Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  Bundó was more fortunate. It must be said that his sturdy build and resolute air in the face of life’s surprises were a help. The Mother Superior, Sister Elvira, came from a well-heeled family of the Bonanova neighborhood. While she harbored a few pangs of conscience, her parents and siblings had repositioned themselves with surprising ease after all the upheaval of war and, ever since their kind of people had been in charge, had set about reestablishing the old order of things, which had worked so well in their favor. Needless to say, in January 1939, after two long years of eking out an existence in a property on the outskirts of Barcelona, in hiding and shitting themselves with fright, without any maids and grudgingly rationing their breakfast coffee, they’d been the first to hang a white sheet from the balcony of their apartment and to go down to Avinguda Diagonal, all of them together, to cheer on Franco’s troops as they marched by in their victory parade. Robert Casellas, Sister Elvira’s older brother, had inherited the family business and had to get it going again from scratch. Every July 18, on the anniversary of the start of the Civil War, he celebrated the godsend by making a generous donation to the House of Charity. By this we mean big money. He saw it as the best way of earning himself a privileged place in heaven. In return for the favor, he sometimes asked his sister to send him the odd boy to lug stuff for his moving company. He wanted them brawny, without any bad habits, and orphans because then they wouldn’t bother him with family celebrations. This was the fate of the young Bundó.

  The company was called La Ibérica Transport and Moving. The offices and garage were in Carrer Almogàvers, very close to Rambla del Poblenou. Three DKV vans and three Pegaso trucks, all boxy and gleaming, slept on the premises. The DKVs were used for the simpler jobs and rarely ventured outside the province, while the trucks were assigned the big moves and, when necessary, traveled from Barcelona all over Spain. The collectivizations of 1937 had stripped the company of men and machines, but Robert Casellas had got them back after some slick wheeling and dealing with the Ministry of Transport. His pride and joy, all six vehicles looked practically new, and he could spend hours and hours gazing at the shiny beasts with paternal love. When they came back to roost after a move, he’d have them washed and buffed by the latest arrivals among his workers until they looked as if they’d just rolled off the assembly line.

  Even though he was getting a miserly wage as an apprentice—and, moreover, part of the money went directly from Casellas’s pocket to the nuns’ account—Bundó enjoyed remembering those days. It makes us suspect he conveniently forgot the suffering for the sake of anecdote: minimizing it without recounting the true measure of its pain because, that way, it was worth recalling.

  “I remember the first days after I went to work at La Ibérica,” he told Petroli in one of those nostalgia sessions he shared with our father, “and I’d get back to Llars Mundet after dark. My back would be totally done in. My arms and legs wouldn’t do what I wanted. I was so worn out I’d go straight to bed. In a morning and an afternoon, for example, we’d dismantled and packed up a second-floor apartment in Carrer d’Aragó and set it up again in Avinguda del General Mola. The whole thing without an elevator, hauling up the bulkiest pieces with a pulley and lugging the rest up a narrow, twisting service stairway, as dark as the catacombs, with the hysterical lady of the house following us everywhere to make sure we didn’t break anything and screeching at us, ‘If anything is missing, you oafs, you’ll be paying for it out of your own pocket.’ Even so, I liked it. I slowly got used to it and learned to see the funny side. It’s also true that going into other people’s houses, diving into Barcelona streets I never knew existed, and then riding around the city in the DKV or the truck (with a windshield like a panoramic lookout) was something new for me, and it made up for the effort, the hard sweats, the bruises, the scratches, the complaints of the uniformed concierges, and the yelling of Senyor Casellas.”

  Although he was shattered, Bundó’s face was a picture of contentment when he slept after the day’s labors. In their shared bedroom Gabriel watched him enviously and couldn’t resist waking him up to moan about his troubles. Day after day, the House of Charity press took on the dimensions of a huge foreboding cave, as black as the forge of hell. It sounded as if he was describing being tortured by the Cheka. With heavy eyelids and emerging from the sponginess of sleep, Bundó listened, trying to cheer him up by making him see that his job as a furniture mover wasn’t a piece of cake either. To make his case and impress his friend, he displayed the rope-burn slashes gouged into the palms of his hands from all the lifting and lowering of pieces of furniture. Secretly, however, he poured balm on his wounds by recalling the day he’d been given a two-peseta tip. Then, he’d drift back to sleep with a sucker’s smile on his face once again as his placid little snores marked the rhythms of his dreams.

