Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

  ‘It’s strange then that he didn’t make María Vela pay for what she did.’

  ‘No, not strange: the thing is he didn’t consider María to be a real bastard. And he was probably right. María was just a mediapath, like him, or rather, like the Zarco character; at most she was an opportunist. But not a bastard. And maybe that’s why Zarco, in the conversations we had then, never spoke badly of her, always downplayed the importance of what she said about him in the press (or what she was still saying, which was less and less as there were fewer and fewer people paying any attention) and he didn’t seem at all irritated by all the visibility in the media she’d achieved at a certain moment by messing with us; more than that: my impression was that Zarco spoke more cordially of María now than he had done when they were together and she spent all her time trying to get him out of jail.

  ‘But what Zarco and I discussed most – where I believe the complicity I told you about sprang from – was none of that, but the summer of ’78. In fact, we could spend all of my afternoon visits in the interview room remembering the guys in the gang, reliving purse snatches, robberies and binges, recalling the General haggling with his wife – who Zarco insisted was actually blind not pretending to be blind – telling each other details of a visit to La Vedette or trying to rescue from oblivion the names and faces of the regulars at La Font or Rufus. Those conversations at times turned into fierce tournaments in which Zarco and I competed in eagerness for precision about the past; thanks to them – and to those I’d had with Tere years earlier, in our nights of romance in my penthouse on La Barca – I was able to reconstruct the summer of ’78, and that’s why I remember it so well. Of course, Zarco often talked about the prefabs, and one day I told him about the only time I’d been there, shortly after the robbery of the Bordils branch of the Banco Popular, although I didn’t tell him that I’d actually gone there that day to see Tere and especially to find out if the gang thought I’d been the one who had given the game away (and, if so, to refute it). This doesn’t mean that we didn’t talk about that matter then, actually we discussed it several times, but always in the way we discussed all the details of the summer of ’78, a slightly strange way, very cerebral, almost with the coldness with which you might discuss a chess problem; whatever the case, I always arrived at the conclusion that Zarco thought that the snitch or informer could have been anybody that day, but that anybody didn’t exclude me.’

  ’You mean you didn’t convince Zarco that it hadn’t been you?’

  ‘That’s it: I tried, but I didn’t manage it. Or I don’t think so. He always had a shadow of a doubt. Although he didn’t say so, I knew he did.’

  ‘Perhaps he had some doubt because you did too, because you weren’t entirely sure that, before the Bordils robbery, you hadn’t run your mouth off.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Another thing. You say that, when he returned to Gerona Prison, Zarco was a physical wreck. Didn’t he improve later?’

  ‘No. Although the prison treated him well, he was ill and exhausted, and he had nothing left. Whle I talked with him in the interview room I often had the sensation I was talking to a zombie, or at least a very old man. And in spite of that (or perhaps thanks to it) during that time I discovered three important things about him and about my relationship with him: the first two demonstrate that deep down I had a vision of Zarco for years that was guileless and mythologized, ridiculously romantic; the third demonstrates that Zarco himself shared that vision. Perhaps by this point you’ve guessed the three things I’ve come to tell you, but I didn’t discover them till then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look, I’ve always heard it said that, in personal relations, the first impression is what counts. I don’t think it’s true: I think the first impression is the only one that counts; all the rest are just additions that do not alter anything essentially. At least that’s what I think happened to me with Zarco. I mean that there in the Gerona prison, Zarco might have looked like human scum, and he surely was, but that didn’t mean I could stop seeing him as I’d seen him with my teenage eyes the first time I’d seen him, walking into the Vilaró arcade with Tere, and as I’d seen him during that summer. That’s the first thing I understood: that for three months of my adolescence I had admired Zarco – I’d admired his serenity, his courage, his audacity – and since then I haven’t been able to stop admiring him. The second thing I understood is that, as well as admiring him, I envied him: now, in the Gerona prison, seen with the perspective of time, Zarco’s life could seem like a wasted life, the life of a loser, but the truth of the matter is that, if I compared it with mine – which had so often seemed to me a false and borrowed life, a misunderstanding or, even worse, an insipid yet convincing simulation of a misunderstanding – his seemed to me like a full life, that had been worth living and that I would have traded for mine without hesitation. The third thing I understood is that Zarco had always been aware of playing the role of Zarco, or at the very least he was aware now of having played this role for years.’

