Lost Luggage (16 page)

Today, Carolina lives in a nondescript town in the center of France. It would appear that she has made peace with her destiny, or whatever you want to call it. Still youthful, in her late fifties, she's married to a moderately wealthy gentleman and bears a French surname that enables her both to shield and forget about her past as Muriel. In some writing-desk drawer, under a bundle of letters and newspaper cuttings, she must have hoarded a few photos of Bundó, or maybe just one, the one that shows him at his best. In her jewel box, too, she must keep the earrings he bought for her, after much deliberation and shelling out a fortune, at the Bagués jeweller's shop in Barcelona, or a bijou ring from one of their purloined boxes. Carolina professes an intimate devotion to these objects and, precisely because of that, she forces herself not to look at the photos or wear the jewellery too often. From time to time, however, she goes back to them, compelled by some desperate need. If she's alone at home, she takes out a photo of Bundó and leaves it on the kitchen table where she can see it all morning, or she'll put on the earrings even though she's not going out. “The past hurts,” she says and then feels guilty because she can't help it. Without Bundó, the past turned into forbidden territory.

In our inspection of the boxes that Gabriel had left in the apartment in Carrer Nàpols, we found a recent address book. We checked through it and discovered where Carolina was living in France. We didn't know whether she was still alive, but we wrote to her explaining who we were, the Christophers, and that we were trying to find Gabriel. Then we asked if we could visit her. The answer came two months later when we'd given up hope, and it was brief and disappointing. In wavering handwriting, as if she doubted every word she penned, she said she didn't know where our father was—“where he's hiding,” she said in fact, as if that were the only possible verb. She was happy that we four brothers had finally met—yes, she knew there were four of us—but ventured to say she didn't think it was a good idea to see all of us
together. (Her lack of curiosity, by the way, reminded us of how our mothers felt about the enigma of Gabriel. With time one forgets these things.) The best she could do, said Carolina at the end of her letter, would be to meet Christophe for an hour and a half when she next went to Paris. Immediately after that, betraying a sense of urgency—and who knows if she would come to regret her words—she suggested a time and a place.

The appointed day arrived. In the end, with considerable difficulty, Christophe managed to stretch the hour and a half into a two-hour conversation (a monologue, rather). It was a Friday, lunchtime, at the beginning of September, at that time of year when the clear blue Parisian sky stretches like a balloon about to burst. Carolina had arranged to meet Christophe in Gastronominus, an old-style brasserie with mirrors, wooden benches, and a display of oysters in Avenue Gambetta, not far from the Père Lachaise cemetery. We'd decided to move one of our nonessential meetings to Paris that weekend. Disguised as tourists, cameras hanging from our necks, and using an open map as a foil, we other Christophers spied on them from behind the greasy windows of a Chinese restaurant across the street. (Carolina, if you read this, will you forgive us? We were full of admiration and got carried away.) It wasn't through lack of desire, but we refrained from showing up at the brasserie and confined ourselves to observing her from a distance. We were carrying on like lovesick adolescents, we admit, and each of us kept to himself the libidinous thoughts that afforded us a false intimacy with a sort of
belle de jour
Carolina (and Bundó would surely have forgiven our playful fantasies). The two hours went by in a flash. When she decided that the conversation had run its course, despite Christophe's best efforts to distract her and keep her talking, Carolina paid for the lunch, gave him a kiss, and disappeared up the avenue in a taxi. We other three Christophers came out of hiding and dashed over to Gastronominus as if we wanted to breathe in the essence of whatever trace she left, or were trying to keep a flame alive before it definitively went out. Seated at the same table, fetishizing the moment, we
demanded that Christophe recount every inflection of her voice, every word that had crossed her lips.

Having pooled all the—at times contradictory—information at our disposal, we can now find our way through part of the maze.

