Outlaws (26 page)

‘We went up. When we got inside my flat I left my things on the counter and then went to the bathroom to find a clean towel so she could dry off; as I handed her the towel I asked her if she’d had dinner. No, she said. But I’m not hungry. I ignored that. While I made a salad and opened a bottle of wine and she set the table in the dining room, we talked about my place, a loft I’d bought a few years earlier from a Brazilian couple, he an architect and she a film director, or, to be precise, a director of documentaries and things like that. It wasn’t until I’d served her a bit of salad and a couple of falafels that I mentioned to Tere that I’d been to see Zarco. How did he seem to you?, she asked. Fine, I lied. Older and heavier, but fine. He told me he’s fed up with prison. He asked me to get him out of there whatever it takes. Tere smiled. As if it were that easy, right?, she said. He thinks it’s easy, I said, then added: Maybe it’s not so hard. Do you think so?, she asked. I pulled a dubious face and answered: We’ll see.

‘Tere didn’t go on about the matter, and I thought it was premature to discuss my impressions and conjectures with her. While we were eating, Tere asked me about my life; I told her vaguely about my daughter, my ex-wife, my partners, my firm. Then I asked her; to my surprise, Tere replied with such an ordered account of events that it almost seemed prepared in advance. I learned that she’d lived in Gerona until she was seventeen, when the police arrested her after she participated in a bank robbery in Blanes, the summer after we met. That after her arrest she was tried and sentenced to five years in prison, of which she served two, at the Wad-Ras women’s prison. That in prison she got hooked on heroin and when she got out she stayed in Barcelona for almost a decade, living most of the time in La Verneda, earning a living with occasional jobs and occasional robberies that occasionally sent her back to prison. That in the second half of the nineties she spent several days in the Vall d’Hebron hospital on the brink of death due to a heroin overdose, and when she was discharged from hospital she agreed to be admitted to the Proyecto Hombre detox and rehabilitation centre. That she spent a good long while there. That she came out clean. That when she came out she tried to start a new life or what tends to be called a new life, and to do so she left Barcelona and returned to Gerona. That since then she had not had a drop or a speck of heroin or cocaine or any pills (except in the odd relapse). That she’d had lots of jobs and lots of men but no children. That she’d been working at the factory in Cassà for two years. That she’d started to study nursing that very year. That she didn’t like her job but she did like her course. That she was happy with the life she was leading.’

‘Didn’t you ask about Zarco?’

‘As soon as she stopped talking about herself. At first she seemed disinclined to answer, but I got out a second bottle of wine and she was soon talking about the relationship she’d had with him over those past twenty years.’

‘Had she gone on seeing him?’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s odd. As far as I recall, Zarco doesn’t even mention her in his memoirs.’

‘Your recollection is right, but his not mentioning her is more revealing than if he had mentioned her, because it means he took her for granted. Of course that’s what I say now, because now I know things I didn’t know then . . . In any case, yes: although sometimes sporadically, they had gone on seeing each other. What Tere told me that night was that, during Zarco’s first years in prison, she visited him every once in a while and he turned to her when he was out on parole, when he escaped or when he had no one else to turn to. Later, for a long spell, the two of them stopped seeing each other. The reason is that in the middle of 1987, after Zarco escaped from the Ocaña penitentiary by taking advantage of the cocktail party after the press screening of
The Real Life of Zarco
, Bermúdez’s final film based on his life, Tere got mad at him and, although in the end she was the one who found him refuge in a friend’s house during his days on the run, she refused to visit him after he’d been recaptured. But what separated them completely, still according to Tere’s version, was that, once he was back in prison, Zarco began his great change: he went on being a famous delinquent but he tried to no longer be the implacable juvenile delinquent to become the mature repentant delinquent, a change in which he had no need of Tere or in which Tere was simply superfluous, because she was a hindrance from the past that he wanted to overcome. Still, years later Zarco called her again. It was after holding up a Barcelona jewellery store in the city centre and thus violating his third-stage release, one level before getting out on probation that he’d been granted for the first time in his life and which allowed him to spend the days outside and return to the prison to sleep; the absurd stupidity of the robbery meant this privilege was revoked and Zarco was put back on trial again and had many years added to his sentence of many already accumulated years, not to mention the disappointment it provoked in public opinion in general, which had believed in his rehabilitation, and among the politicians, journalists, writers, film-makers, singers, athletes and the rest of the people who’d supported the cause of his release: they all wrote him off as an incorrigible
quinqui
, as a persona with no future from the blackest days of Spain. Again he was defeated and dismissed and with no support from anybody, and again he turned to Tere, who at first told him to go to hell and finally ended up giving in, agreeing to see him and help him and help María to help him, who by then had appeared on the scene. She’d been working with her on Zarco’s behalf lately, until they came to see me.