  After he’d been working for La Ibérica for four months, during a moving job that the boss deemed to be of “the utmost importance,” Bundó witnessed at close quarters an accident that would turn out to be providential. Providential for him, for our father, and, when all’s said and done, for all of us. A new provincial secretary of the interior had been appointed by Franco and was moving to Barcelona from Segovia. Among the objects he’d decided to bring from his home was a massive, medieval-looking wood and cast-iron desk, which was to take pride of place in his office.

  “This is an heirloom that has been in my family for centuries. Although it is cumbersome to move, it would pain me to leave it behind at this crucial point in my political career. Take great care with it, please,” the government representative had solemnly announced to the three movers from Barcelona and two lads from the property who’d been told to help.

  Carried by ten arms, the desk made its exit through the monumental doorway of the Segovia mansion, and docilely submitted to being eased into the truck, but, once in Barcelona, as four men unloaded it, it started bucking like a wild animal and, with a twist and a flip, shot out of their hands. The result of the disaster was—in this order of importance, according to Senyor Casellas—one split desk leg, a crack that would be very difficult to repair, and the broken—in fact, smashed—right foot of one of the La Ibérica workmen.

  The bones of Bundó’s injured workmate, who was on the point of retiring, had seen too much wear and tear, and the insurance company doctors advised him not to carry any more weight and to get on with claiming his invalidity pension. Senyor Casellas spent a whole week, until the crack in the desk was fixed, bemoaning his bad luck in a lachrymose singsong dirge, so gratingly shrill that it set the workers’ teeth on edge. When the storm had passed, Bundó went to see him and in a barely audible voice asked whether he’d thought about a replacement for the injured man. A replacement? No, not yet. Then Bundó began singing Gabriel’s praises, waxing lyrical about his physical makeup, which was all sinew, and his willingness to work. He was a Hercules. If necessary, he could ask the nuns for references.

  “Good heavens, anyone would think he was your girlfriend,” Casellas replied with a sneer in his voice. “All right, let him come and see me one of these days.”

  A week later, making the most of having a Monday off from the press, Gabriel asked Sister Elvira for permission to go and see Senyor Casellas. Bundó had more than once described his employer’s grotesque appearance, sparing no details or snide observations, but at that first face-to-face interview at which he was very nervous, Gabriel had the impression that he was looking at a dummy from some sideshow at a fair. Senyor Casellas was short and fat. His pendulous jowls met in a double chin, which divided like two rolls of fat on a baby’s belly, and the skin of his fleshy cheeks shone as if he’d just demolished a very oily roast dinner. His voice, too high-pitched, didn’t match the bloated body. Now that he could actually see the man, Gabriel realized that Bundó could imitate him with comic brilliance. When he spoke, he smirked without being aware of it, and waved his hands around, pointing and gesturing with fingers as short and thick as sausages. When he was silent, list
ening to somebody, he had a strange tic that involved moving his top lip up and down, then clenching it in his teeth as if about to start munching on it. Trying to hide this, perhaps, he’d cultivated a pencil moustache of the kind favored by the regime. Since his status as a businessman required some mark of authority—and somebody must have pointed this out because it wouldn’t have come naturally to him—he’d taken two further steps toward establishing himself as a tyrannical boss and, at the same time, appearing utterly ridiculous: One was his choice of suit, made to measure by the Santaclara tailoring establishment, with which he always wore a bluish shirt—not the official blue, but hinting at it—and secondly, although he was from a Catalan family, he addressed everyone at work in Spanish.

  Gabriel knocked at the door of Senyor Casellas’s office and heard the jarring voice telling him to come in. He entered.

