by Jordi Puntí
While inner courtyards filled up with the rankness of boiled cabbage, the concierges of the buildings in the Eixample neighborhood listened to the radio and cursed under their breath. The whores in the Barri Xino straightened their bra straps and touched up their cheap makeup. Shopkeepers decorated their windows with castles built of canned foods. Doormen nodded sleepily inside their vestibules. As piss fermented and stained the cobblestones, a small girl ate lupine beans next to a fountain. A soldier on leave bought flowers for a little seamstress at one of the stalls on La Rambla. An old man in pajamas came out on to his balcony and scratched his balls. A kid in an undershirt killed rats with a catapult. Sea air blew up from the port to caress the legs of a girl in a short, not-quite-knee-length skirt. A tiny man dressed in a white work coat with a threadbare jacket on top sidled through an alley, trying to conceal a well-wrapped packet . . .
“Now. Now, yes! Stop here!”
This scraggy little man with permanently floury hair was a baker’s assistant called Lluís Salvans, and he lived in Senyora Rifà’s boarding house. Although this is only conjecture, we’d say that the packet, wrapped in brown paper and about the size of a thick book, probably contained incendiary leaflets that were about to be distributed at the entrance to one of the markets, or at the exit door of the Liceu opera house, or in the middle of Plaça de Catalunya. Salvans was, for a time, the most enigmatic lodger in the pension (a reputation inherited by Gabriel when he eventually disappeared). He always seemed to be fleeing from something and was wary of the other tenants. If he met anyone in the hallway he didn’t shun conversation but preferred to conduct it in conspiratorial whispers. The strange nature of his job only added to the mystery. Since he worked the night shift in a bakery in Carrer Hospital, he only coincided with the other residents on his days off, which is to say Saturdays and religious holidays. On these occasions he often left the table after dinner, went out the door and let ten seconds go by, waiting in the hallway—like one of the stuffed animals—after which he made a surprise, theatrical reentry into the dining room to see if he could catch anybody criticizing him or conspiring against him. The other lodgers knew what he was up to and were always on the alert for his reappearance. When he burst in again they stared at him in silence, trying hard not to laugh when they saw his face darkening with rage. The trail of Salvans and his neuroses peters out on the other side of the French border at the end of the sixties. His surname appears in the odd history book, interred in the mass grave of footnotes. From what we’ve been able to ascertain, which isn’t much, he must have kept up some kind of contact with what remained of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT and sometimes took part in subversive activities. A couple of times when she was sweeping his room Senyora Rifà found books that looked as if they ought to be prohibited stashed under his bed. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta . . . these too-Russian or too-dangerous names made her suspicious and apprehensive. Salvans bought her silence by presenting her with a kilo loaf of bread every morning, still hot from the oven.
“Take it off my rent, as we agreed,” he’d say in front of the others to put them off the track when anyone caught them red-handed in the transaction.
When they knew him they were very young and innocent, but both our father and Bundó spoke affectionately of Lluís Salvans, whose libertarian ideas—although they were expressed in mysterious and cryptic words that the two friends barely understood at the time—ended up as part of their ideological education. It must have been a meager introduction, it has to be said, for neither our father nor Bundó ever embraced politics. These pages don’t accommodate daring deeds or lofty epic achievements. The train of heroic exploits passed them by, for they were kept busy at the House of Charity. When not being obliged to memorize the “Formation of the National Spirit” under the vigilance of a nun of doughy complexion, they were otherwise distracted, for example by getting dressed up in uniform and tie and having their hair neatly parted for the Eucharistic Congress children’s procession. Of course, later on when they became aware of them, they hated the restrictions and austere life that had been foisted on them by the dictator and his henchmen—and even more so when they started to travel around Europe in the Pegaso and understood that people had much better lives outside Spain—but the daily grind of moving furniture kept them on too short a leash. In that, they were victims indeed. And that’s why they schemed every single day. Like them, a lot of people got through those years putting up a modicum of resistance that was crushed day after day by such loathsome characters as Senyor Casellas. Petroli told us, for example, that La Ibérica union meetings had always been a farce conducted by Deulofeu, the boss’s favorite hireling, the nuns’ little squealer in the orphanage, who had subsequently built his career on being Casellas’s spy.
To return to the other end of the spectrum, to the influence of Lluís Salvans, we need to go back to the first winter Bundó and Gabriel spent in Senyora Rifa’s house. One Saturday night in their nineteenth year, too cold for them to be roaming the streets, they lingered at the table for coffee and a chat and, with the challenge of finishing a bottle of Soberano brandy, they started playing cards. Their adversaries that night in the Catalan game of botifarra were Lluís Salvans and the student from Berga (sorry, friend, but we don’t know your name). A brazier under the table kept the four of them warm but, as further protection against the cold, the chap from Berga was also wearing the fingerless gloves he used when he was studying. As usual, Bundó and Gabriel began to win easily after three or four hands. They’d been playing together for some time now and had a finely honed repertoire of gestures and face-pulling that were fail-safe and invisible to others (Gabriel’s cheating must have helped them too, obviously, but Bundó didn’t know about that then). After one especially long hand, Gabriel made the killer move and set out his cards on the table, whereupon the student threw his cards down in a gesture of surrender.