Bundó met Muriel first and gradually, like someone peeling a thick-skinned fruit, he discovered the sweet Carolina hidden beneath. That November of 1965, Mademoiselle Muriel was only nineteen and had been working in the brothel for less than two months. She was a tall girl, more than a meter seventy, of firm yet svelte build. She was what the Spanish truck drivers of the time called a
maciza
, a well-built woman. In the salon, dressed only in a negligée, she displayed graceful flesh that seemed to have soaked up the sun, like that of a professional tennis player at Roland Garros during afternoon play. Her long hair, of such bright blondness it looked false, gave her a Nordic appearance that was only belied by the unmistakably Latin features of her face. At some stage in her genetic history there'd been a festival. Her Latin features were especially appealing: She had dark eyes and soft rounded cheeks, while a slightly outsize nose and mouth gave her a Gypsy-like physiognomy. More than beauty, her main attraction was her proportions: Seeing her height, her long legs, terrific breasts, and the bone structure of her body, you might have expected some awkwardness or possibly equine features, but she was perfectly proportioned. (Christophe confirms somewhat cautiously that, more than thirty years later, her elegance is still intact.) Our mothers, who saw photos of her at the time, shown off by a very proud Bundó, agree that she had a film-star aura. Sarah says she looked like an ingenuous, virginal starlet just before she's discovered (and messed up) by a Hollywood director. Mireille, the one who saw most of her, says she could have been a pin-up girl on a fold-out poster from
Lui.
Sigrun recalls her as having a touch of Monica Vitti in Antonioni's
The Eclipse
, as if she'd become bored with life too soon.

This profound disaffection must have acted as a protective carapace, and only Bundó was able to break through it. He did so in the only way possible: by not especially wanting to. At first, the frosty distance Muriel presented to her clients, unaware that
this only heightened her charms, was simply the translation of Carolina's shyness into sexual confidence. Something the French are good at. Not long afterward, when the trade of spreading her legs for strangers left her innocence in tatters, Muriel learned to exploit this
froideur
, in order to spend more time with her legs closed and charge for it anyway. Bundó's good fortune—the transition from client to lover, the subconscious desire of most men who enter a brothel—is that he was able to bed Muriel while he was in love with Carolina, seeing them as two different people. We won't go into the intimate details because we don't know them, and too much time has gone by since their expiry date for them to matter much, although it is worth going back to the beginning in order to understand the situation.

In the spring of 1965, Carolina's parents decided to leave the little village in Jaén where they'd lived all their lives and to move to the outskirts of Barcelona. Some relatives, the pioneers, who'd taken a chance on leaving the village six months earlier, had written them a hope-inspiring letter. They talked about a metallurgical factory that needed workers and some cheap, very nice little houses that were being built on the outskirts of the city. It was like an Andalusian village, they said, but relocated close to the sea and shaded by a mountain. When they seriously pondered this uncertain future, Carolina's parents found, incredibly, that it had more appeal than the deadening silence of the street they lived on. Her father, a daydreamer who listened to the radio every night, tried hard to imagine a hectic, noisy city full of cars and people, but the pictures were never clear. Then his stomach knotted up with the familiar, uncomfortable sensation of regretting the fact that he'd never dared to leave. In the end, mainly because he was tired of grappling with these difficult thoughts of a different future, he decided to take his family to the prosperous Catalan region. Responding to a challenge or, if you like, looking to the future.

Carolina cried all the way on the train to Barcelona. Once there, her mother settled easily into the new neighborhood, a microclimate outside of which she rarely ventured until the day she died. Her three brothers, younger than her and all quite callow,
accepted the father's plans without too much adolescent angst. Two weeks after the family had moved into a rented shack in Can Tunis, all three boys were working and were allowed to keep some of their weekly wages. Meanwhile, Carolina's tears regularly gushed forth with all the despair of a Juliet. She stayed at home, helping her mother and incessantly complaining that her parents had dragged her away from the village with the sole intention of separating her from an overly wild boyfriend who drank rum and coke and wanted to be a motocross rider when he was old enough. Her sense of injustice put her in a perpetually foul mood. She also wrote daily letters to the boy.

“They were such crazy letters that the poor boy must have been scared to death,” Carolina told Christophe in the Paris brasserie, disowning that stage of her life. “I can't even remember his name. Benito? Indalecio? It was one of those names you'd expect a bachelor uncle to have. I wrote to him in pencil, which I do remember, and I imagine him replying to me scared stiff and praying I wouldn't do anything stupid because at the end of all my letters I threatened to cut my veins for love. Cutting your veins, in Jaén, in the sixties, was something done only by women who weren't right in the head or were possessed by the devil.”

