Outlaws

Chapter 1

‘Shall we begin?’

‘Yes, but first let me ask one more question. The last one.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Why have you agreed to write this book?’

‘Didn’t I tell you already? For the money. I’m a writer, that’s how I make my living.’

‘Yes, I know, but is that the only reason you agreed?’

‘Well, it’s not every day you get an opportunity to write about a character like El Zarco, if that’s what you mean.’

‘You mean you were interested in Zarco before you were asked to write about him?’

‘Of course, isn’t everybody?’

‘Yeah. Anyway, the story I’m going to tell you isn’t Zarco’s story but the story of my relationship with Zarco; with Zarco and with. .’

‘Yes, I know, we’ve talked about that too. Can we begin?’

‘We can.’

‘Tell me when you met Zarco.’

‘At the beginning of the summer of 1978. It was a strange time. Or that’s how I remember it. Franco had died three years earlier, but the country was still governed by Franco’s laws and still smelled exactly the same as it did under Franco: like shit. I was sixteen years old back then, and so was Zarco. We lived very near each other, and very far away from each other.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you know the city?’

‘Roughly.’

‘That’s almost better: the city today has very little in common with what it was back then. In its way, Gerona at that time was still a post-war city, a dark, ecclesiastical dump, encircled by the countryside and covered in fog all winter; I’m not saying that today’s Gerona is better — in some ways it’s worse — I’m only saying it’s different. At that time, for example, the city was surrounded by outlying neighbourhoods where the charnegos lived. The word’s fallen out of fashion, but in those days it was used to refer to immigrants from other parts of Spain who’d come to Catalonia, incomers, people who generally didn’t have a cent to their name and who’d come here to try to get by. . Though you already know all this. What you might not know is, as I was saying, at the end of the seventies the city was ringed by charnego neighbourhoods: Salt, Pont Major, Germans Sàbat, Vilarroja. That’s where the dregs accumulated.’

‘That’s where Zarco lived?’

‘No: Zarco lived with the dregs of the dregs, in the prefabs, los albergues provisionales, temporary housing on the city’s north-east border, set up in the fifties for the influx of workers and still in use somehow. And I lived barely two hundred metres away: the difference is that he lived over the border, across from where the River Ter and La Devesa Park marked the divide. I lived on Caterina Albert Street, in the neighbourhood now called La Devesa but back then it was nothing or almost nothing, a bunch of gardens and vacant lots where the city petered out; there, ten years earlier, at the end of the sixties, they’d put up a couple of isolated tower blocks where my parents had rented a flat. In a way it was also an incomer neighbourhood, but the people who lived there weren’t as poor as most charnegos usually were: most of the families were those of middle-class civil servants, like mine — my father had a low-level position working for the council — families who weren’t originally from the city but who didn’t consider themselves charnegos and in any case didn’t want anything to do with real charnegos or at least with the poor ones, the ones in Salt, Pont Major, Germans Sàbat and Vilarroja. Or, of course, with the people who still lived in the prefabs. In fact, I’m sure that the majority of the people who lived on Caterina Albert (not to mention the people from the city) never set foot anywhere near the prefabs. Some perhaps didn’t even know they existed, or pretended not to know. I did know. I didn’t really know quite what they were and I’d never been there, but I knew they were there or that it was said they were there, like a legend that nobody had confirmed or denied: actually, I think that for us, the neighbourhood kids, the very name of los albergues added a touch of prestige by evoking an image of refuge in inhospitable times, like an inn or a hostel in a tale of epic adventure. And all this is why I told you that back then I lived very near and very far away from Zarco: because there was a border separating us.’

‘And how did you cross it? I mean, how did a middle-class kid make friends with a kid like Zarco?’

‘Because at sixteen all borders are porous, or at least they were then. And also by chance. But before I tell you that story I should tell you another one.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I’ve never told anybody this; well, nobody except my analyst. But unless I do you won’t understand how and why I met Zarco.’

‘Don’t worry: if you don’t want it to go in the book, I won’t use it; if I do use it and you don’t like how it sounds, I’ll cut it. That was the deal, and I’m not going to break it.’

‘OK. You know what? People always say that childhood is cruel, but I think adolescence is much crueller. In my case it was. I had a group of friends on Caterina Albert: my best friend was Matías Giral, but there was also Canales, Ruiz, Intxausti, the Boix brothers, Herrero and one or two others. We were all more or less the same age, had all known each other since we were eight or nine, lived our lives in the street and went to the school run by the Marist Brothers, which was the closest one; and of course we were all charnegos, except for the Boix brothers, who were from Sabadell and spoke Catalan among themselves. In short: I didn’t have any brothers, just one sister, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating if I say that in practice those friends filled the vacant role of brothers in my childhood.

‘But in adolescence they stopped doing so. The change began almost a year before I met Zarco, when a new kid came to the school. His name was Narciso Batista and he was repeating his second year of high school. His father was chairman of the council and my father’s boss; we knew each other from having crossed paths a couple of times. So, also because our surnames meant we sat at the same desk (in the class list Cañas followed Batista), I was his first friend at the school; thanks to me he made friends with Matías, and thanks to Matías and me he made friends with the rest of my friends. He also turned into the leader of the group, a group that up till then had never had a leader (or I hadn’t been aware that it did) and perhaps needed one, because the essential feeling of adolescence is fear and fear needs leaders with which to fight it. Batista was a couple of years older than us, physically strong and knew how to make himself heard; besides, he had everything any teenage charnego might desire: to start with, a solid, rich, Catalan family (although he considered himself very Spanish and despised everything Catalan, not to mention catalanista, especially if it came from Barcelona); also, a large apartment in the new part of the city, a tennis-club membership, a summer house in S’Agaró and a winter one in La Molina, a 75cc Lobito to get around on and his own place on La Rutlla Street, a tumbledown old garage to spend the evenings listening to rock and roll, smoking and drinking beer.

‘Up to here, everything’s normal; from here on in, nothing was. I mean in just a few months Batista’s attitude towards me changed, his sympathy turned into antipathy, his antipathy into hatred and his hatred into violence. Why? I don’t know. I’ve often thought I was simply the scapegoat Batista invented to ward off the group’s essential fear. But I really don’t know; the only thing I know is that in a very short time I went from being his friend to being his victim.

‘The word victim is melodramatic, but I prefer the risk of melodrama to that of lying. Batista began taunting me: although his mother tongue was Catalan, he laughed at me for speaking Catalan, not because I spoke it badly, but because he despised those who spoke Catalan without being Catalan; he laughed at my appearance and called me Dumbo, because he said I had ears as big as the Disney elephant’s; he also laughed at my awkwardness with girls, at my studious-looking glasses, my studious-looking grades. These taunts became increasingly ferocious, and I couldn’t stop them, and my friends, who just laughed at first, ended up joining in. Soon words were not enough. Batista got a taste for half-joking and half-seriously punching me in the shoulders or ribs and giving me an occasional slap; perplexed, I answered with laughter, playing at returning the blows, trying to take the gravity out of the violence and turn it into a joke. That was at the start. Later, when it was no longer possible to disguise the brutality as fun, my laughter turned into tears and the desire for escape. Batista, I insist, was not alone: he was the big bully, the origin and catalyst of the violence, but the rest of my friends (with the occasional exception of Matías, who sometimes tried to put the brakes on Batista) at times turned into a pack of hounds. For years I wanted to forget that time, until not long ago I forced myself to remember it and realized I still had some of those scenes stuck in my head like a knife in the guts. Once Batista threw me into a freezing stream that runs through, or used to run through, La Devesa Park. Another time, one afternoon when we were at his place on La Rutlla, my friends stripped me and locked me in the darkness of the loft, and for hours all I could do was hold back my tears and listen through the wall to their laughter, their shouts, their conversations and the music they put on. Another time — a Saturday I’d told my parents I was sleeping over at Batista’s parents’ place in S’Agaró — they left me again at the place on La Rutlla, and I had to spend almost twenty-four hours there — from Saturday afternoon to midday on Sunday — alone and in the dark, with nothing to eat or drink. Another time, towards the end of term, when I was no longer doing anything but avoiding Batista, I got so scared I thought he was trying to kill me, because he and Canales, Herrero, the Boix brothers and another one or two trapped me in the washrooms off the patio at school and, for what must have been a few seconds but felt like a very, very long time, held my face inside a toilet they’d all just pissed in, while I listened to my friends’ laughter behind me. Shall I go on?’

‘Not if you don’t want to. But if it makes you feel better, go ahead.’

‘No, talking about it doesn’t make me feel any better; not any more. I’m surprised to be telling you, though, which feels different. The Batista thing has become like so many things from that time: it’s not like I lived through them but more like I dreamt them. Although you’ll be wondering what all this has to do with Zarco.’

‘No: I was wondering why you didn’t report the bullying.’

‘Who was I supposed to report it to? My teachers? I had a good reputation at school, but I didn’t have any proof of what was going on, and reporting it would have turned me into a liar or a snitch (or both), and that was the best way to make everything worse. Or my parents? My father and mother were good people; they loved me and I loved them, but over those months our relationship had deteriorated so much that I wouldn’t have dared tell them. Besides, how would I have told them? And what would I have told them? On top of everything else, as I already said, my father was subordinate to Batista’s father at work, so if I told him what was going on, aside from turning into a liar and a snitch, I would have put my father in an impossible situation. In spite of that, more than once I was tempted to tell him, more than once I was on the brink of telling him, but in the end I always shied away. And if I wasn’t going to report it to them, who was I going to tell?

‘The thing is that going to school every day turned into an ordeal for me. For months I cried myself to sleep. I was scared. I felt enraged and embittered and humiliated and most of all guilty, because the worst thing about humiliation is that it makes the one who suffers it feel guilty. I felt trapped. I wanted to die. And don’t think what you’re thinking: all that shit didn’t teach me a thing. Knowing absolute evil — that’s what Batista was to me — earlier than most, doesn’t make you better than others; it makes you worse. And it’s absolutely no use whatsoever.’

‘It was useful to you in that it led you to meet Zarco.’

‘That’s true, but that was its only use. That happened not long after term finished, when I’d gone for a while without seeing my friends. With the classrooms closed there were more possibilities of hiding from them, although the truth is, in a city as small as Gerona, there weren’t really that many either and it wasn’t easy to drop out of circulation, which is what I needed to do so my friends would forget about me. I had to avoid bumping into them in the neighbourhood, avoid the places we used to hang out, avoid going near Batista’s place on La Rutlla, even avoid or evade visits or phone calls from Matías, who kept inviting me to come out with them, probably to ease his guilty conscience and hide the actual harassment they were subjecting me to behind his apparent generosity. Anyway: my plan that summer was to go outside as little as possible until August when we’d go away on holiday, and to spend those weeks staying in reading and watching TV. That was the idea. But the reality is that, no matter how dejected or cowardly, a sixteen-year-old kid is incapable of spending all day at home, or at least I was incapable of it. So I soon started venturing out into the street, and one afternoon I went into the Vilaró games arcade.

‘That was where I saw Zarco for the first time. The Vilaró arcade was on Bonastruc de Porta Street, still in La Devesa neighbourhood, across from the railway overpass. It was one of those amusement arcades for teenagers that proliferated in the seventies and eighties. What I remember of that one is a big warehouse with bare walls and a six-lane Scalextric track; I also remember several table-football games, a few Space Invaders consoles and six or seven pinball machines lined up against one of the side walls; at the back there was a drinks machine and the washrooms, and at the entrance was the glass-walled booth where Señor Tomàs sat, a stooped, balding, round-bellied old man who was only distracted from his crossword-puzzle books by the odd practical problem (a jammed machine, a clogged toilet) or, in the case of an altercation, to throw out the troublemakers or re-establish order with his shrill voice. I used to go there with my friends, but more or less since Batista showed up I’d stopped going; my friends had too and, maybe for that reason, it seemed like a safe place, like the hole where a shell had just landed during a bombardment.

‘The afternoon I met Zarco I’d arrived at the arcade not long after Señor Tomàs opened up and started playing my favourite pinball machine — Rocky Balboa. A good machine: five balls, an extra ball for not many points and at the end bonus points that let you make the next level easily. For a while I was the only one playing in the empty place, but soon a group of kids came in and headed over to the Scalextric track. A little while later a couple more showed up. A guy and a girl, who looked older than sixteen but younger than nineteen, and my first impression when I saw them was that they seemed like they might be related somehow, but mostly that they were a couple of tough charnegos, from the outskirts, maybe even quinquis or delinquents. Señor Tomàs sensed the threat as soon as they walked past his window. Hey, you two, he called after them, opening the door to his booth. Where’re you going? They both stopped short. What’s up, chief? asked the guy, raising his hands as if offering to be searched; he wasn’t smiling, but gave the impression that the situation amused him. He said: We just want to have a game. Can we? Señor Tomàs looked them both up and down with suspicion, and when he finished his examination said something that I didn’t quite catch; then realized what it was: I don’t want any trouble. Anyone who gives me trouble is out. Is that clear? Absolutely, said the guy, gesturing in a conciliatory way and lowering his hands. Don’t worry about us, boss. Señor Tomàs seemed to be half satisfied with the reply, returned to his booth and must have gone back to his crossword puzzle while the pair walked into the arcade.’

‘It was them.’

‘Yes: the guy was Zarco; the girl was Tere.’

‘Tere was Zarco’s girlfriend?’

‘Good question: if I’d known the answer in time I would have saved myself a lot of trouble; I’ll come to that later. The thing is that, like Señor Tomàs, as soon as I saw Zarco and Tere walk in I immediately felt wary, felt that from this moment on anything might happen in the arcade, and my first instinct was to abandon Rocky Balboa and split.

‘I stayed. I tried to forget the pair, act like they weren’t there, and carry on playing. I didn’t manage it, and a moment later felt a slap on my shoulder that made me stagger. What’s up, Gafitas? asked Zarco, taking my place at the controls of the machine. He looked me in my bespectacled eyes with his very blue ones, spoke with a husky voice, had a centre parting in his hair and wore a tight denim jacket over a tight beige T-shirt. He repeated, defiantly, What’s up? I was scared. Holding up my hands I said: I just finished. I turned to leave, but at that moment Tere stepped in my way and my face was a handspan from hers. My first impression was surprise; my second, of being completely dazzled. Like Zarco, Tere was very thin, dark, not very tall, with that springy outdoors air quinquis used to have back then. She had straight dark hair and cruel green eyes, and a beauty spot beside her nose. Her whole body radiated the composure of a young woman who was very sure of herself, except for one tic: her left leg moved up and down like a piston. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and her handbag strap crossed her chest. Going already? she asked, smiling with her full, strawberry-red lips. I couldn’t answer because Zarco grabbed my arm and forced me to turn back around. You stay right there, Gafitas, he ordered, and started playing pinball on the Rocky Balboa machine.

‘He wasn’t very good at it, so the game was soon over. Shit, he said, punching the machine. He looked at me furiously, but before he could say anything Tere laughed, pushed him aside and put a coin in the slot. Grumbling, Zarco leaned on the table right next to me watching Tere play. Both of them commented on the game without paying any attention to me, although every once in a while, between one ball and the next, Tere would glance over at me out of the corner of her eye. People kept coming in and out of the arcade; Señor Tomàs came out of his booth more often than usual. Gradually I began to calm down, but was still a bit jittery and didn’t dare leave. Tere didn’t take long to finish her game either. When she did she stepped back from the machine and pointed at it. Your turn, she said. I didn’t open my mouth, didn’t move. What’s the matter, Gafitas? Zarco asked. You don’t want to play any more? I kept quiet. He added: Cat got your tongue? No, I answered. So? he insisted. I’ve run out of money, I said. Zarco looked at me curiously. You’re out of cash? he asked. I nodded. Really? he asked again. I nodded again. How much did you have? I told him the truth. Fuck, Tere, Zarco laughed. That wouldn’t be enough for me and you to wipe our asses with. Tere didn’t laugh; she stared at me. Zarco shoved me aside again and said: Well, if you ain’t got cash, you’re fucked.

‘He put some more coins in the machine and started a new game. As he played he started talking to me; or rather: he started interrogating me. He asked me how old I was and I told him. He asked me where I lived and I told him. He asked me if I went to school and I said yes and told him which school I went to. Then he asked me if I spoke Catalan; the question seemed strange to me, but I answered yes again. After that he asked me if I came to the arcade often and if I knew Señor Tomàs and what time the place opened and what time it closed and other similar questions, which I don’t remember specifically, but I do remember answering them or answering as far as I could. I also remember that his last question was whether I needed money, and I didn’t know how to answer that. Zarco answered for me: If you do, tell me. Come to La Font and tell me. We’ll talk business. Zarco swore at a ball that got past him and punched the machine again; then he asked me: Do you or don’t you, Gafitas? I didn’t answer; before I could a tall blond guy in a Fred Perry polo shirt who’d just walked into the arcade came over. The guy said hi to Zarco, whispered with him for a moment and then the two of them went outside. Tere stood there looking at me. I noticed her eyes again, her mouth, the mole beside her nose, and I remember thinking she was the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen. Will you come? she asked. Where? I asked. To La Font, she answered. I asked what La Font was and Tere told me it was a bar in the district and I understood that the district was the red-light district. Tere asked me again if I’d go to La Font; although I was sure I wasn’t going to, I said: I don’t know. But then quickly added: I probably will. Tere smiled and stroked the beauty spot beside her nose with one finger; then she pointed at Rocky Balboa and, before following Zarco and the guy in the Fred Perry shirt, said: You’ve got three balls left.

‘That was our first meeting and that’s how it went. Left on my own I breathed a sigh of relief and, I don’t know whether for pleasure or because I thought Zarco and Tere might still be hanging around outside the arcade and I didn’t want to risk running into them again, I started playing the balls left in the machine. I’d just begun when Señor Tomàs came over. Do you know who those kids were, son? he asked, pointing at the door. He was obviously referring to Zarco and Tere; I said no. What were you talking about? he asked. I explained. Señor Tomàs clicked his tongue and made me repeat the explanation. He seemed anxious, and after a moment he went away mumbling something. The next day I arrived at the arcade in the late afternoon. When I passed the booth on my way in, Señor Tomàs rapped on the glass with his knuckles and asked me to wait; when he came out he put a hand on my shoulder. Hey, son, he began. Would you be interested in a job? The question took me by surprise. What job? I asked. I need a helper, he said. He gestured vaguely around the whole place before making his offer: You help me close up every night and in exchange I’ll give you ten free plays a day.

