Outlaws (42 page)

‘That anecdote is the last thing I know of Tere; after Zarco’s funeral she vanished: literally. When the burial ended I was waiting for her with Jordi, Cortés and Gubau at the cemetery gate until we realized that she must have left through another gate with Zarco’s family. I called her on her mobile, but she had it switched off. Only then did I understand what was going on. And what was going on was that Tere had been avoiding me almost since I gave her the news of Zarco’s death. Cortés and Gubau, who possibly guessed what I had guessed, invited me to go for a drink; I accepted and Jordi said he’d come along, although in the end it wasn’t one drink but several and although, while we drank them, I kept dialling Tere’s number, always without success.

‘I finished up that evening quite drunk, and the next morning began several weeks of bitterness. No matter how hard I tried I didn’t understand Tere’s disappearance; as well as not understanding it I didn’t accept it: I phoned her at all hours of the day and at all hours was waiting for her to call; I went to look for her at her place, and spent many hours sitting on the stairs, waiting for her; I even thought of getting in touch with her through Zarco’s relatives who she’d introduced me to during the wake, but I didn’t know how to and, after a few attempts to locate them, I gave up. One afternoon, it must have been at least a week after her disappearance, I decided to knock on every door in her building and ask if any of her neighbours knew where she was; I didn’t speak to all of them – some weren’t in, most were Arabs and quite a few didn’t understand Spanish – but from that inquiry I concluded that Tere had clearly not returned home after the burial, although also that she hadn’t moved out and might return at any moment. On another day I went to see Jordi at his library and confirmed that conclusion: he told me that he didn’t know where Tere was and the only thing he did know was that she’d left her job at the council without explanation. That afternoon I had a few beers with Jordi at a bar next door to the library; we were there till they closed, talking about Tere: since I immediately realized Jordi was still in love with her, I wasn’t bold enough to tell him the truth, to tell him about our honeymoon tucked up in Tere’s flat, and I spent the whole time trying to console him. When we were saying goodbye, Jordi couldn’t hold himself together any more and burst into tears.

‘During the weeks that followed I immersed myself in work matters. I was afraid of falling back into depression, into a blacker and deeper depression than the previous one or even a depression with no way out, and I fought it by working. My partners helped me a lot. Cortés and Gubau had the brains to treat me as an unwell or convalescent person and the tact to keep me from noticing that they were treating me as an unwell or convalescent person. They accepted without protest my pathological hyperactivity, my inexplicable absences, my glaring errors and apparent whims, among them eliminating prison visits, from which I invariably returned filled with deadly discouragement. On the weekends Cortés and Gubau took turns trying to distract me: they took me on day trips or out drinking, invited me to the cinema, the theatre or a football match, had me over for dinner or introduced me to single or divorced women friends. Keeping my daughter apart from my misfortunes helped even more, oblivious to what I was going through, which I hadn’t been able to do or known how to do during the collapse that followed Tere’s penultimate disappearance which had only contributed to making my misfortune worse. It also helped to accept the help of a psychoanalyst, to whom Gubau practically dragged me. Psychoanalysis did me good for three reasons. The first is that it helped me formulate in detail, chewing over and digesting it, what had happened to me at age sixteen with Batista (only then did I realize, for example, that he’d represented absolute evil to me, for several months). The second is that, although perhaps it didn’t allow me to entirely digest what had happened with Tere, or with Tere and Zarco, it allowed me to accept it, live with its memory, keeping at bay legions of hostile ghosts in the shape of poisonous conjectures, guilty fictions, regrets without compassion and real or invented memories that fed the torture I mortified myself with on a daily basis.’

‘And what’s the third reason? What else did psychoanalysis do for you?’

