Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  “You’re still living in that pension, aren’t you? One of those places where people come and go without having to give any explanations . . .”

  They say the past is a foreign country where things are done differently. During that period of reclusion, Christophers, the saying would have applied quite literally to our father. Bundó, Petroli, and the moves in the Pegaso had been his main link with the world. For him, being alive meant being on the move, nonstop, savoring the lightness that came with crossing the border, and tinkering with the schedule so he could visit his three sons and their mothers. The accident stole all that from him, in one blow, with the appalling shock of pain. All of a sudden, alone in Barcelona, obliged to stay put, he could see the present fading before his eyes. You and your mothers became a point in the past, a tangle of relations that were too complicated for him to maintain at a distance without hurting somebody. This is our main beef with our father, I think. Was he so unaware, so naive that he’d never foreseen this? Was it possible that he didn’t realize that his amorous rounds couldn’t go on for ever and that one day it would all go askew and collapse like a house of cards? He’s the only person who can answer that. Without wanting to excuse him, it’s likely that he counted too much on your mothers: young, free, and with an independence of spirit that wasn’t acceptable in Franco’s Spain. It’s also probable that, immured in his solitude, he longed for the family protection of Sigrun and Christof, or Sarah and Christopher, or Mireille and Christophe . . . But that, of course, would have meant choosing one family, and he was in no condition to choose anything.

  In the light of this speculation, then, we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that Gabriel went to ground in the Via Favència apartment. Once Carolina had renounced it, the place became a no-man’s-land, a desert island for a voluntary Robinson Crusoe. Visionaries might say that Gabriel was waiting for some sort of epiphany to bring him out of his isolation. They’d be wrong. This self-inflicted solitary confinement is monotonous, inviolable precisely because it has no ambition. The only possible epiphany is the dullness of everyday life: The sun rises, the sun sets, another day gone.

  As I noted, we know very little about Dad’s confinement. We can confirm, however, that he became a TV addict. At the end of December, a few weeks before the accident, Bundó had gone to Pont Reyes and invested his Christmas bonus in a Philips television set, cash down. He’d put it on a small wheeled table in a strategic corner of the dining room and set up a Nativity scene underneath. Unlike Bundó, Gabriel wasn’t remotely interested in TV. He’d never been able to spend more than half an hour looking at it without getting bored. At most, he occasionally glanced at it out of the corner of his eye if they happened to be broadcasting a soccer match on a Sunday afternoon when he was having a beer at Café Principal. He was more of a radio man, listening to news, sports programs or some nighttime serial. Senyora Rifà was the same. She’d always refused to install a television set in the pension because she didn’t want her lodgers to settle down in front of it and lapse into an after-dinner stupor.

  Strange as it may seem, Gabriel turned the TV on because he was freezing. It was a Tuesday night at the end of February and Barcelona had been hit by a cold snap. Just before dark, he’d gone out on to the balcony to check the thermometer and discovered it was four degrees below zero. Sitting on the couch wrapped up in a blanket, he recalled something Bundó had said just after he moved in. “The only problem is there’s no heating and it’s fucking cold.” Gabriel had closed the living room and left the butane heater on all day, but the walls kept oozing damp, and the icy air squeezed in relentlessly through cracks in the window frames. Insulating tape was completely useless. Then he got the idea of turning on the TV to see the weather report on News at Nine. He was sure that a new ice age had arrived, and he wanted the meteorologist to confirm it. In addition, he told himself, the screen might add a smidgen of warmth to the room.

  The weatherman reported on the polar cold wave, but his forecast of a huge anticyclone building up in the Azores brought some comfort. By the end of the news it didn’t seem quite so cold. The new warmth encouraged him to leave the TV on for a while longer. There were a few minutes of ads, a riveting war film, more ads, a shorter news report, and then an inordinately serious gentleman took his leave of the viewers until the morning. It was midnight, and Gabriel had sat through it all without once getting up from the sofa. The screen filled with randomly flickering snow. Then his body started to freeze again. The television, he realized, kept him company.

