Outlaws

by Javier Cercas

  ‘With slight variations, conversations like this were repeated for weeks at the Royal between one beer and the next, and I participated in them with increasing anxiety as Zarco’s nervousness grew and his physical state degenerated before my very eyes (as I later discovered, in part because he’d gone back to using heroin); also as I watched unfold before my eyes, in the things that he said, the oft-repeated spectacle of the irreconcilable contradiction between his person and his persona: again he wanted the world to forget Zarco once and for all, that it let him be Antonio Gamallo, a normal man with a normal life like the majority of people; but, at the same time, once again he didn’t want to be a normal man, he didn’t want anybody to forget he was Zarco nor did he want to dispense with his pride and the privileges of being Zarco, among them that of not living the life of slavery that the majority of people lived. He didn’t want to and, in part, maybe he couldn’t: as much as he aspired to be a normal person, a new person, he panicked at the thought of not being Zarco any more, because that meant no longer being who he’d always or almost always been; likewise, as much as he aspired to live outside prison, he panicked at the thought of doing so, because it meant no longer living where he’d always or almost always lived.

  ‘But all this is mere speculation, or not much more. What’s certain is that at some point, perhaps tired of me arguing with him and telling him what he had to do, or simply tired of complaining, Zarco stopped coming to my office after work and I practically stopped hearing anything about him. Two or three months later – eight months after getting his third-stage parole, to be precise – the government granted him a limited pardon and conditional release. This was the premature culmination of the project we’d set in motion almost two years earlier, and, in spite of my melancholy premonition that Zarco was heading for disaster, I received the news as a triumph: not only because I’d done my work conscientiously and got Zarco out of prison in record time, or because I would be able to get the highest propaganda value out of his case this way; most of all because in those months I’d reached the conclusion that I could only get Tere back when Zarco got his freedom back and we were free of him: our relationship had always been hindered by Zarco, by our need for him as teenagers and by his need for us as adults, by the suspicions and mistakes and doubts those needs had provoked, and I imagined that, once Zarco was no longer depending on us nor us on him, Tere and I could start over again, picking up our relationship where Tere had left it in suspension a few months back, after the night we’d rescued Zarco from La Creueta. So I waited impatiently for news of the pardon and, as soon as I got it, I rushed to phone Zarco to tell him.

  ‘It was a late morning in early June or mid-June. I phoned his workplace in Vidreres and asked for him, but they told me he’d been off sick for a couple of days and hadn’t left the prison. I phoned the prison and again asked for him, but they told me he was in Vidreres. The misunderstanding didn’t surprise me. For some time the businessman who’d hired him had kept me informed of Zarco’s absences from work; this, combined with his constant lack of punctuality and refusal to submit to drugs tests, had led to the prison superintendent drafting a report advising against Zarco’s pardon and recommending rescinding his third-stage parole status with the argument that he was not ready for release. Luckily, no one had paid the report any attention, and that morning I wondered whether or not I should call the superintendent. Then I wondered whether or not to call María. I hadn’t talked to her for months, but I knew from Tere that she was fed up with her sham marriage and barely saw Zarco, which was not preventing her from turning into an increasingly popular public persona, although in her appearances on the radio, in the press and on television she talked less and less about Zarco and more and more about herself.

  ‘In the end I just phoned Tere. After phoning the factory in Cassà and being told she was no longer employed there, I found her at home. As I told you before, Tere and I talked on the phone every once in a while, but it was usually she who called me rather than me calling her, so, without giving her time to be surprised by my call, I told her what they’d told me at the factory in Cassà. Why didn’t you tell me?, I asked. Because you didn’t ask, she answered. Have you found a new job?, I asked. No, she answered. I asked her what she was planning to do; nothing, she answered. I’ve got a few months of dole coming to me, she explained. Maybe I’ll go on holiday; or maybe I’ll stay home and study: I’ve got exams next month. Tere fell silent; now it was she who asked: Has something happened? I told her what had happened. Congratulations, Gafitas, she said. Mission accomplished. I didn’t notice any enthusiasm in her voice, and I wondered if she was really glad that all this was over. Thanks, I said, without daring to ask her; instead of that I asked: Do you know where he is? Zarco?, she asked: for a while now she’d gone back to calling him that, not Antonio. Isn’t he at work? No, I answered. Not at the prison either. Then I have no idea where he is, said Tere.