‘It got me writing. As soon as I lay down on the psychoanalyst’s couch I began to think that, if it was really going to be useful to tell my story out loud to be able to understand it, it would be more useful to tell it in writing, because I thought that writing was more difficult than talking, it requires a greater effort and allows you to go into more depth. So I got into the habit of writing down sketches of episodes, dialogues, descriptions and reflections on Zarco and on Tere, on the summer of ’78, on my re-encounter with Zarco and with Tere twenty years later; in short: many of the things I’ve been telling you about recently. These notes were fragmentary and random, they didn’t have a single narrative thread or the slightest systematic, not to mention literary, volition; and, although the stimulus for writing them had been psychoanalysis, they didn’t have a healing intention, but the truth is that they worked on me like therapy, or at least they did me good. The truth is, a year after losing sight of Tere and after Zarco dying, I was sure that I had dodged the threat of another collapse and had the impression that I’d recovered myself, and recovered my work and my former habits, including visiting my clients in prison at least once a week. A symptom of my recovery (or perhaps a consequence) was that at Christmas I took a week-and-a-half-long holiday. I spent it in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, staying in the Hotel de las Américas, swimming in the mornings at the hotel beach or at the beaches on the Rosario Islands, spending the afternoons reading and drinking coffee with white rum and the nights dancing at the Havana Club, a place in the Getsemaní neighbourhood where I met in the small hours of one of those nights a Dutch divorcée I slept with several times and with whom I exchanged an unhealthy number of emails once I was back in Gerona for a couple of weeks, at the end of which the story ended as easily as it had started. A little while later I started sleeping with a linguistics professor recently arrived at the university and a friend of Pilar’s, Cortés’ wife, a good-looking, cheerful and kind Andalusian woman from whom I fled as soon as I noticed her phoning me too often.

‘During this time I knew nothing about Tere; on the other hand, I had lots of news about Zarco (or about what remained of Zarco). His death provoked his last public resurrection and the definitive crystallization of his myth. It was predictable: as soon as Zarco died, everybody must have felt with good reason that the myths of the living are fragile, because the living can still belie them, while, since the dead cannot, the myths of the dead are more resilient; so everybody hastened to construct an invulnerable myth out of the dead Zarco, a myth that he could no longer contradict or disfigure.’

‘An invulnerable but modest myth.’

‘A modest but real myth. The proof is that here you are, preparing a book about him. The best proof is that, right now, even kids know who Zarco was. If you think about it, that’s extraordinary: after all we’re talking about a guy who was just a minor delinquent, known most of all because of three or four mediocre films and a riot and a couple of jail breaks. It’s true that the image people have of Zarco is false, but one doesn’t attain posterity, even a modest one, without simplifications or idealizations, so it’s natural that Zarco has turned into the heroic outlaw that, for the journalists and even for some historians, embodies the yearning for liberty and the frustrated hopes of the heroic years of the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain.’

‘The Robin Hood of his day.’

‘Yes: the Lin Chung of the Transition. That’s the image Zarco’s been reduced to.’

‘It’s not a bad image.’

‘Of course it’s bad. It’s false, and if it’s false it’s bad. And you should do away with it. You should tell the true story of Liang Shan Po. That’s why I’ve spent all these days talking to you.’

‘Don’t worry: I won’t forget. Although in the book, I might not just talk about Zarco: I’ll talk about you and Tere and . . .’

‘Talk about whatever you want, as long as you tell the truth. Well, what else do you want to know? I have the impression that I’ve told you everything.’

‘Not yet. Have you seen Tere again?’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t heard anything about her?’

‘No.’

‘And María?’

‘No more than everybody else knows. That she’s still out there, gripping her fame with teeth and claws, or what remains of her fame, which I think by now is very little. Zarco’s death and reappearance in the media allowed her to return to her origins as the wife of a famous man and exploit the rose-tinted version of her life with Zarco again. Like that, on the basis of lies, María recovered the place she’d lost, though for a very short time. Then she lost it again, and since then I don’t know what’s become of her, or even if she’s moved back to Gerona . . . Anyway, for my part I can only say that at least I didn’t knowingly contribute to that bullshit, because, no matter how much they insisted (and I assure you they insisted a lot), I never let any of the reality shows she appeared on interview me. Don’t take it the wrong way. It wasn’t an ethical matter, I don’t consider myself superior to María, I don’t even have anything against her any more, and much less against reality shows. Everyone makes a living how they want, or how they can. I deal in legal judgments, not moral ones. But I didn’t fancy going on TV talking about my life. That’s all. You understand, don’t you?’

‘Of course. What I don’t entirely understand is that, from Zarco’s death until now, you’ve refused to speak of him with serious journalists, people preparing articles, features, documentaries, biographies, things like that.’