  After that first night Gabriel’s new hobby became an evening ritual. Six hours every day. The first step was to turn the TV on just before six in the afternoon. The children’s programs came immediately after the test card. With their jolly dulcet voices, the presenters of these educational slots reminded him of the nuns at the House of Charity when they were organizing games. He watched them without really wanting to, just for the hell of it, a sort of warm-up session to distract him while he was waiting for the films to come on: a horse from the Wild West, a naughty kangaroo, some astronauts lost in space. The Pink Panther made him laugh for the first time in ages, and the next day he unconsciously hummed the music while he was making coffee. As the days went by, he refined his viewing habits, shaping the rhythms of his life to the TV. At half past seven they broadcast “Buenas Tardes,” a current affairs program. If he didn’t like it, he went to make himself something for dinner, which he ate watching the daily episode of Persuasion. After that came the news program. It was the only thing he watched out of obligation, like a sort of compulsory road toll. Apart from the daily fare of Franco propaganda, he was exasperated because there was hardly any news about what was happening outside Spain. It seemed as if Spain was the only country that existed in this black-and-white world. He never checked the TV Guide and liked being surprised by whatever film or series turned up on the screen at night. He especially enjoyed the moments when the credits appeared and a male voice-over announced the title. “Tormented.” “Ironside.” “McMillan & Wife.”

  Things were more upbeat on the weekends, and these mood changes on the TV cushioned his routine. There was the Saturday rugby game, for example, which they called the Five Nations Tournament. Although it was hard for him to understand the game, he wallowed in those fields of England, France, and Scotland. He repeated the names aloud: Twickenham, Murrayfield . . . He saw the grimacing faces of players huffing and puffing like bullocks, and they reminded him of some of the characters he’d met when he was driving around those places in the Pegaso.

  One evening, when he was trying to turn up the volume on the television set, he pressed the wrong button and another channel came on. What a surprise, what a wonderful thing! He felt like he was entering a parallel world. The film they were showing was set in Paris, but the people were speaking fluent Spanish. The streets and people of the city were so wonderfully reproduced that they tricked him into feeling nostalgic. He was glued to the TV right to the end, and, when the announcer said goodnight, he confirmed what Gabriel already surmised: This was the second Spanish channel. It was called UHF. Thenceforth, his devotion to television was increasingly complex. He couldn’t watch everything so he had to choose, which wasn’t so bad. Every evening he got up from the sofa a hundred times to change channels. These gymnastics soon encouraged him to be more selective. He stopped watching the news and tended more toward UHF’s less predictable programming. The window was now opening onto another kind of landscape. His favorite program was on Sunday nights. It was called “Un Domingo en . . .” and offered reports about cities in other parts of the world. Budapest, Berlin, Amsterdam . . . London! With his eyes glued to the screen, his feet were braking and working the clutch while his hands sometimes gripped an invisible wheel. He was on the move once again, if only in black-and-white.

  Mourning is a process, they say, and each person channels it the best way he or she can. The weeks were rolling by, and Gabriel hadn’t shed a single tear over Bundó’s death.

>   The night of the first Monday of April, which turned out to be Easter Monday, he was watching an episode of Hawaii Five-O, one of his favorite programs. There was a scene in which two masked delinquents beat up a parking lot guard and steal a luxury car. Shortly afterward, Detective McGarrett interviews the guard, who appears with a black eye, bandaged head, and arm in a cast. Gabriel recognized himself. He looked at his own cast. Since it didn’t hurt or bother him, he’d completely forgotten about it. His body had grown used to it like a wristwatch or a new haircut. He stared at it. It was filthy with accumulated dirt, really disgusting. He hadn’t used the sling for days, and, thanks to the blows it was getting and his scratching inside with a knitting needle, it had been crumbling and chipping. He always wrapped it up in a plastic bag when he was having a shower but the water had softened it and it looked quite mangy. He got out a calendar and counted the days since the accident. It should have come off two weeks before.

  The next day, Tuesday, he asked for an appointment with the orthopedic specialist provided by the insurance company. When they broke open the shell, a defenseless white arm emerged. It stank. Gabriel carefully cradled his wrist with his other hand. His weedy arm felt as floppy as a newborn kitten.

  “Since I see no one’s drawn or written on it, I won’t ask you if you want the cast as a memento,” the doctor commented as he dropped the debris into the garbage bin. Gabriel didn’t answer. It was the first time in a month and a half that he’d ventured beyond his neighborhood. “You’d be amazed at the stupid things people write on a cast nowadays. Sometimes they carry political messages and, depending on the policeman that discovers them, you can be sent straight to prison.”

