by Jordi Puntí
“Lucy in the sky with diamonds . . .” Chris sings. His interruption makes sense. It’s his crafty way of reminding us that we have yet to deliver the final detail of that evening. Gabriel and Mireille were at the door of the bar saying good-bye to Justine’s friend when a girl came up from behind them and tapped Gabriel’s shoulder.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” she asked. “Don’t you recognize me?”
Gabriel had to dredge up the identity of the thin, angular face and cropped blond hair from the depths of his memory. He went back six years, to the ferry taking them to England and then recaptured the fleeting form of a naked girl riding a horse. Yes, it was Anna Miralpeix. It turned out that Anna was a cousin of Justine’s friend. All in the family.
“What did you have in the end, a boy or girl?” Gabriel asked.
“A little girl. She’s called Llúcia but we call her Lucy. She’s five now and the cutest little thing in the world. Well, she’s a bit naughty and never keeps still, that’s for sure.”
“She must take after her mother. Does she like the sea?”
“She prefers animals, especially horses,” she said, winking.
The encounter with the “divine left” of Barcelona was offset, or at least found its antidote the next day, with Christmas dinner at Bundó’s apartment—or perhaps we should say Bundó and Carolina’s apartment—even if it’s only for the first and last time. If Gabriel and Bundó had been alone they would have had a Catalan-style Christmas lunch on December 25th, but the presence of the two girls meant that they celebrated with a dinner on Christmas Eve instead. Carolina had arrived the day before, also by coach, and had taken possession of the apartment in a matter of a few hours. Gabriel couldn’t believe his eyes. This bore no relation to the desolate place he’d left on the verge of depression that first night. It had only taken a few finishing touches and a dash of good taste to transform it. Bundó, of course, was exultant. Still in her apron, Carolina emerged from the kitchen to greet them, as if she’d been doing it all her life. The smell of chestnut-stuffed turkey browning in the oven wafted through the apartment, perfuming it with a kind of domestic warmth that all four of them—for different reasons—identified with an idea of happiness. Since this was something unknown to them and they weren’t oppressed by nostalgia for earlier Christmases, they forged a special bond over the course of that night, so unique and unrepeatable that they never experienced it again. If they believed in some god, it would have been the essence of that Christmas.
They were ablaze with happiness all night. Carolina and Mireille took to each other immediately. They were both wearing minijupes and high boots. They smoked the same brand of cigarettes. They’d grown up in fits and starts. They spoke French together, and when Bundó and Gabriel moaned about not understanding them they carried on like a pair of affluent expatriates, teasing them and treating them with exaggerated haughtiness. Behind the fun and games, however, if the friendship gelled it was thanks to the secrets kept by their boyfriends: Bundó had never told Carolina that Gabriel had two other women and two more sons in England and Germany.
When the turkey was reduced to a carcass, they had the mandatory Catalan torrons for dessert and proposed their toasts with French champagne nicked by Gabriel and Bundó on a recent trip. Some days earlier they’d agreed to buy gifts. As they opened them, Carolina and Mireille joked that they couldn’t accept anything that came from a move. It wouldn’t be ethical at Christmas, they chided. Then Bundó, who’d drunk more than the others, started singing carols, making up the words if he didn’t know them, and Carolina and Gabriel joined in. Mireille tried to remember something in French, from her childhood, and Carolina joined in with her too. They turned out the lights and sang in the subtle flickering of candles and disco-style flashes of the Christmas tree lights. Lacking the traditional zambomba drum to accompany the carols, Bundó was in such high spirits that he improvised by grabbing a bottle of anis and kept the beat going by rattling a knife up and down the knobbly glass. The two girls couldn’t stop giggling and had tears pouring down their faces, to which Bundó responded by clowning even more. He was out of control, prancing around the living room, sweaty, with his shirt hanging out, scraping away at his anis bottle. He was the picture of contentment. The victory of the present.
Gabriel, more contained, was also laughing at his antics. Later, when only memory remained, of all the Bundó’s he’d known, he’d remember precisely that Bundó of that Christmas Eve. Day after day after day. The only way to bear the pain was by celebrating past happiness.
We’ve been going on too long, haven’t we? We Christophers do go on too long. So what else is new? We’ve been putting off the Pegaso’s last ride for a while now, as if the fact of not talking about it could change the course of history, but that’s enough beating about the bush. We’re now so well schooled that we could reconstruct in real time—on a scale of one to one—everything that happened between that Christmas Eve and that February 14th, that sad Saint Valentine’s Day. But this isn’t a good idea. If we want to make progress in our search for our father, we’ll have to go back to that awful time for once and for fucking all. We’ll need to take a few shortcuts in order to get ahead. For example, although they became great friends that Christmas Eve, Mireille and Carolina never saw each other again.
