‘I stopped calling Tere and tried to forget her. I didn’t manage to. The only thing I managed to do was wake up each morning with a crushing sensation of failure. That sensation increased a few weeks later, when Zarco was arrested on the Rambla de Catalunya in Barcelona after having robbed a pharmacy and having tried to steal a car from an underground parking lot. It was less than five months since he’d received the pardon and the conditional release. It was front-page news in the newspapers and magazines and on the radio and television, it unleashed a journalistic debate about the softness of Spanish penal legislation, the insufficiencies of the prison system and the limits of rehabilitation, and provoked a small political earthquake that included a row in the Congress, an exchange of accusations between the Madrid government and the Catalan one and the sacking of the Director-General of Correctional Institutions, Señor Pere Prada. For Zarco the episode also represented an ending. The violation of the conditions of his release meant that from the correctional point of view he went back to square one: he went back to having three decades of imprisonment to serve, to which he’d now have to add, besides, the years he’d get for his last two crimes. All this meant, given his age and given that nobody was going to risk granting him any kind of release, let alone parole, in practice Zarco was condemned to a life sentence. His hopes for liberty ended there. And there ended the myth of Zarco.’
‘You mean the myth of Zarco in his lifetime ended there, the one you reactivated with the campaign in favour of his pardon; but the Zarco myth didn’t end: the proof is that here we are you and I, talking about him.’
‘You’re right. Actually, when you think about it, rather than ending at that moment Zarco’s myth seemed to transform, or degrade, or took its final shape. I mean that almost from one day to the next Zarco went from being the legendary good delinquent who had finally found the right road and began to be seen as an irredeemable junkie, sordid and dirty, like a perpetual delinquent, ungrateful and glib, like a hopeless quinqui without a trace of glamour. In short, he began to be seen as a tyrant and not as a victim. María contributed very much to this transformation from the beginning, from the first time she appeared on television ranting and raving about Zarco; well, ranting and raving about Zarco, and about Tere and about me. Which was the first time I saw her converted into a furious vengeful woman. I don’t suppose you’ve seen that interview, because I didn’t record it; anyway these things must be on the Internet, on YouTube or sites like that, no?’
‘Probably. I’ll find out.’
‘Find it if you can: it’s worth seeing. The interview went out one Saturday night, quite late, on a magazine show with a huge audience. María was interrogated for more than an hour by the presenter and by several reporters with the idea that she might confide in them about her relationship with Zarco and clear up her insinuations about the wedding having just been a stunt. By then her appearance barely bore any relation to the shy, sad, anodyne woman Tere had introduced me to years earlier in my office: she’d let her hair grow, dyed it blonde and had it curled, her face was caked with make-up, she was wearing a sparkling, violet-coloured, tight satin dress with a plunging neckline. That night María more than fulfilled her mission: she clarified, confided, ranted and raved; her performance was worthy of a diva: she accompanied her words with dramatic silences, with outbursts of rage, affected gestures, challenging looks straight at the camera. She began by saying that she hadn’t seen Zarco for months and had no news of him apart from what she’d read in the press, and then she went on to say that Zarco had hit her many times, that he’d stolen money from her, that he’d abused her sexually and had tried to sexually abuse her daughter, that he’d cheated on her with Tere, that Zarco, Tere and I had tricked her into marrying him in order to get him released, that she had paid me significant sums of money to defend him, that I knew about all the humiliations he and Tere had submitted her to and not only did I not do anything to prevent them but I had encouraged them because I’d belonged to Zarco’s gang in my youth and Zarco and Tere were blackmailing me with the threat of exposing my delinquent past. I listened to all this live, alone in my loft on La Barca Street, more fascinated than furious or scandalized, as if they weren’t talking about me but about my double and, as soon as María started to spill the beans, I began telling myself that a good lie is not a pure, free-standing lie, that a pure lie is an implausible lie, that, to make it plausible, a lie needs to be constructed in part out of truths, and I spent the programme wondering how much truth María’s lies contained: I knew, for example, that it was true that Zarco had stolen money from her (though not that María had paid me a single euro to defend Zarco), and I wondered if it was also true that Zarco hit her and had tried to sexually abuse her daughter; I knew that it was true, of course, that when I was young I’d been in Zarco’s gang and that in a certain sense Zarco, Tere and I had tricked María so she would marry Zarco so we could get him freed, and I wondered if it was also true that Zarco cheated on María with Tere and if from the moment he started to get out on weekend-release passes, more than a year before, the two of them had been seeing each other behind my back and that explained why since then Tere hadn’t wanted to go back to seeing me and had kept me at a distance, keeping my hopes up through telephone conversations. I asked myself many questions similar to these, but I didn’t give myself any answers. I didn’t want to.
‘Or I couldn’t. As soon as the programme began Gubau called me, and almost immediately after him my daughter called and then Cortés; before I got into bed I spoke by telephone with no fewer than ten people. All of them were watching the programme or had seen it and all of them wanted to comment on it and find out how I was, but from there on in the reactions differed: most of them tried to calm me down, took it for granted that the woman was crazy, that she just wanted to be on television and that what she said was false. But there were also different reactions. In my sister’s tone of voice, for example, I thought I detected, well covered by the obligatory indignation, a tiny shade of resentment, as if she were pained by the public prominence her little brother had just acquired, but also a shade of respect, as if she’d just discovered, proudly, that I had finally become somebody. Is it true that you were in his gang? my ex-wife asked for her part, with a mixture of admiration and astonishment. Crikey, you could have told me: now I understand why you were so obsessed with Zarco. . The truth is that, sometimes with one ear on the television and the other on the receiver while my mobile was ringing, I tried to deal with them all, answer their questions and play down the importance of the programme and María’s accusations, but when I finally disconnected the phones I’d realized that this was just the beginning and that, supposing it didn’t end up affecting me personally, it was obviously going to affect the opinion others had of me, which was a way of affecting me personally.
‘In the days that followed the gossip magazines and radio and television chat shows repeated María’s accusations, and that Monday morning I read in everybody’s eyes, in the office and at court, that yes, that was just the beginning. That afternoon my secretary put through an unexpected call. It was the producer of the programme María had appeared on two days before. He introduced himself, said his name — López de Sol, I remember he was called — and, without any further explanation, he offered me the possibility of defending myself the following Saturday against María’s accusations: it would simply entail allowing myself to be interviewed at the same time and on the same set by the same group of journalists that had interviewed her. I thanked him for the offer and turned it down. The producer told me not to be hasty, to think it over, that he’d phone back that evening. I answered that I’d already thought about it and he could save himself the trouble of calling back. Here the producer changed his tone, with an inflection at once friendly and paternalistic he mentioned a sum of money, not particularly high, and then explained María’s appearance on his programme the previous Saturday had been a hit, that they planned to continue with the story next Saturday and that, if I didn’t agree to be interviewed, they would most likely interview María again. Then I flew off the handle: shouting, furious, I told him he should do what he thought best, but that, if María continued talking about me on television the way she had the time before, I’d be bringing two lawsuits to court, one for slander and another for defamation of character, one against María and the other against the programme. My threat did not upset the producer; I heard him click his tongue, heard him sigh; before hanging up on him I heard him say: You haven’t understood anything, Counsellor.