‘I paid for the beers, went outside and walked over to the field where my friends were waiting in the Seat 600. Dani rolled down the window and asked: What’s up? We’re in luck, I said, standing beside the car. Paco looked like he hadn’t taken his hands off the steering wheel, as if he was ready to start the engine and get out of there. I hope so, he said. This place gives me the creeps. After a few minutes Tere came out of the bar and I walked over to meet her. She reached into the pocket of her raincoat and pulled out three thin little bars of hash wrapped in tinfoil; she handed them to me: I took them in one hand while passing her three one-thousand-peseta notes with the other. Having made the exchange, we looked at each other in the shadows, standing between the long light extending out the door of the bar and the circle of light shining from a nearby streetlamp. The night was damp and cold. We weren’t very close to one another but the double spiral of vapour coming from our mouths seemed to envelop us in a shared mist. I pointed vaguely towards the Seat 600 and said: They’re waiting for me. Three men came out of the bar and walked past us; while they walked away up the street talking, Tere turned towards them and, without taking my eyes off her in the dimly lit street, I suddenly thought of the washrooms of the arcade and Montgó beach and for a moment I wanted to kiss her and almost had to remind myself that I was no longer in love with her and that she had just been a strange and fleeting summer fling. Tere turned back to me. I have to meet some friends tonight, I said very quickly, with the feeling I’d been caught red-handed and that I’d already said that; I asked: Are you busy tomorrow? No, answered Tere. If you want we could meet up, I suggested. You’re not going to stand me up this time?, asked Tere. I immediately knew she was referring to the last time we saw each other, at the door of her hut in the prefabs when we’d arranged to meet at La Font the next day as we said goodbye and then I didn’t go. I didn’t want to pretend that I’d forgotten. Not this time, I promised. She smiled. Where should we meet?, she said. Wherever you want, I said, and remembered the moment when Tere taught me, in the Marocco, that to dance you don’t have to know how to dance you just have to want to move, and added: Do you still go to Rufus? Not any more, said Tere. But if you want we can meet there. OK, I said. OK, she repeated. She kissed me on the cheek, said see you tomorrow and went back inside the bar.
‘I went back to the car. Have you got the hash?, asked Dani as soon as I opened the door. I said yes and, as he put the car into first gear and accelerated, Paco celebrated. Cool, he said. And the chick? What chick?, I asked. The one who sold you the gear, Paco said. What about her?, I asked. Quite the quinqui, he said. Where do you know her from? Dani interrupted: Yeah, she’s a quinqui, sure, but is she a fox or do all chicks look good at night in the distance? She’s pretty good-looking, I said. But don’t get your hopes up, I only know her to see her. I’m not getting any hopes up. Though get to know her a bit better she might suck you off. Stopped at an intersection, Paco let go of the steering wheel for a moment to simulate a blowjob. Hopes?, he said, grabbing the steering wheel again. Fuck, I wouldn’t let that chick suck my cock if I was dead: she might bite it off. Dani burst out laughing. Say what you like, dickhead, I said. But don’t you dare say anything to Montse. I don’t want her ripping mine off, and for nothing. She’s a right one, your sister. Now it was Paco’s turn to laugh. We’d left Vilarroja, were driving past the cemetery and I suddenly felt sick, as if I was carsick or coming down with something. In the front seats, Paco and Dani kept talking as we drove back into the city centre.
‘I spent that night and the next day thinking about Tere. I was full of doubts. I wanted to see her and didn’t want to see her. I wanted to go to Rufus and didn’t want to go to Rufus. I wanted to leave Montse and my friends for one night and didn’t want to at the same time. In the end I didn’t see Tere or go to Rufus or abandon my friends, but Saturday night was a strange night: although I was at Paco and Montse’s place until very late, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that I’d stood Tere up again or stop imagining her at Rufus, bombarded by the changing lights that flashed over the dance floor, dancing to the same songs or almost the same songs as the summer before that I’d watched her dance to so many times from the bar while her body adapted to the music as naturally as ever – as naturally as a glove fits a hand and as a fire gives off heat – dancing alone while waiting for me in vain.
