‘When I left the prison I called Tere and told her what the superintendent had told me, but she made no comment.
‘The three days that followed were very strange; in fact, I remember them as the happiest days of my life, and at the same time the most melancholy. Tere and I were barely apart. She had a week of holidays, and I took the time off. First I suggested we go away somewhere, but she wouldn’t; then I suggested she come and stay at my place, but she wouldn’t agree to that either; finally it was me who ended up going to stay at her place, arriving with a bag full of clothes and another full of part of my collection of CDs of ’70s and ’80s music. It was like a honeymoon. We didn’t leave home except to eat at L’Espelma, a restaurant in Salt, and we spent morning, noon and night in bed, listening to my CDs, watching movies on TV and making love without the enthusiasm of the first times, but with a care and tenderness that I’d never known. Like a honeymoon, as I said, except a honeymoon troubled by bad omens: in those happy days I had an intuition more than once of how it was all going to end, and that’s why they were also melancholy days.
‘The fact of the matter is that first thing in the morning on New Year’s Day the prison service supervisor woke me up to tell me that Zarco had died in the early hours. From that moment on confusion takes over from the strangeness in my memory, to such an extent that the following hours and days have the texture of a dream for me, or rather a nightmare. I don’t remember, for example, how I told Tere the news. I don’t remember how she took it, either; I don’t remember the two of us at the prison, taking charge of the body or of Zarco’s things, although I know we went to the prison and took charge of the body and of Zarco’s things, of all the paperwork of the death. The funeral was held on the second day of the year. Inevitably, the newspapers repeated that it was a media event and a manifestation of popular mourning, but my impression is that, for once, the cliché did not entirely betray the reality. Over the last years the country seemed to have forgotten Zarco, or only seemed to remember him every once in a while as a guilty husband and increasingly distant secondary and declining character in the gossip magazines; now, the massive crowd at his funeral demonstrated that it wasn’t the case, that the people had not forgotten him.
‘Zarco’s relatives, friends and acquaintances immediately showed up at the wake. Tons of them showed up. I had never seen a single one of them, I didn’t know if any of them had ever visited him at the prison or had anything to do with him over the last few years; Tere, however, seemed to know them all, at least she treated them as if she knew them. The wake was in Salt, in the Salt chapel of rest. As I said before Tere and I had at first shared responsibility for the formalities and paperwork, but she soon turned into a sort of mistress of ceremonies, I think unintentionally. Shortly after we arrived at the chapel building she introduced me to a relatively young woman, still good-looking, with big blue eyes and big blonde hair, and told me it was her aunt, Zarco’s mother; then she introduced me to other relatives of Zarco’s, including one of his younger brothers (an albino who bore not the slightest physical resemblance to Zarco). I didn’t manage to exchange anything more than the typical expressions of condolence with any of them, I don’t know whether because Tere always introduced me simply as Zarco’s lawyer. Some of them were Gypsies or looked like Gypsies, but none expressed outwardly any signs of pain over Zarco’s death, except for his mother, who sighed every once in a while or cried out for her dead son.
‘By mid-afternoon the chapel was full of busybodies and journalists on the hunt for quotes. I avoided them as best I could. By then I’d already lost my place, I did nothing but wander aimlessly between one big crowd of strangers and another and I had the impression that, rather than helping Tere, I was annoying her. I talked to her and we agreed that it would be best if I left and she stayed with the family. That night I called her, I suggested we have dinner just the two of us. She said she couldn’t, that she was still with people, that she’d be finished late and that I should call her the next day. I called her the next morning, very early; she had her mobile disconnected and, although I tried again and again, it was futile. When I finally managed to get through to her it was almost one. She seemed nervous, she told me she’d argued with someone, maybe with Zarco’s mother, she told me about preparations for the funeral; I asked her where she was, but all she answered was that I shouldn’t worry and we’d see each other that afternoon. Then she hung up. I was worried, and a minute later I called her back. I got an engaged signal.
‘The funeral was held in Vilarroja. There, at four in the afternoon, a huge crowd packed the church and its grounds. I had to make my way through those present, escorted by Cortés and Gubau, who had wanted to come with me. After looking around the church for a while I found Tere in the middle of a circle of mourners. I hugged her. We talked. She seemed to have recovered her serenity, but she also seemed tired, perhaps uncomfortable with the role that had fallen to her or been assigned to her, impatient to get all that over with as soon as possible. When the priest appeared in the vestibule, we separated: Tere sat in the front row, beside Zarco’s mother; I stood at the back near the door. The ceremony was brief. While the priest was speaking I looked around the church and saw Jordi, Tere’s former boyfriend, behind me; I also saw Lina on the end of an aisle, holding onto a wheelchair where, unmistakable, very pale and crying, Tío sprawled, fatter than thirty years earlier but with the same vaguely childlike air he had back then. Once the ceremony was over, the crowd didn’t want to disperse and accompanied the family and the hearse to the cemetery, a few kilometres from the church. It was the most motley funeral cortège: there were mink coats beside rags, bicycles beside Mercedes, elderly people and children, relatives mixed in with journalists, criminals mixed in with cops, Gypsies mixed in with non-Gypsies, people from the neighbourhood, people from the city, people from other cities. I was with my two partners and with Jordi – who was walking his bike and told me he hadn’t been able to say hello to Tere – all of us quite distant from the hearse, back where the cortège was starting to thin out; a cortège that, as people had joined along the way, soon filled the cemetery, which made Cortés, Gubau, Jordi and I decide not to go in but stay by the gate, waiting. That was why we didn’t manage to witness either the burial or an incident that some newspapers picked up the next day and has to do with María Vela, who it seems had attended the burial (although I didn’t see her at the funeral or at the cemetery). Various versions of the incident circulated. The most often repeated claims that, after the ceremony, María had approached Tere, who had returned her greeting; everything would have ended there and there wouldn’t have been any incident had not a photographer caught the scene and had Tere not seen him do so; but the fact is she saw him and asked for the memory card from the camera and, when the photographer refused, she grabbed the camera and smashed it on the ground and stamped on it.
‘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.’
Outlaws Page 33