Lost Luggage

by Jordi Puntí

  The new silence was so premonitory, so loaded with tension, that we were frozen to the spot, and then, while we were standing there as motionless as statues waiting for years and centuries to tick by, something extraordinary happened. The wardrobe door was flung open and, as if emerging from the bowels of hell, out popped Senyora Giuditta.

  Once upon a time in Paris, a girl had got into a wardrobe of Gabriel’s. Now in Barcelona, another woman was coming out of another one.

  She was so sure of herself and we were so quiet that she didn’t see us at first. She was in her house clothes and her expression of great concentration suggested that her head was well and truly elsewhere. She looked as if she’d just been hanging out the washing or had been to ask a neighbor for a pinch of salt. It was evident that she often came in and out of the wardrobe. She exited backward and her contortions as she emerged from her lair were proof that her body was still good for the circus. Once outside—as we remained motionless and silent—she stood up straight, recovering her usual form, shut the door, and fiddled with her hair. There was a full-length mirror on the outside of the wardrobe. When Giuditta looked at herself in it, she discovered us reflected there. A sharp cry shrilled from her throat as if we were four zombies about to rip into her. We took fright at her fright and also screamed, each of us in keeping with the guttural particularities of his own language in such a way that the five of us joined in chorus to create a magical moment of universal fear. The reverberation of our respective fright gave way to mutual recognition. We four. Her.

  “Madonna! Che shock!” she yelled at the top of her lungs in the purest tradition of Italian sopranos, with heavy panting and a hand clutching at her breast. You could never have imagined that such a little body could produce such power. “What are you doing here?”

  “We might well ask you the same,” we said. “What are you doing here, in our father’s apartment? How come you’ve just emerged from his wardrobe?” Chris brought her a glass with one finger of whisky, which went straight down the hatch, as if she was taking medicine.

  “I didn’t hear you arrive . . .” she answered. “But what a stroke of luck that you are here! In fact, I wanted to go through your papers to find some telephone number or address where I could find you . . .” She was talking in fits and starts and paused for a moment to catch her breath. “Your father will kill me . . . He didn’t want me to say a word, but they’ve had him kidnapped for some days and . . .”

  “Kidnapped?” we interrupted in one voice. The word summarily put an end to any adventurers’ joys we might have had.

  “I wanted to persuade you to go there . . . tonight, without him knowing. They’ve abducted him to make him play. You must go and save him tonight—you’re his sons.”

  We poured her another whisky to calm her down. Of course we’d do everything we could to help our father, but first she’d have to tell us the whole story, from beginning to end. She asked us to follow her and, as if undergoing an initiation rite, all four of us passed through the wardrobe’s secret passage one by one. Christof, the most strapping (he doesn’t want us to say “fat”) of all of us, almost got stuck. Once in her place, we distributed ourselves around her now-familiar couch and armchairs to hear from her lips the latest—and most unknown to us—chapter in Gabriel’s life.

  “Where shall I start?” Giuditta asked.

  The first incredible revelation, which left the four of us dumbfounded, is that Gabriel had never left that building in Carrer Nàpols. On the contrary, he’d been holed up there the whole time, with her help. We struggled with our feelings of frustration. How far off the mark we’d been when we imagined him roaming all over the place, and how close he was when we were holding our meetings in the mezzanine apartment!

  Just as we’d suspected more than once, the disastrous game with Feijoo and Miguélez more than a month before had forced our father into hiding. Gabriel refused to return the money they’d loaned him as he believed it was his. If he’d played without their pressure, he said, with his faculties in top form, he would certainly have won. Moreover, it was a matter of pride. He’d wanted to teach that gang of crooks a lesson . . .

  “At that time,” Giuditta informed us, “he’d been playing cards (with sleight of hand when required) as his only profession for about two years. When I asked him if at least he found it diverting he said not really, or only sometimes when he detected that someone was trying unsuccessfully to cheat. He knew of about three or four big-time card games in the city. They were always on Friday and Saturday in simple, working-class bars, nothing flashy, places notable for easy-money exhibitionists and even easier inebriation. Gabriel went from one game to another so nobody would suspect that he lived off them: He never played with the same group two weeks in a row . . .”

