Authors: Javier Cercas
‘Gafitas’ father stopped talking. During the silence that followed, as I held his gaze, I thought of my father, an old Civil Guard about to retire back in Cáceres, and said to myself that he would have done the same thing for me that Gafitas’ father was doing for his son, and that he might be right. You might be right, I said. But I can’t do what you’re asking of me. Your son has made a mistake, and he has to pay for it. The law is the same for everyone; if it weren’t, we’d be living in the jungle. You understand, right? There was a silence and then I went on: For my part I understand, and I’ll do what I can to soften the affidavit; with a bit of luck and a good lawyer he won’t spend more than a year or a year and a half in prison. I’m sorry. That’s all I can do. I expected Gafitas’ father would answer, maybe had the silly expectation that he’d admit I was right, or partially right; he didn’t, of course, but he nodded his head slightly as if he did, took a deep breath and, without a word, turned back to the fireplace and slumped back down in the rocking chair.
‘I waited for Gafitas, but, since he didn’t come out, without saying anything to his father I went to get him. When I opened the door to his room I found him exactly as I’d left him: sitting on the bed and leaning against the wall, his bare legs sticking out of a tangle of sweaty sheets; exactly as I’d left him or almost: the difference was that there was no longer any trace of the faked composure and his eyes weren’t the bewildered and startled eyes of Gafitas, but those of a little boy or those of a rabbit dazzled by the headlights of the car about to run over him. And then, instead of demanding he get dressed and come with me, I stood there in the doorway, quietly staring at him, without thinking anything, without saying anything. I don’t know how long I was there; all I know is that, when the time passed, I turned around and left. How do you like that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Is that the end of the story?’
‘Almost. The rest isn’t of much interest any more. Although this is a small city and everybody knows each other here and everybody’s paths cross, I didn’t see Gafitas again for a long time. I did see his father a couple of times, in the street, and both times he recognized me, looked at me and greeted me with an almost invisible nod, without approaching or saying anything to me. Gafitas reappeared many years later, ten or twelve at least, but by then he was no longer Gafitas but Ignacio Cañas, recently graduated from Barcelona and starting to make a professional name for himself in the city. The first few times we met in that period we pretended not to know each other, didn’t even say hello, but at the beginning of the nineties I was named the civil governor’s security advisor and, since the civil government building is almost right across the street from Cañas’ office, we began to see each other with some frequency and more than once we had to talk about work-related things. That was when our interaction changed; I won’t say we became friends, but we did maintain a cordial relationship. Needless to say we never talked about the past, about when we’d met and how we’d met and such. In fact, I think a moment arrived when I almost forgot that Ignacio Cañas had been Gafitas, just as he must have forgotten that I’d been the same cop that had pursued them, him and Zarco’s gang, through the dives of the district. Later I left my job at the civil government and Cañas and I practically stopped seeing each other. And that is the end of the story.
‘And now we are done, right?’
‘After the robbery of the Bordils branch of the Banco Popular and Inspector Cuenca’s visit to Colera, my father and I stayed in the village for several more days. I don’t know why, though I imagine that the fact that the morning after our arrival I woke up with a fever must have had something to do with it. It was a Thursday, and for forty-eight hours my temperature remained high and I didn’t get out of bed, sweaty and tortured by nightmares of persecution and prison, victim of a simple summer cold according to the doctor who came to see me, victim of a panic attack as I now believe. My father didn’t leave my side. He brought me fruit, water and instant soup and spent hours sitting by my bed, reading newspapers and cheap novels that he bought at the kiosk in the plaza, barely speaking or asking any questions, whispering into the phone in the dining room every once in a while to my mother, who he convinced to stay home.
‘On the Saturday I felt better and I got up, but I didn’t go outside. That was when my father’s questions started coming. There were so many, or I had so much to tell him, that we spent the whole morning talking. Right after the bank robbery in Bordils, in the bathroom at home and during the trip to Colera, I had told my father the basics; now I told him everything, point by point: from the day Batista moved to our school to the day of the bank robbery in Bordils. My father listened to me without interrupting, and when I finished made me promise not to set foot in the red-light district again and to go back to school as soon as classes began; he in turn promised that Batista would not bother me again. I asked him how he was going to manage that; he answered that when he got back to work he’d talk to his father, and asked me to forget about the matter.