‘On Sunday morning I woke up feeling anxious, with the guilty certainty of having committed a serious mistake the night before, and to remedy it I decided that very afternoon I’d go and look for Tere at the bar in Vilarroja where I’d run into her. But as the morning wore on reality weakened my determination – I had no one to drive me to Vilarroja, I couldn’t ask Paco, couldn’t be sure of finding Tere and, on top of everything, I’d arranged to meet Montse and the others after lunch – so, feeling like that really was the end of the water margin, that afternoon I didn’t go to Vilarroja. And it turned out really to be the end, because it was all over then.’
‘Do you mean that was the last time you saw Tere back then?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t hear anything more about Zarco either?’
‘No.’
‘How about we leave it there for today.’
‘That’d be just fine.’
Part II
Over Here
Chapter 1
‘Do you remember when you next saw Zarco?’
‘At the end of 1999, here in Gerona.’
‘He was no longer the same then.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘I mean that he’d had time to create and destroy his own myth.’
‘In a manner of speaking. In any case it’s true that, for Zarco, everything went very fast. In fact, my impression is that when I knew him, in the late seventies, Zarco was a sort of precursor, and when I saw him again, in the late nineties, he was almost an anachronism, if not a posthumous persona.’
‘From precursor to anachronism in just twenty years.’
‘That’s right. When I knew him he was a forerunner in a way of the masses of juvenile delinquents who filled the jails, the newspapers, radio, television and cinema screens in the eighties.’
‘I’d say he not only announced the phenomenon: he played the part better than anybody.’
‘Could be.’
‘Tell me the name of a delinquent from back then better known than Zarco.’
‘OK, you’re right. But, be that as it may, by the end of the nineties it was over; that’s why I say that by then Zarco was a posthumous persona, a sort of castaway from another era: at that time there was no longer the slightest media interest in juvenile delinquents, there were no longer films about juvenile delinquents, or hardly any juvenile delinquents. All that was passé: the country had completely changed by then, the hard years of juvenile delinquency were considered the last throes of the economic misery, repression and lack of liberties of the Franco years and, after twenty years of democracy, the dictatorship seemed to have been left very far behind and we were all living in an apparently interminable intoxication of optimism and money.
‘The city had also completely changed. By that time Gerona was no longer the post-war city it still had been at the end of the seventies but had become a post-modern city, a picture postcard, cheerful, interchangeable, touristy and ridiculously pleased with itself. Actually, little remained of the Gerona of my adolescence. The charnegos had disappeared, annihilated by deprivation and heroin or dissolved into the country’s economic wellbeing, with secure jobs and children and grandchildren who went to private schools and spoke Catalan, because with democracy Catalan had become an official, or co-official, language. The ring of charnego neighbourhoods that used to menace the city centre had also disappeared, of course; or rather had transformed into something else: some neighbourhoods, like Germans Sàbat, Vilarroja or Pont Major, were now prosperous neighbourhoods; others, like Salt, had become independent from the city and were flooded with African immigrants; only Font de la P�
�lvora, the last bastion of the final inhabitants of the prefabs, had degenerated into a ghetto of delinquency and drugs. I don’t know if I told you that the prefabs themselves were demolished: now the ground where they had stood was a park in the middle of Fontajau, a newly built neighbourhood of small duplexes with garages, gardens and backyard barbecues.