  ‘Is that what you meant when you said that at this moment the persona disappeared and only the person remained?’

  ‘Exactly. Let me tell you about one of the last conversations Zarco and I had, in the prison’s interview room. That afternoon we’d been talking for a while as usual about the summer of ’78 when, after I mentioned the prefabs in passing, Zarco interrupted me and asked me what I’d said. At that moment I understood that, without realizing it, I’d just called the prefabs by the nickname I’d always had for them, so I said I hadn’t said anything and tried to change the subject; Zarco wouldn’t let me, and repeated the question. Liang Shan Po, I finally confessed, feeling as ridiculous as a guy who accidentally says his lover’s pet name out loud in public. That’s what you called the prefabs? Zarco asked. I nodded. I tried to keep talking so I wouldn’t have to give him an explanation, but I couldn’t; Zarco frowned, his eyes narrowed until they looked like two slits and he asked: Like the river in The Water Margin? Zarco greeted my surprise with a black and toothless smile. You remember the series?, I asked. Fuck, Gafitas, Zarco protested. You think you’re the only one who ever watched TV? He immediately started talking about The Water Margin, about the dragon and the snake, about Lin Chung and Kao Chiu and Hu San-Niang, until he stopped short in mid-sentence, frowned again and looked at me as if he’d just deciphered a hieroglyphic on my face. Hey, he said. You didn’t fall for that old song and dance too, did you? What song and dance?, I asked. He took a couple of seconds to answer. The Liang Shan Po thing, he specified. The honourable bandits. All that shit. I wasn’t sure what he meant. I told him so. He explained: You didn’t believe that whole Water Margin spiel, did you? That whole story about you lot on that side being worse sons of bitches than we are on this side, and vice versa; that thing about the only difference between me and you is that I was born in a wrong neighbourhood of the city and on the wrong side of the river, that society’s to blame for everything and I’m innocent of everything and this that and the other. You didn’t believe that, right?

  ‘At that moment I knew it. It wasn’t only in his words, it was in the sarcasm that drenched his voice, in the disappointment and irony and sadness of his old man’s eyes. What I knew was that Zarco was definitively finished, that the persona had disappeared and only the person barely remained, that lonely, ill and washed-up quinqui I had in front of me, on the other side of the interview room. And I also knew or imagined that, deep down, Zarco had never believed in his own persona, had never seriously thought that he was the true Robin Hood of his time, or the great reformed delinquent; it had just been a pretend, strategic identity, which he’d used when it suited him but never really believed or he’d only believed it fleetingly and almost without meaning to, an identity that he hadn’t believed in for a long time in any case and that, in those days of terminal lucidity when he no longer had the energy to laugh or cry, was only pitiful.

  ‘That’s what I knew then (or what I
imagined), thanks to that conversation.’

  ‘I would have imagined something else as well.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The opposite: that perhaps Zarco no longer believed in his own persona, but he believed that you did believe in it. That he believed, in some way, that you still believed he was an innocent victim, that you were the last one who thought of him as the Robin Hood of his day, or as the great reformed delinquent. That you weren’t really either his lawyer or his friend, but the last admirer he had left. Or the last deputy: the last honourable man Lin Chung had left on the far side of the Water Margin. After all, the questions Zarco had asked you were rhetorical, weren’t they?’

  ‘You might be right.’

  ‘And didn’t you say anything? Didn’t you try to disabuse him of that notion?’

  ‘More or less. I told him I hadn’t believed his song and dance, as he’d called it, that of course I’d never thought that society was to blame for everything and he was just a victim of society. Zarco replied by asking then why did I call them the outlaws of Liang Shan Po, and I answered because at first I did believe it, that after all in the summer of ’78 I was sixteen years old and at sixteen you believe things like that, but later I stopped believing it, only by then it was too late to change the nickname so it stuck. That’s what I told him, more or less, though I realized he didn’t believe me and I didn’t want to insist.’

