‘I was wrong, and that was the first surprise I had from Cañas.’
Chapter 3
‘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.
‘We went up. When we got inside my flat I left my things on the counter and then went to the bathroom to find a clean towel so she could dry off; as I handed her the towel I asked her if she’d had dinner. No, she said. But I’m not hungry. I ignored that. While I made a salad and opened a bottle of wine and she set the table in the dining room, we talked about my place, a loft I’d bought a few years earlier from a Brazilian couple, he an architect and she a film director, or, to be precise, a director of documentaries and things like that. It wasn’t until I’d served her a bit of salad and a couple of falafels that I mentioned to Tere that I’d been to see Zarco. How did he seem to you? she asked. Fine, I lied. Older and heavier, but fine. He told me he’s fed up with prison. He asked me to get him out of there whatever it takes. Tere smiled. As if it were that easy, right? she said. He thinks it’s easy, I said, then added: Maybe it’s not so hard. Do you think so? she asked. I pulled a dubious face and answered: We’ll see.
‘Tere didn’t go on about the matter, and I thought it was premature to discuss my impressions and conjectures with her. While we were eating, Tere asked me about my life; I told her vaguely about my daughter, my ex-wife, my partners, my firm. Then I asked her; to my surprise, Tere replied with such an ordered account of events that it almost seemed prepared in advance. I learned that she’d lived in Gerona until she was seventeen, when the police arrested her after she participated in a bank robbery in Blanes, the summer after we met. That after her arrest she was tried and sentenced to five years in prison, of which she served two, at the Wad-Ras women’s prison. That in prison she got hooked on heroin and when she got out she stayed in Barcelona for almost a decade, living most of the time in La Verneda, earning a living with occasional jobs and occasional robberies that occasionally sent her back to prison. That in the second half of the nineties she spent several days in the Vall d’Hebron hospital on the brink of death due to a heroin overdose, and when she was discharged from hospital she agreed to be admitted to the Proyecto Hombre detox and rehabilitation centre. That she spent a good long while there. That she came out clean. That when she came out she tried to start a new life or what tends to be called a new life, and to do so she left Barcelona and returned to Gerona. That since then she had not had a drop or a speck of heroin or cocaine or any pills (except in the odd relapse). That she’d had lots of jobs and lots of men but no children. That she’d been working at the factory in Cassà for two years. That she’d started to study nursing that very year. That she didn’t like her job but she did like her course. That she was happy with the life she was leading.’
‘Didn’t you ask about Zarco?’
‘As soon as she stopped talking about herself. At first she seemed disinclined to answer, but I got out a second bottle of wine and she was soon talking about the relationship she’d had with him over those past twenty years.’