‘I got in. Tere got back into the front seat and, before Travolta pulled out back onto the highway, she grabbed his earlobe, tugged it hard and said as if she were talking to me at first and then to him at the end: He’s a dickhead but he looks good enough to eat. And tonight I’m going to screw him. Aren’t I, tough guy? Travolta swatted her away, mumbled something and pulled out. Five minutes later, after crossing the bridge over the Onyar and driving all the way up the Paseo de La Devesa, we stopped at Caterina Albert. Tere got out of the car and let me out. Thanks, I said, once I was outside. No problem, said Tere. Are you all right? Yeah, I answered. Then why do you have that pissed-off look on your face? she asked. I don’t know what look I’ve got on my face, I answered. I’m tired, but I’m not pissed off. You sure? she asked. Tere put the palms of her hands on my cheeks. You’re not pissed off because I’m going to screw this dickhead tonight? she insisted, pointing with her head inside the car. No, I said. She smiled and, without another word, kissed me softly on the lips, scrutinized me for a couple of seconds, then said: Next time me and you’ll have a shag, OK? I didn’t say anything and Tere got back in the 124 and the 124 turned around and drove away.
‘That’s how the night ended. And that’s why I was saying that from that moment on my way of looking at things changed: because that’s when I realized that whatever the relationship tying Tere and Zarco to each other, Tere did what she liked with whomever she liked.’
‘And Zarco did too?’
‘Yeah. And it didn’t seem to bother him that Tere did, either.’
‘And you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Did it bother you that Tere slept with other guys?’
‘Of course. I liked Tere a lot, I’d joined Zarco’s gang for her, I would have liked her to sleep with me; I don’t mean that she’d only sleep with me: I mean that she’d at least sleep with me. But what could I do? Things were the way they were, and I didn’t have any choice but to wait for my chance, assuming I’d get one. Besides, I didn’t have anything better to do.’
‘Did you idealize Tere?’
‘If falling in love with someone doesn’t consist of idealizing them, you tell me what it does consist of.’
‘And Zarco? Did you idealize him too?’
‘I don’t know; maybe. Now I detest those who did — actually, that’s one of the reasons I agreed to talk to you: to put a stop to the falsehoods and tell the truth about him — but maybe the first one to idealize him was me. It could be. In a certain way it would be logical. Look, at the beginning of that summer I was just a baby-faced, frightened kid who practically from one day to the next had seen his best friends turn into his worst enemies and realized his family wasn’t capable of protecting him and that all the things he’d learned up till then had been useless and mistaken, so, after the worry and fear of the first days, why wouldn’t I prefer to stay with Zarco and his gang? Why wouldn’t I not be pleased with someone who in those circumstances offered me respect, adventure, money, fun and pleasure? How could I help but idealize him a little? And by the way, do you know what I called Zarco’s gang?’
‘What?’
‘The outlaws of Liang Shan Po. Have you ever heard that name?’
‘No.’
‘No, of course not; you’re too young. But I bet you anything the majority of people my age remember it. It was made famous by the first Japanese television series to be shown in Europe. The Water Margin, and here in Spain it was called La Frontera Azul, the blue border. It was so spectacularly successful that two or three weeks after it started there was barely a teenager in the country who didn’t watch it. It must have gone on air in April or May of that year, because, when I met Zarco and Tere, I was already addicted to it.
‘It was a sort of Oriental version of Robin Hood. I remember the opening sequence really welclass="underline" over a background tune I could still hum, the images revealed a rag-tag army of men on foot and horseback carrying weapons and standards, while the narrator’s voice-over recited a couple of identical phrases every week: “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.” The storyline was simple. It was set in the Middle Ages, when China was governed by I don’t know which dynasty and the empire had fallen into the hands of Kao Chiu, the emperor’s favourite, a corrupt and cruel man who had converted a prosperous land into a desert with no future. Only one group of upstanding men, led by former imperial guard Lin Chung, rose up against the oppression; among them was one woman: Hu San-Niang, Lin Chung’s most faithful deputy. The members of the group were condemned by the oppressor’s laws to a life in exile on the banks of the Liang Shan Po, a river near the capital that was also the blue border or water margin of the title, a real border but especially a symbolic border: the border between good and evil, between justice and injustice. Anyway, all the episodes of the series followed a similar outline: because of the humiliations inflicted by Kao Chiu, one or several honourable citizens found themselves obliged to cross to the other side of the Liang Shan Po to join Lin Chung and Hu San-Niang and the other honourable outlaws. That was the story repeated without too many variations in each episode.’
‘And you somehow began to identify with it.’
‘Drop the somehow: what are stories for if not to identify with? And especially: what good are they to a teenager? That’s why I’m sure that in a way, in my instinct, in my fantasy, in my feelings, in the depths of my heart, during that summer my city was China, Batista was Kao Chiu, Zarco was Lin Chung, Tere was Hu San-Niang, the Ter and the Onyar were the Liang Shan Po and everyone who lived on the far side of the Ter and the Onyar were the Water Margin outlaws, but above them all were those who lived in the prefabs. As for me, I was an upstanding citizen who had rebelled against tyranny and was anxious not to go on being just a snake (or just one man) and aspired to be a dragon (or an army) and, every time I crossed the Ter or the Onyar to go and meet Zarco and Tere, it was as if I were crossing the water margin, the border between good and evil and between justice and injustice. Something that, if you stop and think, has some truth to it, doesn’t it?’
Chapter 4
‘Have you ever heard of Liang Shan Po?’
‘Of what?’
‘Liang Shan Po.’
‘No. What’s that?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Tell me about the first time you saw El Zarco.’
‘It was the spring of 1978. I remember because I’d just turned twenty-three, had spent four uninterrupted years living in Gerona (uninterrupted or with no interruption other than the months I spent in Madrid doing my military service, at the headquarters of the Intelligence Service and the State Security Office), had just moved out of the apartment on Montseny Street I shared with other inspectors and had just married my wife, Ángeles, a nurse at the Muñoz clinic I met while recuperating from an appendectomy. Back then Gerona was still a damp, dark, lonely and filthy city, but there was nowhere damper, darker, lonelier or more filthy than the red-light district.
‘I should know, since I practically lived there for years. Like I said, all or almost all the city’s delinquents got together in the district, so all we had to do was keep an eye on that part of town to make sure nobody went too wild. Why should I lie: it wasn’t hard work. The district was just a handful of blocks of ancient buildings that formed a spiderweb of narrow, stinking, gloomy streets: Bellaire, Barca, Portal de la Barca, Pou Rodó, Mosques and Pujada del Rei Martí; those five or six streets squeezed between churches and convents were once the city’s entrance; prostitution had always thrived there and still did. In fact, at the end of the seventies the district enjoyed its final glory days, before drugs and apathy took over in the eighties and nineties and the council took advantage of its decline to clean it up, throw people out and turn it into what it is today: the most elegant part of the city, a place where there’s now nothing but trendy restaurants, chic stores, loft apartments for the rich and so on and so forth. How do you like that?