by Jordi Puntí
Making a big deal out of the little kerfuffle because she had a secret penchant for this kind of familiarity, the Mother Superior straightened her coif, smoothed out the non-existent creases in her habit, and immediately set about putting a damper on things.
“You must be eternally grateful to God and to Senyor Casellas, in that order, for what they have done for you,” she said, shifting from Catalan to Spanish to give more gravity to her words. “In fact, it’s not entirely true that you have been exempted from military service: You’re going to enter the ranks, so to say, of La Ibérica moving company and it is my expectation that you will serve Senyor Casellas with the same devotion as our soldiers serve the fatherland and General Franco.”
Only a few months earlier, declaring that Spain represented “unity of destiny in the universal,” Franco had presented the principles of the National Movement, and the Mother Superior had learned them by heart. The two boys cagily agreed with her pronouncements. As they heard her out, Gabriel mentally drew a fine moustache on the nun’s pasty face and realized that she and Senyor Casellas were like two peas in a pod.
And now, if we may, we’ll close the doors of the House of Charity and Llars Mundet forever.
5
* * *
A Home on the Ronda de Sant Antoni
Destiny, playful and mischievous as a puppy, landed Gabriel and Bundó in a boarding house. Whenever a youngster left the orphanage, the nuns made inquiries as to whether there were any relatives, even distant ones, with a view to handing over responsibility to the family. This time, however, they’d known for years that the two friends were alone. They let them leave, then, with the recommendation that they should install themselves in some economical, but above all decent, lodgings. Gabriel and Bundó didn’t need to be told twice. Acting on the advice of Grandpa Cuniller at La Ibérica, who’d spent more than half his life in boarding houses, they opted for a room with two beds in an establishment on the Ronda de Sant Antoni. The building was on the corner of Carrer Sant Gil, just a few steps from the local market, although the main reason for choosing that particular place was that it was very close to the House of Charity. They only had to walk along Carrer Ferlandina to get to one of its entrances, the one opening into the Nadal i Dou courtyard. It’s not that the two friends were yearning to hang around their old orphanage again—indeed Gabriel had fled from the printers with the guilty conscience of a deserter—but they had a sense of going back to the neighborhood where they’d grown up. They wiped the slate clean of the time they’d spent in exile in Llars Munder and were at last able to satisfy an urge that had been repressed since early adolescence. They almost swooned at the thought of the bittersweet perfume of the streets of the red-light district, the Barri Xino, at nightfall. Now free of the nuns’ vigilance, they were longing to roam its most notorious corners, and nothing would deprive them of the thrill of these so-often-imagined attractions.
It was autumn 1958, and the boarding house captured perfectly the frontier spirit of that part of Barcelona: It overlooked the cramped spaces of the Barri Xino at the back, while its front door opened on to the Ronda de Sant Antoni with its ambience of a Parisian boulevard. The establishment occupied the whole of the spacious second floor of a four-story building, and it had a well-lit living room thanks to the glassed-in balcony overlooking the street, but its interior offered much less than what the façade promised. This was a modest boarding house, in the shape of a funnel and organized around a long passageway. There were six dark bedrooms with high ceilings and fake moldings, a bathroom with a translucent door—on the other side of which you could always make out gelatinous shadows—and a separate toilet in a narrow little room. The landlady’s kitchen and bedroom were set apart, a kind of secret annex that was off-limits to the lodgers and, immediately after that, the apartment widened out into the luminous living-cum-dining room that looked on to the Ronda.
With no known name beyond the dented sign at the entrance—“Pension. Travelers and Long-term. Second Floor”—the boarding house belonged to a Senyora Rifà, who hailed from the plain near Vic. A petite energetic woman, a human dynamo, Senyora Natàlia Rifà had inherited the business ten years earlier from a first cousin of her mother’s. A spinster, well over fifty, suspicious and coquettish by nature, she scurried around her domain as if there was a constant danger of one of the rooms being set on fire. Notwithstanding all the disappointments she had borne, she hadn’t renounced the pleasure of a little primping and preening every morning, and she had great faith in a corset that made her backside look misshapen. Her boarders only ever saw her in a dressing gown when she went into the kitchen. She always got dressed up to serve the food at mealtimes. She was clean and required the lodgers to be clean too and, if she saw that they had a future in her house, she educated them in all-around tidiness. She cooked passably well, which is to say not stinting on the salt but without much joy, and that might be why she only accepted men in her pension—because she knew they were easier to please.
