Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

  ‘The barracks hut where Tere lived was identical to all the rest, except for the fact that a double row of clothes were hung out to dry across the front and a slightly taller television antenna stuck out of the roof. It had two windows closed with blinds, but the door was ajar; as I pushed it I heard some cartoon laughter, my nostrils were saturated with a sickly-sweet smell and, as I stepped over the threshold, I took in the whole dwelling in a single glance. It was barely forty square metres lit by a couple of naked bulbs and divided into three separate spaces by curtains: in the main space there was a woman cooking on a portable stove, with a dog curled up at her feet, three children were glued to the TV on a sofa made out of a sheet of wood and a mattress, and, beside them, sitting on a folding chair by a brazier table, a very young mother was breastfeeding a baby; in the secondary spaces I just saw some mattresses lying on the floor on top of a bed of straw. Tere was standing on one of them, in front of an open chest of drawers, with a pile of folded clothes in her hands.

  ‘As soon as I stepped inside everybody turned towards me, including the dog, who stood up and growled. Noticing that Tere was blushing, I blushed and, before anyone could say a word, my friend left the clothes on top of the chest of drawers, grabbed me by the arm, said she’d be right back and dragged me outside. A couple of steps away from the door to the hut she asked: What are you doing here? Looking for you, I answered. I just wanted to know if you were all right. Have you got any news of Zarco and the other guys? My words seemed to calm Tere, who soon went from defensive surprise to curiosity: as if she hadn’t heard me, she pointed to the bandage on my arm and asked what had happened. I began to tell her about the bank robbery in Bordils. She didn’t interrupt me until I explained that the police were waiting for us when we came out. They must have got a tip-off, she said. Yeah, I said. Then she said she wasn’t surprised, and I looked at her uncomprehending. She clarified: It’s Zarco’s fault. As soon as I told him I couldn’t go with you guys he started talking to anyone who would listen; and it never fails: when you talk to anyone who will listen you end up talking to someone you shouldn’t have talked to. He was the first to make the rule and the first to break it.

  ‘You can’t imagine how relieved I was to hear Tere say that. Free of the need to demonstrate that I’d had nothing to do with the tip-off, I continued my tale, though I didn’t say anything about what had happened after our car rolled over on La Barca Bridge: nothing about Zarco’s arrest, nothing about fleeing to Colera with my father, nothing about Inspector Cuenca’s visit to Higinio Redondo’s house. When I finished, Tere told me what she knew about Zarco, Gordo and Jou. She told me that the three of them were all right, though Zarco had a cast on one leg, and that, after having been interrogated at the station house over three days and nights, they’d been handed over to a judge, who’d sent them to Barcelona and had them locked up in the Modelo. Now they’re awaiting trial, Tere concluded. But who knows how long that’ll take; you know how long ago Chino and Drácula got nabbed and they’re still waiting. But nobody’s going to save them from four or five years, that’s for sure: they’re going to have to take the rap for the guns, car theft, bank robbery and at least three or four other charges. Not as bad as it could have been, but it won’t be nothing. They haven’t said anything about us, nothing about you, nothing about me or anybody else, and they won’t. If you were worried about that, you can forget it.

  ‘I was a little humiliated that Tere guessed what I was thinking; but only a little: by then the opinion Tere might have of me had begun to stop mattering. While she kept talking I glimpsed over her shoulder, across the river and into the trees, no more than three hundred metres away, the apartment blocks on Caterina Albert, and at that moment I thought – it was the first time I thought this – that my house and the prefabs were at once very close and very far apart, and only then did I feel that it was really true that I wasn’t like them. Suddenly all that had happened over the past months seemed unreal, and it felt comforting to know that I belonged on the other side of the river and that the waters of the blue border had now returned to their course; I suddenly understood that I had cleared up my feelings about Tere and that Tere had just been a strange and fleeting summer fling.