  ‘So you let Zarco hold onto a false idea of what you thought of him.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘I thought the truth was very important to you.’

  ‘It is, but a virtue taken to extremes is a vice. If one does not understand there are things more important than the truth one doesn’t understand how important the truth is.’

  ‘You didn’t talk about the matter again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And neither of you mentioned the Liang Shan Po again?’

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘And Tere? You haven’t even mentioned her today.’

  ‘She hasn’t come up. What do you want me to tell you? That summer we saw each other quite often. Tere had lived in Barcelona for a while but the last two or three years she’d moved back to Gerona, or rather to Salt, where she had a job cleaning various council properties. She’d given up her nursing studies and was going out with the local librarian, a guy with a ponytail and a goatee who went everywhere on his bicycle, spoke Catalan-inflected Spanish and rented an allotment on the banks of the River Ter where he grew tomatoes and lettuces. His name was Jordi and he was ten years younger than Tere. We got along well immediately (as far as he was concerned I was just Zarco’s lawyer, and Zarco was just Tere’s famous, unruly relative), so some Saturdays I’d show up at the allotment and spend the afternoon watching him and Tere working the land, talking politics (he was a separatist) or about Salt (he’d been born there and hoped to die there, though he’d travelled all over the world) and having the odd toke of his marijuana; when it got dark we’d go back into the city, them on their bikes and me in my car, and have something to eat at Jordi’s place or in some bar in the old quarter.

  ‘Sometimes, not many times, Tere and I would meet on our own. For this I would have to invent some important matter to do with Zarco, which was not at all easy. I remember one Saturday I’d met her at midday in a bar in the Sant Agustí Plaza and, after we finished our coffee and dealt with my bullshit, I accompanied her to the farmers’ market they have every weekend on the boardwalk between La Devesa and the banks of the Ter; and I remember while Tere was doing her shopping I thought I might lay a trap for her and suggest crossing the river over to the ground where years before the prefabs had stood. Have you ever been back?, I asked. No, she said. It doesn’t look anything like it used to, I told her, and then went on to describe the immaculate park of freshly mown lawns, with brand-new wooden benches and swings and slides that had replaced the lines of miserable barrack huts crisscrossed by streams of pestilential water swarming with flies where she had lived, until I noticed she was looking at me strangely. And if it doesn’t look anything like it used to what do I want to see it for?, she asked curtly. That’s how Tere was then: invulnerable to the lures of nostalgia, reluctant to talk more than necessary about the past we shared. Even so, one of those Saturdays we met to talk about Zarco she suggested a café in Santa Eugènia, and when I got there I found her with a large woman who greeted me with a big kiss. Don’t you know who I am?, she asked. I had trouble recognizing her: it was Lina. She was still just as blonde as she had been in La Font days, but she’d put on twenty-five or thirty kilos, looked very much worse for wear and shouted when she talked. She didn’t say a word about Gordo, but told me she’d married a Gambian, that she lived in Salt too, that she worked in a hair salon and had three kids. It was an odd encounter. Tere and Lina had never completely lost touch although it had been a while since they’d seen each other, and at some point Lina started talking about Tío, who apart from us was the only member of Zarco’s gang still alive: it seems she’d bumped into him by chance not long before, at the Trueta hospital, and she told us he was getting around in his wheelchair and she’d been really happy to see him (and him to see her); finally she suggested the three of us go visit him in Germans Sàbat, where he still lived with his mother. Tere and I agreed to her suggestion, and we arranged to meet the following week at the same time and in the same place to go together to Tío’s house. But the following Saturday I didn’t show up to meet them; days later I found out that Tere hadn’t shown up either.