‘I didn’t even need to give it a second thought. I accepted, and from then on my afternoons began to follow a single pattern. I arrived at the Vilaró arcade as soon as it opened, sometimes a little later, played my ten free games on whichever machine I felt like playing (almost always the Rocky Balboa) and, around eight-thirty or nine in the evening, I’d help Señor Tomàs close up: while he opened the machines and took out the coins, counted the day’s takings and filled in a sort of inventory, I made sure there was no one left in the main part of the building or in the washrooms, and then between the two of us we pulled the metal shutters down over the door; when we finished, Señor Tomàs got onto his Mobylette with the money and I walked home. That was all. Do I mean by this that I soon forgot about Zarco and Tere? Not at all. At first I was afraid they’d show up at the arcade again, but after a few days I was surprised to find myself wishing they would, or at least that Tere would. It never crossed my mind, however, to accept Zarco’s invitation, to go into the red-light district one afternoon and turn up at La Font: at sixteen years of age I had an approximate but sufficient idea of what the district was, and I didn’t like the idea of going there, or maybe I was just scared. In any case, I soon convinced myself that I’d met Zarco and Tere because some unlikely coincidence had made them stray outside their territory; I also convinced myself that, as well as unlikely, the coincidence was unrepeatable, and that I would not see them again.

‘The same day I arrived at this conclusion I had a terrible scare. I was on my way home after having helped Señor Tomàs close the arcade when I saw a group of kids walking towards me on Joaquim Vayreda. There were four of them, coming from Caterina Albert, on the same side of the street as me and, in spite of the fact that they were still quite a way off and it was getting dark, I recognized them immediately: it was Batista, Matías and two of the Boix brothers, Joan and Dani. I wanted to just keep walking along, but before I could take another two or three steps I felt my legs buckling and I started to sweat. Trying not to give in to panic, I began to cross the street; before I reached the other side I saw that Batista was doing the same. Then I couldn’t help it: instinctively I took off running, reached the kerb and turned right down an alley that led into La Devesa; just as I got to the park Batista jumped me; he brought me down and, kneeling on my back and twisting my arm behind me, immobilized me on the ground. Where’re you going, asshole? he asked. He was panting like a dog; I was panting too, face down in the dirt of La Devesa. I’d lost my glasses. Looking around desperately for them, I asked Batista to let me up, but instead he asked me the same question again. Home, I said. Through here? Batista asked, digging his knee into my back and twisting my arm till I screamed. You’re a fucking liar.

‘At that moment I heard Matías and the Boix brothers catch up. From the ground, in the leaden light shining from a streetlamp, I saw a blurry confusion of jean-clad legs and feet in sneakers or sandals. Nearby I caught sight of my glasses: they didn’t look broken. I begged them to pick them up and someone who wasn’t Batista picked them up but didn’t give them to me. Then Matías and the Boix brothers asked what was going on. Nothing, said Batista. This fucking catalanufo, he’s always lying. I didn’t lie, I managed to say in my defence. I just said I was going home. See? said Batista, twisting my arm harder. Another lie! I screamed again. Let him go, Matías said. He hasn’t done anything to us. I felt Batista turn to look at him without letting go of me. He hasn’t done anything? he asked. Are you a dickhead or what? If he hasn’t done anything why does he take off running as soon as he sees us, eh? And why has he been hiding? And why does he keep lying? He paused and added: Well, Dumbo, tell the truth for a change: where were you coming from? I didn’t say anything; as well as my back and arm, my face was hurting too, pressed against the ground. See? said Batista. He keeps quiet. And a guy keeps quiet when he has something to hide. Just like a guy who runs away. Yes or no? Let me go, please, I whined. Batista laughed. As well as a liar you’re a dickhead, he said. You think we don’t know where you’ve been hiding? You think we’re idiots? Eh? What do you think? Batista seemed to be waiting for an answer; suddenly he twisted my arm even harder and asked: What did you say? I hadn’t said anything and I said I hadn’t said anything. Yes you did, said Batista. I heard you call me a son of a bitch. I said: That’s not true. Batista brought his face up to my face as he twisted my arm nearly out of its socket; I thought he was going to break it. Feeling his breath on my face I screamed. Batista paid no attention to my screams. Are you calling me a liar? he asked again. Matías intervened again, tried to ask Batista to leave me alone; Batista cut him off: told him to shut up and called him an idiot. Straight away he asked me again if I was calling him a liar. I said no. Unexpectedly, this answer seemed to pacify him, and after a second or two I felt the pressure ease up on my arm. Then, without another word, Batista let me go and stood up.

‘As quickly as possible I did the same, brushing the dirt off my cheek with the palm of my hand. Matías handed me my glasses, but before I could take them Batista grabbed them. I stood looking at him. He was smiling; in the darkness of the park, under the plane trees, his features appeared vaguely feline. You want them? he said, holding out my glasses. As I reached out my hand towards them, he pulled them away. Then he held them out again. If you want them, lick my shoes, he said. I stared back at him for several seconds, and then looked at Matías and the Boix brothers, who were watching me in expectation. Then I knelt down in front of Batista, licked his shoes — they tasted of leather and dust — stood up again and stared back at him. His eyes seemed to sparkle for an instant before he let out a snort that sounded like laughter or a laugh that sounded like a snort. You’re a coward, he finally said, throwing my glasses on the ground. You disgust me.

‘I spent the night tossing and turning in bed while trying not to feel completely ashamed of the incident with Batista and trying to find some relief for my humiliation. I didn’t manage either one, and after that I decided not to return to the Vilaró arcade. I feared that Batista had been telling the truth and knew where I was hiding and would come looking for me. What might have happened if he had found me? you’ll be wondering. Nothing, you’ll say to yourself, and I suppose you’d probably be right; but fear is not rational, and I was afraid. Whatever the case, soon loneliness and boredom overcame my fear, and two or three days later I went back to the arcade. When he saw me Señor Tomàs asked what had happened and I told him I’d been sick; I asked him if our deal still held. Of course, kid, he answered.

‘That afternoon something happened that changed my life. I’d spent quite a while playing the Rocky Balboa machine when I was startled by a group of people bursting into the place. At first I thought, in panic, that it was Batista and my friends; with relief, almost with joy, I soon saw that it was Zarco and Tere. This time they weren’t alone: they were accompanied by two guys; this time Señor Tomàs didn’t stop them on their way in: he just watched them from the door of his booth, his hands on his hips and his crossword-puzzle book in one of them. After a moment, the relief and joy faded and the worry returned, especially when the four recent arrivals made straight for me. What’s up, Gafitas? asked Zarco. Not planning to come to La Font? I stepped back from the machine and ceded the controls to him; he stopped short; pointing at me with a smile he turned to the two guys: See? This is my Gafitas: I don’t even have to say anything before he does what I want him to. While Zarco took over the game I’d started, Tere said hi. She said she’d been waiting for me at La Font and asked why I hadn’t gone there. The other two guys watched me with interest. Later I found out they were called Gordo and Tío: Gordo, or Fatso, because he was so skinny he always seemed to be in profile; Tío, because that’s what everyone called him. Gordo wore tight bellbottoms and had wavy, shoulder-length hair that looked like it was kept in place with hairspray; Tío was shorter than him and, even though he was the oldest of all of them, had a sort of childlike air about him, his mouth always half-open, his jaw a little loose. I answered Tere’s question with excuses, but nobody paid any attention to my reply: Zarco was concentrating on the Rocky Balboa machine and Gordo and Tío were playing the pinball machine next to it; as for Tere, she too soon seemed to lose interest in me. But I stayed beside her anyway while her friends played, not daring or not wanting to walk away, listening to the comments the four of them made, watching Señor Tomàs go in and out of his booth and watching the regulars glance over at us out of the corners of their eyes.

‘Zarco had finished his turn and given his place to Tere when the guy in the Fred Perry shirt came back into the arcade. Zarco exchanged a few words with him and Gordo and Tío stopped playing and the four of them went outside together. Tere went on playing pinball. Now, instead of looking at the table all the time, I looked at her every once in a while, furtively, and at a certain moment she caught me; as a cover-up I asked who the Fred Perry guy was. A dealer, she answered. Then she asked me if I smoked. I said yes. Hash, Tere clarified; I knew what hash was (just as I knew what a dealer was), but I’d never tried it and didn’t say anything. Tere guessed the truth. Do you want to try it? she asked. I shrugged. If you want to try some come to La Font, Tere said. In a pause between one ball and the next, she looked at me and asked: Are you going to come or not? I had no intention of going, but I didn’t want to tell her. I looked at the image of Rocky Balboa looming over the pinball table; I’d seen it a thousand times: Rocky, muscular and triumphant, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts with the American flag printed on them, raising his arms to the clamouring stadium while a defeated boxer lies in the ring at his feet. I looked at this image and remembered myself licking Batista’s shoes and felt the shame of my humiliation all over again. As if fearing that the silence could reveal what I was feeling, I hurried to answer Tere’s question with another question: Do you go every day? I meant to La Font; Tere understood. More or less, she answered, and launched the next ball; when that one got swallowed by the machine too she asked again: Why? Are you going to come? I don’t know, I said, adding: Probably not. Why not? Tere insisted. I shrugged again, and she kept playing.

‘I kept looking at her. I pretended to look at the pinball table, but I was looking at her. Tere noticed. The proof was that she hadn’t even finished playing that ball when she said: Not bad-looking, am I, Gafitas? I blushed; I immediately regretted having blushed. The arcade was very noisy, but I had the impression that in the centre of the uproar was an absolute silence, which only I could hear. I pretended I hadn’t really heard her question. Tere didn’t repeat it; she finished playing the ball unhurriedly and, leaving the game half-finished, took me by the hand and said: C’mon.

‘Have I already told you that some of the things that happened that summer feel like things I’ve dreamt rather than things I’ve experienced? What happened next was one of those. Tere dragged me to the back of the arcade, dodging the people that were beginning to fill the place, and without letting go of my hand we went into the women’s washroom. It was exactly the same as the men’s — there was a long hallway with a big mirror on the wall, opposite the line of stalls — and at that moment it was almost empty: just a couple of girls in high heels and miniskirts applying mascara in front of the mirror. When Tere and I came in, the girls looked at us, but didn’t say anything. Tere opened the door of the first stall and invited me in. Where are we going? I asked. In here, she answered. Disconcerted, I looked at the two girls, who were still looking at us. What? Tere hissed at them. Take a picture; it’ll last longer.

‘Startled, the girls turned back to the mirror. Tere pushed me into the stall, stepped in behind me, closed the door and bolted it. The stall was a minuscule space where only a toilet and tank fit; the floor was cement and the walls wood and they didn’t reach all the way to the floor. I leaned back against one of them; Tere pushed her handbag around to her back and gave me an order: Drop your trousers. What? I asked. Tere’s reply was to kiss me on the mouth: a long, dense, wet kiss, with her tongue twirling around mine. It was the first time in my life that a woman had kissed me. Drop your trousers, she repeated. Like a sleepwalker I unbuckled my belt and undid my zipper. Pants too, said Tere. I obeyed. When I finished, Tere took me in her hand. And now pay attention, Gafitas, she said. Then she crouched down, put it in her mouth and started to suck. It was all over very quickly, because, although I tried not to, I came almost immediately. Tere stood up and kissed me on the lips; now her mouth tasted of semen. Did you like that? she asked, still holding my exhausted dick in her hand. I managed to mumble something. Then Tere smiled fleetingly but perfectly, let go of me and, before walking out of the stall, said: Tomorrow I’ll be expecting you at La Font.

‘I don’t know how long I stayed there with my pants round my ankles, trying to recover from the shock, or how long it took me to get dressed again. But when I came out of the stall the washroom was empty. And when I came out of the washroom, Tere was not in the arcade; Zarco wasn’t there either, Gordo and Tío had come back in. I went to the door, leaned outside and looked up and down the street, but I didn’t see anybody. Señor Tomàs appeared beside me. Where did you get to? he asked. I looked at him: he had his hands in his pockets, and he hadn’t noticed that the pressure of his gut had popped two buttons of his shirt; a clump of curly, grey hair poked through the opening. Before I could answer he asked another question: Hey, kid, are you all right? You don’t look so good. I told him I was fine but that I’d just thrown up in the washroom, though I felt better now, and that maybe I wasn’t entirely recovered. Well, you take care, kid, Señor Tomàs warned me. You don’t want a relapse. Then he asked me what I’d been talking about with Zarco and Tere and the others and I told him that time we hadn’t talked about anything. Señor Tomàs clicked his tongue. I don’t trust those quinquis one bit, he said. Then he said: Don’t take your eyes off them if they come back, OK? I said OK and, looking at the double row of cars parked under the train overpass, for a moment I thought I’d never see Tere again and asked: Do you think they’ll be back? I don’t know, answered Señor Tomàs; and as we walked back to his booth added: With those people you never know.

‘The next day I went to La Font.’

Chapter 2

‘Yes: I’m a police officer. Why did I join the police? I don’t know. I’m sure my father being a Civil Guard had something to do with it, though. And besides, I imagine at the time I was as idealistic and fond of novelty as any other kid my age; you know what I mean: in the movies the cop was the good guy who saved the good people from the bad guys, and that’s what I wanted to be.

‘The fact is that at the age of sixteen I prepared for the exam to become an inspector of the General Police Corps, the secret police. I was a terrible student, but for nine months I studied like crazy and at the end of that time I sat the exam and passed it and even got a good grade. How do you like that? To do my practical training I had to move from Cáceres to Madrid; I took a room in a house on Jacometrezo from which I came and went daily to the Police Academy, at number five Miguel Ángel Street. At that time I began to realize what this job actually entailed. And you know what? I wasn’t disappointed; well, some things did disappoint me — you know, the obligatory routines, stupid colleagues, oceans of red tape, things like that — but on the other hand I made a discovery that should have surprised me a lot and didn’t surprise me at all, and it was that being a police officer was exactly like I’d always thought it was going to be. I already told you I was an idealist, and such a stubborn idealist that for a long time I believed my job was the best job in the world; now that I’ve spent almost forty years doing it I know it’s the worst, apart from all the rest of them.

‘What were we talking about? Oh, yes. My practical training. I found Madrid a bit intimidating, in part because I’d always lived in a small city and in part because it was a difficult time and the veterans of the force with whom I patrolled the city and I were always coming across altercations in the streets: one day it was an illegal demonstration, the next it would be a terrorist attack, and then another day a bank robbery. Or whatever. The thing is I knew almost immediately that level of commotion was too much for me and that neither Madrid nor any other big city was right for me at the time.

‘That is one of the reasons behind the decision I took when I finished my practical training: requesting a position here, in Gerona. I both did and didn’t want to go back to Cáceres. I liked the city, but I didn’t like the idea of going back to live there again one bit, and much less with my parents. And then I thought Gerona could be a good solution to that wanting and not wanting, because it wasn’t Cáceres but it was very similar — both were tranquil, historic provincial capitals, with a large old quarter and all that — and I thought that would make me not feel such a stranger in Gerona; I must have also thought I could get a head start there before going home or choosing a better posting, doing easier and less demanding work than I would have had to do in a big city. Besides (this might seem stupid to you but it was very important), I don’t know why but I was very curious about the Catalan people, especially the people of Gerona. I’m lying, I do know: I was curious because during my practical training I read Gerona, the novel by Galdós. Do you know it? It’s a portrait of the city during the siege by Napoleon’s troops. When I read it, forty years ago, I loved it; it was damn good: the total tragedy of war, the greatness of a whole city up in arms and defended by an iron-willed people, the heroism of General Álvarez de Castro, a character of mythic stature who refused to surrender the ruined and starving city to the French, and whom Galdós portrayed as the greatest patriot of his age. In 1974 I was only nineteen years old and things like that made an impression on me, so I thought Gerona would be the ideal place to start.

‘I requested Gerona and they sent me here.

‘I remember the day I arrived as if it were yesterday. I’d come on the train with five other new recruits and we went straight from the station to the Hotel Condal, where they had reserved rooms for us. It must have been seven or seven-thirty in the evening and, since it was February, night had already fallen and everything was dark. That was my first impression of Gerona: the sensation of darkness; the second was the sensation of damp; the third was the sensation of dirtiness; the fourth (and most intense) was the sensation of loneliness: a complete and absolute loneliness, such as I hadn’t even felt in my first days in Madrid, alone in my room in the boarding house on Jacometrezo. When we got to the hotel we unpacked, had a quick wash and went out to find some dinner. One of the other recruits was from Barcelona and knew the city, so we followed him. Looking for a restaurant we walked up Jaume I, crossed the Marquès de Camps and Sant Agustí Plazas, past the statue of Álvarez de Castro and the city’s defenders, which I didn’t see or didn’t notice that night; then we crossed the Onyar and in the dark could just barely make out its filthy water and the sadness of the façades overlooking the river, covered in clothes hung out to dry; then we wandered through the old city and walked the Rambla from bottom to top and crossed the Plaza de Cataluña and, when we were about to give up and say to hell with it all and go to bed on empty stomachs after that depressing stroll and that exhausting trip, we came across a place that was open very close to the hotel. It was the Rhin Bar. There, after haggling with the owner, who was closing and didn’t want to serve us, we drank a glass of milk. So I managed to go to bed that night not completely starving, and as I did so I thought I’d made a mistake and that as soon as I could I’d request a transfer and leave that godforsaken city.

