Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  “Hang on, hang on,” Cristoffini springs into action again. “How could Gabriel be sure you were his son?”

  “That’s exactly what he asked her shortly afterward, once he’d got over his stupefaction. You’ve got to understand, he was only dropping in for a visit. Maybe with some sexual expectation, let’s not deceive ourselves, but without any intention of perpetuating things. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said making himself understood, ‘but how do you know he’s my son?’ They’d put me to bed by then. There were a thousand ways of answering his question, from drama to sarcasm, but Sigrun chose the following: ‘Because his name is Christof.’ That put an end to any doubts. ‘Don’t worry. No obligations,’ she soothed him, seeing how his face had changed. ‘But, well, I’m really pleased,’ he stammered. According to Mom, he seemed very touched, and they at once set about celebrating his paternity. Now, we have to go back for a moment to that first night, to confirm that the mystery of the Christophers goes back a long way. The candlelight dances in the wine glasses (we accept that, Mom), and the words and gestures come out enhanced by the alcohol. The impossible conversation careens from one subject to another, and Sigrun asks Gabriel if he has children. He pats his pockets, as if his wallet’s been nicked, and hastens to say, ‘No, no children.’ Later, however, he tells her that, if it did happen some day, if he did have a son, he would want to call him Cristòfol or Cristóbal. He picks up a pencil and notepad that Sigrun has on the table and writes the Catalan and Spanish names. She follows suit and writes the name in its German version below: Christof. We were right at the crux of the matter, Christophers, we were so hot on the trail, but my mother didn’t ask the right question: Why did he like that name? Instead, she said, ‘And what if it’s a girl?’ Then he said, ‘Sigrun, like you.’ Oh, the art of seduction, how it tames us!”

  After that final exclamation, Christof and Cristoffini fall silent. Cristoffini has apparently been waylaid by some thought.

  “Which is to say that, basically, you’re a mistake,” he finally remarks. “I always thought so.”

  Christof lights up another cigarette.

  “Or a bull’s-eye. Depends on how you look at it. Before meeting the other Christophers, I might have been an error, the arithmetical error of a girl who miscounted when it came to taking the pill. But now that the four of us have met, our life has become a bull’s-eye.”

  “The five of us. I count too, don’t I?”

  “I’m not sure what to say . . .” Christof sniggers. “Let’s see, let me listen to your heart. I want to hear how it beats . . .”

  “Don’t be cruel, little brother!” Cristoffini looks scared. He starts to tremble. “What’s that look in your eye? Don’t leave me, Christof. Don’t abandon me. You won’t abandon me, will you? We’re inseparable, we are. We’ve helped each other so much in difficult times! What would you do without me? Who would protect you? What would I do without you?”

  Christof remains in silence. The expression on Cristoffini’s face is pure panic. Desperate, puppy-like, he burrows into Christof’s neck.

  9

  * * *

  An Adventure on the Channel, or Toxicosmos

  CHRISTOPHER’S TURN

  Rain. That fine, unrelenting rain that so regularly veils Great Britain in grayness, from one end to the other. And water, fresh water and salt water, everywhere. I warn you: My part of the Christophers’ story is going to be damp. To begin with, go and check out a few British pop bands from the eighties—the Smiths, the Pale Fountains, Lloyd Cole, the Cure—all those songs wavering between wintry and self-consciously melancholic. Play them and you’ll be listening to the soundtrack of my adolescence. Like the characters immortalized in that music, my solitude only got worse on Saturdays as I settled on the grotty sofas of local pubs or lined up in the rain to get into a club (with nervous fingers fiddling distractedly with a couple of pills in my coat pocket). My mum worked as a nurse at St. Andrews Hospital. When I say that, I don’t mean that she got me the speed but that once a month—when she was doing the weekend shift—she granted me two days of total freedom. I hated those weekends off the leash. They were endless. And following the dictates of some kind of unwritten teenage law, my friends wouldn’t let me pass up this opportunity to go on an all-day bender. My mum started work at the hospital at eleven on Saturday morning and didn’t come home till midnight on Sunday. My Saturdays, you might say, were launched by New Order’s “Ceremony” and crashed with Joy Division’s “Shadowplay.” Listen to them and you’ll get my drift. We often took a free ride on the train to Charing Cross. At the age of fifteen, London meant Oxford Street. We’d get lost in narrow side streets. We’d go into music shops and get them to play records for us until the shop assistants, fed up with our New Wave screams, kicked us out. We nicked books from Charing Cross bookshops just for the thrill of it, and then tried to resell them to the competition a couple of doors down. We sidled up to the hookers in Soho and pinched their bums, and, because they were junkies and sick as hell, they reacted as if we were flaying them alive, hurling insults and spitting at us. “Fuck off, you fucking cunt!” As the hours went by, my clothes began to stink with accumulated layers of smells: fish and chips, tobacco smoke, beer, resoaked sweat, puke. It was a cosmic mystery, how I ended up surfacing from a night out in my bed on Sunday. Rather than waking up, I recovered consciousness, and painfully so. Dazed and hungover, I hid at home until nightfall.