The second floor of the building in Ronda de Sant Antoni hadn’t been renovated since well before the Civil War. The walls sweated in summer and patches of damp, which took ages to vanish, appeared in some rooms after rain (and an insanely superstitious student from Jaca saw faces in them). The furniture creaked with age and the kitchen utensils were blackened by fire. This rather fusty atmosphere was accentuated by the most outlandish feature of the house: its collection of stuffed animals.
Birds, Canidae, rodents, or members of the feline species: each room exhibited its own variety of embalmed creature. It was a veritable natural history museum. In the vestibule, crouched in semi-ambush above the coat and hat rack, a shiny-pelted fox stood sentry: You can come in; you can’t come in. On the floor, beside the umbrella stand, a kindly looking dalmatian kept it company, sitting up on its back legs, apparently soliciting caresses from anyone entering or leaving. A squirrel with its tail all fluffed up like a feather duster and on its way up the bookcase in the hallway propped up the volumes of Reader’s Digest Selections (the landlady had also inherited the subscription). In the display cabinet in the dining room, a sky-blue parrot and a multihued cockatoo with permanently open beaks chattered incessantly, miming the most frequently used words of the occupants of the house. In a different corner of the same cabinet, a hummingbird with iridescent feathers, its wings whirring in perpetual still motion, imbibed at an exotic plastic flower. On top of an old cocktail cabinet, a genet with its mouth half open sighed over such succulent prey.
This obsession with taxidermy even extended to the landing. Next to her door and with permission from the other residents of the building, who saw it as a touch of class that graced the whole house, Senyora Rifà had mounted the head of a wild goat, the kind that has spiraling, sharp-tipped horns. Once they’d earned their landlady’s approval, the most faithful clients were let into the secret of the goat: The semibared teeth of the beast guarded a copy of the key to the pension for latecomers and the absentminded.
The inhabitants of the pension took a while to get used to the disquieting presence of all these creatures. As they lingered at the table over coffee, tall stories were told about the poor quality of the taxidermy in some specimens. Hearing them, newcomers started scratching uneasily and, for some time afterward, their dreams were filled with bloated-bellied beasts and revolting flies buzzing around them.
Senyora Rifà also had a cat, a live cat. The animal, which had become unapproachable after the half-hearted caresses of so many hands—a sort of pension levy or toll—seemed to revel in startling people. Without any warning at all, after spending hours and hours sleeping on the sofa or immobile atop its favorite piece of furniture, it would let out a screech and leap onto the shoulder of whoever was nearest. The lodgers hated it, and the sentiment was mutual. Apart from the cat, which was the original furry occupant of the house, the invasion of animals, the motionless ones, had occurred in the days when one of Senyora Rifà’s lodgers was a traveling salesman promoting Rioj
a wines. Gabriel and Bundó just missed out on meeting him, but some of the residents made it their business to induct them into the mystery. The gentleman in question, a widower with two daughters of more than marriageable age who were the bane of his existence, lived in the pension for almost four years, from 1954 to 1958. At first, he was there one week a month, just enough time to do the rounds of Barcelona’s restaurants and businesses, but, after six months, his stays extended and, claiming a terrific amount of work, he was now spending twenty days in the boarding house and ten in Logroño. He and the landlady used the familiar tu and they enjoyed each other’s company—on the mattress, every night. The happiest days in Senyora Rifà’s life were those she spent as this man’s concubine. She confessed this to Bundó on more than one anisette-soaked evening, whereupon he gave her his shoulder to cry on. In the end, the gentleman also endowed her with his stuffed-animal collection.