‘I never did: I didn’t request a transfer or return to Cáceres or ever leave this city. Now it’s my city. My wife’s from here, my children are from here, my father and mother are buried here, and I love it and hate it more or less the way a person loves and hates what matters most to him. Although, on reflection, it’s not true: the truth is that I love this city a lot more than I hate it; how do you think I’ve put up with it for so long? Sometimes I even feel proud of it, because I’ve done as much as the next guy to make it what it is today; and believe me: it’s a lot better than it was when I got here. . Back then, as I’ve already told you, it was a horrible city, but still, I soon got used to it. I lived with my five friends in a rented flat on Montseny Street, in the Santa Eugènia neighbourhood, and I worked at the station on Jaume I, near Sant Agustí Plaza. Gerona has always been as calm as a millpond, but it was even more so back then, when Franco hadn’t yet died, so as I’d expected, my work was much easier and less dangerous than what I’d done during my practical training. I was under the command of the deputy superintendent in charge of the Criminal Investigation Squad (Deputy Superintendent Martínez) and a veteran inspector in charge of one of the two groups the squad was divided into (Police Inspector Vives). Martínez was a good person and a good cop, but I soon discovered that Vives, who could be a lot of fun, deep down was a brainless thug. Why should I lie to you: there were lots of cops like that then. But luckily none of the guys with whom I had to share the flat and the squad, because I was living with them all hours of the day: we spent our mornings at the station, had lunch at Can Lloret, Can Barnet or El Ánfora, in the afternoons we walked our beats, at night we slept under the same roof and on our days off we tried to amuse ourselves together, something that in the Gerona of those days was almost more difficult than doing a good job. It’s true that the resources the Squad had at its disposal were very sparse (we only had, for example, two undercover cars, which everyone recognized anyway because they were always parked in front of the station), but we didn’t really need that much more either, because there was very little crime in the city and it was all concentrated in the red-light district, and that made it pretty easy to keep it under surveillance: all the crooks congregated in the district, all the jobs were cooked up in the district, and in the district, sooner or later, everyone knew everything about everyone. So all we needed to do was pass through the red-light district every evening and every night to control most of what went on in the city without too much difficulty.’

‘And that’s where you met El Zarco?’

‘Exactly: that’s where I met him.’

Chapter 3

‘As I told you before: at the age of sixteen I’d heard of the red-light district, although the only thing I knew about it was that it was not a highly recommended place and was on the other side of the river, in the old part of the city. In spite of my ignorance, the first time I went to La Font I didn’t get lost.

‘That afternoon I took the Sant Agustí bridge across the Onyar, and once I was in the old quarter I turned left on Ballesteries Street, continued up Calderas and, as I left the Church of Sant Fèlix behind on my right and turned into La Barca Street, realized I’d arrived in the district. I realized that from the stench of garbage and piss rising up like a thick waft from the paving stones heated by the siesta-hour sunshine; also from the people at the corner of Portal de la Barca, taking advantage of the stingy shade those decrepit buildings cast: an old man with sucked-in cheeks, a couple of sinister-looking adults, three or four quinquis in their twenties, all smoking and holding glasses of wine or bottles of beer. I passed them without looking at them and once I’d crossed Portal de la Barca I saw the Sargento bar; next door to it was La Font. I stopped at the door and looked through the glass. It was a small place, long and narrow, with a bar on the left and a space that ran along in front of it towards the back where it opened out into a little room. The place was almost empty: there were a few tables in the little back room, but I didn’t see anybody sitting at any of them; a couple of customers were chatting by the bar; behind the bar a woman was rinsing out glasses in the sink; above the woman, stuck on the wall, a sign read: “Smoking joints strictly forbidden”. I didn’t dare go in and kept going along La Barca to the corner of Bellaire, the border of the district. I hung around there for a good long while, between the railway overpass and Sant Pere Church, wondering whether I should go home or try again, until at some point I gathered my courage, returned to La Font and went in.

‘There were quite a few more people in the bar now, although not Tere or Zarco. A bit intimidated, I planted myself at the end of the bar, near the door, and the landlady — a grim-faced redhead in a stain-covered apron — soon came over and asked me what I wanted; I asked for Zarco and she said he hadn’t arrived yet; then I asked if she knew when he was going to get there and she told me she didn’t; then she stood there looking at me. What’s wrong? she finally said. Aren’t you going to order anything? I asked for a Coca-Cola, paid for it and began to wait.

‘It wasn’t long before Tere and Zarco showed up. As soon as they came through the door of La Font they saw me; as soon as they saw me, Tere’s face lit up. Zarco patted me on the back. Fuck, Gafitas! he said. About time, eh? They took me to the back of the place and we sat at a table where two young guys were sitting: one, freckled and with almond-shaped eyes, they called Chino; the other chain-smoked constantly and was very small and very nervous, had a face full of pimples and they called him Colilla, or cigarette butt. Zarco made me sit between him and Tere, and while he was ordering beers from the landlady, Lina appeared, a blonde in a miniskirt and fuchsia-coloured sneakers who, I later found out, was Gordo’s girlfriend. No one introduced me to anyone and no one said anything to me: Tere was talking to Lina, Colilla and Chino talked to Zarco; Gordo and Tío didn’t even give any sign of recognizing me when they showed up after a while. I felt totally out of place, but never for a minute did I consider leaving.

‘A little while later a slightly older guy came over to sit with us. He was wearing cowboy boots, very tight flared jeans and his shirt unbuttoned; a gold chain shone on his chest. The guy sat astride a chair, beside Zarco, leaned his forearms on the chairback and pointed at me: And this posh kid? Everybody shut up; I suddenly noticed eight pairs of eyes staring at me. Zarco broke the silence. Fuck, Guille! he admonished. He’s the guy from Vilaró: I told you he’d show up eventually. Guille made a face like he didn’t know what Zarco was talking about. Zarco was about to go on when the landlady appeared with more beers and with a kid they called Drácula. When the landlady left (and Drácula stayed: they called him that because one of his eye teeth stuck out over his lip), Zarco continued: Go on, Gafitas, tell Guille what you told me the other day. Although I guessed what he meant, I asked him what he meant. What you told me about the arcade, he said. I told him; flattered by my momentary prominence, maybe trying to score points in front of the group (or just in front of Tere), I added that now I was helping Señor Tomàs close the place. Zarco asked me a couple of questions, among them how much money Señor Tomàs collected each day. I don’t know, I said, honestly. More or less, Zarco insisted. I said a figure that was too high, and Zarco looked at Guille and I looked at Tere and at that moment I guessed I shouldn’t have said what I’d just said.

‘I soon forgot my hunch, and spent the rest of the afternoon with them. After my starring moment on account of the arcade and Señor Tomàs, I barely opened my mouth again; all I did was try to go unnoticed and listen while they drank beer at La Font and went out to smoke joints sitting on the rail of the bridge over Galligants, in the Sant Pere Plaza. That was how I found out three things: the first is that Zarco and Tere lived in the prefabs (as I later learned, the rest of them lived in Pont Major, Vilarroja and Germans Sàbat, but all of them or almost all of them had lived in the prefabs and most of them knew each other from there); the second is that, apart from Zarco, who was from Barcelona and had only been living in Gerona for a few months, they were all from Gerona or had been living here for years; and the third is that Zarco, Guille, Gordo and Drácula had all spent time in reform school (as I later learned, between the previous summer and the winter of that very year Zarco had been in Barcelona’s Modelo Prison, even though he hadn’t yet turned sixteen and was still a minor). As for the rest of it, until that day I had never tried hashish, so towards evening, after the feeling of well-being and uncontrollable laughter that a couple of tokes provoked had passed, I started to feel bad and, while we were on our way back to La Font from Sant Pere Plaza, I slipped away from the group and walked down Bellaire Street away from the district.

‘Walking through La Devesa did me good. When I arrived at the arcade it was still open, and as I walked past Señor Tomàs’ booth I waved to him, but didn’t stop to talk. I went directly to the washrooms; I looked at myself in the mirror: I was pale and my eyes were red. I still felt like I was floating in a thick fog; to clear my head I urinated, took off my glasses, washed my face and hands. Then, as I looked back at myself in the mirror again, I remembered Zarco and Guille’s conversation about Señor Tomàs and the arcade. On my way out of the washroom I bumped straight into the old man; as if he’d caught me doing something wrong, I was startled. What’s wrong? asked Señor Tomàs. Have you been sick again? I said no. Well, you still look ill, son, said Señor Tomàs. You should go to the doctor. We’d started to walk towards his booth. The arcade was still full of people, but Señor Tomàs announced: We’ll close in ten minutes. At that moment I thought I should tell him what I’d told Zarco and Guille and the rest of them at La Font, and what I was starting to suspect about them; only then did I realize that maybe he had suspected it much earlier than me, since the first afternoon Zarco and Tere showed up at the arcade, and that this was precisely why he’d offered to make me his helper. Even so, I didn’t dare confess my suspicions — after all, doing so would have also meant confessing that I’d been with Zarco and the others and in a sense had turned into their accomplice, or at least that I’d said too much — and ten minutes later I helped him close up.

‘That same night I had my first fight with my father. I mean the first more or less serious fight, of course, because we’d already had quite a few unimportant fights; not many, really: up till then I’d behaved like a good boy, and the one who had fights in my house was my sister, who was the eldest (and who, therefore, because I was a good kid and never confronted my parents, accused me of being a coward, a hypocrite, faint-hearted and accommodating). But over the last little while things had begun to change and the run-ins between my parents and me — mostly between my father and me — had become habitual; I suppose it was logical: after all I was a teenager; I suppose as well that, since nothing is as satisfactory as being able to blame someone else for all our woes, part of me blamed my parents for my troubles, or at least all the trouble Batista was giving me, as if I’d arrived at the conclusion that the inevitable result of my meek charnego upbringing was the horror in which Batista had me imprisoned, or as if this horror were part of the natural logic of things and Batista was just doing to me what, without my knowing or anyone having told me, his father had always done to my father.

‘I don’t know. The thing is that for months a wordless grudge against my parents had been growing in my guts, a silent fury that surfaced then, the first day I drank a few beers and smoked joints with Zarco’s gang. I have a sort of hazy memory of what happened that night, maybe because during that summer there were various similar episodes and in my memory they all tend to blend into a single one: one of those interchangeable quarrels between fathers and sons in which everyone says brutal things and everyone’s right. What I do remember is that when I got home it was after nine and my parents and my sister were having dinner. You’re home late, said my father. I mumbled an apology and sat down at the table; my mother served my dinner and sat down again. They were eating with the television news on, though the volume was so low that it barely interfered with conversation. I began to eat without lifting my eyes from my plate, except to look at the television screen every once in a while. My sister was absorbing my parents’ attention: she’d just finished high school at the Vicens Vives Institute and, while preparing to start university the following year, she had a summer job in a pharmaceutical lab. When my sister stopped talking (or maybe just paused), my father turned to me and asked how I was; avoiding his gaze, I said I was fine. Then he asked me where I’d been and I said outside. Oh oh oh, my sister intervened, as if she couldn’t stand not being the centre of attention for every second of the meal. But look at the eyes on you! What’ve you been smoking? A hush fell over the dining room, disturbed only by the sound of the television, where there was news of an attack by ETA. Shut up, you idiot, I said before I could stop myself. There’s no need to insult anybody, said my mother. Besides, your sister’s right, she added, putting her hand on my forehead. Your eyes are red. Are you feeling all right? Pulling my forehead away I said yes and kept eating.

‘Out of the corner of my eye I saw my sister observing me with her eyebrows arched mockingly; before she or my mother could add anything, my father asked: Who were you with? I didn’t answer. He insisted: Have you been drinking? Have you been smoking? I thought: What’s it to you? But I didn’t say it, and I suddenly felt a great serenity, a great self-confidence, just as if all the confusion of the beers and the joints had cleared in one second and had left only a lucid form of rapture. What is this? I asked without getting upset. An interrogation? My father’s expression hardened. Is something going on with you? he asked. Let it go, Andrés, my mother chimed in, trying again to restore the peace. Keep quiet, please, my father cut her off. Now I was staring back at him; my father insisted. I asked you what’s going on. Nothing, I answered. Then why don’t you answer me? he asked. Because I don’t have anything to say, I replied. My father kept quiet and turned towards my mother, who half-closed her eyes and begged him in silence to let it go; my sister was watching the scene with barely disguised satisfaction. Look, Ignacio, said my father. I don’t know what’s going on with you lately, but I don’t like you behaving the way you’ve been behaving: if you’re going to keep living in this house. . And I don’t like to be lectured, I interrupted; then I continued, fired-up: When did you start drinking? When did you start smoking? At the age of fourteen? Fifteen? I’m sixteen, so leave me alone. My father didn’t interrupt me; but, when I finished speaking, he left his cutlery on his plate and said without raising his voice: The next time you speak to me like that, I’ll knock your teeth out. It felt like a blow to the chest and throat, I looked at my almost empty plate and then at the TV: on the screen, the Minister of the Interior — a man with square-framed glasses and a severe countenance — was condemning the terrorist attack on behalf of the government. As I stood up from the table I murmured: Fuck right off.

‘My father’s shouts chased me to my room. My sister was the first to come to offer her understanding and advice; naturally, I ignored her. I ignored my mother too, although she seemed truly worried. Lying on my bed, trying in vain to read, I felt too proud of myself, and wondered why I wasn’t capable of confronting Batista as serenely as I confronted my father; before falling asleep I promised myself, full of resolve, that the next day I’d go to La Font and speak to Zarco to ask him not to bother Señor Tomàs, and then I’d speak to Tere to ask her if she was going out with Zarco: if the answer was no, I promised myself, I’d ask her to go out with me.

‘The next day I went to La Font without stopping in at the arcade. At the same table as the day before were Gordo, Lina, Drácula and Chino, who didn’t seem surprised when I joined them. Zarco and Tere arrived a little while later. Yesterday you left without saying goodbye, said Tere, sitting down beside me. I didn’t think you’d come back. I apologized with the truth — or half the truth: I told her I’d gone to close up the arcade — and remembered the double promise I’d made myself the night before. Feeling incapable of speaking to Zarco, but not to Tere, after a while I told Tere I wanted to speak to her. What about? she asked. Two things, I answered. Tere waited for me to begin. I nodded towards Zarco and the rest and said: Not here.

‘We went outside. Tere leaned on the wall beside the door to La Font, folded her arms and asked me what I wanted to talk about. I immediately knew I wasn’t brave enough to ask her if she was Zarco’s girlfriend. I decided to talk to her about the arcade and, after pressing up against the wall to let a drinks truck past that barely fit in La Barca Street, I asked her: Are you guys going to do something to Señor Tomàs? Who’s Señor Tomàs? asked Tere. The old man who runs the Vilaró arcade, I answered. Are you going to rob him? Tere looked surprised, she laughed and unfolded her arms. Where did you get that idea? she wanted to know. Yesterday Zarco asked me about the arcade, I answered. And the first day we met as well. So I thought that. . Second thing, Tere interrupted me. What? I asked. Second thing, she repeated. You told me you wanted to talk about two things, didn’t you? The first is fucking stupid; what’s the second? She stared at me with all the cruelty her eyes were capable of and her lips curved into a half-ironic half-contemptuous sneer; I wondered where the girl from the arcade washroom had gone and why she’d made me go to La Font, was glad I hadn’t asked her if she was going out with Zarco, and felt completely ridiculous. There is no second thing, I said. Tere shrugged and went back inside the bar.

‘We spent the rest of the afternoon as we had the previous afternoon, back and forth from La Font to the Galligants bridge, smoking and drinking. On one of these comings and goings Zarco grabbed my arm at the intersection of La Barca and Bellaire. Hey, Gafitas, he said, forcing me to stop. Tere told me you’re a bit pissed off. I watched Tere and the rest disappear down La Barca towards La Font. It was Friday and, although it hadn’t started to get dark yet, groups of drinkers were already beginning to arrive in the district. Zarco went on: Is it true you thought we were going to rip off the place in Vilaró? There was no sense in denying it, so I didn’t deny it. And where did you get that idea? he asked. I told him. He listened to me attentively, but I hadn’t finished talking when he let go of my arm and put his hand on my shoulder. Anyway, what if it is true? he asked. You told me you didn’t have money, right? Well that’s how you get money: you tell us how things work, we do the job and then you get your share of the take. He paused before concluding: There’s no risk. It’s a great deal. What more do you want? He stared at me waiting for my reply. Nothing, I answered. So why are you pissed off? he insisted. I didn’t know how to explain it to him. I explained: Well, I’m not really like you guys. Zarco smiled: a hard smile, showing off-white teeth. And what do you mean by that? he asked. Before answering I reflected. It means I don’t want a share, I said, and added quickly: I don’t want to make a deal. I don’t want anything to happen to the old man and it to be my fault. I don’t want you to rob him. Now Zarco’s expression turned uncertain and his eyes narrowed so much that they were reduced to two slits, just a touch of blue showing through. What’s the deal? he finally asked. The old man’s a mate of yours? More or less, I answered. Really? he insisted, opening his eyes wide. I nodded. Zarco took a few seconds to process my reply; then he took his hand off my shoulder and looked somewhat resigned and somewhat understanding. OK, he said in another tone of voice. If he’s your mate that changes things. Does that mean you guys aren’t going to do anything to the old man? I asked. Of course, Zarco answered, sticking his hands in his pockets. Friendship’s sacred, Gafitas. Don’t you think so?

‘I said I did. We were in the shade, but the air was still hot and beyond the sidewalk the sun was still beating down on the cobblestones. Behind Zarco, the Gerona bar was heaving. People kept arriving in the district. So there’s no job, Zarco decided. Mates are mates. I’ll tell Guille and the rest. They’ll understand. And if they don’t understand, fuck them: I’m the leader of this pack. Thanks, I said. Don’t thank me, said Zarco. You do owe me one, though. He took his right hand out of his pocket and pointed the long, dirty nail of his index finger at me while moving it up and down and adding: I scratch your back, you scratch mine. That said we went back to La Font. A while later, when I was going to leave the district without any further mention of the subject, Zarco grabbed me by the wrist and pointed at me again while Tere watched us. Don’t forget you owe me one, Gafitas, he said. And he repeated: I scratch your back, you scratch mine.

‘That night I made the decision not to return to La Font. I’d had enough: my two incursions into the district had entailed an enormous risk and had been about to lead to a calamity for Señor Tomàs; but most of all they’d been enough to convince me that Tere wasn’t the girl for me and that what happened between us in the washrooms at the arcade could never happen again. Although I’m not so sure of the last bit; I mean I’m not so sure that I was sure of that. Whatever the case, my impression was that I had nothing to show for my walk on the wild side, except the certainty that, on the other side of the river, there was a world that bore no relation to the one that I knew.

