Lost Luggage (58 page)

Let's indulge in a touch of filial vanity, Mothers. If we four didn't exist, it's probable that Gabriel, progenitor of the Christophers, would be no more than a minor footnote in your stories, testament to an age of sexual joys and amorous doubts that you'd sometimes remember with pride and sometimes with contempt—like so many other things in life.

Someone looking at the story from outside will ask perhaps: Was there anyone else afterward? Yes, of course, all four of them
met other men, but none of them could ever replace Gabriel, so they have no place here.

The main purpose of our meetings has been, and still is, keeping on our father's trail. Only we four are with him, about him, for him, against him (add all the prepositions you wish) and hence our mothers are not included. They, it must be said, are very happy with our decision.

As we made clear from the outset, Bundó's traumatic death put an end to our father's journeys, and he never visited us again. Maybe the fact that our mothers took it fairly well and ended up forgetting him—each in her own way—reveals the fragility of their relationships with Gabriel. At the end of the day, they never stopped being single moms and living as such.

We could say that if the accident in the Pegaso hadn't happened early that Saint Valentine's morning, everything would have turned out differently, but that won't get us very far. It's better to be pragmatic and accept that the situation would eventually have become unsustainable for Gabriel. The deceit would have eventually become rotten to the core.

“At last the secret is out!” as the poem says.
Per fi s'ha revelat el secret. Enfin le secret est percé. Das Geheimnis ist gelüftet.

Without intending to, Gabriel had emerged again after some months of not visiting his trans-Pyrenean sons and women. On the face of it, the meeting with Rita in Barcelona and the birth of Cristòfol should have been his big chance to hang up his spurs. Just one family, just one city. However, it didn't take long for Gabriel to realize that he was no good at conventions, and he went back to his old solitary ways. Rita sums it up very well—“when the present prevailed”—but, once again, Cristòfol asks permission to fill us in on those early times.

You've got five minutes, Cristòfol, and that's it. Ready, set, go!

Thank-you for your boundless generosity, Christophers. Let me say, to begin with, that Gabriel never lived with us in Carrer del Tigre. He spent many nights and days there looking after the tiny
tot that was me. Rita says he even learned to change my diapers. How about that?

“Just a moment. Excuse me. He changed my diapers, too, when he had to,” Christof interrupts.

“And mine.”

“And mine.”

Okay, so there's nothing original about me. But let's see who can do better than this: When I was about four months old, my mom went back to work at the airport, and there were some weeks when Gabriel stayed over every day. Every single day. A whole week. Day and night. How about that? Yet, for all his perseverance, he never saw our place as his home. Just to make things clear, his name never appeared on our mailbox. This family ambiguity didn't bother Rita at first. It was in the seventies, Franco was still dying (without finishing the job properly), and Danish pediatric theory was all the rage among young mothers. Besides, as a militant orphan, Rita didn't set much store by parental authority and liked the idea that I should grow up slightly, ever so slightly neglected. I imagine that she got used to Gabriel's intermittency in those days. His comings and goings fitted into a certain lifestyle and should be seen as the counterpoint to the total, passionate surrender with which he gave himself to her when they were together.

You recognize the situation, don't you Christophers? I'm sure he acted like that with your mothers too: It was as if he was eternally grateful to them and knew that he was making up for long hours of absence and waiting with his brief presence. Although it was never made explicit, this modus operandi worked from the very beginning and he got better and better at it . . .

“Words are flowing out . . . like endless rain . . .”

“You see what happens when you start going on about yourself? You're provoking him. We agreed on five minutes, Cristòfol.”

“We know the score . . .”

