Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  “No, I didn’t want get folksy or overdo the pathos. On the contrary. What I wanted to tell you was precisely (before this parasite butted in as usual) that today’s Petroli, the pensioner in the north of Germany, is convinced that time proved him right and that his fixation with the emigrants’ centers sorted out his life, but that’s only partly true. The fact is that, after several years of running around in the truck (by February 1972 to be precise), Petroli was well known among the emigrants, to the point of being a caricature. Everywhere he went, they all knew his troubles and complaints and took pains to avoid him. The thousands of kilometers he’d swallowed up had begun to dampen his spirits and age him prematurely. Then, on a visit to the Asturian Center in Hamburg, which we might describe as routine, he met Ángeles. The mutual attraction was so immediate and electric that, first thing next morning, without a second thought, he phoned Senyor Casellas and, amid bursts of demented laughter, announced that he was leaving the job. Gabriel and Bundó were already on their way back to Barcelona. Casellas tried to dissuade him, appealing first to his responsibilities and then tempting him with the prospect of a raise. Petroli, however, wasn’t in the least embarrassed about pronouncing the word . . .”

  “What word?”

  “The word. You know what it is.”

  “No, I don’t. Go on, say it. I want to hear it.”

  “You just want to mess with me, I know.”

  “I’m telling you I won’t. Promise. What word?”

  “Love. Love. He told Casellas he’d found the love of his life.”

  “Ooooooh! Che bello! L’amore!”

  “You’re disgusting, Cristoffini, and you’ve got no soul. If the devil appeared one day wanting to buy it, you’d have nothing to sell him. You’re empty inside. You’re a bottomless pit. A glacier, an abyss that gobbles up everything . . . Shall I go on?”

  “Well, do you know what I think?” Cristoffini counterattacks, demonstrating that criticism is water off a duck’s back to him. “If I don’t have a soul it’s because you stole it when you were a kid. Every time you stuck your hand inside me without the slightest qualm, just like you’re doing now, you took a pinch of my soul and kept it for yourself. You’re a thief. You’re worse than a thief!” He pauses to let the venom take effect. “Is that what you want? Shall we get out our dirty laundry and show it to our brothers?”

  Christof’s been stopped in his tracks. With drooping shoulders and a lost look in his eye, he’s turned into a lifeless dummy. Cristoffini raises a haughty head, lie a newly crowned king, savouring his victory. When the silence starts to weigh too heavily, he taps Christof’s shoulder as if trying to snap him out of a daydream. It’s a defiant gesture.

  “Come on, stop carrying on like a baby, little brother. Don’t get cross. We’re dying to hear what you’ve got to say. You were saying that Petroli fell in love with Ángeles . . .”

  “Yes, I was saying that he met her in one of those emigrants’ places,” Christof says self-consciously, “but what I wanted to remark on is that, apart from that detail, you won’t find anything else that matches Petroli’s normal erotic ambitions: She wasn’t older than him, she didn’t carry on every five minutes about being homesick for her motherland, and neither did she want to return to Oviedo.”

  “Very good. Have you finished, Barbara Cartland? Sorry, sorry . . .” From Christof’s deflated reaction Cristoffini realizes that sarcasm is no longer seemly. “I just want to ask you one thing. What does Petroli’s sentimental life have to do with the famous day of the snowstorm, which is what concerns us right now?”

  “Everything, Cristoffini, everything. Let’s see if you get it. Life’s full of surprises and that’s what’s so great about it. Right, Christophers?” Christof wants supporters. “If there’s one thing we’ve confirmed since we began following the trail left by our father, it’s that our lives (everybody’s lives) are capriciously entwined and knotted together, sometimes playfully and, more often than not, in an impossible twist. Try to follow a strand from the end, undo all the knots to observe each thread separately, and you’ll soon find out that it’s totally useless. At the moment of birth we’re already tangled like wool. In the end, the paradox is that a life as solitary as Gabriel’s could have been braided with so many different people. So, in our father’s case, the skein of realities and dreams that is the stuff of intimate life starts to become dangerously snarled up the day of the big snowfall in Mainz.”

