Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

‘When we finished talking that day, Zarco and I stood up to go – he back to his cell, me back to my office, or home – but I hadn’t left the visiting room when I heard: Hey, Gafitas. I turned around. Zarco was looking at me from the opposite corner of the room, with one hand on the knob of the half-open door. Have I said thanks yet?, he asked. I smiled. No, I answered. But there’s no need. And I added: You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Zarco stared at me for a couple of seconds; then he smiled too.’

  Chapter 2

  ‘Let me make one thing clear from the start. I don’t like talking to journalists, I don’t like talking about Antonio Gamallo, and what I like least of all is talking to journalists about Antonio Gamallo; in fact, this is the first time I’ve spoken of the matter with a journalist.’

  ‘I’m not a journalist.’

  ‘Aren’t you writing a book about Zarco?’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Then it’s as if you were a journalist. I’ll tell you the truth: I wouldn’t have agreed to talk to you if it hadn’t been the daughter of a good friend of mine who asked me to, and because she promised my name would not appear in the book. I understand you’ll respect that promise.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Don’t be offended: I don’t have anything against you personally; but I do have quite a bit against journalists. They’re a bunch of tricksters. They make things up. They lie. And, since they tell lies disguised as truths, people live in tremendous confusion. You take what they did to Gamallo, to Gamallo’s wife, to Ignacio Cañas; journalism is a meat-grinder: everyone gets crushed, and they’ll crush everything you put in front of them. They get nothing from me. Well. Now that we’ve got that clear, I’m at your disposal, although I have to warn you I spoke very little with Gamallo. There are lots of people who knew him much better than I did. By the way, have you already spoken with his wife?’

  ‘María Vela? She charges for interviews. Besides, everyone already knows her version, she’s told it a thousand times.’

  ‘True. And the other woman? Have you talked to her?’

  ‘You mean Tere?’

  ‘Yes. She could tell you lots of things; they say she’s known Gamallo all her life.’

  ‘I know. But she’s dead. She died a couple of weeks ago, near here, in Font de la Pòlvora.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘By sight.’

  ‘Look, I understand your reservations. I understand that you don’t want to make statements to the press. And that you don’t like talking about Zarco. But, as I said, I’m not a journalist, I don’t work for a radio or television station or write in a newspaper, and I’m not even sure I’m going to write about Zarco.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No. That was the idea at first, yes: to write a book about Zarco that denounced all the lies that have been told about him and tell the truth or a portion of the truth. But a person doesn’t write the books he wants to write, but those he can or those he finds, and the book I’ve found both is and isn’t that one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll know when I finish writing it. At the moment all I know is that the book will be about Zarco, of course, but also about Zarco’s relationship with Ignacio Cañas, or about Zarco’s relationship with Ignacio Cañas and with Tere, or about Ignacio Cañas’ relationship with Tere and with Zarco. Anyhow: as I said I still have to find that out.’

  ‘I didn’t have anything to do with the girl, but I had more to do with Cañas than with Gamallo.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Actually it was Cañas who suggested I should. It seemed like a good idea: after all, apart from Tere and María you’re the only person who was in contact with both of them at that time. Cañas also says that he has the impression that you understood things that no one else understood, not even him.’

  ‘He says that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It might be true: I’ve had the same impression myself sometimes. You see, it always seemed to me that, deep down, Cañas always thought that Gamallo was a victim. You know: the good thief in his youth, the perpetual rebel, the Billy the Kid or Robin Hood of his day, and then – it turns out to be the same thing except in reverse – the villain who comes to understand the evil he’s done and turns into the repentant delinquent; anyway, that story the journalists invented to sell papers, and then so many people bought it, starting with Gamallo himself. How could he not buy it, pretty as it was and with him coming out of it so well in the articles, in the songs, in the books and films about him? And I’m not saying that the story didn’t have some truth to it, albeit a small part; what I say is that Cañas was a victim of that myth, or that legend, of that great invention. Cañas believed that Gamallo was a victim of society, but Cañas turned out to be the victim himself: a victim of the legend of Zarco. That’s the reality. That he’d known Gamallo when he was young, as we discovered later, mustn’t have helped him at all, but I don’t think it was the main thing either: for me the main thing is that Cañas had grown up with the myth of Zarco, that it was the myth of his generation, and that, like so many people of his generation, he thought he could redeem him. Of course, he also thought that by redeeming him he’d make money and become famous; one thing doesn’t rule out the other: Cañas was no charitable nun. But the truth is at that moment he believed he could help Gamallo, or rather that he could save him and score a bit along the way. And believing that hurt him. And perhaps this is what Cañas has the impression that I and no one else understand, not even him, but actually I think it’s not that he doesn’t understand it but that he doesn’t want to understand.

