Authors: Javier Cercas
‘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 according 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 single 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.
‘In the days that followed the gossip magazines and radio and television chat shows repeated María’s accusations, and that Monday morning I read in everybody’s eyes, in the office and at court, that yes, that was just the beginning. That afternoon my secretary put through an unexpected call. It was the producer of the programme María had appeared on two days before. He introduced himself, said his name – López de Sol, I remember he was called – and, without any further explanation, he offered me the possibility of defending myself the following Saturday against María’s accusations: it would simply entail allowing myself to be interviewed at the same time and on the same set by the same group of journalists that had interviewed her. I thanked him for the offer and turned it down. The producer told me not to be hasty, to think it over, that he’d phone back that evening. I answered that I’d already thought about it and he could save himself the trouble of calling back. Here the producer changed his tone, with an inflection at once friendly and paternalistic he mentioned a sum of money, not particularly high, and then explained María’s appearance on his programme the previous Saturday had been a hit, that they planned to continue with the story next Saturday and that, if I didn’t agree to be interviewed, they would most likely interview María again. Then I flew off the handle: shouting, furious, I told him he should do what he thought best, but that, if María continued talking about me on television the way she had the time before, I’d be bringing two lawsuits to court, one for slander and another for defamation of character, one against María and the other against the programme. My threat did not upset the producer; I heard him click his tongue, heard him sigh; before hanging up on him I heard him say: You haven’t understood anything, Counsellor.
‘That Saturday night María was on the show again. I decided not to watch it, and I didn’t see it, but on Sunday I learned that her second appearance had been even more brutal than the first, so for several days I considered the possibility of carrying out the threat I’d made over the phone and filing suits against María and the programme. Cortés and Gubau talked me out of it; their arguments were irrefutable: I knew it wasn’t easy to win such a lawsuit, but my partners made me see that, even supposing we did win and María was sentenced to withdrawing her insults and accusations and the programme obliged to broadcast a retraction, the person most harmed would still be me, because the trial would destroy my reputation, and the main beneficiaries would be them, because the trial would only increase María’s fame and the programme’s audience. So I chose to keep quiet, to try to stay out of it, to go on as if nothing were going on. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe I should have filed a suit. Who knows. The thing is that over the following weeks the sensation of failure and shame multiplied and began to devour me like a cancer.’
‘Didn’t you try to talk to Tere? Didn’t you try to get in contact with her?’
‘I tried, but I couldn’t. I phoned her, but she didn’t answer. I went to her house, but she wasn’t in. Someone told me she wasn’t living in Vilarroja any more. I don’t think finding her would have done any good, anyway. Of course, it didn’t even occur to me to try to find out which prison Zarco had been sent to, although I thought of him far too often. And do you know what I remembered most of all? The night in La Creueta, of the binge he went on of telling me I was making a fool of myself and calling me dickhead and wanker. Because that was the honest truth, that’s how I felt then: like a dickhead and a wanker who’d made the most ridiculous fool of himself.