  “Translate that for us, please. All this philosophy’s making my head spin . . .” Christoffini makes his point by twisting his neck in a way that is horrible to watch.

  “Well that evening, with the same speed with which Bundó located the Ace of Hearts, Petroli consulted his list of emigrants’ centers in Germany. The highly industrialized bank of the Rhine and the environs of Frankfurt were teeming with them and he soon discovered that there was a Spanish workers’ center in a place called Rüsselsheim. The town was about ten kilometers away from the motorway. In other words, it was worth taking a chance. Since night was falling and Gabriel had a better sense of direction in the dark, Petroli asked him if he wanted to come along too.

  “And poor Gabriel had to choose between the bitch and life’s-a-bitch,” Christoffini added.

  “You and your wordplay. Oh, we think you’re so witty . . . My guess is that on those occasions what often happened was that our dad really wanted to be left alone. Any roadside snack bar was fine by him, however inhospitable it was. He’d have something to eat and then, while he was having his coffee and a smoke, he’d get out his cards and play solitaire until it was time to go back to the truck. If the other two still hadn’t arrived, he’d tune into some music on the radio, stretch out on the bunk, and try to get some sleep. That was fine by him because he tended to take the wheel after dinner. He said it helped his digestion. Sometimes, however, if he didn’t feel like being alone or if it was too cold to wait inside the cab of the Pegaso, he went along with one of his friends’ proposals. He tried to be evenhanded, and it wasn’t unusual for him to flip a coin. The sexual excursions with Bundó were flavored with a joviality that made him relive his adolescence. Furthermore, by keeping him company he could also keep an eye on his wallet. Carried away by euphoria, his soul mate had an immoderate capacity for gratitude and leaving lavish tips for the ladies (without thinking, of course, of the abyss that separated pesetas from francs, marks, and pounds). Then again, Petroli’s visits to partners in melancholy offered Gabriel the chance to play cards . . .”

  “Sex or gambling, I get it now. So that was the choice,” Cristoffini chips in. “What an edifying life our dear father led! Now I know who I take after.”

  “No, with those people he didn’t play for money. He didn’t cheat either. As soon as he arrived Gabriel sat down at a table, took out his Spanish deck, his baraja, and shuffled the cards. The majestic presence of the king of swords, or the perfidious presence of a knave (fuck you, Jack), was sufficient to fire up two or three emigrants and get a little game going. They played the time-honored games, mus, remigio, and botifarra. In the background, like a TV turned on in a bar, they could hear Petroli droning on as he bashed the ears of his compatriots. He was so over the top that the other card players didn’t take long to start criticizing him, and then Gabriel had to leap to his defense because, well, that’s what a little brother does. These visits weren’t always so cosy. On some occasions, especially in France, it turned out that the emigrants’ center had a more political orientation, marked by exiles and refugees from the Civil War, and then the two friends were welcomed as survivors of another time, heroes of the past still resisting in the inferno that was the workers’ struggle in the motherland. Gabriel and Petroli then stuck out their chests, repeating the few basic things they knew about feudal oppression and denouncing the exploiter Casellas to the four winds. If they needed to back up their account, they recounted their long list of grievances about interminable moving jobs, wretched conditions, and subhuman wages. Gabriel also tende
d to remember the revolutionary sermons with which Lluís Salvans had indoctrinated them in the boarding house, even citing him as a reference in case there was some old anarchist present, some CNT or FAI militant who’d known him or who might know his whereabouts. The emigrants, somewhere between mournful and combative, heard them out and agreed with them. At this point, somebody would get out a guitar and they’d all start singing a few songs together to counter the distress. They’d jump from ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma’ to ‘España Mi Emperaora’, from a Republican song to ‘Asturias, Patria Querida’. In the end, they always sang a song about émigrés, toasted their new comrades in friendship, and raised their glasses to Franco’s speedy death, for once and for fucking all.”