  ‘I believed her. That night I went to look for Zarco at the prison. Shortly before nine I asked through the intercom by the entrance if he’d arrived; they told me he hadn’t and I went back to wait for him in the car. I was there for a while, and I’d already decided that Zarco wasn’t coming back and I might as well leave when I saw him get out of a clapped-out Renault parked in front of the yard. Hey, Antonio! I called him, climbing out of my car. He turned towards me and waited on the sidewalk, right beside the prison gate. At first my presence seemed to annoy him – What are you doing here, Counsellor?, he asked when he recognized me – but as soon as I gave him the news his expression relaxed, he took a deep breath, opened his arms wide and said: Come here, Gafitas. He hugged me. He smelled intensely of alcohol and tobacco. Well, he said as we finished hugging; I looked in his eyes: they were red. When do I get out? I don’t know, I replied. Tomorrow they announce the news, so pretty soon, I suppose. Then I hastened to warn him: But the problem is not when you’re going to get out but what you’re going to do when you’re out. During my wait I’d loaded up with arguments, and now I reproached him for not having gone to work for the last two days and asked him what he was going to live on if he lost that job and told him I knew it had been a long time since he saw María and asked him where he was going to live if not with María. Zarco didn’t let me continue. Take it easy, man, he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. I just found out I’m a free man. Save the lectures for another day; let me enjoy it for now, eh? And don’t worry about me, for fuck’s sake, I’m a big boy. For a moment that drunken laid-back attitude irritated me. I’m not worried, I replied. I just want you to understand that this hasn’t ended and it’ll all go to hell if you don’t live a normal life from now on. With all the work we’ve put in . . . I understand, Zarco interrupted me again. Fuck, how am I not going to understand? The way you go on about it. He took his hand off my shoulder and gave me a pat on the cheek; then he pointed at the building where he slept, on the other side of the prison fence, on the far side of the inadequately lit yard, and added: Well, Gafitas, it’s damn late: if I don’t get in there right now I’ll be left without a pardon. Zarco had already called through on the intercom and they’d opened the gate to the yard when I suggested: Tomorrow we could celebrate the news with a drink at the Royal. I clarified: When you get off work. I added: I bet Tere would join us too if you invited her. She’s lost her job. The news didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Zarco, and I thought maybe he already knew; or that he was so absorbed in his own stuff that he’d barely heard. Tomorrow?, he asked, almost without turning back to me. Tomorrow we’ll have to hold a press conference and all that, no? Well, maybe I’ll call you and we’ll talk about it.

  ‘He didn’t call, we didn’t talk about it, we didn’t celebrate the pardon. The press conference, however, was held. It was two days later, in the prison itself, and it was the Director-General of Correctional Institutions who called it. I didn’t attend the event because no one asked me to; neither María nor Tere attended either, not even the superintendent, at least accordin
g to the reports of it I read the next day in the papers. They all included a photo of Zarco and the director-general, both smiling and both with their index and middle fingers raised in a victory sign; they all reproduced the director-general’s statement, according to which Zarco’s liberty represented “a triumph for Antonio Gamallo, a triumph for our prison system and a triumph for our democracy”, and a few words from Zarco thanking all those people “who’d done their bit, however small, to make this moment possible”; they all highlighted María’s absence, and all related this fact to the rumours of the couple’s separation that had been circulating lately.