‘Over here, on this side of the Ter, La Devesa was still more or less the same, but La Devesa was no longer an outlying suburban neighbourhood; the city had absorbed it: it had grown to both sides of the river and the fields and orchards that surrounded the tower blocks of Caterina Albert in my childhood had been developed. The Marist Brothers were still in their place, though not the Vilaró arcade, which closed not long after I stopped going there and Señor Tomàs retired. As for the red-light district, it had not survived the city’s changes; but, unlike La Devesa, which had turned into a middle-class neighbourhood, the district had become an elite neighbourhood: where twenty years earlier the narrow stinking streets swarmed with the city’s riffraff, grimy bars, decadent brothels, dark poky little rooms, now there are cute little plazas, terrace bars, chic restaurants and lofts done up by trendy architects for visiting artists, foreign millionaires and successful professionals.’
‘Like yourself.’
‘More or less.’
‘Do you consider yourself a successful professional?’
‘It’s not that I consider myself: I am. Fourteen people work for my firm, among them six lawyers; we deal with around one hundred significant cases a year. I call that success. How about you?’
‘Me too. Although, if you don’t mind me saying, you don’t talk like a successful professional.’
‘And how do successful professionals talk?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s say you don’t seem to have a killer instinct.’
‘Because I put it away in a drawer, as Calamaro’s song says. But I did have it, no doubt about it. Who knows, maybe I’m getting old.’
‘Don’t be cute. You’re not even fifty.’
‘What’s that got to do with it? At my age, not long ago, people were already old, or almost. My father died at fifty-seven; my mother didn’t live much longer. Now everybody wants to be young; I understand, but it’s a bit stupid. It seems to me the fun in all this is being young when you’re young and being old when you’re old; in other words: you’re young when you don’t have memories and you’re old when behind every memory you find a bad memory. I’ve been finding them for a while now.’
‘Yeah. Well. Let’s go on then. Tell me about your life after you lost sight of Zarco until you saw him again.’
‘There’s not much to tell. When I finished high school with the Marist Brothers I went to Barcelona. I spent five years there studying law at the Autónoma and living in student flats. I lived in three different flats; the last was on Jovellanos Street, near the Rambla, and I shared it with two classmates: Albert Cortés and Juanjo Gubau. Cortés was from Gerona, like me, but he’d studied at the Vicens Vives Institute, like my sister; Gubau was from Figueras, and his father was a court solicitor. We studied hard, didn’t do drugs and went home on weekends, except during exams. At the beginning of my time in Barcelona I was still going out with Montse Roura, but after a year we split up and that ended up disconnecting me from my group of friends from the Marist school, who by then had otherwise all pretty much gone their separate ways. Then I went out with a few girls, until in third year I met Irene, who was also studying law but at the Central University. Three years later we got married, moved to Gerona and had Helena, my only child. By then I had started working in Higinio Redondo’s firm. I told you about Redondo before, I don’t know if you remember him.’
‘Of course: the man who lent your father the house in Colera to hide you, no?’
‘Exactly. And also the one who convinced my father that afternoon not to take me to the police station; or at least that’s what I’ve always believed . . . He was an important person in my life. I mean Redondo; so important that, if it hadn’t been for him, I most likely would not have become a lawyer: after all I never had any lawyerly vocation. Redondo was from my parents’ hometown and had set up a criminal-law practice, and at some stage of my adolescence I admired him a lot, maybe because he was the opposite of my father, or because he seemed like it to me: my father didn’t have money and he did; my father didn’t have a degree and he did; my father didn’t go out at night and he went out almost every night; my father was a political moderate and voted for the centre parties and he was a radical: in fact for years I believed he was a Communist or an anarchist, until I discovered he was a Falangist. In any case he was a good lawyer and a good person and, although he was also a frivolous, irascible kerb-crawler, drinker and gambler, he loved my family and he loved me. He encouraged me to study law and, as I said, when I graduated he took me on to do articles in his practice, taught me what he knew and after a few years made me his partner. A little while later something happened that changed both our lives completely. What happened was that Redondo fell in love with the wife of a bankrupt client; he fell in love for real, like a teenager, left his wife and four children and went to live with her. The problem was that when the client got out of jail thanks to Redondo’s efforts, the woman left him and went back to her husband. Then Redondo went crazy, attempted suicide, finally disappeared and we had no news of him until four years later we learned that he’d been killed while crossing a street in downtown Asunción, Paraguay, run over by a delivery truck.
