Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

  ‘We had ended up at Cap de Creus. None of us knew it, of course, but that was where Zarco and I had that conversation I was telling you about. We passed in front of an abandoned hut, climbed up to the headland and I parked the Mehari by the lighthouse, a rectangular building with a tower rising out of it with a cupola of iron and glass, topped by a weathervane. When we stopped we realized that Tere and Gordo had fallen asleep. We didn’t wake them up, and Zarco and I got out of the car and started walking along the esplanade in front of the lighthouse until the esplanade ran out and in front of us was nothing but a precipice that descended to a labyrinth of coves and inlets and, beyond them, a sea that stretched to the horizon, wavy and open and a little bit shadowed already by the beginning of twilight. Both of us stood there, our faces to the wind. Zarco murmured: Fuck, it looks like the end of the world. I didn’t say anything. After a while Zarco turned around, walked away from the cliff, went and sat down against the wall of the lighthouse and started rolling a joint out of the wind. I walked away from the cliff too, sat down beside Zarco, lit the joint when he’d finished rolling it.

  ‘That’s where the conversation started up. I don’t remember how long it lasted. I remember that when we started talking the sun was starting to set, staining the surface of the sea a pale red, and that on the right a boat appeared on the horizon sailing parallel to the coast, and when we left, the boat was about to disappear on the left of the horizon and the sun had sunk into the now dark water; I also remember how the conversation got started. We’d been sitting there for a while not talking when I asked Zarco what he was thinking of doing when summer was over; I’d asked the question most of all to escape from the uncomfortable silence, and it sounded a little incongruous, a little out of place, so Zarco brushed it off saying he’d do the same as always, and half-heartedly asked what I’d do. As well as half-hearted, my answer was innocuous – I said I’d do the same as always too – but it seemed to arouse Zarco’s curiosity. And what do you mean by that?, he asked. That you’re going back to school? It means I’ll do the same as this summer, I answered. I don’t plan to go back to school. Zarco nodded as if he approved of the answer and took a pensive toke. I stopped going to school when I was seven, he said. Well, maybe eight. Doesn’t matter: it was a pain. You don’t like it either? No, I said. I used to like it, but not any more. What happened?, asked Zarco. At that moment I hesitated. I told you before that I’d never mentioned Batista in front of Zarco and the rest; now, for a second, I thought I might; the next moment I discarded the idea: I felt that Zarco wouldn’t be able to understand, that telling him about my previous year’s ordeal would be to relive it, relive the humiliation and lose the self-respect I’d gained over the summer and force Zarco to lose respect for me. Then, with a blend of amazement and joy, I thought how, although the ordeal had happened just a couple of months ago, it was now as though it had happened centuries ago. Then I said: Nothing. I just stopped liking it and that was it.

  ‘Zarco kept smoking. The wind whipped around the lighthouse and blew our hair about and we had to smoke carefully, so a gust wouldn’t blow the end off the joint; in front of us the sky and the sea were an identical, immense blue. And your folks?, asked Zarco. What about my folks? I asked. What are your folks going to say if you don’t go back to school?, asked Zarco. They can say what they like, I answered. Whatever they say it’s over. I’m not going back. Zarco took another toke, handed me the joint and asked me to tell him about my family; without taking my eyes off the sea and sky and the boat that seemed suspended between the two, I told him about my father, my mother, my sister. Then I asked him the same question (and not just because he’d asked me: I told you before that I’d barely heard him talk about his family). Zarco laughed. I looked at him: like me he had his head leaning back against the lighthouse wall and his hair tangled by the wind; a bit of saliva had dried in the corner of his mouth. What family?, he asked. I never knew my father, my stepfather got killed years ago, my brothers are in jail, my mother’s too busy just trying to get by. You call that a family? I didn’t answer. I turned back towards the sea, finishing off the joint, and, when I stubbed it out on the ground, Zarco started rolling another.