‘I spent the weekend between my house and the Vilaró arcade, reading and watching TV and playing the free games I’d accumulated on account of the help I gave Señor Tomàs, help I knew Señor Tomàs no longer needed, or rather that I hoped he didn’t need. On Monday I continued my new routine. In the afternoon I was at the arcade and at dusk I helped Señor Tomàs close up and said goodbye to him. Then, on my way home, just after I’d passed one of the columns that supported the railway overpass, somebody made a sound behind me. A cold shiver ran down my spine. I turned around; it wasn’t Batista: it was Tere. She was leaning against the overpass column smoking a cigarette. Hiya, Gafitas, she said. In two strides she was in front of me; she was wearing her usual sneakers and jeans, but it seemed like her handbag strap across her white T-shirt accentuated her chest more than ever. How are you? she asked. Fine, I said. She nodded and rubbed the mole beside her nose and asked: Aren’t you coming back to La Font? Of course I’m coming back, I lied. Tere looked at me inquisitively. I explained: It’s just that this weekend I was tied up. At the arcade? she asked. I said yes. Tere nodded again and took a drag of her cigarette; as she blew out the smoke she gestured behind her: How’s the old man? I understood that she meant Señor Tomàs and I said he was fine. That’s good, said Tere. I didn’t know you were friends. Zarco told me. She paused and then added: Does he know he owes you one? She meant Señor Tomàs again, but this time I didn’t say anything. Well he does, said Tere. You better believe he owes you one. You should have seen the stink Guille made. He wanted to do the arcade job whether anybody else wanted to or not. Luckily Zarco stopped him. If not for him, the old man would have had a rough time. Thanks to him and to you, of course. At that moment a train started to pass over our heads; the noise was deafening, and we kept quiet for a few seconds. When the sound of the train began to fade into the distance, Tere took a last drag of her cigarette; then she threw the butt on the ground, stepped on it and asked: What were we talking about? You lied to me, I improvised. What? asked Tere. You lied, I insisted. You told me you guys weren’t planning on hitting the arcade and you were planning it. Tere looked like she was thinking it over; then she made a gesture of indifference; then her expression brightened. Oh, yeah, she said. Now I remember what we were talking about: about how the old man owes you one. She paused. And that you owe Zarco one, she said. Remember? She pointed at me with her index finger the same way Zarco had pointed when we said goodbye at La Font on Friday and said: He scratched your back now you scratch his.

‘We looked at each other for a moment. Tere leaned on the hood of a car parked next to us and explained that Guille had been talking for some time about a housing development in Lloret, that it was the perfect place to rob because it was really isolated and the owners were rich people, and it was the perfect moment too because June wasn’t over yet and lots of houses were still empty, waiting for their owners to come and stay for July and August. Finally she said that Zarco was going to do a job there and needed me to help him. Then she changed the singular for the plural: You’ll help us, right? I had no intention of helping them and, to gain time, for a moment I thought of asking her why Zarco didn’t ask me himself, why he sent her to ask me; instead of beating about the bush I said: I’m sorry. I can’t. Tere opened her arms and looked at me with astonishment that struck me as genuine. Why? she asked. The only thing that occurred to me was to answer the same way I’d answered Zarco. Because I’m not like you guys, I said. I’ve never done that. You’ve never done what? she asked. Stolen anything, I answered. Nobody’s asking you to steal, she said. We’re the ones who’re going to do the stealing. What you have to do is something else. And it’s dead easy, so easy that it’s almost nothing. So why doesn’t somebody else do it then? I asked. Because we need someone like you, she answered. Someone who speaks Catalan and looks like a good kid. Come on, Gafitas, for fuck’s sake: are you going to leave us high and dry after what Zarco did for you? Pay us what you owe and we’ll be even. She fell quiet. The streetlamps of Bonastruc de Porta had been on for a while and they tinged Tere’s dark hair, her green eyes, her red, full lips with their golden light. What do you say? she asked. I looked behind her at the closed blinds of the Vilaró arcade and thought that, if I said no, I’d never see Tere again; I felt my legs go weak as I said: What do I have to do?

‘I don’t remember exactly what Tere’s reply was; only that she assured me that the next day Zarco would explain what I had to do and that she said goodbye with two sentences. Be on time. Tomorrow at La Font at three. I spent a horrible night wondering whether to go or not, deciding not to go and then a minute later deciding to go. In the end I went, and before three in the afternoon I was already at La Font. A little while later Zarco arrived and Tere, wearing a pair of shorts that revealed her long, tanned legs; Guille was the last to show up. Zarco wasn’t surprised by my presence there, didn’t explain what it was we were going to do, and I didn’t ask him either; I was too worried. As we left the district, Zarco, Tere and Guille started checking out the cars parked along the streets and, when we came up to a Seat 124 parked in a solitary alley that led out onto Pedret Avenue, Tere took a small sawblade with a hook on one end out of her bag and handed it to Zarco while Guille took off running up to the next sidestreet; then Tere ran to the one behind us. I stayed with Zarco and saw him stick the sawblade into the slot between the Seat 124’s door and window and, after feeling around for a couple of seconds with the blade, I heard a click and the door opened. Zarco sat in the driver’s seat, yanked the steering wheel around, reached underneath it and brought out a handful of wires, connected one wire to another, touched another wire to them and the engine immediately started. The whole operation lasted a minute, maybe less than a minute. A little while later we were on our way out of the other side of the city riding in the 124.

‘We arrived in Lloret around four. We drove in on a wide street that led to the centre, flanked by souvenir shops, cheap restaurants, closed discotheques and groups of tourists in flip-flops and swimsuits, and when we came to the sea we turned left and followed a promenade dotted with patio bars that ran parallel to the beach. Finally we turned left again, drove away from the sea for a moment and then came back towards it up a winding road that clung to the cliffs, until we saw a sign that said: La Montgoda. It’s here, said Guille, and Zarco parked the car on a slope, at the entrance to the housing development; then he turned around to face the back seat and started to explain what I had to do while Tere took a comb, an eyebrow pencil and lipstick out of her bag. I don’t know if I understood Zarco’s whole explanation, but when he asked me if I’d understood I answered yes; then he said: OK, now forget everything I told you and just do what you see Tere doing. I said yes again, and at that moment Guille caught my eye in the rear-view mirror. Gafitas is shitting himself, he scoffed. All the bastard can say is yes. Zarco told him to shut up while I turned and looked helplessly at Tere and Tere winked at me while carrying on combing her hair. Zarco added: And you, Gafitas, don’t let it get to you: do what I told you and everything’ll be fine. OK? I was about to say yes again, but I just nodded my head.

‘Once she’d finished getting ready, Tere put her comb, eyeliner and lipstick back in her bag and said: Let’s go. When we got out of the car she took me by the hand and we started walking up the badly paved slope. The housing development seemed deserted; the only noise we could hear was the sound of the sea. When we saw the first house appear among the pine trees, Tere instructed me. Let me do the talking, she said. Nobody’s going to say anything to you, but, if someone speaks in Catalan, you talk. If not, keep quiet. Do what I do. Most of all, whatever happens, stay with me. And one more thing: is what Guille said true? My heart was beating through my ribs like a caged bird; I’d started to sweat, and Tere’s hand was slipping in my soaking wet hand; I managed to say: Yes. Tere laughed; I laughed too, and that simultaneous laughter filled me with courage.

‘We got to the first house, walked through the garden and Tere rang the doorbell. The door opened and a woman who looked like she’d just got out of bed questioned us in silence, with her eyes half-closed against the strong sun; Tere answered the questioning look with a question: she asked if Pablo was home. Unexpectedly friendly, the woman answered that no one called Pablo lived in that house, and Tere apologized. We left the garden and walked down the street. How’s it going? asked Tere. How’s what going? I asked. How’s everything going? she clarified. I don’t know, I said, truthfully. Does that mean you’re not nervous any more? she asked. More or less, I answered. Then stop squeezing my hand, would you, she said. You’re going to break it. I let go of her hand and dried mine on my trousers, but she was soon holding it again. We didn’t call at the house next door or the next one, but at the one after that we tried again. This door opened too, this time an old man in a T-shirt with whom Tere exchanged a series of questions and answers similar to the exchange she’d had with the first woman, only longer; in fact, at one point it seemed to me that the old man, who couldn’t take his eyes off Tere’s legs, was undressing her in his mind and that, instead of trying to cut short the dialogue, he was trying to lengthen it.

‘The third house we tried was the one. Nobody answered when we rang the bell and, as soon as we made sure the villa was empty, that the villa next door was empty and that on the other side of the villa next door there was nothing but a brick wall behind which was a vacant lot full of shrubs, we walked back to the entrance of the development, where Zarco and Guille were waiting for us in the 124. Go up to the end of the street, Tere said to Zarco, who started up the car as soon as we got in. It’s the last house on the right. As we drove into the development in slow motion, Tere answered questions from Zarco and Guille and, after a Citroën with a woman and two children in it passed us on its way out, we arrived at the brick wall at the end, and parked in front of the door with the car facing back the way we came.

‘That’s where the real danger began. As Zarco and Guille walked into the garden and around the house — a two-storey house with a flat roof, a big willow tree shading the entrance — Tere put her bag behind her back, leaned against the hood of the 124, pulled me towards her, wrapped her arms around my neck and wedged her bare knee in between my legs. Now we’re going to do like they do in the movies, Gafitas, she told me. If nobody comes along, we stay here nice and quiet until Zarco and Guille call us. But, if someone decides to come by here, I’m going to snog you to within an inch of your life. So you can start praying that someone comes by. This last bit she said with half a smile; I was so scared I just nodded. Anyway, nobody came past, and I don’t know how long the two of us were leaning against the car, joined in that fake embrace, but shortly after seeing Zarco and Guille disappear beneath the branches of the willow, towards the back of the garden, I was startled to hear in the absolute silence of siesta time a vague crunch of breaking wood coming from the house and then an unmistakable crash of broken glass. Tere tried to calm me down by pressing her knee into my crotch and talking. I don’t know what she talked about; all I know is that at a certain point I started to get a massive hard-on, which I tried to hide but couldn’t, and that, when she noticed my erection, a happy smile revealed her teeth. Fuck, Gafitas, she said. What a time to get horny!

‘Tere had barely finished that sentence when the door of the house opened and Zarco and Guille came out carrying bags. They put them in the trunk of the car, asked me to stay there, keeping an eye out, and went back inside the house, this time with Tere. After a while they came out with a couple more bags, a Telefunken television, a Philips radio-cassette player and a turntable. When everything was loaded into the trunk, we got into the car and drove unhurriedly out of La Montgoda.

‘That was my baptism by fire. Of the return trip to Gerona I remember only that I felt not the slightest relief because the danger had passed; on the contrary: instead I swapped the fright for euphoria, the wild rush of the robbery with adrenaline coming out my ears. And I also remember that when we got to Gerona we went directly to sell what we’d stolen. Or did we sell it the next day? No, I think it was the same day. But I’m not sure. Anyway. That week I still went back to the arcade a few times to help Señor Tomàs (and sometimes, on my way past, to play a few games of pinball before going to La Font); but, when I started going out at night without telling anybody, treating my family with no consideration, further embittering my relationship with my father and multiplying our fights, I stopped going to the arcade entirely, and one afternoon, on my way to La Font, I went in and told Señor Tomàs that I was going on holiday and probably wouldn’t be back for a long time. Don’t worry, son, Señor Tomàs said. I’ll find someone to help me close up. If you like, I said. But you won’t need to. Nobody’s going to bother you. Señor Tomàs looked at me intrigued. And how do you know that? he asked. Privately proud of myself, I said: I just do. From then on I started to go to La Font almost every afternoon.’

‘But you didn’t have to: you’d paid Zarco back the favour in La Montgoda and you were even.’

‘Yeah, but there was Tere.’

‘You mean you joined Zarco’s gang for Tere?’

‘I mean that, if it hadn’t been for Tere, I most likely wouldn’t have done it: although I’d arrived at the conclusion that she wasn’t the girl for me, I wanted to think that, while we were near to each other, what had happened in the Vilaró arcade washrooms could always happen again; and I think I was willing to run any risk in order to keep open some possibility of that happening again. That said, you’re a writer and must know that, even if we find it very comforting to find an explanation for what we do, the truth is that most of what we do doesn’t have a single explanation, supposing that it even has any.’

‘You told me before that robbing the house was a rush. Does that mean you enjoyed it?’

‘It means what it means. What do you want me to say? That I loved it? That the day I stole stuff in La Montgoda I discovered that there was no way back, that Zarco’s game was a very serious game, where everything was at stake, that I could no longer be satisfied playing the Rocky Balboa pinball machine, where I had nothing at stake? You want me to say that playing that game I felt I was getting even with my parents? Or you want me to tell you that I was getting revenge for all my humiliations and the guilt that had been accumulating over the last year and that, as Batista represented absolute evil for me, this game that liberated me from Batista represented absolute good? If you want I’ll say it; maybe I’ve already said it. And it may be true. But do me a favour: don’t ask me for explanations; ask me for facts.’

‘Agreed. Let’s get back to the facts. The robbery in La Montgoda was the first in a series of robberies you participated in with Zarco. You told me before that when you got to Gerona that day you went to sell what you’d stolen. Where did you sell it? Who did you sell it to? Because I can’t imagine it would have been easy.’

‘Selling it was easy; what wasn’t easy was getting good money for it. There was only one fence in Gerona, or at least only one serious fence, so since he had practically no competition, he did whatever he wanted. He was the General. They called him that because he bragged about having been an officer in the Spanish Foreign Legion; also because he wore long bushy sideburns like a comic-strip general. I only met him three or four times. He lived in an Andalusian-style house in the middle of an open field in Torre Alfonso XII and he was a peculiar guy, although maybe the peculiar thing was him and his wife as a couple. I clearly remember the afternoon we went to sell him the loot from La Montgoda, which was the first time I saw him. As I told you before, it might have been the same afternoon as the robbery, but it might have been another, because we often stashed what we stole and took a few days to sell it. As a precaution. The thing is that day we — Zarco, Tere, Guille and I, the same ones who’d gone to La Montgoda — went that day, parked the car in front of the General’s house and Zarco went to the door and soon came back and announced that the General was busy although his wife said he’d soon be finished and we could go in shortly. They want to fuck with the guys who are with the General, Zarco said. Guille and Tere laughed; I didn’t get the joke, but didn’t think anything of it either. Between the four of us we carried all the stuff into the house guarded by the General’s wife, a skinny, scraggy woman, with vague eyes, messy hair and a grey housecoat. When we went out to the yard we saw the General and a couple of men at one side in front of a large cardboard box with a radio-cassette player sticking out of it. The men looked angry when they saw us and immediately turned their backs. The General seemed to be trying to placate them; he greeted us with a slight nod. We left our load in the middle of the yard (at the other side there was a jumble of bed frames, bicycles, scrapped motorbikes, furniture and appliances), and waited for the General to finish what he was doing. He soon did, and the two men left in a hurry without even looking at us, accompanied by the General and his wife.

‘We were left alone in the yard, and Zarco amused himself by looking through the big cardboard box with the radio-cassette sticking out of it while Guille, Tere and I smoked and talked. A while later the General came back without his wife. He seemed cheerful and relaxed, but before he could say a word Zarco pointed to the gate. Who were those guys? he asked. The ones who just left? asked the General. Yeah, answered Zarco. Why do you want to know? asked the General. Zarco shrugged. No reason, he said. Just wondering what that pair of dickheads were called. The answer didn’t seem to annoy the General. He looked at Zarco with interest and then turned for a second towards his wife, who’d come back out to the yard while they were talking and was standing a few metres away, with her head leaning on one shoulder and hands in the pockets of her housecoat, apparently oblivious to the conversation. The General asked: What’s up, Zarquito? Did you come here to piss me off? Zarco smiled modestly, as if the General was trying to flatter him. Not at all, he said. Then would you mind telling me what you’re talking about? said the General. Zarco pointed to the cardboard box he’d just looked through. How much did you pay for what’s in there? he asked. What’s it to you? replied the General. Zarco didn’t say anything. After a silence the General said: Fourteen thousand pesetas. Satisfied? Zarco continued smiling with his eyes, but pursed his lips sceptically. It’s worth a lot more, he said. And how do you know? asked the General. Because I know, answered Zarco. Anyone other than those two dickheads knows it; what a pair: as soon as they saw us they shat themselves and could only think of how fast they could get out of here. He paused and added: What a bastard you can be. Zarco said this calmly looking at the General, with no malice in his tone of voice. As I told you, it was the first time I went to that house and I didn’t know what Zarco’s relationship was with the man he was talking to or how to take that verbal sparring, but I was reassured by the fact that neither Tere nor Guille seemed anxious or surprised. The fence didn’t either, just scratched a sideburn thoughtfully and sighed. Look, kid, he said afterwards. Everyone does business the way they like, or the way they can. Besides, as I’ve told you many times: in this world things are worth what people pay for them, and in this house things are worth what I say they’re worth. Not one peseta more. And anyone who doesn’t like it shouldn’t come here. Is that clear? Zarco rushed to answer, still a bit mocking but conciliatory now: Crystal. Then, turning to the merchandise that we’d left in the middle of the yard, he asked: And according to you how much is this worth?

‘The General looked at Zarco with distrust, but soon followed him, just as Tere, Guille and I did; then his wife followed. For quite a long time the General was examining the stuff, crouched down, with his wife standing beside him: he’d pick something up, describe it, list its defects (many, according to him) and virtues (according to him, few) and then he’d move on to the next. As I watched the scene I understood that the General was listing and describing more for his wife than for himself, and for a moment I thought his wife had trouble with her eyesight or that she was actually blind. When they finished the inventory and valuation, the General and his wife moved a few steps away, exchanged a few inaudible words and soon the man returned, crouched down again beside the Telefunken television set, passed his hand over the screen as if he wanted to get the dust off it, pressed the on-off button a couple of times to no effect and asked: How much do you want? Double, answered Zarco without a thought. Double what? asked the General. Double what you paid those dupes, answered Zarco. This time it was the General who smiled. Then he placed his hands on his knees, stood up with a groan and looked his wife in the eye; his wife didn’t look at him; she was staring beyond the fences of the yard, as if something in the sky had caught her attention. The General looked at the empty sky and then looked back at Zarco. I’ll give you sixteen thousand, he said. Zarco pretended to think it over for a moment before turning to me. Hey, Gafitas, he said. You’ve been to school: is sixteen thousand double fourteen thousand? I shook my head slightly and Zarco turned back to the General and copied my gesture. You’re crazy, said the General without the smile leaving his face. I’m making you a good offer. It doesn’t seem that good to me, said Zarco. Nobody’s going to pay what you’re asking, insisted the General. We’ll see about that, replied Zarco. He immediately signalled to Guille and the two of them picked up the television while I carried the record player and Tere the speakers, but we hadn’t even started walking when we saw that the General’s wife was waiting for us at the door to the house, as if she wanted to say goodbye or rather as if she wanted to prevent us from leaving. Twenty thousand, the General said then. Carrying the television, Zarco looked at him, looked at his wife, looked at me and asked: Is twenty thousand double fourteen thousand? Before I could answer, the General said: Twenty-three thousand. It’s my final offer. Then Zarco gestured to Guille that they should put the television down and, once they’d done so, went over to the General, held out his hand and said: Twenty-five thousand and there’s no more to be said.

