Lost Luggage by Jordi Puntí Page B

their landlady’s approval, the most faithful clients were let into the secretof the goat: The semibared teeth of the beast guarded a copy of the key to the pension for latecomers and the absentminded.
    The inhabitants of the pension took a while to get used to the disquieting presence of all these creatures. As they lingered at the table over coffee, tall stories were told about the poor quality of the taxidermy in some specimens. Hearing them, newcomers started scratching uneasily and, for some time afterward, their dreams were filled with bloated-bellied beasts and revolting flies buzzing around them.
    Senyora Rifà also had a cat, a live cat. The animal, which had become unapproachable after the half-hearted caresses of so many hands—a sort of pension levy or toll—seemed to revel in startling people. Without any warning at all, after spending hours and hours sleeping on the sofa or immobile atop its favorite piece of furniture, it would let out a screech and leap onto the shoulder of whoever was nearest. The lodgers hated it, and the sentiment was mutual. Apart from the cat, which was the original furry occupant of the house, the invasion of animals, the motionless ones, had occurred in the days when one of Senyora Rifà’s lodgers was a traveling salesman promoting Rioja wines. Gabriel and Bundó just missed out on meeting him, but some of the residents made it their business to induct them into the mystery. The gentleman in question, a widower with two daughters of more than marriageable age who were the bane of his existence, lived in the pension for almost four years, from 1954 to 1958. At first, he was there one week a month, just enough time to do the rounds of Barcelona’s restaurants and businesses, but, after six months, his stays extended and, claiming a terrific amount of work, he was now spending twenty days in the boarding house and ten in Logroño. He and the landlady used the familiar tu and they enjoyed each other’s company—on the mattress, every night. The happiest days in Senyora Rifà’s life were those she spent as this man’s concubine. She confessed this to Bundó on more than one anisette-soaked evening, whereupon he gave her his shoulder to cry on. In the end, the gentleman also endowed her with his stuffed-animal collection.
    It seems that, thanks to some childhood memory related to an old Republican schoolteacher, the gentleman from Logroño was agreat lover of taxidermy. Every Friday afternoon he went off, like an explorer setting out on a hunt, to pay a visit to the taxidermist’s that used to be in the Plaça Reial. He gazed and gazed again upon the exhibited items and, from time to time, when one of them stole his heart, spent a few pesetas and brought it home. Senyora Rifà tended to receive the new acquisition with a wrinkling of her nose—“dust and more dust,” she said to herself—but immediately set about looking for somewhere to put it. She saw each new adoption as a sign of permanence. As long as the animals were there, she reasoned—and it wasn’t as if they were going to be escaping all by themselves some fine day—it would never occur to the gentleman from Logroño to leave her.
    She was wrong, of course.
    She was wrong because on her return from the market one September morning, that time of day when the house was empty and she listened to the serial on Ràdio Barcelona while she was cooking lunch, she found a folded piece of paper on the dining-room table. The gentleman from Logroño informed her, with immoderate stylistic flourishes, that he’d been obliged to hasten back to his home town. His two daughters, together and in concert, had attempted suicide. He’d write with further news as soon as he could. Lots of kisses, et cetera. Senyora Natàlia Rifà shuddered at the situation and felt sorry for the man. She then noticed the reek of Dandy Male and realized that the