  A tic remains from those days: I sniff my fingers.

  Why am I telling you all this? Well, Christophers, those hungover Sundays all by myself at home were the times when I was most affected by Dad’s absence. That’s how it was for me. Ever since we met, we’ve all been trying to identify the bonds that unite us so that they’ll lead us to where he is. Yet, in fact, there are plenty of details that separate us. Agreed? There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m not trying to make problems, either. I see it like this: We’re four people pulled together by destiny at a specific moment. It’s like being stuck in an elevator. We’re talking in order to keep fear at bay and discover a shared past. Our lives are an accident. Our father is an accident. And don’t forget that, of the four of us, I’m the one who saw him least. I could probably count the number of times on my fingers: about ten, the last time when I was four. I was so young, I don’t even remember it.

  The La Ibérica trips to the British Isles didn’t happen very often. What diplomat wanted to live and work in Great Britain in the sixties? Fog, hippies . . . London, maybe, but Manchester, Liverpool, Southampton! Grubby industrial cities that never appeared on any high-society map. Besides, back then Buckingham Palace and all those lords were still well out of reach. The high-ranking Spanish officials who had to endure the English purgatory preferred to leave their families in Spain, to sublet a mansion in Belgravia and submit to the martial regime of a traditionally disagreeable war-widow housekeeper. I believe that Mr. Casellas wasn’t too unhappy about this arrangement. Moves to British destinations meant that the three workers had to put in more hours than made sense, the insurance cost more because of the sea crossing, and profits suffered. But then, at the beginning of 1964, the Norwegian company Thoresen merged with the English company Townsend, and they launched a fleet of ferries that criss-crossed the Channel. The word was that the crossing from Calais to Dover was much faster, cheaper, and safer—good business—and Mr. Casellas stopped turning up his piggy nose at requests for a move to Great Britain. And it wasn’t the only way he made himself useful, as you’ll soon discover.

  First, however, I want to go back to the last time I saw our dad, in November 1971. His visit lasting a whole weekend—from Saturday midday, after they’d unloaded the furniture, to early Monday morning—began with a gift. He walked into the house, picked me up to give me a kiss, and presented me with a globe of the world (Lot 192, Barcelona-London). It had a bulb inside and was supposed to light up, but it didn’t work because the Spanish plug was different from the English one. There was a crack in it that turne
d Italy into a Mediterranean island. It never occurred to him that the best gift was his presence. On the Saturday evening, to amuse me while I was having my dinner, he took the globe and traced the route that he, Bundó, and Petroli had taken in the Pegaso all the way to London Fields. I was fascinated by the journey recreated on the globe by his tobacco-stained finger. Pyrenees, Perpignan, Saint-Étienne, the River Rhone, Lyon, Dijon, the River Seine, Paris, Calais . . . Heard for the first time and in Dad’s execrable pronunciation, the French names took on fantastical dimensions. Heaven knows what I imagined. All of a sudden, the finger stopped at the French coast. Dad began to imitate the sounds of the wind and rain, and the surging waves of a storm, then slowly advanced his finger over the blue patch of water.

  “If you look carefully,” he said, acting scared, “you’ll see how we’re crossing the Channel on a ferry.”

  “What’s a ferry?”

  “A ferry’s a great big boat that can carry people, cars, and trucks. This ferry of ours is called Viking III. Always remember that name, Chris. When you’re missing me, get out the magnifying glass I gave you last time and look for us in that patch of sea. I’m sure we’ll be there. Petroli, Bundó, and me.”

  Can you imagine, Christophers, how many, many times, like a Sherlock Holmes of stolen memories, I scoured that miniature sea with my magnifying glass? And I saw them! I saw the Viking III with Dad and his friends on board! Of course I saw them, and they waved at me just like they did when they said good-bye from the Pegaso window!