  ‘When he finished rolling it he passed it to me and I lit it. What I don’t understand is what the fuck you’re going to do if you don’t go back to school, said Zarco, picking up the conversation again. The same as you guys. Zarco curled his lip in a way I didn’t know how to interpret, passed me the joint and turned back to look at the sea and the sky, still immense, less and less blue, both turning towards a reddish darkness. Fuck, he said. I took a drag on the joint and asked: What’s up? Nothing, said Zarco. What’s up?, I repeated. Can’t I do the same as you guys? Sure, said Zarco. I don’t know if I was satisfied by his answer, but I turned back towards the sea and sky as well and had another toke; after a few seconds, Zarco changed his mind: Actually you can’t, he said. Why not?, I asked. Because you’re not like us, he answered. We stared at each other: that was the argument I’d used with him, at the beginning of the summer, to refuse to rob the Vilaró arcade (and then again with Tere to refuse to break into a house in La Montgoda). For a moment I thought Zarco remembered and he was turning the tables on me; then I thought he didn’t remember. I smiled. Don’t tell me you’re going to give me a sermon?, I asked. In reply, he just smiled back. We kept quiet. I smoked in silence. And I said: Why aren’t I like you guys? And he said: Because you’re not. And I said: I do the same things you guys do. And he said: Almost the same, yeah. But you’re not like us. And I insisted: Why not? And he explained: Because you go to school and we don’t. Because you have a family and we don’t. Because you’re scared and we’re not. And I asked: You guys aren’t scared? And he answered: Yeah, but we’re not scared the same way you are. You think about the fear, and we don’t. You have things to lose, and we don’t. That’s the difference. I made a sceptical face, but didn’t push it. I smoked. I passed him the joint. For a while we kept staring at the sea and the sky and listening to the howling wind. Zarco took two or three more tokes, put out the joint and then went on: Do you know what happened to Chino the day he went into the Modelo prison? He paused; then said: He was raped. Three sons of bitches gave it to him up the ass. He told his mother and his mother told Tere. Funny, eh? He paused again. Oh, by the way, he added, did I ever tell you the story of Quílez? It happened the first day I was in the nick.

  ‘I was waiting for him to tell me the story of Quílez when I heard him say: Look at her. I turned around: it was Tere, who’d just come around the corner of the lighthouse and was walking towards us. I conked out, she said when she came up beside us, crouching down. And Gordo?, I asked. Out for the count, she answered. Zarco rolled and lit a joint and passed it to Tere, who smoked for a while before passing it to me. Then Tere stood up and walked over to the cliff and stayed there, facing the sea, her hair whipping around like crazy in the wind and her silhouette standing out against a cloudless, darkening sky and choppy, darkening sea. That was the moment Zarco started talking to me about Tere. First he asked if I liked Tere; I pretended he was asking what he wasn’t asking and quickly said of course. Then Zarco said that’s not what he meant and I, knowing what he meant, asked him what he meant and he answered that he meant would I like to shag her. Since I’d guessed the question, I didn’t have to improvise the answer. No, I lied. Then why did you shag her?, asked Zarco. I froze. Just at that instant, as if she’d caught a snippet of our conversation (impossible, because she was too far away and the howling wind and the noise of the iron and glass rattling in the lighthouse cupola drowned out the words), Tere turned around and opened her arms wide in a gesture of admiration or incredulity for the sky and sea behind her. I passed the joint to Zarco, who held my gaze for a second with a neutral look in his eyes; the dried saliva had disappeared from the corner of his mouth. What did you think?, he asked. That I didn’t know? I didn’t answer, and we both looked back at Tere: shielding her eyes with her hand from the sun’s last rays
of the evening, at that moment Tere was looking towards an abandoned building a hundred metres or so to our right, on the same headland. Who told you?, I asked. She did, he answered. It was only once, I lied again; I specified: The night we went to the Marocco. Are you sure?, he asked. Yes, I answered, thinking about the washrooms at the Vilaró arcade. Yeah, said Zarco. And he passed me the joint. I took it, smoked and watched how Tere pointed to the empty building and shouted something and started walking, jumping from one rock to the next and holding her bag against her body, towards where she’d been pointing. So it was just once, said Zarco. Yeah, I said. What’s the matter?, he asked without irony. Didn’t you like it? Of course I liked it, I answered, and immediately regretted the reply. So?, he asked. I reflected. I took several drags on the joint. I said: I don’t know. Ask her. I passed the joint to Zarco and that was it.’