It seems that, thanks to some childhood memory related to an old Republican schoolteacher, the gentleman from Logroño was a great lover of taxidermy. Every Friday afternoon he went off, like an explorer setting out on a hunt, to pay a visit to the taxidermist’s that used to be in the Plaça Reial. He gazed and gazed again upon the exhibited items and, from time to time, when one of them stole his heart, spent a few pesetas and brought it home. Senyora Rifà tended to receive the new acquisition with a wrinkling of her nose—“dust and more dust,” she said to herself—but immediately set about looking for somewhere to put it. She saw each new adoption as a sign of permanence. As long as the animals were there, she reasoned—and it wasn’t as if they were going to be escaping all by themselves some fine day—it would never occur to the gentleman from Logroño to leave her.
She was wrong, of course.
She was wrong because on her return from the market one September morning, that time of day when the house was empty and she listened to the serial on Ràdio Barcelona while she was cooking lunch, she found a folded piece of paper on the dining-room table. The gentleman from Logroño informed her, with immoderate stylistic flourishes, that he’d been obliged to hasten back to his home town. His two daughters, together and in concert, had attempted suicide. He’d write with further news as soon as he could. Lots of kisses, et cetera. Senyora Natàlia Rifà shuddered at the situation and felt sorry for the man. She then noticed the reek of Dandy Male and realized that the paper she was holding in her hands was perfumed. What a strange thing. Who would perfume such a sorrowful note unless he was soliciting forgiveness for something? She rushed to the room that the gentleman from Logroño still rented in order to keep up appearances and flung open his wardrobe. Empty. Fearing she was going to faint, Senyora Rifà flopped onto the bed. Immobile on top of a chest of drawers, a ferret mocked its landlady with a scornful leer.
In the first few weeks, Senyora Natàlia Rifà pinned her hopes on the stuffed zoo, but her longing for a letter postmarked Logroño gradually dwindled away to nothing. One evening at dinnertime, after two months of resisting renting out the man’s room, she realized that looks of compassion were being exchanged between her lodgers. She was an expert at deciphering the undercurrents running among them. She asked a few questions and was met by the same deadpan expressions, but, in the end, a young fellow from Berga, a notary’s assistant and a blabbermouth by nature, couldn’t stand it any longer: That very afternoon as he was returning from the courts he’d seen the gentleman from Logroño walking along carrer Trafalgar. He. Was. Accompanied. By. A. Floozy—if one might put it thus.
Senyora Rifà immediately started putting him down. Just what you’d expect from a good-for-nothing who owes me money. That’s the kind of thing that happens in Barcelona. When she was a child her family, God-fearing people, had always taught her to repress any show of feelings. The next day she squeezed another bed into the vacated room and filled it with two new heaven-sent boarders, Gabriel and Bundó. This convinced her that she was starting a new chapter. The very same day she moved some of the animals around and threw one out, but only one. She got rid of a poor raccoon that had traveled halfway around the world only to end up in the garbage, and all because it too painfully reminded her, with the mask around its glassy eyes, of the gentleman from Logroño, whose expression darkened every time he started carping about the problem of his unmarried daughters.
From that day onward, Senyora Rifà got into the habit of naming the rooms according to the animals they housed. The Badger Room. The Woodcock Room. The Lizard Room. Bundó and Gabriel entered the pension occupying the Ferret Room, a modest two-person room but with the small luxury of a window opening into the light well. In the summer one was grateful for the little bit of air that came in. Senyora Rifà rented them the room for a ridiculously low price. She was in a hurry to fill it with life again. Furthermore, since they were so busy with the moving, always traveling about, they came to an agreement that they’d never have lunch in the boarding house.
When our mothers asked about where he lived in Barcelona, our father didn’t deceive them and told them about the pension, although he never elaborated on specific details of the neighborhood, the rooms, or what kind of life people led there. He and Bundó were in the boarding house for many years—first sharing a room, then, after a while, each with his own room—and the six rooms of the house were jumbled up in his memory as an indivisible whole. A bed, a wardrobe, a chair, a bedside table, maybe a mirror and a washbasin, and the stuffed animal. Senyora Rifà established a sort of hierarchy, or lineage based on length of stay in the pension, so if a lodger decided to leave or if he died (something that also happened), the next on the list had the right to move into the empty room. Gabriel went through the whole process of these minimoves, from room to room, until coming to occupy the best of the lot, the Falcon Room—although, at this point, we can’t confirm whether he got to the one that was really the best, which was the landlady’s. When all’s said and done, the arrangements imposed by Senyora Rifà were not so different from the way of life in the orphanage and the two youths weren’t really bothered by them. If they knuckled under it was because they didn’t want to upset her.