‘Nothing more was said: the General reluctantly accepted the deal and paid us the twenty-five thousand pesetas in thousand-peso notes.’

‘Zarco twisted his arm.’

‘That’s what it seemed like, that’s what I thought that day, but I don’t believe it: what we’d stolen was surely worth a lot more than that; otherwise the General wouldn’t have paid what he paid. He was smart, and his wife was even smarter. They always seemed to give ground, but they never actually did, or at least they never lost out; when I think about it, the very opposite happened to Zarco, and not only with the General and his wife: although he sometimes seemed to win, he always ended up losing. Of course it took me a long time to understand that. The first time I saw him, at the Vilaró arcade, Zarco seemed to me like one of those unpredictable, violent, tough guys who inspire fear because they feel no fear, exactly the opposite of what I was or how I felt then: I felt like a born loser, so he could only be a born winner, a guy who was going to conquer the world; that’s what I think Zarco was to me, and maybe not just for that summer. As I said, it took me a long time to figure out that he was actually a born loser, and when I did figure it out it was too late and the world had already conquered him. . Anyway. I just remembered a story. It doesn’t have to do directly with Zarco, but indirectly it does. Or at least I feel it has to do with him.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Tere told the story, I don’t remember when or where. In any case it was one of many I heard about the prefabs, something they talked a lot about in Zarco’s gang, as if they were all really proud of having lived there or as if having lived there was the only thing that really united them. It had happened some eight years earlier, before Zarco lived in the prefabs but when the rest of them did, and so, some more and some less, they all remembered it or had heard it told. The story had started the day a man caught his wife in bed with the next-door neighbour; according to Tere’s version, the man was a good man, but the neighbour was an awful brute who’d been making his life impossible for years. And so, when the good man saw that his wife was cheating on him, and who she was cheating with, he freaked out and ended up setting fire to the place next door. The problem was that this happened in the wooden prefabs (housing that, as Tere pointed out, no longer existed), and the flames spread very quickly and the fire ended up devouring thirty-two homes. It was a dramatic story, which had apparently caused the worst disaster in the whole history of the prefabs, but Tere told it as if it were a comical story or we’d all smoked so much hash and drunk so many beers and popped so many pills that we listened to it as if it were a comical story, laughing till tears were streaming down our faces, interrupting her constantly. Anyway, what I remember most clearly isn’t the story itself but what happened after Tere finished telling it. I asked how it had ended for the two protagonists. That’s the best part of the story, interrupted Guille, who never let an opportunity for sarcasm pass him by. In the end the bastard got off and the cheated-on husband owned up. Poor sucker got at least a couple of years in the can. We all laughed again, even harder. It’s what always happens, man, Gordo philosophized, suddenly serious, patting his lacquered shoulder-length hair. The good guys lose and the bad guys win. Don’t be a wanker, Gordo, Zarco leapt in. That’s what happens when the good guys are dickheads and the bad guys are smart. Oh man, Tío then burst in, with an innocence that for a moment I interpreted as a form of irony. Don’t fucking tell me that now you want to be a good guy? Zarco seemed doubtful, seemed to think over his reply or to realize all of a sudden that we were all waiting for his reply and had stopped laughing. Of course, don’t you? he finally said. But I’d rather be a bad guy than a dickhead. A wave of laughter met Zarco’s reply. And that’s where we left it.’

‘Are you telling me that, as well as a born winner, during that summer you saw Zarco as a good guy turned by circumstances into an arsonist?’

‘No. I’ve just told you a small story that forms part of a larger story; take it however you like, but not before I finish telling the whole story. Remember: facts, not explanations; ask me to tell you things, not interpret them.’

‘OK. Tell me then. You said that the General gave you twenty-five thousand pesetas for what you’d stolen in La Montgoda. That was quite a lot of money back then. What did you do with it?’

‘We spent it immediately. That’s what we always did. Money burned holes in our pockets: one afternoon we’d have twenty-five, thirty, forty thousand pesetas, and the next morning we’d have nothing left. That was normal for us. Of course we all spent the money and not just the ones who’d participated in the theft.’

‘When you say all you mean the whole gang?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That was the norm? Everything they stole got divvied up in equal portions?’

‘More or less. Sometimes we shared out what we earned and other times it went into a sort of kitty. But the money was everybody’s and we spent it between all of us.’

‘What did you spend it on?’

‘Drink, food and smokes. And drugs, naturally.’

‘What drugs did you use?’

‘Hash. Pills too: uppers, downers, stuff like that. Sometimes mescaline. But not cocaine.’

‘Did any of you use heroin?’

‘No. Heroin came in later, same with coke. I don’t remember anyone doing heroin back then in the district.’

‘Not even Zarco?’

‘Not even Zarco.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Totally. The thing about him being addicted to heroin from the age of thirteen or fourteen is a lie. A legend like so many that circulate about him.’

‘Tell me how you got hold of the drugs.’

‘It wasn’t as easy as you might think. During the spring Zarco and the rest of them had been supplied by a couple of dealers who were regulars at La Font, but a little while before I joined the gang the police had made two or three raids and cleaned the dealers out of the district, so, when I showed up, they were in jail or had scarpered. That explains why Zarco and Tere were at the Vilaró arcade when we met; as Tere told me, the guy in the Fred Perry shirt was a dealer: he’d told them to meet him there. And it also explains why we had to go outside the district all summer to sort ourselves out. Luckily the Fred Perry dealer didn’t arrange to meet Zarco at the arcade again (he must have sensibly realized it was not a suitable place for his business dealings); they met in bars in the old quarter: in the Pub Groc, in L’Enderroc, in Freaks. Later, towards the middle of July or the beginning of August, the Fred Perry dealer disappeared and we started frequenting the Flor, a bar with big windows that overlooked Mayor Street in Salt; we had several dealers there from the middle of July or the beginning of August until the middle of September: some guy called Dani, a Rodri, a Gómez, maybe another one or two.’

‘Did they never suggest becoming dealers? It would have solved the supply problem.’

‘But it would have created much worse problems. No. It was never suggested. Not as far as I know.’

‘Everybody took everything?’

‘Yeah. Some were greedier than others, but in general, yeah: we all took everything. Maybe the girls were more sensible, including Tere, but not the rest of them.’

‘You took everything too?’

‘Of course. I wouldn’t have fitted into the gang if I hadn’t. Supposing I eventually did fit in, that is.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I tried to. Sometimes I think I managed it, but other times I think not; depends on what you understand by fitting in, I suppose. It’s true that, as I’ve told you, after a certain point I went to La Font almost every day, hung out with them and did more or less whatever they were doing. But it’s also true that I never felt entirely like just one more member of the gang: I was and wasn’t, I did and didn’t, I was inside and out, like a witness or onlooker who participated in everything but most of all watched everyone participate. That’s how I think I felt deep down, and I think that’s how they felt about me; the proof is that, aside from Zarco and Tere (and only on exceptional occasions), I barely spoke to anyone on my own, and I wasn’t close to any of them. For all of them I was what I obviously was: a meteorite, a disorientated kid, a posh brat lost among them, the top dog’s protégé, their leader’s whim, someone who didn’t have much to do with them, although they accepted him and could fraternize with him once in a while.

‘But, to get back to the facts, yes, I took everything. At first I had a hard time keeping up with the rest of them, and I had a few bad days, but I soon got used to it.’

‘What other things did you have to do to fit in?’

‘Lots. But, please, don’t misinterpret: I didn’t take drugs to be accepted; I took them because I liked it. Let’s say I started off doing it out of some sort of obligation, or curiosity, and ended up doing it for pleasure, or habit.’

‘Like what happened with the robberies, no?’

‘In a certain sense. With other things.’

‘For example?’

‘For example with hookers.’

‘You went to hookers.’

‘Of course. In the district there was a brothel every couple of steps and we were sixteen, seventeen years old, walking around with a permanent overdose of testosterone, we had money; how could we not go to hookers? Actually, I think we spent most of our money on hookers. Although, to be perfectly honest, it was much harder for me to get used to the hookers than the drugs; I got much more hooked on drugs than hookers. I did like some hookers, but the truth is, especially at first, most of them gave me the creeps. I can tell you about my first visit to a brothel; I remember that night very clearly because something strange happened.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘It was at La Vedette, a brothel that was where most of the red-light district brothels were, on Pou Rodó, parallel to La Barca. It was the most expensive place in the neighbourhood, and also the best, though it was still a filthy, dark cave; imagine what the rest were like. It was run by a madam who was also called Vedette, a woman in her fifties with a reputation for ruling her business with unceremonious authority. That day the place was only half full, there wouldn’t have been more than ten or twelve men leaning on the bar or against the walls, drinking or breathing in the atmosphere saturated with smoke, cheap perfume and the smell of sweat, sex and alcohol. The girls swarmed around them, wearing very tight clothes and with faces caked in make-up, and a full-volume rumba shut down the conversations. It must have been right after the robbery in La Montgoda, or at least right after one of the first jobs I was involved in, among other reasons because after a job was when we could afford the luxury of going to La Vedette. The thing is that a few minutes after we got there all my friends had paired off and disappeared, and I suddenly found myself alone at the bar, after several girls had given up on me when they understood I didn’t have the slightest intention of bedding them. At that moment Vedette strolled calmly over from the other side of the room. Hello, handsome, she said. Don’t you like any of my girls? Vedette had bleached blonde hair, big breasts, big bones and hard features, and her powerful proximity was more intimidating than that of her charges, but for that very reason I found it easy to lie. Of course I like them, I answered. Vedette spilled her cleavage over the bar and asked: Well then? I smiled and put my empty beer glass to my lips and averted my gaze as I searched for a reply. Don’t tell me it’s your first time? she asked. Before I could tell her another lie, the woman let out a terrifying cackle; terrifying until I realized that nobody in the place had heard it. Little angel, she said, exhaling her mentholated breath in my face. If I wasn’t retired I’d deflower you myself. She let me go and added: But if you want I’ll introduce you to the girl you need. She pointed to a place in the shadows. It’s her over there, she continued. Do you want me to call her? Go on, don’t be silly, you’ll see how much you like it. I didn’t see who Vedette was pointing at, but it didn’t matter: the mere idea of shutting myself up in a dark room with one of those big painted women was so revolting that it killed the slightest twinge of desire. Vedette must have sensed this (or maybe I shook my head), because she sighed, defeated, and asked, pointing at my beer: Do you want another?

‘I still hadn’t finished drinking my second beer when Zarco and the rest started to come downstairs. They all asked me the same thing and I answered them all the same way and they all insisted I choose a girl and go upstairs with her; none of them suspected what Vedette had guessed, or at least no one voiced the suspicion out loud, and finally their insistence and my fear the secret would come to light overcame my disgust and I went over to Vedette and told her to introduce me to her candidate. Her name was Trini and she turned out to be a little brunette with short hair and swaying hips who pulled my arm around her waist and, while Zarco and the rest of the guys gestured euphorically at the other end of the bar, led me upstairs to one of the bedrooms. There she stepped down out of her high heels, stripped me and helped me strip her. Then she took me into the bathroom and washed and washed me and pushed me down on the bed and started sucking me off. It was the second time in my life something like this had happened to me, although the truth is it seemed like two different things and not the same thing done by two different women. After a while Trini managed to get it up, but as soon as she tried to get me inside her it shrank again. She tried to reassure me, saying it was normal for the first time, and then she went back to work on me with her mouth. I was very flustered, afraid of a total fiasco, and I concentrated until I came up with the solution: imagining that we weren’t in one of La Vedette’s rooms but in the washrooms of the Vilaró arcade and that those were Tere’s fingers and lips down there and not Trini’s, I got an erection and came right away.

‘That was when the strange thing I mentioned before happened. I was starting to get dressed when a red light came on beside the door and Trini said: Shit. What’s going on? I asked. Nothing, said Trini. But we can’t leave. She pointed to the light and added: Cops are downstairs. I felt my legs weaken and a wave of heat enveloped me. In the bar? I asked. Yes, Trini answered. Don’t worry, they won’t come up; but until they leave we can’t go down. So it would be better for you to take it easy. I tried to take it easy. I finished getting dressed while Trini told me that, each time a pair of cops on their round came into the bar, Vedette or her husband pressed a button behind the bar and a red light turned on in all the bedrooms; then, when the police left, they pressed the button again and the lights went out. Trini insisted that I shouldn’t worry and just had to have patience, because, although naturally the police knew just what was going on (knew that there were girls and their clients in the rooms 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 tough guys and thought tough guys don’t dance. I say in general because, when they played slow songs — things by Umberto Tozzi or José Luis Perales or people like that — Gordo would run down to the dance floor as fast as he could to dance with Lina and, when they played rumbas by Peret or Los Amaya, or songs by Las Grecas, sometimes Tío, Chino and Drácula would dance to them. The girls, however, danced much more, especially Tere, who never stopped from the moment she arrived until we left the place. I, as I said, concentrated on her for hours, watching her as I couldn’t anywhere else, without anyone bothering me or suspecting me (or that’s what I thought). I never got tired of watching her: not only because she was the most attractive girl in the disco or because more than dance she seemed to float over the floor; also because of something else I discovered with time: lots of people — Lina, for example — danced non-stop, but they danced the same way to almost all the songs, while Tere danced differently to every song, as if she adapted to the music the way a glove does to a hand or as if her movements came out of each song as naturally as heat comes off a fire.

‘Sorry: I’ve strayed off on a tangent. I was telling you about one of the first times I went to Rufus. The truth is I don’t remember very clearly what happened that night in the discotheque, but I do remember at two-thirty or three in the morning, when I’d been in there for a while, I felt a hot foam bubbling up in my stomach, went outside and threw up in the parking lot beside the river. After that I felt better and wanted to go back inside, but when I reached the door realized I was incapable of making my way through that mass of humanity enveloped in smoke, music and intermittent lights, and told myself the party was over.

‘I’d gone to Rufus with Zarco and Tere, but decided to go home on my own. I’d been walking for quite a while back towards the city when, very close to the Pedret bridge, a Seat 124 Sport braked beside me. At the wheel was a guy who looked like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, which was not strange because that summer the nights were full of guys trying to look like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever; at his side was Tere, which was not strange either because that night I’d seen her dance with tons of guys, among them the John Travolta lookalike. Where did you get to, Gafitas? asked Tere, rolling down the window. I couldn’t think up an excuse to improvise, so I had to resign myself to the truth. I wasn’t feeling well, I said, and leant on the roof of the 124 and down to the window. I puked, but I feel better now. It was true: the night air had begun to clear my wooziness. I gestured towards the nearly dark highway. I’m going home, I announced. Tere opened the car door as she said: We’ll give you a lift. Thanks, I answered. But I’d rather walk. Tere insisted: Get in. That’s when Travolta intervened: Let him do what he wants and let’s get out of here, he said. You shut up, dickhead, Tere cut him off, getting out of the car and pushing her seat forward so I could get in the back. She repeated: Get in.

‘I got in. Tere got back into the front seat and, before Travolta pulled out back onto the highway, she grabbed his earlobe, tugged it hard and said as if she were talking to me at first and then to him at the end: He’s a dickhead but he looks good enough to eat. And tonight I’m going to screw him. Aren’t I, tough guy? Travolta swatted her away, mumbled something and pulled out. Five minutes later, after crossing the bridge over the Onyar and driving all the way up the Paseo de La Devesa, we stopped at Caterina Albert. Tere got out of the car and let me out. Thanks, I said, once I was outside. No problem, said Tere. Are you all right? Yeah, I answered. Then why do you have that pissed-off look on your face? she asked. I don’t know what look I’ve got on my face, I answered. I’m tired, but I’m not pissed off. You sure? she asked. Tere put the palms of her hands on my cheeks. You’re not pissed off because I’m going to screw this dickhead tonight? she insisted, pointing with her head inside the car. No, I said. She smiled and, without another word, kissed me softly on the lips, scrutinized me for a couple of seconds, then said: Next time me and you’ll have a shag, OK? I didn’t say anything and Tere got back in the 124 and the 124 turned around and drove away.

‘That’s how the night ended. And that’s why I was saying that from that moment on my way of looking at things changed: because that’s when I realized that whatever the relationship tying Tere and Zarco to each other, Tere did what she liked with whomever she liked.’

‘And Zarco did too?’

‘Yeah. And it didn’t seem to bother him that Tere did, either.’

‘And you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Did it bother you that Tere slept with other guys?’

‘Of course. I liked Tere a lot, I’d joined Zarco’s gang for her, I would have liked her to sleep with me; I don’t mean that she’d only sleep with me: I mean that she’d at least sleep with me. But what could I do? Things were the way they were, and I didn’t have any choice but to wait for my chance, assuming I’d get one. Besides, I didn’t have anything better to do.’

‘Did you idealize Tere?’

‘If falling in love with someone doesn’t consist of idealizing them, you tell me what it does consist of.’

‘And Zarco? Did you idealize him too?’

‘I don’t know; maybe. Now I detest those who did — actually, that’s one of the reasons I agreed to talk to you: to put a stop to the falsehoods and tell the truth about him — but maybe the first one to idealize him was me. It could be. In a certain way it would be logical. Look, at the beginning of that summer I was just a baby-faced, frightened kid who practically from one day to the next had seen his best friends turn into his worst enemies and realized his family wasn’t capable of protecting him and that all the things he’d learned up till then had been useless and mistaken, so, after the worry and fear of the first days, why wouldn’t I prefer to stay with Zarco and his gang? Why wouldn’t I not be pleased with someone who in those circumstances offered me respect, adventure, money, fun and pleasure? How could I help but idealize him a little? And by the way, do you know what I called Zarco’s gang?’

