Javier Cercas - Outlaws

‘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.

‘But I don’t want to give you a mistaken impression: the truth is that I was not very worried about that old story; and it’s also true that what Tere and I talked about at my place was far and away not the most important thing that happened on those nights of surreptitious love. The most important is that, as I said, they were happy nights, although of a strange and fragile happiness, as if separate from real life, as if every time Tere and I got together at my place we segregated ourselves inside a hermetic bubble that isolated us from the outside world. The secret nature of our dates and the fact that at first Tere and I only ever saw each other within the perpetual penumbra and four walls of my home contributed to this sensation. Music also played a part.’

‘Music?’

‘You can’t live without music, Tere had said to me the first time she came up to my place. Remember? Well, I decided that Tere was right and that up till then I’d lived without music or almost without music and now I was going to correct that mistake. And the first thing that occurred to me was to get hold of the music that used to play at Rufus when Tere and I used to go there and she would spend the nights on the dance floor and I would spend them propping up the bar watching her dance.

‘The day after Tere’s first visit to my place was a Saturday, and that afternoon I went to a record shop on the Plaça del Vi, called Moby Disc, and bought five CDs of late-seventies artists with songs I remembered hearing at Rufus or that I associated with the time we used to go to Rufus — one CD by Peret, one by the Police, one by Bob Marley, one by the Bee Gees, one by Boney M. — and that Tuesday night, when Tere came back to my place, I had “Roxanne” playing at full volume as she arrived. Fuck, Gafitas! said Tere as she walked into the dining room, starting to dance as she pulled her handbag strap over her shoulder. This one’s old too, but it’s something else! From then on I devoted many hours of my weekends to looking for records from the second half of the seventies and first half of the eighties. At first I always bought them at Moby Disc, until an acquaintance recommended two shops in Barcelona — Revólver and Discos Castelló, both on Tallers Street — and I started going to them almost every Saturday. I took great pains over what music to play for my midweek encounters with Tere and tried to follow her taste, although the truth is she liked everything or almost everything: rock and roll as much as disco or rumba, Rod Stewart or Dire Straits or Status Quo as much as Tom Jones or Cliff Richard or Donna Summer, as much as Los Chichos or Las Grecas or Los Amaya. We both loved to listen to the corny Italian and Spanish hits from back in the day every once in a while, the songs of Franco Battiato and Gianni Bella and José Luis Perales and Pablo Abraira we had heard for the first time in Rufus. I’ll never forget the night we screwed up against the dining-room table, listening to Umberto Tozzi singing “Te amo”.