Lost Luggage (42 page)

In his long, arduous journey through the courts, Senyor Bravo had become accustomed to dealing with charlatans and rotters as wily as sewer rats. Rita, the poor young girl who'd been left helpless and alone, was an exception, a victim, and he was fond of her. Not long after New Samson was impounded, Senyor Bravo phoned her one morning and asked her for a few details about her parents. If she gave him permission, he told her, he'd try to get some sort of compensation from Iberia or the airport. After all, somebody had to be responsible for the accident. Rita hung up and discussed it with Aunt Matilde—who told her to light a candle to Saint Rita, her patron saint and granter of impossible wishes—and never gave it another thought. Summer came, the August holidays went by, and one morning at the beginning of September Senyor Bravo phoned again.

“Do you remember me, Senyoreta Manley?” he asked. “Carlos Bravo. I have good news for you, I believe. I've been making some inquiries and telephone calls to see if we can get compensation for what happened to your parents, but we haven't had much luck. Iberia will pay some indemnity for damages, but, I warn you, it's a pitiful sum. It's better than nothing, of course, but I hoped to get you a lot more. In any case, I spoke to the people at the airport's legal services, and, although they're under no obligation to pay anything, they were moved by your case and they've come up with a proposal. It happens that, with the extensions they're doing to the terminal at El Prat, they need to fill some new positions. If you're interested in applying, and I most heartily advise you to do so, you have a job. I don't know what area it is in but they've assured me that the salary is adequate and there are good possibilities for promotion.”

Thus it was that, a few months later, just before her seventeenth birthday in January 1968, Rita started work at Barcelona airport. It was a tender age, which possibly worked in her favor since her job was to deal with indignant passengers at the Lost Luggage Office.

As for Aunt Matilde, she packed her bags that very afternoon, and without saying good-bye to anyone, not even to Rita, she went back to Sagunto for the rest of her days.

Thanks, Christophers, for allowing me to rescue these family dramas and antics from oblivion. Scissors and wigs. And now that we've left Rita working at the airport (we're getting closer and closer, as you can see) and with a brighter future ahead of her, we have to go back to Germany again. I know we don't want to return there, but that Saint Valentine's Day morning of February 14, 1972, is calling.

It was snowing heavily again, right? Bundó was asleep. The Pegaso driven by Gabriel was roaring down the motorway . . .

Months later, after he'd met my mother and was still unsure about whether to pick up the pieces of his life, Gabriel poured out the whole story of the disaster. How long must he have been asleep at the wheel? Eight, ten seconds? Ten seconds at the most. Close
your eyes and count to ten, Christophers. It's nothing, but it's also an eternity. It was enough for the truck to veer to the right, leave the road and, borne along by the thrust of its downhill run, hurtle about fifteen meters down a wooded slope. Gabriel remembered opening his eyes in the middle of a tremendous din, sounds he'd never heard before, and screaming in terror. The first image he had when he relived that moment was of a torrent of water washing over his face with supernatural force. Before the accident, our father had dreamed one night that he and his friends went off a bridge and fell into a river with the truck. The smashing of glass, the cracking of branches, the rain of mud, the confusion that had sprung from nowhere . . . In the accident itself, all these elements eclipsed the nightmare.

When the Pegaso finally came to a halt, in an almost vertical position with the cab squashed underneath, Gabriel took some seconds to get his thoughts together. His left arm, trapped between two creases in the buckled door, sent out the initial jabs of pain. He understood they'd had an accident. Fucking hell, he'd gone to sleep. While his brain was gaining consciousness, his right hand automatically groped for the ignition key and he turned the engine off. A wheel stopped revolving in emptiness. Then he understood the all-pervading silence, the false, intrusive, grotesque silence and immediately realized that Bundó was dead. He couldn't see him. One of his eyes was veiled with blood. He shouted.

“Bundó! Bundó! Wake up! Fuck!”

The right side of the cab was less damaged by the impact. Though his posture looked uncomfortable, Bundó lay with his head resting on the door, the way he usually slept. Eyes closed. Three or four small cuts on his face were bleeding. Only one detail was different: the strange position of his neck, an impossible angle. Gabriel shook his friend's body three or four times. Submitting to defeat, he clutched Bundó's hand, trying to transmit life to him. Then he, too, was still.

He didn't deserve anything more.

Incomprehensible shouts, coming closer and closer, briefly shook him from his concussion and kept him hazily awake.

Thank goodness for the snow, Christophers. It was seven o'clock in the morning and there wasn't much traffic. A minute after the Pegaso left the road, a Turk driving a worn-out Mercedes understood the meaning of the lines traced by wheels on snow-covered asphalt. For some kilometers, for safety's sake, he'd been trying to keep his wheels on the thick constant tracks made by the truck's tires, but the straightness of the two parallel lines suddenly ended, swerving gracefully off toward the hard shoulder and disappearing into nothingness. He braked in time, resisting the impulse to follow the lines to the end, and stopped his car by the side of the road. Then he saw the wreck of the Pegaso beneath him, a dark patch smoking among the trees, and he ran down along the path the truck had opened up.

“Alles in Ordnung? Hören Sie mich? Sagen Sie was!”

In the retelling, Gabriel wasn't sure whether he lost consciousness at this point, but the last thing he remembered from inside the truck was the face of this man, shocked, or numb with cold, looking at him through the window with his head upside down, opening his mouth to say something. The next thing he knew he was on the motorway, in an ambulance, surrounded by cars and emergency lights. A male nurse from the Red Cross was immobilizing his left arm—broken in two places near the elbow—and another one was cleaning the wounds on his face and neck with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. His forehead, nose, and one cheek were scored all over with scratches and cuts from shards of glass. The circumspect silence of the two nurses presaged the terrible news but, lying on the stretcher on his way to hospital, he asked one of the nurses about Bundó.

