Free Outlaws by Javier Cercas Page B

upstairs, knew that Vedette and her husband alerted them when they walked in), they always went away without bothering anyone after talking to Vedette for a while.
    ‘She was right: that’s what happened. Trini and I sat on the bed for a while, dressed, side by side without even touching, telling each other lies, until after a while the red light went out and we went downstairs. That was my first visit to a brothel. And that was how we spent the money.’
    ‘Did the girls in the gang know about it?’
    ‘What? That we spent the money on hookers?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I don’t know. I never asked myself that question.’
    ‘Ask yourself now.’
    ‘I don’t know if they knew. I don’t think so. Obviously, we went to the brothels without telling them, and I don’t remember anyone ever saying anything about it in front of them. I suppose in theory they didn’t know, although it’s hard to believe that in practice they didn’t suspect. As I said that’s where most of the money went.’
    ‘Well, I guess it mustn’t have been too difficult to hide it from the girls; after all there were only two of them, and one was Zarco’s girl and the other was Gordo’s.’
    ‘That there were only two is true: there were lots of girls who came in and out or circled around the gang, but only Tere and Lina belonged to it. The other part, however, is not true, or not entirely, or I didn’t have the impression that it was, or I only did for a time: Lina was Gordo’s girlfriend, yes, but as for Tere being Zarco’s girl . . . Well, as I said before if I’d known the truth in time everything would have been different; or if I’d seen from the beginning that she and Zarco behaved like Gordo and Lina did, which was more or less like most couples behaved back then: in that case I wouldn’t have got my hopes up or gone to La Font or done everything possible to fit in with the gang. It’s probable. But the fact is that Zarco and Tere did not behave like a couple, and unlike Lina, who gave the impression of being in the gang as Gordo’s girlfriend, Tere gave the impression of being in the gang like any of the rest of us. So how was I not going to get my hopes up and think I might have a chance? How was I going to forget what had happened with Tere in the arcade washrooms? It’s true that after that Tere acted like nothing had happened, but the fact is that it had happened and I didn’t get any signal that it could never happen again (or if I did I hadn’t been able to decipher it). Because it’s also true that in the early days I thought Tere was Zarco’s girlfriend, but it soon struck me that, even if she were, she and Zarco did their own thing when they felt like it.’
    ‘When did you start to think that?’
    ‘Pretty soon, like I said. I remember, for example, one of the first nights I went with them to Rufus, a discotheque in Pont Major, on the way out of the city on the highway to La Bisbal. That’s where Gerona’s charnegos and quinquis used to hang out and, as I later discovered, where the gang ended up every night, or almost every night. It was the first discotheque I’d been to, though if you asked me to describe it now I wouldn’t be able to: I always arrived high, and the only thing I remember is a foyer where the bouncers and the ticket office were, a big dance floor with strobe lights and disco balls, a bar on the right and some sofas in the darkest section, where the couples hid.
    ‘There, as I was telling you, we ended up almost every night that summer. We’d get there about midnight or twelve-thirty and leave when they closed, about three or four in the morning. I spent those two or three hours drinking beer, smoking joints in the washrooms and watching Tere dance from a corner of the bar. At first I never danced: I would have liked to, but I was embarrassed; besides, in general the guys in the gang never danced, I don’t know whether for the same reasons I didn’t or because they considered themselves