  ‘But, well, if I have to tell you the story it would be best to start at the beginning. Cañas and I didn’t meet when Gamallo arrived in Gerona: we knew each other before; not well, but we knew each other. He always had clients in the prison and he visited them regularly, so our paths had crossed in the entrance foyer and we’d chatted for a moment or two. That was the extent of my relationship with him: the normal relationship of the superintendent of a prison and a lawyer with several clients incarcerated there. Anyway, although I barely knew him I didn’t have a very good impression of him; I don’t know why: we’d never had any friction, and everybody knew he was the most competent criminal lawyer in the province; or maybe I do know: because Cañas had the unmistakable vanity of guys who triumph too young; and because hardly a morning would go by without his face appearing in the papers: it was obvious the journalists adored him and he adored the journalists and, as you’ve realized, I distrust people who adore journalists. In spite of that, from the moment Gamallo arrived in my prison and I learned that Cañas was going to defend him, I wanted to talk to him.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’ll explain. At the end of 1999, when he arrived in Gerona, Gamallo was no longer the most famous prisoner in Spain, but he was still Zarco, a legend of juvenile delinquency; and although physically he was in bad shape, he still had a lot of fight in him. On the other hand I was sure that Cañas had agreed to defend him to profit from his renown, among other reasons because Zarco was an inmate who couldn’t pay him and who had a tremendous history of conflicts with his lawyers. So I wanted to speak to him before Gamallo started causing the troubles he’d caused in every prison he’d been incarcerated in: I wanted him to convince Gamallo not to cause them, I wanted to arrive at an agreement with him and turn him into my ally and not my rival and enemy and, since I thought this could only benefit both of us (or rather all three of us), I was sure that it would be easy for me to achieve it.

  ‘I was wrong, and that was the first surprise I had from Cañas.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘When I finished my interview with Zarco in the prison I had made two commitments: to be his lawyer in a trial for the incident at the Brians prison and to set up a strategy to get him released. Along with the happiness produced by the reappearance of Tere and Zarco, this event worked like a cat
alyst on me. Suddenly everything changed. Suddenly I had, in the misunderstanding of the anodyne life I was leading, the flavour of a goal and the passion of a challenge: defending Zarco and getting him out on the street as soon as possible.

  ‘That’s what I immediately started to do. The morning following the interview with Zarco I handed my two partners two copies of his prison record and the Brians indictment, asked them to study those papers and buried myself back in them. As soon as I did I began to think that Zarco’s predictions about his future were less unrealistic than I’d initially thought; two days later, meeting with Cortés and Gubau again, I realized that they both shared my opinion: none of us were as optimistic as Zarco, but all three thought that, if we took the correct steps, Zarco could be out of prison in three or four years, and that was in spite of having firm sentences adding up to more than twenty. Of course, none of the three of us wondered whether Zarco was prepared to leave prison so soon and, when I left Cortés and Gubau, we still hadn’t decided what the steps were that we had to take to get him out, and how to take them (actually, it wasn’t urgent that we decide: we couldn’t tackle the subject until the Brians trial was over). Be that as it may, over the following days I suspected that, in our case, taking the adequate steps would probably include trying to resuscitate Zarco’s media image, because that was the only way to get political support, through popular support, and prison perks and benefits through political support, until we could get a pardon. The problem, I then said to myself, was how to achieve Zarco’s media resurrection; that is: how to focus the media’s attention on a figure already so overexposed?; how to convince the media that a person from the past could be of some interest in the present?; and most of all, and in light of the more or less serious but failed attempts to rehabilitate him, how to convince the media again and get the media to convince the public that Zarco deserved one final chance, that he’d learned from his past errors, that he no longer had anything to do with the legend or myth of Zarco but only with the reality of Antonio Gamallo, a man approaching his forties with a turbulent past of poverty, prison and violence seeking to construct an honest future for himself in freedom and thereby needing the support of public opinion and the politicians in power?