The next day, Gabriel and Mireille spent a lazy morning in the Falcon Room. They’d woken up with brutal hangovers, and every word they pronounced echoed in a drum-roll crescendo in their heads, rum pum pum pum. The throbbing alcohol-steeped nausea demanded darkness and silence, and they didn’t speak any more about their future. If they’d known that these were going to be the last hours they’d be together as a couple, they probably would have made better use of the time.
As the afternoon advanced, Senyora Rifà heard that they’d got up and offered them a couple of plates of noodle-and-meatball soup left over from Christmas lunch. The broth was warming and hearty, and it revived them a little, if only enough to get them to understand that the coach was leaving for Paris in a couple of hours, at eight o’clock. As Mireille was packing her bag, Senyora Rifà knocked at the door and presented her with the stuffed humming-bird. She’d dusted down the iridescent feathers, and the vibrant patina of colors brightened up the farewell and the journey home.
“Take good care of it for me,” the landlady said in French. “Ah, and come back for Gabriel some day. I love him a lot, but if he stays in this house too much longer he’ll end up as a dried animal like all the rest.”
The hummingbird at least still resides in Mireille’s house in Paris. As for our father, well, as you’ll understand, we don’t know how he reacted to her absence. This was the first time he’d tasted the medicine he’d so often doled out to our mothers. For the first time, he was the one who said good-bye, the one who stood there quietly and went home to face loneliness. We Christophers imagine that this new situation caught him unawares. To cap it all, a few days later he had to deal with another tricky situation. Carolina had stayed in Barcelona for a whole week, until New Year, and went back to France on January 1st. The Papillon needed Muriel. At the beginning of her stay they’d agreed, and she’d promised too, that she’d come to live with him in Barcelona very soon, but Bundó took her departure badly. The commitment Carolina had made soon amounted to nothing. He was unmanned by his fear that she’d go back on her word and was consequently tormented by renewed attacks of jealousy over all the Frogs who were paying for her favors. It made him ill.
“She didn’t even leave a toothbrush,” Bundó raved as Gabriel tried to calm him down.
After the holidays, in their first week back at La Ibérica, Bundó’s doom and gloom only worsened. He was convinced that he absolutely had to go and visit Carolina at the Papillon, but there was no foreign move planned at the time. They were doing jobs around the city instead or, in some cases, going to other parts of Spain. Every day that went by without seeing her, Bundó feared that Carolina was moving further away from him. Distraugh
t, he phoned her at night but the minute he heard her voice he didn’t know what to say and hung up. After the third call, Carolina started to insult the putain de connard that was harassing her. In the middle of all this exhausting folly, Bundó came up with a tailor-made solution. Carolina needed an incentive to come to Barcelona. She was terrified of being lonely and bored. If Mireille was here too, and since they were friends, it would be easier for her to adapt. Therefore Mireille had to come and live in Barcelona. Bundó set out on a crusade against our father’s complicated love life and tried to convince him that he had to put his energies into making Mireille happy. In Barcelona. He abruptly deserted their lifelong, mutual, respectful discretion and started attacking him from every flank. Gabriel had to choose one woman—Mireille—and forget about the rest. This mix-up wasn’t good for him. He nagged him to leave the boarding house—couldn’t he see that La Rifà had set her sights on him, wanted to abduct him?—and get himself an apartment in Via Favència. “Everyone needs a family, Gabriel, but only one. That’s enough, so let’s not have any more fucking around about that.” “Surely you don’t want to die all alone . . .” Stubborn as he was, Bundó never missed a chance to lay siege to Gabriel. When they were driving around in the truck, when they were unloading an extra-heavy wardrobe, when they were having dinner together after a gruelling day. He didn’t care if Petroli witnessed his harangues. On the contrary, he was a friend and Bundó sought his support. Right, Petroli? True, eh, Petroli? Don’t you agree, Petroli?
“Bundó, poor boy, really lost it for a while,” Petroli recalled when we went to see him in Germany. “It was terrible to see him so obsessed. His whole temperament changed. He wasn’t eating, which was incredible for him, and it was almost worse when he was silent. He withdrew into himself. His jealousy was preying on his mind and we were scared stiff about him driving the Pegaso in that state. In those days, people didn’t take it seriously but now the psychologists would say he had a galloping depression.”
