‘We spent it immediately. That’s what we always did. Money burned holes in our pockets: one afternoon we’d have twenty-five, thirty, forty thousand pesetas, and the next morning we’d have nothing left. That was normal for us. Of course we all spent the money and not just the ones who’d participated in the theft.’
‘When you say all you mean the whole gang?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That was the norm? Everything they stole got divvied up in equal portions?’
‘More or less. Sometimes we shared out what we earned and other times it went into a sort of kitty. But the money was everybody’s and we spent it between all of us.’
‘What did you spend it on?’
‘Drink, food and smokes. And drugs, naturally.’
‘What drugs did you use?’
‘Hash. Pills too: uppers, downers, stuff like that. Sometimes mescaline. But not cocaine.’
‘Did any of you use heroin?’
‘No. Heroin came in later, same with coke. I don’t remember anyone doing heroin back then in the district.’
‘Not even Zarco?’
‘Not even Zarco.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Totally. The thing about him being addicted to heroin from the age of thirteen or fourteen is a lie. A legend like so many that circulate about him.’
‘Tell me how you got hold of the drugs.’
‘It wasn’t as easy as you might think. During the spring Zarco and the rest of them had been supplied by a couple of dealers who were regulars at La Font, but a little while before I joined the gang the police had made two or three raids and cleaned the dealers out of the district, so, when I showed up, they were in jail or had scarpered. That explains why Zarco and Tere were at the Vilaró arcade when we met; as Tere told me, the guy in the Fred Perry shirt was a dealer: he’d told them to meet him there. And it also explains why we had to go outside the district all summer to sort ourselves out. Luckily the Fred Perry dealer didn’t arrange to meet Zarco at the arcade again (he must have sensibly realized it was not a suitable place for his business dealings); they met in bars in the old quarter: in the Pub Groc, in L’Enderroc, in Freaks. Later, towards the middle of July or the beginning of August, the Fred Perry dealer disappeared and we started frequenting the Flor, a bar with big windows that overlooked Mayor Street in Salt; we had several dealers there from the middle of July or the beginning of August until the middle of September: some guy called Dani, a Rodri, a Gómez, maybe another one or two.’
‘Did they never suggest becoming dealers? It would have solved the supply problem.’
‘But it would have created much worse problems. No. It was never suggested. Not as far as I know.’
‘Everybody took everything?’
‘Yeah. Some were greedier than others, but in general, yeah: we all took everything. Maybe the girls were more sensible, including Tere, but not the rest of them.’
‘You took everything too?’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t have fitted into the gang if I hadn’t. Supposing I eventually did fit in, that is.’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘I tried to. Sometimes I think I managed it, but other times I think not; depends on what you understand by fitting in, I suppose. It’s true that, as I’ve told you, after a certain point I went to La Font almost every day, hung out with them and did more or less whatever they were doing. But it’s also true that I never felt entirely like just one more member of the gang: I was and wasn’t, I did and didn’t, I was inside and out, like a witness or onlooker who participated in everything but most of all watched everyone participate. That’s how I think I felt deep down, and I think that’s how they felt about me; the proof is that, aside from Zarco and Tere (and only on exceptional occasions), I barely spoke to anyone on my own, and I wasn’t close to any of them. For all of them I was what I obviously was: a meteorite, a disorientated kid, a posh brat lost among them, the top dog’s protégé, their leader’s whim, someone who didn’t have much to do with them, although they accepted him and could fraternize with him once in a while.
‘But, to get back to the facts, yes, I took everything. At first I had a hard time keeping up with the rest of them, and I had a few bad days, but I soon got used to it.’
‘What other things did you have to do to fit in?’
‘Lots. But, please, don’t misinterpret: I didn’t take drugs to be accepted; I took them because I liked it. Let’s say I started off doing it out of some sort of obligation, or curiosity, and ended up doing it for pleasure, or habit.’
‘Like what happened with the robberies, no?’
‘In a certain sense. With other things.’
‘For example?’
