Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  We’ve discovered that songs in Catalan are another childhood experience we share. At our first meeting in Barcelona we had lunch in a restaurant and tried to pool all the information we had about our father. All at once, some children playing and singing at a nearby table had us reliving the songs he taught us when we were small. Songs like “En Joan Petit quan Balla” and “El Gegant del Pi,” in which little Johnny danced and a giant strode around carrying a pine tree.

  “I remember a bedtime story Dad used to tell me,” Christof said. “The kid was called Pàtiufet or something like that, and he ended up in the belly of a bull, where it never snows or rains, und scheint keine Sonne hinein. I’d be shitting myself with fright. Sometimes I tell it to my friends’ kids in German, mostly because I like the idea of Pàtiufet competing with the Brothers Grimm.”

  “Well, I was obsessed with ‘Plou i Fa Sol,’ that song about rain and sun . . . and witches combing their hair,” Chris recalled, singing his own weird Catalan version. “In London that happens a lot, I mean rain and sun at the same time. Almost every day when I went to school or to play with my friends in the park across the road, I used to look anxiously up at the sky and there would always be a ray of sunshine in that constant drizzle. ‘Here we go again,’ I’d think. ‘In some old mansion, here in this city, right now, the witches are combing their hair again, getting ready to go out.’ When I told my friends about it, convinced I was revealing a secret, they started teasing me and then I’d sing them the song to make them shut up. But it didn’t help.”

  This linguistic synergy that the four of us are fast perfecting brings us even closer to our father. It’s an inheritance of sorts since it seems that he spoke all our languages yet none of them. Over the years, according to our mothers, the words he learned across Europe started overlapping, setting up shortcuts and false friends, simplified verb conjugations and etymologies that only superficially made sense. He took the view that you can’t have long silences in the middle of a conversation, so he slipped from one language to another in his head, and then uttered the first thing that occurred to him.

  “My brain’s like a storeroom packed to the ceiling,” they reported him as saying. “Luckily, when I need something, I always end up finding it.”

  Even if it was only his conviction, his resources worked and the result was a very practical idiolect. Sigrun complains that a conversation with him always turned comic even when it was meant to be serious. Rita remembers, for example, that his Catalan vi negre had gone linguistically from black to red with vi vermell because that was the color that ruled in France (vin rouge), Germany (Rotwein), and Great Britain. And, yet Mireille assures us that once, in a brasserie on Avenue Jean-Jaurès, he ordered black wine or, as he put it, “vin noir” and even “vin tinté de la maison,” with the inky-black Spanish red, tinto, in mind.

  Although the reason is an absent father, when the four of us start pooling our memories, the experience never ceases to amaze us. At our first meeting we made the commitment to meet up one weekend in five, more or less. With each new get-together we fill in some gap or untangle one or other of our father’s many deceits. Our mothers are helping us to reclaim those years, and, though the details aren’t always pleasant, we’re often struck by how rewarding it feels. It’s as if we can rewrite our lonely upbringings, as if those childhoods without brothers or sisters, which sometimes weighed heavily on us in a strange adult way—making us feel so helpless—can be partially rectified because now we know some of our father’s secrets. No one can rid us of the uncertainty of those days, that’s for sure, but we want to believe that the four of us unknowingly kept each other company, and that our father’s life did have meaning because, if he shrouded himself in secrecy, we were the very essence of that.

  Since this solitary fraternity might seem too abstract, we’ll give a practical example to make things clearer. When we four Christophers decided to meet up for the first time, communicating with each other in a cold, distant way that was so ridiculous it makes us laugh now, we agreed that we’d bring along the photos we have of our father. The idea was that we’d choose one, a clear image, one that was not too old, and then place an ad seeking information in our national newspapers. We’d publish his picture across half the continent, asking anyone who might have seen him, or who had any idea of where he might be hiding, to get in touch. In the end, however, after a lot of discussion, we gave up on the idea because it seemed futile. If, as we agree, his disappearance was gradual and voluntary with nothing sudden about it, then nobody would recognize him. Nobody would have seen him yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or last week. His absence would appear perfectly normal to everyone.