  Months later, when it was clear that Dad wouldn’t be coming back—no sign of life, no letter, no phone call—Mum had to hide the globe from me because I became obsessed with it.

  She gave it back to me after eight long years, on my thirteenth birthday. At first I thought it was ridiculous. What was I supposed to do with that kid’s toy? Automatically, though, or instinctively, my eyes sought out that patch of sea in the Channel. The dark blue had faded. I was seized by years of pent-up rage. Every age cruelly mocks its predecessor and adolescence tends to be tough on childhood naivery. I grabbed the globe, went out into the street and kicked it as hard and high as I could. I went back inside without looking to see where it had fallen but couldn’t avoid hearing the thud of a shattering world.

  Inside the house, Mum hugged me for ages until I calmed down. Then she gave me the birthday gift of telling me about the chain of events that led to my birth. Why do we always like to know about these prenatal episodes when they’re just the purest expression of vanity—placental vanity?

  It all began with an adventure my future father and his friends had on the Channel, on board a ferry creaking ominously, at the mercy of six-meter waves in the middle of a storm that Turner would have loved to have painted. The denouement comes, with the dregs of an especially crazy day and the inevitable product of cause and effect, when Sarah and Gabriel got together.

  Am I, then, the result of the calm after the storm? It’s hard to believe. On those Sundays of my sixteen lonely years my bed was adrift on high seas and I was dashed again and again upon the rocks of a terrible hangover. If I opened my eyes, I was even more seasick. If I closed them, I could see Dad’s silhouette in the darkness.

  Now I want to tell you about the adventure on the Channel. Maybe I should add a footnote saying that I owe the peculiar scenes featuring the Barcelona bourgeoisie to Cristòfol, but I’ll skip it because I’m not writing an academic paper.

  Let’s go.

  The ferry departed from Calais on time. Ten in the morning. At that time of year—early October—the English Channel was a narrow corridor where the winds came to play, like city kids confined at home. The La Ibérica truck had arrived at the port in good time and was the first to park on the car deck. Now, as the Viking III was going through the motions of casting off and the city of Calais was dissolving into sea mist, the passengers were up on deck watching the whole thing. There must have been about fifty of them scattered here and there, not many if you consider that the ferry could take six hundred. It was autumn and the summer tourist madness had abated. Gabriel was grateful for that. Four months earlier, in June, they’d done the same trip—Move 88—and the two long hours to Dover had been torture because there were so many people crammed on the boat. He shuddered at the mere memory of it.

  The shipping company and its capitalist instincts were to blame. A few years earlier, in 1964, they’d revamped the ferry fleet, axing the first-class section in the absurd belief that the whole thing was going to look like first class. The “Channel crossing,” as people called it, was suddenly fashionable in provincial towns of France and Middle England. They offered several routes: between Calais and Dover, Cherbourg and Southampton, Dieppe and Newhaven. The passion for day-tripping became a spectacle in itself. Arthritic, heavy-smoking, thirsty grannies from Birmingham sipped their whiskies in the bar and then stocked up in the duty-free shop. Butchers from Leeds and their lady wives strolled around the deck with lah-di-dah airs as if they were cruising back from New York on the Queen Elizabeth II. On sighting the white cliffs of Dover, lonely beadles from Oxford or Cambridge recited a few lines from Matthew Arnold, which they’d learned from some obtuse don with whom they’d been secretly in love. The French spent the trip trying to avoid the British riffraff. Pensioners from Amiens, heads held high and a Second World War medal pinned to their chests, got lost in the boat’s corridors. The prettiest demoiselles from Rouen, looking like characters in a Resnais film, sipped crème de menthe and deplored the uncouthness of certain waiters from Brighton. Little children from Chartres, overwhelmed by the sight of English ladies sporting beehives, burst into tears.

  Back in June, oppressed by this carnival, Gabriel and Bundó had found respite at a table in the most out-of-the-way corner of the cafeteria, killing time with a game of cards. Now, in contrast, the calm on deck augured a smooth, swift crossing. Seeking confirmation, Gabriel glanced at the people around him. A hiker, reclining on his knapsack, was reading in a well-sheltered corner. A couple took photos of one another with the sea as their backdrop. Five English soldiers stood in a ring, smoking and chatting. A solitary man was declaiming something out loud, but his words were lost midair. Bundó was stretching his legs at the other end of the deck. A first blast of wind, unexpected and chilly, tousled everybody’s hair. Gabriel looked at the girl at his side. She was leaning on the rail and lost in thought. For all her apparent calm, he could see one of her eyelids twitching.

