‘I finished up that evening quite drunk, and the next morning began several weeks of bitterness. No matter how hard I tried I didn’t understand Tere’s disappearance; as well as not understanding it I didn’t accept it: I phoned her at all hours of the day and at all hours was waiting for her to call; I went to look for her at her place, and spent many hours sitting on the stairs, waiting for her; I even thought of getting in touch with her through Zarco’s relatives who she’d introduced me to during the wake, but I didn’t know how to and, after a few attempts to locate them, I gave up. One afternoon, it must have been at least a week after her disappearance, I decided to knock on every door in her building and ask if any of her neighbours knew where she was; I didn’t speak to all of them — some weren’t in, most were Arabs and quite a few didn’t understand Spanish — but from that inquiry I concluded that Tere had clearly not returned home after the burial, although also that she hadn’t moved out and might return at any moment. On another day I went to see Jordi at his library and confirmed that conclusion: he told me that he didn’t know where Tere was and the only thing he did know was that she’d left her job at the council without explanation. That afternoon I had a few beers with Jordi at a bar next door to the library; we were there till they closed, talking about Tere: since I immediately realized Jordi was still in love with her, I wasn’t bold enough to tell him the truth, to tell him about our honeymoon tucked up in Tere’s flat, and I spent the whole time trying to console him. When we were saying goodbye, Jordi couldn’t hold himself together any more and burst into tears.
‘During the weeks that followed I immersed myself in work matters. I was afraid of falling back into depression, into a blacker and deeper depression than the previous one or even a depression with no way out, and I fought it by working. My partners helped me a lot. Cortés and Gubau had the brains to treat me as an unwell or convalescent person and the tact to keep me from noticing that they were treating me as an unwell or convalescent person. They accepted without protest my pathological hyperactivity, my inexplicable absences, my glaring errors and apparent whims, among them eliminating prison visits, from which I invariably returned filled with deadly discouragement. On the weekends Cortés and Gubau took turns trying to distract me: they took me on day trips or out drinking, invited me to the cinema, the theatre or a football match, had me over for dinner or introduced me to single or divorced women friends. Keeping my daughter apart from my misfortunes helped even more, oblivious to what I was going through, which I hadn’t been able to do or known how to do during the collapse that followed Tere’s penultimate disappearance which had only contributed to making my misfortune worse. It also helped to accept the help of a psychoanalyst, to whom Gubau practically dragged me. Psychoanalysis did me good for three reasons. The first is that it helped me formulate in detail, chewing over and digesting it, what had happened to me at age sixteen with Batista (only then did I realize, for example, that he’d represented absolute evil to me, for several months). The second is that, although perhaps it didn’t allow me to entirely digest what had happened with Tere, or with Tere and Zarco, it allowed me to accept it, live with its memory, keeping at bay legions of hostile ghosts in the shape of poisonous conjectures, guilty fictions, regrets without compassion and real or invented memories that fed the torture I mortified myself with on a daily basis.’
‘And what’s the third reason? What else did psychoanalysis do for you?’
‘It got me writing. As soon as I lay down on the psychoanalyst’s couch I began to think that, if it was really going to be useful to tell my story out loud to be able to understand it, it would be more useful to tell it in writing, because I thought that writing was more difficult than talking, it requires a greater effort and allows you to go into more depth. So I got into the habit of writing down sketches of episodes, dialogues, descriptions and reflections on Zarco and on Tere, on the summer of ’78, on my re-encounter with Zarco and with Tere twenty years later; in short: many of the things I’ve been telling you about recently. These notes were fragmentary and random, they didn’t have a single narrative thread or the slightest systematic, not to mention literary, volition; and, although the stimulus for writing them had been psychoanalysis, they didn’t have a healing intention, but the truth is that they worked on me like therapy, or at least they did me good. The truth is, a year after losing sight of Tere and after Zarco dying, I was sure that I had dodged the threat of another collapse and had the impression that I’d recovered myself, and recovered my work and my former habits, including visiting my clients in prison at least once a week. A symptom of my recovery (or perhaps a consequence) was that at Christmas I took a week-and-a-half-long holiday. I spent it in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, staying in the Hotel de las Américas, swimming in the mornings at the hotel beach or at the beaches on the Rosario Islands, spending the afternoons reading and drinking coffee with white rum and the nights dancing at the Havana Club, a place in the Getsemaní neighbourhood where I met in the small hours of one of those nights a Dutch divorcée I slept with several times and with whom I exchanged an unhealthy number of emails once I was back in Gerona for a couple of weeks, at the end of which the story ended as easily as it had started. A little while later I started sleeping with a linguistics professor recently arrived at the university and a friend of Pilar’s, Cortés’ wife, a good-looking, cheerful and kind Andalusian woman from whom I fled as soon as I noticed her phoning me too often.
‘During this time I knew nothing about Tere; on the other hand, I had lots of news about Zarco (or about what remained of Zarco). His death provoked his last public resurrection and the definitive crystallization of his myth. It was predictable: as soon as Zarco died, everybody must have felt with good reason that the myths of the living are fragile, because the living can still belie them, while, since the dead cannot, the myths of the dead are more resilient; so everybody hastened to construct an invulnerable myth out of the dead Zarco, a myth that he could no longer contradict or disfigure.’
‘An invulnerable but modest myth.’
‘A modest but real myth. The proof is that here you are, preparing a book about him. The best proof is that, right now, even kids know who Zarco was. If you think about it, that’s extraordinary: after all we’re talking about a guy who was just a minor delinquent, known most of all because of three or four mediocre films and a riot and a couple of jail breaks. It’s true that the image people have of Zarco is false, but one doesn’t attain posterity, even a modest one, without simplifications or idealizations, so it’s natural that Zarco has turned into the heroic outlaw that, for the journalists and even for some historians, embodies the yearning for liberty and the frustrated hopes of the heroic years of the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain.’
‘The Robin Hood of his day.’
‘Yes: the Lin Chung of the Transition. That’s the image Zarco’s been reduced to.’
‘It’s not a bad image.’
‘Of course it’s bad. It’s false, and if it’s false it’s bad. And you should do away with it. You should tell the true story of Liang Shan Po. That’s why I’ve spent all these days talking to you.’
‘Don’t worry: I won’t forget. Although in the book, I might not just talk about Zarco: I’ll talk about you and Tere and. .’
‘Talk about whatever you want, as long as you tell the truth. Well, what else do you want to know? I have the impression that I’ve told you everything.’
‘Not yet. Have you seen Tere again?’
‘No.’