  ‘Those were some of the questions I asked myself over the days that followed my re-encounter with Zarco. That week of surprises ended with another surprise. Friday evening, as we often did, Cortés, Gubau and I had a few beers at the Royal, a café in Sant Agustí Plaza. When we left the Royal night had fallen. It was raining. I didn’t have an umbrella with me, but Cortés and Gubau both did, so Gubau lent me his as he and Cortés were both heading towards the newer part of the city. In a Middle Eastern restaurant on Ballesteries Street I stopped to buy a plate of falafels with yogurt sauce and pitta bread and a couple of cans of beer; then I carried on home. The streets of the old quarter were deserted and the paving stones shiny with rain under the streetlights, and as I reached the door to my building I had to do a balancing act: holding the umbrella, my briefcase and my dinner in one hand and trying to open the door with the other. I hadn’t yet managed to get it open when I heard: Fuck, Gafitas, you practically live in La Font. It was Tere. She was a few metres away from me, having just emerged from the doorway across the street, with her hair wet and jacket collar turned up and hands in her pockets; what she said about La Font, by the way, was true: I have a loft in the same block where La Font was thirty years ago. What are you doing here?, I asked her. I was waiting for you, she answered. She pointed at my umbrella, briefcase and the bag with my dinner in it and said: Can I lend you a hand? She lent me a hand, I opened the door, she handed me back what I’d given her to hold. Do you want to come up?, I asked.

  ‘We went up. When we got inside my flat I left my things on the counter and then went to the bathroom to find a clean towel so she could dry off; as I handed her the towel I asked her if she’d had dinner. No, she said. But I’m not hungry. I ignored that. While I made a salad and opened a bottle of wine and she set the table in the dining room, we talked about my place, a loft I’d bought a few years earlier from a Brazilian couple, he an architect and she a film director, or, to be precise, a director of documentaries and things like that. It wasn’t until I’d served her a bit of salad and a couple of falafels that I mentioned to Tere that I’d been to see Zarco. How did he seem to you?, she asked. Fine, I lied. Older and heavier, but fine. He told me he’s fed up with prison. He asked me to get him out of there whatever it takes. Tere smiled. As if it were that easy, right?, she said. He thinks it’s easy, I said, then added: Maybe it’s not so hard. Do you think so?, she asked. I pulled a dubious face and answered: We’ll see.

  ‘Tere didn’t go on about the matter, and I thought it was premature to discuss my impressions and conjectures with her. While we were eating, Tere asked me about my life; I told her vaguely about my daughter, my ex-wife, my partners, my firm. Then I asked her; to my surprise, Tere replied with such an ordered account of events that it almost seemed prepared in advance. I learned that she’d lived in Gerona until she was seventeen, when the police arrested her after she participated in a bank robbery in Blanes, the summer after we met. That after her arrest she was tried and sentenced to five years in prison, of which she served two, at the Wad-Ras women’s prison. That in prison she got hooked on heroin and when she got out she stayed in Barcelona for almost a decade, living most of the time in La Verneda, earning a living with occasional jobs and occasional robberies that occasionally sent her back to prison. That in the second half of the nineties she spent several days in the Vall d’Hebron hospital on the brink of death due to a heroin overdose, and when she was discharged from hospital she agreed to be admitted to the Proyecto Hombre detox and rehabilitation centre. That she spent a good long while there. That she came out clean. That when she came out she tried to start a new life or what tends to be called a new life, and to do so she left Barcelona and returned to Gerona. That since then she had not had a drop or a speck of heroin or cocaine or any pills (except in the odd relapse). That she’d had lots of jobs and lots of men but no children. That she’d been working at the factory in Cassà for two years. That she’d started to study nursing that very year. That she didn’t like her job but she did like her course. That she was happy with the life she was leading.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask about Zarco?’

  ‘As soon as she stopped talking about herself. At first she seemed disinclined to answer, but I got out a second bottle of wine and she was soon talking about the relationship she’d had with him over those past twenty years.’

  ‘Had she gone on seeing him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s odd. As far as I recall, Zarco doesn’t even mention her in his memoirs.’