“You’ve got fucking good luck!” he shouted. “You’ve been getting the winning cards all night.”
“That’s not luck, friend,” Gabriel defended himself with a brandied whiff to his words. “It’s all about knowing how.”
“Yeah, yeah, look at the pro! Where did you learn that, at the Monte Carlo casino?”
“No, come off it! We got our degree in the House of Charity, I’ll have you know,” Bundó mocked, offended by his remark. “The nuns taught us catechism first and then cards—botifarra, brisca, and seven and a half. And yeah, always with real money. They nicked it from the church donations.”
Brooding and glum, Lluís Salvans dealt out the cards again, and it seemed that the matter was closed. They kept playing and, at the end of another game, he turned to Bundó and blurted out, “So, you were raised near here, in the House of Charity . . . Are you an orphan, then?”
“Yes, we both are,” Bundó answered, tilting his head to include Gabriel. He felt a quiver of pride. That didn’t happen often.
“And where were you born, if one might ask?”
“Of course one might ask. My ID card says El Vendrell. Why?”
“Nothing. Curiosity . . .”
Lluís Salvans was a man of few words, and his curiosity ran out then and there. The game lasted another hour, until the brazier and the Soberano called it quits and the four lodgers went off to bed. A couple of days later, when Bundó was walking along the hallway one evening, a door half opened and someone murmured his name. It was Lluís Salvans. He called him into his room and immediately closed the door. He was in the Woodcock Room.
“I’ve been making some inquiries among the right people,” he announced with secretive flourish. He was bowing slightly as if this were protocol demanded by the weight of his knowledge. The look on Bundó’s face was one of total bewilderment.
“Do you know who your dad was?”
“No,” Bundó replied. “I never knew him. Once the nuns told me he was a bad man because he abandoned my mom and me, and then my mom died of a broken heart and left me all alone.”
&nb
sp; “Well, now you’ll know the truth, Bundó.” Salvans lowered his voice. “Your dad was killed by the fascists. In Camp de la Bota. They had him locked up in Modelo prison, and some bastards, some of the dictator’s butchers, took him off and shot him. They killed a lot of other combatants in that place.” He looked at a scrap of paper on which he’d jotted down a date. “This says they killed your dad on November 29th. In 1941.”
“But that’s the day I was born!” Bundó exclaimed.
Lluís Salvans could hardly believe his ears.
“What fucking bastards! What utter fucking bastards!” His face hardened in a way Bundó had never seen. Not even when he was doing his dining-room routine trying to catch the other boarders conspiring against him had he ever shown such rage. “Always remember this, Bundó: Your dad was a hero.”
Bundó never forgot Lluís Salvans’s words, but it took him some days to digest what they really meant. Until then, his idea of a hero had been shaped by the exploits in the Captain Thunder comic books. He’d been buying them at the Palacio kiosk as his bedtime reading material ever since they’d become popular in the newsstands. A few days after that first encounter, Salvans knocked at the door of their room and, sneaking in with his own particular brand of stealth, he showed Bundó a photo.
“Take it, you can keep it,” he told him. “Keep it well hidden away. You’ll know right away which one’s your dad. You’re identical. You only have to look in the mirror. He must have been the same age as you are now.”
The photograph, in black and white, showed a bunch of youngsters on the trailer of a truck. They looked like a group of friends, united in their festive spirit. Some were smiling and boldly raising their fists high in the air. The youngest one, aged about fifteen, had wrapped himself in an anarchist flag. Bundó recognized himself in a boy who was clutching another boy, trying to keep his balance and at the same time holding up one end of a banner. They were indeed identical. He gazed for a long time at this figure, waiting for the pain to hit, some sadness, some sign, but nothing happened. When he raised his eyes from the photo, Salvans had disappeared.
Instead of hiding it, Bundó dug out a silver frame filched from one of his first moves, put the photo in it and placed it on his bedside table. The next few nights, after getting into bed, he picked it up and gazed at the group of youths. They made him feel good. He started with his father—the tension in his arms, the clothes he was wearing, the expression of triumph—and then went on to his comrades-in-arms. He studied their features, trying to imagine what they were thinking just then. Who would have been his father’s best friend, his Gabriel? Maybe that skinny lad he was embracing? The ultimate pessimist, Salvans had told him that they must all be dead.
Two weeks later, on one particularly pleasant March afternoon, Bundó completed the imaginary process of reclaiming his father. He, El Tembleque, and Gabriel were coming back in the DKV from a move to Badalona. As they were driving along the Mataró road, just after the Besós bridge, Bundó asked if they could stop for a moment at Camp de la Bota.
“I want to see the place where they did for my dad,” he announced.
