Lost Luggage (61 page)

Gabriel took this predicament as a personal defeat, a battle lost. He'd underestimated Feijoo and Miguélez. They were craftier than he'd given them credit for, and there was no doubt that the siege would continue. These people never give up. Again, reporting them to the police would be useless. It might look like a cowardly decision but, right now, his only solution was to make them believe that he really had left the country. Desperate measures were needed. The first step would be to stop paying his rent, water, and electricity bills. He'd won a lot of money playing cards and could keep going without joining other games for a good long while. Anyway, he said, he'd already been a recluse once in his life, and going into seclusion again didn't bother him in the least. Giuditta wasn't impressed by this display of stoicism and asked
how much he owed them. She could just give it to them and that would be the end of it. Gabriel firmly rejected her offer.

“These people never have enough. Anyway, I'm sure that it's not because of the money that I owe them that they're so angry,” he admitted. “It's because of the money I've been taking off them over time.” He got a piece of paper and a pen and did a few sums, adding and multiplying. The figure was impressive. “You could say that they and they alone have been maintaining me for a year and a half.” Giuditta whistled in admiration. “But now, for some reason, the penny's suddenly dropped that I won by cheating . . .” Gabriel mused.

While he was formulating his hypothesis he had a hunch. He went to get the jacket he'd been wearing the night of the last game, sat down on the couch and felt around in the sleeves. He pulled out two cards, one from each sleeve, and carefully examined them. One was a joker, and he soon found Feijoo's mark, the third-eye spot. “I'm done for,” he said, tossing away the card in a gesture of despair.

“That afternoon, Gabriel started to measure up the bedroom wall,” Giuditta went on. “When I wanted to know why he was doing that he just asked me to go to the hardware shop and buy him a chisel and a mallet. He was patient and resigned, with the conviction of someone with a plan to carry out. ‘If I have to stay shut up here for a time,' he explained, ‘at least we'll be able to cross the border between Italy and Spain whenever we feel the urge.'

“The following morning he tuned into a music program on the radio and turned it up full blast to cover up the mallet blows. He emptied the wardrobe, traced a window with a pencil and set about breaking through the wall. Crouching there inside with dust all over his face and surrounded by rubble, he looked like Steve McQueen in
The Great Escape.
Three hours later, he'd opened up a hole that was eighty centimeters high and almost the same width, large enough for us to cross to the other side, which is to say into the wardrobe in his bedroom. In the afternoon he made it easier to move through. He smoothed off the edges of the bricks and then covered up the hole with some wooden panels and a few empty shoeboxes. That night we crawled across the border and, for
the first and only time since we'd met, he insisted that we should sleep together in his place. Maybe it's stupid, but that made me very happy . . .”

We Christophers listened to Giuditta in utter amazement. What she was recalling for us was well beyond what we'd ever imagined. We're used to our father's existential tangles. We've grown up with them, but this last episode was too much. The physical proximity of the events only exacerbated matters. We were sitting on Giuditta's couch after crossing through the hole made by Gabriel. Even the mezzanine apartment, which we'd turned into a sort of pretentious Christophers Club, took on a mythical aura as if we'd been living in two parallel dimensions, his and ours. Now, having passed through the wardrobe, the Christophers had gained access to the other dimension.

The afternoon was waning and it would soon be dark outside, but we still had more than three hours to kill before the card game began. Giuditta continued with her story and we started to feel slightly self-conscious: The Christophers were about to take center stage. The plot was thickening.

