Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  As for Petroli, after that first trip to Düsseldorf, he stopped wearing a belt and became a wholehearted member of the suspender-wearing sect. We discovered this a few months ago when we spent a weekend visiting him so he could summon up those times for the four of us. Even at the risk of imitating one of those television programs that dredge up sweaty old anecdotes and bring together old school friends who actually hate each other, we believed that Petroli’s memories would help us in our attempts to fix the point when our father took flight. For almost ten years after Senyor Casellas pulled the right strings and La Ibérica got a toehold in the privileged business of international transport, Petroli, Bundó, and Gabriel cohabited—if we can put it like that—in a Pegaso truck. Our father’s notebooks record almost two hundred departures heading all over Europe, mainly to France, Germany, and England (Italy and Portugal were excluded as another company had negotiated an exclusive deal with the government). We’re talking about an average of two or three journeys a month if you calculate that each one lasted three or four days, what with getting there, unloading and returning. And after a certain point, the three friends almost always worked together as a team with moves inside Spain as well.

  Nowadays, Petroli’s a very well-preserved eighty-year-old. He lives in a German city by the North Sea where winter evenings smell of log fires and smoked fish. He asked us not to give any more details. Please. That’s his only condition. Looking back, retracing the route of his desires, he can now say that he’s achieved what he most yearned for during his years as a truck driver: He has a house with a back garden in a quiet neighborhood next to a bay, and has been living there for years with an Oviedo-born woman, Ángeles, who emigrated to Germany at the end of the fifties. Since Petroli is a good-looking chap, slightly bandy-legged, with a vaguely athletic set of muscles—and tormented by back pain, like all truck drivers—Christof reckons he looks like a retired soccer player, a famous center forward of the Bundesliga who occasionally agrees to interviews. Like ours.

  Chris, however, goes for the patriotic vein and starts fantasizing, “Imagine what would happen if Madame Tussaud’s in London exhibited figures of our father and his friends. I reckon that everyone would want to be photographed standing next to Petroli. With that good-natured, slightly crafty self-assurance of his, you’d only have to dress him up in some dark-green overalls and people would take him for a Lord Mountbatten in aviator’s gear. He’d still have that intriguing air about him, a sort of relaxed control, the stamp of years of hard battles.” He pauses, mulls over something and then goes on. “And, if you’ll indulge me a little more, Bundó would be a replica of Dylan Thomas, moon faced, with tousled hair and a stained pullover . . .”

  “And what about Dad?” we other Christophers ask as one.

  “Dad? Gabriel? That’s easy. Dad would be Houdini, the museum’s escape artist. Immobilized for the first time in his life. With a nest of thick chains coiled around him, his face tense, almost asphyxiating, he’s still trying to strike a powerful pose, the showmanship of someone who knows that, with one wave of the magic wand and before thirty seconds have elapsed, all those padlocks will click open like toy ones. And then he can make his getaway.”

  It must be said that this image of Gabriel as an escape artist was suggested to us by none other than Petroli. Ramón Riera Marcial, Petroli to his friends, agreed to meet us after lunch one Saturday in July, at one in the afternoon (the Germans, and even nonnatives, have lunch very early). His workmates at La Ibérica nicknamed him Petroli years ago because of the intense blackness of his dyed hair, which was so shiny and gummy that it took on a bluish sheen in the sunlight. The first thing we discovered when we went to his house was that he’d got over his hang-up about his hair, thanks perhaps to his peaceful life as a pensioner, or maybe Ángeles’s insistence. Now, his mop of neatly combed white locks gave him a venerable, good-natured look. He might have been our paternal grandfather.

