Lost Luggage (28 page)

So, here's the big joke, Christophers: I'm a child of the revolution. I told you before that the world's badly divided up. I was born in the blissful Latin Quarter. Mom wanted a natural birth assisted by a pioneering midwife and a bunch of hippies who, when I poked my head out, were in ecstasy over the cosmic communion that my appearance afforded them. The first smell to hit my nostrils on
this side of the universe was that of marijuana. They swaddled me in sequinned Indian scarves, which I soon polluted with dribble and puked-up milk. Rocking me in my cradle, my wannabe fathers and mothers sang “Les Nouveaux Partisans” or “Le Déserteur” (“
Depuis que je suis né, j'ai vu mourir mon père, j'ai vu partir mes frères
 . . .”). They sound like words wanting to predict my future, eh? Maybe it's the pendulum effect, but I've always had problems with the hippie flights and fancies of my mom and company. Not that I've gone to the other extreme, but I do value law and order and see myself as a pragmatic rationalist. That's why I studied science, I guess.

Sometimes when she's been in Paris visiting a friend from those days, or when she's smoked too much dope, or simply because she's having a regressive day, Mom phones me in the evening to have a chat (she kicked me out of the house years ago, as she likes to say). First, as an opening gambit, she tells me a bit of news, but she soon starts rambling on about how she's wondering where we'd be and what we'd be like now if we hadn't gone to live in the much more working-class neighborhood of the nineteenth arrondissement around Christmas in 1970. What would I, especially, be like if we'd stayed on in the commune? She's exquisitely polite, affably resigned, and shows no sign of resentment, but I'm sure that deep down, very deep down, she's having a go at me about something as if, entirely through my own fault, I missed the chance to be a better person and am somehow responsible for the way things turned out with Dad, and so on and so forth. I hear her out patiently and, in the end, always say the same thing: “Don't ask me, Mom, I wasn't even two.”

I know I bore her to death and I don't do anything to spare her.

As I said before, Christophers, I've never been able to recapture all those events filed away in my perplexed little head. If we're going to reconstruct those days of wine and roses, I'll trust the memories of the lead players and go back a little more in time. I'd like to talk about the glorious entry—ahem—into Paris of La Ibérica's Pegaso. We'll leave Mireille stranded in the Latin Quarter commune. It's early in the morning. Cigarette in her hand, gaze
lost in the distance, her mind trapped between desire for insurrection and sleep, as she's just expressed in a yawn, she's smiling as she contemplates the possible victory. Sitting around her, the striking students are recounting their forays of the preceding days, the police charges, and last Monday's meeting at the Arc de Triomphe with some proletarian comrades. I look it up in the history books—because it's history now—and read that the demands of the demonstration were that the police should vacate the university campus, an amnesty for the detained students, and that the Nanterre and Sorbonne universities should be reopened, but the government ignored them. Mireille and her comrades are going over their plans for future clashes.

That was the morning of Friday, May 10, 1968, and the first ray of sun was about to light up the tip of the Eiffel Tower.

Meanwhile, more than eight hundred kilometers away, the Pegaso had just got through the customs point at La Jonquera and was now trundling along French roads. The previous afternoon Bundó, Gabriel, and Petroli had loaded up the contents of an apartment at the top end of Carrer Balmes. After a very early night, they'd left La Ibérica at four in the morning. The move consisted of transporting furniture and objects belonging to a young fellow in the tanning business, who was opening up a branch in Paris. Since his boy had married a Frenchwoman, Daddy had coughed up and presented him with his very own luxury shoe boutique in Rue Saint-Honoré.

As always, Gabriel was driving when they crossed the border. Bundó had dropped off to sleep when they were level with Figueres, his head resting against the door. The gently rocking truck was his cradle but, near Lyon, as regularly happened, he'd wake up with a headache and then complain that his two friends hadn't roused him earlier. Petroli, sitting in the middle, checked that they had the keys and then leafed through the papers for the move. The seven o'clock news on Spanish National Radio had just reported disturbances in Paris. “The City of Light is under siege, is in darkness, and has become a war zone due to an uprising by students and workers. The authorities are attempting to restore law and
order.” He found the address: Rue de l'Estrapade. He'd locate the street on the map later. They still had hours of traveling ahead of them. They did a hundred kilometers listening to the radio in silence. Gabriel used to say that all their trips required a warming-up stage. During the first few hours, the coolest and the ones that went by fastest, they didn't waste their breath. There was no point in talking for the sake of it. The three men molded themselves into the seat and kept their eyes on the road, mesmerized by the monotonous landscape. Sometimes they looked for changes in it. They'd comment on them for a second and then lapse back into silence.