‘What?’

‘The outlaws of Liang Shan Po. Have you ever heard that name?’

‘No.’

‘No, of course not; you’re too young. But I bet you anything the majority of people my age remember it. It was made famous by the first Japanese television series to be shown in Europe. The Water Margin, and here in Spain it was called La Frontera Azul, the blue border. It was so spectacularly successful that two or three weeks after it started there was barely a teenager in the country who didn’t watch it. It must have gone on air in April or May of that year, because, when I met Zarco and Tere, I was already addicted to it.

‘It was a sort of Oriental version of Robin Hood. I remember the opening sequence really well: over a background tune I could still hum, the images revealed a rag-tag army of men on foot and horseback carrying weapons and standards, while the narrator’s voice-over recited a couple of identical phrases every week: “The ancient sages said: Do not despise the snake for having no horns, for who is to say it will not become a dragon? So may one just man become an army.” The storyline was simple. It was set in the Middle Ages, when China was governed by I don’t know which dynasty and the empire had fallen into the hands of Kao Chiu, the emperor’s favourite, a corrupt and cruel man who had converted a prosperous land into a desert with no future. Only one group of upstanding men, led by former imperial guard Lin Chung, rose up against the oppression; among them was one woman: Hu San-Niang, Lin Chung’s most faithful deputy. The members of the group were condemned by the oppressor’s laws to a life in exile on the banks of the Liang Shan Po, a river near the capital that was also the blue border or water margin of the title, a real border but especially a symbolic border: the border between good and evil, between justice and injustice. Anyway, all the episodes of the series followed a similar outline: because of the humiliations inflicted by Kao Chiu, one or several honourable citizens found themselves obliged to cross to the other side of the Liang Shan Po to join Lin Chung and Hu San-Niang and the other honourable outlaws. That was the story repeated without too many variations in each episode.’

‘And you somehow began to identify with it.’

‘Drop the somehow: what are stories for if not to identify with? And especially: what good are they to a teenager? That’s why I’m sure that in a way, in my instinct, in my fantasy, in my feelings, in the depths of my heart, during that summer my city was China, Batista was Kao Chiu, Zarco was Lin Chung, Tere was Hu San-Niang, the Ter and the Onyar were the Liang Shan Po and everyone who lived on the far side of the Ter and the Onyar were the Water Margin outlaws, but above them all were those who lived in the prefabs. As for me, I was an upstanding citizen who had rebelled against tyranny and was anxious not to go on being just a snake (or just one man) and aspired to be a dragon (or an army) and, every time I crossed the Ter or the Onyar to go and meet Zarco and Tere, it was as if I were crossing the water margin, the border between good and evil and between justice and injustice. Something that, if you stop and think, has some truth to it, doesn’t it?’

Chapter 4

‘Have you ever heard of Liang Shan Po?’

‘Of what?’

‘Liang Shan Po.’

‘No. What’s that?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Tell me about the first time you saw El Zarco.’

‘It was the spring of 1978. I remember because I’d just turned twenty-three, had spent four uninterrupted years living in Gerona (uninterrupted or with no interruption other than the months I spent in Madrid doing my military service, at the headquarters of the Intelligence Service and the State Security Office), had just moved out of the apartment on Montseny Street I shared with other inspectors and had just married my wife, Ángeles, a nurse at the Muñoz clinic I met while recuperating from an appendectomy. Back then Gerona was still a damp, dark, lonely and filthy city, but there was nowhere damper, darker, lonelier or more filthy than the red-light district.

‘I should know, since I practically lived there for years. Like I said, all or almost all the city’s delinquents got together in the district, so all we had to do was keep an eye on that part of town to make sure nobody went too wild. Why should I lie: it wasn’t hard work. The district was just a handful of blocks of ancient buildings that formed a spiderweb of narrow, stinking, gloomy streets: Bellaire, Barca, Portal de la Barca, Pou Rodó, Mosques and Pujada del Rei Martí; those five or six streets squeezed between churches and convents were once the city’s entrance; prostitution had always thrived there and still did. In fact, at the end of the seventies the district enjoyed its final glory days, before drugs and apathy took over in the eighties and nineties and the council took advantage of its decline to clean it up, throw people out and turn it into what it is today: the most elegant part of the city, a place where there’s now nothing but trendy restaurants, chic stores, loft apartments for the rich and so on and so forth. How do you like that?

‘But in my day, like I say, it wasn’t like that. Back then it was a neighbourhood where families who’d been there for generations lived cheek by jowl with the penniless, with immigrants, gypsies and quinquis; there were the hookers as well, in my day more than two hundred of them. We had them all on file. We knew who they were and where they worked, we kept an inventory of hirings and firings, made sure there were no minors or criminals among them, every once in a while we checked to make sure none of them were being forced to work as prostitutes. There was no lack of places for them to work, believe me: we counted fifteen just on Portal de la Barca and Pou Rodó Streets, which were the centre of the district and where most of the joints were. I knew them all, actually for years there was hardly a week when I didn’t go in one or another of them; I can still recite the names from memory: there was La Cuadra, Las Vegas and Capri on Portal de la Barca; the rest were on Pou Rodó: Ester’s, Nuri’s, Mari’s, the Copacabana, La Vedette, Trébol, Málaga, Río, Chit, Los Faroles and Lina’s. Almost all the girls who worked in those places were Spanish, had children and didn’t want any trouble. We had a good relationship with them and their madams; we had an unsigned pact advantageous to both sides: we wouldn’t bother them and in exchange they would keep us informed. This pact also meant that we should all respect certain formalities; for example: although we knew that the majority of the bars in the red-light district had prostitution going on, we pretended they were normal bars, and everybody had to play along, so, when we entered one of them, normal activity was paralyzed, the girls and their clients stopped going up to the rooms and the madam let the ones who were already upstairs know that we’d arrived and everybody had to stay put and keep quiet until we left. It’s true that the pact wasn’t always honoured: sometimes because the girls or their bosses kept information from us, something they naturally did whenever they could get away with it; other times because we abused our power, which was enormous. In my early days of patrolling the district I was on the beat with Vives, my section boss. I already told you that Vives was a brainless thug and I soon saw that he would drink and screw on the house every night in the district, but sometimes he’d go crazy and make a big scene and sow panic among the girls. I was still an idealist who thought the police were the good guys and we saved good people from the bad guys, so I didn’t like what Vives was doing and once or twice I reproached him. How do you like that? He didn’t pay me a blind bit of notice, of course: he’d tell me to fuck off and mind my own business, and I didn’t have the guts to report him to Deputy Superintendent Martínez; the only thing I dared do was ask him to assign me a new partner, something he did without asking why, probably because the deputy superintendent knew Vives better than I did and, although he didn’t want to get rid of a guy like that, or couldn’t, his opinion of him was even lower than mine.

But I insist: in general we cops and the girls tended to respect the pact, which allowed us to keep crime under control with relative ease in the district and also in the city, like I said, because sooner or later all criminals passed through the district and because everything that went on in the district ended up reaching the ears of the girls. Mind you, I’m talking about the spring of ’78; after that all this changed. What I think is that two things made it change: drugs and juvenile delinquency. Two things we knew nothing about back then.’

‘Two things that everybody associates with Zarco.’

‘Sure. How can they not associate them with him when he ended up becoming this country’s official drug addict and quinqui? Who was going to tell us that then, eh? Though, why should I lie, I’ve always thought that we at least should have been able to tell a bit more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ll tell you about the first time I saw him. You’ll say there was nothing special about it, or almost nothing, except that it was the first; but for me there was. It happened on the way out of La Font, one of the few normal bars in the district, along with the Gerona and El Sargento; normal is just a figure of speech: what I mean is that they weren’t hooker joints but basic dives where quinquis got together, so, for us, anyone going in or coming out of one of them was suspicious, as was anybody wandering around the district, actually. We knew most of them, but not Zarco: so that afternoon, as soon as we saw him, we stopped him, asked for his ID, searched him and so forth. I was with Hidalgo, who was my partner on the beat then. Zarco wasn’t alone either; he was with two or three other kids, all around about the same age as him, all just as unknown to us. We asked them for their documentation as well and frisked them. Of course you could see from a long way off that Zarco was the ringleader, but maybe we would have let him go straight away if we hadn’t found a lump of hash in his pocket when we searched him. Hidalgo examined it, showed it to him and asked him where he’d got it. Zarco answered that he’d found it in the street. Then Hidalgo got mad: he grabbed him by the arm, pinned him up against the wall, leaned his face right up to Zarco’s and asked him if he thought he looked like an imbecile. Zarco seemed surprised but didn’t react, didn’t resist, didn’t look away; finally he said no. Without letting go of him, Hidalgo asked what they were doing there, and Zarco said nothing, just going for a walk. In an undefiant voice he added: Is that against the law? He said that and smiled at us, first at Hidalgo and then at me, and that’s when I saw he had very blue eyes; that smile disarmed me: I instantly noticed the tension level drop and Hidalgo and Zarco and the guys with Zarco noticed it too. Then Hidalgo let go of Zarco, but before we went on with our rounds he threatened him. You watch out, kid, he said, although he didn’t sound convincing any more. You don’t want me to have to give you a smack next time I see you round here.

‘That was it. In other words, like I said, it was hardly anything, practically nothing. But I’ve thought many times since that maybe that little nothing or whatever it was should have put us on the alert about Zarco.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well from that first encounter I could have guessed that Zarco wasn’t just another teenager in the district, one of many clever kids without much to lose who tried to act hard with us because deep down they were soft, one of so many little tough guys from the outskirts running as fast as they could to nowhere or one of so many teenage quinquis unable to escape their quinqui fate. . What do I know. He was, of course, but that’s not all he was; he also had something else that was immediately visible: that serenity, that coldness. And also that sort of joy or lightness or self-confidence, as if everything he was doing was a pastime and nothing could cause him problems.’

‘Are you sure that was what you thought back then? We’re all very good at predicting the past: are you sure this isn’t a retrospective thought, something you say in the light of what later became of Zarco?’

‘Of course it’s a retrospective thought, of course I didn’t think that back then, but that is precisely the problem: that I could have thought of it, that I should have thought of it. Or at least guessed. If I had, everything would have been easier. For me and for everyone.’

‘Your partner, Hidalgo, threatened him: could you have carried out the threat, could you have kept him from coming back to the district and forming his gang there?’

‘How were we going to prevent him? He hadn’t done anything wrong, or at least we couldn’t prove that he had: were we going to arrest him for drinking beer in La Font, for smoking joints, for taking pills, for doing what all the quinquis in the district were doing? We couldn’t; and if we could have we wouldn’t have wanted to: in Gerona a guy like Zarco could only go to the district, and that suited us, because in the district we could control him better than anywhere else. Anyway. The result was that Zarco and his gang became another part of the landscape of the district that spring. It’s true that they were a special part, and that this should also have put us on our guard. Because in the district there were a lot of quinquis like them, more or less the same age as them, but they all got together with older guys, who were the ones in charge, who pointed out objectives and took advantage of them; whereas Zarco and his gang did everything their own way and didn’t take orders from anybody. And this, later, when things got serious, made them much more uncontrollable.’

‘When did that happen?’

‘Pretty early: as soon as the gang took shape.’

‘And when did the gang finish taking shape?’

‘I’d say around the beginning of the summer.’

‘More or less when Gafitas joined?’

‘You know who Gafitas was?’

‘Of course.’

‘Who told you?’

‘What do you mean who told me? Everybody knows: Zarco’s ex-wife has been telling anyone who’d listen for years that Cañas was part of her ex-husband’s gang. Cañas himself told me that they called him Gafitas. He agreed to talk to me too; actually he’s my principal source, if it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have been commissioned to write this book.’

‘I didn’t know you were talking to him as well.’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘Who else are you talking to?’

‘No one yet. Shall we go on?’

‘Sure.’

‘You were saying that the gang settled into shape more or less when Gafitas joined.’

‘I think so. More or less. But you’d be better off asking Cañas.’

Chapter 5

‘Inspector Cuenca says that Zarco’s gang settled into shape when you joined.’

‘Is that what he says?’

‘Yes. I think what he means is that you were like the leavening that makes the dough rise into bread.’

‘Yeah. It could be, but I don’t think so. In any case, if it was like that, I didn’t do anything to raise it; and even if I had: remember that I was the lowest guy on the totem pole, who’d just arrived, who was a complete nobody and who was living in a sort of permanent beatified state of shock, to give it a name. On the other hand, what is certain is that Zarco had looked out for himself in his own way for ever, and since arriving in Gerona he’d been gathering around him a group made up mostly of old friends of Tere’s, who she’d grown up with in the prefabs and at Germans Sàbat school. So, when I arrived, the group was already formed and had been doing jobs for months.

‘No, I don’t think I made anything take shape. What is true is that my arrival coincided with the first of the two qualitative leaps the gang made; it wasn’t me who provoked them, but the summer, which changed everything by filling the coast up with tourists and turning it into an irresistible lure. This increased the gang’s activity, maybe turning it into a real criminal gang and in any case and for practical reasons caused it to divide into two groups, which outside the district acted with relative independence: on one side there was Zarco, Tere, Gordo and me, and on the other Guille, Tío, Colilla, Chino and Drácula. Those two groups came into being more or less spontaneously, without anyone suggesting it and without regulation by any explicit hierarchy; it wasn’t necessary: we all took it for granted that Guille was in charge of the second group and Zarco was in charge directly of the first and indirectly of the second. Of course neither the composition of the gang nor that of the two groups was fixed: sometimes people from the second group worked with the first and other times the first group worked with the second; and sometimes people who didn’t belong to the gang or who in theory didn’t belong to the gang acted with the gang, like Latas and Jou and other regulars from La Font or Rufus, not to mention Lina, who belonged to the gang but almost never worked with either of the two groups, I don’t know whether because she didn’t want to or because Gordo wouldn’t let her. I insist that Tere was a case apart: to all intents and purposes she was the same as everyone else; well, to all intents and purposes except for one, because sometimes she didn’t show up at La Font and didn’t always come along on jobs with us and then we had to find someone to take her place. One night I asked Tere about these disappearances, but she smiled, winked at me and didn’t answer. Another night I asked Gordo while smoking a joint with him in the toilet of Rufus, and Gordo answered me with a confusing explanation about Tere’s family from which I only caught clearly that her father was dead or missing, that she lived with her mother and older sister in the prefabs, as well as two nieces, and that she had another sister who’d left home more than a year ago but had just returned, pregnant with her first child.

‘One person who never or almost never missed those daily meetings in La Font was me. Shortly before getting into Zarco’s gang I began to live by an invariable routine: I’d get up about noon, have breakfast, read or loaf around until lunchtime and, when my parents went to have their siesta and my sister went back to work at the pharmaceutical lab, I left and didn’t come back till the early hours of the morning. Around three or three-thirty in the afternoon I’d get to La Font and, while waiting for my friends, I’d talk to the landlady or her customers. I sort of made friends with some of them, especially with Córdoba, a small, scraggy man with a felt hat, always dressed in black and always with a toothpick between his lips, who often bought me beers while we talked about red-light-district things; but I also made friends with an old Communist prostitute called Eulalia, who never raised her large glasses of anisette without toasting the health of La Pasionaria and the hoped-for death of the traitor Carrillo; or with a salesman of pipes, peanuts and candies called Herminio, who would show up at La Font mostly on the weekends and talk about bullfighting and recite poetry in an impossible Catalan and predict the end of the world and the invasion of the planet by extraterrestrials, before visiting all the brothels, offering his wares in a wicker basket; or with a couple of lingerie and trinket salesmen whose names I never knew or have forgotten, two twin brothers who’d arrive after eating lunch in a downtown restaurant, fat, congested and sweaty, with a couple of cheap cigars in their mouths and a couple of patched suitcases in their hands, and leave at dinner time bragging at the top of their voices of having sold their best pieces.

‘My friends would start to show up about four or four-thirty, and from that moment on we’d spend the afternoon talking, going out to smoke joints on Galligants Bridge and drinking beer among the lush collection of hookers, Gypsies, hawkers, hustlers, quinquis, lost causes and crooks who tended to congregate in La Font, until around midnight, after eating a snack somewhere, we went to Rufus to end the day. This happened especially at the beginning, during the first two or three weeks, when there were whole evenings when we practically never left the district. Then we began to escape as a rule to the coast or inland, and La Font became just a meeting place. But by then we were already a fully fledged criminal gang, or just about, and everything had changed.’

‘Before you tell me, let me ask you a question I’ve been wondering about for a while now.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Didn’t you see your friends from Caterina Albert Street again?’

‘That summer? Once or twice, hardly at all, and only just in passing. As I said I would leave the house at three or three-thirty in the afternoon and not return until the early hours, so it was unlikely I’d run into them; besides, we didn’t go to the same places. Anyway, the one I didn’t bump into again was Batista. Why do you ask?’

‘I was wondering if you hadn’t wanted to take revenge on them, if it hadn’t at least occurred to you. You could have tried to get Zarco and company to teach Batista a lesson, for example.’

‘I might have thought about it at some point, but I doubt it: I never had enough confidence with them to dare to ask them something like that. For one thing because I would have had to tell them what Batista and the rest had done to me, and I didn’t want to do that. Don’t you understand? I felt ashamed and guilty about what had happened, I wanted to erase it. I suppose that’s also why I’d gone with Zarco and Tere: to begin a new life, as they say, because I wanted to be someone else, reinvent myself, change my skin, stop being a snake and turn into a dragon, like the heroes of Liang Shan Po. That was what I wanted and, although of course I would have enjoyed getting revenge, given the circumstances it was impossible, at least for the moment. Besides, remember that I had the impression that my old friends and Zarco’s gang lived in different worlds, just like my parents and I, just like my old self and the new me; like I said before: Zarco and I lived very close to each other and very far away, separated by an abyss.’

‘The water margin.’

‘Yes, that border, Liang Shan Po: call it whatever you want.’

‘One more thing. Inspector Cuenca told me that at the time the police had absolute control of the red-light district.’