Gabriel knew Bundó like a brother—well, he was his brother, our uncle, dammit—and, when it started, was very patient with him. It’ll pass, he told himself. This is just one of his fits. At the end of January they did the first international move for 1972 (Barcelona-Geneva, Move Number 198), and, at last, Bundó found a way of meeting up with Carolina. But the two-hour visit to the Papillon didn’t help. On the contrary. Carolina received Bundó with tenderness and devotion as always—she’d missed him so much those three weeks!—but he was in such a state he didn’t notice, was too blind in his zeal to convince her, and she ended up retreating behind her usual doubts and forms of evasion. Bundó climbed into the Pegaso feeling like he’d taken a step backward. The world was falling apart. The next day he was so down that he couldn’t even go to work. He didn’t have the phone turned on in the apartment so they couldn’t contact him. Halfway through the morning he got on the bus, went to the boarding house, and asked Senyora Rifà if she had a room free. He wanted to forget about the apartment in Via Favència and to be near Gabriel. Showing very good judgment, Senyora Rifà made him a cup of linden-blossom tea and told him she had no vacancies, after which she sent him back home, making him promise to find some distraction and then go to work in the afternoon. When he got back to Via Favència, with the intention of staying in bed until Carolina came to rescue him, he found Gabriel and Petroli waiting at the door. They carried him off to do a move—Senyor Casellas was enraged—and that night, fearing he might do something stupid, Gabriel stayed in the apartment to sleep. In those four weeks without Carolina, the place had turned into a nest of dirt and neglect.
The spiral went on and on with no end in sight. Then came the trip to Hamburg, which changed everything.
After years of international haulage, Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli had got into the habit of comparing every trip with climbing a mountain. It was Petroli’s idea. He’d done some hiking when he was young. The climb was always the slowest, hardest part: loading furniture, leaving first thing in the morning, ensuring the delivery time set by Senyor Casellas was met . . . Once they got to the destination and had done the unloading, which was the equivalent of planting the flag, things got easier and more agreeable. Europe was the downhill run. The Pegaso rolled along more lightly, they divided up the booty, invented excuses to take a break and, whenever the route permitted, stopped off to visit the family—interpret the word as you please. To stay with the simile, the journey to Hamburg was their Everest. The longest possible route within La Ibérica’s radius. They’d only done the trip on one previous occasion and had a doleful memory of it. Hamburg, they’d found out, was at the northern edge of Germany. Just looking for it on the map made them feel cold.
“We’re going almost all the way to the Arctic Circle,” Bundó announced with his usual flourish.
That first journey had been relentless and, since it was also in winter, they’d faced every kind of inclement weather. Rain and snow, and more rain and more snow, and driving with chains on the wheels, and police checkpoints every couple of hundred kilometers, and jam-packed motorways, and cab heating that kept breaking down . . . The truck was getting old and couldn’t handle such extreme ordeals any more.
Two years later, the Pegaso was the same old grumbling heap, Hamburg was still in the same place on the map, and all three drivers had a dwindling spirit of adventure.
They began the ascent in the very early hours of Saturday morning, February 12th. Senyor Casellas had calculated twenty-four hours on the road to cross France and Germany, taking turns to sleep on the bunk, after which they’d do the unloading on Sunday the thirteenth first thing in the morning. At that rate, they could be back in Barcelona on Monday night and ready for work again on Wednesday morning. All three knew that these tight schedules never worked, but what intimidated them was the move itself. In addition, the Pegaso was chockablock: They were taking the furniture and all the mementos of a recent window who was going back home forty years after having fled from the Nazis. Since then, she’d married a Catalan nationalist banker, gone through some lean times during the Civil War, and raised four children, who now wanted her out of the way.
Just after they crossed the French border—with Petroli driving—the first contretemps arose. Bundó had been unusually quiet and pensive. Now he broke the silence.
“Now, soon,” he said, “when we’re going through Clermont-Ferrand, we need to stop for a moment at the Papillon. In and out. Ten minutes. I have to talk to Carolina.”
He said this in the calm, falsely naive tone of a kid begging for a gift knowing the answer will be no. Gabriel and Petroli were afraid this would happen. Before leaving, the three of them had agreed that they wouldn’t be stopping anywhere on the way up so they could get to Hamburg as fast as possible. They’d gain time that way and then, on the descent, they could take it easy. Gabriel responded.
“You know that’s not on, Bundó. You say ten minutes but it will be longer. We all know each other. We can’t waste time this trip. This is Everest.”
“Why do we always have to do what you two say?” Bundó replied. “You know what, just drop me off and go on without me.” His friends laughed at the joke. “No, I’m serious. I’m off. I’ll find something. I’m leaving La Ibérica. You two can tell Senyor Casellas. Bye-bye. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’ll buy a van and do my own transporting. What with the shit wages we get . . .”
“Think before you speak, Bundó,” Gabriel countered. “On the way home you can spend as long as you want with Carolina. Anyway, I don’t know why you’re carrying on like this. She’s crazy about you. Just seeing the two of you together on Christmas Eve was enough to know that.”