‘And now we are done, right?’
Chapter 9
‘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.