“At first I had the idea that we were making one home out of two and that would bring us closer but I must confess that I ended up hating the secret passage. Gabriel slowly went back to his old ways. Instead of going out on to the landing and entering his apartment through the door, he used the tunnel. We were sleeping together at my place but, when I went to work or out to have dinner with a girlfriend (luckily I hadn't totally neglected my social life), he went to his place. When he heard me arriving he came back. For me, this waiting, hanging around hour after hour, would have been unbearable, but I fear he didn't see it as a transition, rather as a permanent state. I brought him the newspaper, and he did read that, but I can't give you any real idea of how he amused himself. He never watched TV because he said he'd got a gutful of it years before. I also know that he did some exercise in the morning to keep fit . . . In any case, his strategy started to bear fruit after a couple of weeks and Miguélez and Feijoo stopped harassing us. They ignored us. It was hard to believe. In the beginning I tended
to be very watchful when I went out in case someone was following me or spying on me. The road was always clear. We relaxed. Meanwhile the gas and water had been cut off too, so Gabriel's apartment became the bunker that you inherited. Everything was topsy-turvy because, at the end of the day, the hole he'd excavated inside the wardrobe led into a prison. Yet the state of his place didn't worry Gabriel at all. To my surprise, he assured me he'd lived in worse places. One bright sunny Sunday in spring, I suggested that he should start going out again. It was almost a year, I calculated, since that god-awful game of cards, and he hadn't set foot on the street. Now we didn't have to worry any more, and it would be good for him to have a stroll in Ciutadella Park. He could fill his lungs with fresh air. He refused, saying it was too soon and we should wait a couple of weeks more. Then I realized what was happening: Your father had turned into an invalid who didn't want to get better. For him, coming to my place, passing through the secret hole, was the same thing as going into the outside world. He was going to Italy and I was cooking him pasta, and there you have it. The situation, as you can imagine, was trying, boring, uncomfortable, and it was killing our relationship. We'd never argued before and now we were at each other's throats over the stupidest things. If we got annoyed with one another, he went back to his place in a huff. One night when we'd been fighting I was lying in my bed unable to sleep and he was in his. The wardrobe door was half open and that tunnel thing was connecting us. If I listened carefully, I could hear him tossing and turning, a martyr to insomnia, and I wanted to help him, wished we could comfort each other. It was then that I decided to act . . .”

Giuditta's boldness ended the stalemate, but then they had to face new unknowns. When Feijoo and Miguélez's siege was at its peak, she'd suggested to Gabriel that he should try to get into contact with us. We were his sons, weren't we? She was sure we'd help him. He categorically refused. He hadn't seen us for years, many years, he said, and he didn't know where to find us (false). Furthermore, he explained, we Christophers didn't know each other. It would be a shock (it was) and a trauma (it wasn't). In a moment
of weakness, he'd confessed to her that we were the great frustration of his life, proof of his inability to lead an orderly existence. He'd abandoned us, and now he had no right to expect anything of us. “Maybe they're not like you,” Giuditta had retorted, which made all four of us blush and feel uncomfortable. In any case, the morning after that double sleepless night, Giuditta betrayed our father. For a good cause. What did her betrayal consist of? After talking with the other residents of the house and the owner of Gabriel's apartment, she went to the police station to report him missing. Her neighbor, she explained, had given no sign of life in six months. Carried away with her story-telling, she even added that there was a smell of something dead in the stairway, a highly suggestive touch as far as the neighbors were concerned. As it turned out, her strategy was spot on. They would start the legal search, as is required in such cases.

From that point on, we Christophers had a pretty good idea of the facts leading up to our meeting. Even so, Giuditta presented them from another angle: hers. Shortly after she reported him missing, the police turned up at the apartment with the owner and certified yet again—but this time officially—that Gabriel had disappeared. It was necessary to go ahead with the appropriate procedures. This was first thing in the morning. That night, our father had slept in Italy, so to speak. In the wee hours, before he woke up, Giuditta had stealthily crossed the border to leave a piece of paper on the bedside table of the other bedroom. Our four names were written on it. In the hands of the police the list was further proof, so they began the search as she'd envisaged: the first thing they did was to locate Cristòfol. If that boy has the tiniest shred of curiosity, she reasoned, he'll try to find out what the other names mean, or go looking for his father . . .