  Tere kept talking while I had started to look for a way to get out of there. She was talking about Zarco; she was saying that, whatever sentence was passed on him, he wouldn’t spend much time in prison. He’ll escape as soon as he can, she said. And that’ll be soon. I nodded, but made no comment. Two little boys on bikes followed by a dog went by a couple of metres from where we were, splashing mud on my shoes. Just then the hut door opened and the sounds of a fake gunfight and a real baby crying came from inside at the same time as the head of the girl I’d seen breastfeeding the baby peeked out and told Tere she was needed. I’ll be right there, answered Tere, and the door closed again. Tere touched the beauty spot beside her nose; instead of going in she asked: Have you been back to La Font? No, I answered. Have you? Me neither, she answered. But if you want we could meet there tomorrow afternoon. I’m seeing Lina. I thought for a moment and said: OK. Tere smiled for the first time that day. Then she said goodbye and went into her house.

  ‘The next day I didn’t go to La Font and I didn’t see Tere again until the middle of December. Over those three months of autumn I completely changed my life; or rather: in a certain sense I went back to my former life. The life I’d had before Tere, before Zarco, before Batista and before everything. Although, as I say, I only went back to it in a certain sense, because the person going back was no longer the same one. I told you when we started talking about Zarco: at the age of sixteen all borders are porous, or at least they were back then; and it’s true that the border formed by the Ter and the Onyar rivers was as porous as that of the Liang Shan Po, or at least it was for me: three months before I had gone from being a middle-class charnego to being a quinqui from one day to the next, and three months later I stopped being a quinqui overnight and went back to being a middle-class charnego. Things were as simple as that. And as quick. The disbanding of Zarco’s gang made it all easier, of course: most of them were in prison or not around any more, the ones who were still on the outside didn’t come looking for me and I didn’t go looking for them. That radical change in my relationship with my family also made it easier. I told you already that after those days in Colera my relationship with them became really good again and that, although my father knew everything that had happened that summer, he never asked me any more questions; my mother and my sister didn’t either, so in my family it was as if what had happened that summer hadn’t really happened.

  ‘But what made my return to this side of the water margin irreversible was going back to school, or the way I went back to school. Term started two days after my visit to the prefabs. The first day of school started with a clear sunny morning, the sky a perfect blue and the football pitch gleaming as if it had just been watered. In the octagonal courtyard outside the entrance to our wing, while waiting for the doors to open and classes to start, I greeted some of my old Caterina Albert Street friends from a distance, but not Batista, who didn’t show up first thing. In spite of that, I didn’t even have a chance to consider the possibility that he might have changed schools because the teacher read out his name from the list when he took attendance.

  ‘Batista came in halfway through the morning, though we didn’t exchange a word until classes finished at lunchtime. I was on my way out by the back door, where the parking lot was, when, as I rounded the corner of the school cafeteria, I saw him a few metres away from me, leaning on the gas tank of his Lobito, which in turn was leaning against the wall; in front of him, talking to him, were all the guys: Matías, the Boix brothers, Intxausti, Ruiz, Canales, and maybe one or two others. As soon as I appeared they fell quiet and I knew it was a chance encounter; also, that I had no alternative: unless I wanted to avoid them ostentatiously or turn around and go back inside and out the front door of the school, I had no choice but to walk past
Batista and the rest of them. Plucking up my courage I kept walking but before I walked by Batista he stood up from the Lobito and blocked my way by holding out his arm. I stopped. Long time no see, catalanufo, said Batista. Where’ve you been? I didn’t answer. In light of the silence, Batista nodded at my bandaged arm. What’s that?, he asked. A mosquito bite? I heard some nervous or stifled laughter; I didn’t know who was laughing and didn’t bother looking around to find out. Then, without having planned it, I answered in Catalan. No, I said. It was a bullet. Batista laughed loudly. You’re so funny, Dumbo! he said. After a silence he added: Hey, don’t tell me you’re only going to speak in Catalan now? At that moment I turned to him, and got a surprise as I looked him in the eye. With an unexpected sensation of victory – feeling almost like Rocky Balboa on my pinball machine, muscular and triumphant, wearing shorts with the American flag printed on them and raising my arms to the cheering stadium while a defeated boxer lies on the canvas in the ring – I realized that I didn’t care if Batista called me Dumbo or called me a catalanufo. I realized that Batista was just a half-assed bully, a harmless loudmouth, a weak, spoilt brat, and I was astonished at myself for ever having been scared of him. Even more astonishing, I realized that I no longer felt any need to get revenge on him, because I didn’t even hate him any more, and that’s the best revenge.

