‘It took still more effort, but finally, with Tere’s help, María ended up saying yes, and that very Saturday I got down to work. I had lunch with my daughter, who for weeks hadn’t stopped asking me about my new squeeze (which is what she called Tere, not knowing her name), reproaching me for not introducing her and making fun of the traces of her having been in our house (I’m not surprised you don’t want to introduce her to me, she said when she noticed the shelves in the dining room were starting to fill up with CDs of seventies and eighties music. What an old square she must be), and in the afternoon went into the office to draft a request for a cumulation of sentences and prepare a sketch of a script to discuss with Zarco and then present to María. On the Monday I asked Cortés and Gubau to read the request for the sentences to be served concurrently, finished polishing it up and had it sent to the court in Barcelona, and at about four, with my sketched-out script in hand, I went to visit Zarco. I spent almost the whole afternoon with him. I told him that María and Tere had agreed to my plan and he said he knew that already: María had told him that weekend. I explained that as I envisioned it, the campaign for his freedom would be like a piece of theatre in which María would play the starring role on the stage and we would be the directors in the wings. And Tere? asked Zarco. Tere would be the assistant director, I answered. I don’t know if Zarco knew what an assistant director did, but he seemed satisfied with my reply. Then he took a couple of folded pieces of paper out of his back pocket and told me to call the duty guard so he could give them to me. The guard appeared immediately, unlocked the little paper-passing drawer and I took the pages and had a look at them: it was a long list of names and phone numbers of journalists and personalities who’d had something to do with Zarco at some point or had been interested in his case and who, according to him, I could ask for help. Thanks, I said, putting the pages away. These are going to be very useful; but not yet. Zarco’s brow crinkled. This time things have to be done differently, I explained. We won’t start at the top but from the bottom. I reasoned that, for the national media, he practically didn’t exist; for the local media, however (as we’d seen from the hearing for the last trial), he was still someone, so first we’d have to fully reactivate his figure in the local media and turn him back into a cause, in order to later be able to claim the attention of the national media.
‘Zarco watched me curiously, a little surprised, but he didn’t protest, so I deduced that the surprise was a welcome one and that he approved my strategy, and we devoted the rest of my visit to discussing the script that should guide María’s public remarks. In the end, what we prepared was more of a sales pitch than a script, an arsenal of laments, good intentions and reasoning saturated with philanthropic and sentimental clichés, accompanied by something like an instruction manual. According to the pitch, Zarco was a generous and noble person, condemned by the chance circumstances of his birth to a life of criminality, who had spent half his life behind bars without ever having spilled any blood and who had more than paid for his missteps, had matured and learned from his mistakes; in short, Zarco was no longer Zarco but Antonio Gamallo, a man with whom María, a good, simple, unlucky woman, had fallen in love, and it was a love that had overcome all obstacles and would give her and her daughter the husband and father they deserved, and Zarco the family he’d never had and a free and decent future. That was the sales pitch; the instructions that went with it said more or less the following: so that María and Zarco could be married as soon as the prison authorities granted him leave, María should request a partial pardon from the government and, in order to achieve that, she needed to gather the maximum number of signatures in support of her request; for that reason, in all her public appearances María would request support for her cause from readers, listeners or spectators, who should send their signatures to the address that María herself would give them during the interview, an address that would be that of my office, thus converted into a sort of general headquarters of the campaign for Zarco’s freedom.
‘That was in short what Zarco and I agreed that afternoon at the prison. The next day I summoned María to my office, explained it to her and gave her some notes and an outline. I like it, she said, once she’d heard me out and had read the notes and outline. It’s the absolute truth. I’m glad, I said, knowing that at least fifty per cent was absolute lies. But what matters is not that it’s true, but that it’s convincing. And that’s where you come in. I’m going to get you a couple of interviews this week. Do you want us to rehearse what you’re going to say? No need, said María, brandishing the papers I’d just given her. If you and Tere come with me, I have enough with what it says here. Are you sure? I asked, surprised by her new self-assurance. I think so, she answered.
‘She wasn’t short of reasons to be. During that week I met separately with two journalists from two local papers: El Punt and Diari de Girona. Both owed me favours, I explained to both of them that I’d taken on Zarco’s defence and asked them to interview María who would describe Zarco’s current situation and give them a new point of view on his character; both their reactions were predictable, identicaclass="underline" a mixture of scepticism, pity and irritation, as if I were trying to sell them some fourth-hand merchandise. I had to do my utmost. I reminded them of the favours they owed me, promised to make it up to them, appealed to the human dimension of the matter, praising María and her efforts to get Zarco out of jail, the populist dimension, exaggerating the turnout of journalists and public at Zarco’s last trial and finally the political dimension: the Catalan government had taken over responsibility for prisons within the region years before, and I predicted that what left-wing Madrid centralism hadn’t been able to achieve in Zarco’s case conservative Catalan nationalism was going to be able to do.