Then again, living with the other inhabitants of the house helped them to get settled in the new world. The two friends spent the better part of the day with the workers at La Ibérica. Hours of toil in that particular microcosm dulled their thoughts but conversation with the other lodgers, over dinner or waiting to proceed to the dining room, often had the effect of jolting their brains into action. The cement was still wet and the footsteps thereon were forcibly imprinted. Bits of advice given, anecdotes and overly emphatic statements stirred them up. Faced with some new comment, they’d be immoderately irritated or they’d laugh as they savored the pleasures of a private joke and knowing looks. Although the friendship that had united them since their early childhood always remained staunch, Gabriel and Bundó learned in the boarding house that there was nothing wrong with having differing opinions. Besides, their age without a name still provided a safety net.
It would be impossible to reproduce the list of transient and long-term tenants our father consorted with in the boarding house. If we do the sums, the figure skyrockets. At the end of the sixties, by which time we’d been born and he was visiting us from time to time—in Paris, Frankfurt, and London—Senyora Rifà’s establishment had been his fixed address for more than ten years. More than ten years: mind-boggling. In 1969 Bundó used his nest egg to make a down payment on a public housing apartment. A year and a half later he moved into it. Gabriel, however, didn’t follow suit. He was comfortable in the imperfect nomadic existence that combined truck journeys around Europe and the ever-provisional hospitality of a pension, and was loath to abandon the status quo.
“It’s as if all the to-ing and fro-ing of the boarding house, all those people coming in and going out, just like him, prolonged the pleasurable sensation of always being on the move,” Christof remarked.
“We’re Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We hope you will enjoy the show . . .
”
Okay, Chris, we get the drift. In that lonely hearts club, Bundó and our father met all sorts of people. The place must have been frequented by friendly types and show-offs, misers and depressives, timid souls and loudmouths, swindlers and jokers. For some years, there’d been periods in which the city had started buzzing again, as it had done before the war, with the agitation of an anthill. There were weeks—though not many—in which the jittery energy of the outside world permeated the pension. Tenants came and left. Senyora Rifà got fed up with washing sheets and towels. A grudging Barcelona woke up in a bad mood, and thick and sore headed from nightmares, but the frenetic activity didn’t ease up for a single moment. In the streets, trams and buses and trucks and cars and people tweaked the nerves of the city and, eventually, the city reacted.
One Sunday morning when we four Christophers were wandering around the Sant Antoni neighborhood looking for signs of those times, we went to the second-hand book market and bought a book of photos from those years.
“And what if we stumble across a photo where, in the background, in a corner or sneaking by, Bundó and Dad appear?” we joked.
It didn’t happen. It was unlikely that they would have been captured in those days because they were never still. The photos in the book were printed in high-contrast black and white. The larger ones were very grainy. The first image of the book, probably taken midafternoon from the foot of Mount Tibidabo, shows the whole city spread out from the port and the mountain of Montjuïc to the chimneys of Sant Adrià. Veiled by sea mist, it is an incandescent mirage. Then the photographer got down to particulars and captured a thousand and one details of daily life. In those pages, where night fell just as easily as dawn broke, there was a place for everybody. From the society debuts of young ladies from good families to equestrian events at the Polo Club; from the farriers near the old slaughterhouse to the beer guzzlers in the Plaça Reial; from the raffles and fun and games at the festival of Gràcia to the procession on Saint Eulalia’s Day with traffic cops all decked out in feathered helmets; from the white squares after the great snowfall of ’62 to the skeletons of public housing blocks being constructed in La Verneda and the shanties of Montjuïc. If we are to stay hot on the heels of our father, then, we’re obliged to plunge in among the throng and stop the shifting shadows. We tried to get inside each photo, breathing in its odors and listening to its cries. We really did try.