by Jordi Puntí
“That must have taught him . . .” Rita ventured, pointing at the stuffed falcon over the wardrobe. Senyora Rifà pulled a face, not understanding what she was getting at. “How to fly, I mean. That big bird must have taught him to fly. Has Gabriel gone very far?”
“I can’t answer that,” Senyora Rifà replied, pleased to be able to make the most of a juicy bit of gossip. “I asked him, of course, as you can imagine, but with Bundó’s death he’s gone strange and doesn’t want to talk. I told him a hundred times not to dwell on it but he feels guilty. If he’s always been tight-lipped, well, you can guess what he’s like now. He just said good-bye and that he’d drop in and say hello when things settle down. He was in a hurry because a friend of his was waiting downstairs with a loaded van. When he was on his way down, twisting half sideways because of his arm being in a cast, I called out—Gabriel!—and asked if he was going to live in Bundó’s apartment. He looked up at me through the stairwell and nodded good-bye again but didn’t say yes or no. Look, we were close but, well, dear . . . Anyway, if he did go to Bundó’s apartment, I hate to say it but he’s going to die of sorrow up there among all those Spanish migrants who never speak a word of Catalan.”
Rita didn’t stay for coffee. Five minutes later, she was in the street again, back on the job and happy to be so. She’d left the pension with an address written on a bit of paper and a promise that, if there was any news, Senyora Rifà would let her know at once. It was Friday evening, and she had the whole weekend free for finding Gabriel. Nothing was going to stop her now. Nonetheless, she had trouble getting to sleep that night. She couldn’t get the stuffed falcon out of her head. She could still see its piercing enigmatic eyes and envied it the thousands of hours it must have spent spying on what went on in that room.
It was drizzling when she went out the next morning. She got the Number 50 bus and crossed half the city until it left her at one end of Via Favència, after which she walked through the neighborhood looking for the apartment into which Gabriel had apparently moved. Some streets were still under construction, dirt tracks that, with the rain, had turned into puddle-strewn bogs. Rita was overdressed and walking on tiptoes trying to keep her shoes clean. By the time she found the building in question it had started to rain more heavily. A lady with a shopping cart held the door open for her, and she dived inside. Alone in the vestibule, she read the names on the mailboxes but couldn’t find the one she was looking for. In a glass display case used by the residents’ association, the notice of Serafí Bundó Ventosa’s death was stuck up with a drawing pin. She checked the floor and number of the apartment and climbed the stairs.
Gabriel—we now know—was certainly at home, and he didn’t open the door when Rita rang the bell. Another wasted opportunity. He was curled up under the bedclothes, stunned by the upheaval of the past few days. He’d woken up very early (that’s if he actually slept) and felt unable to do anything. The paralysis that had just begun—another thing we know—was going to last more than two months. Rita didn’t give up and rang again, three brief friendly chimes, trying to convey that she was someone he could trust, but it didn’t work. She then stuck her ear to the door and listened for ages to the heavy silence emanating from inside the apartment. “If he opened the door now,” she thought, “there could only be a brick wall on the other side.” A neighbor from the same landing, coming up the stairs laden with bags from the greengrocer’s, interrupted her reverie. Puffing with exertion, he startled her with a curt hello and told her that nobody lived there, that the owner had died a few days earlier. He then waited for her to go downstairs before he went into his apartment.