  Although we decided we wouldn’t take any steps in that direction, we kept poring over the photos we’d brought, just for fun. We were in Barcelona and we spread out all the photos on a table. Then we stared at them as if they were a graphic novel of an unfinished life. They were images from the sixties and seventies, in black and white, or the kind of colors that, faded by time, lent the scene a heightened air of unreality. There were some he had sent with his letters and others taken during one of his visits. When they were placed side by side, we could see that his pose was always the same, that way he had of smiling at the camera—Lluiiiiís, cheeeese, hatschiiiii . . . —as if he was making a big effort, or the recurring gesture of caressing our hair when we appeared in the picture, or embracing whichever mother it happened to be, with his hand placed on exactly the same part of her waist . . .

  This sensation of seeing the four of us being reproduced according to a formula, standing equally still before the camera, as if there were no substantial differences between us, was uncomfortable and disturbing. The backgrounds changed slightly and we did too, of course, but sometimes Dad was wearing the same denim jacket and the same shoes in all the photos from any one season. As we were discussing these coincidences we became aware of a detail that infuriated us at first but which was consoling once we’d digested it. Often the photos we received in a letter, pictures of him alone, had been taken during a visit to one of our homes. Dad would say something about the image but was careful not to write anything that might make our mothers suspicious. At most, he’d situate it on the map of his travels in the truck. “The photo I’m sending you was taken by Bundó last September when we stopped for lunch in some tucked-away corner of France,” he wrote in a letter to Christopher and Sarah at the end of 1970, and the “tucked-away corner” you can make out in the background was actually the white façade of the house where Christophe and Mireille lived in Quai de la Marne. “A stop for gasoline in Germany, just outside Munich,” he wrote on another photo sent to Christophe and Mireille, but Christof spotted in the background, just behind the image of our father, his neighborhood gas station in Frankfurt. Moreover, the photo was from 1968, two years earlier, because we all had some from the same roll of film (and now this coexistence inside the camera also comforts and amuses us).

  Given all this evidence, the easiest thing would be to recognize that Dad was a compulsive liar, and we certainly wouldn’t be wrong about that, but that explanation seems too simple. For the moment, we’re not interested in condemning him but just finding out where he is. Who he is. If we succeed some day, then we’ll ask for explanations. At present, we prefer to venture free of prejudice into the shadows of his life because, after all, if the four of us have met it’s thanks to him—and his absence. It may not be easy to understand, but we prefer our totally subjective or, if you like, deluded enthusiasm to indignation. The same photos that perpetuated his deceit now serve to bring us together as brothers. We prize them as a sign that, all those years ago, our father foresaw our meeting up as brothers. Yet another dream for us to cling to. Sure, our method of deduction isn’t very scientific, but at least it allows us to breathe a little life into these photos.

  We must confess: Starting from a certainty helped us forge a bond. The first day we got together in Barcelona and laid out the photos of our fathe
r, in order on the table, in our attempt to construct a plausible story, we understood that he’d never revealed anything about himself to us. Not a glimmer. Hardly a hint of emotion. Suddenly, those photos all lined up, mute and faded, reminded us of a series of images from a film, like those stills they used to hang in the entrances of cinemas to show what was coming next. You could study them for ages, staring at the motionless actors and actresses, imagining the scenes in which they’d been shot, and, if you didn’t know anything about the story beforehand, it was impossible to work out whether it was a comedy, a drama, or a mystery. Whether they were about to burst out laughing or crying.

  That’s pretty much how it is. Gabriel, our father, is an actor in a photo, and the more you look at him the more you fall under his spell.

  2

  * * *

  These Things Happen

  Our father’s name is—or was—Gabriel Delacruz Expósito. We’ll start there.

