Lost Luggage (3 page)

Given all this evidence, the easiest thing would be to recognize that Dad was a compulsive liar, and we certainly wouldn't be wrong about that, but that explanation seems too simple. For the moment, we're not interested in condemning him but just finding out where he is. Who he is. If we succeed some day, then we'll ask for explanations. At present, we prefer to venture free of prejudice into the shadows of his life because, after all, if the four of us have met it's thanks to him—and his absence. It may not be easy to understand, but we prefer our totally subjective or, if you like, deluded enthusiasm to indignation. The same photos that perpetuated his deceit now serve to bring us together as brothers. We prize them as a sign that, all those years ago, our father foresaw our meeting up as brothers. Yet another dream for us to cling to. Sure, our method of deduction isn't very scientific, but at least it allows us to breathe a little life into these photos.

We must confess: Starting from a certainty helped us forge a bond. The first day we got together in Barcelona and laid out the photos of our father, in order on the table, in our attempt to construct
a plausible story, we understood that he'd never revealed anything about himself to us. Not a glimmer. Hardly a hint of emotion. Suddenly, those photos all lined up, mute and faded, reminded us of a series of images from a film, like those stills they used to hang in the entrances of cinemas to show what was coming next. You could study them for ages, staring at the motionless actors and actresses, imagining the scenes in which they'd been shot, and, if you didn't know anything about the story beforehand, it was impossible to work out whether it was a comedy, a drama, or a mystery. Whether they were about to burst out laughing or crying.

That's pretty much how it is. Gabriel, our father, is an actor in a photo, and the more you look at him the more you fall under his spell.

O
ur father's name is—or was—Gabriel Delacruz Expósito. We'll start there.

It's anybody's guess whether the mother who bore him gave him the name in memory of the man who got her pregnant, or in the belief that if she made this offering to the archangel her child would be looked after for the rest of his days, or simply because somebody in the street that night rained curses on some good-for-nothing named Gabriel, and she was inspired by that. Such suppositions can never be confirmed. Whatever happened, the woman must have had her own good reasons if she went to the trouble of giving her kid a name.

A married couple with a salt cod stall next to the El Born market found the child at six in the morning. They were the first to arrive that day. They noticed a bundle of rags next to the main entrance in Carrer Comerç but, in the dim early morning light, they took it for a rotten cauliflower overlooked by the garbage collectors (who, sometimes, when they were having a midnight break in the vicinity of the market, would get one that was still fairly intact and play a bit of soccer). All of a sudden, the cauliflower started to squall in broken wails that echoed under the market roof. The nightwatchman who was chatting with the couple went over and shone his lantern on the bundle. The cod seller's wife picked it up cautiously and discovered inside it a naked, still-bloody baby boy with bluish skin, moving his hands and lips desperately trying to find a nipple. He was so defenseless, so needy that the woman
lost no time in unbuttoning her smock and pulling up her woollen pullover. Right then and there, in front of her husband, the nightwatchman, and several onlookers who'd by now turned up at the market, she released a breast the size of a pumpkin, her left one, which she guided to the baby's mouth. The group watched in silence, captivated by the spectacle of the proud and abundant mamma. The nightwatchman was trying to look dignified, as required by his public office. The baby stretched out his neck as if drawn by a magnet and sucked at the nipple for quite a long time. Miraculously, some tiny bubbles of milk dribbled from the corners of his mouth. When he calmed down, the woman, in some pain but satisfied, disengaged him from her breast—it had been a while since she'd been called on as a wet nurse—and handed him over to the figure of authority. The nightwatchman took the bundle in his arms, his heart melting at the warmth of the tiny thing. He'd take the baby straight to the hospital, and, if he survived, he'd be sent to some charitable institution. Then, as they contemplated the child, they noticed, stuck to his stomach with dry blood and covering the stump of the umbilical cord, a scrap of white paper, not unlike a factory label. It said “Gabriel.”