  ‘That very day Zarco disappeared from the media and didn’t show up again until four or five months had passed. Just as I’d suspected (or desired), during that time I no longer saw him. But I still received news of him. Thanks to my former client from Vidreres I found out that, once he’d regained his freedom, Zarco had not set foot in the carton factory again. A little while later María made some casual or apparently casual statements to a reporter on a television programme in which she confirmed that she and Zarco were living apart and hadn’t seen each other since months before the pardon was granted, and in which she also insinuated that, almost from the start, their relationship had just been staged. These words unleashed a storm of gossip, conjecture and demands for explanations among the tabloid and romance journalists that María fed with silences and rudeness, which filled many minutes of television and whole pages of magazines for several weeks and which I interpreted as the swansong of the media soap opera starring María and Zarco.

  ‘The exact opposite of what my incurable optimism had predicted ended up happening with Tere. For the first few weeks things stayed more or less the same as they’d been up till then: she phoned me every once in a while and I waited for the opportunity to take a step forward, as if I were afraid to rush things or feared that if I didn’t get it right the first time, I wouldn’t get a second chance. But after a month and a half Tere stopped calling me, and then I made up my mind; I started calling her, started pressuring her: I suggested we see each other, that we go out for lunch or dinner, that she come over for lunch or dinner, that we give it another try; I assured her I was ready to accept her conditions and that this time there would be no ties, no mess, no commitments, no demands. Tere responded to my suggestions with excuses and to my complaints by saying I was right, especially when I repeated that I’d been waiting for months and was tired. You should try something else, Gafitas, she suggested more than once. I don’t have anything else to try, I answered, almost infuriated. I already know what I want. The one who doesn’t seem to know what she wants is you. The last conversation we had was not awkward but sad, or that’s how I remember it. Resigned to reality, I didn’t beg and we didn’t argue, but, maybe because I sensed that this was farewell, I asked her about Zarco, something I hadn’t done for a while. Tere answered vaguely, told me she hadn’t seen him and all she knew was that he was living in Barcelona and earning a living working in the car-repair garage of a former cellmate. That’s what she said, and for some reason I thought she was lying and that she was giving me the brush-off again; I also thought that she was telling me without saying so that it was no longer any of my business because my work with Zarco had finished. When I hung up the telephone I remembered Zarco’s words in La Creueta: end of story, debt settled, you can go now.

  ‘I stopped calling Tere and tried to forget her. I didn’t manage to. The only thing I managed to do was wake up each morning with a crushing sensation of failure. That sensation increased a few weeks later, when Zarco was arrested on the Rambla de Catalunya in Barcelona after having robbed a pharmacy and having tried to steal a car from an underground parking lot. It was less than five months since he’d received the pardon and the conditional release. It was front-page news in the newspapers and magazines and on the radio and television, it unleashed a journalistic debate about the softness of Spanish penal legislation, the insufficiencies of the prison system and the limits of rehabilitation, and provoked a small political earthquake that included a row in the Congress, an exchange of accusations between the Madrid government and the Catalan one and the sacking of the Director-General of Correctional Institutions, Señor Pere Prada. For Zarco the episode also represented an ending. The violation of the conditions of his release meant that from the correctional point of view he went back to square one: he went back to having three decades of imprisonment to serve, to which he’d now have to add, besides, the years he’d get for his last two crimes. All this meant, given his age and given that nobody was going to risk granting him any kind of release, let alone parole, in practice Zarco was condemned to a life sentence. His hopes for liberty ended there. And there ended the myth of Zarco.’

  ‘You mean the myth of Zarco in his lifetime ended there, the one you reactivated with the campaign in favour of his pardon; but the Zarco myth didn’t end: the proof is that here we are you and I, talking about him.’

  ‘You’re right. Actually, when you think about it, rather than ending at that moment Zarco’s myth seemed to transform, or degrade, or took its final shape. I mean that almost from one day to the next Zarco went from being the legendary good delinquent who had finally found the right road and began to be seen as an irredeemable junkie, sordid and dirty, like a perpetual delinquent, ungrateful and glib, like a hopeless quinqui without a trace of glamour. In short, he began to be seen as a tyrant and not as a victim. María contributed very much to this transformation from the beginning, from the first time she appeared on television ranting and raving about Zarco; well, ranting and raving about Zarco, and about Tere and about me. Which was the first time I saw her converted into a furious vengeful woman. I don’t suppose you’ve seen that interview, because I didn’t record it; anyway these things must be on the Internet, on YouTube or sites like that, no?’

