Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  The so-called bistro or roadside brothel was called Papillon, a name that in the sixties, through some absurd entomological association of pinning down and captivity, conveyed eroticism. The arrival of the new cocotte was seen as a major event in the area. The only missing touch was coverage in the local newspapers. Made up comme une poupée de cire—as the madame required—and wearing a flimsy dress that the red lighting conspired to make still more transparent, she could at once look like a thirteen-year-old kid and a housewife out for a bit of extramatrimonial fun. In either case, she had a surfeit of admirers.

  “Muriel, ma belle, sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble . . .” Chris had to have his say, profanation of lyrics included.

  Bundó didn’t discover Muriel’s real name until their third meeting. The first time he entered the club was in the course of Move 73: Barcelona-Strasbourg. The three friends had unloaded that same day and were dog-tired. It was getting dark as they approached Lyon and, in the interest of health and safety, they decided to stop and sleep somewhere on the outskirts of the city, on the way to Valence. They were looking for a roadside hostel that appeared in The Expert Trucker’s Guide to Europe. Gabriel, who was driving at that point, tended to put his faith in cities with a more or less famous soccer team. As they approached the first houses, and though he was half asleep in his seat, Bundó spotted in the distance the glittering eye of a neon butterfly and asked Gabriel to stop in front of the establishment. In the darkness of the cab he smiled smugly, well satisfied with his fine-honed instinct. He couldn’t resist. “It’ll cost me about the same as a room with breakfast and, as you know, I never eat breakfast. I prefer to get my fill at dinnertime . . . if you get my meaning,” he said by way of justifying himself. It wasn’t true, of course. His partiality for these places cost him quite a lot more, and, besides, he couldn’t put it down as travel expenses, but the other two always went along with it. He was a big boy now. They agreed to pick him up, at the front entrance, at five the next morning.

  Bundó went inside. It was winter and the place was practically deserted. Seated at the bar were half a dozen bored girls and a couple of loners who preferred boozing. Outside, the red neon-lit façade sparkled with such intensity that its light seeped through the cracks in the door and boarded-up windows, outlining everything with a sanguinary aura. Later, on subsequent visits, an exhausted Bundó would be mesmerized by this effect while Muriel was upstairs with another client and taking too long to come down. That first night, however, he set about securing Muriel’s company because no other alternative was possible. You know these things immediately. There’s no need to think about it.

  Once upstairs in the room, what sort of conversation would these two have had? We Christophers like playing with this.

  BUNDÓ (taking his shoes and socks off): Comme tu t’appelles? Tu es très jolie.

  MURIEL (pretending to smooth down her dress): Muriel, mon cheri. Et tu?

  BUNDÓ (unbuttoning his shirt and yawning): Je m’appelle Bundó.

  MURIEL (looking in the mirror, pretending to brush her hair): Bondeau, mon chéri? De dond es-tu?

  BUNDÓ (taking off his pants, seated on the edge of the bed): Espagnol.

  MURIEL (watching his reflection in the mirror and pretending she’s got a problem taking off one of her earrings): Wow! I’m Spanish too. From Jaén. I’m Andalusian.

  BUNDÓ (climbing into bed): Well, actually, I’m Catalan. I’m a truck driver. Hey . . . what kind of name . . . is this . . . ? Who . . . called you . . . that?

  MURIEL (sitting with her back to the bed, mumbling and pretending to blush): It’s just a name. And you, what part of Catalonia are you from?

  BUNDÓ (in bed): Zzzzzz . . .

  MURIEL (pretending that she loves him a little): Bon soir, mon chéri.

  Instinct woke Bundó at quarter to five the next morning. He started moving although it took him a few seconds to work out where he was. This often happened to him. The warmth coming off Muriel sleeping at his side helped him to get his bearings. He gazed at the girl while he got dressed: her body curled up under the sheets, her straight blond hair—à la France Gall—such beautiful features, slightly swollen with sleep . . . Bundó remained there for a minute, holding his breath, and in this suspended time he realized that the girl had got to him in a way that had never happened before. Perhaps it was tenderness. The blast of the Pegaso’s horn outside snapped him out of his reverie and brought him to his senses. He washed his face in a basin in one corner of the room—in freezing water—put on his anorak and, with a look, he said good-bye. When his hand was on the door handle, however, he stopped, went back and slowly, very carefully so as not to wake her, lifted the bedclothes and contemplated Muriel. She was naked under the sheets and the magnificent body curled up like a seed in a husk emanated an intense, female, nocturnal smell. He sniffed greedily, trying to absorb it, and covered her up again.

  Even before reaching the bottom of the stairs, he knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to get the girl out of his head.

  The second meeting in the brothel took place nine weeks later—Move 77, Barcelona-Paris—and Muriel took a while to recognize Bundó. It was a shorter visit, a quick upstairs-and-downstairs, while Gabriel and Petroli washed the truck, topped up the diesel, and had breakfast at a nearby service station. Bundó spoke to her in Spanish, but Muriel was having a bad day and would only answer him in her shaky French. He thought this must be part of some game—all this mon chéri and mon chouchou whispered in his ear, so badly pronounced and so exciting—and he followed suit. They got to work, and au revoir. But the girl’s reserved character occupied Bundó’s thoughts the whole trip.