The whole thing—the birth, abandonment, and first suckling of Gabriel—took place early one morning in October 1941. Our father was convinced that he developed a sybarite's passion for salt cod because of that first taste of milk that nourished him. He ate it whenever he could, however it came: baked in white wine with paprika (
a la llauna
), in an olive oil emulsion (
al pil-pil
), shredded (
esqueixat
), in batter (
arrebossat
), or cooked in the oven with potatoes. Oddly enough, he found cow's milk too salty and could only drink it sweetened with three good-sized spoons of sugar.

Our mothers say that he embellished the story of his first hours in the world, as if to somehow gloss over his lack of a mother and all the hardships he had to endure in the orphanage in the following years. In addition, as if needing to provide proof of the legend, he always carried a newspaper cutting in his wallet so he could show it to people. The news item appeared in
La Vanguardia Española.
Unsurprisingly, the author of the piece reveled in the more
sensational details, while also highlighting the efficiency of the forces of law and order and the decisive intervention of the stall holder's wife.

In any case, Gabriel didn't know about all this until years later—seventeen to be precise—and thanks to the most extraordinary fluke. These things happen. Not long before, he'd started shifting furniture for a moving company. One day, they had to go to the Sant Gervasi neighborhood and empty an apartment for a family that was moving. His job was to dismantle a solid oak wardrobe that was too large and heavy to be moved by one person. First, he took off the doors and then decided to remove the drawers so the wardrobe would weigh a bit less. He opened the first drawer, pulling it off the runners with a crunch of woodworm-riddled timber. Then he took out the second one and, once he was holding it in his hands, he noticed the sheet of newspaper with which the owners had lined it. It was a folded, yellowing page from
La Vanguardia.
Gabriel removed it with great care and opened it. The corners crumbled between his fingers. He found an article about breaking the Stalin Line, signed by the news agency EFE from “the Führer's headquarters.” He understood it was talking about the Second World War and immediately took note of the date on the newspaper. Wednesday, October 22, 1941. He was born the day before, on October 21, the same year! As he was taking this in, he turned the page over to look at the news on the other side. His eye was caught by a Gasogen ad with a prophetic drawing of a truck. Then he noticed the piece above it. It was headed
BARCELONA LIFE
and, in no time at all, he discovered the news of his abandonment. These things happen.

The piece was titled
NEWBORN BABY FOUND AT BORN MARKET ENTRANCE
and went on to describe in ten lines the details of Gabriel's first dawn, stressing the goodness of the woman from the salt cod stall and ending with the following words: “Our correspondent can attest that at the time of going to press the little angel was sleeping placidly in the Provincial Maternity and Foundling Home, saved from death and inevitable purgatory, and blissfully unaware of the commotion caused by his first hours on this earth.”

Gabriel learned the article by heart, reading it over and over again and reciting it with all due ceremony. This piece of paper represented his only link to his mother. A few days after his discovery, one Monday when he had the day off, he went to El Born market and searched for the salt cod stall. As he lined up to buy his three bits of salt cod—it was Lent and the nuns at Llars Mundet, the children's home where he still lived, would be pleased by his thoughtfulness—he watched the buxom woman whose breast had given him his first nourishment seventeen years earlier, uneasily admiring her. She had peroxide-blond hair. Although the years had taken their toll, she was still a splendid full-bodied woman. Pale with the cold, the flesh of her arms looked as solid as marble. The planetary roundness of her breasts thrust against her white smock. How easy it would have been for Gabriel to regress, to latch on again, there and then, and with the same voracity as on the first day of his life.

Our father never told the salt cod vendor that he was the baby she'd put to her breast that February morning. From time to time, however, every three or four months, he went to the stall to have a look at her.

“Tomorrow, I'm going to escape for an hour or two to visit my adoptive mother,” he'd announce when he was returning to Barcelona with Bundó and Petroli, apparently thinking out loud as he drove.