  ‘More or less around the middle of October I stopped seeing Tere and Jordi, not for any reason; Tere simply stopped calling me and I was starting to get the impression that, after the novelty of the first few months, my company was starting to be annoying and they’d rather be alone. The fact is I didn’t see Tere again for almost three months. This time it was by chance. That afternoon I’d gone to La Bisbal to visit a client, at dusk I was returning to Gerona and as I drove into the city by Pont Major I recognized Tere in a group of women and children waiting for a bus at the stop closest to the prison, sheltering from the cold under a little roof. It was Sunday, the last Sunday of the year. I stopped the car, waved to Tere, offered to give her a lift home. Tere accepted, got in beside me and, as soon as we pulled away from the bus stop, told me that Zarco was in very bad shape, that both Friday and Saturday he’d had a fever and that morning they’d diagnosed him with pneumonia. A bit surprised, I said I’d seen Zarco on Wednesday and he hadn’t said anything and I hadn’t noticed anything either; I asked: Did you see him? Tere said no, but she’d been able to speak to the senior supervisor. They were thinking of taking him to hospital, she said. Which hospital?, I asked. I don’t know, she answered. I took my eyes off Pedret Avenue for a moment and looked at her. Don’t worry, I said. Tomorrow I’ll talk to the superintendent. And I added: I’m sure it’s nothing. The conjecture filled the car like an unavoidable lie as we approached the city, which at that hour, covered in Christmas lights, sparkled in the distance. To dispel the silence I asked after Jordi. Tere told me distractedly that she hadn’t been seeing him for a while; I waited for an explanation, some comment, but neither was forthcoming, and I didn’t want to keep asking.

  ‘Tere’s house was on the outskirts of Salt, near the overpass and the highway to Bescanó, in a tower block planted in the middle of a dirty site covered with rubble and weeds. I stopped in front of the building and again promised Tere that I’d talk to the prison superintendent the next day; Tere nodded, asked me to please do that and said goodbye, but as she stepped out of the car she seemed to hesitate. Outside the darkness was almost total; the silence too, except for the growl of the traffic coming from the highway. Without turning back towards me, Tere asked: Do you want to come up?

  ‘It was the first time she’d ever invited me into her home. We went up a stairway with scaly walls lit by fluorescent tubes, and on the way up we crossed paths with two Middle Eastern women with their hair covered
by scarves. When we went inside her apartment Tere ushered me into a tiny dining room, turned on the gas heater and offered me tea or camomile tea. I said I’d have camomile. While Tere made the tea I noted the underprivileged order that reigned in the room: there was nothing but a table with two chairs, an imitation-leather armchair, a sideboard, a small CD player, a portable television and the heater; there were also three open doors leading off the dining room: behind one of them was the kitchen where Tere was bustling, behind the other two I glimpsed or imagined a bathroom and bedroom even smaller and icier than the room I was in. Distracted by that inventory of misery, without realizing it I lost the joy I’d felt at the news that Tere had split up with Jordi, and felt overwhelmed with sorrow at Tere’s life in that lonely outlying flat, sorrow at the news about Zarco’s health, sorrow of the season and Sunday night sorrow.

  ‘That night Tere and I slept together again. First thing the next morning, instead of going to the office, I went to the prison. At the entrance I was told I couldn’t see Zarco because he’d been admitted to the infirmary. Then I tried to see the superintendent and, after being kept waiting for several minutes, went into his office. I asked him straight out how Zarco was doing. By way of reply the superintendent dug a sheet of paper out of the mess of papers on his desk and handed it to me. And what does this mean? I asked, waving the paper around after I read it. It means that, according to the doctor, Gamallo probably won’t come out of this one, the superintendent answered. Can’t they do anything else? I asked. Aren’t they going to take him to hospital? The superintendent made a gesture of indifference or discouragement. If you want we’ll take him, he answered. But the doctor advises against it. Gamallo isn’t well enough to be moved, and we’re taking good care of him here. Can I go in and see him?, I asked, handing him back the paper. I’m sorry, said the superintendent. No visitors are allowed in the infirmary. But I repeat you shouldn’t worry. Gamallo is well attended. Besides, you know doctors: they always say things are worse than they are. Who knows if this one might not be wrong.