‘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”.
‘This idyll lasted for several months, more or less until the summer. At first I must have had satisfaction written all over my face, because everyone noticed something strange, starting with my daughter, who arrived home the day after Tere’s first visit and spent the weekend joking with lethal marksmanship (I don’t recognize you, Dad, she sprung on me several times, laughing. Anyone would think you got laid this week), and ending with Cortés, Gubau and the rest of the people at my office, who benefited from my good mood though they also suffered from my absenteeism, or my inattention. I mean that I began to deal almost exclusively with Zarco’s case and to delegate the rest of the work to Cortés and Gubau, provoking consternation in the office and complaints from some clients, accustomed to being looked after by the senior partner in the firm. But I was too absorbed by my happiness and paid no attention to the complaints or the disconcertion. That doesn’t mean I didn’t work. I was reading, studying, collecting information, arguing details of Zarco’s case with Cortés, with Gubau, sometimes with other lawyers. I often went to see Zarco. On those visits we mostly talked about judicial and prison matters, about his situation in prison and how to improve it; but neither Zarco nor I evaded talking about the past, not even the summer of ’78, especially if we considered some detail or concrete episode from back then could serve to clarify some detail or concrete episode from his later life, and in this way he was able to give me tools with which to defend him. Anyway, our relationship was strictly professional, or almost. I would say we were weighing each other up. In his case I don’t know what the initial balance was in that weighing up; in mine it was that, in spite of his visible physical deterioration and secret moral vulnerability, Zarco was all there: he thought clearly, his behaviour was reasonable, he had a real desire to get out of prison and begin a different kind of life and he seemed capable of doing it.