‘That’s more or less what Tere told me that night, while we had dinner, or perhaps what she told me that night added to what she told me on other nights. Whatever the case, when we finished dinner and Tere finished telling me about Zarco, or she tired of doing so, we were a bit drunk. At that moment there was a rather long silence, which I was about to fill in by praising Tere’s loyalty and patience with Zarco or asking after Lina – who Zarco had told me Tere saw once in a while – but, before I could do so, she stood up from the table, went over to the stereo, crouched down and started looking through my few CDs. You still don’t like music, Gafitas, she said then. My daughter says something similar, I answered. But it’s not true. It’s just that I don’t listen to it much. Why’s that?, asked Tere. I was going to say I didn’t have time to listen to it but kept quiet. Looking at the CD covers, Tere added, half-amused half-disappointed: And I don’t even know any of them. I got up from the table, crouched down beside Tere, pulled out a Chet Baker CD and put on a song called “I Fall in Love Too Easily”. When the music started to play, Tere stood up and said: Sounds old, but nice. Then she started to dance on her own, with the wine glass in her hand and eyes closed, as if searching for the hidden rhythm of the song; when she seemed to have found it she set her glass down on top of the stereo, came over to me, put her arms around my neck and said: You can’t live without music, Gafitas. I put my arms around her waist and tried to follow her. I felt her thighs against my thighs, her chest on my chest and her eyes on my eyes. I’ve missed you, Gafitas, whispered Tere. Thinking it was incredible that I hadn’t missed her, I said: Bullshit! Tere laughed. We kept dancing in silence, looking in each other’s eyes, concentrating on Chet Baker’s trumpet. Seconds or minutes later she asked: Do you fancy a shag? I took a moment to answer. Do you?, I asked. Tere’s first reply was to kiss me; the second seemed redundant – I do, yeah, she said – although she immediately added: But on one condition. What condition?, I asked. Tere also took a moment to reply. No ties, she finally said. She soon noticed that I hadn’t entirely understood. No ties, she repeated. No mess. No commitments. No demands. Each to his own. I would have liked to ask Tere why she said that, but it seemed like a way of looking for useless complications and a distraction from the essential, so I didn’t. It was Tere who asked: Yes or no, Gafitas?

‘Those are the last words I remember from that night, the second in my life that I slept with Tere. The following months were unforgettable. Tere and I started to see each other at least once a week. We saw each other in the evening or at night, at my place. There were no fixed days for these encounters. Tere called me in the morning at my office, we arranged to see each other later, at seven or seven-thirty or eight, that day I’d finish work earlier than usual, buy something for dinner in some shop in the old quarter or in Santa Clara or Mercadal and wait for her at home until she arrived, which I never knew when might happen – she was often late and more than once took two or three hours to get there, and more than once I thought she wasn’t coming – although she always did eventually arrive. She’d arrive and, especially the first times, as soon as she was through the door we’d be screwing, sometimes right in the front hallway with most of our clothes still on, with the fury of people not making love but war. Later, once we calmed down, we’d have a glass of wine, listen to music, dance, have something to eat and then drink some more and listen to music and dance until we’d go to bed and have sex until late.

