Lost Luggage (30 page)

How many times has my mother told me about the episode of the wardrobe? She closes her eyes, I guess to relive the darkness inside it, and now she's recalling it once more for you, Christophers.

It turned out that the three La Ibérica workers didn't release her from her hiding place. Afraid that another straggling gendarme might appear, or because some sense of propriety made them want to do the job properly, they didn't open the doors and let Mireille reemerge into the light of day, but carried the occupied wardrobe
up the stairs. The trip didn't last long. “Twenty-six steps exactly, at a snail's pace. I counted them later, when I left.” But it was enough for my mom to fall in love with Gabriel. Direct quote. Paralyzed by fear and embarrassment inside that sort of mobile confessional, she had her laywoman's epiphany: She'd been saved by the Working Class. While students like her were demonstrating for an egalitarian world where everyone can grow up with the same opportunities, those comrades had to keep working, enslaved to some bloodsucking boss. By saving her from the gendarme, she said, they'd returned the favor. So here we have the best possible example of the alliance between culture and labor that the students were demanding!

“Don't forget that I was only twenty years old with a head full of doctrines and proclamations,” Mireille emphasises. “Inside the wardrobe it was so dark that I saw the light. That's all there was to it. Ah, yes, and one more thing you need to remember, which is infinitely more decisive: Gabriel was so attractive! Your dad was a seducer like few others, Christophe. What a pity you didn't inherit that quality. A passive seducer. Ask his other women if you don't believe me . . . Without the slightest effort, only with that half-inhibited presence of his, your father had me wrapped around his little finger in no time at all.”

Upstairs in the apartment, Petroli opened the doors of the wardrobe, and Bundó gave her his hand to help her out. Mireille, dumb-founded, stared at the three men with all the bafflement of the noble savage contemplating other human beings for the first time. They asked if she was okay. Bundó did an imitation of the incensed gendarme, and they all laughed. Gabriel made the introductions. This was really the icing on the cake. Besides being oppressed truck drivers, these three Herculean creatures were Spaniards who eked out a living under the boot of the Franco dictatorship. They kept working, leaving her to her musings. By the time Gabriel came upstairs again, lugging a washing machine with Bundó's help, Mireille was in love with him. He took some time to realize it.

They finished the move as the clock struck nine. The three
men had a wash and changed their clothes. It had been a very long day for them, but their reward was waiting.
“Paris la nuit,”
they shouted in mangled French. The concierge came up to check that the apartment was all in order, signed the docket, and closed the door. Mireille wanted to stay with them for precaution's sake. She felt safer, she said. They went downstairs together. When the little man wished them a good trip home, each one played out his or her part, as planned. After an emotional farewell, Mireille went off down the street. The three drivers climbed into the Pegaso and left too. When they turned into Rue Lhomond, the girl was waiting for them, beaming from ear to ear. The truck stopped, and Petroli and Gabriel got out. Bundó had keys to the apartment. Now he'd go and look for somewhere to park—Mireille recommended the area around Montparnasse cemetery—and then come back on foot. The quarrel with Muriel that morning had shaken him up, and he was in no mood for fun and games. He might stop somewhere for a beer and a sandwich—maybe not even that. Petroli had his night planned. A while ago, some emigrants had told him about a bar that wasn't too far away, Le Buci, quite near the Odéon. They'd marked the spot with a cross on the map. If it had been a Thursday or a Sunday, he would have gone to Avenue de Wagram, which was where all the Spaniards got together. The other days of the week, Le Buci was the best place in Paris for hobnobbing with one's compatriots. He'd try to dodge the demonstrations, cross Saint-Germain and find the bar. Since he was very tired, he'd have a beer and come back straight away to sleep—unless, of course, some homesick lady from Córdoba or Salamanca claimed him.

Mireille convinced Gabriel to accompany her to the bistro in Rue Danton. If they hurried they'd be there in time for the ten o'clock regrouping. She was dying to show him off to Justine and the rest of them.

“With that parting in his hair, his wide-legged trousers and leather jacket, Gabriel was the living image of a unionist dressed up in his Sunday best for the strike,” Mom recalled after I begged her to tell me the story. “He agreed to come with me but wasn't very keen. He wanted to do a tourist route through the
neighborhood as far as Notre-Dame, but I told him that we were the tourists now, us, the students. While we walked along at a good pace, I told him all about the insurgency that afternoon and what we were demanding. I pronounced the words slowly so he'd understand. He nodded politely, but it was clear he wasn't interested. As we approached Rue des Écoles, the shouting got louder. We walked through clouds of smoke, which made our eyes sting. I wanted to convey to Gabriel the euphoria of being right there, right then. The importance of being there with him. Then floods of people started pouring around the corner from Saint-Germain. Without a moment's hesitation, I took him by the hand and we ran with them. I was exultant. After a few meters he stopped and pulled us into another street. ‘Are you too tired?' I asked, feeling a bit let down. ‘Yes, but it's not that. If the police catch me, I'll have problems. My passport says I'm Spanish. They'd send me back to my country, and I'd automatically be a political prisoner.' His fear touched me, of course. ‘So why don't you stay here?' I blurted out in all my naivety. ‘Don't go back to Spain. My friends will find you a job . . . You could stay with us. You even babble a bit of French.' He forced a smile and spent a few seconds searching for the exact words he needed. ‘Thanks, but it's not possible. I'm one of those people who can't stay long in any one place.' His answer was so surprising that alarm bells should have rung, but I'd emerged from a wardrobe that evening, like someone coming out of a time machine into another dimension, and the only thing that occurred to me was, ‘Let's go back and hide at my place, then. I live nearby. I'll show you the rest of the neighborhood on the way.' ”

That's about it, Christophers. Chris needed reams of pages. I'm a bit more modest. I just have to tie up a few loose ends.