The boy couldn't have been such a good-for-nothing by the standards of the day because he replied punctually to all her letters once a week and, in his way, said yes to everything. That he'd rescue her from that hell. That they'd escape and travel the world—or Spain at least. That they'd have a big family, like in that film
La Gran Familia
, with Alberto Closas, the one where he's got fifteen kids. One day, in a letter of early June, amid all the tremendous promises that Carolina extracted like manna from him, the boy came up with a proposal. In the summer he'd be joining a group of local seasonal farm workers to go grape-picking in France. They planned to be there almost two months, until the end of September, and the employers promised a good wage. They'd be paid in French currency. What if she did that too and they met up there? He could add her name to the list of grape-pickers and then, once the season was over, they could have a week's holiday. Two months
of being together every day, could she imagine that? He'd been told the south of France was very beautiful.

Carolina received the offer with some chagrin. She was delighted with the idea, genuinely moved, but she was also loath to emerge from the state of anguish into which she'd settled over the last few weeks. Happiness doesn't exist; it is only desired. Then again, she found it suspicious that, when her mother heard about it, she didn't hesitate to encourage her to put her name down as a grape picker.

“She would have wanted me out of the house, and the further away the better, of course,” Carolina recalled. “I don't blame her. That silly stubborn little girl, a rebel without the slightest cause, probably deserved everything that happened to her shortly afterward in France.” A few seconds of meditative silence. “Even now, I don't know if my life's been a punishment or a prize.”

Finally, Carolina got on the train that took her to Perpignan. Once there, she had to get the bus the Andalusians were traveling on and go with them to pick grapes somewhere near the Rhone. The last-minute preparations and the telephone conversation with her boyfriend, frequently interrupted by interference and tearful laughter, cleared up any lingering doubts. The Carolina who said good-bye to her parents one Saturday morning at the Estació de França was a soul in expansion. She was nineteen, with kilometers stretching ahead of her and a head full of dreams. Barely four months later, the Muriel who attracted Bundó in a roadside brothel just outside Lyon, near Feyzin, had given up hope and confined herself to surviving in no-man's-land.

“So what happened? Well, my poor little boyfriend couldn't cope with the French air,” Carolina said. “We met in Perpignan, and sat in the back seat of the bus holding hands all the way, but when we started picking grapes he went strange on me. To begin with, the men and women slept in separate shelters. The first three or four nights we waited patiently until everybody had gone to bed to sneak off and meet secretly in some hiding place. In the morning at breakfast, when we were eating our slice of bread with olive oil, he was congratulated by the men in the village. I, however,
was given dirty looks by the women. Before long, tiredness got the better of us. In our free time, he went looking for out-of-the-way places, but I didn't dare to move away from the women. Then he told me that Barcelona had changed me. I denied it and—without really wanting to, I can assure you—I began to defend my parents and their decision to leave the village. He told me I'd got stuck-up. We had a fight and went to bed early. In our separate shelters. The next morning, in the vineyard, we sought each other out to make up, but it was difficult to exchange even a few words because the overseers were always watching. For them, we were just dirt-poor Spaniards. They yelled at us in French and those storms of guttural sounds hovered over us like a threat. Today, I doubt they'd yell so much. Well anyway, what happened was that our first day off was a Sunday. We'd decided to take some lunch with us and go and swim in the river. My little angel was quite a sluggard. I waited for a while with the sandwiches ready and finally went to wake him up. He'd skipped out. His bed was empty, and there was no sign of his suitcase. One of the people from the village took me aside and, before saying a word, handed me a nicely ironed handkerchief. Then he told me that the boy had gone home, the wimp. He said he was missing his family.” Carolina let out a sarcastic laugh. “Poor little chap. I never heard another word from him and I didn't want to either. I got through the two months as best I could. The women in the village must have consoled me, though I don't have good memories of them. I finished the grape picking with a bit of money in my pocket. It wasn't much but, since I'd earned it myself, it gave me a sense of freedom and self-esteem. At home with my family, I never knew that existed. The day the bus went back to Spain, I didn't turn up at the bus stop. Instead, I went into a baker's and asked for a slice of cake. I wanted to feel important. Then I phoned home and told my mother I'd been offered another job working on the land and wouldn't be back till Christmas. I didn't go back to Barcelona at Christmas. One of the overseers in the vineyard had introduced me to a friend of his from Saint-Étienne. He had a bistro in Lyon and needed waitresses.”