‘They were clandestine dates. At first I understood this confidentiality as part of the conditions Tere had imposed – part of the no ties and no commitments or demands and each to our own of the first night – so I accepted it without protest, although I sometimes wondered who might be bothered about she and I going out together. Me, answered Tere, when I finally asked her. And you’d be bothered too. It was a categorical reply, that did not allow a rejoinder, and I didn’t have one. Otherwise, as far as I recall that was one of the few times, in those early days, that Tere and I talked about our relationship; we never did, as if we both felt that happiness is for living, not for talking about, or that mentioning it might be enough to make it disappear. This is odd, when you think about it: after all there is no subject of greater interest to new lovers than their own love.

‘What did Tere and I talk about then? Once in a while we talked about Zarco, about Zarco’s situation in prison and about what I was doing to get him out of there, although after a certain point we only talked about that in the presence of María, who in theory was the main interested party. Sometimes we talked about María, about her relationship with Zarco, about how she’d come to be Zarco’s girlfriend. Tere liked to talk about her studies and ask me about things at my office, my partners, my sister – who I didn’t see more than once or twice a year, because she’d been working in Madrid for many years where she was married and had kids – about my ex-wife and most of all about my daughter, although, as soon as I suggested to Tere the idea of meeting her, she refused without a second thought. Are you crazy?, she asked. What’s she going to think of her father hooked up with a
quinqui? Quinqui
, what
quinqui
?, I answered. There are no
quinquis
left any more! Zarco’s the last one, and I’m about to turn him into a normal person. Tere laughed. Getting him out of jail would be enough!, she said.

‘We often talked about the summer of ’78. I remembered pretty well what had happened back then, but on a few points Tere’s memory was more precise than mine. She, for example, remembered better than I the two times I’d stood her up after our last two encounters: the first, when I didn’t show up at La Font, and the second three months later, when I didn’t show up at Rufus. Tere mentioned those episodes without resentment, making fun of herself and the scant attention I seemed to have paid her twenty years earlier; and when I tried to deny it with the evidence that in reality it was her who paid no attention to me, or who’d paid me intermittent and very partial attention, she asked: Oh yeah? Then why did you stand me up? I couldn’t tell her the truth, so I laughed and didn’t answer; but, at least on this point, my memory of that summer was crystal clear: I had joined Zarco’s gang mainly for Tere and my impression was that, leaving aside the incidents in the washrooms of the Vilaró arcade and on Montgó beach, during those three months Tere had done nothing but avoid me and sleep with Zarco and others. All this shows, now that I think of it, that it’s not true that Tere and I didn’t talk about our love – at least we talked about our frustrated love from two decades before – but I was telling you for another reason and it’s that, after Tere brought up those two episodes a couple of times, more than once I wondered if her insistence was due to some hidden reason, if she wouldn’t be provoking me to catch me in a lie, if at some moment the repeated slight of standing her up twice hadn’t put her on a wrong track and hadn’t led her to the mistaken conclusion that, after the failure of the robbery of the Bordils branch of the Banco Popular, I had disappeared and hadn’t returned to the district not because I didn’t like her any more or because I didn’t want to be with her and considered her just a fleeting summer fling, but because I was the snitch who’d tipped off the police. And I wondered whether Zarco had arrived at the same conclusion on his own or if Tere had told him and convinced him it was true and that explained in part the role of traitor that Gafitas played in
Wild Boys
, or at least why he was portrayed as untrustworthy or possibly untrustworthy in
The Music of Freedom
, the second volume of Zarco’s memoirs. And, if the reply to this wondering was affirmative, perhaps there was another reason why Zarco wanted me to be his lawyer: not just because he knew me and because I lived in Gerona and was known to be a competent lawyer nor only because our former friendship might make me more manageable and more tolerant with him and might save him fights like the ones he’d faced with his previous lawyers; but also so I could pay for my betrayal or snitching or untrustworthiness, so that it would be me, who twenty years earlier had put him behind bars, who would now get him out.