  As the bartender had guessed, after that last night in the Carambola Miguélez had gone to the police station and found out Gabriel’s address. On Tuesday evening he and Feijoo turned up at the apartment. The two men, full of cognac and rage, battered at Gabriel’s door, threatening to kill him if he didn’t return the money. Perhaps he’d forgotten, but they had a pistol. Despite the racket, Gabriel gave no sign of life, and after an hour they got fed up and left . . .

  “But the next day they were back. And the next. And the next . . .” Giuditta told us. “ ‘We know you’re in there, you son of a bitch, and we won’t stop till you come out,’ they bellowed in turn. They had no special timetable. One day they’d come in the morning and the next in the evening. Sometimes, when I got home from work, or went out shopping, I saw one of their thugs hanging around in the street a couple of buildings down from us. It was obvious he was watching our doorway. One Friday, I think it was, they turned up again and Miguélez added a new line to his spiel. ‘It’s in your interests to come out, Delacruz,’ he announced. He was full of himself, very arrogant. It gave me the shivers. Gabriel said it was Franco’s cop coming out.

  “It’s not about the money now, you bastard. It’s a question of honor, a personal matter, and, I swear by my holy mother, we won’t stop till we flay you alive. I’ve got good friends in the police force, you know that? And, if necessary, I’ll slap a search warrant on you and we’ll break your door down.’ He drew out the words (“o-u-u-ut,” “mo-o-o-ney,” “b-a-a-astard,” “hono-o-o-or,” “frie-e-e-e-nds”) and, I don’t know how to put it, but you could hear the paranoia in those stretched-out vowels. He sounded like someone who was used to dealing out threats and torture . . .”

  When Miguélez’s obsession over his lost honor, sainted mother, or whatever, led him and Feijoo to intensify their siege, Gabriel had already been holed up for a week without going out. Years earlier, just after Giuditta moved into the next-door apartment, she and our father had embarked on an—let’s say—unlikely amorous relationship. And here we have the second bombshell. The Christophers have a new stepmother, if that’s what we want to call her (not that it makes any difference now), the fifth mother, the Italian one, though she wasn’t of an age to bear another Christopher. From the outset, Giuditta and our father had agreed that they’d each live in their own apartments and preserve a certain degree of independence. They’d be together when they needed one another . . . the same old story that all of us had heard from our mothers.

  “There were weeks when we only saw each other on Sundays, but that was no problem,” Giuditta said. “The celebration more than made up for it. In addition, the neighbors didn’t suspect a thing and the clandestine atmosphere was exciting. Gabriel, as you’ve seen, lived like a refugee, a fugitive with just a few belongings, as if he was waiting for the signal to flee the country pronto. I knew all about this temporary feeling when I was in the circus. One day, for example, he rang at my door, standing there with a travel bag in his hand and beaming from ear to ear. ‘Are you going somewhere?’ I asked him, pointing at the bag. ‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘I’ve come to spend a couple of days with you. Well, that’s if you want . . .’ That night, before we went to bed, he realized
he’d left his toothbrush at his place. ‘Why don’t you go and get it?’ I asked, but he didn’t want to. ‘Too far,’ he said. I thought he was joking but then I saw the unbridgeable distance in his eyes . . .”

  Yes, the fondness with which Giuditta spoke of Gabriel made us think of our mothers: All of them had wisely opted for the same stoicism in their love for him. However, she did confess that the amorous association worked more in our father’s favor. At first she’d hinted a couple of times that they might live together some day—“even more together,” she’d said—but he said he wasn’t made for conjugal life. Then, like someone displaying the scars of an old wound in order to condemn war, he’d told her that he had four sons scattered around Europe with four different mothers. Once she’d taken in that news—subsequently backed up with photos—she had a better understanding of the man’s social limitations . . .