‘For lunch we ate a roast chicken with potatoes that my father bought in the village restaurant and in the afternoon we watched a movie on TV. When it ended, my father went to turn it off, but just at that moment I noticed that an episode of
The Water Margin
was starting and I asked him to leave it on. It wasn’t just any episode: it was the final one. I had almost stopped following the series when I’d joined Zarco’s gang and, as soon as the episode began, it struck me that it seemed to belong to the same series and at the same time to a different series. The opening, for example. It was the same as ever, but changed at the same time, because the images, which were the same as ever, now meant other things: now the ragtag army of men on foot and horseback carrying weapons and standards was a known army, an army formed by honourable men who in the previous episodes had been cast out beyond the confines of the law by the evil Kao Chiu and who, episode by episode, had been joining up with Lin Chung and the rest of the honourable outlaws of Liang Shan Po. The phrase recited in a voice-over at the beginning of each instalment (“The ancient sages said: Do not despise the snake for having no horns, for who is to say it will not become a dragon. So may one just man become an army”) now also had another meaning: it was no longer conjecture but fact, because Lin Chung had now become an army and the snake without horns had become a dragon. At least that’s how I have always remembered the opening of the episode and the whole episode: the same and different. And a couple of nights ago, knowing I was going to talk to you about the days in Colera, my curiosity was piqued and I downloaded the episode and confirmed that it was just as I remembered it. Shall I tell you?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘As the episode begins, Lin Chung and the outlaws of Liang Shan Po are threatening the capital city of China, where Kao Chiu, the emperor’s favourite, has his lord practically sequestered and the population subjugated by martial law, misery and fear. Kao Chiu has devised a plan to take power: he means to take advantage of the fear of war provoked by the arrival at the gates of the capital of the army from Liang Shan Po with the aim of accusing the emperor of weakness, assassinating him and founding a dynasty of his own. To thwart this strategy, Lin Chung opts to strike with a
coup de main
; he and his deputies will infiltrate the city, get to the emperor, reveal Kao Chiu’s deceit and then do away with him. The
coup de main
is successful and, thanks to Lin Chung’s courage and cleverness and that of his deputies, the capital rises up against the tyranny and Kao Chiu is left with no choice but to flee the city in defeat.
‘Here begins a sort of epilogue that abandons the realism of the series to delve into a hallucination. Kao Chiu flees across a desert of black sand in the company of several soldiers who collapse one by one, weakened by hunger and thirst, until the emperor’s former favourite is left alone and, as he falls from his horse, which runs off, and drags himself pitifully across the sand, reality dissolves around him in a delirium inhabited by his victims from times gone by, with threatening expressions on their faces, with illusory lances, horses, riders, standards and fires that drive him mad and threaten to devour him, until the Liang Shan Po men finally find him and Lin Chung kills him in single combat. This is the finale of the adventure, but not of the episode or the series, which ends with two didactic speeches: the first is delivered by Lin Chung and it is a speech to his deputies in which he announces that, although they have now defeated evil in the form of Kao Chiu, evil can return in other forms and they must remain ever vigilant, ready to fight and defeat it, because Liang Shan Po is not really just the name of a river but rather an eternal symbol, the symbol of the struggle against injustice; the second speech is delivered by an off-camera voice and it is a prophesy: while Lin Chung and his deputies ride off into the sunset, the voice-over announces that the heroes of Liang Shan Po will reappear whenever necessary to prevent the triumph of injustice on earth.
‘That last image is no more than flatulent cliché, a postcard sweetened by epic sentimentalism, but when I saw it that afternoon, in Higinio Redondo’s summer home, I burst into tears; I’m lying: actually I’d already been crying for a long time. I cried for a long time there, in silence, sitting almost in the dark beside my father in that half-empty dining room of some house in a village in the back of beyond, with a despair I neither recognized nor recalled, with the feeling of having suddenly puzzled out the complete meaning of the word failure and having discovered an unknown flavour, which was the taste of adult life.