Back in the street, Rita moved a few meters away from the building to take in the whole thing. She didn’t believe what the man had told her. She counted the apartments and worked out which balcony had to be Gabriel’s. The blind was up. On this gray day with a lowering sky paved with dense clouds she could see no light shining through the window. This first failed attempt didn’t discourage her, however. She went into a nearby bar for breakfast but didn’t lose sight, not for a single moment, of the people coming and going along the sidewalk. Their umbrellas made it difficult for her to keep watch, however, and as soon as she’d finished she went back into the street. Stationed under a balcony with the cold creeping into her bones, she spent the whole day there. Shortly after lunchtime, she saw the surly neighbor leaving the building and heading into the bar. She used this opportunity to rush upstairs and ring the doorbell, once again without results. Then she scurried back to her surveillance position. The hours went by, it stopped raining, night fell and the few streetlights came on. The balcony window remained in darkness. For a long time it was the only black window in the whole façade, like a blind eye. Rita could make out a tiny flickering light, the hint of a candle, but then realized it was the reflection of starlight on something in the air. Her neck ached from looking up for so long. At half past ten, when the owner of the bar pulled down his blind and everyone seemed to have gone home, she sneaked inside the building again. This time she didn’t ring the bell but just put her ear to the door. The automatic light switch went off, and then she seemed to hear a cavernous metallic noise coming from the other side, like a pulley heaving up a bucket of water from a well. Under the weight of silence, the ear invents the most peculiar sounds. She took fright and ran downstairs. She hurtled down, three steps at a time, her leaps muffled by television sets blaring in every apartment. At midnight, seeing that all the windows were darkening, she gave up. Her feet were frozen and, when at last she reached Plaça Virrei Amat, she was able to hail a taxi.
The next day she woke up with a fever and aching bones, but she repeated her mission exactly as she’d done on the Saturday. The results were the same, a shitload of hours hanging around and all for nothing. Now that we know that Gabriel was actually in the apartment, the story is even more disheartening and dramatic but, for those two days, it was all he could do to survive. Bed, bathroom, bed. Bed, kitchen, bed. Not once did he leave his burrow to enter the dining room and go over to the window. The outside world (including the door, the bell, and the finger pressing the bell) had ceased to exist.
Going home on the bus on the Sunday night, Rita might have felt very sorry for herself. However, she preferred to see those hours as proof of her resistance vis-à-vis everything that she was yet to face. How far was she prepared to go? The question had arisen in a weak moment that evening. Words aren’t sufficient, but I can try to answer . . . She’d look for Gabriel as long as was necessary. She’d look for him as long as she didn’t stop feeling the imperative need to do so, as she did right now. The bus came down Passeig de Sant Joan and crossed Avinguda Diagonal, leaving behind the statue of the poet and priest Jacint Verdaguer, and, as wide-eyed as the owl on top of the Rótulos Roura building, she stared at the people in the street. Night vision. Any one of them could be him. She only needed to look out for the signs: tired steps, an arm in a cast, an absent air. Or maybe he’d appear now that they’d turned into Gran Via from Plaça de Tetuán, for example. Two men were arguing while they waited at a red light; a very elegant gentleman and lady walked hand in hand toward the Hotel Ritz—but, of course, that wouldn’t be her man!—a group of boys and girls, looking snug in duffle coats and scarves, emerged from the depths of a bar called El Viejo Pop. When the bus came to a stop, she turned to check out the people who hadn’t got on. Then she looked over the ones who had. Everything was an opportunity and, as long as the emotion lasted, as long as the city kept giving her some cause for hope, it would be worth it.
Christophers, don’t think that Rita was naive. It wasn’t that. It’s just that she was very lonely.
On Monday she phoned La Ibérica from the airport. The secretary, Rebeca, took the call and, when Rita asked for Senyor Delacruz, told her that Gabriel was on sick leave. She didn’t know when he was returning to work. It would be a long time.
“We’re phoning from the airport because we need to deliver a bag of his that was m
islaid,” Rita lied. She’d been spending a lot of time moving heaven and earth to find the bag but still with no results. “Do you know where we might locate him?”
“Gabriel lives in a pension on Ronda de Sant Antoni . . .”
“He no longer lives there,” Rita cut her off. “Well, that’s what they’ve just told us. You don’t know where else he might be? With some relative?”
“No,” Rebeca replied. “He has no relatives. He only has his workmates, but they’re not in the picture right now. Being who he is, he could be anywhere . . . Wherever.”
“Wherever?”
“Yes, but I’d say he’s in Barcelona. I don’t think he’s in any state to go anywhere, to tell the truth. He broke his arm in an accident. I don’t know if you know that. And he had a bad experience recently. His best friend, his soul mate, died. Go and check at the pension again. Or if you like, bring the bag here to La Ibérica, and we’ll get it to him . . .”