‘For example with hookers.’
‘You went to hookers.’
‘Of course. In the district there was a brothel every couple of steps and we were sixteen, seventeen years old, walking around with a permanent overdose of testosterone, we had money; how could we not go to hookers? Actually, I think we spent most of our money on hookers. Although, to be perfectly honest, it was much harder for me to get used to the hookers than the drugs; I got much more hooked on drugs than hookers. I did like some hookers, but the truth is, especially at first, most of them gave me the creeps. I can tell you about my first visit to a brothel; I remember that night very clearly because something strange happened.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘It was at La Vedette, a brothel that was where most of the red-light district brothels were, on Pou Rodó, parallel to La Barca. It was the most expensive place in the neighbourhood, and also the best, though it was still a filthy, dark cave; imagine what the rest were like. It was run by a madam who was also called Vedette, a woman in her fifties with a reputation for ruling her business with unceremonious authority. That day the place was only half full, there wouldn’t have been more than ten or twelve men leaning on the bar or against the walls, drinking or breathing in the atmosphere saturated with smoke, cheap perfume and the smell of sweat, sex and alcohol. The girls swarmed around them, wearing very tight clothes and with faces caked in make-up, and a full-volume rumba shut down the conversations. It must have been right after the robbery in La Montgoda, or at least right after one of the first jobs I was involved in, among other reasons because after a job was when we could afford the luxury of going to La Vedette. The thing is that a few minutes after we got there all my friends had paired off and disappeared, and I suddenly found myself alone at the bar, after several girls had given up on me when they understood I didn’t have the slightest intention of bedding them. At that moment Vedette strolled calmly over from the other side of the room. Hello, handsome, she said. Don’t you like any of my girls? Vedette had bleached blonde hair, big breasts, big bones and hard features, and her powerful proximity was more intimidating than that of her charges, but for that very reason I found it easy to lie. Of course I like them, I answered. Vedette spilled her cleavage over the bar and asked: Well then? I smiled and put my empty beer glass to my lips and averted my gaze as I searched for a reply. Don’t tell me it’s your first time?, she asked. Before I could tell her another lie, the woman let out a terrifying cackle; terrifying until I realized that nobody in the place had heard it. Little angel, she said, exhaling her mentholated breath in my face. If I wasn’t retired I’d deflower you myself. She let me go and added: But if you want I’ll introduce you to the girl you need. She pointed to a place in the shadows. It’s her over there, she continued. Do you want me to call her? Go on, don’t be silly, you’ll see how much you like it. I didn’t see who Vedette was pointing at, but it didn’t matter: the mere idea of shutting myself up in a dark room with one of those big painted women was so revolting that it killed the slightest twinge of desire. Vedette must have sensed this (or maybe I shook my head), because she sighed, defeated, and asked, pointing at my beer: Do you want another?
‘I still hadn’t finished drinking my second beer when Zarco and the rest started to come downstairs.
They all asked me the same thing and I answered them all the same way and they all insisted I choose a girl and go upstairs with her; none of them suspected what Vedette had guessed, or at least no one voiced the suspicion out loud, and finally their insistence and my fear the secret would come to light overcame my disgust and I went over to Vedette and told her to introduce me to her candidate. Her name was Trini and she turned out to be a little brunette with short hair and swaying hips who pulled my arm around her waist and, while Zarco and the rest of the guys gestured euphorically at the other end of the bar, led me upstairs to one of the bedrooms. There she stepped down out of her high heels, stripped me and helped me strip her. Then she took me into the bathroom and washed and washed me and pushed me down on the bed and started sucking me off. It was the second time in my life something like this had happened to me, although the truth is it seemed like two different things and not the same thing done by two different women. After a while Trini managed to get it up, but as soon as she tried to get me inside her it shrank again. She tried to reassure me, saying it was normal for the first time, and then she went back to work on me with her mouth. I was very flustered, afraid of a total fiasco, and I concentrated until I came up with the solution: imagining that we weren’t in one of La Vedette’s rooms but in the washrooms of the Vilaró arcade and that those were Tere’s fingers and lips down there and not Trini’s, I got an erection and came right away.