  The nurse washed his arm and the doctor then examined it, bending it up and down several times. Before Gabriel left he suggested that he should do some weightlifting, to strengthen the muscles, and then he signed the medical discharge papers. Gabriel could return to work on the following Monday.

  Needless to say, come Monday, Gabriel didn’t go near La Ibérica. No way. The visit to the orthopaedic specialist and the removal of his cast—like shedding dead skin—encouraged him to get out on the streets a little more, even to go for a walk every morning, but not to get into a truck. The same day another significant event contributed to his rebirth, if we can call it that. Gabriel remembered that once, in the division of spoils after a move to Munich, Bundó had kept a set of hand weights. At first, he’d left them in the Pegaso and, when it wasn’t his turn to drive, he did biceps-strengthening exercises, twenty lifts at a time, counting aloud, as they rolled along.

  “I’m losing muscular mass,” Bundó would announce, panting, and his two friends would laugh at him, telling him he was losing brain mass.

  “Stop this weightlifting and carry a few more boxes by yourself and you’ll see how your muscles grow,” they challenged him. In the end, fed up with their teasing, he took the weights home.

  Gabriel turned the apartment upside down looking for them. He rummaged methodically through cupboards and drawers, inspecting Bundó’s possessions, forcing himself not to load them with meaning or memories of his friend, but the weights didn’t appear. Then he realized there was still one place to look, the main bedroom. That’s where they had to be. In all the time he’d been living in the apartment he hadn’t been in there once. In his own way, trying to survive, he’d managed to strip the whole place of past associations, except for the main bedroom. After pondering it for a while, he grasped the door handle, breathed in deep like a diver about to plunge into the depths of the sea, and went inside. Everything was just as it had been on the day of the funeral, the same shadows, the same silent, accusing stillness. Moving fast, Gabriel knelt down by the side of the bed, lifted up the bedspread and looked underneath. Sure enough, the two weights were there, cowering beneath a shroud of dust. He knew Bundó’s habits and peculiarities as if he’d given birth to him. He pulled them out and, just when he was about to retreat, a black object, half tucked away in a corner, caught his eye. He went in for a closer look.

  In the semidarkness he recognized the cloth traveling bag he’d brought from the airport. Someone, most likely Gabriel himself, had dumped it there on the day of Bundó’s wake. Then, after coming back from the cemetery, things had moved so fast, what with Carolina’s renouncing the apartment, his moving in, his subsequent reclusion, and so on, that he’d erased it from his thoughts ever since. He picked it up and, taking it over to the dining room table, realized it hadn’t been opened since that day. He thought he remembered what was inside, but now it seemed heavier.

  When he opened the zipper, Gabriel was met by a gust of sweet, illicit air and instantly knew it wasn’t his bag. He’d been plundering other people’s baggage for many years and knew all about unfamiliar smells. He slowly unpacked the contents and laid them out on the table. Then he examined them. There were several items of male clothing, very good quality and, once, well ironed. Their owner had packed two of everything: shirts, trousers, T-shirts, underwear, and a couple of discreetly elegant ties. A belt and shoes in the same kind of leather with a British brand name. Two gifts in kids’ wrapping paper turned out to be a Lego set and a wooden grasshopper. A sealed white envelope at the bottom of the bag contained what seemed to be a sheaf of papers. Intrigued, he opened it and found two porn magazines. They were Swedish or Danish. Pooling funds with Bundó and Petroli, he’d bought a few on their trips to Germany and France, but he’d never seen photos like these. Sex between men and women, and women and women, appeared with stunning naturalness as scenes from paradise on earth. He continued his investigation. A delicate bronze reproduction of the Little Mermaid confirmed that the owner of the bag must have returned from Copenhagen, most probably after a week-long business trip. A small case revealed that, besides being well off, he was diabetic: There were five ampoules of insulin, two syringes, and a rubber strip.