  The third encounter took place only two weeks later, a radiant Saturday in a gray February and, for both of them, it was the confirmation that something was going on. Bundó wasn’t working that weekend. Some strange feeling tugged him to the Estació de França very early on the Saturday morning. He took a train to Perpignan and then, after changing platforms, went on to Lyon. He then took a taxi and told the driver to take the Saint-Étienne road. The train and taxi fares cost him a week’s wages, but, far from letting that worry him, his pulse was throbbing with heroic urgency by the time he reached the whorehouse door. Such high spirits. He was the king. The adventure was worth it for this incredibly powerful sensation alone. He got out of the taxi at what must have been around seven in the evening. What with the traveling, pauses, and delays, almost twelve hours had gone by since he’d left Barcelona that morning. He’d told himself the whole thing was a jaunt and, with the same flippancy, dismissed one tricky thought: He hadn’t worked out how or when he’d be getting back.

  As his eyes adapted to the false darkness of the brothel—there were lots of clients, a scrum of men and women—he looked for Muriel and couldn’t see her. He spotted the madame at one end of the bar and asked for her.

  Muriel? It was her the day off.

  What? He didn’t understand . . .

  Muriel wasn’t working that day. Women’s things, you know.

  The world caved in. The madame smiled pityingly—she’d seen this kind of doomed addiction before—and pointed at the other girls who might be able to save him. Bundó looked mechanically at the faces of the people around him, trying to react, and only managed to see himself as an imbecile. He’d dressed as if he was going to work, with his anorak on top so it would all look more natural, and now these clothes made him feel even more ridiculous. Without finishing his whisky, he turned tail and went outside. The reddish light fell over him like a rain of shame. Right then, he would have given another week’s wages to be back home again unscathed and to wipe out the memory of this farce, including the memory of Muriel. Then he heard the click of high heels, turned around and saw her coming down the outside stairway that led to her room.

  We’ll only give a brief account of the scene. Muriel had circles under her eyes, wore no makeup, and was so listless she was almost unrecognizable. Bundó worshipped her even more. She saw the
attractive, chubby-cheeked, naughty-boy face framed by curly hair. The Barcelona truck driver. Muriel stopped halfway down the stairs. He started to move as if in response and then stopped too. Later, Bundó would describe how he was about to kneel down dramatically and declare his love but desisted because he didn’t have the bunch of flowers. It was lucky he didn’t. Muriel had experienced several such episodes and had sent the fellows packing without a second thought. For a prostitute, there’s nothing more detestable than a client who thinks he can lure her—and redeem her—with the promise of a spick-and-span life in the provinces.

  “It’s my day off today,” she finally said in a wan voice when she got to the bottom of the stairs. “But will you invite me to dinner? I want to ask you something.”

  It’s difficult to imagine that there could have been, in the whole wide world, on that Saturday evening, two people more in need of affection.

  Bundó invited Muriel to dinner. Of course he invited her. Since they had neither car nor truck they decided to go to the service station cafeteria, five minutes away, where they did quite a good croque-monsieur. As they walked along the roadside, Muriel took Bundó’s arm. In heels, she was taller than him. They were silent, the breath steaming from their mouths. Every time a car passed, they stopped for safety’s sake and she clung to him a little more. Then, for a few seconds, the headlights lit up a pair of furtive lovers. This particular image summed up the future as Bundó wanted to see it. It monopolized his thoughts and, although the night was very cold, sweat was running off him. Muriel felt the warmth coming off his body, like a stove, and clutched him all the tighter.

  In the cafeteria, they played cat and mouse as they ate. Now more focused, Bundó tried to penetrate the girl’s inner life and started asking questions. Muriel answered evasively and deftly changed the subject. It was a trick of the trade. They could have been at it half a lifetime. Then she asked him to do her a favor, and the first chink opened up.

  If Bundó was going to help her, Muriel had to tell him that her real name was Carolina and that less than a year ago she was living with her parents in the Can Tunis district on the periphery of Barcelona. She then specified what the favor was: She would give him a sum of money, and he was to take it to her parents. Naturally, when they asked for news of her, he had to lie about her work and where she lived. They’d sort out the details together. As he listened and nodded, Bundó mentally repeated her name. Carolina. He liked it more than Muriel, a lot more. Carolina. Maybe it was more normal, more familiar—Carolina—but to him it sounded like the password to a precious secret.

  Now that she’d begun to unburden herself, Carolina breathed more easily. She went into the restroom to tidy up and looked in the mirror. Her face had changed. Bundó then paid for their dinner and they returned to the brothel. They went up to her room and, between the two of them, cooked up a story that was sufficiently plausible for Carolina’s parents. Her practical imagination combined very well with Bundó’s crazier concoctions. It got late, very late. Bundó started yawning and Carolina hastened to say he could sleep there if he wanted to.