El Tembleque went white and stopped the van next to some open ground. He made the sign of the cross, a reflex action. Then he told them that, if they didn’t mind, he wouldn’t go with them. Since they were nearby he’d go and visit some old acquaintances in the Pequín neighborhood. In the forties, before getting married and taking his mother to live in Sant Adrià, he’d grown up in one of those whitewashed shacks without running water or toilet—the ones that used to be there just beyond the Quatre Torres castle in Camp de la Bota. More than once when he was lying in bed early in the morning just as the sun was coming up, he’d heard the sinister volleys of firing-squad bullets borne on the wind and then, still more baleful, the dry crack of the coup de grâce. He counted them and knew how many people they’d shot dead. During the day they played ball on the beach where bullet casings, mixed with the seashells, cut their bare feet. There were kids in the neighborhood who collected them and then went off to sell them at the Els Encants flea market.
Gabriel and Bundó got out of the van near the castle. The salty sea air was disagreeably sticky. The sun, which was slowly starting to set behind the factories and the first blocks of apartments of the La Mina neighborhood, rose-tinted the sky with illusory clarity. The castle with its four towers and clearly outlined battlements loomed before them like a cardboard figure in a diorama. Leaving a huddle of shacks behind them, the two friends walked down to the water’s edge and then along the beach for a hundred meters or so. Gabriel continued on from the point indicated by El Tembleque as the start of Camp de la Bota, and Bundó stopped. With his shoe he drew a straight line about ten meters long, plowing through the wet sand and vigorously pushing aside all the pebbles he’d dug up. He didn’t know why he was doing it. The sound of the waves that hour of the afternoon, their unrelenting sinuous rhythm, made him start retching, although he didn’t vomit.
In the distance, some kids were playing around the shacks and occasionally they all screamed in unison. Their screeching sounded like some strange tribal call. Two dogs started to bark, first one and then the other, round after round until they were hoarse. When they both went quiet, there was a new silence and Bundó felt utterly alone. He closed his eyes and, there in the painful, absolute, hermetic solitude of Camp de la Bota, the whole legacy of his father came to him in a flash. It was the first time in his life—and probably the only time—that he sensed he was close to the truth.
Feeling Gabriel’s arm around his shoulders, he opened his eyes again. They didn’t speak. They returned to the castle in silence and waited for El Tembleque to come and pick them up in the DKV. But there must have been something in the air, or Bundó must have transmitted some kind of shudder, because the next morning Gabriel left the house early and, before going to La Ibérica, stopped off at the El Born market. From a distance, wordlessly, he said his last good-bye to the salt cod seller who’d put him to her breast.
6
* * *
Women and Petroli
Number 49. Barcelona-Biarritz.
February 6, 1965.
Two shoeboxes tied up with twine. One is bigger than the other. In the small box is a pair of men’s shoes with worn soles. They are size 42 and still look quite good. Gabriel will have them. The bigger one was probably for boots but now it contains a chessboard and a wooden box with alabaster pieces. A white pawn is missing and they have replaced it with a domino tile, a double blank. We don’t play but we’ll take it to the pension and give it to La Rifà. They’ve used the space in the box for a leather cigar case with three Havanas inside. Petroli will smoke them, though one of them has a damaged tip from the move. There is also a solid wood paperweight. Then there’s a figure of an elephant with its trunk raised and a slot in its back to hold a box of matches. Bundó will have those.
We’ve started a close reading of the catalogue of pilfering—or robbery, or permanent loans, or borrowings, or sidetrackings or rescues, or whatever your moral code chooses to call it. Now that we’ve come to 1963 in this itinerary through Gabriel’s life, and the Pegaso engines are warming up to drive across half of Europe, each of the hauls that our father detailed in his notebooks is like a secret passageway that leads us directly back to those times. Going back four decades in a single paragraph. At first, in the early pages, the description was simply factual. It’s possible that Gabriel and Bundó still didn’t totally trust Petroli since he was older and more experienced than they were so they recorded the division of spoils to make sure it was fair. Slowly, however, the lists became more elaborate. Although he never spoke in first person, we know that Gabriel wrote them and can see that his descriptions became increasingly detailed and persnickety. Sometimes he even permitted himself a reference to the family they’d pillaged. We’re not saying they’re literary because that’s not the case, but what you can see in those pages is deep empathy with their only two readers, Bundó and Petr
oli. It’s as if, after a certain point, the game of writing the list became an important part of the purloining itself. Although Petroli has never wanted to give credence to this interpretation, it’s a major source of fascination for us: Since he never expected that anyone else would read his notes, this would have to be the place where our father is most guileless, without subterfuges or masks. Where we can best intuit the essence of his character.
We’ve just transcribed one of the entries in his catalogue in which the process of elaboration is evident. Now we offer one of the early rudimentary checklists, for your comparison:
Number 4. Move to Düsseldorf. April 18, 1963.
One old traveling bag.
Petroli: Two ties. Pair of suspenders. One Dux jersey.
Bundó: One tie. Leather gloves.
Gabriel: One tie. One dark-green jacket.
Only a year later, Gabriel would have described the dark-green item (which we found still hanging in his wardrobe) as a tweed jacket with a shield sewn on the breast pocket, noting that it was probably used for hunting or horse riding. In his more inspired moments he might even have reported that inside one of the pockets was a dry oak leaf, probably overlooked by the owner the previous spring.