Lost Luggage (43 page)

Gabriel recognized his own handwriting on one scrap of paper. On it were a few sums from the day when they distracted themselves as they traveled by calculating how many kilometers they'd covered together in the Pegaso. Another newer sheet of paper bore the La Ibérica letterhead with its drawing of a truck crossing a map of Europe. Here, Gabriel read a series of dates, times, and doctors' names. It had been typed up by the secretary, Rebeca, and, taking in the details, Gabriel felt the thrust of their perfidious dagger. They projected a future that would never exist for him and Bundó. Every two years La Ibérica's drivers had to pass a medical checkup
confirming they were fit to drive the trucks. The checkups were done in the insurance company clinic, and Rebeca arranged them two months in advance to fit in with the moving schedule. Bundó and Gabriel always did their checkups together. Senyor Casellas insisted on this, to kill two birds with one stone, he said, and to make sure they didn't forget. The day they were getting ready to leave for Hamburg, about to commence fatal move number 199, Rebeca had called Gabriel into the office and handed him copies of her list.

Dates of medical examinations of Gabriel Delacruz and Serafí Bundó

(Yes, I know it would be better to do it all in one day but it's impossible.)

Place:
Transport Insurance Company. Clínica Platón, Calle Platón, 33.

Thursday, April 20, 9 a.m.
Blood test. It has to be done on an empty stomach—and that means no breakfast, Bundó.

Friday, April 28, 10 a.m.
Oculist. Doctor Trabal.

Friday, May 5, 10:30 a.m.
Ear, nose, and throat. Doctor Sadurní.

Monday, May 8, 9 a.m.
General checkup. Doctor Pacharán.

Gabriel was gripped by the strange power of the papers, so painful yet so reassuring, and couldn't stop fiddling with them until the car got on to the motorway. Then he took out the plane ticket, his passport and Bundó's, and returned the folder to the black bag. A few kilometers farther on, when they were nearing the scene of the accident, Gabriel asked the driver to stop there.

“Zwei minuts,”
he said.
“Es importante.”

Slowly, finding it hard to keep his balance because of the unwieldy cast, he went down the slope alone. The chauffeur watched from the top. They'd taken the Pegaso away the day before, and all that was left now was a strip of razed vegetation and churned-up ground. Flattened bushes and a smattering of glass indicated the spot where the truck had stopped its downward slide. Beyond that,
a layer of frozen snow covered everything. He went down a little farther. Here and there were scraps of metal, a fragment of a tire, a splinter from the rearview mirror. Why did he want to return to the scene of the accident? Three weeks later, still unable to cry, he told himself it was his first attempt to summon the tears. On the day itself, however, he tortured himself with a scathing thought: “The killer always returns to the scene of the crime.” The driver whistled from the top, signaling for him to come up. They were going to miss the plane. Gabriel lingered a moment longer. It was a bright day and the snow was melting in patches. Something was missing . . . With the tip of his shoe he poked at the ground among the fallen leaves. The chauffeur whistled again, now impatiently, and just as he was about to desist, to begin the retreat, his right foot hit something soft. That was it. He picked it up, pleased to find the black oilcloth notebook, the record of their thefts, the truest biography of his adventure on God's earth with Bundó and Petroli.

He got back into the car, and the funeral procession made its way to the airport.

That's what you wanted, wasn't it, Christophers? “Facts!” you were saying. Well, now you've got facts. One after another, linked up and synchronized as if orchestrated by some capricious and mocking god. And we're not done yet. Not by a long shot! Gabriel and Bundó's body are flying to Barcelona. It's the first time our father's been on a plane, but he's so overwhelmed by the facts—the facts!—that he's not aware of anything. Meanwhile, at the airport, Rita's well into another day at work in the Cage, as she called it.

If you do the sums, you'll realize that, by this February 16, 1972, Rita had been working at the airport for more than four years. Conrad and Leo were slowly filling the space she had reserved for them among her other memories. They had priority, of course, but they remained cut off, fixed in time, and mythologized somehow, as you'll soon see. Along the way, motherless and fatherless, she'd discovered the security afforded by daily routine and a salary at the end of the month. Her working hours at the Lost Luggage Office
had, from the very start, given momentum to her sense of independence. She was now used to waking up early and getting up by herself, for example. At seven she took a bus to the airport. Once there an hour later, she donned a uniform that made her feel like an air hostess and applied the lipstick that would frame her smile when, scrupulously following the instructions she'd been given, she began the day's work of dealing with irate clients. Rita started as a novice but had mastered all the tricks of the trade within a couple of months. They'd chosen her for her youthful innocence and sweet angel face that disarmed the most belligerent members of the general public. Like everyone else who worked in the office, her first duty was to be the target of their wrath. The scapegoat. She had to listen to the passengers' complaints and demands and make them believe that they'd been very unlucky, that such a thing rarely happened.