‘It’s true. Absolute or almost absolute. Later, in the eighties and nineties, everything changed: they abandoned the neighbourhood to its fate, washed their hands of it, and the neighbourhood deteriorated and ended up going to hell. Or not, depending on your point of view. In any case the district disappeared. But in my day they controlled everything: there were always a couple of secret police there, they inspected the bars and the brothels, kept an eye on the hookers, stopped people in the street at all hours, asked for your papers, searched you, asked you what you were doing, where you were going.’

‘Did they ever stop you?’

‘Lots of times.’

‘And didn’t it matter? I mean: weren’t you scared? Didn’t you think the police might tell your parents? Didn’t you think you might get arrested and locked up?’

‘Of course I thought all that, of course I was scared. Anybody would be. But that was just the first few times. Not later. After a while, getting stopped by the cops became part of the routine. Bear in mind that what my parents thought or might no longer think mattered less and less to me. And, as far as getting caught, well, I was sixteen years old and knew that at my age I wasn’t going to end up in juvenile court or a reformatory, but directly in jail, but it seems to me that for any kid that age prison, until he gets locked up there or actually sees the writing on the wall, is more or less like death: something that happens to other people.’

‘You’re right, only you weren’t just any old kid: you didn’t stop committing crimes from the time you met Zarco, or helping to commit them; in other words you didn’t stop giving them reasons to put you in jail.’

‘True, but that’s the secret: the more crimes you commit without anything happening to you, the less fear you have of everything and the more convinced you are that they’ll never catch you and that prison is not for you. It’s as if you’re anaesthetized, or armour-plated. You feel good; or to put it a better way, you feel fucking great: apart from sex and drugs, at sixteen I didn’t know anything better than that.’

‘Tell me about the crimes you guys committed.’

‘At first, more or less up to the month of August, we mostly snatched handbags, robbed houses and stole cars. Stealing cars was so easy that we’d steal them at the drop of a hat, sometimes more than one a day, not always because we needed one but simply because we liked the car and wanted to take a ride in it, or to see who could steal one faster. The fastest were Zarco and Tío, who could get a car open in less than a minute and that’s why they were always in different groups. I learned to open cars straight away, and to start them and drive them. There’s no secret to driving cars, much less to hot-wiring them: first you snap the steering lock with a sharp turn of the wheel, then you identify the power wire, the contact wire and the starter wire and finally you put the three of them together. Getting the cars open, however, was another story; there were several systems: the simplest was to kick in the little window beside the driver’s window, reach in and open the door with your hand; for the more sophisticated method you needed a sawblade with a hook at one end and enough skill to get the blade through the crack between the window and the door and the hook around the lock so you could pull it up. This is the system we tended to use, because it was quicker and more discreet (I watched with my own eyes as Zarco resorted to it on various occasions in places full of people, in plain view of everyone and without anyone noticing what he was doing); but the most common system was to open the car door by picking the lock with one of those keys for opening a tin of sardines or tuna. Anyway, everyone in the gang — some more, some less — knew how to do all these things, and Zarco better than anybody, because he’d been stealing cars since he was six or seven years old. But just because it was very easy to do and we did it every day doesn’t mean that every once in a while we didn’t get a good scare and sometimes, I at least, was very scared while doing it.’

‘In spite of the anaesthesia and armour-plating?’

‘In spite of the anaesthesia and armour-plating. Habit teaches you how to handle part of the fear; but you can never learn how to handle fear as a whole: it almost always handles you.

‘I remember for example one time in La Bisbal, an afternoon in the middle of July. Zarco, Gordo, Drácula and I were in a Renault 5, and as we drove through town we decided to stop for a beer. We parked in a street backing off the main highway, drank a beer while we played table football in a bar called El Teatret and when we went back to the car we saw a Citroën Tiburón parked next to it. Do you remember that beauty? Now it’s an old relic, although back then you didn’t see too many of them either. Anyway. There was no one in sight, so we didn’t even have to exchange a single word before deciding we’d take it. Drácula ran to one corner of the street and I went to the other while Zarco and Gordo stayed by the Tiburón and got down to work. Since the street was not long, I got to my corner straight away, and as soon as I leaned around it saw two cops coming towards me on motorbikes; I should say: I didn’t see them coming but bearing down on me. I doubt the cops suspected what we were up to, but I turned around and ran towards my friends shouting that the cops were coming. All three took off as fast as they could: Drácula immediately vanished and behind him Zarco and Gordo vanished too. Hearing the noise of the motorbikes getting closer and closer, I ran past the Tiburón, turned the corner my friends had just turned, saw that I’d lost them and, as I turned the next corner, found myself running alone under a colonnade, beside the main road, through a commotion of pedestrians getting out of my way and people sitting on the patios of bars. That was when panic overcame me and I knew for certain two complementary things at once: the first was that the two cops had got off their motorbikes and given up chasing my friends and were now only chasing me; the second is that they were going to trap me because I wasn’t going to have time to get to the next corner. And that was when I made an irrational decision, an absurd decision dictated by panic that in hindsight seems dictated by someone who has learned to handle panic: in the middle of the crowd coming out of the shops and bars, drawn by the disturbance, I stopped dead, took off my jean jacket, threw it on the ground, turned around and, pretending to limp and with my heart pounding in my throat, started to walk towards the two cops, who flashed past and vanished behind me around a corner while I quickened my pace and vanished around the opposite corner.’

‘You were saved by a miracle.’

‘Literally.’

‘Now I understand why you said that was a very serious game, in which you risked everything.’

‘Did I say that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well it’s true. And it was also an unending game; or rather, the end could only be catastrophic: the risk anaesthetized you, armour-plated you, but to keep playing you had to keep taking risks, you had to do something for which neither the anaesthetic nor the armour-plating could protect you, so you constantly had to run greater risks. I don’t know if this was conscious, maybe not, or not entirely, but that’s how it was. The fact is that as well as stealing cars, and robbing the occasional house, at first we mainly snatched handbags (tanks, we called them), probably because it seemed as simple and low risk as stealing cars. The proof is that sometimes we’d do it when we didn’t even need money, like stealing cars, almost as a sport or a bit of entertainment; the best proof is that I dared to do it very soon.’

‘How did you do it?’

‘The way we all did: grabbing them. I’ve since read that a famous juvenile delinquent of the time said that Zarco invented the grab and all he did was borrow it from Zarco or from Zarco’s film character; maybe you read that too in some cutting in my file. . It might be true, I’m not saying it’s not, although I tend to believe that this kind of thing says more about Zarco’s legend than reality: after all, there’s almost nothing connected to the juvenile violence of the time that hasn’t been attributed directly or indirectly to him. Because when it comes down to it grabbing a handbag is such an elemental thing that nobody really needed to invent it. All you had to do was steal a car and choose a suitable victim and location: the ideal victim was an older woman with a wealthy appearance if possible and the ideal location was an out-of-the-way sidestreet, solitary if possible; once chosen, the driver approached the victim from behind and drove slowly beside her and at this moment I, who would be sitting in the front passenger seat, had two options: one — the simplest and best — consisted of sticking my body out the window and grabbing the handbag away from the victim in one yank; the other — more complicated, that we’d only use when there was no other choice — consisted of jumping out of the moving car, running to the victim, snatching the bag and, once it was in my hands, running and jumping back in the car. The only precaution I took in both cases consisted of taking off my glasses so the victim couldn’t recognize me by them. Like I said it was a very simple thing, and comparatively low risk; of course low earning too, because there normally wasn’t a lot of money in the stolen handbags. Anyhow, at first that was the kind of robbery in which I most frequently played the part of protagonist, although not the only one: now I remember, for example, one afternoon when I stole the day’s takings from a refreshment stand on the beach in Tossa while Tere distracted the manager by flirting with him. But that wasn’t very usual. The usual was that I played the part of bait or front, or I just kept a lookout while the rest worked, or did both successively. That’s what I’d done the first time I robbed with them, the afternoon in La Montgoda, and that’s what I kept doing throughout the month of July, up until Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest changed things.’

‘It’s odd. The way you tell the story, anyone might think that it wasn’t you who joined up with Zarco’s gang but Zarco who recruited you.’

‘It doesn’t strike me as a mistaken deduction. Although probably the two things happened at once; in other words: that I needed what Zarco had and that Zarco needed what I had.’

‘I understand what you might have needed from Zarco, but what could Zarco have needed from you? That you acted as bait or a front, as you put it?’

‘Sure. That was useful for a gang like that; besides, remember what Tere told me to convince me to come with them on the robbery in La Montgoda: they needed someone like me, someone who looked like a student at the Marists’ school with a face like he’d never broken a plate, someone who spoke Catalan. . I think that’s what Zarco thought of me, at least at first. Do you remember the character of Gafitas in the first part of that film Wild Boys? Obviously, that’s based on me, was inspired by me, and the Zarco of the film recruits him for his fictional gang for the same reason I believe the real Zarco recruited me for his gang in reality: so I could act as bait or as a front. Anyway, I’m not saying that Zarco went to the Vilaró arcade looking for me on purpose or anything like that; what I think happened is that our paths crossed by chance at the arcade and that, when he realized I could be useful to him, he did everything he could to keep me. Probably including inventing an attack on the arcade.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, most likely Zarco never had any intention of robbing the Vilaró arcade. Neither Zarco nor Guille, or anybody else either. It’s possible. The truth is it wasn’t the kind of job they were doing then, without guns or anything, so it’s possible that Zarco invented it to scare me so I would ask him not to do it and he would do me a false favour and I would feel obliged to owe him one.’

‘Are you sure of that?’

‘No, not sure, although once Zarco told me that was what happened.’

‘What other things do you think Zarco might have done to recruit you?’

‘Are you thinking of something in particular?’

‘The same as you.’

‘What am I thinking of?’

‘Tere. Do you think Zarco could have convinced her to do what she did?’

‘You mean what happened in the washrooms of the Vilaró arcade?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know. There were times when I thought that and other times when I thought not; now I don’t know what to think. Besides, I don’t think this has anything to do with your book, so we better change the subject.’

‘Sorry. You’re right. Let’s talk about something else. You mentioned Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest. What happened? How did Guille die? How did the other three get arrested? How did it affect the gang?’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Of course what happened in the arcade has to do with your book, at least in my case, everything to do with Tere has to do with Zarco and vice versa; so if you don’t understand my relationship with Tere you won’t understand my relationship with Zarco, which is what this is about. Did I tell you I joined Zarco’s gang for Tere?’

‘Yes, but you also said that she probably wasn’t the only reason.’

‘I’m not saying she was the only reason; I do say she was decisive. How would I have dared to get into that gang of quinquis and do what I did if it wasn’t the only way to get close to Tere? She was what I most needed of what Zarco’s gang had. Love made me brave. I’d fallen in love before, but not like I fell in love with Tere. At first it even passed through my head that Tere could be my girlfriend, the first girl I’d go out with; after my first few days in the gang I ruled that out, of course, and not because it was impossible in theory — after all, whether or not she was Zarco’s girl, Tere slept with whoever she wanted and even flirted with me once in a while or I had the impression that she was flirting with me — but because she seemed too much for me: too independent, too good-looking, too much of a tease, too grown-up, too dangerous; in reality, I don’t know what I aspired to with her: I probably just hoped that what happened in the washrooms of the Vilaró arcade would happen again, and that she’d sleep with me every once in a while.’

‘Yeah, you told me that too.’

‘The thing is Tere turned into an obsession. I’d been masturbating since I was thirteen or fourteen, but that summer I must have broken the world wanking record; and up till then I’d masturbated over photos from The Book of Woman, illustrations in comics, movie actresses, heroines of novels and girls in nude magazines or garage mechanics’ calendars, from then on Tere was the absolute protagonist of my imaginary harem. So much so that I often felt that Tere wasn’t one character but two: the real character I met every afternoon at La Font and the fictional character with whom I went to bed morning, noon and night in my fantasies. If I’m honest, I sometimes had my doubts about which one of the two had shared the washrooms of the Vilaró arcade with me.

‘Until one night in late July it seemed like the real person and the fictional character finally merged into one, and that meant that everything was going to change between us. It’s one of the nights of that summer that I remember best, maybe because over the years since I’ve gone over and over what happened. If you like I’ll tell you.’

‘Please do.’

‘It’s a bit of a long story; we’ll have to leave Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest for another time.’

‘Not to worry.’

‘All right. As I was saying, it was one of the last nights in July, not long after the scare over the Tiburón in La Bisbal and not long before Guille’s death and the arrest of the others. It was a Friday or Saturday night, in Montgó, a beach in L’Escala. We’d been in the district till dusk, and then Tere, Zarco, Gordo, Lina and I stole a Volkswagen and drove off towards the coast.

‘As far as I recall we didn’t have any plan and we weren’t going to any particular place, but when we got to Calella de Palafrugell we felt hungry and thirsty and decided to stop. It was a pitch-black night. We parked on a patch of ground at the edge of the village, took a second round of uppers, went down to the beach, looked unsuccessfully for a table on one of the patios and finally went into a bar, maybe Ca la Raquel. There we ordered beers and sandwiches at the bar and Zarco started talking about his family, something I’d never heard him do before. He talked about his Uncle Joaquín, one of his mother’s brothers with whom, as he later told in his memoir, he’d spent two years of his childhood travelling here and there in a DKW, helping him earn a living through robberies and shady deals; he also talked, with admiration, of his three older brothers, who were in their twenties back then and in prison. He might have talked about something else, though I don’t remember now. The thing is that at some point I went to the washroom and, when I came back, two girls had joined the group. One, the one who was beside Zarco, was called Elena and she was petite, dark-haired and pretty, like a doll; the second was called Piti and she was taller and had reddish hair and pale freckly skin. I grabbed my beer and started listening to Zarco, who was telling Elena that we lived in Palamós and were students, although, he added in the same unconcerned tone, we spent the summer doing jobs; the lie didn’t surprise me, because it was inoffensive, but the truth did, because it was indiscreet, and, since Zarco didn’t usually commit indiscretions, I thought he’d taken such a fancy to that doll that he was willing to do anything to seduce her. Jobs? asked Elena. We nick cars, break into houses, all sorts, Zarco explained. Elena looked at me, looked back at Zarco and laughed; I tried to laugh, but I couldn’t. That’s a lie, said Elena. And how do you know? asked Zarco without laughing. Simple, answered Elena. Because people who do jobs like that never say they do. Shit, said Zarco, pretending to be frustrated, and added, pretending to be guileless: Tell me something else: Do people who have dosh go around saying they do? Elena seemed to consider the question, amused. If they have a little, they do, but if they have a lot, then no, she said at last. Then we can’t say we do, said Zarco, looking at me with feigned annoyance. Why do you want to say you’ve got dosh? Elena asked, prolonging the flirtation. To impress us? Of course not, said Zarco. Just to buy you another round. Elena laughed again. We accept, she said. Zarco immediately ordered another round of beers and, while we were drinking them, Elena told us that she and her friend lived in Alicante, that they’d been travelling around Catalonia for two weeks, that they were staying in a cheap hotel in L’Escala and that they’d hitchhiked that afternoon from L’Escala to Calella. When she finished talking, the girl leaned over to Zarco and whispered something in his ear. Zarco nodded. Sure, he said. He paid and we left.

We wandered the streets a bit looking for a quiet place to roll some joints, until we got to a plaza in front of the village church. We sat there for quite a while smoking and talking around a bench and, when we started to think about moving on, Elena mentioned a discotheque where they’d gone dancing a couple of times; Piti said the disco was called Marocco and it was near L’Escala, and Zarco suggested we go check it out. Have you guys got a car? Piti asked. Of course, answered Zarco. Great, said Elena. We only have one car, Gordo pointed out. And there’s seven of us. That doesn’t matter, said Elena. We’ll all fit. Don’t pay any fucking attention to Gordo, Zarco interrupted. He’s always joking around: no respect for anyone. And he added: we actually came in two cars. Before anyone could deny it, Zarco asked Elena and Piti if they both knew the way to the Marocco; they said they did and then Zarco jumped off the back of the bench where he was sitting, landed on the flagstones and said: Cool. Gordo, I’ll take Elena, Tere and Gafitas in the Volkswagen; you bring Lina and Piti in your dad’s car. What car? asked Lina. But Zarco had already started walking out of the plaza and we all followed him and nobody paid any attention to Lina, not even Gordo, who just fixed his lacquered hair a little with a resigned look on his face, draped his arm over his girlfriend’s shoulder while telling her to shut up and cursing Zarco’s mother.

‘So that’s how we ended up that night in Montgó, which was the cove where the Marocco was hidden. From Calella it couldn’t have taken us more than half an hour to get there, and that was in spite of Elena getting us lost and, after crossing L’Escala, spending a while driving in circles around a housing development. But eventually we saw a sign advertising the place, went down a dirt road and managed to park in a clearing in a pine forest crammed full of cars and illuminated by the lights of the discotheque, shining in the distance, way down by the beach.

‘Marocco turned out to be a disco for foreign tourists and hippy stragglers, but the music playing inside was no different from what they played at Rufus, probably because that summer all the discos played more or less the same music or because it seemed more or less the same to me: rock and pop hits alternating with disco songs (and once in a while a rumba, quite frequently at Rufus). Before going inside the discotheque we’d smoked one last joint, and Zarco, Tere and I popped our third upper; as soon as we went in I lost sight of Zarco and Elena, not Tere, who went straight onto the dance floor. I stood at the bar and watched her while I drank a beer, at times with the smug sensation (which sometimes struck me at Rufus as well) that she was dancing for me or at least that she knew I was watching her, always with the feeling that the movements of her body adapted to the music like a glove to a hand. After a while Gordo, Lina and Piti arrived, said hi and ordered drinks. Gordo and Lina went to sit on a sofa or got lost on the dance floor, and Piti asked me where Elena was; I answered that I didn’t know though I thought she was with Zarco. Then Piti asked me if we’d been there long and I said yes and then she told me, as if I didn’t know or as if apologizing, that it had taken them longer than expected to get there; I interrupted her to say that we’d got lost too, but Piti answered that they hadn’t taken so long because they got lost but because Gordo had forgotten where he’d parked the car, and she and Lina had had to wait for him until he found it and came back to pick them up. I clicked my tongue and said, shaking my head back and forth: Not again. The same thing every time. He always forgets where he parks his car? she asked. No, I answered. Only when he drives his dad’s car. Really? she asked. Really, I answered; I added: He should go see a psychoanalyst. We looked at each other and then burst out laughing. Then we carried on talking, until Tere interrupted us. Piti asked her where Elena was. Tere said she didn’t know and then the two of them started talking. I didn’t hear what they were talking about, but a short time later Piti left the bar as fast as she could. What happened to her? I asked. Nothing, answered Tere. It looked like she was crying, I insisted. You’re seeing things, Gafitas, Tere teased. Then she asked: So, are you dancing or what?