“Mein Freund?”

The nurse shook his head.

He spent all that day and the next in a hospital in Kassel. First they took X-rays of his arm and set it in a cast. Then they kept him under observation. Frankfurt wasn't far away, and we don't know if he thought about phoning Sigrun or not. The fact is he didn't. As I see it, Christophers, if he had phoned her we probably wouldn't have come to this point, which we can now interpret as the very
first sign of Gabriel's long period of inactivity. Meanwhile, another ambulance had taken Bundó along the motorway to the hospital morgue. A crane had recovered the wreckage of the poor Pegaso, and the German police checked the vehicle's papers. They identified the transport company, phoned Barcelona, and informed Senyor Casellas of the accident.

Halfway through the afternoon when Gabriel was starting to feel cut off from everything, he was visited by the secretary of the Spanish consulate in Frankfurt. The man looked familiar. They'd done his move a couple of years earlier. After expressing his condolences over Bundó's death, the secretary informed him that the consul—another former client of La Ibérica—had received a call from Senyor Casellas asking for help and advice. Naturally, Senyor Casellas wished to convey his support, express his sympathy because he knew Bundó was Gabriel's best friend—and wish him a swift recovery. The secretary also informed him of some practical matters. The consulate had arranged for the German branch of La Ibérica's insurance company to take charge of the wreckage of the truck, which was a complete write-off. If the doctors confirmed that he had no internal injuries, as they hoped, they'd reserved a seat for him on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Barcelona the day after next, on February 16th, in the morning. If he had no objection, the body of Senyor Serafí Bundó would be repatriated on the same flight and, needless to say, the consulate, prepared for such matters, would also supply an emergency coffin for the occasion.

Gabriel heard the secretary out, agreeing mechanically or answering in monosyllables. Although he hated the situation he was in, the pen-pusher's diplomatic smoothness was a help. The painkillers they'd given him were making him groggy, and his brain was grateful for the rest. Not thinking. Letting go. When the consular underling had taken his leave, however, memory crept into the lonely hospital room. When the secretary and his family had moved to Frankfurt, the three La Ibérica movers had mislaid a bag containing sports clothing. The shared booty was meager, mainly tracksuits, sneakers, tennis socks that nobody wanted, and swimming goggles. Although it was hardly his size, Bundó got it into his
head that he wanted an apparently brand-new and aristocratic-looking man's dressing gown, in navy-blue toweling and decorated with a shield on the breast pocket. Now, when he recognized the original owner, tall, slender, and mournful-looking, Gabriel had a flashback of Bundó wearing the dressing gown. He'd worn it for a while when they were living at the pension. He put it on when he came out of the shower or over his pajamas at night and the effect was hilarious. Since he was shorter than its original owner and on the tubby side, the dressing gown was a tight fit so he couldn't quite keep it together with the belt and the two front corners trailed on the floor. When he was walking around in it, Gabriel used to say he looked like a king in a cape, a medieval king fed up with the rabble and about to condemn all the boarding-house riffraff to death. The vision brought a painful smile—tugging the stitches of one of his cuts—and then he slept, out of pure exhaustion.

A day and a half later, on the Wednesday morning when they came to take him to the airport, he was no longer befuddled. Without the painkillers turning his brain to mush, reality kicked in with piercing force. Every second without Bundó at his side drilled through his temples like Chinese water torture. The guilt tormented him. Under such a sky, the future could only get worse. He'd never been on a plane, but this fear was engulfed by other fears. A contest of fears. And it was only eight in the morning.

From the hospital door, dressed in clothes they'd supplied, he saw two black cars pulling up. One was the hearse that had just picked up Bundó's coffin. The other was driven by the consulate chauffeur, who got out and opened the back door, but Gabriel gave him to understand that he wanted to sit next to him in the front seat. He was no big shot. Once he was in the car, the chauffeur gave him a folder bearing the emblem of the Spanish consulate in Frankfurt and a black canvas bag. He opened it. Inside he found a few personal effects of Bundó's and other things retrieved from the Pegaso, like a bottle opener and his sunglasses, still intact. They'd been useful once but now they made him angry. There was also a shirt and trousers belonging to Bundó, impeccably washed and ironed thanks to the good offices of the consulate staff. They
were the clothes he'd changed into after the move to Hamburg, and Gabriel had some trouble identifying them. Bundó was a slave to his own fads, and that had been his favorite shirt for some months. They'd nicked it from a move to Bonn (Number 188), and he liked it, he said, because it had the three great qualities a working shirt should have in winter: Being made of flannel it was warm, it let him move freely because it was loose on him, and it didn't show the dirt. That third reason wasn't objective. Bundó was always covered in food stains, but he didn't care. When Gabriel or Petroli pointed it out he laughed at them and started looking for geographical shapes in his stains—a tomato-sauce Italy, an aioli Iberian peninsula, a chocolate-ice-cream Africa. The flannel shirt was black-and-white herringbone, modern and very eye-catching, and the stains were fairly well camouflaged. Now, the sight of that shirt, so soft and neat with a starched collar, crushed Gabriel even more. It was as if they'd stolen the essence of his friend.

To keep his mind off it, he opened the consulate folder. Someone, maybe the secretary himself, had put his plane ticket inside and, in a neat pile, the documents they'd been able to rescue from the cab. He found his passport and Bundó's, the waybills, the Pegaso papers, his international driving licence, postcards nobody had written on, a few maps ripped at the edges (Bundó always folded them badly), a crumpled leaflet about the Via Favència apartments, Petroli's list of Spanish emigrant centers, and several other documents. He flipped listlessly through the papers and was once again caught off guard by Bundó's presence in all of them.