Lost Luggage (50 page)

“I'm not going up,” she said. “Everything I need from Bundó I have with me. I couldn't even spend five minutes in that house. The memories we didn't get to create . . . the constant trap of what couldn't be would make my life unbearable. I'm taking the train back to France tonight, Gabriel, to see if I can start all over again. I'll write to you or phone you. Here, take the keys and do whatever you want with the apartment. Live there, if you like. We'll sort out the legal stuff later. It'll take no time at all because there's nothing more I can take from there.”

That night, Gabriel slept in the Falcon Room. Well, rather than sleeping, he waited till morning. Then, at breakfast, he informed Senyora Rifà that he was leaving the boarding house.

“I'll be away for a long time,” he said.

Even in his most desperate moments he only thought about a provisional change of address (but, in fact, he never went back there). Then he phoned El Tembleque and asked him to help him move his few belongings. That's how he ended up living in Bundó's apartment. He didn't know why, maybe it was like repaying a debt, but he had one clear goal. He would never go out unless it was absolutely essential. Once again, Christophers, irony did a dazzling double somersault. The very day that Rita decided to spare no effort to find the man of her life, he finally stopped moving.

Barcelona was too big a city for playing hide-and-seek.

G
abriel's retreat lasted eighty days. The day it ended . . . well, the day it ended, Christophers, my mother appeared in his life for the third time, ready to stay for ever. But there's no need to get excited about that just yet. It'll all happen soon enough. As for what happened during his lengthy (two Lents!) reclusion, we now have a paradox: While our father was running around in the Pegaso, we could easily stay on his trail but when he finally stops in one spot, we lose track of him.

All we know of that period is what he revealed to my mother during pillow talk. His withdrawal into the apartment in Via Favència couldn't have been more prosaic. It's not as if he rolled down the blinds, for example, believing that his solitude should be steeped in darkness or, worse, exposed beneath the interrogative glare of a bare light bulb. He wasn't moved by mystical or esoteric impulses; he didn't want to purge his pain like an anchorite; he wasn't trying to communicate with Bundó's spirit (though he would have liked to). Neither did he want to take his friend's place even though Bundó had once suggested that they could live there together. No, Gabriel locked himself away in his new home out of instinct, a simple reaction to his own state of mind. Yet me might say that, in his isolation, Gabriel respected Bundó's wishes.

The apartments in that building—and, in fact, the whole neighborhood—seem to have been designed to blight the private
lives of workers, to make them yearn for the factories. In sixty square meters, counting dead space and off-kilter walls, there were two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living-cum-dining room and a bathroom. I know that because, when we first started to look for signs of our father, I went up to Via Favència one Saturday morning to see Bundó's apartment. I rang at the street door. After taking me for a Jehovah's Witness and then an encyclopedia salesman, the lady who's now living there decided I was a journalist and let me in. My heart sank when she opened the door. It was a desolate sight. Thirty years after the building went up architects had discovered structural deterioration typically associated with high-alumina cement. A forest of metal props temporarily underpinned her ceiling. The lady ushered me into the apartment through a sort of tunnel.

“It might smell of mildew because of the damp,” she warned. “I don't notice it any more.”

Hiding my excitement, which would have been unseemly, I walked around that bunker, room by room. For a few frivolous seconds I was tempted by the idea that all this ruin emanated from our father's unhappy days, a kind of affliction brought on by delayed grief. With admirable poise, no doubt a by-product of two years of enduring life on this building site, the lady made coffee, which we had in the living room. It was like being in an abandoned coal mine. The only relief came from a yellow canary warbling in its cage and a radio-cassette player from which issued Antonio Machín's boleros. “Right here, on these very tiles,” I thought, “Bundó was capering and dancing around like a man possessed on the last Christmas Eve of his life.”

The lady, a widow in her sixties, wanted me to have a look at the title deeds. She always kept them handy, tucked away in a plastic folder ready to show visiting journalists or building inspectors. I recognized Carolina's signature on them. The date on the contract of purchase for that slum was June 1979. I would have paid a fortune to know the terms of the agreement between Gabriel and Carolina. What was clear was that the apartment remained in Carolina's name for the seven years Gabriel lived there.
I asked the lady if she recalled the person who countersigned the contract, but it had been a long time, and her memory was no longer what it used to be. What she did tell me is that when she and her husband moved in they found a collection of things left behind by the former occupant. Most of it was junk, but they'd taken a fancy to two or three items. I asked her if she could show me any of them, and she pointed at two pictures, still hanging on the wall. They were the autumnal landscapes, the bad Olot School imitations claimed by Bundó in the divvying up of the last move, Number 199. He hadn't lived to see them on display, so I deduced that Gabriel must have retrieved them and hung them up. Ah, and before leaving, Christophers, I indulged in a bit of mischief that you'll like. I told the lady that they were by a very good painter who hadn't been properly recognised in his lifetime, informing her, too, that the initials S.B. with which they were signed concealed a man called Serafí Bundó.

“That name rings a bell . . .” the candid soul said, not knowing how happy that made me.

In the few months he was living there, Bundó had fixed up the apartment to his liking but had left the smaller bedroom empty, the only room he hadn't wallpapered. He always said it would be for the kids. When Carolina reminded him that she didn't want to have children, that she'd told him so a thousand times, he corrected himself and referred to it as the guest room. That was our father's refuge. It was about nine square meters with a window opening onto the light well. Since it was a seventh-floor apartment, halfway up the building, this window had to be kept closed all the time because of the smells drifting up from the downstairs kitchens. Before moving in, Gabriel bought a mattress, a bedstead, and a bedside table and set out his possessions just as he'd done when he was in the boarding house. You might say only the falcon was missing.

You mustn't—please don't—confuse this conduct with any kind of temporary insanity. What I want to say, and I'll try to clarify this, is that when it suited him, Gabriel's withdrawal was sometimes more psychological than physical. He spent whole days
without going out, but this wasn't because of dogma, and it didn't make him a Carthusian monk either. When the larder was bare, he'd go out for an hour or so in the morning, call into the bank, get a bit of money out of his account, do some shopping at the corner shop, and stock up at the tobacconist's. On one of these expeditions, two weeks after shutting himself away, he went looking for a pay phone and called La Ibérica. Although he was still on sick leave, he told Rebeca he'd decided to call it a day. Advising him not to rush into it, the secretary spared him the conversation with the boss. They'd talk about it again when they took the cast off and he was fit to work. He agreed but on condition that she never revealed to anybody where he was. Nobody. Rebeca went along with it.

“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.”