“I've thought so often about the first time you came, Cristòfol,” Giuditta resumed. “It was a miracle you didn't bump into Gabriel! A few seconds before you opened the wardrobe door, he'd slipped away to my place, making sure that the entrance to the passage was well disguised. What would have happened if, besides the cards hidden in his sleeves, you'd found the tunnel? I've wondered that
so many times . . . You probably would have been terrified and run away, and we wouldn't be here now. Never mind. It's better not to think about that. The important thing is that while you were walking around the apartment getting used to your father's absence, he, on the other side of the wall, was more worked up than I'd ever seen him. He deserved it because of his stubbornness. How many hours were you there? Six? Seven? Gabriel had his ear glued to the wall listening to your footsteps. ‘Who could it be?' he kept asking me every five minutes. ‘Do you think Feijoo and Miguélez have come back? Did the police give them a key?' I spared him any more suffering. ‘It's okay,' I told him. ‘I didn't want to tell you so as not to worry you, but the neighbors and the owner of the apartment have reported you missing. When someone disappears, the police usually go looking for the next of kin. It must be your Barcelona wife, Gabriel, or, more likely, your son.' I spelt out the details of my hypothesis with all the care in the world because I was afraid he'd get really upset, but he reacted very well. Suddenly, the idea of seeing you again didn't distress him. I saw this as the first victory. ‘How old would Cristòfol be now?' he wondered, and then he got lost in his calculations . . .”

From here onward, the Christophers' story runs in parallel with our father's wishes. He was overwhelmed by the idea of meeting up with us again, but Giuditta told us he was also following our moves with enormous expectation. The first day the four of us visited the apartment together, Gabriel was on cloud nine. We like to put it like this: Now that the widely scattered elements of his lost past unexpectedly came together, they assumed new meaning. On weekdays, when there was no danger that we were going to turn up, Gabriel went to the apartment and reviewed our findings. Then he tidied up his belongings to make our task easier and went over the notes we jotted down about our investigations. He read Carolina's letters, listened to our interview with Petroli, and spent hours gazing with an archivist's devotion at all the photographs we'd brought. Although meeting up with us again would have been mortifying for him, he somehow liked the feeling that we were nearby, so close, in fact, that one Saturday when he'd gone to sleep
at siesta time we came into the apartment and were on the point of nabbing him. According to Giuditta, there were days when it seemed that he wanted just that. It was as if, with our decision to keep paying the rent and getting the light, water, and gas put on again, we were giving him oxygen. All his life he'd been uprooted and, now at last, at the age of sixty and for the very first time, he felt some kind of bond with this earth.

“I thought that he was very ripe, very ready,” Giuditta recalled. “I mean regarding you. I was convinced he wouldn't be long in letting himself get caught. One important sign was that he'd given up his seclusion and started going out. He put on some sunglasses and a hat I bought him and went for walks in Ciutadella Park at times when there weren't many people. Maybe it wasn't such a big deal, but, for me, this was a major change. His willingness to meet up with you again was growing by the day, thanks to all the things you were leaving in his place . . . Then, three weeks ago, your investigations hit the bull's-eye and everything changed again . . .” At this point, Giuditta was getting emotional. We poured her the last dram of whisky left in the bottle. Then she pulled herself together and continued, “Unfortunately, Cristòfol, the beast was aroused again the day you went into the Carambola asking about Gabriel. It's as if Feijoo had an attack of jealousy because another hunter was on the track of his prey. Besides, if some stranger was looking for him in these parts it meant that he wasn't too far away. This time Miguélez and Feijoo were more patient, more subtle. Instead of immediately turning up, bellowing and beating at the door of his apartment, claiming their money and hassling us with their threats, we think they must have been studying our movements for several days. I can just imagine their stupefied expressions when Gabriel began walking around the streets like a man without a care in the world. We'd relaxed, as I told you. Then, last Monday, all hell broke loose. Gabriel went for a walk in the morning and didn't come back for lunch. At first, I took this as a good sign and imagined all sorts of reasons. Maybe he felt more confident and had ventured further, or he'd had lunch in some restaurant, or he might have visited his old workmates at La Ibérica. By midafternoon, I
was worried because something wasn't right. Now that he'd got his freedom back, would he have left without a word, like the man who goes out to buy a packet of cigarettes and never comes home? I remembered what he'd done to your mothers and my stomach knotted. To calm down, I told myself that now we were fine, the two of us, and there was no call for alarm, but then my fears spiralled off into possibilities that were even more upsetting because they were beyond my control. What if Feijoo and Miguélez were back on the job? At midnight, thank God, I heard his door open and breathed more easily but I was still a nervous wreck when I hurried through the secret passage. On the other side, as if that wardrobe was a time machine, I found a Gabriel who'd aged ten years, haggard, trembling . . .”