‘That happened on a Saturday. Sunday morning we drove back to Gerona, and that day and the following ones I was anxious. Classes were just about to start again and, as I told you, I’d promised my father that I would go back to school and not go back to the red-light district. I kept my word, at least as far as the district was concerned (and intended to keep it about school as soon as I could). No, the anxiety didn’t come from that side; it didn’t come from my family either: suddenly, in just a few days, my relationship with them went from being very bad to being very good and, as if we’d all decided to respect a code of silence, nobody at home mentioned the escape to Colera or the circumstances surrounding it again. I insist: the anxiety was not from there; it came from the uncertainty. I didn’t understand why Inspector Cuenca hadn’t arrested me in Colera, and feared that at any moment he might come back to my house and arrest me. Also, during the feverish days in Colera I’d begun to nurture the suspicion that it could have been me whose tongue had slipped before the bank robbery in Bordils, unintentionally provoking the police ambush, and I was scared that Zarco, Gordo and Jou would have arrived at the conclusion that I had provoked it intentionally and had decided to inform on me in revenge. So I was plagued by a dilemma during those days. I didn’t want to break the promise I’d made to my father not to go to the district and I didn’t want to run the risk entailed in going to the district (especially the risk of bumping into Inspector Cuenca), but at the same time I wished I could go there. I wanted to know if Zarco, Gordo and Jou were going to give me up or had already given me up and if any of the others had been arrested and were thinking of giving me up, but most of all I wanted to see Tere: I wanted to make clear to her that I hadn’t given anybody up or caused the police ambush outside the bank in Bordils, at least not on purpose; I also wanted to make myself clear about her, because, although part of me was starting to feel that she’d been left behind and had just been a strange and fleeting summer fling, another part was feeling that I was still in love with Tere and I wanted to tell her that, now that Zarco was off the scene, nothing was standing in our way.
‘On the Tuesday at midday I resolved my dilemma: I went to the district without going to the district; in other words: I went to the prefabs to look for Tere. I told you some days ago that I’d never been there and didn’t know exactly where they were; the only thing I’d known since I was little was that they were just across from La Devesa on the other side of the Ter. So I walked from one side of La Devesa to the other (retracing in reverse the route I’d taken the previous week, as I escaped from the police after the bank robbery in Bordils), left the park and crossed La Barca Bridge. On the other side I turned left, went down some steps that led to the river bank, went back up and, walking along a dirt track, passed by a wheat field, a farmhouse with three palm trees by the door and a ravine where reeds, poplars, willows, ash and plane trees all grew together. The prefabs stood at the end of the track. As I also told you some days ago, I had always had a vague and legendary idea about the prefabs, adorned by romantic suggestions from adventure novels, and somehow none of the anecdotes and comments about them I’d heard that summer in Zarco’s gang had done anything to contradict it; on the contrary: those stories had been the perfect fuel for my imagination to add to the prefabs epic tinges of honourable outlaws from a Japanese television series.
‘That’s as far as my fantasies went: as I got closer to the prefabs I began to understand that the reality had nothing to do with them.
‘At first sight the prefabs struck me as a sort of workers’ housing colony composed of six rows of semi-detached barrack huts, with concrete walls, corrugated roofs and floors raised a few centimetres above the ground, but as I walked along one of the streets that separated the barracks – a street that was not a street but a mire that stank of sewage where swarms of flies hovered above naked babies, domestic animals and heaps of junk, from empty rabbit cages to broken bedsprings and old or useless cars – I began to feel that, rather than workers’ housing, that garbage dump was the apotheosis of misery. Fascinated and disgusted at once, I kept going, jumping over streams of foul water, leaving behind the barracks whose walls had once been white, bonfires in broad daylight, children with dirty faces and children on bicycles who stared at me with indifference and mistrust. I went on sleepwalking, my courage shrinking by the second, and when I reached the end of a street I snapped out of it and was about to turn around and flee, but at that moment I noticed a woman watching me from the door of the last barrack hut, just a few steps away from me. She was an obese woman, with extremely white flesh, sitting in an office chair; she had a baby in her arms, her hair wrapped in a dark scarf, her big eyes fixed on me. The woman asked me what I was looking for and I asked after Tere. Since I didn’t know her surname, I started to describe her, but, before I could finish, the woman told me where she lived: In the third hut on the last street, she said. And she added: The one closest to the river.