Lost Luggage (5 page)

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So are we orphans, then? No, we're not orphans. Not yet. Anyway, if we claimed we were, we'd be carrying on like spoiled brats, as if we were somehow trying to relive the hardships suffered by
our father as a kid while sparing ourselves the feeling of defenselessness he must have endured all those years. Sometimes when the four of us are talking about it, we come to the conclusion that everything that came later—his life on the truck, being continually on the move, and his pathological secrecy when he left the motorways and hid away from the world—is simply a result of his unfortunate childhood. But when he used to recall his youth, Dad wasn't self-pitying or bitter or holier-than-thou. He accepted it as his lot, and that was that.

Let's imagine, for example, that fearful, withdrawn little boy who went into the House of Charity in 1945. Just before his fourth birthday. Though he didn't know it, he still bore the stigma of being a “child of war.” Heaven knows where all those abandoned children have come from, people said. Harlots, single mothers, naive or shameless maids who'd got pregnant . . . Or, worst of all, they might be the spawn of those red separatists who died on the front. The devil's blood ran in their veins. In the light of which the orphanage wouldn't have been such a terrible fate.

The nuns managed everyday life in the orphanage, and a couple of lay teachers were employed for the older kids. The little ones like our father grew up in an atmosphere of Catholic piety. It seems that mealtimes, for example, turned into religious instruction classes in which the nuns thickened the gruel with the lives of the saints.

“This one's for Saint Pelagius, martyred in the name of chastity . . . This is for the first Christian martyr, Saint Stephen, who was stoned to death . . . This is for Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, the twin brothers who died decapitated . . . This is for Saint Engratia, the patron saint of Zaragoza, who was dragged around the city by a horse . . .”

Dad never forgot the singsong litany, or the strange relationship that was established between the food they made him eat and the horrible, gory deaths of the saints.

In the afternoons, one sister read the children extracts from the catechism, and they had to learn them by heart. Although the nuns felt maternal affection for their charges, especially if they'd
come to the orphanage at a very young age, discipline kept them on the straight and narrow. They were spared no punishments, threats, or moral-bearing lessons, but the children always found ways to let off steam. Years later, Gabriel remembered it as a kind of purgatory. A lenient purgatory because hell for those kids was called the Duran Home for Children. When the nuns caught them misbehaving they could put a stop to it with the mere mention of this reformatory in the north of the city. They told all sorts of stories about it. In the hellhole that was the Duran Home, they said, the children slept tied to their beds so they couldn't escape, and their heads were always shaved as a precaution against plagues of lice. One of the gardeners who worked in the vegetable patch of the House of Charity took it upon himself to spread the worst tales. If any children playing hide-and-seek trod on his vegetables, he'd take them aside and strike the fear of God into them by telling them that in the Duran Home, which was where they'd end up if they didn't behave, children who destroyed a vegetable garden were punished by being made to eat rats and beetles, which they had to catch themselves, in the building's cellars and sewers.

The passage of time always distorts reality. In his capacity as a lecturer in quantum physics, Christophe insists that we jot down that sentence. The passage of time always distorts reality. For Gabriel, those eight years he spent in the House of Charity remained half buried in the depths of his memory, as if obeying an order to lie dormant while not quite being erased. The moments or images he recalled with any clarity became fewer and fewer: the thrill of the day he turned ten and the older children abducted him and took him at midnight for his first visit to the institution's miniature museum, to see the fluorescent bones of a human skeleton (“Of course it moved: If you look hard you can see it's laughing . . .”); the contrived warmth at Christmas when some figure of authority came bearing gifts, and it was as if the nuns, together with the teachers and even the gardener, were doing their best to hide something terrible from them and holding back their tears in public.

He'd gradually learned not to be tormented by these memories,
which visited him without warning and against his will when he was still young. Only a few episodes survived intact. These were stories that Gabriel and Bundó reminisced about together—and that must have been the important factor—when they were driving around in the truck. They told each other these tales every so often, when something spotted or heard along the way (a song on the radio, the name of a town, a roadside ad) jolted their memories, and they'd learned to take turns at narrating. First one, then the other, they filled in the gaps with convincing new details, small variations on the same story. This patient reconstruction drove Petroli crazy. Since his memory was better than theirs, he had perfect recall of the facts from the last time they'd told the story, but when he joined in the conversation and tried to correct them, they'd cut him off saying how would he know when he'd never even been to the House of Charity. Petroli, who was a decent fellow, let them rattle on. Of all those stories, which they can no longer get nostalgic about together, the most regularly recounted, the most famous of them all, was the one about the lame nun and her secret.

Dad used to tell us this one as a sort of bedtime story. We were too small to understand it properly but, on those occasions, his voice changed and we were riveted. Even now, we fancy we can remember how slowly and mysteriously he pronounced each and every word, and how the spell would often be broken by an incorrect translation or unintelligible pronunciation. As children hungry for affection we took on the task of mentally tying up the loose ends. Sister Elisa, Dad used to say, was very tall and always wore a shiny black habit. She was lame and swayed from side to side as she walked, lurching like a wounded crow. When they saw her for the first time, just after arriving at the orphanage, the smallest children tended to respond by bursting into tears. In fact she never did anything to scare them, but nor did she smile at anybody. Her round face was framed by the white wimple of her order and it rose above her head like the horns of some fantastic animal. At night or when the light was dim, her face glimmered like a pale moon suspended in the air. The torment of her disability permanently twisted her mouth in a grimace of pain. She hardly ever
spoke and seemed to sow silence around her wherever she went. Conversations abruptly stopped and everyone went quiet. Oddly enough, the lame nun had a wooden leg. The rhythmic
clip-clop
of her steps made the silence that sprang up around her even more threatening. (At this point, Dad used to stop talking and would suddenly close his fist and thump the wood of the bedside table, the wardrobe, the chair, or whatever was closest to hand four or five times. Our hearts shrank and slowed down, keeping time with those blows. Sometimes they almost stopped beating.)