  “Ironies of destiny,” Giuditta resumed. “Feijoo and Miguélez’s harassment pushed us into marital life. Early on Monday morning, three days after the previous visit, Miguélez turned up in the company of another cop from the Policia National. Luckily we’d slept together that night, and Gabriel was still here at my place. All of a sudden we heard a din of footsteps stomping up the stairs. The cop knocked at the door demanding that whoever was inside should open up in the name of the law. He had a search warrant! Obstruction of the law would be punished with heaven knows what! That was the first time we were really scared. Since the situation was getting hairier by the minute, Gabriel made a decision. He gave me the key to his apartment and asked me to go out onto the landing. Meanwhile, he hid in the wardrobe. I opened the door and told the policeman that Senyor Delacruz had gone away for a while. A very long while, to be precise. He’d left me the key in case of emergency. Miguélez (now I could see the face of this monster in all its vileness) interrupted me to ask where Gabriel had gone. I acted all innocent and said I had no idea. He’d just said he was leaving the country and going far away. ‘What did this man do wrong?’ I asked. ‘He seemed so reserved . . .’ The policeman dodged the question. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘there are apartments like this one, that are officially empty but they’re sublet and used as fronts for prostitution or gambling rings.’ ” Giuditta smiled. “ ‘Or dens where they pack in illegal immigrants.’ Then they asked me for the key. All three of us went into Gabriel’s apartment (I didn’t want to leave them alone in there), and the policeman searched it, but very superficially. He went into the bathroom, pulled back the shower curtain, opened the cupboards, and that was that. He did it roughly, just getting the job done. It was all Miguélez could do not to join in. He would have loved to open drawers and snoop along the shelves. It was clear that the cop was uncomfortable. He was doing a favor for a friend, or returning one maybe, but didn’t want to get tangled up in anything. There was a pack of cards on the dining-room table. Sometimes Gabriel killed time playing solitaire. Miguélez picked it up and examined the cards one at a time, looking for some sign of cheating. ‘This is confiscated,’ said the cop and he took the pack. His show of authority satisfied them both and they went off. ‘Ah, and if Senyor Delacruz turns up again,’ the cop warned me, ‘tell him we’re looking for him.’ Miguélez chipped in, ‘And sooner or later we’re going to catch up with him.’ ”

  They were still suspicious because Feijoo and Miguélez repeated their visits over the next couple of days. Without the cop’s presence they were less about psychological torment and more about action, violent and brutal. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. They started to knock at Giuditta’s door to ask for the key, but she wouldn’t open it. From her side of the door she got rid of them by asking if they had another search warrant. Out of an elementary sense of precaution, then, Gabriel stayed in Giuditta’s apartment day and night. If he needed anything, they waited until it was good and late, in the early hours of the morning, and she discretely slipped into his place and brought him whatever it was. The honeymoon—to use Giuditta’s expression—lasted three months . . .

  “To sum up, I don’t believe that Gabriel ever came to think of my place as his place. He liked to say he was spending a while in Italy. That was something he’d always wanted to do. When he was a truck driver he traveled around half of Europe but had never been in my country. He asked me to teach him a few words in Italian and then he mixed them up with words from other languages he’d picked up. As a result, we had the craziest conversations. When we were at home together we talked about our travels as a way of escaping. He reminisced about his adventures in the truck and I relived the endless wandering that was part and parcel of working in a circus. We toyed with the idea, and it wasn’t totally off the wall, that the La Ibérica truck might have stopped, years ago, in some town where we were camped.” Giuditta was struggling not to lose herself in these sweet memories and to stay with the present. “Gabriel’s roving, weightless existence, which I compared with the gravity-defying hours I spent on the trapeze, finally came to an end . . .”

