‘As soon as Cañas finished speaking I sat up a bit in my chair, took the sheaf of pages, leafed through it for a moment without reading it and then I sighed and put it back down where it had been. Look, Counsellor, I said. Maybe you’re right: maybe Gamallo is no longer what he used to be. I’m not saying you’re not. What I do say is that, even half dead, that man is a headache. I paused and then continued: You know something? In a little over two years I’m going to retire. Don’t you think I too have the right to live this time out in peace? You know better than anybody that when Gamallo was in this prison my life was unbearable, and on top of that it did no good; I don’t want to go through that again. Besides, what good would it do to transfer him? Naturally the superintendent of Quatre Camins wants to be rid of Gamallo, but the truth is that his prison is much more modern and much better equipped than mine, especially to deal with Gamallo. So, don’t take it personally, but, if I can spare myself the presence of that man here, I’m going to. I hope you’ll understand. Cañas did not understand, or did not want to understand. We argued for a few minutes more. In the end we went our separate ways amicably, and, though the lawyer managed to get me to keep the reports on Gamallo, he did not manage to get me even to promise that, since I wasn’t going to support the move, I would at least not oppose it.’
‘But in the end you supported it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I didn’t know, I guessed. Why did you?’
‘Support him? To be frank, I don’t know. One day Correctional Institutions called me to ask if I thought it would be good for Gamallo to return to Gerona and I simply couldn’t think how to say no. I suppose Cañas and the Quatre Camins reports must have convinced me between them that Gamallo was no longer a problem, that he was on his last legs.’
‘And were they right?’
‘Yes, this time they were. When they brought Gamallo to the prison I was surprised that a man could deteriorate so much in such a short time. He was skin and bones, had difficulty walking, he’d lost most of his hair and his face looked like a preview of his skull, with his black teeth, sunken eyes and fleshless cheeks. My first impression was that the man was no more than a walking skeleton; the medical reports confirmed it: he had once again exchanged heroin for methadone, but AIDS was devouring him from within and he was very weak, which meant that, at any moment, any minor illness could overcome his defences and wipe him out.
‘His myth had also collapsed. Not only did the press not mention a word of it, when he arrived in the city, but even in the prison his arrival didn’t provoke the slightest agitation. In spite of everything I decided to hedge my bets and assigned him his own individual cell with the idea of keeping him separate from the rest of the inmates. For Gamallo, this was a humiliating measure, which equated him with the lowest of the low — informers or rapists — but he didn’t protest, I think he already knew that because of the combination of his former celebrity and his physical weakness he was an irresistible target for the kids looking to make themselves respected, kids he no longer had the strength to confront; he didn’t protest when I tried to impose an activity programme that would keep him busy from morning till night either. How ingenuous! The activity programme, I mean: in his physical state, Gamallo couldn’t carry out any programme and, when I realized that, I understood that Cañas was right and the only thing we could do for him was to let him end his days in tranquillity. And that’s what I tried to do.’
Chapter 11
‘At the end of the spring or beginning of the summer of 2005 Zarco returned to Gerona Prison and I started seeing him once a week again, often more than once. It wasn’t until then, almost thirty years after I met him, that I started to feel that what linked us was starting to resemble a friendship. Of course, I was still his lawyer, but the problem (or the advantage) was that, once we got him transferred to Gerona, he practically didn’t need a lawyer, or he needed one much less than he had before: after all, any fantasy of rehabilitation was ruled out, as was any hope of getting any release permits, and the legal matters we could deal with had been reduced to a minimum. By then, Zarco was physically a wreck; morally too: as Tere had told me, he was alone, nobody wanted anything to do with him, he was totally discredited outside and inside the prison and he no longer even seemed capable of playing the part of Zarco. This is important: as soon as I saw him again, still in Quatre Camins, before we managed to get him transferred to Gerona, I had the impression that the struggle within him between the person and persona was over, that the tendency to see himself as a victim and the arrogance were coming to an end and the magnificent façade of the myth was about to come tumbling down, revealing the prematurely aged, defeated and ill man in his forties behind it. At first, as I said, it was just an impression, but it made me see him in a different way, just as knowing that he was actually Tere’s brother changed my way of seeing him; it changed, although I don’t know how it changed: I didn’t know exactly what his relationship with Tere had been like — and I don’t think I wanted to know — but the truth is that he no longer interfered in my relationship with her, and nor did she in my relationship with him.
‘All this explains why I started to go to see Zarco at the prison almost immediately, more to chat for a while than for work, and that our conversations became much more intimate than they had ever been before. Obviously it never occurred to me to tell him what Tere had revealed in my office; actually, as far as I recall, we barely talked about Tere except in passing. We talked a lot, however, about his mother (who was living in Gerona, like some of his family, and with whom he hadn’t been on speaking terms for years), and especially about his three older brothers, three quinquis who he’d got to know when he was eleven or twelve, with whom he’d lived for a very short time and who’d been the idols of his youth; all three had died more than a decade before in violent circumstances: Joaquín, the youngest, crashed into a moving van at an intersection in El Clot, in Barcelona, while fleeing the police in a stolen car; Juan José, the eldest, while trying to slip down a rope from the window of the Madrid prison hospital, where he had been moved from a prison where he was serving thirty years for homicide; Andrés, the middle brother and for many Zarco’s model, at a police roadblock on the way into Gerona, after robbing a bank in Llagostera, when the police shot him when they saw him reaching for his pistol. But you know all these things: they’re in the cuttings in my archive and besides, if I’m not mistaken, Zarco recounts them in his memoirs.’