Lost Luggage (55 page)

In short, his suicidal predisposition didn't go away. On the contrary, it was unrelenting and able to exploit these moments of weakness to conquer a little more of his spirit. He calculated that five days had passed between the announcement of Jorge Mistral's death and that of George Sanders. It wouldn't be altogether stupid, then, to suppose that in another five days—Monday—the newspapers would report a third suicide. If he was wrong about that, perhaps he should start thinking about whether it was his turn.

It happened that Monday fell on the first of May, Workers' Day and a public holiday. It was hot, and the city had been so empty
over the long weekend that any news seemed impossible. The previous day the newsdealer had informed Gabriel that he'd be closed on Monday and reminded him that
La Vanguardia
wasn't coming out either. This meant that he stayed home and didn't read any newspapers. Abstinence was good for him, and the hours went by without any upsets, but he had trouble getting to sleep that night. A new question took shape, a clot forming and refusing to dissolve in the liquidity of sleep: When the time came, how was he going to go about it?

He was as yet unaware of it but Tuesday brought further respite. He went out to walk for a couple of hours in the afternoon and bought three newspapers, from the kiosk on the way home, almost grudgingly and as if under duress. He opened
La Vanguardia
at the Obituaries page and the headline of a half-column report immediately jumped out:

ON THE DEATH OF THE POET GABRIEL FERRATER

The text didn't specify how Gabriel Ferrater had died, but the fact he was a poet alerted Gabriel. “Poets have always been killing themselves,” he thought. Then he read the article and, although the text was full of euphemisms, he saw it quite clearly. Shortly afterward, a less-inhibited newspaper confirmed that it was suicide.

Of the three deaths, Gabriel Ferrater's made the greatest impact. He even had the same name! Could there be any doubt now? First a Jorge had inspired a George and now a Gabriel was calling upon another Gabriel. The poet had killed himself a few days ago, Thursday, he calculated, but they hadn't found him till Monday. He lived alone in Sant Cugat. Besides being a poet, he was a teacher at the Autonomous University. He hadn't yet turned fifty. Gabriel trawled all the sources of news but didn't come up with any more substantial information. He didn't know, for example, whether the poet had left any note or message.

Gabriel pored over the story, which took him some hours to digest. By the time he looked up it was night. It was that time of the evening when, without really knowing why, he went out on to the
balcony to smoke the second-to-last cigarette of the day (the last one he kept for just before going to bed). It was eight, the colors were fading high in the sky, and, down below, the city had a morbid, vaporized look about it. The panoramic view was one of the reasons why Bundó had decided to buy the apartment. The sun slowly went into hiding behind the Collserola hills, and Gabriel amused himself by imagining how, with the light now behind him, the shadow of his slim body was sufficient to cast the whole of Barcelona into darkness. If he raised an arm, he could eclipse an entire neighborhood. In the midst of such distractions he looked down at the street and was once again surprised at how high up he was. Seven floors before hitting the pavement. An idea took shape in his brain: Taken one at a time, every instant of every day made its own sense but, if they were all put together, the result was meaningless.

Let me say it again, Christophers. You can be sure that these arguments that were pushing him to kill himself were not cast in a tragic light. The proof is that while Gabriel was doing something as mundane as getting undressed that night, putting his pajamas on or cleaning his teeth, he was trying to work out when it would be his turn. If he counted four days from getting the news about the poet, he'd have to do it on Saturday. Yes, Saturday wasn't an especially bad day. Yet this advance planning seemed excessive and unnatural and, moreover, it made him understand something evident: He wouldn't be appearing in the newspapers. No journalist would write an article titled
FURNITURE MOVER COMMITS SUICIDE IN
 . . . If he really wanted to insert his link into the chain of suicides, and if his grand act was going to make sense, he'd have to look for a public place that everyone knew. The Sagrada Familia Expiatory Temple. The lions in the zoo. The airplane in the Tibidabo funfair. A touch of eccentricity that would put him on the front page.

Now, at the hour of reckoning, he was being capricious.

In the end, after much rumination, he chose the Christopher Columbus monument, which appeared on page 27 in Rita's city guide. He was playing with the symbolic idea that his last route would be traced by a leap from the feet of such an illustrious traveler as this voyager. He'd do it on Saturday afternoon at the time when the citizens of Barcelona came out to stroll along the Ramblas, when the florists lowered the prices of their half-wilting wares, and the prostitutes scored their first gentlemen on the corner of Carrer Escudellers and in the inner reaches of Carrer Conde del Asalto. He'd pay to get into the monument, take the elevator up the column to the lookout directly beneath the statue at the top and, when no one was looking, he'd throw himself off, embracing the whole city with his last gaze or perhaps, heeding Columbus's finger, he'd look where he was pointing, out to the open sea. The seafarer wouldn't bat an eyelid when he hit the ground. Isn't it true that all the big monuments, from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to Big Ben in London, have their own particular stories of a suicide that adds to their prestige? Well, his would go down in history as the “Columbus Suicide.”

Although he'd planned it quite well, Christophers, Gabriel never jumped from Columbus's feet, didn't get to say hello to the elevator driver or even buy the ticket to go up the monument. However surreal it may seem, his soul mate Bundó saved his life. He did it with an intervention from the grave that amply compensated for all the patience and favors our father had bestowed on him ever since they were little kids.

Furthermore, the intercession in extremis of a transmigrated (or, given the form it took, would it be more apt to say “transliquified”?) Bundó was doubly fortunate because, by then, Rita had already ruled out the possibility of Gabriel's hiding on page 27 of her guide. She would never have turned up at the bottom of the Columbus monument to save him in the nick of time.