  “Hello, I’m Gabriel Delacruz. I’ve come from Llars Mundet. Bundó . . .”

  “Hello, hello . . .” Casellas cut him short, looked him up and down. “You’re a bit on the runty side, aren’t you? How much do you weigh?”

  “Seventy kilos, Señor Casellas.”

  “That’s not true, you’re skinnier than that. I’m telling you. Go back and weigh yourself. Don’t the sisters feed you? Tell them to give you more to eat if you want to work here. Especially spinach. It’s got a lot of iron. And lentils. And meat. You’ve got to eat more meat. You’ve got to eat the same as Bundó, who’s built like a bull.”

  Gabriel nodded. He was all too aware that neither he nor Bundó had tasted a veal steak or stew, let alone a beefsteak, for months, probably since the day when a rake-thin woman with the face of a scavenger bird, Doña Carmen Polo de Franco, had come to visit the House of Charity. All of the children had been made to put on their best clothes and parade in the courtyard before the local authorities, and the choir of the Female Section had sung the “Salve Regina.”

  “Do you really want to work as a furniture mover? It’s a very hard, demanding life . . .”

  “Yes, Señor Casellas.” Bundó had recommended that Gabriel should call him Señor Casellas because he liked the formal address and it made him more amenable.

  Casellas looked him up and down again and was just about to say something when the phone rang. At the first ring, the company owner squared his shoulders like a soldier and sat up straight backed in his office chair. Then he picked up the handset and started talking with an important client, some big fish. He listened with great attention and said “yes, yes, of course, of course, yes, naturally, sí, sí, claro, claro, sí, cómo no,” to everything, oozing sycophancy with every word. A good two minutes went by until he remembered that Gabriel was still standing there. Then he covered up the earpiece for a moment and said, “Go on, off you go, off you go now. Tell Sister Elvira you’ll be starting next Monday. You won’t be paid for the first two weeks. You’ll be on trial. You’ll go with Bundó in the van. He’ll be responsible for you. Ah, and as I was saying before, eat more spinach, lad. You’ve got to be a Popeye, or whatever his name is.”

  4

  * * *

  Age Without a Name

  The change of job was a tonic for our father. From the front of the van, wonderful views of the city replaced the dismal sight of printing presses. The narcotic smell of ink faded away into some cranny of his memory, only to resurface when it was completely inoffensive, for example when it occasionally drifted out of the open pages of a newspaper at breakfast time, or when a leaking pen decorated his chest with a navy-blue medal. In Gabriel’s first weeks with La Ibérica, when he and Bundó were arriving or leaving in the DKV, Senyor Casellas watched them from a distance, smug in the confirmation of his own good judgment when he took on the new orphan mover. It seemed that, rather than leaving him tired out, lugging furniture and boxes was doing him good, making him a little hardier every day.

  About to turn seventeen, Gabriel and Bundó had bodies that obeyed them. With muscles as pliant as rubber they could carry any weight. Besides being in good physical condition, the two friends were both easygoing by nature, which also helped. They’d shed the age of innocence but hadn’t fully entered the age of calculation and were breezing through life with just the right amount of baggage, unburdened by any extraneous weight or terrible hardships. They’d reached an age that isn’t an age, one that has no name and, in all likelihood, the job of shifting furniture, emptying and filling houses and loading up the trailer with all the useless things that people accumulate protected them against the temptation of growing up, thinking about marrying the first girl to nab them and surrendering to more mundane worries.

