Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  What happened was this. Late one afternoon at the end of March, El Tembleque came to visit him, and they had a beer in the bar downstairs. Besides bringing him up-to-date with the news from La Ibérica, his friend brought him a message from Senyor Casellas: The appropriate amount of time had now gone by since the accident, and they knew at the company that the doctor had given him the all-clear. If he didn’t show up at work the following Monday he could consider himself dismissed. Alone in the apartment again, Gabriel weighed up the situation and realized that if he put going back to work on one side of the balance, there was something weighing more on the other side. He didn’t immediately identify it, but it didn’t take him long to work out what it was: nothing. In other words, he thought it would be easier to wipe himself off the map.

  His eventual decision to kill himself took shape in ways that, if anything, were banal. Gabriel smoked a carton of Ducados every seven days. His cigarette consumption had gone up since he’d begun leading a sedentary life, but he tried to exercise some restraint by buying his supplies on a fixed day. Therefore, every Monday morning he went down to the tobacconist’s to get the week’s rations. The man in the shop, a Valencian who’d lost an eye in the war, always bent his ear for five minutes, clearly intent on rhapsodising over the latest deeds of Franco (who observed them from a photo hung up behind the counter), and then wrapped up his Ducados in a sheet of newspaper. The man read La Vanguardia, and that Monday he used the Entertainment page. Since he hadn’t smoked since Sunday, Gabriel unwrapped the carton and lit up as soon as he got home. Then, ensconced on the sofa, he took the half-crumpled newspaper page and read this headline:

  THE ACTOR JORGE MISTRAL COMMITS SUICIDE

  He had been living in Mexico for some years

  Although he didn’t have much memory for names of actors, he knew who Jorge Mistral was, and the news gripped him. During one of their last moves in the Pegaso, the name had come up in a conversation with Bundó and Petroli. A news item on National Radio referred to the actor in reporting the death of his newborn daughter. After chatting about the tragedy, the three friends started talking about his films. Petroli had seen Love Madness, in which he appeared when he was very young and was what they called a promising actor. Bundó remembered one time when the House of Charity nuns had taken them to the Goya Cinema. They would have been about eleven or twelve and had seen Anchor Button, in which Jorge Mistral had a starring role and, after that, all the boys in the orphanage played at rescuing sinking ships and proclaimed that they wanted to be sailors when they grew up.

  The newspaper, Gabriel noted, was from a few days earlier, Friday, April 21st. Jorge Mistral had killed himself on Thursday the twentieth. When he read the article he found that Jorge wasn’t his real name. He was actually called Modesto Llosas Rosell. He’d shot himself in the head. He was fifty-one years old. He was Spanish but had lived in Mexico for many years. He’d left three letters, one for his wife; one for a friend, also an actor; and another for the coroner.

  This information rekindled Gabriel’s suicidal ambitions. He now began to imagine his disappearance and subsequent absence, although without yet introducing the gloomier logistical aspects of the story. What if that page was a sign? Years earlier he’d learned about his birth thanks to a newspaper page that had turned up by chance. These things happen. Well, now the page might be showing him the way to go. There was a certain symmetry in the whole thing that appealed to him.

  That afternoon, he went back to the tobacconist’s and asked the disabled veteran if he could leaf through the weekend newspapers. The man, who suspected everyone, looked at him out of the corner of his remaining eye but went to look for the back issues. A customer was a customer after all. On Saturday, La Vanguardia reported that the deceased Jorge Mistral had cancer but hardly anyone knew, not even his wife. On Sunday, a new article talked about all the messages of condolence from the actor’s friends. It seemed that his will stipulated that he wanted to be cremated, but the family had preferred to bury him because, that way, they said, they could take flowers to his tomb. Gabriel asked the tobacconist if he could have the two pages—if necessary he’d buy more tobacco—and the man gave them to him.