  “As a friend.”

  The next morning, before returning to Barcelona, Bundó gave her the first gift: a silver chain bracelet (Lot 66, Barcelona-Cologne).

  He showed up late at La Ibérica on Monday. He had a terrible cold.

  After work one evening that week, Bundó went to visit Carolina’s parents. He introduced himself as an acquaintance of their daughter and handed over the envelope containing the money. Carolina’s mother cried when she read the letter inside. The father whistled in astonishment when Bundó calculated the exchange value in pesetas of those francs. They ushered him into the living room, invited him to have a glass of wine with them, and then they both began to badger him with their questions. One of the things that most impressed them was that their daughter, who was now working as a secretary for a fruit exporting company, had learned to speak French in such a short time.

  The same scene was repeated on future occasions, depending on when the La Ibérica destinations took Bundó anywhere near the brothel. The wariness with which her parents had received him on the first visit turned into total trust and, little by little, Bundó became Carolina’s official biographer. In accordance with her wishes, he tried to give them only the barest details, in dribs and drabs. The fewer the details the better. After a certain point, however, since the parents kept demanding news and Carolina continued to be the hostage of Muriel, the messenger was obliged to invent a double life for her. Enthusiasms, friends, projects, setbacks. With each visit, Bundó constructed another episode of the story of Carolina in France. As long as he didn’t make things awkward for her, anything could be used to give substance to the false life. Eventually not even Carolina was au fait and, when she phoned her parents on special days like birthdays or Christmas Eve, she was taken aback by some of their comments. Then she had to improvise and invent. Immediately afterward, very indignant (and slightly frisky too), she phoned Bundó at the boarding house and gave him an earful. What on earth did he think he was doing? How dare he tell them that her best friend was called Muriel? Or that she might be transferred to Paris? Ah, so she had a French boyfriend, did she? And what did this boyfriend look like? Like him, Bundó?

  We know that Bundó enjoyed Carolina’s outbursts but suffered in equal measure. It was 1967, more than a year since they’d been seeing each other intermittently, and their relationship had entered a new phase. Bundó stopped frequenting other prostitutes. This abstinence now meant that the La Ibérica trucks stopped more frequently on the road from Lyon to Saint-Étienne. While he went upstairs with Muriel, Gabriel and Petroli waited in the service station cafeteria. They ate croque-monsieur, as Bundó had recommended, and worked on the excuses they’d have to offer to Senyor Casellas to explain the delay. Carolina, meanwhile, had begun to incorporate Bundó’s fabrications into Muriel’s life. When a client got too heavy, she’d blow him away by telling him she was finishing a university degree in Lyon, that she had a brawny, evil-tempered French boyfriend and that they were going to live in Paris very soon.

  There were days when the to-ing and fro-ing between reality and fiction caught even Bundó off guard. Sometimes, when he was lucky enough to spend the whole night with her, he’d get into bed with Muriel (paying, because the brothel norms and the madame’s monitoring required it) and would wake up in the morning lying next to Carolina. However familiar he was with her double identity, he wasn’t spared a certain degree of anguish because of it, and, when he was back in the truck again, his two friends had to try to lift his spirits. Petroli, the most methodical of the three of them, advised him to take Carolina back to Barcelona, and the sooner the better. Nevertheless, since the beginning, since the first Saturday he’d stayed to sleep with her—as a friend—Carolina had warned Bundó that he should never make plans for the two of them, or try to convince her to do anything. She, and she alone, would decide about her future.

  Bundó then plotted his own, more gradual strategy. The idea was to be patient and to swaddle Carolina in a mesh of gallantry that would make her see the light. He visited her with sexual devotion, brought her news of her parents (sweetened up, when necessary, to disguise the grayness), and presented her with objects he acquired through the moves. With each step he took, she ceded him a cubic millimeter of her future. They were vague references, comments made as if in passing and, for any one of us, would have been imperceptible in terms of any advance, but Bundó knew how to interpret them as a stimulus to keep going.

  Early in 1969, after three years of dithering that threatened to go on forever, Bundó made a down payment on an apartment in a building that was going up in Via Favència in Barcelona. He put it in both their names. Here we have a sea change. When he eventually took possession of the keys, he left Senyora Rifà’s boarding house and went to live there alone. Carolina approved of the change (and maybe even started to make plans), but it was very difficult for her to decide to return to Barcelona
.

  Before Christophe met her in the brasserie in Paris, we Christophers had asked ourselves more than once: Did she really love Bundó? We had no right to do so, but we questioned her motives. We must confess that this uncertainty continued for some time after the lunch. Senyora Carolina, in her late fifties, friendly but distant, could only go back to that period of her life sheltered behind a shield of cynicism. This artifice didn’t convince us, and, unjustly, we left Paris oppressed by feelings of frustration. Three weeks later, Christophe opened up his mailbox and found the following note. Read it and declare us guilty.