  Cristoffini raises his left fist and hums the first few bars of the partisan song “Bella Ciao.” It’s not clear whether it’s in jest or not but, in any case, it’s a dramatic gesture. Christof covers his mouth with his hand, but you can still hear the humming somewhere inside him. When he’s had enough of being asphyxiated, Cristoffini bites him. It looks for a moment as if the palm of Christof’s hand is stained scarlet with drops of blood.

  “Sigrun, my mother,” Christof resumes, trying to ignore him, “who was very active politically when she was young, recalls that Petroli and Gabriel got tired very quickly and would leave as soon as they could come up with a good excuse. Their long hours of driving left them too whacked to enjoy a session of libertarian anarchist theory. She knows that firsthand because it happens that the very day of the snowstorm, the day when Petroli and Gabriel opened the door of the Rüsselsheim social club, she’d gone with a friend to the Spanish workers’ center.”

  “Aha! About time! Gabriel’s little critters are warming up for the race. Christof, advancing toward existential doubts about the future, isn’t there yet but he’s about to get there. Come on, tell us. Tell us.”

  “First, I have to say that age and frustrations have colored my mother’s memory. When she got pregnant, Sigrun was a twenty-one-year-old student. I won’t bother you with her CV now except to say that she studied sociology at the University of Frankfurt, went to Habermas’s classes, and was a member of the famous Socialist German Student Union. She’d even been at the odd students’ dinner with Angela Davis and, if she hadn’t had to feed me, she might even have got mixed up with the Baader-Meinhof Group in the end. After I was born, she started to work in a university library. She was an only child and needed the money. Her parents hadn’t accepted the shameful pregnancy and her student grants weren’t enough. She kept going to classes when she could but at a different pace, trying all the while to forget about Gabriel. But every time she managed to get him out of her head, he’d turn up again to top up her hope tank (Entschuldigung!). Sigrun was living in a vicious circle. When Dad finally stopped his intermittent visits and never came back, her love life turned into a parade of men. Long live sexual freedom! Names and faces have merged into an Identikit picture of those allegedly open-minded and critical young German men of the sixties. Yet it’s a deceptive portrait: What emerges is a serious, strange young fellow, politically committed or otherwise, with a big weakness for sexual contact but who unfailingly took to his heels when he discovered that the tender, well-read girl had her own homegrown son.”

  Christof pauses to take in a deep breath. With a clout to the back of the neck he rouses Cristoffini, who’s yawning, pretending to be dozing off.

  “It’s taken some years, then,” he resumes, “for Sigrun to separate the important experiences from those that simply served as distraction. Nowadays, her men, when there are men, don’t look remotely like that portrait. Questions don’t scare her any more, even coming from her son, and I’ve finally been able to half satisfy my curiosity. Here’s the story. It happens that, in Rüsselsheim that January night of 1965, a bunch of Spaniards had got together in honor of one of their friends who’d just retired. He was from Galicia, had come to Germany more than a decade before, and, like many others at the gathering, worked in a car factory. A Republican through and through and committed to the workers’ struggle, the man had exerted himself to learn German so he could be the union representative of his shop-floor compatriots. Everyone recognized him as a pioneer among the emigrants to Germany (an excuse, like many another, to crack open a few bottles of wine). At the time, Sigrun had got her first grant to study sociology and had just applied to become a member of the students’ union. One of her classmates, a daughter of Spanish emigrants, invited her to the party. She’d definitely have a great time. If the Galician worker had a drink or two (and he liked a tipple), they’d get him to relive the brief, glorious interval of the Second Republic. The friend would translate the most important bits for her. When, appearing from nowhere, Petroli and Gabriel walked into the center, the older emigrants were singing the last bars of “El Himno de Riego.” Immediately afterward the Galician worker, choking with emotion, intoned a “Long Live the Republic!” and everybody applauded. In the silence that followed the two friends said good evening to all the people who were staring at them. Petroli instinctively rubbed his hands and added, “Quite a night, eh? And this is a great place to be!” His comment offered them safe-conduct, and the thirty-odd people in the room welcomed them with open arms. They asked the usual questions, and the two truck drivers said what was expected of them. The night wouldn’t have been especially noteworthy if it hadn’t been for the fact that, an hour and a half later, having said their good-byes, they discovered that the temperature had plummeted to ten degrees below zero and the roads were buried beneath a layer of ice. Since they weren’t going to be able to drive even five meters in the Pegaso, the emigrants rallied to organize accommodation. Two ladies who worked in a handkerchief factory vied over Petroli, one of them a widow from Altafulla and the other a spinster from near Manises (the widow won, of course, since she was the older of the two candidates). Gabriel accepted the offer of a shy, quiet girl. She was wearing a green wool scarf and matching cap and behaved with the unaccented assurance of one whose convictions have not yet been put to the test. She didn’t know a word of Spanish but was attractive, and he was flattered by her insistence. Moreover, out of the whole group, she was the one that least intimidated him since she wasn’t Spanish.