  On Tuesday he went down very early to get La Vanguardia. Standing there next to the kiosk, he opened up the newspaper and flipped through it looking for the Entertainment page, but there were no further revelations. He went back to buy it again on Wednesday. He wanted to know what Jorge Mistral had said in the letters he left behind. He read the Entertainment section attentively but found nothing and, having got through that, kept turning the pages. In the News in Brief section he found a headline that froze the blood in his veins:

  GEORGE SANDERS TAKES HIS LIFE IN A CASTELLDEFELS HOTEL

  Another actor. In this case, more space was given to the news, three columns accompanied by a photo of George Sanders with that bearing of his that had brought him so many roles as the enigmatic, always affable yet distant gentleman. The actor’s face looked familiar, but Gabriel couldn’t remember any of his films. The article included a reproduction of the note he’d left: “Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.” Another note, in Spanish, said. “Tell my sister. There’s enough money to pay for everything.”

  He’d written his good-bye in English, the writing slightly wobbly but still bearing a calligraphic beauty, and someone had translated it for publication in the newspaper. Gabriel pored over every word of the article, a man interpreting an oracle. George Sanders had killed himself in Room 3 of the Rey Don Jaime Hotel in Castelldefels. He’d washed down five phials of barbiturates with the help of a bottle of whisky. He’d arrived two days earlier from Palma de Mallorca—after selling his house there in January—and was to have left for Paris the following day. It seemed he’d hit a rough patch, was in low spirits, and was toying with the idea of buying a house by the sea in Castelldefels. (Who knows whether the palm trees along the coast, leaning at their half-wild angles, reminded him of Santa Monica or Venice Beach, or some other seashore near Los Angeles?) The news item was rounded off with a biographical note and a list of films that had made him famous. Gabriel recognized two titles—All About Eve and The Picture of Dorian Gray—but he wasn’t sure whether he’d seen them. The next few days he’d keep an eye on the television programs. Sometimes when a famous actor died, Channel Two paid homage by showing a film.

  In the next few hours he reorganized the facts to establish some kind of framework. Was it coincidence that George Sanders and Jorge Mistral were actors and had the same first name? He didn’t know where—most probably on the radio—he’d heard that one suicide often leads to another, like an epidemic. Perhaps George Sanders had made his decision—because it was a decision, a brave act—after hearing about the death of his colleague. If that was true, who would be next? What sign should he wait for? The next few days he was irresistibly drawn to the News in Brief pages. He was now buying El Correo Catalán as well as La Vanguardia. He sat at the dining-room table and read the two newspapers from start to finish. Over the next couple of days he was still gleaning new details—the pills Sanders had taken were Nembutal and Tranxene—but then the story dried up. With their callow pretensions of documenting the present, newspapers are the best proof yet that time is a tyrant that punishes with oblivion.

  Not yet satisfied, he took the train to Castelldefels on Saturday and went to the Rey Don Jaime Hotel. He’d put on a jacket and tie, hoping to slip by unnoticed, but someone in reception was on to him at once and threw him out, shouting that they’d had enough of journalists. If he wanted to know anything else he should go to the police. Twenty minutes later, concealed in the middle of a group of German tourists, he came back in and slipped down a side corridor. When he got to Room 3, he found it was sealed off with yellow tape. He hesitated about whether to try to open it or not but then thought better of it. On the way home he mulled it over. What would have been t
he point? He’d never been a busybody and wasn’t going to change now.

  In short, his suicidal predisposition didn’t go away. On the contrary, it was unrelenting and able to exploit these moments of weakness to conquer a little more of his spirit. He calculated that five days had passed between the announcement of Jorge Mistral’s death and that of George Sanders. It wouldn’t be altogether stupid, then, to suppose that in another five days—Monday—the newspapers would report a third suicide. If he was wrong about that, perhaps he should start thinking about whether it was his turn.

  It happened that Monday fell on the first of May, Workers’ Day and a public holiday. It was hot, and the city had been so empty over the long weekend that any news seemed impossible. The previous day the newsdealer had informed Gabriel that he’d be closed on Monday and reminded him that La Vanguardia wasn’t coming out either. This meant that he stayed home and didn’t read any newspapers. Abstinence was good for him, and the hours went by without any upsets, but he had trouble getting to sleep that night. A new question took shape, a clot forming and refusing to dissolve in the liquidity of sleep: When the time came, how was he going to go about it?

