‘The three days that followed were very strange; in fact, I remember them as the happiest days of my life, and at the same time the most melancholy. Tere and I were barely apart. She had a week of holidays, and I took the time off. First I suggested we go away somewhere, but she wouldn’t; then I suggested she come and stay at my place, but she wouldn’t agree to that either; finally it was me who ended up going to stay at her place, arriving with a bag full of clothes and another full of part of my collection of CDs of ’70s and ’80s music. It was like a honeymoon. We didn’t leave home except to eat at L’Espelma, a restaurant in Salt, and we spent morning, noon and night in bed, listening to my CDs, watching movies on TV and making love without the enthusiasm of the first times, but with a care and tenderness that I’d never known. Like a honeymoon, as I said, except a honeymoon troubled by bad omens: in those happy days I had an intuition more than once of how it was all going to end, and that’s why they were also melancholy days.
‘The fact of the matter is that first thing in the morning on New Year’s Day the prison service supervisor woke me up to tell me that Zarco had died in the early hours. From that moment on confusion takes over from the strangeness in my memory, to such an extent that the following hours and days have the texture of a dream for me, or rather a nightmare. I don’t remember, for example, how I told Tere the news. I don’t remember how she took it, either; I don’t remember the two of us at the prison, taking charge of the body or of Zarco’s things, although I know we went to the prison and took charge of the body and of Zarco’s things, of all the paperwork of the death. The funeral was held on the second day of the year. Inevitably, the newspapers repeated that it was a media event and a manifestation of popular mourning, but my impression is that, for once, the cliché did not entirely betray the reality. Over the last years the country seemed to have forgotten Zarco, or only seemed to remember him every once in a while as a guilty husband and increasingly distant secondary and declining character in the gossip magazines; now, the massive crowd at his funeral demonstrated that it wasn’t the case, that the people had not forgotten him.
‘Zarco’s relatives, friends and acquaintances immediately showed up at the wake. Tons of them showed up. I had never seen a single one of them, I didn’t know if any of them had ever visited him at the prison or had anything to do with him over the last few years; Tere, however, seemed to know them all, at least she treated them as if she knew them. The wake was in Salt, in the Salt chapel of rest. As I said before Tere and I had at first shared responsibility for the formalities and paperwork, but she soon turned into a sort of mistress of ceremonies, I think unintentionally. Shortly after we arrived at the chapel building she introduced me to a relatively young woman, still good-looking, with big blue eyes and big blonde hair, and told me it was her aunt, Zarco’s mother; then she introduced me to other relatives of Zarco’s, including one of his younger brothers (an albino who bore not the slightest physical resemblance to Zarco). I didn’t manage to exchange anything more than the typical expressions of condolence with any of them, I don’t know whether because Tere always introduced me simply as Zarco’s lawyer. Some of them were Gypsies or looked like Gypsies, but none expressed outwardly any signs of pain over Zarco’s death, except for his mother, who sighed every once in a while or cried out for her dead son.
‘By mid-afternoon the chapel was full of busybodies and journalists on the hunt for quotes. I avoided them as best I could. By then I’d already lost my place, I did nothing but wander aimlessly between one big crowd of strangers and another and I had the impression that, rather than helping Tere, I was annoying her. I talked to her and we agreed that it would be best if I left and she stayed with the family. That night I called her, I suggested we have dinner just the two of us. She said she couldn’t, that she was still with people, that she’d be finished late and that I should call her the next day. I called her the next morning, very early; she had her mobile disconnected and, although I tried again and again, it was futile. When I finally managed to get through to her it was almost one. She seemed nervous, she told me she’d argued with someone, maybe with Zarco’s mother, she told me about preparations for the funeral; I asked her where she was, but all she answered was that I shouldn’t worry and we’d see each other that afternoon. Then she hung up. I was worried, and a minute later I called her back. I got an engaged signal.
‘The funeral was held in Vilarroja. There, at four in the afternoon, a huge crowd packed the church and its grounds. I had to make my way through those present, escorted by Cortés and Gubau, who had wanted to come with me. After looking around the church for a while I found Tere in the middle of a circle of mourners. I hugged her. We talked. She seemed to have recovered her serenity, but she also seemed tired, perhaps uncomfortable with the role that had fallen to her or been assigned to her, impatient to get all that over with as soon as possible. When the priest appeared in the vestibule, we separated: Tere sat in the front row, beside Zarco’s mother; I stood at the back near the door. The ceremony was brief. While the priest was speaking I looked around the church and saw Jordi, Tere’s former boyfriend, behind me; I also saw Lina on the end of an aisle, holding onto a wheelchair where, unmistakable, very pale and crying, Tío sprawled, fatter than thirty years earlier but with the same vaguely childlike air he had back then. Once the ceremony was over, the crowd didn’t want to disperse and accompanied the family and the hearse to the cemetery, a few kilometres from the church. It was the most motley funeral cortège: there were mink coats beside rags, bicycles beside Mercedes, elderly people and children, relatives mixed in with journalists, criminals mixed in with cops, Gypsies mixed in with non-Gypsies, people from the neighbourhood, people from the city, people from other cities. I was with my two partners and with Jordi — who was walking his bike and told me he hadn’t been able to say hello to Tere — all of us quite distant from the hearse, back where the cortège was starting to thin out; a cortège that, as people had joined along the way, soon filled the cemetery, which made Cortés, Gubau, Jordi and I decide not to go in but stay by the gate, waiting. That was why we didn’t manage to witness either the burial or an incident that some newspapers picked up the next day and has to do with María Vela, who it seems had attended the burial (although I didn’t see her at the funeral or at the cemetery). Various versions of the incident circulated. The most often repeated claims that, after the ceremony, María had approached Tere, who had returned her greeting; everything would have ended there and there wouldn’t have been any incident had not a photographer caught the scene and had Tere not seen him do so; but the fact is she saw him and asked for the memory card from the camera and, when the photographer refused, she grabbed the camera and smashed it on the ground and stamped on it.
‘That anecdote is the last thing I know of Tere; after Zarco’s funeral she vanished: literally. When the burial ended I was waiting for her with Jordi, Cortés and Gubau at the cemetery gate until we realized that she must have left through another gate with Zarco’s family. I called her on her mobile, but she had it switched off. Only then did I understand what was going on. And what was going on was that Tere had been avoiding me almost since I gave her the news of Zarco’s death. Cortés and Gubau, who possibly guessed what I had guessed, invited me to go for a drink; I accepted and Jordi said he’d come along, although in the end it wasn’t one drink but several and although, while we drank them, I kept dialling Tere’s number, always without success.