The lame nun's secret was that nobody had ever seen her wooden leg. Hidden beneath the folds of her habit, the leg fueled the fantasies of all the children who lived in the House of Charity. They grew up obsessed by the mystery of the wooden leg and eventually came to see it as an object with a life of its own. When Sister Elisa was hobbling along a passageway, or when she came into a classroom to give a message to the teacher, or when she escorted the children to the parish church, they couldn't stop staring at her habit, at the place where the leg should have been. Sometimes, if the nun took a long stride, or if she stopped for a moment to rest, a strange angular shape was outlined by the black cloth, like a broken bone sticking out from a badly fractured leg. If it was her turn to keep watch in the dormitories the measured
clip-clop
of that leg on the tiles made the night darker, and the children froze between their sheets. Blood curdled. Nightmares were common.

The stories passed down from the bigger children to the smaller ones ensured the myth was never lost. Some of the tales told about the origins of the false leg were quite elaborate. One of the more successful had it that, one stormy evening when Sister Elisa was walking alone in the garden and deeply engrossed in her thoughts, a lightning bolt struck her feet and charred her leg all the way up to the thigh. It smoked like scorched firewood. The same lightning bolt lopped off the thickest branch of the oak tree under which she was sheltering and dropped it right beside her. Hearing the tremendous claps of thunder, the gardener ran out to see if anything had happened to his favorite tree and thus saved the nun's
life. He made a promise at the foot of the tree: Since, by the grace of God, the nun and the tree had survived, he'd fashion a wooden leg out of the branch so she could walk. According to this story, the gardener was the only other person who knew what the leg looked like, but he never talked about it. The legend was further embellished, and one of the more fanciful versions had it that a bud had started to sprout on the oak branch, and the nun's leg would soon have leaves. Some people said that the leg came from an old mannequin in the Can Jorba department store, that it was hollow, and that was why it made that sinister
clip-clop.
A gang of inquisitive kids who'd read
Treasure Island
imagined that, under the habit, they'd find a pirate's peg leg, like Long John Silver's, as thin as a broomstick with a small bowl at the top fitted to the stump of an amputee's knee. If they were anywhere in the vicinity of the nun and wanted to refer to it, but in code because that gave them a certain superiority in the eyes of the others, they'd start chanting, “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum . . .”

We four, we Christophers, each in his own home and on different nights, listened to the nun's trials and tribulations without really understanding them. Dad, who was never very good at gauging how far he could go in scaring us, used to tell us her story when he put us to bed. We were probably too young. As we were dropping off to sleep, our shivers of fear transported us to the dormitories of the House of Charity. We tossed and turned in our beds, getting tangled in our sheets, sweating in our distress and, when we woke up disoriented, halfway between dream and reality, we were reassured by the certainty that our dad was also sleeping in that dormitory, and if the lame nun came over to our beds, he'd protect us.

Since Dad disappeared from our lives, that wooden leg has remained lodged in our imaginations to this very day with all the symbolism of a votive offering, less threatening now but still impressive. We all agree on that. Some years ago, at one of those huge mass ceremonies they hold in the Vatican, Pope John Paul II beatified several martyr nuns. On the list was Sister Elisa, the one from the House of Charity, and part of the mystery was unexpectedly revealed. The nun lost her leg during the Civil War when a
bunch of anarchists had set fire to the Hieronymite Convent in Barcelona, and she tried to stop them from profaning a crucifix. As the smoke and flames spread through the church, a wooden beam fell from the roof, landed on top of her, and smashed one of her legs. The anarchists left her for dead, but she regained consciousness, and some divine power gave her the strength to drag herself a few meters and call for help, for somebody to come and save her.

We don't know if our father had news of the beatification, but doubtless, reading about it or seeing it on TV, hundreds of former wards of the House of Charity immediately remembered—with the odd twinge of conscience—the fears and wild fantasies that this poor, lame, silent woman had inspired in them all those years ago. We're also sure that, wherever he might be, our father still has the tic that harks back to his childhood. Often, in the middle of a conversation, if he wanted to ward off some intimation of bad luck, he'd say “touch wood,” like everybody does, but then he'd automatically tap his right leg two or three times.

On his more expansive days, Dad would let himself go and regale our mothers with some of his other memories of the House of Charity. Most were stories of the rebel child, orphanage escapades that tended to end up with a couple of smacks on the bottom or a spoonful of castor oil. Our mothers listened with some compassion, and, if any shadow of doubt crossed their faces, he'd say, “So you don't believe me, eh? Just ask Bundó. He was there too.”

When Bundó and Petroli came by to collect Dad on their way out of town again (sometimes, depending on their timetables, they stayed for breakfast or dinner), our mothers made the most of the occasion to question Dad's comrade-in-arms. They asked him whether he'd ever managed to see the nun's wooden leg, or to give them his version of their adventures when they escaped from the orphanage by getting out through an empty cistern in the school grounds, after which they spent hours and hours moving around the sewers of Barcelona until they ended up at the air-raid shelter in Carrer Fraternitat. Could anyone really believe, our mothers
asked, that dozens of people were still living underground, in hiding since the war, and that they'd turned blind like moles because they never saw the light of day? As he listened to them, Bundó used to smile, glancing at Dad out of the corner of his eye, perhaps because he didn't fully understand the language, but later he'd vouch for the veracity of these stories with an almost scientific air, like a Doctor Watson verifying the exploits of his Sherlock.