  ‘You didn’t talk any more?’

  ‘No. Zarco didn’t push it and I was desperate to change the subject.’

  ‘And you were thinking that Tere wasn’t Zarco’s girlfriend.’

  ‘I thought she was and wasn’t, I told you already. Anyway, I don’t know . . . I think that at some point I had a sense that this friendly conversation might be a trap, that it might actually be a scheme of Zarco’s, a way of testing me or an attempt to make me talk; ultimately, that it might be his way of telling me that Tere was his and that I should keep my distance. I don’t know, it was just a feeling, but a very vivid feeling, and I did not feel comfortable. It’s even possible that later I began to think that Zarco had been looking for an opportunity like that for a while to bring up the subject of Tere and the night on Montgó beach, and I might have also thought that, deep down, what Zarco wanted was for me to leave the gang so I’d get away from Tere.’

  ‘Did he tell you to leave the gang?’

  ‘Yes. That same day, just before we left the lighthouse. I, to stop talking about Tere, had started talking about that afternoon’s thwarted heist, and then we were silent for a while smoking and listening to the wind rattling the iron and glass of the lighthouse cupola, watching Tere approach the abandoned building and wander around it and disappear behind it, and the sun beginning to sink into the sea and the boat to disappear off to the left of the horizon, and at some point Zarco asked what we were talking about and I said that afternoon’s thwarted heist and he said: No, before. I said I didn’t remember although I remembered perfectly well and then, to my relief, I heard him say: Oh yeah, the story of Quílez.

  ‘And then he told me about Quílez, a long story that he later left out of his memoir and never told in any of the interviews he gave or any of the ones I’ve read, something which I at least found rather shocking because, as you know, Zarco told the journalists everything. What he told me is that the story had happened on his first day in prison, in the Modelo in Barcelona, at the time it would have been more or less a year before. He told me that afternoon, when he came out to the main courtyard at exercise time, he met two friends of his brother Juan José who’d been locked up in the prison for months (though not in the same cell block as him) and started talking to them. He told me the yard was full of prisoners calmly talking and walking and playing football. He said the calm shattered when the crowd seemed to stop all of a sudden while a circular wall of men formed in the middle of the yard, and in the middle of that wall was a blond, corpulent man, and in the blink of an eye another man, this one pale and very thin, hurled himself on him and, with a homemade stiletto fashioned from a mattress spring, with a single slash, opened his chest and then ripped out his heart and held it up in his hand, fresh and gushing blood in the afternoon sun. And he told me that as he displayed his trophy the murderer let out a long rejoicing shriek. He also told me that it all happened so fast that, before falling down dead, the victim didn’t even have time to shout in horror or for help. And he told me how the prison guards evacuated the yard and left the heartless corpse sprawled on the ground, and that he didn’t ask anyone anything but soon knew that the murderer’s name was Quílez and the murdered man was a guy reputed to be a snitch who’d arrived at the Modelo that very day, just like he had, except that he’d been transferred from another prison. And finally he told me – and when he told me this, I thought his voice trembled – that night, after the guards locked up Quílez in solitary confinement, his name was chanted in a righteous murmur that travelled through the cell blocks of the Modelo like a prayer or a triumphal lullaby.

