left her before, lying in bed, flipping through the latest issue of
Garbo.
Rita Manley Carratalà is turning the pages. Her parents Conrad and Leo are packing their bags. Meanwhile, Christophers, if you want, while they're saying good-bye, we can fill in the first sixteen years of Rita's life. (The Christophers are ecstatic but perhaps they're being ironic.) Let's begin then.