Lost Luggage by Jordi Puntí

frenzy, Bundó rushed over to the nun and planted kisses on both hercheeks. The nun gave him a friendly shove—get away with you!—and blushed. Gabriel was tempted to imitate his friend but, at the last minute, merely opted for doing something awkward with his arms and making an affectionate bow in her direction (and one can’t discard the possibility that he’d suddenly remembered the titillating tale starring Sister Mercedes).
    Making a big deal out of the little kerfuffle because she had a secret penchant for this kind of familiarity, the Mother Superior straightened her coif, smoothed out the non-existent creases in her habit, and immediately set about putting a damper on things.
    â€œYou must be eternally grateful to God and to Senyor Casellas, in that order, for what they have done for you,” she said, shifting from Catalan to Spanish to give more gravity to her words. “In fact, it’s not entirely true that you have been exempted from military service: You’re going to enter the ranks, so to say, of La Ibérica moving company and it is my expectation that you will serve Senyor Casellas with the same devotion as our soldiers serve the fatherland and General Franco.”
    Only a few months earlier, declaring that Spain represented “unity of destiny in the universal,” Franco had presented the principles of the National Movement, and the Mother Superior had learned them by heart. The two boys cagily agreed with her pronouncements. As they heard her out, Gabriel mentally drew a fine moustache on the nun’s pasty face and realized that she and Senyor Casellas were like two peas in a pod.
    And now, if we may, we’ll close the doors of the House of Charity and Llars Mundet forever.

5
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A Home on the Ronda de Sant Antoni
    D estiny, playful and mischievous as a puppy, landed Gabriel and Bundó in a boarding house. Whenever a youngster left the orphanage, the nuns made inquiries as to whether there were any relatives, even distant ones, with a view to handing over responsibility to the family. This time, however, they’d known for years that the two friends were alone. They let them leave, then, with the recommendation that they should install themselves in some economical, but above all decent, lodgings. Gabriel and Bundó didn’t need to be told twice. Acting on the advice of Grandpa Cuniller at La Ibérica, who’d spent more than half his life in boarding houses, they opted for a room with two beds in an establishment on the Ronda de Sant Antoni. The building was on the corner of Carrer Sant Gil, just a few steps from the local market, although the main reason for choosing that particular place was that it was very close to the House of Charity. They only had to walk along Carrer Ferlandina to get to one of its entrances, the one opening into the Nadal i Dou courtyard. It’s not that the two friends were yearning to hang around their old orphanage again—indeed Gabriel had fled from the printers with the guilty conscience of a deserter—but they had a sense of going back to the neighborhood where they’d grown up. They wiped the slate clean of the time they’d spent in exile in Llars Munder and were at last able to satisfy an urge that had been repressed since early adolescence. They almost swooned at the thought of the bittersweetperfume of the streets of the red-light district, the Barri Xino, at nightfall. Now free of the nuns’ vigilance, they were longing to roam its most notorious corners, and nothing would deprive them of the thrill of these so-often-imagined attractions.
    It was autumn 1958, and the boarding house captured perfectly the frontier spirit of that part of Barcelona: It overlooked the cramped spaces of the Barri Xino at the back, while its front door opened on to the Ronda de Sant Antoni with its ambience of a Parisian boulevard. The establishment occupied the whole of the spacious second floor of a