  ‘When Zarco finished telling me the story of Quílez we sat in silence. After a few seconds he stood up and stretched and took a few steps away from the lighthouse towards the cliff, stuck his hands in his pockets and stood there for a while in front of the darkened sea and sky. Then, all of a sudden, he turned back towards me and spoke with an irritated look on his face. Look, Gafitas, I’m going to tell you, he began. You do whatever the fuck you feel like, but at least don’t say that I didn’t tell you. After a pause he went on: If it’s up to me, you can stay with us. You turned out to be tougher and more of a son of a bitch than you look like, so there’s no problem there. Do what you want. Now, he added, if you want my advice, drop it. He took his right hand out of his pocket and cut the air with a horizontal slash, much more violent than his words. Drop this, he repeated. Don’t come back to La Font or the district. Get lost, man. Forget the gang. Go back to your family, go back to school, go back to your life. There’s no more to this, don’t you see? You’ve already seen all there is to see. Sooner or later we’ll get caught, just like they caught Guille and the others. And then we’re fucked: if you’re unlucky you end up dead like Guille or in a wheelchair like Tío; and if you’re lucky you end up in the slammer, like Chino or Drácula. Although for a guy like you I don’t know which would be worse. I spent a few months in the slammer, but the slammer’ll crush you, it’ll be the end of you. That’s another reason you’re not like us. Besides, we don’t have a choice, this is the only life we have, but you have another one. Don’t be a dickhead, Gafitas: drop it.

  ‘That’s more or less what he said to me. I didn’t answer, in part because I had nothing to answer and in part, as I told you before, the conversation about Tere had made me uneasy, but especially because at that moment Tere showed up at the lighthouse with the news that the abandoned building was a Civil Guard post and the suggestion that we should check it out. It was almost dark by then. Zarco pointed the long, dirty fingernail of his index finger at me and said as if he hadn’t heard Tere’s suggestion: Think about it, Gafitas. I stood up. Tere looked at me; then she looked at Zarco. What does Gafitas have to think about?, she asked. Zarco patted her on the ass and answered: Nothing. We went back to the Mehari and drove away.’

  ‘And that was the last time you and Zarco talked about Tere that summer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you consider leaving the gang after Zarco advised you to?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Not because I wanted to leave, but because I had the suspicion that Zarco had advised me to leave the gang and return to my previous life to get me away from Tere, and that there was a threat hidden behind that advice. In any case he didn’t mention the matter again, and the truth is there was barely any time for me to consider it seriously: shortly after the conversation at Cap de Creus it was all finished.’

  ‘You mean the gang.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When did it finish?’

  ‘In the middle of September, a couple of weeks after my parents got back from their holiday. That was the worst moment of the summer for me. On the one hand I felt increasingly ill at ease in the gang or in what was left of the gang, because that conversation with Zarco had injected me with the poison of distrust. On the other hand my relationship with my parents didn’t improve on their return; quite the contrary: after a few days of truce even the rows and shouting matches multiplied and worsened, especially with my father, who must have seen me as an unrecognizable and furious monster, full of contempt. I don’t know: now I think I probably felt trapped, an
d felt that everything could explode in those days at home or in the gang; finally everything exploded in the robbery of the Banco Popular branch in Bordils.

  ‘It was our last job and it was a disaster. The reason for the disaster is obvious. For a start it has to be said that we planned it all in no time and so clumsily that we didn’t even check out the branch and barely had a look around outside it. Add to this that the people who participated in the heist were not the best suited: we couldn’t count on Tere, who was in Barcelona because one of her sisters had just had a baby, and, after Zarco sounded out the district, Latas and some other guys, the one who ended up filling in for her was Jou, who’d never robbed a bank and had no experience with guns. And to top it off we were unlucky . . . All this is true, but it doesn’t explain the disaster; the explanation is simpler: there was a tip-off. We never found out who it was, or at least I never found out. It really could have been anybody: any of the guys Zarco sounded out to participate in the heist, any of the guys those guys talked to, any of the guys we’d talked to. Keep in mind as well that all the bars of the red-light district were full of police informers, starting with La Font; there were also snitches at Rufus. We knew it and, although Zarco was always demanding discretion, the truth is we talked to too many people and too cheerfully. And the first to do so was me.’

  ‘Do you mean that it might have been you who let it slip?’

  ‘I’ve often thought so.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because two days before the heist, when we were all set to go and just needed to find someone to take Tere’s place, I spent a couple of hours drinking beer with Córdoba while waiting for my friends in La Font. I’ve told you about Córdoba, right? I don’t remember what we talked about that day, but Córdoba and I were friends and I trusted him, although I’ve often thought since that he wasn’t trustworthy. I don’t know. It might have been him. Which is to say: it might have been me.’