  ‘Your recollection is right, but his not mentioning her is more revealing than if he had mentioned her, because it means he took her for granted. Of course that’s what I say now, because now I know things I didn’t know then . . . In any case, yes: although sometimes sporadically, they had gone on seeing each other. What Tere told me that night was that, during Zarco’s first years in prison, she visited him every once in a while and he turned to her when he was out on parole, when he escaped or when he had no one else to turn to. Later, for a long spell, the two of them stopped seeing each other. The reason is that in the middle of 1987, after Zarco escaped from the Ocaña penitentiary by taking advantage of the cocktail party after the press screening of The Real Life of Zarco, Bermúdez’s final film based on his life, Tere got mad at him and, although in the end she was the one who found him refuge in a friend’s house during his days on the run, she refused to visit him after he’d been recaptured. But what separated them completely, still according to Tere’s version, was that, once he was back in prison, Zarco began his great change: he went on being a famous delinquent but he tried to no longer be the implacable juvenile delinquent to become the mature repentant delinquent, a change in which he had no need of Tere or in which Tere was simply superfluou
s, because she was a hindrance from the past that he wanted to overcome. Still, years later Zarco called her again. It was after holding up a Barcelona jewellery store in the city centre and thus violating his third-stage release, one level before getting out on probation that he’d been granted for the first time in his life and which allowed him to spend the days outside and return to the prison to sleep; the absurd stupidity of the robbery meant this privilege was revoked and Zarco was put back on trial again and had many years added to his sentence of many already accumulated years, not to mention the disappointment it provoked in public opinion in general, which had believed in his rehabilitation, and among the politicians, journalists, writers, film-makers, singers, athletes and the rest of the people who’d supported the cause of his release: they all wrote him off as an incorrigible quinqui, as a persona with no future from the blackest days of Spain. Again he was defeated and dismissed and with no support from anybody, and again he turned to Tere, who at first told him to go to hell and finally ended up giving in, agreeing to see him and help him and help María to help him, who by then had appeared on the scene. She’d been working with her on Zarco’s behalf lately, until they came to see me.

  ‘That’s more or less what Tere told me that night, while we had dinner, or perhaps what she told me that night added to what she told me on other nights. Whatever the case, when we finished dinner and Tere finished telling me about Zarco, or she tired of doing so, we were a bit drunk. At that moment there was a rather long silence, which I was about to fill in by praising Tere’s loyalty and patience with Zarco or asking after Lina – who Zarco had told me Tere saw once in a while – but, before I could do so, she stood up from the table, went over to the stereo, crouched down and started looking through my few CDs. You still don’t like music, Gafitas, she said then. My daughter says something similar, I answered. But it’s not true. It’s just that I don’t listen to it much. Why’s that?, asked Tere. I was going to say I didn’t have time to listen to it but kept quiet. Looking at the CD covers, Tere added, half-amused half-disappointed: And I don’t even know any of them. I got up from the table, crouched down beside Tere, pulled out a Chet Baker CD and put on a song called “I Fall in Love Too Easily”. When the music started to play, Tere stood up and said: Sounds old, but nice. Then she started to dance on her own, with the wine glass in her hand and eyes closed, as if searching for the hidden rhythm of the song; when she seemed to have found it she set her glass down on top of the stereo, came over to me, put her arms around my neck and said: You can’t live without music, Gafitas. I put my arms around her waist and tried to follow her. I felt her thighs against my thighs, her chest on my chest and her eyes on my eyes. I’ve missed you, Gafitas, whispered Tere. Thinking it was incredible that I hadn’t missed her, I said: Bullshit! Tere laughed. We kept dancing in silence, looking in each other’s eyes, concentrating on Chet Baker’s trumpet. Seconds or minutes later she asked: Do you fancy a shag? I took a moment to answer. Do you?, I asked. Tere’s first reply was to kiss me; the second seemed redundant – I do, yeah, she said – although she immediately added: But on one condition. What condition?, I asked. Tere also took a moment to reply. No ties, she finally said. She soon noticed that I hadn’t entirely understood. No ties, she repeated. No mess. No commitments. No demands. Each to his own. I would have liked to ask Tere why she said that, but it seemed like a way of looking for useless complications and a distraction from the essential, so I didn’t. It was Tere who asked: Yes or no, Gafitas?