  He was as yet unaware of it but Tuesday brought further respite. He went out to walk for a couple of hours in the afternoon and bought three newspapers, from the kiosk on the way home, almost grudgingly and as if under duress. He opened La Vanguardia at the Obituaries page and the headline of a half-column report immediately jumped out:

  ON THE DEATH OF THE POET GABRIEL FERRATER

  The text didn’t specify how Gabriel Ferrater had died, but the fact he was a poet alerted Gabriel. “Poets have always been killing themselves,” he thought. Then he read the article and, although the text was full of euphemisms, he saw it quite clearly. Shortly afterward, a less-inhibited newspaper confirmed that it was suicide.

  Of the three deaths, Gabriel Ferrater’s made the greatest impact. He even had the same name! Could there be any doubt now? First a Jorge had inspired a George and now a Gabriel was calling upon another Gabriel. The poet had killed himself a few days ago, Thursday, he calculated, but they hadn’t found him till Monday. He lived alone in Sant Cugat. Besides being a poet, he was a teacher at the Autonomous University. He hadn’t yet turned fifty. Gabriel trawled all the sources of news but didn’t come up with any more substantial information. He didn’t know, for example, whether the poet had left any note or message.

  Gabriel pored over the story, which took him some hours to digest. By the time he looked up it was night. It was that time of the evening when, without really knowing why, he went out on to the balcony to smoke the second-to-last cigarette of the day (the last one he kept for just before going to bed). It was eight, the colors were fading high in the sky, and, down below, the city had a morbid, vaporized look about it. The panoramic view was one of the reasons why Bundó had decided to buy the apartment. The sun slowly went into hiding behind the Collserola hills, and Gabriel amused himself by imagining how, with the light now behind him, the shadow of his slim body was sufficient to cast the whole of Barcelona into darkness. If he raised an arm, he could eclipse an entire neighborhood. In the midst of such distractions he looked down at the street and was once again surprised at how high up he was. Seven floors before hitting the pavement. An idea took shape in his brain: Taken one at a time, every instant of every day made its own sense but, if they were all put together, the result was meaningless.

  Let me say it again, Christophers. You can be sure that these arguments that were pushing him to kill himself were not cast in a tragic light. The proof is that while Gabriel was doing something as mundane as getting undressed that night, putting his pajamas on or cleaning his teeth, he was trying to work out when it would be his turn. If he counted four days from getting the news about the poet, he’d have to do it on Saturday. Yes, Saturday wasn’t an especially bad day. Yet this advance planning seemed excessive and unnatural and, moreover, it made him understand something evident: He wouldn’t be appearing in the newspapers. No journalist would write an article titled FURNITURE MOVER COMMITS SUICIDE IN . . . If he really wanted to insert his link into the chain of suicides, and if his grand act was going to make sense, he’d have to look for a public place that everyone knew. The Sagrada Familia Expiatory Temple. The lions in the zoo. The airplane in the Tibidabo funfair. A touch of eccentricity that would put him on the front page.

  Now, at the hour of reckoning, he was being capricious.

  In the end, after much rumination, he chose the Christopher Columbus monument, which appeared on page 27 in Rita’s city guide. He was playing with the symbolic idea that his last route would be traced by a leap from the feet of such an illustrious traveler as this voyager. He’d do it on Saturday afternoon at the time when the citizens of Barcelona came out to stroll along the Ramblas, when the florists lowered the prices of their half-wilting wares, and the prostitutes scored their first gentlemen on the corner of Carrer Escudellers and in the inner reaches of Carrer Conde del Asalto. He’d pay to get into the monument, take the elevator up the column to the lookout directly beneath the statue at the top and, when no one was looking, he’d throw himself off, embracing the whole city with his last gaze or perhaps, heeding Columbus’s finger, he’d look where he was pointing, out to the open sea. The seafarer wouldn’t bat an eyelid when he hit the ground. Isn’t it true that all the big monuments, from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to Big Ben in London, have their own particular stories of a suicide that adds to their prestige? Well, his would go down in history as the “Columbus Suicide.”