Yes, Gabriel stayed with Mireille till early morning. Just the two of them in the apartment. Don't get too worked up. Whatever comparison you were thinking of making between the ruckus that night in the Latin Quarter and what happened under the sheets in the commune in the Place de la Contrescarpe, I've certainly
beaten you to it. As for Gabriel, our father, he was certainly a situationist! He had an amazing talent for being in the right place at the right time.

He went back to the apartment in Rue de l'Estrapade before daybreak. Mireille had only let him leave after making him promise that he'd think about emigrating to Paris—she called it going into exile. The streets wore an air of devastation. Uprooted cobblestones, broken lampposts, a lost shoe here, a singed placard there. Sirens and shouting could still be heard in the distance, coming from the direction of the Seine. Gabriel slipped around the edge of the battlefield, a fleeting shadow, like an agent provocateur. Not far from the building, another shadow started moving toward him. They stopped and stared at each other for a few seconds.

“Gabriel!” the shadow whispered at last.

“Fucking hell, Petroli, it's you,” he replied.

This time she was from Murcia. He'd succumbed to the charms of a woman from Murcia.

At nine, after four hours' sleep and breakfast in a café on Boulevard Raspail, they went to get the Pegaso. Bundó, the most awake of the three, phoned Senyor Casellas, who was spending the weekend at his beach house in Caldetes. He informed him that the gendarmes had immobilized the vehicle all night because of the demonstrations but they'd be letting them go soon. He hung up in the middle of the boss's railing and cursing, savoring the privilege of getting him out of bed on a Saturday morning, and with bad news too.

Opposite Montparnasse cemetery, before they got moving again, the three friends divided up the box that had gone astray. Two and a half months later, on another trip to Paris one Saturday at the end of July, Gabriel rushed to visit Mireille. In his second visit to the commune in the Place de la Contrescarpe, Mom asked him again if he'd go into “exile” with her in Paris. Trying to convince him, she informed him she was pregnant. Her belly was still flat, and, with the flowing dress she was wearing, you couldn't tell.

“Is it mine?
C'est à moi
?” He asked at once, as excited as if it were the first time. They were with her roommates, sitting in
a circle on the floor. Gabriel had just been introduced. He was preceded by his working-class fame, and Justine and the others, thrilled to bits, couldn't take their eyes off him. They were smoking and drinking wine. It was midday. The windows were open. They were listening to music on the radio. With summer and the end of term the student revolts had fizzled out, in Paris at least.

“Yes, it's yours,” Mireille told him, “but you should know it's going to be everybody's. We'll all be the mothers and fathers of this baby. You too. It's a child of the revolution.”

Mireille kissed him on the mouth, clinging to him as the others applauded. When she'd finished, Gabriel remained silent. He was listening to the radio, to a song that the presenter had just introduced. He raised a finger so the others would listen too. They all looked at him.

Puis il a plu sur cette plage

Et dans cet orage elle a disparu . . .

Et j'ai crié, crié, Aline, pour qu'elle revienne

Et j'ai pleuré, pleuré, oh! j'avais trop de peine . . .

“This song . . .” he said, “this song is very beautiful. Let's do something, Mireille. If it's a girl, we'll name her like the girl in the song . . .”

“And what if he's a boy?” she inquired giggling.

“Well, if he's a boy, like the singer!”

Everyone laughed at the joke but, when I was born, Gabriel reminded Mireille of the conversation and, of course, she listened to him.

Yes, the song was “Aline,” a hit at that time, and the singer was called Christophe.

Gabriel, the perfect situationist.

A
nd then,” Christophe said with a mysterious air, “Gabriel woke up in his boarding-house bed. The sheets were wet and he realized that the whole Paris adventure was a dream.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“No. Hey no! It's a joke! Don't look at me like that, Christophers. Everything I've said is true. Honestly.”

We're in the mezzanine apartment in Carrer Nàpols, in the middle of one of our “spiritualist sessions,” as Rita likes to call them, and we're going crazy. Literally. Sometimes it's as if we're possessed by Gabriel's volatile spirit, as if these walls that protected him are taking over our minds. Each meeting of the Christophers Club only makes us more obsessed. We're reeling in our father, as detectives say in films, but we never nab him. The step-by-step description we have of his movements often leaves us wanting more. Although we include in our account all kinds of people that he dealt with—and there are a lot of them—we still can't make him any more three-dimensional or bring him any closer. On the contrary, Gabriel seems to enjoy disappearing into the crowd so that no one will notice him.

“Get back, get back, get back . . . to where you once belonged!”

It's not Chris singing these Beatles lyrics as one might expect, but Christof. Cristoffini joins in for the chorus and they're both out of tune. They're tiptoeing around the apartment (well,
Christof's tiptoeing, and Cristoffini's clinging to his neck as usual), opening doors with a flourish as if they're going to find our father hiding behind them. “Get back, come on, get back, get back, for once and for fucking all, to where you once belonged.” You see? Even in the songs we choose we're directionless. If we're sure about anything, after so many months of reconstructing his life, it's that Gabriel never belonged anywhere. Most people need to have a place where they can put down roots. It might be in some isolated corner of the map, or in the chaotic center of some city, surrounded by pneumatic drills and traffic noise. Other people might be nearby or far away, but we always need some corner of the world where we feel alive. There are other people, in contrast, who are incapable of staying still, and their home ends up being movement itself, constant, routine flight with no destination.