  ‘Batista held my gaze for a second, during which I was sure that he knew what I’d realized, what I was feeling. His laughter froze in his mouth and, as if in search of an explanation, he looked at Matías and the others; I don’t know what he found, but he turned back to me and slowly, without taking his eyes off me – eyes in which there was no longer the slightest trace of sarcasm or contempt, only bafflement – lowered his arm. As I carried on towards the exit I said in Catalan, loud enough so that everyone would hear: Well, I’m not speaking Spanish to you, Batista. That day I had lunch with my father, my mother and my sister. After we’d finished, my father took me aside and asked how the first day of term had gone; he’d already asked during the meal, and I repeated my reply: I told him that everything had gone well; then I asked him if he’d already talked to Batista’s father. Not yet, said my father. I was thinking I’d do it tomorrow. No, don’t, I said. You don’t need to any more. My father stared at me. It’s all sorted out, I explained. Are you sure?, my father asked. Completely, I answered.

  ‘I wasn’t so sure, of course, but it turned out I wasn’t wrong and our encounter in the school parking lot must have convinced Batista of the fact that over the summer I had changed from a serpent into a dragon. So Batista’s first defeat was his last, and from the second day of term he seemed like a different person. He didn’t bother me again, he avoided me systematically, barely spoke to me and, when he found himself obliged to do so, it was always in Catalan. My friends from Caterina Albert also seemed like different people: Matías immediately, and gradually the rest, began to distance themselves from Batista (or maybe he distanced himself from them) and tried to seek my friendship again, and I learned that power is lost as easily as it’s gained and that one on one people are always inoffensive, but in groups we’re not.

  ‘The reconciliation with my friends from Caterina Albert Street was a done deal, but towards the middle of that autumn, without any shrillness or bad vibes, also without any explanation – as if it were obvious that our friendship had run its course and given all it had to give – I began to spend less time with them and more with a group of students doing their COU (Curso de Orientación Universitaria), in their final year of high school before going on to university. That’s how I met the first girl I ever went out with. Her name was Montse Roura and, despite the fact that she wasn’t doing her COU at the Marist Brothers’ school (she was actually only in her second year, and with the Carmelites), she was part of the gang because her brother Paco was. Montse and Paco were from Barcelona, had moved to Gerona two years earlier, when they were orphaned, and they lived in a building with several of their aunts and uncles in the old part of the city, a building where they had a flat to themselves. This made them the centre of the group, because their door was always open and not many Friday or Saturday nights went by when we didn’t get together at their place to listen to music, talk, drink and smoke. Also to take drugs, although that only happened once I’d started hanging out with them, simply because I was the only one who knew anything about them and how to get them, which turned me into the group’s dealer. In short: that was a magnificent time in my life, full of changes. During the week I studied hard and on the weekends I cut loose with my friends and Montse. I recovered my self-esteem and then some. I signed a definitive peace accord with my parents. I almost forgot Zarco and Tere.