  Petroli and Ángeles ushered us into a living room crammed with objects and ornaments and looking out to the garden. In the next few hours, as the interview lengthened, we couldn’t resist trying to identify items on our father’s theft list among the vases, pictures, reproductions of old maps, coasters, lights, and the other more or less valuable pieces that surrounded us. They were certainly conspicuous in their out-of-place opulence in that little living room. While Ángeles was in the kitchen cutting Apfelstrudel and making us coffee, Petroli asked us to sit on the sofa and in two armchairs he’d lined up in the living room. Standing in front of us, he subjected us to careful scrutiny, one by one. In an interval of half a minute three different cuckoo clocks struck quarter past one. Petroli had got dressed up for our visit in an old-fashioned suit, shiny with frequent ironing and slightly baggy. His expression was mischievous and he seemed to be wondering whether or not he should crack a joke. He then guessed our names, one version of Christopher for each face, and he got us all right. He hadn’t seen us for more than thirty years so it must have been his way of accepting that there was some kinship between us and his past. Then, sitting in a leather armchair, our father’s friend made the grueling effort of remembering and remembering and remembering. We imagine that, for him, the afternoon must have been both pleasurable and painful. Every question we asked led to some description by him, which at once opened up new questions for us. His words wove together even more tightly the combined existences of Bundó, Gabriel, and Petroli himself. Very discreetly, so as not to lose the thread, the four of us glanced at each other when he disclosed some crucial detail. Ángeles noticed this and joined in the conversation as our ally, asking him some of the more awkward questions. Meanwhile, she kept serving us coffee, and we drank it without a second thought, as if accepting that insomnia in a hotel bedroom that night was the price we’d have to pay.

  We left off at nightfall. The next day, Sunday, we returned with the promise that we wouldn’t take up too much of their time, but, once again, it was dark by the time we finished. There was a point beyond which Petroli began to ramble and repeat himself, but there was no way we were going to interrupt him. It must have been years since he’d had a chance to talk about his adventures. On the Monday we had to be back in our everyday worlds, and at seven that Sunday evening we said our good-byes to the couple with sincere hugs and promises to come and visit them again some day. Christophe watched them disappearing in the rearview mirror of the rented car, waving at us from their front door, veiled in ghostly shadows. Only two kilometers down the road, as we were discussing the finer points of Petroli and Ángeles’s recollections, Cristòfol interrupted the conversation. He wanted to make a confession. On his way to the loo he’d been snooping, had opened a couple of cupboards in the hallway, and couldn’t resist nicking a French silk tie. His share of the perks from Move 165. Petroli would never wear it again, he claimed by way of justifying the theft. Then there materialized, amid scandalized giggles, a Cinzano ashtray (Chris), a paperback edition of Quevedo’s El Buscón (Christof), and a keyless key ring with the Mercedes-Benz star (Christophe). Okay, it’s not good manners, but it’s in our blood.

  Besides our acquisition of pieces for the Christophers’ private museum, we’d spent the two days cramming Petroli’s stories and emotions into our cassette recorder—which he did consent to—and now they’ve been tidied up and slightly tweaked in the interests of narrative structure, we offer them in Petroli’s own words.

  PETROLI SPEAKS

  Where shall I start, boys? Let’s see. Sometimes, when I’m trying to get through those especially trübsinnigen days, those gray ones that fog up your mind (and, I can assure you, we have a string of them every year here in the north of Germany), I cling to the memory of a certain sensation. Now it’s just a vaguely remembered feeling, if you like, but in those times it was alive in all three of us. Something bestial. I’m almost embarrassed to talk about it. The first thing Gabriel, Bundó, and I did whenever we started a new move was, of course, to introduce ourselves at the residence in question. One of u
s stayed in the street, keeping an eye on the parked truck and getting the ropes and pulleys ready, while the other two went to the house to present ourselves and organize the move. The sense of excitement kicked in as soon as we rang the doorbell. Oh, those seconds of waiting till someone opened the door! We could hear the footsteps coming closer, the click of tentative heels, then the eye looked through the peephole, the key turned in the lock, and, in that heavenly sequence, we forgot we were long-suffering La Ibérica workers. It was like they were opening the gates of paradise. The woman who opened the door, always a woman—a maid or the lady of the house—looked us up and down with a mixture of relief and agitation. We’d done dozens of moves and we had them figured out immediately: the one that would suffer, the one that would ignore us, the one in a hurry, the one that wouldn’t say a word, the one that would need to talk to calm down, the one that would be buzzing around us like a blowfly, the one that would give us a tip so she’d feel good. Instinct guided us and we adapted to their moods so we could do the move without hassles, but all of us kept nursing that excited feeling we had at the beginning.