  It’s anybody’s guess whether the mother who bore him gave him the name in memory of the man who got her pregnant, or in the belief that if she made this offering to the archangel her child would be looked after for the rest of his days, or simply because somebody in the street that night rained curses on some good-for-nothing named Gabriel, and she was inspired by that. Such suppositions can never be confirmed. Whatever happened, the woman must have had her own good reasons if she went to the trouble of giving her kid a name.

  A married couple with a salt cod stall next to the El Born market found the child at six in the morning. They were the first to arrive that day. They noticed a bundle of rags next to the main entrance in Carrer Comerç but, in the dim early morning light, they took it for a rotten cauliflower overlooked by the garbage collectors (who, sometimes, when they were having a midnight break in the vicinity of the market, would get one that was still fairly intact and play a bit of soccer). All of a sudden, the cauliflower started to squall in broken wails that echoed under the market roof. The nightwatchman who was chatting with the couple went over and shone his lantern on the bundle. The cod seller’s wife picked it up cautiously and discovered inside it a naked, still-bloody baby boy with bluish skin, moving his hands and lips desperately trying to find a nipple. He was so defenseless, so needy that the woman lost no time in unbuttoning her smock and pulling up her woollen pullover. Right then and there, in front of her husband, the nightwatchman, and several onlookers who’d by now turned up at the market, she released a breast the size of a pumpkin, her left one, which she guided to the baby’s mouth. The group watched in silence, captivated by the spectacle of the proud and abundant mamma. The nightwatchman was trying to look dignified, as required by his public office. The baby stretched out his neck as if drawn by a magnet and sucked at the nipple for quite a long time. Miraculously, some tiny bubbles of milk dribbled from the corners of his mouth. When he calmed down, the woman, in some pain but satisfied, disengaged him from her breast—it had been a while since she’d been called on as a wet nurse—and handed him over to the figure of authority. The nightwatchman took the bundle in his arms, his heart melting at the warmth of the tiny thing. He’d take the baby straight to the hospital, and, if he survived, he’d be sent to some charitable institution. Then, as they contemplated the child, they noticed, stuck to his stomach with dry blood and covering the stump of the umbilical cord, a scrap of white paper, not unlike a factory label. It said “Gabriel.”

  The whole thing—the birth, abandonment, and first suckling of Gabriel—took place early one morning in October 1941. Our father was convinced that he developed a sybarite’s passion for salt cod because of that first taste of milk that nourished him. He ate it whenever he could, however it came: baked in white wine with paprika (a la llauna), in an olive oil emulsion (al pil-pil), shredded (esqueixat), in batter (arrebossat), or cooked in the oven with potatoes. Oddly enough, he found cow’s milk too salty and could only drink it sweetened with three good-sized spoons of sugar.

  Our mothers say that he embellished the story of his first hours in the world, as if to somehow gloss over his lack of a mother and all the hardships he had to endure in the orphanage in the following years. In addition, as if needing to provide proof of the legend, he always carried a newspaper cutting in his wallet so he could show it to people. The news item appeared in La Vanguardia Española. Unsurprisingly, the author of the piece reveled in the more sensational details, while also highlighting the efficiency of the forces of law and order and the decisive intervention of the stall holder’s wife.

  In any case, Gabriel didn’t know about all this until years later—seventeen to be precise—and thanks to the most extraordinary fluke. These things happen. Not long before, he’d started shifting furniture for a moving company. One day, they had to go to the Sant Gervasi neighborhood and empty an apartment for a family that was moving. His job was to dismantle a solid oak wardrobe that was too large and heavy to be moved by one person. First, he took off the doors and then decided to remove the drawers so the wardrobe would weigh a bit less. He opened the first drawer, pulling it off the runners with a crunch of woodworm-riddled timber. Then he took out the second one and, once he was holding it in his hands, he noticed the sheet of newspaper with which the owners had lined it. It was a folded, yellowing page from La Vanguardia. Gabriel removed it with great care and opened it. The corners crumbled between his fingers. He found an article about breaking the Stalin Line, signed by the news agency EFE from “the Führer’s headquarters.” He understood it was talking about the Second World War and immediately took note of the date on the newspaper. Wednesday, October 22, 1941. He was born the day before, on October 21, the same year! As he was taking this in, he turned the page over to look at the news on the other side. His eye was caught by a Gasogen ad with a prophetic drawing of a truck. Then he noticed the piece above it. It was headed BARCELONA LIFE and, in no time at all, he discovered the news of his abandonment. These things happen.