Okay, okay. I'll be brief. At their meeting in the vale of tears, Rita told Gabriel that she'd been looking for him ever since he'd lost a bag and tried to reclaim it at the airport. Eighty days earlier. Gabriel didn't remember her, but the girl's courage touched
his heart, and he let himself be adopted. Make note of that expression because I think it's crucial, Christophers: He let himself be adopted. The long crying session had dried his mouth and he was thirsty and hungry. They had something to eat and drink in some bar or other. They talked with their mouths full. Rita was delighted to describe her nighttime vigil in Via Favència, how cold she'd been as she kept watch. There was not a trace of reproach in her words. Instead of seeing her as a lunatic or recoiling in panic, Gabriel was grateful that someone had been thinking about him during those dark days. They laughed when he recalled that he'd heard the doorbell from inside the apartment but didn't have it in him to do anything. Yes, they laughed. “It was better like that,” Rita thought. “All's well that ends well, right?” The blind date orchestrated by Bundó from the great blue yonder was working fine.

That night Gabriel didn't sleep in the Via Favència apartment, and his ear suppurated on a new pillow. Rita fixed him another dressing the next day. Thanks to all the tears shed for Bundó, his ear was on the mend. On Saturday and Sunday they didn't leave the apartment. They stayed in bed and reconstructed their separate pasts, leaping from one story to another. Conrad and Leo's plane accident. The Pegaso accident. We should assume that Gabriel was more selective and chose what he could say and what he couldn't. They were thrilled to discover what they had in common when he told her about the La Ibérica pilfering racket.

“We filched a suitcase, or box, or packet from every move . . .” “Really? We do exactly the same at the airport! We keep lost suitcases. We're soul mates.” “Yes, we are.”

On Monday, Gabriel saw Rita to the bus stop and then returned to the Via Favència apartment. His first retreat to his winter quarters lasted just one day. The next day he slept at Rita's again. The second retreat lasted two more days. Rita didn't want to pressure him because she understood that he was delicate and insecure and could see that he needed to be alone. One night, Gabriel told her about his decline after Bundó's death, without sparing her the episode of his would-be suicide. They both knew that, by turning up as she did, she'd foiled his plan to throw himself off the
Columbus monument. (Some months later, by the way, with Rita now pregnant, Gabriel insisted on going up to the lookout at the top. They were going out to have a drink before lunch on a Sunday morning, and he thought it would be a good way to bury those distressing thoughts once and for all. When they were up in the cupola beneath the feet of the statue, contemplating from aloft the port, Montjuïc, and the Ramblas all decked out for Christmas, Gabriel realized that it wouldn't have been easy to throw himself off the top. The windows had been reinforced. Then he said to Rita, “You know what? If it's a boy, we should call him Cristòfol, like Columbus.” Convinced she had a boy in her belly, she thought it was a great idea and they called me Cristòfol thereafter.)

Mom says there was a period after my birth in which Gabriel spent a lot of time with us. Meanwhile, he tried going back to work at La Ibérica. His savings had run out, and Senyor Casellas took him back as a driver. He asked to do short trips with the DKV van, only around Barcelona and the province, but he gave up after a few weeks. He got tired more quickly than before, his broken arm often swelled up, and the routine reminded him too much of the good old days with Bundó. Seeing him so dejected, Senyor Casellas felt guilty and suggested he could go back to doing international moves. They'd just bought a new truck, and the trips were more comfortable now. Gabriel preferred not to and six months later left La Ibérica once again, this time for good. (We'll have to assume that his return to the European motorways would have entailed too great a moral effort on his part, that of getting his other sons and women back.) He left the job without the safety net of any other employment. For a time he spent his days doing odd jobs here and there. A messenger in the neighborhood had a hernia, and Gabriel took over until he'd recovered from the operation, driving his 2CV van and delivering his packages, this time without keeping any. Just before I was born, Rita finally got the insurance money for the deaths of her parents and now had something put aside in the bank. One day she offered to buy him a vehicle so he could set up his own messenger service. He couldn't imagine being a boss, not even of himself. Rita knew that lukewarm reaction:
It was the same one she'd got a couple of times when, half jokingly, she'd suggested they could get married.