“No, no, that’s impossible,” Rita countered. “The delivery must be made in person.”
Then she hung up.
Wherever. Wherever, yet in Barcelona. Since she had no other alternative, Rita took Rebeca’s words as a challenge. That afternoon, coming back from the airport, she bought the Barcelona city guide, an updated 1972 edition. Looking through it at home, she read on one of the first pages, “Contains 10,006 streets,” but instead of letting the enormity of this fact get her down, she thought about limits instead. There’s nothing like being in love. That incredibly lengthy list of streets boiled down to only two hundred pages of maps! She’d never realized that Barcelona was so small. Which is the best approach if you want to find someone? Staying still and waiting till he walks by, or running around all over the place? The answer was obvious because, after talking with Rebeca, she suspected that Gabriel was stranded somewhere. She was going to unstrand him. Starting from tomorrow she’d devote every free moment to finding him, page by page. After work, she’d take the Metro to wherever she had to go. She had to be systematic: She’d start with page one and she’d comb the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, if fate didn’t help her run into Gabriel. If she got to the end without unearthing him, she’d go back to page one.
It’s clear there was no future in this method. Indeed, Rita herself admits nowadays that not even she believed in it. “You can’t travel the world without a rearview mirror,” she says enigmatically, but she also recalls that her plans distracted her then and helped her not to think too much. It never so much as entered her head that she might have wasted a whole lifetime—two lifetimes, even, or a hundred—without ever coming across Gabriel. Humans are like that: We’re attracted and moved by love stories that are born in the most unlikely, adverse, and even absurd circumstances but forget that, for each happy ending, there are a million that will never prosper. Right, Christophers? Maybe that’s why we’re reconstructing our father’s steps. Because of his remarkable character. Like those people who win the lottery twice, or get struck by lightning in three different storms and live to tell the tale, he had the odd blessing of getting himself chosen by four women. Not one. Four.
5
* * *
Waverings
CRISTÓFOL’S TURN ONCE MORE. SCHON WIEDER! DE NOUVEAU! AGAIN!
Rita didn’t know it, but when she was roaming around Barcelona and working her way through the pages of the city guide, as if she could thus rule out streets, there was one factor that went in her favor: Gabriel attracted coincidences. From the moment that an unknown woman had dropped rather than brought him into the world, chance took a shine to him, like a cat playing with a mouse, to such an extent that if he went back over his thirty-one years of existence, he had the feeling that, however intensely he appeared to have lived, he’d never made a single major decision for himself. Things just happened to him because that’s how it was or because others wanted it like that, starting with the inaugural gesture of the salt cod seller at El Born market who’d heard his squalling and put him to her breast. Even the one firm wish of his life—staying on in the boarding house—could be seen as antivolition, another passive move. Rita sought coincidences obsessively; for Gabriel they became inevitable. That was the difference that united them.
Following this line of thought, we can assume that Bundó’s death—which Gabriel might have prevented if they’d stopped in Frankfurt, or if he’d obliged his friend to take over at the wheel of the Pegaso—changed him overnight. In the first two months of his seclusion in the apartment in Via Favència he resigned himself to living without a destiny, as if he’d already died, but then something as arbitrary and imposed as being named Gabriel sneaked into those shadowless days and pushed him to make a real decision.
Gabriel’s retreat—as we’ve seen—was sabotaged for the first time the day the orthopedic surgeon removed his cast. Many people experience a sort of reverential fear when they go to the doctor. In the waiting room, whether they’ve come to get their flu diagnosed or a prescription for some antibiotic, even the most serene or simple-minded individuals are infused with a feeling of solemnity that automatically evokes death. It has something to do with that white silence, the serious faces of the other patients, the calculus of the pain of others. In Gabriel’s case, the visit had the opposite effect: He arrived there so alone, so without hope, so alienated that this atmosphere somehow managed to revive him.
