Free Lost Luggage by Jordi Puntí Page B

Casellas because he liked the formal address and it made him more amenable.
    Casellas looked him up and down again and was just about to say something when the phone rang. At the first ring, the company owner squared his shoulders like a soldier and sat up straight backed in his office chair. Then he picked up the handset and started talking with an important client, some big fish. He listened with great attention and said “yes, yes, of course, of course, yes, naturally, sí , sí , claro , claro , sí , cómo no ,” to everything, oozing sycophancy with every word. A good two minutes went by until he remembered that Gabriel was still standing there. Then he covered up the earpiece for a moment and said, “Go on, off you go, off you go now. Tell Sister Elvira you’ll be starting next Monday. You won’t be paid for the first two weeks. You’ll be on trial. You’ll go with Bundó in the van. He’ll be responsible for you. Ah, and as I was saying before, eat more spinach, lad. You’ve got to be a Popeye, or whatever his name is.”

4
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Age Without a Name
    T he change of job was a tonic for our father. From the front of the van, wonderful views of the city replaced the dismal sight of printing presses. The narcotic smell of ink faded away into some cranny of his memory, only to resurface when it was completely inoffensive, for example when it occasionally drifted out of the open pages of a newspaper at breakfast time, or when a leaking pen decorated his chest with a navy-blue medal. In Gabriel’s first weeks with La Ibérica, when he and Bundó were arriving or leaving in the DKV, Senyor Casellas watched them from a distance, smug in the confirmation of his own good judgment when he took on the new orphan mover. It seemed that, rather than leaving him tired out, lugging furniture and boxes was doing him good, making him a little hardier every day.
    About to turn seventeen, Gabriel and Bundó had bodies that obeyed them. With muscles as pliant as rubber they could carry any weight. Besides being in good physical condition, the two friends were both easygoing by nature, which also helped. They’d shed the age of innocence but hadn’t fully entered the age of calculation and were breezing through life with just the right amount of baggage, unburdened by any extraneous weight or terrible hardships. They’d reached an age that isn’t an age, one that has no name and, in all likelihood, the job of shifting furniture, emptying and filling houses and loading up the trailer with all the useless things that people accumulate protected them against the temptationof growing up, thinking about marrying the first girl to nab them and surrendering to more mundane worries.
    This sensation of weightlessness was enhanced both by the excitement of novelty and the contrast with their workmates, who were more accustomed to routine and yoked to everyday affairs. Neither Gabriel nor Bundó had a driver’s license, of course, and they had to wait a few years before they could get one, so when they went out it was always as flunkies for some more experienced worker. The owner wanted to toughen up the apprentices and tended to assign them to one of the vans covering the moves within the city of Barcelona. As they were learning the trade they gradually got to know everyone on the La Ibérica payroll. There was Romero from Murcia, who used to spit out of the window not giving a damn about anyone else and who, with the deftness of a one-armed man, could roll cigarettes while he was driving; there were Sebastià and Ricard Nogueró, two mutually ill-disposed brothers from the neighborhood of Sants who were at each other’s throats all day long; El Tembleque, “The Wobbler,” a once-promising bullfighter from Andalusia who now lived in Sant Adrià; Sirera and Brauli, who were supporters of the Espanyol Soccer Club; Fornido, a hefty chap who did honor to his