‘Outside we took the stockings off our heads and got in the car. Gordo drove normally down the main street of Palamós, without jumping a single red light, and once we were out of town took a detour towards a tennis club, but a short time later Gordo stopped in a lot where there were several parked cars, we got out of the 124, took a Renault 12 and drove back out to the highway. As we drove away from Palamós, sure now that we weren’t being followed, Zarco counted the money; most of it was hundred- and five-hundred-peseta notes: the total was less than forty thousand. Zarco announced the sum, and the silence that followed betrayed his disappointment; Tere and Gordo also seemed disappointed. As for me, I cared much less about the miserable amount of the booty than about having made up for my cowardice during the car chase that followed the hold-up of the gas station in Sils, so I tried to cheer them up with my enthusiasm.
‘It was no use. Zarco and the others experienced the success of our first bank robbery as a failure (and that false failure blurred my bravery, although I was so proud of myself, and especially of the pride I saw in Tere’s eyes just before the hold-up, that it almost didn’t matter to me). Maybe this explains why we blew that money even faster than usual, as if we looked down on it even more than usual. Whatever the case, speed calls for more speed, and from that moment on our accelerated impatient life accelerated even more and we became more impatient than ever. While we were surviving on a base of routine jobs (mostly purse-snatchings, sometimes the odd house), the mirage of the perfect heist obsessed us, as if we all planned to give up that outlaw frenzy after we did it, which was not true. We planned several bank jobs, called at least two of them off at the last minute and in the end only two came off: one at a branch of the Banco Atlántico in Anglès, which yielded loot almost as paltry as the job in Palamós, and another at the Bordils branch of the Banco Popular.
‘I remember the heist in Bordils very well and one of the hold-ups we called off. The heist in Bordils I remember because it was the last one and because for a long time barely a day went by when I didn’t think of it; I remember the frustrated hold-up because, immediately after we called it off, Zarco and I had our longest conversation of the summer. Maybe I should say our only conversation. Or at least the only conversation we had on our own and the only time back then that he and I talked about Tere. In any case, it’s the only one I remember in detail.’
‘The other day you told me that your relationship with Tere didn’t change after sleeping with her on the beach at Montgó.’
‘And it’s true. I thought it would change (or I should say: I would have liked it to change), but it didn’t change. Of course we didn’t sleep together again. Nor did we talk more than before or become more involved with each other than before or closer. In fact, I’d almost say that, instead of improving, our relationship deteriorated: Tere even stopped flirting with me, like she used to do sporadically; and if I got up my courage to get down off the barstool and out onto the dance floor at Rufus and started dancing beside her as I’d done at the Marocco, the night of Montgó beach, her response was always cold, and I soon gave up and swore never to try again. I didn’t know what to attribute her disinterest to, and I never dared ask her or remind her of what had happened on Montgó beach (just as I’d never dared to remind her of what happened in the arcade washrooms). Of course, Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest might have had some bearing; the appearance of the weapons might also have had some bearing and the fact that with them everything became rougher, more serious and more violent, as if that change had isolated us more and made us become more introverted and more aware of ourselves, or more grown-up. In any case, just as I never had the impression that Tere regretted what happened between us in the arcade washrooms, now I did have the impression that she regretted having slept with me on Montgó beach.’
‘And in spite of that it never occurred to you to think that Tere had slept with you to get even with Zarco, because that night he went off with another girl.’
‘No: I already told you the last time we talked. It didn’t occur to me then. But by then I no longer thought that Tere was Zarco’s girlfriend. Or I didn’t exactly think she was. I thought she was his girlfriend but not his girlfriend, or that she was his girlfriend but in an elastic and occasional way, or that she had been his girlfriend and wasn’t any more but might be again or he thought she might be again. I don’t know. I told you before that I’d never seen them behaving like a couple, never seen them kissing, for example, although I had seen Zarco, especially very late at night, at Rufus, trying to kiss or caress Tere and her pushing him away sometimes with irritation and sometimes with an amused or even affectionate gesture. Anyway. The truth is I didn’t really understand too well what the relationship was between them, and I wasn’t interested in understanding it either.’
‘Do you know if Zarco found out that summer about what happened in the arcade washrooms between you and Tere?’
‘No.’
‘He didn’t find out or you don’t know if he found out?’
‘I don’t know if he found out.’
‘Do you know if he found out that you and Tere slept together on Montgó beach?’
‘Yeah. He did find out about that. I know because he told me himself, in the conversation I was just telling you about, a couple of weeks after the night on Montgó beach. That afternoon, like I said, we’d called off a heist. It was in Figueras or in some town on the outskirts of Figueras. We called it off at the last minute, when we were just about to go into the bank and a Civil Guard car drove past and we had to buzz off. The escape lasted for quite a while, because for quite a while we feared we’d been identified and that they were following us. Actually I think we only calmed down when our car was travelling under the mid-afternoon sun on a mountain road that snaked between hillsides divided by low stone walls and covered by pines, olive trees, prickly pears and shrubs. After a while we came to a town of white houses crowded together in front of the sea that turned out to be Cadaqués. We wandered the streets drinking beer in the bars along the boardwalk, and when we came out of one of them I saw a brand-new Citroën Mehari and hot-wired it with Zarco and Gordo’s permission and then, with Zarco beside me and Gordo and Tere in the back seat, drove out of Cadaqués with no intention other than to enjoy the ride.
‘I drove along the edge of the sea northwards and passed a couple of pebble beaches and a fishing village. The road got emptier and narrower and the surface more irregular and full of potholes. The wind coming in off the sea threatened to blow the top off the Mehari, and at some point (by then it had been a while since we’d seen any other cars) the road ran out, and became almost a dirt track or a half-paved track. Where are we going? Zarco asked. I don’t know, I said. Zarco was sunk down in the passenger seat, with his bare feet resting on the dashboard; I thought he was going to tell me to turn around but he didn’t say anything. In the back seat, Tere and Gordo hadn’t even heard Zarco’s question, and didn’t look impatient but rather exhausted or bewitched by the silence and desolation of that suddenly lunar landscape: a plateau of slate, grey crags and dry bushes in which only here and there, between bare gullies and rocks, did we get a glimpse of the sea. I carried on avoiding rough patches until at the end of the track I caught sight of a headland crowned by a lighthouse and beyond it an expanse of water almost as big and as blue as the sky.