  “Are you nervous?” he asked. Then he realized that this wasn’t the time to be asking that. There were still a few hours to go.

  “No. Yes. No, it isn’t nerves. It’s a gnawing sensation in my stomach, but not nerves. I must be hungry.”

  “I’m not surprised. You haven’t eaten anything since we left Barcelona. We’ll go down to the bar, if you want, and get you something. The sandwiches here are . . . different.” He’d been about to say “disgusting.” “They’re Norwegian, like the ferry company. And Norwegians like butter, smoked salmon, cucumber, raw onion, that kind of thing.”

  Unable to shake off her nausea, the girl said nothing. Her only response was to try to light a cigarette. After she’d struck three matches, Gabriel came to her aid, cupping his hands against the wind and then, making the most of it, lighting up himself. They smoked in silence. The tips of their cigarettes glowed in the sea air. Gulls circled the boat in erratic swoops.

  “Don’t think about it,” Gabriel said after a while.

  Again the girl said nothing. She merely forced a half smile. The whole trip, he and Bundó had had to drag the words out of her. Gabriel felt uncomfortable in the role of escort, or father almost. He hated this vassalage that Senyor Casellas was imposing on him, for the third time now. The girl was called Anna Miralpeix and she, too, had to leave something in London: The La Ibérica truckers were taking her to have a secret abortion. She was seventeen years old and six weeks gone. Small, slender, olive-skinned and of angular features, she affected a tomboy look. Her blond hair was cut
in a gamine style and she was dressed as if summer wasn’t over (white trousers, blue-and-white horizontal-striped T-shirt, yellow Windbreaker). At first glance, she seemed as fragile as fine porcelain and free of any emotional excess. However, this pose was fashionable among the Costa Brava smart set in the summer of ’66 when the offspring of well-to-do families got together at private garden parties or beach bars and night clubs and amused themselves by exhibiting a feigned disregard for life, a contrived emptiness that, moreover, distracted them from the real emptiness that haunted their futures. Sometimes when they were still green, as in the case of Anna Miralpeix, the game sucked them in completely, seducing them with its novel sensations. The rite of passage always included the verses of some trusted poet (a friend of the family and at once an ally), the odd French song, grilled sardines, laughter, intellectual conversations (it was always the same ones, but she didn’t give a damn), a longing to drive around in a convertible, reckless love affairs, and the glazed, party’s-over languor and vague Marxist pronouncements that marked the climax of every booze-up. Alcohol, of course, protected them from the outside world, like amniotic fluid replenished each evening.

  With the end of summer, the fun and games adjourned to Barcelona. A few unlucky ones had to pay the price in September. Thus it was that, just a week before, sin had visited the Miralpeix house in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood. Anna’s first classes of her university-entrance course had been punctuated by several attacks of nerves, giddiness, and vomiting. A Galician maid who could read the future in the sheets of an unmade bed apprised the lady of the house. That very same day, the mother took her daughter to the family doctor to see if she was expecting. “She’s expecting, yes she’s expecting, your little girl’s expecting,” the doctor confirmed. On their way home in a taxi the mother asked Anna to tell her the name of the baby’s father, the wholly guilty party. Would they have to suffer? Juan Marsé’s novel Últimas tardes con Teresa had recently been published, and its account of the love affair between a social-climbing, working-class Spanish immigrant boy and a blond, upper-class Catalan girl had unleashed a wave of hysteria in the swanky part of town up on the hill. No, Anna conveyed with a shake of head. She wasn’t going to give the name. At the very thought of him her mouth filled with the bitter-orange taste of Licor 43. The mother was satisfied with her revulsion. Then the appropriate cogs began to turn in order to sort out the awkward situation. The doctor had written a letter in English (for the third time that autumn). Senyora Miralpeix had calmed her husband. “Our little girl is our little girl.” Senyor Miralpeix knew somebody in the Equestrian Circle who, faced with the same plight, had entrusted the matter to a certain Casellas. Phone call. No, no phone call, personal visit. Dark glasses. References. Casellas bowing and scraping. Luck would have it that there was a move to England scheduled for the following week. Was the timing right, or should it be brought forward? Rebeca, the La Ibérica secretary, immediately made a few phone calls to a contact in a London hospital.