Thenceforth, every time he had to go out and buy something, he took the occasion to go for a stroll. He put on his English shoes, which had now molded themselves to his feet, and wandered around the neighborhood. April had finally brought good weather, radiant mornings in which bare-legged girls welcomed the sun in short skirts, licking the first ice cream of the season. In the afternoon, if the good weather held out, Gabriel went down to spend an hour in Guineueta Park. Like a statue bearing witness to the passage of time, he sat on a bench with the pensioners and listened to their ailments (which made him feel better) and at the same time watched the children playing on the swings, studying their expressions and looking for them repeated in the faces of the mothers who were keeping an eye on them.
He was spending less and less time in front of the TV, which had now lost its novelty, and he was plucking up the courage to venture farther afield. In those days, the Canyelles neighborhood was still under construction, especially the part next to the mountain, Roquetes. If he felt like a bit of exercise, Gabriel picked his way through the havoc of Via Favència and headed up to Carrer Alcántara or Carrer Garellano, going higher and higher. Most of the streets were still dirt tracks, dusty in summer and perpetually boggy in winter. Solitary towers raised in the middle of vacant ground carried power cables spreading out like a menacing spiderweb to supply the buildings. Some residents—most of them from Andalusia or Murcia—had cemented the few square meters in front of their houses, embellishing the little patio with the trilling of a caged goldfinch and a geranium planted in an old five-kilo olive can. At nightfall, now that spring was well advanced, they took some chairs outside and sat in the fresh air. The men smoked black tobacco and pretended they didn’t give a damn about anything, and the women shrieked hysterically when they saw the shadow of a rat fleeing down the hill. Then they dashed to close the front door while their menfolk burst out in full-throated, complacent laughter.
Twice a week, midmorning, a van drove into the middle of one of the vacant lots. Two Gypsy women set out boxes full of clothes and loudly proclaimed their wares to customers. A bit further on, a few callow school-age kids mucked about with a ball while their older brothers hung around smoking and arguing about which motorbikes were easier to steal, the Bultaco or the Montesa. When he went on his walks, Gabriel gave all that a miss, heading farther and farther uphill till he reached the edge of a small pine forest. While stopping to catch his breath, he smoked a cigarette and contemplated the city. Rising ever higher, the cranes in the foreground loomed over the few hovels that were still hanging in there, while the skeletons of two or three blocks under construction cast t
hreatening tiger-striped shadows over their corrugated asbestos—cement roofs. Beyond Via Favència, way below, the social-housing buildings lined up like domino tiles or a cement rib cage, their contours blurred in the pollution.
When he tired of this route, Gabriel went farther afield. He never used public transport. He was drawn to three squares that he could reach on foot, all of them named after places in the Balearic Islands. He walked to Plaça Llucmajor or continued further down to Plaça Sóller and, on a few occasions, even strode through Horta, going up Turó de la Peira and down again to Plaça Eivissa. The return route was always quicker. He was like a pup that strays beyond his regular patch and suddenly feels lost, but the walk left him with a very agreeable aftertaste of adventure. These were parts of Barcelona that he’d seen in passing from the van, but he’d always had to keep a close eye on the traffic. Now he was like a foreigner mapping unexplored terrain.
Gabriel’s forays into the outside world (which could also be seen as incursions into the inner world) frequently had a sentimental side: He saw himself as Bundó’s surrogate, tracing out his routes in what would have been his natural habitat. He observed these places with the voracious eye of his friend strolling, let’s say, arm-in-arm with Carolina one Sunday afternoon, and felt consoled. It was one way of not feeling like an intruder.
Immersed in his new routine and with the same ease with which he asked for a coffee in a bar, or greeted neighbors, or hung out his washing, Gabriel began to contemplate suicide. He wasn’t an impulsive person, and the idea didn’t appear out of the blue in a moment of weakness but slowly grew inside him like pebbles and sediment settling in a riverbed. In the end, on one normal, humdrum day, they block off the flow of water. Not even he would have been able to pinpoint the moment when the idea first came to him. In fact, looking back, it seemed to him that it was predestined. “Something like a factory defect,” I recall my mother saying when I asked her what that meant.