‘That Saturday night María was on the show again. I decided not to watch it, and I didn’t see it, but on Sunday I learned that her second appearance had been even more brutal than the first, so for several days I considered the possibility of carrying out the threat I’d made over the phone and filing suits against María and the programme. Cortés and Gubau talked me out of it; their arguments were irrefutable: I knew it wasn’t easy to win such a lawsuit, but my partners made me see that, even supposing we did win and María was sentenced to withdrawing her insults and accusations and the programme obliged to broadcast a retraction, the person most harmed would still be me, because the trial would destroy my reputation, and the main beneficiaries would be them, because the trial would only increase María’s fame and the programme’s audience. So I chose to keep quiet, to try to stay out of it, to go on as if nothing were going on. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe I should have filed a suit. Who knows. The thing is that over the following weeks the sensation of failure and shame multiplied and began to devour me like a cancer.’
‘Didn’t you try to talk to Tere? Didn’t you try to get in contact with her?’
‘I tried, but I couldn’t. I phoned her, but she didn’t answer. I went to her house, but she wasn’t in. Someone told me she wasn’t living in Vilarroja any more. I don’t think finding her would have done any good, anyway. Of course, it didn’t even occur to me to try to find out which prison Zarco had been sent to, although I thought of him far too often. And do you know what I remembered most of all? The night in La Creueta, of the binge he went on of telling me I was making a fool of myself and calling me dickhead and wanker. Because that was the honest truth, that’s how I felt then: like a dickhead and a wanker who’d made the most ridiculous fool of himself.
‘During the following months I again tried to force myself to forget about Tere. Also to forget about Zarco. María, however, was much harder to even try to forget, because as a result of her two appearances on the Saturday-night TV programme she blasted off for stardom and began to show up in magazines, on the radio and television much more often than she had up till then, taking Zarco’s place to a certain extent. Not that Zarco was suddenly obliterated from people’s memories, but that, thanks to María, he seemed at times to turn into a different character, hazy and secondary, into the minor bad guy of a tragedy or a melodrama no longer his own: up till then María had just been Zarco’s wife, while he was the real protagonist of the story; from then on María became the protagonist and Zarco became merely the beast who had made her a victim par excellence. As far as everything else went, that was a bad time for me. I’d just turned forty, but I felt washed up, and that feeling sunk me into a foul pit of self-pity: I saw myself wallowing about in absolute failure, in absolute drought and desiccation, in absolute futility; my old feeling of living a borrowed anodyne life returned, stronger than ever, my impression of having taken a wrong turn and of being trapped in a misunderstanding. I lost interest in my work, lost my capacity for joy, I wore out physically in no time. Some mornings I woke up crying; some nights I cried myself to sleep; some days I stayed in bed, unable to get up and go to my office. Just then I made what I thought was a great discovery; I thought I discovered a truth that I’d always had in view and hadn’t wanted to see, a truth that changed everything except the sensation of having been a dickhead and a wanker and made the most ridiculous fool of myself, which became even sharper.
‘The discovery happened in a trivial way, one morning when I was talking to a bunch of colleagues in the courthouse corridor and someone mentioned Higinio Redondo, my father’s friend, I don’t know if you remember. .’
‘The friend who lent you his house in Colera after the bank robbery in Bordils.’
‘That’s right: my mentor, the lawyer I began my career with. At a certain moment someone brought up his name while we were talking. I don’t know who it was or what they said, perhaps they were remembering one of Redondo’s anecdotes or jokes, something like that, which wasn’t unusual either, as I told you before Redondo was a real character, people at the courthouse still remember him. The thing is that Redondo’s name acted as a trigger: I suddenly stopped listening and mentally left the small group and the courthouse; suddenly, like I say, I believed I saw the truth, as if it had always been right in front of my nose, barely hidden by a semi-transparent veil, and the unexpected mention of Redondo had revealed it. I don’t remember what happened afterwards, or how the conversation ended. The only thing I remember is that for several days I walked around stunned by the humiliating certainty that my story was actually a mediocre copy of Redondo’s story, a version of a story as old and ridiculous as the world: I already told you that Redondo had fallen in love like a schoolboy with the wife of a penniless client who used him to get her husband out of prison and that, as soon as she got what she wanted, she left him.’
‘And you believed your story with Tere was similar?’
‘It’s not that I believed it: it’s that it struck me as obvious. And not that it was similar: it was even worse. More ridiculous. More humiliating. I suddenly felt that everything fell into place: Tere was Zarco’s girlfriend when I met her, in the Vilaró arcade, she still was while Zarco’s myth grew up in the prisons and she probably still was now, when he himself had destroyed or degraded his own myth and now knew for sure that he would never live in freedom again. That didn’t mean Tere hadn’t loved me, or that she hadn’t been in love with me when we used to see each other at my place to make love and listen to old CDs, or even that she hadn’t been during the summer of ’78, like Zarco and she herself claimed. Why wouldn’t she have been? Who can say that in her own way Redondo’s lover wasn’t in love with him? Women are like that: they turn their interests into feelings; they always have and they always will, at least as long as they’re weaker than us. So no, that didn’t mean that Tere hadn’t loved me: it just meant that she’d loved me in an occasional and conditional way, while she loved Zarco in a permanent and unconditional way. It meant that probably everything or almost everything Tere had done with me she’d done for Zarco: in the washrooms of the Vilaró arcade she’d seduced me because Zarco needed to recruit me, and that same summer, as you suspected, she’d seduced me again on Montgó beach to get even with Zarco, who was sleeping with another girl that night; and at my place on La Barca she’d seduced me again, twenty years later, because she wanted to make sure I’d work conscientiously to get Zarco out of prison and, when Zarco started to get out on release, brushed me off so I wouldn’t bother them, but she used her wiles to keep hold of me, although at a distance, so I wouldn’t abandon them before Zarco was freed and she could run away with him. . It all fell into place. And worst of all I felt that I’d always known the truth and at the same time had never wanted to know it, that it was such an obvious truth that neither Tere nor Zarco had bothered much about hiding it from me, and that, precisely for that reason, I’d been able to ignore it or pretend I didn’t know. I understood Tere’s attitude that night in La Creueta, trying to get Zarco to shut up when, drunk and drugged up, he let off steam and almost let out the brutal truth and called me a dickhead and a wanker and said that the two of them were using me and that I didn’t understand anything. I understood the irony of two professional sharks like Redondo and I falling for such an old and well-known trick. I understood Redondo’s horror when he discovered the snare he’d fallen into and immediately started planning to imitate him by leaving the practice in the hands of Cortés and Gubau and abandoning the city for a good long while. And I understood that the great misunderstanding of my life was that there hadn’t been any misunderstanding.’