  The piece was titled NEWBORN BABY FOUND AT BORN MARKET ENTRANCE and went on to describe in ten lines the details of Gabriel’s first dawn, stressing the goodness of the woman from the salt cod stall and ending with the following words: “Our correspondent can attest that at the time of going to press the little angel was sleeping placidly in the Provincial Maternity and Foundling Home, saved from death and inevitable purgatory, and blissfully unaware of the commotion caused by his first hours on this earth.”

  Gabriel learned the article by heart, reading it over and over again and reciting it with all due ceremony. This piece of paper represented his only link to his mother. A few days after his discovery, one Monday when he had the day off, he went to El Born market and searched for the salt cod stall. As he lined up to buy his three bits of salt cod—it was Lent and the nuns at Llars Mundet, the children’s home where he still lived, would be pleased by his thoughtfulness—he watched the buxom woman whose breast had given him his first nourishment seventeen years earlier, uneasily admiring her. She had peroxide-blond hair. Although the years had taken their toll, she was still a splendid full-bodied woman. Pale with the cold, the flesh of her arms looked as solid as marble. The planetary roundness of her breasts thrust against her white smock. How easy it would have been for Gabriel to regress, to latch on again, there and then, and with the same voracity as on the first day of his life.

  Our father never told the salt cod vendor that he was the baby she’d put to her breast that February morning. From time to time, however, every three or four months, he went to the stall to have a look at her.

  “Tomorrow, I’m going to escape for an hour or two to visit my adoptive mother,” he’d announce when he was returning to Barcelona with Bundó and Petroli, apparently thinking out loud as he drove.

  Since Gabriel, the name given by the unknown mother, was appropriately Catholic, the nuns at the Provincial Maternity and Foundling Home were happy for the baby to be called that and limited themselves to providing the two requisite surnames. They decided on “Delacruz Expósito,” a typical choi
ce for abandoned children, which literally meant “Foundling of the Cross.” In those early years of the Franco regime these names provided a kind of safe-conduct and opened more than one door. People responded to them with compassion, imagining that behind the face of the little waif was a father killed at the front, or a mother who had to break up a large family in order to survive. More than one God-fearing woman made the sign of the cross when she heard the two surnames.

  His sons didn’t inherit them. Our mothers never married our father, so we got their surnames, and that was that. Sometimes, though, we like to address each other with the surname we would have had—translated—if it had come from our dad. Chris could be called Christopher Cross, like the American singer, or Chris of the Cross, a stage name chosen for its more universal ring, perhaps, by some magician performing in a Las Vegas casino. Christof would be von Kreuz, a name evoking a Kaiser’s colonel, and Christophe would have the same surname as the painter in the Louvre: Christophe Delacroix. Cristòfol would be the most faithful and would keep Delacruz, like the Spanish mystic San Juan de la Cruz, or it could even be rendered into Catalan, to become Delacreu.

  Most of the parentless children who, like our father, grew up in the Provincial Maternity and Foundling Home and, subsequently, the House of Charity, had been given similar surnames. They were like brothers and sisters without really being so. When our father reminisced about his childhood, Bundó was the only person he regarded as something close to a blood brother. Gabriel was just a few weeks older, and they grew up together. Their friendship was for life, from the tyranny of charity to the tyranny of moving furniture, and only tragedy would separate them. Of course, the time will come in these pages when we’re going to have to talk about the tragedy, which was disastrous, or providential, for a number of people.