  I can tell you now that at that stage of my life, I used to go out of my way to meet older women, especially married, mature ones. Now over forty, I’d got through the physical and mental quarantine and had, let’s say, a twenty-year head start on Bundó and Gabriel. I blame it on the war. It made me grow up fast. I went from a schoolroom with a Republican schoolteacher and playing leapfrog in a dusty street of a little village in the Matarraña region to dressing up in soldier’s gear with my mom crying over me as if she were already watching over my corpse. I still remember how her weeping and wailing terrified me, how it made me feel even more like a baby. Before I knew how to shave I could mount a rifle, so to speak, and those ten months I spent buried in the trenches by the River Segre nipped my adolescence in the bud. When it was all over, after the humiliation of defeat and the daily nightmare of military service in Teruel, I went home a man, but I was a grotesque man. I tried on my clothes from before and everything was pathetically small. My mom started crying again, for two whole days, as if she’d seen my resurrection. When I look at the photos of those days I don’t recognize myself. I’d turned into a sort of big brother to the Petroli who’d marched off to the front, one of those brothers that are so overprotective they destroy you in the end. Inside, too, my real self was all messed up. It was like a constant jabbing that starts in the stomach and goes up to the brain. Once it was there, it nagged at me to walk out on everything. I tried to resist. A few weeks after my discharge and return home, I tried my luck courting a girl from the village. She was a bit younger than me and was dazzled by my half-invented adventures at the front. In the beginning things worked okay but taking it all so slowly, step by step, got on my nerves. I’d done a fast-track course in sex during my military service, thanks to a string of prostitutes from Teruel—wrecked women, poor things, but tender and affectionate—and I was bored to death with that girl. One Saturday night we went off for a bit of slap and tickle and I ran out of patience. You know what I mean, don’t you? Her dad’s still looking for me. Meanwhile, my older sister had married a fellow called Tartana, from the next village, and they went off to live in Barcelona. He was working at La Ibérica and managed to get them to take me on too. As soon as I got the news, I took the first bus to the city.

  So, now you’ve got me living in Barcelona in the forties, fifties, and sixties, a long way from that piddling little life of the village, I want to go back to what I was saying before: In those days I used to go out of my way to meet older women. Every time one of those doors opened and a proper woman appeared before us, ripe and in her prime, I was as excited as a little kid. I often forgot all about my lust after half a minute of asking questions and getting only monosyllables but, very occasionally, I had a hunch that there was a chink of hope. Then I’d get to work, using all the tricks in the book. In general, housekeepers, governesses, and maids (the ones that weren’t young any more) were difficult: They were so full of themselves they hardly spoke to me. They were too set on keeping the castle safe from strangers that stank of sweat and whistled while they were working. On the other hand, the ladies of the house . . . they were almost always rich, bourgeois, right-wing, and they’d had plenty of training in telling the difference between appearance and reality. The husbands, starchy Franco supporters, politicians, and bankers, were at one extreme, and we were at the other. The situation helped too. With all the objects in boxes, with the furniture dismantled and piled up ready to go, there were ladies who suddenly felt that they were at the mercy of the elements, lost and kind of incomplete. Those hours they spent in no-man’s-land were like a little gift of freedom, and they had to make the most of it, even more so when they realized that being romanced wasn’t something that happened too often at their age. Now, don’t go imagining a whole heap of adventures and entanglements, but I—Ángeles, Schatz, cover your ears, please—laid more than one high-society lady on a wool mattress or rug that was too old to survive a move. It tended to happen toward the end of the day, when Bundó and Gabriel were in the truck tying down the load. The ladies always went for the empty conjugal bedroom—out of inertia—with the silhouettes of furniture and the crucifix outlined on the walls. Our panting sounded more mournful than anything else, as if it was fated to turn into ghostly voices that would haunt the future inhabitants of the house. Sometimes the attempt ended after a bit of kissing. Other times you could see that the ladies were a little reluctant to cross the line, and that they only wanted that sinful quickie so they could have a very secret secret, all for themselves, which they’d turn to later to relive their daring as a kind of vaccination against the deadly dull life they were going to lead in some other country. Needless to say, our sweaty, sticky working clothes had a basic part to play in all this and, once the adventure with those pedigreed ladies was over, I got all puffed up with an unexpected side effect: what you might call working-class pride.