‘That’s how I became the senior partner of Redondo’s firm. By then Irene and I were getting divorced and she moved back to Barcelona and I began to see my daughter only every second weekend and on holidays. But professionally it was the height of my career. Redondo, as I told you before, had taught me many things – among them that a lawyer can’t be a good lawyer if he’s not able to set aside his moral scruples every once in a while – although I learned others on my own – including how to manage the press. I also learned that, if I wanted to grow, I needed to delegate, and I was able to hire good people: I contracted Cortés and Gubau, who were then working for a firm in Barcelona, and later made them partners, though I remained the senior partner. Anyway, I had my killer instinct intact, I was obsessed with being the best and I was, to such an extent that, as Cortés started to say, not a punch was thrown in Gerona without the thrower or receiver passing through our office.
‘Then suddenly everything changed. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know. The thing is that precisely at that moment, when I had achieved the money and position I’d been fighting to achieve for years, I was overcome by a sense of futility, the feeling of having already done all that I needed to do, that what I had left to live wasn’t exactly life but rather life’s residue, a sort of insipid deferral, or perhaps the feeling was that, more than insipid or bad or deferred, the life I was leading was an error, a life on loan, as if at some moment I’d taken a wrong turn or as if all that was a small but terrible misunderstanding . . . That’s how bad or muddled I was seeing things just before Zarco reappeared, or maybe that explains in part – a small part – what happened with him.’
‘As well as a successful lawyer you’re an unusual lawyer.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Before becoming a lawyer you were a delinquent, which means knowing first hand both sides of the law. That’s not so common, is it?’
‘I don’t know. What I do know is that a lawyer and a delinquent are not on two different sides of the law, because a lawyer is not a representative of the law but an intermediary between the law and the delinquent. That converts us into equivocal, morally dubious types: we spend our lives with thieves, murderers and psychopaths and, since human beings function by osmosis, it’s normal that the morals of thieves, murderers and psychopaths end up rubbing off on us.’
‘How is it that you became a lawyer if you have this opinion of lawyers?’
‘Because before I became a lawyer I had absolutely no idea what it meant to be a
lawyer. Well, I’ve told you my life story.’
‘Yes. I’d like you to tell me now what your relationship was with Zarco during the years you didn’t see him; that is: how did you follow the creation and destruction of the Zarco myth?’
‘First you tell me exactly what you understand by the word myth.’
‘A popular story that is true in part and false in part and that tells a truth that cannot be told only with the truth.’
‘You’ve obviously given it some thought. But tell me: whose truth?’
‘Everyone’s truth, one that concerns us all. Look, these kinds of stories have always existed, people invent them, can’t live without them. What makes Zarco’s a little different (one of the things that makes it a little different) is that the people didn’t invent it, or not only people, but most of all the media: the radio, the newspapers, TV; also songs and movies.’
‘Well, that’s how I followed the creation and destruction of the Zarco myth: through the press, books, songs and films. Like everyone. Well, not like everyone: after all I’d known Zarco as a kid; or rather: not only had I known him but I’d been one of his guys. Of course that was a secret. Apart from my father and Inspector Cuenca, no one who hadn’t hung out in the district back then knew that at the age of sixteen I’d belonged to Zarco’s gang. But my father had never made the slightest mention of the matter and, as far as I know, neither had Inspector Cuenca, at least until I said you should talk to him. The thing is that during those years I assiduously followed everything that appeared about Zarco, clipped out and saved articles from the newspapers and magazines, watched the films based on his life, recorded the reports and interviews they showed on television, read his various memoirs and the books others wrote about him. That’s how I put together the archive I lent you.’
‘It’s magnificent. It’s making my job much easier.’
Outlaws Page 17