“Early in the morning,” my mother told me, reminiscing about those times, “I used to get the more fuddled, better-mannered passengers. They'd just staggered off a transatlantic flight, disoriented with jet lag, not knowing whether it was day or night, and then they discovered that the company had lost their bags. As I tried to get them to understand that their luggage was still in Buenos Aires or New York, and that it would come without fail the next day, on the next flight, they slumped over the counter and answered listlessly. Their eyes were half shut with fatigue. It was incredibly difficult to get them to fill out the form, but, after that, most of them wandered off, resigned and uncomplaining. You have to understand, it was different then. Now any Tom, Dick, and Harry can travel, but not in those days. The tickets were expensive, and the passengers got princely treatment from the airline companies . . . The businessmen started arriving after eleven, most of them with a young secretary. You could tell from their mood if the girl was also on bedroom duty. If they were foreigners, one of my colleagues who spoke a bit of English took my place. If they were South Americans or Spanish, I dealt with them. Needless to say, I always got the worst ones. Such airs and graces these idiots had! It was so obvious that the Franco regime had filled their
pockets, and I say pockets because they didn't even carry a wallet but went around with bundles of notes held together with a rubber band. Uptight and boorish, they were escaping for a few days from their dingy cities and towns, believing that they'd be met in Barcelona with a red carpet and everyone bowing and scraping. Often, the only way to calm them down was to solicit the support of the secretary. “I wish to apologize in the name of the airline company, Mr. So-and-So. I cannot tell you how much we regret the inconvenience caused to you and your wife,' I used to say and, if necessary, resorted to the double whammy. ‘Goodness me, you wouldn't be on your honeymoon, would you? You seem so much in love . . .' The men always went red or got tangled up in a thousand explanations, and then the women took over. Without denying anything, they gave me the name of the hotel where we could send the luggage once we'd recovered it and graciously accepted the vanity case we presented them with. Some of them even winked at me when they said good-bye, like coconspirators. After midday, tourists and other travelers who'd had to come to Barcelona for whatever reason replaced the businessmen. These were people who'd boarded the plane with a problem and who, on disembarking, found they had two. Lunchtime was coming up and, instead of being in a restaurant or back at home, they had to line up to reclaim a lost suitcase. These were the most difficult hours. The atmosphere in the terminal was charged, and everybody was more irritable. Then, if someone raised his or her voice unnecessarily, or insisted on calling the Guardia Civil, I had to resort to my secret strategy, my private commemoration of Leo and Conrad. ‘Please don't let it upset you so much,' I'd quietly tell the complaining individual. ‘It could have been worse . . .' At this point I threw in a dramatic pause, adopting my orphan's pose, after which I added, ‘Like with my parents.' The rest of the sentence was left dangling in the air, and the client, without fail, took the bait after a couple of seconds. ‘And what happened to your parents, young lady, may I ask?' By now the tone had mellowed. Then I only had to mention the accident (which everybody remembered), sparing no gory details, and ending with a stagy lie. ‘You might remember me because I
appeared in that news program about the accident. I was the lost-looking girl in the cemetery while the voice-over announced that the disaster took a large number of innocent lives and left a trail of disconsolate orphans in its wake.' The news program never existed, of course, but I always won them over, I can assure you.”

The claims office was hidden away in an ill-lit corner of the airport, on the ground floor behind the baggage carousels. It had two windows and a desk for attending to the public. Inside, behind a permanently closed door, was a large room crammed to the ceiling with lost suitcases, boxes, bundles, and all sorts of mind-boggling things. Four people worked each shift, two attending to the passengers and two in the storeroom. Rita called the office the Cage, not so much because of the daily claustrophobia and confinement but because, for her, it evoked the animal kingdom.

“When we're attending to the passengers we sound like parrots,” she used to say.

After some months of dealing with the public, she was instructed in the other two occupations of the Cage, which took place in the back room. First, they had to put in order and write a description of the ownerless bags, which Rita thought was the most boring task. When an item was left behind, dizzy after a hundred rounds on the carousel, one of the airport workers picked it up and delivered it to the Cage. The person in charge that shift then produced a basic description: size, color, weight, and other external details that might help with identification. If the piece bore a label with a name and address, or if it was claimed by telephone the same day, the next flight took it to wherever it had to go. However, if it was still unclaimed after a week, it went into the storeroom and was then ready for an “autopsy,” as the denizens of the Cage called it.

Opening bags and suitcases was the job Rita liked most. Often it was sufficient to undo a buckle or a knot, but sometimes they slashed open a fabric suitcase or even smashed the odd safety lock with a hammer. Then the contents were laid out in an orderly fashion on a long table in the hope of finding some sign of who the owner might be. Some of the Cage workers were revolted by the autopsy, put off by the unfamiliar smells emanating from a bag, or
the strange ways of packing clothes, some of them dirty, or the chilly accusations from possessions whose privacy was violated. For Rita, in contrast, the operation was fascinating. It made her feel like a trainee detective. If no useful document was found in the luggage, she had a natural gift for turning up data that might be useful in the long run: a prescription matching a bottle of anti-depressants in a first-aid kit, an owner's name inside the cover of a novel written in Italian, an ashtray and towels nicked from a hotel in Acapulco . . . If really valuable objects like watches and jewelery turned up, or if any bundle looked suspicious, they had to inform the Guardia Civil, who then took charge of the luggage until the owner was found.

Rita confesses that her inspections didn't often end successfully, but she was certainly entertained by the task. She could regale us with a whole string of anecdotes that include, for example, cassocks and suspender belts in one bag (never reclaimed by the priest), a mummified monkey fetus and other articles of black magic, and then there was the gentleman from Galicia who'd emigrated to Chile and was going back after his holidays at home with a box full of dry bread for his chickens. She also recognizes now, all these years later, that her effectiveness was limited because she herself sabotaged it. As you'll soon see, if the contents of a suitcase looked valuable, she returned it to the storeroom without a word to anyone, thus condemning it to oblivion in the depths of the Cage. Oblivion so absolute that, in the end, the piece of baggage melted away for ever.

Now, as you see, Christophers, Rita had no problems in adapting to a working existence. She threw herself into it with an enthusiasm that her workmates in the Cage found hard to explain. Her salary was nothing to write home about, but she could certainly get by while she waited to turn twenty-one and thus become eligible to receive the bounty of her parents' life insurance policy, a tidy little pile.