By autumn 1975, Gabriel was moving away from us. Then one day he left and that was the end of it. Rita never had any illusions that he'd come and live with us, but she had managed to drag some kind of family feeling out of him for a time. We went out for walks together, he carried me on his shoulders, he sang songs to me, and he seemed happy. Then his visits were further and further apart. At first, he'd turn up unexpectedly or would phone at the last minute to say he wasn't coming. Rita had grudgingly got used to this maybe-maybe-not situation and accepted it out of love, but he must have been feeling guilty because eventually he preferred not to commit himself. No more of this on-such-and-such-a-day-we'll-do-so-and-so. No, he preferred things to be more open, freer. When Rita asked him why it was so hard for him, he replied that the Via Favència apartment was too far away. It was almost in another city, another Barcelona, he said. Sometimes I wonder about this and think he's not referring so much to space as to time. Perhaps, for him, living in Carrer del Tigre, a hundred meters from his old boarding house and almost next to the House of Charity, meant moving in the past. The set hadn't changed much but the dramatis personae were different. Or maybe when he visited us he felt as if he was traveling into a future, a future that didn't match the one he'd imagined.

Although Gabriel gave the impression of fading out slowly, we actually know the date of the last day he spent with us. It was the twentieth of November. Rita remembers it clearly because it's the day Franco died. We hadn't seen Dad for a week and that afternoon he turned up out of the blue. After dinner, when he and Rita had settled me down to sleep, they went down to the Principal, the café on the corner, to see what the atmosphere was like. The owners had put a radio on the bar. Every time the musical program was interrupted for a news bulletin, the whole place went silent and everyone listened. Some faces were tight and worried, but most of the clients and waiters punctuated the broadcaster's grave utterances with sarcastic comments. He's never going to kick the bucket, that
fucking butcher. If he's suffering so much they should kill him off now. Let's hope the champagne hasn't gone flat after so much waiting. He hasn't died yet because hell doesn't want him either.

Rita was twitchy because they'd left me alone so they came back home. She turned on the TV to see if there were any new developments, but the hours dragged by hypnotically. They were just about to go to bed when they heard the pop of a champagne cork and the gleeful shouts of someone letting it all out. Infected by the neighbor's joy and eagerness to celebrate, they poured a couple of glasses of wine and drank a toast. The fun and games woke me up. I was wide awake so I got out of bed and started playing with Mom and Dad. It was early in the morning and Rita, carried away by all the euphoria, dared to propose to Gabriel that he should come and live with us for once and for all. As always, he didn't say yes and he didn't say no. Nothing could ever be definitive.

The previous day, Gabriel had arranged with the messenger that he'd do the early-morning delivery round with him. At six on the dot we heard the van's horn tooting their agreed-upon signal from the street, and Dad left. Mom picked me up and we waved good-bye from the window.

“You've got one minute left, Cristòfol. Sorry.”

“Tick tock, tick tock . . .”

“I'm a loser, and I'm not what I appear to be . . .”

“Fuck off, Chris. Okay, that's it, I'm finishing. Let's see, short, short, like dictating a telegram. Gabriel. Distance. Silence. Days pass. Vanished. Doesn't return. Stop.” Pause to breathe. “Rita. Tired. Too long. Scared. What happened to him? Desperate. Invents ridiculous political plots. But it's just coincidence. Goes to his place. Never there. Disappointment. Gone for ever. Time heals all wounds. Stop.” Pause to breathe. “Me. I miss him. Mommy, where's Daddy? I forget him. I turn three. I turn four, five, six. I forget him with rage. I hate him. Stop.” Pause to breathe. “One day, for the hell of it, we go to his apartment looking for him. Sold a while back, they tell us. We're forced to forget him. Want to. Twenty years pass. Even more. Stop.” Another pause. “Police call. Us, the Christophers. We meet. We start looking. Now is now. Now. Present.”