Read Online Lost Luggage by Jordi Puntí - Free Book Online Page B

noticed that two young girls were pointing at him and laughing. He instinctively looked at his reflection in the window and didn’t recognize himself in the face staring back at him. There was an inky moustache under the nose, and in the masked features he saw a dejected, shabby man. All of a sudden he saw himself twenty yearslater, doing the same commute, and this made him unhappier still. “This must be what it’s like to grow up,” he resignedly told himself. A series of flashes from the overhead wires shook him from his reverie, and the reflection vanished from the window.
    Bundó was more fortunate. It must be said that his sturdy build and resolute air in the face of life’s surprises were a help. The Mother Superior, Sister Elvira, came from a well-heeled family of the Bonanova neighborhood. While she harbored a few pangs of conscience, her parents and siblings had repositioned themselves with surprising ease after all the upheaval of war and, ever since their kind of people had been in charge, had set about reestablishing the old order of things, which had worked so well in their favor. Needless to say, in January 1939, after two long years of eking out an existence in a property on the outskirts of Barcelona, in hiding and shitting themselves with fright, without any maids and grudgingly rationing their breakfast coffee, they’d been the first to hang a white sheet from the balcony of their apartment and to go down to Avinguda Diagonal, all of them together, to cheer on Franco’s troops as they marched by in their victory parade. Robert Casellas, Sister Elvira’s older brother, had inherited the family business and had to get it going again from scratch. Every July 18, on the anniversary of the start of the Civil War, he celebrated the godsend by making a generous donation to the House of Charity. By this we mean big money. He saw it as the best way of earning himself a privileged place in heaven. In return for the favor, he sometimes asked his sister to send him the odd boy to lug stuff for his moving company. He wanted them brawny, without any bad habits, and orphans because then they wouldn’t bother him with family celebrations. This was the fate of the young Bundó.
    The company was called La Ibérica Transport and Moving. The offices and garage were in Carrer Almogàvers, very close to Rambla del Poblenou. Three DKV vans and three Pegaso trucks, all boxy and gleaming, slept on the premises. The DKVs were used for the simpler jobs and rarely ventured outside the province, while the trucks were assigned the big moves and, when necessary, traveled from Barcelona all over Spain. The collectivizations of 1937 hadstripped the company of men and machines, but Robert Casellas had got them back after some slick wheeling and dealing with the Ministry of Transport. His pride and joy, all six vehicles looked practically new, and he could spend hours and hours gazing at the shiny beasts with paternal love. When they came back to roost after a move, he’d have them washed and buffed by the latest arrivals among his workers until they looked as if they’d just rolled off the assembly line.
    Even though he was getting a miserly wage as an apprentice—and, moreover, part of the money went directly from Casellas’s pocket to the nuns’ account—Bundó enjoyed remembering those days. It makes us suspect he conveniently forgot the suffering for the sake of anecdote: minimizing it without recounting the true measure of its pain because, that way, it was worth recalling.
    â€œI remember the first days after I went to work at La Ibérica,” he told Petroli in one of those nostalgia sessions he shared with our father, “and I’d get back to Llars Mundet after dark. My back would be totally done in. My arms and legs wouldn’t do what I wanted. I was so worn out I’d go straight to bed. In a morning and an afternoon, for example, we’d