‘That was when the strange thing I mentioned before happened. I was starting to get dressed when a red light came on beside the door and Trini said: Shit. What’s going on?, I asked. Nothing, said Trini. But we can’t leave. She pointed to the light and added: Cops are downstairs. I felt my legs weaken and a wave of heat enveloped me. In the bar? I asked. Yes, Trini answered. Don’t worry, they won’t come up; but until they leave we can’t go down. So it would be better for you to take it easy. I tried to take it easy. I finished getting dressed while Trini told me that, each time a pair of cops on their round came into the bar, Vedette or her husband pressed a button behind the bar and a red light turned on in all the bedrooms; then, when the police left, they pressed the button again and the lights went out. Trini insisted that I shouldn’t worry and just had to have patience, because, although naturally the police knew just what was going on (knew that there were girls and their clients in the rooms upstairs, knew that Vedette and her husband alerted them when they walked in), they always went away without bothering anyone after talking to Vedette for a while.
‘She was right: that’s what happened. Trini and I sat on the bed for a while, dressed, side by side without even touching, telling each other lies, until after a while the red light went out and we went downstairs. That was my first visit to a brothel. And that was how we spent the money.’
‘Did the girls in the gang know about it?’
‘What? That we spent the money on hookers?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know. I never asked myself that question.’
‘Ask yourself now.’
‘I don’t know if they knew. I don’t think so. Obviously, we went to the brothels without telling them, and I don’t remember anyone ever saying anything about it in front of them. I suppose in theory they didn’t know, although it’s hard to believe that in practice they didn’t suspect. As I said that’s where most of the money went.’
‘Well, I guess it mustn’t have been too difficult to hide it from the girls; after all there were only two of them, and one was Zarco’s girl and the other was Gordo’s.’
‘That there were only two is true: there were lots of girls who came in and out or circled around the gang, but only Tere and Lina belonged to it. The other part, however, is not true, or not entirely, or I didn’t have the impression that it was, or I only did for a time: Lina was Gordo’s girlfriend, yes, but as for Tere being Zarco’s girl . . . Well, as I said before if I’d known the truth in time everything would have been different; or if I’d seen from the beginning that she and Zarco behaved like Gordo and Lina did, which was more or less like most couples behaved back then: in that case I wouldn’t have got my hopes up or gone to La Font or done everything possible to fit in with the gang. It’s probable. But the fact is that Zarco and Tere did not behave like a couple, and unlike Lina, who gave the impression of being in the gang as Gordo’s girlfriend, Tere gave the impression of being in the gang like any of the rest of us. So how was I not going to get my hopes up and think I might have a chance? How was I going to forget what had happened with Tere in the arcade washrooms? It’s true that after that Tere acted like nothing had happened, but the fact is that it had happened and I didn’t get any signal that it could never happen again (or if I did I hadn’t been able to decipher it). Because it’s also true that in the early days I thought Tere was Zarco’s girlfriend, but it soon struck me that, even if she were, she and Zarco did their own thing when they felt like it.’
‘When did you start to think that?’
‘Pretty soon, like I said. I remember, for example, one of the first nights I went with them to Rufus, a discotheque in Pont Major, on the way out of the city on the highway to La Bisbal. That’s where Gerona’s charnegos and quinquis used to hang out and, as I later discovered, where the gang ended up every night, or almost every night. It was the first discotheque I’d been to, though if you asked me to describe it now I wouldn’t be able to: I always arrived high, and the only thing I remember is a foyer where the bouncers and the ticket office were, a big dance floor with strobe lights and disco balls, a bar on the right and some sofas in the darkest section, where the couples hid.