Since Gabriel, the name given by the unknown mother, was appropriately Catholic, the nuns at the Provincial Maternity and Foundling Home were happy for the baby to be called that and limited themselves to providing the two requisite surnames. They decided on “Delacruz Expósito,” a typical choice for abandoned children, which literally meant “Foundling of the Cross.” In those early years of the Franco regime these names provided a kind of safe-conduct and opened more than one door. People responded to them with compassion, imagining that behind the face of the little waif was a father killed at the front, or a mother who had to break up a large family in order to survive. More than one God-fearing woman made the sign of the cross when she heard the two surnames.

His sons didn't inherit them. Our mothers never married our father, so we got their surnames, and that was that. Sometimes, though, we like to address each other with the surname we would have had—translated—if it had come from our dad. Chris could be called Christopher Cross, like the American singer, or Chris of the Cross, a stage name chosen for its more universal ring, perhaps, by some magician performing in a Las Vegas casino. Christof would be von Kreuz, a name evoking a Kaiser's colonel, and Christophe would have the same surname as the painter in the Louvre: Christophe Delacroix. Cristòfol would be the most faithful and would keep Delacruz, like the Spanish mystic San Juan de la Cruz, or it could even be rendered into Catalan, to become Delacreu.

Most of the parentless children who, like our father, grew up in the Provincial Maternity and Foundling Home and, subsequently, the House of Charity, had been given similar surnames. They were like brothers and sisters without really being so. When our father reminisced about his childhood, Bundó was the only person he regarded as something close to a blood brother. Gabriel was just a few weeks older, and they grew up together. Their friendship was for life, from the tyranny of charity to the tyranny of moving furniture, and only tragedy would separate them. Of course, the time will come in these pages when we're going to have to talk about the tragedy, which was disastrous, or providential, for a number of people.

Now, borne along by these recollections, we too can revisit the labyrinthine passageways of the House of Charity, the tiles disinfected with Zotal, and the little boy who walks along holding the hand of a nun who smells like candles. We too can recall the nighttime comings and goings of the orphans, their adventures and their punishments, the coarse poorhouse clothes, the children's shrewdness in learning to fend for themselves. First, however, in order to make more sense of the whole thing and give it some perspective, we're going to jump ahead about half a century. Hence, as if all our father's journeys were merely a tangle of lines on a map of Europe, we shan't move from Barcelona and we'll enter the apartment in which he took refuge for more than ten years.

Cristòfol has the floor.

“Hang on,” Christof protests, “I think we need to give this a title. Let's make it nice and solemn.”

Over to you, Cristòfol.

Very well. I'm thirty now, and it's more than twenty-five years since I last saw my father. This sentence could sound tragic if I said it like one of those idiots you see flaunting their family dramas on television, but, in my case, it's simply a fact expressed in terms of years. Precisely because we were so used to his absence, as we said before, I'm doing the calculations in order to stress the surprise—or rather the shock—of receiving the first news of him after so long. I refer to something so simple but so ambiguous as being able to trace his steps on a map of Barcelona. The call from the police came one morning just like any other. A policeman identified himself and then went on to ask me if I knew Senyor Gabriel Delacruz Expósito. It took me a few seconds to dredge up the name from the depths of my memory as I repeated it aloud.

“Yes, he's my father,” I replied, “but we haven't seen or heard from him in many years. We'd forgotten he existed.”

“Yes, I see. However, it is our duty to inform you that we have registered him as missing. Not dead, for the record, but missing. There have been no reported sightings of your father for a year. He hasn't paid his rent or utility bills. The gas, water, and electricity were cut off some time ago. The landlord got in touch with us because he's upset about not being paid. His complaint coincided with another one from the neighbors who'd been bothered for several days by a bad smell, like something dead. We took it seriously, entered the apartment, and found nobody there. Everything was in order. The neighbors, as you might imagine, are a hysterical lot. The point now is that you, as next of kin, will have to decide what you want to do: whether you want to pay the back rent and bills while you're looking for him, or whether you think it's better to remove his things and give up the apartment.”