  “Yes!” Cristoffini barges in. “What a great seducer our father was! Long live bad weather! Long live ice storms! Long live dumb love!”

  “Sigrun and Gabriel spent those first hours like two strangers on a blind date. From Rüsselsheim to my mother’s neighborhood on the outskirts of Frankfurt it was five S-Bahn stops. On the way, they used the little English they knew to ask the obvious questions, the ones that, luckily, need no more than a monosyllable in response. Are you a student? Have you been in Frankfurt before? Once they got to her apartment, small and untidy as befits a sociology student, Sigrun poured two glasses of wine and, while she was fixing the sofa bed, tried to offer some conversation. Gabriel’s particular idiom must have given rise to a few funny misunderstandings. They laughed, gesticulated awkwardly and let themselves go, laughing even more. There was a pregnant pause. In Dad’s memory of that night there were two candles on the kitchen table giving off just enough light to make the wine glow with a more intimate red. Today’s Sigrun, however, denies the whole thing, saying that’s a cliché and she can’t stand clichés. Whatever the case, I’ve never been able to take it any further than that. She won’t play the game. We can only blow out the candles and leave the German student and expatriated truck driver in the dark. Let them get their act together.”

  “No, no, no, the one who’s got to get his act together is you, Christof. Come on, it’s about you! Go ahead, waggle your little tail. That’s what the chosen spermatozoon’s supposed to do. Come on! Are you going to leave it to my imagination?”

  “No way!”

  “While they’re talking about this and that,” says Cristoffini, trying to imitate Christof’s unhurried way of speaking, “the clock’s moved on to three in the morning. They’re both thinking th
at body language would be the best way to make themselves understood. Gabriel and Sigrun say goodnight, gazing into one another’s eyes . . .”

  “I said no! Stop that. We’re now going to take a leap forward to one year and ten months later.”

  “What a party pooper! That’s cheating.”

  “November 1966,” Christof bellows in order to retake the floor. “I’ve been born. I’m already walking. I’m curious. I wreck things. I’m really cute. Mom works, studies, reads, prepares my bottles, and changes my nappies, so she’s got no time for anything else. Weekends come around like a blessing for us both because then we can be together and play. It’s Friday afternoon and we’re at home, half an hour after she’s picked me up at the day-care center. She hasn’t even taken her coat off when there’s a ring at the doorbell. She opens the door and it’s Gabriel, my father. She recognizes him at once but is dumbstruck. They look at each other. “We’ve just done another move to Frankfurt,” he attempts to explain, “and we finished early. I had your address written down and thought I’d come and visit you. It’s been such a long time.” Mom asked him in at once—“Komm’ rein”—and then there’s a sort of déjà vu replay of their first night: In the narrow entrance they’re both taking off their coats at the same time and getting in each other’s way, but it’s a pleasurable obstruction. The main difference is that I enter the scene, toddling in from the kitchen to stand staring at the tall, thin man rooted to the ground before me. Then Mom says, ‘Gabriel, this is your son. He was born in October. Last year.’ Sigrun explains things in her beginner’s Spanish. All those months, in her free time, she’s been learning the language using a Berlitz manual and records.”