Outlaws (40 page)

‘So you think his memoirs are reliable.’

‘I think so. Except on particular points, of course.’

‘For example?’

‘For example on the death of Bermúdez. From the first moment everybody thought Zarco was the one who killed him, who shot him up with that overdose of heroin and set up that scene to look like a ritual sacrifice or a sexual crime . . .’

‘But in the memoirs he denies it.’

‘What else was he going to do? I’m sure it’s true.’

‘Did he confess?’

‘No: he denied it. But at that time I could tell when he was lying and when he was telling the truth, and on that matter he lied to me. I’m sure. Or almost sure. You should have heard him bitch about Bermúdez; he really badmouthed him, but not because Bermúdez was homosexual, as some have said: he didn’t care about that, in fact I think he always knew Bermúdez was in love with him and he played with that, or tried to. No, I think he hated Bermúdez for other reasons: he thought that, with Zarco’s saga and his other films about young
quinquis
starring real
quinquis
that followed, Bermúdez had made a fortune and won prestige in the film world at his expense, and on top of that he’d done so by presenting himself as a sort of philanthropist who wanted only to save him and other kids like him; he claimed that Bermúdez’s Catholic altruism was hypocritical, a stomach-turning way to sell his films; he said he’d swindled him from the start, that he’d stolen his life to make into films, that he’d promised he’d get to star in them and that it’s not true that he didn’t star in them because the supervising judge wouldn’t let him leave the prison (as was generally thought), but because in the end Bermúdez wanted someone else to star; he also said that he paid him much less money than they’d agreed he would pay, that it was a lie that he’d legally adopted him while they were filming his last movie and even more of a lie that he’d disinherited him as a punishment for having taken advantage of the press-screening cocktail party, at the Ocaña penitentiary, to escape . . . Anyway, I think by the end his relationship with Bermúdez had gone sour, and as Bermúdez said, that Zarco staged that escape in part to fuck him over and to fuck up his film and that later, when the police were looking for him, he appealed to Bermúdez again and things got out of hand or he bumped him off on purpose, or had him bumped off. Zarco was like that: if he came to the conclusion that someone was a real bastard, or had acted like one, he would make that person pay if at all possible.’

‘As might have happened with Batista.’

‘For example.’

‘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.