  I don’t know what Gabriel and Bundó thought about my getting off with the high-class ladies. In terms of complaining, well no, they never complained about it—maybe because, right from the start, Senyor Casellas had made me their boss—but I don’t think they saw me as a model of behavior either. In amorous matters, it was each to his own. Those two also loved the sweet moments just before the door of a new home opened, though their motivations seemed kinkier to me. Once inside the house, Bundó only had eyes for the objects that were going into the truck. He took charge of supervising the packets, appliances, and furniture, checking to make sure the boxes were properly closed and working out the order in which we’d take it all down to be sure that the weight was properly distributed in the trailer. He used to get well and truly carried away when he was organizing things (while I was doing my bit, wrapping up the lady of the house with my preliminary questions). With the excuse of only having limited space, he opened up boxes and suitcases to peek inside and redistribute things. Covetousness and love were the ruin of him. Basically, he was a harum-scarum (not that we have any right, all these years later, to criticize him for that, understood, boys?). Gabriel and I were always breathing down his neck to make sure he didn’t break our rules of thievery: The three of us had agreed to choose the box, package, or suitcase by chance, right at the end, without knowing what it contained. That was part of the game, and it was against the rules to mark it beforehand because it contained some valuable or especially desirable object. We also had to be discreet.

  Bundó’s obsession only got worse as the years went by and caused us more than one headache. The reasons behind it have a woman’s name—Carolina, or Muriel if you like—and we really shouldn’t try to sum up this part of the story in a few words because it was very important for all of us later on. I mean, we could go into a lot of detail but it’ll have to be some other time, if you don’t mind. As for Gabriel, I hope I’m not disappointing you, but I could never understand what kind of kick he got out of it, what it was that turned him on wh
en we rang the doorbell of a house. Well yes, I’ve got a vague idea based on a few intuitions. Gabriel never seemed to get worked up over carnal needs like Bundó and me. I see him more like a vampire. He’d get into people’s houses and suck up the atmosphere, that presence of life you could still detect in an apartment just before starting the move. Smells, shadows, laughter, chills, silences . . . Maybe that’s why he liked to start the move by getting to know someone who’d lived in the house so he could construct his theories more exactly. With every object and every bit of furniture he lugged, he also seemed to be studying the traces they left behind in those empty rooms. He raised blinds and opened windows, claiming that there wasn’t enough light, and looked out over the street to contemplate the view while he smoked a cigarette. As if it was part of the job, he used to start chatting with the person who was keeping an eye on us. “The siestas on this couch must have been wonderful, isn’t that right, Senyora?” “I’m sure the whole family must have got together for more than one Sunday lunch on such a lovely veranda.” That’s my version, but I’d say that his fantasies about other people’s lives—which he later projected with the same enthusiasm onto the place where we had to unload as if it was a blank canvas waiting to be painted—helped him to breathe better. He absorbed it and stored it like oxygen for when he returned to the boarding house and its fragile comforts. Proof of this compulsion is that, when he got to know your mother—your mothers—and you lot were born and he could finally taste family life in small doses, he lost interest in empty houses. All the moves we did after that were simply an excuse to travel closer to where you lived so he could visit you.