“That ad over there, ‘
Visitez la Camargue
,' was that there before?”

“I think so.”

“I never noticed it.”

“So maybe it wasn't there. I don't know.”

“It doesn't look very new to me.”

“ ‘Visitez la Camargue' . . .”

They'd just passed Valence when Bundó woke up with a start. They'd agreed to stop for breakfast that morning on the Lyon road, a real sit-down, knife-and-fork breakfast for Gabriel and Petroli while Bundó used the time for a chaste encounter with Muriel-Carolina.

“Where are we?” he asked immediately, rubbing his eyes in an attempt to banish sleep and focus on the landscape. The other two laughed at his startled expression.

“We've just gone through Lyon, Dijon too. Carolina sends her regards,” Petroli said. Still dopey, Bundó took some seconds to react, until he saw a sign saying ‘Lyon—20km'.

“You two are just jealous,” he said, relieved. He opened the glove compartment, took out the communal Dopp kit, which was stuffed with stolen goods, and started sprucing himself up. The operation involved running a comb through his tangle of hair, a dash of deodorant under his arms, a squirt of expensive cologne, and, finally, changing into a brand-new poplin shirt, very fashionable at the time. Bundó enjoyed doing this because he believed
he was making his two friends jealous. In fact, he was a bundle of nerves and, with his curls and his ingenuous face-pulling in the hand mirror, he looked like Harpo Marx. What's more, this time, he was smartening up with some ceremony because he had a surprise for Carolina. Some days earlier, when he'd gone to the Monte de Piedad savings bank in Barcelona to deposit his weekly pay, the branch manager had told him about some new public housing apartments in Via Favència. He had a leaflet with a plan of the apartment, photos of the neighborhood, and a balance sheet showing the sums the bank had done for him. The conditions seemed so favorable that Bundó had made up his mind—he only needed a bit of encouragement from Carolina—to go ahead and buy it and, without telling her, to put it in both their names.

Carolina was waiting for them outside when they parked in front of the Papillon. In daylight, without the neon lighting and din of cars coming and going, the big old building looked marooned and so fragile that it might topple over with the next puff of wind. Standing there, weary and as still as a statue after getting rid of her last client five hours earlier, she fitted into the scene with painful precision. Bundó was trembling when he got out of the Pegaso. Gabriel and Petroli said hello to Carolina and went off to the gas station cafeteria. They reminded Bundó and Carolina that they'd be back in fifty minutes, not one second later. As they drove off, Gabriel spied in the rearview mirror the tremulous image of a couple locked in a passionate embrace.

If I dwell a little on these moments, Christophers, it's not because they are of any special importance in the coming epic. Quite the contrary. They're only circumstantial details. I'm transcribing them just as my mother related them to me—and Gabriel to her—with the full weight of their triviality. I like emphasising this because we, brothers, are heirs to this type of contradiction: students turning out Molotov cocktails in a Paris commune and three truck drivers stopping off on a side road to visit a prostitute. Life's strange.

An hour later, a blast from the Pegaso horn reverberated through that small corner of the world. The door of the upstairs
room opened and Bundó and Carolina emerged. The farewell was briefer and more mechanical than on previous occasions. Carolina waved good-bye from the landing, a woebegone send-off. Once in the cab, Bundó was his usual taciturn self but remained silent for a long time. He was the most temperamental of the three of them. His mood could change a hundred times in a single trip. He could just as easily be exultant with unwarranted joy or huddled gloomily in his seat. His brain was then a scramble of forebodings and misunderstandings. His relationship with Carolina had aggravated this emotional bedlam, and Gabriel and Petroli knew that when he'd been with her he always went through an unapproachable phase (and surreptitiously bet on how many kilometers it would last before he spoke).

