Lost Luggage by Jordi Puntí Page A

four-story building, and it had a well-lit living room thanks to the glassed-in balcony overlooking the street, but its interior offered much less than what the façade promised. This was a modest boarding house, in the shape of a funnel and organized around a long passageway. There were six dark bedrooms with high ceilings and fake moldings, a bathroom with a translucent door—on the other side of which you could always make out gelatinous shadows—and a separate toilet in a narrow little room. The landlady’s kitchen and bedroom were set apart, a kind of secret annex that was off-limits to the lodgers and, immediately after that, the apartment widened out into the luminous living-cum-dining room that looked on to the Ronda.
    With no known name beyond the dented sign at the entrance—“Pension. Travelers and Long-term. Second Floor”—the boarding house belonged to a Senyora Rifà, who hailed from the plain near Vic. A petite energetic woman, a human dynamo, Senyora Natàlia Rifà had inherited the business ten years earlier from a first cousin of her mother’s. A spinster, well over fifty, suspicious and coquettish by nature, she scurried around her domain as if there was a constant danger of one of the rooms being set on fire. Notwithstanding all the disappointments she had borne, she hadn’t renounced the pleasure of a little primping and preening every morning, and she had great faith in a corset that made her backside look misshapen. Her boarders only ever saw her in a dressing gown when she went into the kitchen. She always got dressed up to serve the food at mealtimes. She was clean and required the lodgers to be clean too and, if she saw that they had a future in her house, she educatedthem in all-around tidiness. She cooked passably well, which is to say not stinting on the salt but without much joy, and that might be why she only accepted men in her pension—because she knew they were easier to please.
    The second floor of the building in Ronda de Sant Antoni hadn’t been renovated since well before the Civil War. The walls sweated in summer and patches of damp, which took ages to vanish, appeared in some rooms after rain (and an insanely superstitious student from Jaca saw faces in them). The furniture creaked with age and the kitchen utensils were blackened by fire. This rather fusty atmosphere was accentuated by the most outlandish feature of the house: its collection of stuffed animals.
    Birds, Canidae, rodents, or members of the feline species: each room exhibited its own variety of embalmed creature. It was a veritable natural history museum. In the vestibule, crouched in semi-ambush above the coat and hat rack, a shiny-pelted fox stood sentry: You can come in; you can’t come in. On the floor, beside the umbrella stand, a kindly looking dalmatian kept it company, sitting up on its back legs, apparently soliciting caresses from anyone entering or leaving. A squirrel with its tail all fluffed up like a feather duster and on its way up the bookcase in the hallway propped up the volumes of Reader’s Digest Selections (the landlady had also inherited the subscription). In the display cabinet in the dining room, a sky-blue parrot and a multihued cockatoo with permanently open beaks chattered incessantly, miming the most frequently used words of the occupants of the house. In a different corner of the same cabinet, a hummingbird with iridescent feathers, its wings whirring in perpetual still motion, imbibed at an exotic plastic flower. On top of an old cocktail cabinet, a genet with its mouth half open sighed over such succulent prey.
    This obsession with taxidermy even extended to the landing. Next to her door and with permission from the other residents of the building, who saw it as a touch of class that graced the whole house, Senyora Rifà had mounted the head of a wild goat, the kind that has spiraling, sharp-tipped horns. Once they’d earned