  His inventory of these objects made him recall how euphoric the three of them used to become when they opened up the pilfered boxes. How they used to laugh! How happy they were! And how they used to fight too! Gabriel cast a practised eye over the items before him and immediately imagined their hypothetical distribution. Bundó would have kept the clothing, of course. It was more or less his size and, as tended to happen, he would have ended up mistreating it. Gabriel could just see him unloading furniture in those dreadfully expensive pullovers, carrying on and cussing like some disinherited nobleman because his cashmere had got snagged on a nail sticking out from a piece of furniture. Petroli would have wanted the toys, the bronze mermaid, and maybe one of the ties. Gabriel would have kept the belt and shoes but would have been too embarrassed to wear them since they were so classy. He would have given the little case to a workmate at La Ibérica who was also diabetic, and, as for the two smutty magazines, there was no doubt about that: They would have remained in the Pegaso for the personal, solitary pleasure of all three of them and then, one day, they would have disappeared. (When he got bored with them, Bundó used to sell them to some workmate or other at La Ibérica, the ones that only did moves within the city or to the provinces, thus earning himself a bit of a bonus.)

  Another life is possible. That afternoon, as he always did when they divided up the booty, Gabriel chewed on those words at length, breaking them down and savoring them. Another life was possible. Then, again as usual, he knocked back the idea. Trying to stave off dark thoughts, he concentrated on the bag again. What should he do with it? The most natural thing would be to return it to the airport and try to recover his own bag, but his heart wasn’t in it. However, he did get out the old notebook and wrote down the imaginary sharing out of Number 200. It seemed the right and proper thing to do. Then he put Bundó’s items in his wardrobe with the rest of his clothes and parceled up Petroli’s things. If they ever met up again he’d give him the packet. He kept the magazines for himself. He put on the belt and new shoes and went out into the street. When he’d gone about twenty steps along Via Favència, he realized they were
slightly tight. He’d end up with blisters, for sure.

  The passenger from Copenhagen must have tried to reclaim his luggage several times, perhaps appealing to the sentimental value of the toys for his children (without a word about the magazines), but he never got it back because Gabriel never gave it back. In the Cage, ninety days after its disappearance, they considered the bag definitively missing, and the airline paid out a paltry sum in compensation. It wouldn’t even pay for the shoelaces.

  When a piece of baggage disappeared for ever, as that one did, Rita used to say it had gone to heaven. She liked to portray the Cage as a kind of purgatory in which the destiny of those gone-astray souls was decided. Most of the pieces went back to their owners, to an active existence after a period of uncertainty. (Life, therefore, represented hell.) This cosmology—which Gabriel, Bundó, and Petroli could have applied to their La Ibérica thievery—didn’t answer to any spiritual criteria: The lost luggage heaven was simply a way of justifying and embellishing the criminal acts that Rita perpetrated with Sayago, Porras, and Leiva.

  Rita acquired a taste for felony shortly after she started to work at the airport. We might say she inherited it from her predecessor in the Cage, a little soul from the working-class neighborhood of El Clot who retired just before she arrived. The lady’s name was Carola, and she was a spinster. Of fragile appearance and with perpetually moist or teary blue eyes, she’d become a fully fledged institution within the Cage. She worked there for more than twenty years and could be described as its founder, its brain, an inspiration. At the beginning of her career, when there were few commercial flights, she was the only person employed to attend to passengers’ complaints. The stories she told from those times were worthy competitors for a Berlanga film. Later on, when air transport expanded, the management put her in charge of reorganizing the department along the lines of the system they used in Madrid’s airport. The little soul went off to the capital, studied the methods, adapted them to the more modest needs of Barcelona, and created an effective, apparently unimpeachable office: The Cage had just been born. It happened, though, that behind her timorous façade—so very Saint Francis and so very useful with regard to the public—a great strategist was lurking. Without anybody suspecting, not even her co-workers, Carola had hatched a plot to line her pockets. The regulations decreed that every three months without fail all unclaimed baggage had to be taken on a regular flight to a depot in Madrid where it would be destroyed, burned, or whatever. “All that work for nothing,” the little soul muttered to herself and, having identified the problem, preferred to save the company headaches: Not a day went by when she didn’t bear off, hidden under her overcoat, in her handbag, or in her lunchbox, some more or less valuable object yielded by those ownerless suitcases. Sometimes, for example, if the clothes she found in a bag were for a woman and they fitted her, she’d lock herself in the ladies’ room and put them on under her own clothes. She’d then head for home, asphyxiating, her peaky face pearled with sweat. “Hot flashes, it’s the hot flashes . . .” she would exclaim if anyone gave her a questioning look. With all her busy-bee thefts, the bags went off to Madrid half empty or half full and nobody was any the wiser. At the other end of the chain was one of her brothers, also unmarried, a stallholder at the Els Encants flea market. He sold the stolen goods.