  Another highly significant part of the story dates from about this period: the destruction of Gabriel’s apartment. Perhaps that’s exaggerating a bit; let’s say its overall neglect. One morning a worker from the electricity company turned up to do some repairs in the building. He was in uniform and carried a tool box. Giuditta opened her door to him and he showed her his company ID, after which he fiddled with her electricity meter for a while. Gabriel had hidden in the bedroom while she kept an eye on the worker, who was connecting wires and offering all kinds of incomprehensible explanations for the repair job. When he finished, the electrician asked if she knew the next-door neighbor. He’d rung the bell but nobody answered. She very straightforwardly offered to open up the apartment for him. The worker gave nothing away. If anything, he seemed grateful for her help. He went inside and, there too, fiddled with a few wires in the meter, under Giuditta’s constant vigilance. When he finished, he thanked her and disappeared without going up to the other apartments. They thought that this was odd but at no point had any misgivings about the man. That night, however, Giuditta went to Gabriel’s place to get something for him and found that the lights weren’t working. She lit a candle, inspected the meter and thought it looked as if it had been disconnected. She decided she’d phone the electricity company the next day to complain. She wasn’t quick enough. The doorbell woke them very early in the morning. Giuditta got out of bed and took the precaution of looking through the peephole. It was Miguélez. He’d come back. This time he wasn’t shouting. In a slimy, snaky voice he hissed, “I know you won’t open up for me, but that doesn’t matter. When your neighbor comes home, ask him how he’s going to manage without electricity. We’ve got him surrounded. We’re looking for him twenty-four hours a day.”

  Gabriel took this predicament as a personal defeat, a battle lost. He’d underestimated Feijoo and Miguélez. They were craftier than he’d given them credit for, and there was no doubt that the siege would continue. These people never give up. Again, reporting them to the police would be useless. It might look like a cowardly decision but, right now, his only solution was to make them believe that he really had left the country. Desperate measures were needed. The first step would be to stop paying his rent, water, and electricity bills. He’d won a lot of money playing cards and could keep going without joining other games for a good long while. Anyway, he said, he’d already been a recluse once in his life, and going into seclusion again didn’t bother him in the least. Giuditta wasn’t impressed by this display of stoicism and asked how much he owed them. She could just give it to them and that would be the end of it. Gabriel firmly rejected her offer.

  “These people never have enough. Anyway, I’m sure that it’s not because of the money that I owe them that they’re so angry,” he admitted. “It’s because of the money I’ve been taking off them over time.” He got a piece of paper and a pen and did a few sums, adding and multiplying. The figure was impressive. “You could say that they and they alone have been maintaining me for a year
and a half.” Giuditta whistled in admiration. “But now, for some reason, the penny’s suddenly dropped that I won by cheating . . .” Gabriel mused.

  While he was formulating his hypothesis he had a hunch. He went to get the jacket he’d been wearing the night of the last game, sat down on the couch and felt around in the sleeves. He pulled out two cards, one from each sleeve, and carefully examined them. One was a joker, and he soon found Feijoo’s mark, the third-eye spot. “I’m done for,” he said, tossing away the card in a gesture of despair.

  “That afternoon, Gabriel started to measure up the bedroom wall,” Giuditta went on. “When I wanted to know why he was doing that he just asked me to go to the hardware shop and buy him a chisel and a mallet. He was patient and resigned, with the conviction of someone with a plan to carry out. ‘If I have to stay shut up here for a time,’ he explained, ‘at least we’ll be able to cross the border between Italy and Spain whenever we feel the urge.’

  “The following morning he tuned into a music program on the radio and turned it up full blast to cover up the mallet blows. He emptied the wardrobe, traced a window with a pencil and set about breaking through the wall. Crouching there inside with dust all over his face and surrounded by rubble, he looked like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. Three hours later, he’d opened up a hole that was eighty centimeters high and almost the same width, large enough for us to cross to the other side, which is to say into the wardrobe in his bedroom. In the afternoon he made it easier to move through. He smoothed off the edges of the bricks and then covered up the hole with some wooden panels and a few empty shoeboxes. That night we crawled across the border and, for the first and only time since we’d met, he insisted that we should sleep together in his place. Maybe it’s stupid, but that made me very happy . . .”