Outlaws (21 page)

‘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 dispersing 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.

‘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 Pòlvora, 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?’