  This sensation of weightlessness was enhanced both by the excitement of novelty and the contrast with their workmates, who were more accustomed to routine and yoked to everyday affairs. Neither Gabriel nor Bundó had a driver’s license, of course, and they had to wait a few years before they could get one, so when they went out it was always as flunkies for some more experienced worker. The owner wanted to toughen up the apprentices and tended to assign them to one of the vans covering the moves within the city of Barcelona. As they were learning the trade they gradually got to know everyone on the La Ibérica payroll. There was Romero from Murcia, who used to spit out of the window not giving a damn about anyone else and who, with the deftness of a one-armed man, could roll cigarettes while he was driving; there were Sebastià and Ricard Nogueró, two mutually ill-disposed brothers from the neighborhood of Sants who were at each other’s throats all day long; El Tembleque, “The Wobbler,” a once-promising bullfighter from Andalusia who now lived in Sant Adrià; Sirera and Brauli, who were supporters of the Espanyol Soccer Club; Fornido, a hefty chap who did honor to his name; Tartana and Petroli, who were brothers-in-law and friends; Wenceslau, known as Vences, who made the most of any break to set up a game of cards (and who, we suspect, taught Gabriel the cardsharp’s arts); Baltanás, brother of an executed militant of the Iberian Anarchist Federation, who’d dishonored his family by becoming a Franco supporter; Deulofeu—“God Made Him”—another foundling, as his name suggested, also raised in the House of Charity where he was despised as a snitch, the nuns’ little spy; and then there was Grandpa Cuniller with his unfortunate attacks of lumbago whenever things needed to be carried upstairs . . .

  What a bunch of riffraff! The older ones must be dead by now, or about to make the final move, the one where instead of lugging the box they’re inside it. Apart from Petroli, who was soon to enter the scene as their companion in notching up thousands of kilometers of European roads, the two friends’ favorite comrade-in-arms was El Tembleque. El Tembleque, who had a picture of the Virgin of Rocío on his dashboard altar and the Betis Soccer Club pennant hanging from the rearview mirror, often drove them crazy with his misadventures-of-an-ill-starred-bullfighter stories that he told in a gravelly voice, the product of his partiality for sol y sombra, a brandy-and-anise concoction that evoked the “sun and shade” of the bullring. If bad luck decreed that the move that day should take them past the Las Arenas or La Monumental bullring, he’d lean on the horn of the DKV with all the passion of a fanatic, after which he’d resume his monologue about that August afternoon in 1948 when he was about to make his debut as a fully fledged bullfighter in Linares. The great Manolete had died there barely a year before. Had he ever told them about that? His career, he recalled with shining eyes, lasted exactly eight minutes and twenty sweeps of the cape, followed by a chorus of ¡Olé! ¡Olé! from an enthusiastic public, but the animal, as treacherous as they get, charged and put an end to his vocation forever.

  “D’Artañán, the fucking bull was called . . .” he’d say at that point in the story, and then he’d continue dreamily. “I was no coward, mind you, but sometimes I think I should have snuffed it then. Could a bullfighter know greater glory than dying in the same ring as the legendary Manolete?”

  The only consolation left to him, the only way to offset the tragedy was to fight the odd vaquilla, some hot-blooded little heifer, in his n
eighborhood’s annual festivities every June. The Neighborhood Association people looked for a patch of vacant ground somewhere around Besòs, down by the river and, with a few sticks and bags of sand, improvised an enclosure that they could use as a bullring for an afternoon. Alongside the ring, they set up a snack bar, open day and night and lit up by a string of colored light bulbs that were also used for the local Christmas tree. Although more than ten years had gone by, El Tembleque always summoned up that corrida in Linares to give himself pride of place on the poster and, lest there should be any doubts, presented himself in the ring dressed in his “suit of lights,” the same traje de luces he’d worn in Linares. His admirers, the novice bullfighters of his neighborhood, endowed him with a legendary aura. Of scrawny build, El Tembleque slipped easily into his bullfighter’s gear with the same courage as on the first day, but the cloth had faded over the years, and the rhinestones and sequins had lost some of their luster, even though his wife put a lot of elbow grease into polishing them. “It just goes to show, there’s nothing like the sun of Andalusia!” he’d shout by way of justification. They say the bullfighter displayed his old skills when it came to distracting the heifer, but what most impressed the onlookers, especially the kids, was that the trousers still retained the hole made by the fateful goring. A superstitious man, El Tembleque had never wanted it mended, and when his fans and friends had a close-up look, sometimes even asking if they could stick their finger in (which he was delighted to agree to), they discovered a dreadful scar. The usual reaction was to make a sign of the cross, begging for God’s blessing.