  ‘Probably. I’ll find out.’

  ‘Find it if you can: it’s worth seeing. The interview went out one Saturday night, quite late, on a magazine show with a huge audience. María was interrogated for more than an hour by the presenter and by several reporters with the idea that she might confide in them about her relationship with Zarco and clear up her insinuations about the wedding having just been a stunt. By then her appearance barely bore any relation to the shy, sad, anodyne woman Tere had introduced me to years earlier in my office: she’d let her hair grow, dyed it blonde and had it curled, her face was caked with make-up, she was wearing a sparkling, violet-coloured, tight satin dress with a plunging neckline. That night María more than fulfilled her mission: she clarified, confided, ranted and raved; her performance was worthy of a diva: she accompanied her words with dramatic silences, with outbursts of rage, affected gestures, challenging looks straight at the camera. She began by saying that she hadn’t seen Zarco for months and had no news of him apart from what she’d read in the press, and then she went on to say that Zarco had hit her many times, that he’d stolen money from her, that he’d abused her sexually and had tried to sexually abuse her daughter, that he’d cheated on her with Tere, that Zarco, Tere and I had tricked her into marrying him in order to get him released, that she had paid me significant sums of money to defend him, that I knew about all the humiliations he and Tere had submitted her to and not only did I not do anything to prevent them but I had encouraged them because I’d belonged to Zarco’s gang in my youth and Zarco and Tere were blackmailing me with the threat of exposing my delinquent past. I listened to all this live, alone in my loft on La Barca Street, more fascinated than furious or scandalized, as if they weren’t talking about me but about my double and, as soon as María started to spill the beans, I began telling myself that a good lie is not a pure, free-standing lie, that a pure lie is an implausible lie, that, to make it plausible, a lie needs to be constructed in part out of truths, and I spent the programme wondering how much truth María’s lies contained: I knew, for example, that it was true that Zarco had stolen money from her (though not that María had paid me a s
ingle euro to defend Zarco), and I wondered if it was also true that Zarco hit her and had tried to sexually abuse her daughter; I knew that it was true, of course, that when I was young I’d been in Zarco’s gang and that in a certain sense Zarco, Tere and I had tricked María so she would marry Zarco so we could get him freed, and I wondered if it was also true that Zarco cheated on María with Tere and if from the moment he started to get out on weekend-release passes, more than a year before, the two of them had been seeing each other behind my back and that explained why since then Tere hadn’t wanted to go back to seeing me and had kept me at a distance, keeping my hopes up through telephone conversations. I asked myself many questions similar to these, but I didn’t give myself any answers. I didn’t want to.

  ‘Or I couldn’t. As soon as the programme began Gubau called me, and almost immediately after him my daughter called and then Cortés; before I got into bed I spoke by telephone with no fewer than ten people. All of them were watching the programme or had seen it and all of them wanted to comment on it and find out how I was, but from there on in the reactions differed: most of them tried to calm me down, took it for granted that the woman was crazy, that she just wanted to be on television and that what she said was false. But there were also different reactions. In my sister’s tone of voice, for example, I thought I detected, well covered by the obligatory indignation, a tiny shade of resentment, as if she were pained by the public prominence her little brother had just acquired, but also a shade of respect, as if she’d just discovered, proudly, that I had finally become somebody. Is it true that you were in his gang?, my ex-wife asked for her part, with a mixture of admiration and astonishment. Crikey, you could have told me: now I understand why you were so obsessed with Zarco . . . The truth is that, sometimes with one ear on the television and the other on the receiver while my mobile was ringing, I tried to deal with them all, answer their questions and play down the importance of the programme and María’s accusations, but when I finally disconnected the phones I’d realized that this was just the beginning and that, supposing it didn’t end up affecting me personally, it was obviously going to affect the opinion others had of me, which was a way of affecting me personally.