Javier Cercas - Outlaws

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’ll know when I finish writing it. At the moment all I know is that the book will be about Zarco, of course, but also about Zarco’s relationship with Ignacio Cañas, or about Zarco’s relationship with Ignacio Cañas and with Tere, or about Ignacio Cañas’ relationship with Tere and with Zarco. Anyhow: as I said I still have to find that out.’

‘I didn’t have anything to do with the girl, but I had more to do with Cañas than with Gamallo.’

‘I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Actually it was Cañas who suggested I should. It seemed like a good idea: after all, apart from Tere and María you’re the only person who was in contact with both of them at that time. Cañas also says that he has the impression that you understood things that no one else understood, not even him.’

‘He says that?’

‘Yes.’

‘It might be true: I’ve had the same impression myself sometimes. You see, it always seemed to me that, deep down, Cañas always thought that Gamallo was a victim. You know: the good thief in his youth, the perpetual rebel, the Billy the Kid or Robin Hood of his day, and then — it turns out to be the same thing except in reverse — the villain who comes to understand the evil he’s done and turns into the repentant delinquent; anyway, that story the journalists invented to sell papers, and then so many people bought it, starting with Gamallo himself. How could he not buy it, pretty as it was and with him coming out of it so well in the articles, in the songs, in the books and films about him? And I’m not saying that the story didn’t have some truth to it, albeit a small part; what I say is that Cañas was a victim of that myth, or that legend, of that great invention. Cañas believed that Gamallo was a victim of society, but Cañas turned out to be the victim himself: a victim of the legend of Zarco. That’s the reality. That he’d known Gamallo when he was young, as we discovered later, mustn’t have helped him at all, but I don’t think it was the main thing either: for me the main thing is that Cañas had grown up with the myth of Zarco, that it was the myth of his generation, and that, like so many people of his generation, he thought he could redeem him. Of course, he also thought that by redeeming him he’d make money and become famous; one thing doesn’t rule out the other: Cañas was no charitable nun. But the truth is at that moment he believed he could help Gamallo, or rather that he could save him and score a bit along the way. And believing that hurt him. And perhaps this is what Cañas has the impression that I and no one else understand, not even him, but actually I think it’s not that he doesn’t understand it but that he doesn’t want to understand.

‘But, well, if I have to tell you the story it would be best to start at the beginning. Cañas and I didn’t meet when Gamallo arrived in Gerona: we knew each other before; not well, but we knew each other. He always had clients in the prison and he visited them regularly, so our paths had crossed in the entrance foyer and we’d chatted for a moment or two. That was the extent of my relationship with him: the normal relationship of the superintendent of a prison and a lawyer with several clients incarcerated there. Anyway, although I barely knew him I didn’t have a very good impression of him; I don’t know why: we’d never had any friction, and everybody knew he was the most competent criminal lawyer in the province; or maybe I do know: because Cañas had the unmistakable vanity of guys who triumph too young; and because hardly a morning would go by without his face appearing in the papers: it was obvious the journalists adored him and he adored the journalists and, as you’ve realized, I distrust people who adore journalists. In spite of that, from the moment Gamallo arrived in my prison and I learned that Cañas was going to defend him, I wanted to talk to him.’

‘What for?’

‘I’ll explain. At the end of 1999, when he arrived in Gerona, Gamallo was no longer the most famous prisoner in Spain, but he was still Zarco, a legend of juvenile delinquency; and although physically he was in bad shape, he still had a lot of fight in him. On the other hand I was sure that Cañas had agreed to defend him to profit from his renown, among other reasons because Zarco was an inmate who couldn’t pay him and who had a tremendous history of conflicts with his lawyers. So I wanted to speak to him before Gamallo started causing the troubles he’d caused in every prison he’d been incarcerated in: I wanted him to convince Gamallo not to cause them, I wanted to arrive at an agreement with him and turn him into my ally and not my rival and enemy and, since I thought this could only benefit both of us (or rather all three of us), I was sure that it would be easy for me to achieve it.

‘I was wrong, and that was the first surprise I had from Cañas.’

‘When I finished my interview with Zarco in the prison I had made two commitments: to be his lawyer in a trial for the incident at the Brians prison and to set up a strategy to get him released. Along with the happiness produced by the reappearance of Tere and Zarco, this event worked like a catalyst on me. Suddenly everything changed. Suddenly I had, in the misunderstanding of the anodyne life I was leading, the flavour of a goal and the passion of a challenge: defending Zarco and getting him out on the street as soon as possible.

‘That’s what I immediately started to do. The morning following the interview with Zarco I handed my two partners two copies of his prison record and the Brians indictment, asked them to study those papers and buried myself back in them. As soon as I did I began to think that Zarco’s predictions about his future were less unrealistic than I’d initially thought; two days later, meeting with Cortés and Gubau again, I realized that they both shared my opinion: none of us were as optimistic as Zarco, but all three thought that, if we took the correct steps, Zarco could be out of prison in three or four years, and that was in spite of having firm sentences adding up to more than twenty. Of course, none of the three of us wondered whether Zarco was prepared to leave prison so soon and, when I left Cortés and Gubau, we still hadn’t decided what the steps were that we had to take to get him out, and how to take them (actually, it wasn’t urgent that we decide: we couldn’t tackle the subject until the Brians trial was over). Be that as it may, over the following days I suspected that, in our case, taking the adequate steps would probably include trying to resuscitate Zarco’s media image, because that was the only way to get political support, through popular support, and prison perks and benefits through political support, until we could get a pardon. The problem, I then said to myself, was how to achieve Zarco’s media resurrection; that is: how to focus the media’s attention on a figure already so overexposed?; how to convince the media that a person from the past could be of some interest in the present?; and most of all, and in light of the more or less serious but failed attempts to rehabilitate him, how to convince the media again and get the media to convince the public that Zarco deserved one final chance, that he’d learned from his past errors, that he no longer had anything to do with the legend or myth of Zarco but only with the reality of Antonio Gamallo, a man approaching his forties with a turbulent past of poverty, prison and violence seeking to construct an honest future for himself in freedom and thereby needing the support of public opinion and the politicians in power?

‘Those were some of the questions I asked myself over the days that followed my re-encounter with Zarco. That week of surprises ended with another surprise. Friday evening, as we often did, Cortés, Gubau and I had a few beers at the Royal, a café in Sant Agustí Plaza. When we left the Royal night had fallen. It was raining. I didn’t have an umbrella with me, but Cortés and Gubau both did, so Gubau lent me his as he and Cortés were both heading towards the newer part of the city. In a Middle Eastern restaurant on Ballesteries Street I stopped to buy a plate of falafels with yogurt sauce and pitta bread and a couple of cans of beer; then I carried on home. The streets of the old quarter were deserted and the paving stones shiny with rain under the streetlights, and as I reached the door to my building I had to do a balancing act: holding the umbrella, my briefcase and my dinner in one hand and trying to open the door with the other. I hadn’t yet managed to get it open when I heard: Fuck, Gafitas, you practically live in La Font. It was Tere. She was a few metres away from me, having just emerged from the doorway across the street, with her hair wet and jacket collar turned up and hands in her pockets; what she said about La Font, by the way, was true: I have a loft in the same block where La Font was thirty years ago. What are you doing here? I asked her. I was waiting for you, she answered. She pointed at my umbrella, briefcase and the bag with my dinner in it and said: Can I lend you a hand? She lent me a hand, I opened the door, she handed me back what I’d given her to hold. Do you want to come up? I asked.