That day, Bundó broke all records for silence. His friends tried, as usual, to cajole him out of his gloom with the odd cheeky comment, by needling him and teasing him, but he didn't respond. Gabriel, who'd witnessed these attacks of withdrawal both in the House of Charity and the boarding house, realized that this was an extreme situation. It was therefore better to get to the heart of the matter, without beating about the bush.

“Are you going to make us suffer, Bundó? What's going on with you two?” he asked. The question did the job.

“It's all gone down the drain.” Bundó's words fell like a death sentence. He was still holding the crumpled Monte de Piedad leaflet. “Carolina will never come to Barcelona. It's over, boys. I showed her the plans of the apartment in Via Favència. I was so excited about it but when she saw what it meant she got really mad. Instead of being happy, she said that I'm taking too much for granted. She'll leave her job when she's ready to and not when I say so. I'm no white knight . . .” He made a strange, pathetic sound. His voice threatened to break into a sob any minute. “I know I'm no prince but I'm no jerk either. And she's no princess, fucking hell! It's all over. I'd bet my life she's got some client who waits on her hand and foot, one of these uptight Frog bachelors who wants to take her home, promising the world . . .” Petroli, at his side, patted his back to urge him on. Not that there was any need.
Now he'd started to let off steam, there was no way of stopping him. They were a captive audience for more than half an hour while Bundó delivered his monologue. When the list of grievances and complaints started becoming repetitive, his speech took an abrupt turn toward self-flagellation. Bundó took on the blame for everything. He was a miserable wretch . . . and she, poor thing, she did the best she could . . . How could he have not realized? Earning your living as a
cocotte
must be terrible. Now he saw it all clearly: He had to give her more freedom. So she'd feel more secure and, most of all, want to get back together. Gabriel and Petroli had switched off some time before they heard the last few words. “That's it! Now I've got it, lads. On the way back, if it's okay by you, we'll stop at the Papillon again. Ten minutes, that's all. In and out. I'll tell her we can forget all about the apartment, we'll tear up the prospectus, no more ties, and we'll go on just the same as always.” He paused to catch his breath. “But I'm sure Carolina will beg me at the last minute not to do it. I'm certain of that. She's been doing that fucking job so long her feelings have frozen, but if anyone knows how to find the heart in that deep freeze, it's me. Maybe she doesn't know it yet, but we're made for each other. And when the time comes, you'll be at the wedding, won't you? Fucking hell, what am I saying? Of course you'll be there. Gabriel and you, Petroli, you'll be my best men.”

At four in the afternoon they rolled into Paris through the Porte d'Orléans. Bundó had taken the wheel to get through the city. It was a good way to shut him up. Petroli consulted the street map and directed him, using their own pared-down language, like a driver and codriver in a rally. Second right. Straight ahead to the end, then first left if you can. Traffic lights, a roundabout maybe, then right if you can. They didn't say the French names of the streets because that would have complicated things. Gabriel, meanwhile, amused himself by looking at the city. He'd been in Paris several times, thanks to the accidental tourism afforded by the moves, and there was nowhere else he so wanted to stop the truck, forget the load, and go for a walk. He compared it with Barcelona, and it seemed to him that the view through the windshield
was cleaner here. Another life was possible. “If I get lost some day, look for me in Paris,” he used to say, but this didn't turn out to be true later on. As they moved toward the center, the traffic in the avenues was dwindling. It was Friday but it seemed like Sunday afternoon. After listening to the news in French and deciphering the situation, they'd expected a city swarming with people. On the contrary, the Montparnasse neighborhood was sunk in the silence of a curfew. A small smattering of pedestrians here and there; the café terraces, usually chocablock, practically deserted. They drove along a wide avenue to Port-Royal and then continued along Boulevard Saint-Michel but, when the Luxembourg Gardens came into sight, a gendarme made them take a detour. They were less than three hundred meters from Rue de l'Estrapade, very close to Rue Lhomond, but getting to the address they wanted required all kinds of twists, turns, and maneuvres. Some alleys were so narrow that the truck would have got stuck in the middle. The few people who were out and about stared at them as if they'd dropped in from outer space—and perhaps they had. Finally, they found a good parking spot at a crossroads. There was space to unload in front of the building and they stopped the truck.