Javier Cercas - Outlaws

‘I was gobsmacked: Tere had never asked me to dance, and I’d never even considered the possibility that I might dance with her, in part (I think I already told you) out of embarrassment, and in part because I didn’t know how to dance. But that night I discovered that to dance, or at least to dance to the music they played at the discos, you didn’t have to know how to dance, you just needed to want to move around a bit. It was Tere who revealed this to me. But it was when we finished dancing that what I wanted to tell you about happened. When the music stopped and they turned on the lights in the discotheque, Tere and I realized that our friends had disappeared. We spent a while looking for them, first inside the place and then on the way out, on a patio full of night owls prowling around a closed refreshment stand, not yet ready to consider the night over. We didn’t find any of them, and I told Tere that they’d probably all left and we’d better go too. Tere didn’t answer. We walked to the parking lot, swept at this hour by the lights of departing cars. We didn’t know what car Gordo had nicked in Calella, but our Volkswagen was still parked between two pine trees. At least Zarco hasn’t gone, said Tere when she saw it. How do you know? I replied, thinking she was probably right. He might have stolen another car. I had absolutely no desire to see Zarco, I wanted to go on spending the night alone with Tere, so I concluded: It’s almost five; come on, let’s go. Tere stood still and took a while to answer. What’s your hurry, Gafitas? she finally said. Then she took me by the arm and pulled me around and forced me to walk back to the Marocco as she said, Come on. Let’s see if we can find them.

‘We walked past the patio of the discotheque, almost empty now, towards the darkness and started walking along the beach. In the sky a bright full moon was shining and, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and as we approached the water, it revealed a cove bordered by two hills and strewn with lumps on the sand like shadowy shells. They’re here, on the beach, whispered Tere when we got to the water’s edge, sitting down on the sand; she added: We’ll smoke a reefer. How do you know? I asked. What a question, she said. Because I’m going to roll one. How do you know they’re here? I clarified. Tere licked the paper of a cigarette, peeled it, emptied the tobacco into the rolling paper she had spread out in her hand and answered: Because I do. She finished rolling the joint, lit it, took five or six tokes and passed it to me.

‘I sat down next to her and smoked listening to the sound of the waves breaking against the shore and watching the moonlight bouncing off the surface of the sea and diffusing a silver brilliance over the whole cove. Tere didn’t say anything and neither did I, as if we were both exhausted or lost in thought or hypnotized by the spectacle of the beach at night. After a while Tere stubbed out the joint and buried it in the sand; she stood up and said: I’m going for a swim. Before I could say anything she stripped off and walked into the sea that looked like an enormous and silent black sheet. She swam away from the shore and, at some point, stopped and started calling me with muffled little shouts that echoed around the whole cove. I took off my clothes and ran into the water.

‘It was almost warm. I swam out to sea a bit, away from Tere and, when I stopped, I turned around and realized I was in the middle of an immense darkness and that the few little dots of light on the beach were very far away and Tere had disappeared. I swam back towards shore, with strong strokes, but when I stood up I still couldn’t see Tere. With the water up to my waist I looked for her without finding her, and during a moment of panic I imagined she’d left and taken my clothes with her, but then I saw her silhouette emerging from the water to my left, twenty or thirty metres away. I walked out of the water too, feeling that the swim had dissipated the inebriation of the alcohol and hash and calmed the tachycardia of the uppers, and, when I got to Tere, she had already covered up with her T-shirt and was barefoot and sitting on her jeans. Standing up, I put my underwear and jeans on as fast as I could, and still hadn’t finished buttoning my shirt when Tere asked: Hey, Gafitas, me and you haven’t had a shag yet, have we? I got my buttons all mixed up. No, I managed to say. I don’t think so. Tere stood up, took my hands away from my shirt and started unbuttoning the ones I’d got mixed up; I thought she was unbuttoning them to button them up properly, but while she was still unbuttoning them she kissed me, and while she was kissing me I guessed that she was naked from the waist down. Again she asked: Well it’s about time we did, don’t you think?

‘You can imagine the rest. And, as I told you before, as a result of what happened that night I believed everything was going to change between Tere and me and from then on Tere would stop being an imaginary character in my imaginary harem to become only a real character, or that the real character and the imaginary one would meld together into a single one; and I also thought that, although from then on she might not become my girlfriend, at least we’d sleep together every once in a while. It wasn’t like that. Maybe the fact that this episode happened very close to the time of Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest might have contributed to it not turning out like that, but the truth is it wasn’t like that. And everything got complicated. But that, if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you next time. Now I’m running late: I have to get going.’

‘Of course. But I wouldn’t like to stop without you telling me what happened to your friends that night.’

‘Ah, nothing important. The next day I found out at La Font. Gordo and Lina left the Marocco early, they took Piti back to the hotel in L’Escala and went home. Zarco slept with Elena in some hotel in L’Escala, and in the morning went back to Gerona too, just like Tere and I did. We never heard any more from Piti and Elena.’

‘So it wasn’t true that night that Zarco and Elena were on the beach, as Tere had said.’

‘No.’

‘Do you think Tere knew or suspected and lied to you because she wanted to seduce you?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘I’ll put the question another way: did you never think that Tere had slept with you that night out of spite, to get even with Zarco, because he’d left with Elena?’

‘Yeah. But I didn’t think that then. I thought it later. And only briefly.’

‘And later? I mean: and now?’

‘Now what?’

‘Now what do you think about that?’

‘That it’s not true.’

‘Tell me about Gafitas.’

‘What do you want me to tell you? A policeman’s life is full of strange stories, but the story of Gafitas is among the strangest that’s happened to me since I started this job. At first perhaps you might not think so: after all it’s not that rare to see a case of a middle-class kid or upper middle-class or even an upper-class kid get involved with a gang of quinquis and suchlike. At least it wasn’t so rare back then; in fact, a while later I knew of a similar case, although that was in the tough years when kids were going astray on drugs, while in Gafitas’s day drugs were only just starting to arrive and it’s harder to find an explanation for what happened. I at least don’t have one, and this is something I’ve never talked to Cañas about since; I’ve talked to Cañas about other things, but never this: for us it’s as if it never happened. How do you like that? But anyway, if he’s telling you the story of his relationship with Zarco, I imagine you’ll already have an explanation of why he ended up in his gang.’