  Although he’d planned it quite well, Christophers, Gabriel never jumped from Columbus’s feet, didn’t get to say hello to the elevator driver or even buy the ticket to go up the monument. However surreal it may seem, his soul mate Bundó saved his life. He did it with an intervention from the grave that amply compensated for all the patience and favors our father had bestowed on him ever since they were little kids.

  Furthermore, the intercession in extremis of a transmigrated (or, given the form it took, would it be more apt to say “transliquified”?) Bundó was doubly fortunate because, by then, Rita had already ruled out the possibility of Gabriel’s hiding on page 27 of her guide. She would never have turned up at the bottom of the Columbus monument to save him in the nick of time.

  In fact, Rita’s intentions of looking for Gabriel on the map of Barcelona had lapsed overnight. She had abandoned her highly idiosyncratic methodology thanks to a major new development that had come about more or less when Gabriel was discovering the chain of suicides and weighing up his chances of joining in.

  For some weeks now, Rita, the queen of tenacity, had turned her quest into compulsive routine. The first thing she did on arriving at the airport every morning was check to see whether the black canvas bag had turned up in the Cage. The negative response didn’t deter her in the least, and some of her colleagues thought she’d lost her mind. They repeatedly urged her to forget about it. The fucking bag was never going to appear. Lost luggage was everyday fare and she, precisely, knew that better than anyone. Then, one April day, the long-awaited revelation came.

  Although she’d imagined the scene a thousand times, the black bag didn’t simply pop up as she’d expected but appeared piecemeal. What happened was as follows. She was in the Cage, sitting on her stool at the counter, and had just seen to a passenger, the last in the line before the next batch turned up. Since she’d been notching up a considerable number of kilometers around the city every day after work, her legs had become more muscular but the soles of her feet hurt. It was one in the afternoon and nothing was happening. The boss had gone to lunch. In the absence of passengers, she should have gone to the storeroom to sort out the lost luggage that had come in that morning but, right now, she didn’t feel like it. The figure of Leiva and his mop materialized in the distance. Rita recognized his pachydermal silhouette. He’d been off work with the flu, and she hadn’t seen him for several days. As he mopped and buffed up the shine on the ma
rble floor with his particular art of zigzagging like a slalom skier, Leiva was moving closer to the Cage. Rita yawned.

  “Are you better now?” she asked when he came within earshot. Their friendship was based on controlled, ironic condescension toward one another. They knew how to take a joke to the limit without ever causing hurt. With Porras, on the other hand, the relationship was all about saucy innuendo that she rebuffed, calling him a bighead. With Sayago, it was that of hysterical father and rebellious daughter (with conversations tending to end up with a little-girlish “Yes, Daddy” from her). Leiva was the one she had most fun with as some months earlier she’d started to speak to him in Catalan: “How was your vacation?”

  “So-so,” he replied, disguising a grimace. She’d passed the yawn on to him: delayed effect. He raised his hand to his forehead to check his fever and immediately tore it away as if burnt. He dropped the mop.

  “What’s the time? Tell me it’s two. Tell me a lie if you must.”

  “It’s two.” She waited a few seconds for it to sink in. “No, it’s one on the dot. Aren’t you wearing a watch?”

  “Of course I am. It’s the Festina from when I got married,” he said pushing up his sleeve to flash a gilded wrist. “But it stopped when I was sick, and I have to get it fixed. Anyway, I put it on because I can’t be without it. I feel naked.”

  “Better for everyone, then, that you never take it off.”

  They both laughed. Leiva had now leaned his entire weight on her counter. He was one of those people who can’t stand up straight. He pulled a packet of chewing gum out of his pocket and offered it to her.