‘There are two reasons. One is that at first I didn’t feel like talking about Zarco: same with Tere, all I wanted was to forget him. And the other is that I don’t trust journalists, especially serious or supposedly serious journalists. They’re the worst. They’re the tricky ones, not the frivolous ones. Frivolous journalists lie but everyone knows they lie and nobody pays them any attention, or hardly anyone; serious journalists, however, lie while shielding themselves with the truth, and that’s why everyone believes them. And that’s why their lies do so much damage.’

‘So you convinced yourself that only you could tell the truth.’

‘Don’t take me for an idiot. What I convinced myself of is that only I could tell a certain part of the truth.’

‘And why haven’t you told it? Why have you agreed to tell it to me, who isn’t a journalist but might as well be, after all I’m going to write a book about Zarco?’

‘Don’t you know? Haven’t your editors told you? If you want I’ll explain, but it’s a bit of a long story. How about we leave it for next time?’

‘OK. Next time is our last, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah. Next time I’ll tell you the end of the story.’

Chapter 12

‘Gamallo died on New Year’s Eve 2005. Or was it 2006? It must have been 2006, because it wasn’t long before I retired. The fact is that his death brought the press swooping back down on him, this time in search of carrion. Some journalists tried to get in touch with me then, but I didn’t want to talk to them. It was a repugnant spectacle: as if they hadn’t made up enough lies about Gamallo when he was alive; now that he was dead and couldn’t even defend himself any more they wanted to go on lying. Truly repugnant.

‘I lost track of his lawyer again for about a year, maybe a year and a half. In that time he didn’t show up at the prison. I asked, and was told that he hadn’t stopped working: he’d simply stopped visiting his clients; later I found out that it wasn’t just that, Cañas wasn’t well: he no longer attended trials, he seemed to have delegated almost everything to his partners, he began to get a reputation for being standoffish and eccentric. I had grown fond of him, and felt bad that what had happened to him had happened to him, that things hadn’t gone well for him and had affected him so badly; I especially felt that it had happened because he had not listened to me, because he had got his hopes up and tried to defend Gamallo.’

‘Do you think that was the cause of the problems Cañas had?’

‘In part yes. I’m not saying his sorry tale with the girl had no bearing, although it had happened a long time before and it would be logical if, by the time Gamallo died, it had been forgotten; but, anyway, I can’t give an opinion on that. What I do know is that failure is a bad business, and that Cañas felt he had completely failed with Gamallo, after having invested so much in him. For me the problem was that Cañas had believed the legend of Zarco, as I already told you, and he had decided to redeem him, redeem the great delinquent, the symbol of his generation. That was his proposal, and not achieving it hurt him: fellows used to success don’t easily accept failure. So he felt like a failure, and perhaps guilty. Don’t you think so?’

‘No, but I’d like to know why you think that.’

‘Let me finish telling you the story and you’ll understand. Cañas took quite a long time before getting back into his habit of visiting his clients, but one afternoon, shortly after hearing that he’d started doing so again, I ran into him at the prison. We happened to meet in the foyer, as I was on my way out of my office having just finished for the day. Long time no see, Counsellor, I said in greeting. We were starting to miss you. Cañas looked at me with a speck of mistrust, as if he suspected I was making fun of him, but he soon smiled; physically he wasn’t the same man: he still wore an impeccable suit, but he’d lost a lot of weight and his hair was going very grey. I took a bit of a vacation, he said. So you jumped the gun on me, I replied. That’s what I plan to do in a couple of months, except my vacation’s going to be longer. You’re retiring?, he asked. I’m retiring, I answered. It was true; but it wasn’t true that retiring made me as happy as I insisted on pretending: on the one hand it made me happy; on the other it made me uneasy: apart from resting and sitting in the front row for the spectacle of my physical and mental collapse, I didn’t know what I’d devote my life to when I retired, or what I’d do with it. I thought that, like Cañas, I was a bit pitiful too; and I immediately thought there’s nothing filthier than feeling oneself worthy of pity. Cañas and I kept talking. At a certain moment he asked: Can I buy you a coffee? I’m sorry, I answered. I dropped my car in at the garage on my way to work this morning and I have to go pick it up before they close. If you want I can give you a lift, Cañas offered. Don’t trouble yourself, I said. I was just going to call a taxi. Cañas said it was no trouble and settled the argument.