In fact, Rita's intentions of looking for Gabriel on the map of Barcelona had lapsed overnight. She had abandoned her highly idiosyncratic methodology thanks to a major new development that
had come about more or less when Gabriel was discovering the chain of suicides and weighing up his chances of joining in.

For some weeks now, Rita, the queen of tenacity, had turned her quest into compulsive routine. The first thing she did on arriving at the airport every morning was check to see whether the black canvas bag had turned up in the Cage. The negative response didn't deter her in the least, and some of her colleagues thought she'd lost her mind. They repeatedly urged her to forget about it. The fucking bag was never going to appear. Lost luggage was everyday fare and she, precisely, knew that better than anyone. Then, one April day, the long-awaited revelation came.

Although she'd imagined the scene a thousand times, the black bag didn't simply pop up as she'd expected but appeared piecemeal. What happened was as follows. She was in the Cage, sitting on her stool at the counter, and had just seen to a passenger, the last in the line before the next batch turned up. Since she'd been notching up a considerable number of kilometers around the city every day after work, her legs had become more muscular but the soles of her feet hurt. It was one in the afternoon and nothing was happening. The boss had gone to lunch. In the absence of passengers, she should have gone to the storeroom to sort out the lost luggage that had come in that morning but, right now, she didn't feel like it. The figure of Leiva and his mop materialized in the distance. Rita recognized his pachydermal silhouette. He'd been off work with the flu, and she hadn't seen him for several days. As he mopped and buffed up the shine on the marble floor with his particular art of zigzagging like a slalom skier, Leiva was moving closer to the Cage. Rita yawned.

“Are you better now?” she asked when he came within earshot. Their friendship was based on controlled, ironic condescension toward one another. They knew how to take a joke to the limit without ever causing hurt. With Porras, on the other hand, the relationship was all about saucy innuendo that she rebuffed, calling him a bighead. With Sayago, it was that of hysterical father and rebellious daughter (with conversations tending to end up with a little-girlish “Yes, Daddy” from her). Leiva was the one she had
most fun with as some months earlier she'd started to speak to him in Catalan: “How was your vacation?”

“So-so,” he replied, disguising a grimace. She'd passed the yawn on to him: delayed effect. He raised his hand to his forehead to check his fever and immediately tore it away as if burnt. He dropped the mop.

“What's the time? Tell me it's two. Tell me a lie if you must.”

“It's two.” She waited a few seconds for it to sink in. “No, it's one on the dot. Aren't you wearing a watch?”

“Of course I am. It's the Festina from when I got married,” he said pushing up his sleeve to flash a gilded wrist. “But it stopped when I was sick, and I have to get it fixed. Anyway, I put it on because I can't be without it. I feel naked.”

“Better for everyone, then, that you never take it off.”

They both laughed. Leiva had now leaned his entire weight on her counter. He was one of those people who can't stand up straight. He pulled a packet of chewing gum out of his pocket and offered it to her.

“You don't want one, do you?”

“No, thanks, it'd probably poison me,” Rita shot back, but took one anyway. Then she looked him up and down, feigning scientific objectivity. “Have you lost weight? You look skinnier.”

Leiva, a good fellow, didn't understand she was messing with him. His blue work coat was too tight as usual, straining over his belly.

“Maybe I have,” he said smugly. “It's because of the flu, but I'll soon put those kilos back on, I can assure you.”

He gave emphasis to his words by undoing one button of the coat and pulling it open as if it were about to explode. It was then that Rita noticed the shirt he was wearing underneath.

“That shirt . . . Let's see. Take off your coat, Leiva. Please.”

Leiva needed no further encouragement and revealed a flannel shirt in a moiré black-and-white herringbone pattern so garish that it hurt the eyes.

“You like it, eh? It's the first day I've worn it. And the last. It makes me sweat too much.”

Rita recognized in a flash the horrible shirt that Bundó was wearing in the photo she'd been shown the day they buried him. There couldn't be two the same. That was inconceivable, and Leiva was wearing it with exactly the same sloppy indifference.

“Where did you get it?” she demanded.

Leiva moved a little closer and lowered his voice.

“Here. You know. Our business . . .” and he winked, not knowing how otherwise to hint at their shared secret.

“When was that? I don't remember . . .”

“Must've been three weeks ago. It was one of those days when you were so busy with other bags and you told us you didn't want anything, that it was all ours.”

“It wasn't a black canvas bag, was it?”

“No, I don't think so . . .” Leiva was evidently unsure of himself and scared of blowing it. After all, Rita was the boss when it came to stray luggage. He ran his hand over his greasy hair in an effort to recall. “No, now I remember. It was one of those khaki bags, like those big army ones. I don't know if you remember it . . .”

“Sounds familiar. Yes.”

“It looked full but, the thing is, when we opened it up, it was almost empty and inside there was . . . yeah, that's right, there was another bag inside it. And it was black. I remember it now because when we discovered it, Sayago came out with one of those sayings of his: ‘The big fish has eaten the little fish.' The Lufthansa people didn't give a shit and shoved it in there, I suppose, to save space on the plane.”

“And why didn't you tell me the next day?”

“You were so hot and bothered dealing with your own stuff that we didn't want to worry you, girl. You'd passed out, as I recall, and you looked very peaked. And there was nothing valuable in it anyway. Useless stuff like a rusty bottle opener and some old sunglasses. You know. This shirt was the best part of the loot!”

“And what did you do with the bag? Weren't there any papers? Or some address?”

“Yes, I'd say so. But I reckon we threw the whole lot away, like we always do . . .”