‘There, as I was telling you, we ended up almost every night that summer. We’d get there about midnight or twelve-thirty and leave when they closed, about three or four in the morning. I spent those two or three hours drinking beer, smoking joints in the washrooms and watching Tere dance from a corner of the bar. At first I never danced: I would have liked to, but I was embarrassed; besides, in general the guys in the gang never danced, I don’t know whether for the same reasons I didn’t or because they considered themselves tough guys and thought tough guys don’t dance. I say in general because, when they played slow songs – things by Umberto Tozzi or José Luis Perales or people like that – Gordo would run down to the dance floor as fast as he could to dance with Lina and, when they played rumbas by Peret or Los Amaya, or songs by Las Grecas, sometimes Tío, Chino and Drácula would dance to them. The girls, however, danced much more, especially Tere, who never stopped from the moment she arrived until we left the place. I, as I said, concentrated on her for hours, watching her as I couldn’t anywhere else, without anyone bothering me or suspecting me (or that’s what I thought). I never got tired of watching her: not only because she was the most attractive girl in the disco or because more than dance she seemed to float over the floor; also because of something else I discovered with time: lots of people – Lina, for example – danced non-stop, but they danced the same way to almost all the songs, while Tere danced differently to every song, as if she adapted to the music the way a glove does to a hand or as if her movements came out of each song as naturally as heat comes off a fire.
‘Sorry: I’ve strayed off on a tangent. I was telling you about one of the first times I went to Rufus. The truth is I don’t remember very clearly what happened that night in the discotheque, but I do remember at two-thirty or three in the morning, when I’d been in there for a while, I felt a hot foam bubbling up in my stomach, went outside and threw up in the parking lot beside the river. After that I felt better and wanted to go back inside, but when I reached the door realized I was incapable of making my way through that mass of humanity enveloped in smoke, music and intermittent lights, and told myself the party was over.
‘I’d gone to Rufus with Zarco and Tere, but decided to go home on my own. I’d been walking for quite a while back towards the city when, very close to the Pedret bridge, a Seat 124 Sport braked beside me. At the wheel was a guy who looked like John Travolta in Satur
day Night Fever, which was not strange because that summer the nights were full of guys trying to look like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever; at his side was Tere, which was not strange either because that night I’d seen her dance with tons of guys, among them the John Travolta lookalike. Where did you get to, Gafitas?, asked Tere, rolling down the window. I couldn’t think up an excuse to improvise, so I had to resign myself to the truth. I wasn’t feeling well, I said, and leant on the roof of the 124 and down to the window. I puked, but I feel better now. It was true: the night air had begun to clear my wooziness. I gestured towards the nearly dark highway. I’m going home, I announced. Tere opened the car door as she said: We’ll give you a lift. Thanks, I answered. But I’d rather walk. Tere insisted: Get in. That’s when Travolta intervened: Let him do what he wants and let’s get out of here, he said. You shut up, dickhead, Tere cut him off, getting out of the car and pushing her seat forward so I could get in the back. She repeated: Get in.
‘I got in. Tere got back into the front seat and, before Travolta pulled out back onto the highway, she grabbed his earlobe, tugged it hard and said as if she were talking to me at first and then to him at the end: He’s a dickhead but he looks good enough to eat. And tonight I’m going to screw him. Aren’t I, tough guy? Travolta swatted her away, mumbled something and pulled out. Five minutes later, after crossing the bridge over the Onyar and driving all the way up the Paseo de La Devesa, we stopped at Caterina Albert. Tere got out of the car and let me out. Thanks, I said, once I was outside. No problem, said Tere. Are you all right? Yeah, I answered. Then why do you have that pissed-off look on your face?, she asked. I don’t know what look I’ve got on my face, I answered. I’m tired, but I’m not pissed off. You sure?, she asked. Tere put the palms of her hands on my cheeks. You’re not pissed off because I’m going to screw this dickhead tonight?, she insisted, pointing with her head inside the car. No, I said. She smiled and, without another word, kissed me softly on the lips, scrutinized me for a couple of seconds, then said: Next time me and you’ll have a shag, OK? I didn’t say anything and Tere got back in the 124 and the 124 turned around and drove away.
Outlaws Page 6