  ‘It was my role as weekend drug dealer that led to my seeing Tere again. I already told you it happened in the middle of December; however, I haven’t told you that on that day I was with two of my trusty escorts on those weekly incursions into the underworld: one was Paco Roura and the other Dani Omedes, another regular in our gang. Paco had passed his driving test that summer and had the use of a Seat 600 belonging to one of his uncles, so every Friday evening he’d drive me over to the Flor, in Salt, where a couple of the dealers Zarco, Tere and the rest of us used to buy drugs from in the summer still hung out: Rodri and Gómez. That evening neither of the two was in the bar, and no one could tell me where I might find them. We waited for more than an hour, and eventually had no choice but to start driving around the city, first looking for them and then looking for any small-time dealer. We asked here and there, a bit by chance, in some bars in Sant Narcís and in the old town – at the Avenida, at the Acapulco, L’Enderroc, La Trumfa, the Groc Pub – and didn’t find anything. At some point I felt tempted to go back to La Font, but I resisted. It was almost ten when somebody told us about a bar in Vilarroja. Without much hope we went up to Vilarroja, found the bar, I left Paco and Dani in the car and went in.

  ‘As soon as I was through the door I saw her. She was sitting at the back of the bar, a tiny place, filled with people and smoke, with porcelain plates adorning the walls; beside her, around a table full of beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays, were three guys and a girl. Before I could get over to her table, a smile of recognition lit up her face. She stood up, made her way through the crowd, came up to me and asked me the same question she’d asked three months earlier, when I went to look for her in the prefabs, except in a cheerful and not suspicious tone: What are you doing here, Gafitas? As I already told you, during those three months I’d almost forgotten Tere and, when I did remember her, I only remembered the domestic, miserable, defeated quinqui that I’d fled from that day in the shithole of the prefabs; now I saw her again as I’d seen her the first time I laid eyes on her at the Vilaró arcade and as I saw her all summer long: sure of herself, teasing and radiant, the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen.

  ‘I avoided her question by asking if she wanted a beer. She smiled, accepted, we went to the bar, ordered two beers and she asked again what I was doing there, on my own. I answered that I wasn’t on my own, that two friends were waiting for me outside, in the car, and I asked her how she was. Fine, she answered. While they poured our beer it occurred to me that Tere could probably get me some gear, but also that I was obliged to ask another question. I asked the other question: How’s Zarco? Tere replied that he was still in jail, that like Gordo and Jou, he was still awaiting trial in the Modelo, and that she’d gone to Barcelona two or three times to see him and he’d seemed fine. Then she went on: she told me that – unlike Zarco, Gordo and Jou – Chino and Drácula had been tried and sentenced to five years, which they were serving in the Modelo; she told me that she hadn’t been going to La Font or the district for a few months now because after the arrest of Zarco and the others things had got ugly and there had been raids, arrests and beatings; she told me that the raids, arrests and beatings had not been confined to the district but had reached the prefabs and some bars in Salt and Germans Sàbat, that harassment from the cops had ended up dispersi
ng the remnants of the gang and that, although none of the rest of them had been arrested, many people had ended up in jail. Do you remember the General and his wife?, asked Tere. Of course, I answered. He’s in the nick, said Tere. They accused him of selling weapons to Zarco. But they killed his wife. Well, they had to kill her: when the cops went to pick them up at their house, she started shooting at them; in the end she took one of the pigs down with her. Tere looked at me with an expression of joy or admiration, or maybe of pride. You see, she said. And there we were thinking the old gal was blind.

  ‘She finished bringing me up to date with a piece of good news or what she considered good news: she didn’t live in the prefabs any more; actually, the prefabs no longer existed: they’d torn them down and, just over a week earlier, the people who were still in them had been relocated to La Font de la Pòlvora, nearby, where they had gone from living in barrack huts to living in recently constructed flats in recently constructed tower blocks in a recently constructed neighbourhood. While Tere was talking about her new life in La Font de la Pòlvora, it occurred to me that the end of the prefabs meant the end of Liang Shan Po, the definitive end of the blue border, and when she finished talking I feared she would ask about my life since we’d last seen each other. Before she could change the subject I did. I need some hash, I said. I went to the Flor, but neither Rodri nor Gómez were there, and I’ve spent all evening trying to find some. You need it right now?, she asked. Yeah, I answered. How much?, she asked. Three talegos should do me, I answered. Tere nodded. Wait for me outside, she said.