‘I was gobsmacked: Tere had never asked me to dance, and I’d never even considered the possibility that I might dance with her, in part (I think I already told you) out of embarrassment, and in part because I didn’t know how to dance. But that night I discovered that to dance, or at least to dance to the music they played at the discos, you didn’t have to know how to dance, you just needed to want to move around a bit. It was Tere who revealed this to me. But it was when we finished dancing that what I wanted to tell you about happened. When the music stopped and they turned on the lights in the discotheque, Tere and I realized that our friends had disappeared. We spent a while looking for them, first inside the place and then on the way out, on a patio full of night owls prowling around a closed refreshment stand, not yet ready to consider the night over. We didn’t find any of them, and I told Tere that they’d probably all left and we’d better go too. Tere didn’t answer. We walked to the parking lot, swept at this hour by the lights of departing cars. We didn’t know what car Gordo had nicked in Calella, but our Volkswagen was still parked between two pine trees. At least Zarco hasn’t gone, said Tere when she saw it. How do you know? I replied, thinking she was probably right. He might have stolen another car. I had absolutely no desire to see Zarco, I wanted to go on spending the night alone with Tere, so I concluded: It’s almost five; come on, let’s go. Tere stood still and took a while to answer. What’s your hurry, Gafitas? she finally said. Then she took me by the arm and pulled me around and forced me to walk back to the Marocco as she said, Come on. Let’s see if we can find them.

‘We walked past the patio of the discotheque, almost empty now, towards the darkness and started walking along the beach. In the sky a bright full moon was shining and, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness and as we approached the water, it revealed a cove bordered by two hills and strewn with lumps on the sand like shadowy shells. They’re here, on the beach, whispered Tere when we got to the water’s edge, sitting down on the sand; she added: We’ll smoke a reefer. How do you know? I asked. What a question, she said. Because I’m going to roll one. How do you know they’re here? I clarified. Tere licked the paper of a cigarette, peeled it, emptied the tobacco into the rolling paper she had spread out in her hand and answered: Because I do. She finished rolling the joint, lit it, took five or six tokes and passed it to me.

‘I sat down next to her and smoked listening to the sound of the waves breaking against the shore and watching the moonlight bouncing off the surface of the sea and diffusing a silver brilliance over the whole cove. Tere didn’t say anything and neither did I, as if we were both exhausted or lost in thought or hypnotized by the spectacle of the beach at night. After a while Tere stubbed out the joint and buried it in the sand; she stood up and said: I’m going for a swim. Before I could say anything she stripped off and walked into the sea that looked like an enormous and silent black sheet. She swam away from the shore and, at some point, stopped and started calling me with muffled little shouts that echoed around the whole cove. I took off my clothes and ran into the water.

‘It was almost warm. I swam out to sea a bit, away from Tere and, when I stopped, I turned around and realized I was in the middle of an immense darkness and that the few little dots of light on the beach were very far away and Tere had disappeared. I swam back towards shore, with strong strokes, but when I stood up I still couldn’t see Tere. With the water up to my waist I looked for her without finding her, and during a moment of panic I imagined she’d left and taken my clothes with her, but then I saw her silhouette emerging from the water to my left, twenty or thirty metres away. I walked out of the water too, feeling that the swim had dissipated the inebriation of the alcohol and hash and calmed the tachycardia of the uppers, and, when I got to Tere, she had already covered up with her T-shirt and was barefoot and sitting on her jeans. Standing up, I put my underwear and jeans on as fast as I could, and still hadn’t finished buttoning my shirt when Tere asked: Hey, Gafitas, me and you haven’t had a shag yet, have we? I got my buttons all mixed up. No, I managed to say. I don’t think so. Tere stood up, took my hands away from my shirt and started unbuttoning the ones I’d got mixed up; I thought she was unbuttoning them to button them up properly, but while she was still unbuttoning them she kissed me, and while she was kissing me I guessed that she was naked from the waist down. Again she asked: Well it’s about time we did, don’t you think?

‘You can imagine the rest. And, as I told you before, as a result of what happened that night I believed everything was going to change between Tere and me and from then on Tere would stop being an imaginary character in my imaginary harem to become only a real character, or that the real character and the imaginary one would meld together into a single one; and I also thought that, although from then on she might not become my girlfriend, at least we’d sleep together every once in a while. It wasn’t like that. Maybe the fact that this episode happened very close to the time of Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest might have contributed to it not turning out like that, but the truth is it wasn’t like that. And everything got complicated. But that, if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you next time. Now I’m running late: I have to get going.’

‘Of course. But I wouldn’t like to stop without you telling me what happened to your friends that night.’

‘Ah, nothing important. The next day I found out at La Font. Gordo and Lina left the Marocco early, they took Piti back to the hotel in L’Escala and went home. Zarco slept with Elena in some hotel in L’Escala, and in the morning went back to Gerona too, just like Tere and I did. We never heard any more from Piti and Elena.’

‘So it wasn’t true that night that Zarco and Elena were on the beach, as Tere had said.’

‘No.’

‘Do you think Tere knew or suspected and lied to you because she wanted to seduce you?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘I’ll put the question another way: did you never think that Tere had slept with you that night out of spite, to get even with Zarco, because he’d left with Elena?’

‘Yeah. But I didn’t think that then. I thought it later. And only briefly.’

‘And later? I mean: and now?’

‘Now what?’

‘Now what do you think about that?’

‘That it’s not true.’

Chapter 6

‘Tell me about Gafitas.’

‘What do you want me to tell you? A policeman’s life is full of strange stories, but the story of Gafitas is among the strangest that’s happened to me since I started this job. At first perhaps you might not think so: after all it’s not that rare to see a case of a middle-class kid or upper middle-class or even an upper-class kid get involved with a gang of quinquis and suchlike. At least it wasn’t so rare back then; in fact, a while later I knew of a similar case, although that was in the tough years when kids were going astray on drugs, while in Gafitas’s day drugs were only just starting to arrive and it’s harder to find an explanation for what happened. I at least don’t have one, and this is something I’ve never talked to Cañas about since; I’ve talked to Cañas about other things, but never this: for us it’s as if it never happened. How do you like that? But anyway, if he’s telling you the story of his relationship with Zarco, I imagine you’ll already have an explanation of why he ended up in his gang.’

‘Cañas says it was by chance.’

‘That’s not an explanation: everything happens by chance.’

‘What I mean is that Cañas says he met Zarco by chance; the reasons he joined his gang are something else. According to him, the main reason is that he fell in love with Zarco’s girl.’

‘You mean Tere?’

‘Who else?’

‘Zarco had a lot of girls; and Tere a lot of guys.’

‘He means Tere. Does that surprise you?’

‘No: I think it’s interesting. What other explanations has Cañas given you?’

‘He’s told me that Zarco went looking for him. Or that he didn’t just join Zarco, rather Zarco also recruited him: according to Cañas, Zarco needed someone like him, someone who spoke Catalan and looked like a nice boy and could act as a decoy for their jobs.’

‘That sounds a bit unlikely to me. I mean, I’m not saying that a good decoy couldn’t have come in handy for Zarco, but I don’t think it would have mattered to him enough to go out and look for one, among other reasons because he used to do things bare-faced, without any screen.’

‘Not that he was looking: he just found one.’

‘Well, then maybe so. In any case it’s true that Gafitas wasn’t like the rest of the gang; that was clear as day: although he soon started dressing like them, and combing his hair and walking and talking like them, he never looked like one of them; he always looked like what he was.’

‘And what was he? A middle-class teenager taking a walk on the wild side?’

‘More or less.’

‘Do you mean that he never took what he was doing with Zarco seriously?’

‘No: of course he took it seriously; if not he never would have gone as far as he went. What I mean is that he always thought, as serious as it was, that it was just temporary, that he’d stop and return to the fold and then it would be as if nothing had ever happened. That’s my impression. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. In any case, ask Cañas. Or don’t waste your time: I’m sure Cañas will say I’m wrong. Up to you.’

‘From what you say, you guys didn’t see Gafitas the same way you saw the rest of them.’

‘We saw him for what he was, as I said, just that he wasn’t like the rest. And if you mean did we treat him differently from the rest, the answer is no. . Although maybe I should qualify this. The truth is at first, when he showed up in the district with Zarco and the rest, we thought it would just be a fleeting thing, one of those strange things the district sometimes turned up; the surprise was that he lasted and after a short time he was just one more of them. As for the end, well, judging by what happened in the end maybe you’re right: maybe we did always see him in a different light. But we’ll talk about the end later, right?’

‘Yeah. Let’s go back to the beginning. The other day you told me that the gang settled into shape when Gafitas arrived on the scene.’

‘That’s what I believe. Of course before Gafitas showed up there was already a gang more or less in existence: they stole cars and broke into holiday villas, snatched purses and stuff; but when Gafitas showed up things changed. Not because Gafitas wanted them to, of course, just because; these things happen all the time: something is added by chance to a mechanism and it unintentionally changes the way it works. That’s what might have happened when Gafitas joined Zarco’s gang. Or when Zarco recruited him, as Cañas says.’

‘Was it at that moment when you guys detected that there was a gang of delinquents operating in the city?’

‘No, it was earlier. I remember very well because for me the case began then. One morning Deputy Superintendent Martínez called all sixteen inspectors of the Squad into his office. That wasn’t too out of the ordinary; what was out of the ordinary is that the provincial superintendent was present at the meeting: that meant it was a serious matter. During the meeting the superintendent said very little, but Martínez explained that for some time they’d been receiving recurrent reports of robberies in the city and the towns and housing developments of the province; at that time the systems of suspect detection were very rudimentary, we didn’t have a computerized registry of fingerprints like they do nowadays and everything had to be done by hand, imagine what that was like. In any case the repetition of the robbery methods, Martínez told us, led them to believe that we were dealing with a more or less organized gang: the handbags were always snatched the same way, the cars always hot-wired the same way and the houses always broken into through doors or windows when they were empty; furthermore, witnesses spoke of kids doing the robberies. Here things got complicated because, as I think I told you already, there was no such thing as a teenage gang back then, or they didn’t exist the way they later did, or at least we didn’t know about them, so Martínez’s conjectures did not indicate a gang of teenagers but an adult gang who used kids to help them. This meant it wasn’t going to occur to anybody at first that Zarco’s gang had anything to do with those robberies, first because we didn’t even think of them as a criminal gang exactly, and second because, as far as we knew, they weren’t associated with any adults. Be that as it may, Martínez asked the whole brigade to be alert and assigned Vives to take charge of the case; our group had several things on our hands already, and Vives decided to divide us in two and asked me to devote myself exclusively to this case with the help of Hidalgo and Mejía.

‘That’s how I began to pursue Zarco without yet knowing I was pursuing him. Apart from bureaucratic tasks, my job up till then consisted mostly of interrogating victims and suspects, gathering evidence and spending the afternoons and evenings doing the rounds of the bars of the district, identifying, frisking and questioning anyone and everyone, keeping my eyes and ears wide open; from that moment on my job would still be the same, except that now my main objective was to arrest the gang we’d just been alerted to. Just at that time Gafitas showed up in the district, but I’d been trying to complete my mission for a relatively short time and hadn’t yet associated the gang I was looking for with Zarco’s gang.’

‘When did you associate them?’

‘Some time later. Actually, during the first weeks I was so disoriented that I only managed to establish that the robberies were the work of one gang and not a bunch of different gangs or isolated individuals, which is what I thought more than once at the beginning; I also came to think that the gang had no connection to the city or to the red-light district, that it had its centre of operations outside — in Barcelona, perhaps, or maybe in some housing development or town on the coast — and that they only came into the city on jobs and then left. It was a preposterous idea, but ignorance produces preposterous ideas, don’t you think? I had a few at least, until one day I began to suspect that Zarco and his guys could be connected to the robberies.’

‘How did you reach that conclusion?’

‘Thanks to Vedette.’

‘You mean the madam?’

‘Do you know her?’

‘I’ve heard about her.’

‘Of course, lots of people have heard about her, she was a legend in the district. The truth is she was a remarkable woman, and one who stood out in that scene. When I met her she was already getting on, but she still had her faux-grande-dame bearing, she still behaved with the arrogance of a woman who was once very beautiful and still ran her business with an iron fist. She was the proprietor of two clubs, La Vedette and the Eden; the best known was La Vedette, which also had a reputation for being the best hooker bar in the district, as in times gone by the Salón Rosa or the Racó used to have. It was a small L-shaped place, without a single table but with lots of stools lined up against the walls, opposite a bar that began just to the left of the entrance then turned left again and continued to the back, where two doors opened, one to the kitchen and the other to a stairway leading to the rooms upstairs; the walls were wood-lined and had no windows, several columns came out of the bar and reached up to the ceiling mouldings, a reddish light made objects and faces look unreal, the music of Los Chunguitos, Los Chichos and people like that was playing at all hours. Back then it was often full, especially on Saturdays and Sundays, just when we tended not to go to the district so we wouldn’t ruin the bar owners’ businesses by scaring away their abundant weekend clientele.

‘The day I’m talking about must have been a Monday or a Tuesday because there weren’t many people in the bar and Mondays and Tuesdays were slow days in the district. When we went in Hidalgo and I always carried on straight to the back, where we could get a good view of the whole place, and we stayed there while Vedette or her husband pressed the button that turned the red light on in the rooms and the girls moved away looking at us from the other end of the bar with the usual mixture of suspicion and indifference. We talked for a while with Vedette, and then I left her with Hidalgo and went to talk to three girls who were alone at the bar. The first two didn’t tell me anything out of the ordinary, but, after a few minutes of conversation, the third told me or led me to understand — or maybe it slipped out — that Zarco and his gang had spent a fortune in the place the previous Saturday night. I spoke to the first two girls again, who confirmed the story a bit reluctantly, and one of them added, probably to make up for her previous silence, that one of the kids had mentioned that he or someone from the gang or the whole gang had been in Lloret that afternoon. I went back to the bar and told the owner what her girls had told me; a little grimace gave her away: because it was in her interest, Vedette had always behaved very well towards us, but she was an astute woman and knew that information was power and liked to be the one who handled it and doled it out; in any case she immediately realized that she neither could nor should refute what her charges had said, so she had no choice but to confirm it, although she tried to play down Saturday’s orgy, assuring us that Zarco and the rest had spent much less money than the girls had claimed and denied having heard anything to do with Lloret.

‘The first thing I did when I got to the station the next morning was to ask whether there’d been any robberies in the city or province that we hadn’t heard about. Nobody knew anything, but Hidalgo, Mejía and I started making inquiries and soon found out that the Civil Guard in Lloret had received a complaint the previous day of a break-in at a bungalow in a housing development called La Montgoda. That’s how we connected one thing to the other. And that’s how I got my first suspicion that the gang we were looking for was Zarco’s gang. How do you like that?’

Chapter 7

‘It was at the beginning of August, not long after I slept with Tere on the Montgó beach, outside the Marocco, and it was like cresting a hill not least because from that moment on the gang was reduced almost by half. I’m talking about Guille’s death and the arrests of Chino, Tío and Drácula.

‘It happened at the same time as my parents went away on holiday. Until then I’d always gone with them, but I spent the month of July announcing to my mother that I was going to stay in Gerona with my sister and she and my father finally accepted it. My parents’ departure simplified things, because it allowed me to stop leading a double life — that of a quinqui with Zarco’s gang, that of a conventional teenager with my family — and to enjoy much more liberty than I’d ever enjoyed before. I don’t think my parents left without me calmly, but I don’t think they had much choice either, because at sixteen it was impossible to force me to go with them and on top of that they must have been more than fed up with the arguments, complaints, rude remarks and hostile silences, and maybe they thought it would do me good to spend a month apart from them. What my parents did try to do was keep me under control through my sister, although she wasn’t much help to them: as soon as I understood that they’d put her in charge of keeping an eye on me and keeping them informed, I threatened her, told her I knew a lot about her and that, if she told our parents anything I was up to, I’d do the same; of course, I was bluffing, I had no idea what kind of life my sister was leading and had not the slightest interest in finding out, but she didn’t know that and she did know I was serious, that I’d changed in that brief month and a half of summer and was no longer the fragile adolescent or faint-hearted little brother I used to be, and on account of that she had begun to fear my reactions, if not respect me. So she had no choice but to shut up and accept the blackmail.

‘I’m sure I don’t need to clarify that my parents’ departure affected me, not the gang; what affected the gang was, as I was saying, Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest. The episode was pretty confusing, and I wasn’t involved, so what I’m going to tell you is not what happened but what I reconstructed after it happened. That afternoon Guille’s group didn’t even come into La Font; I knew they were up to something but I didn’t know exactly what, which was quite normal anyway, because normally only Zarco and Guille knew what we were all up to and the rest of us knew nothing or only knew about stuff once it had already happened. This ignorance wasn’t premeditated, a security measure or anything like that; it was just a symptom of our absolute subordination to Zarco and Guille, proof that, in the hierarchy of the group, those of us who weren’t Zarco and Guille were no more than extras. The thing is that Guille and his group had planned a robbery in a village near Figueras that afternoon and the robbery went wrong because, as we began to learn that night and as was related in the newspapers the next day, while Guille and Drácula were inside the house the owner and two of his sons showed up firing hunting rifles and scared them away. Everything would have ended at that if some neighbours, alerted by the gunshots, hadn’t called the police and if not for the coincidence that there was a milk cart, which is what we called the white Seat 131s of the police fleet, nearby; these two things meant that, when our guys pulled out onto the main road fleeing the failed robbery, they practically crashed into the cop car and a full-speed chase ensued that ended a few kilometres further on, when Tío took the curve of the Bàscara bridge too fast and lost control of the Seat 124 they were in, and the car flipped over several times before going over the railings and falling into the river. Guille got stabbed in the sternum with the gear stick and died instantly; Tío, Chino and Drácula survived, although Tío broke his spinal column in several places and was left a quadriplegic.

‘The days following the accident were very strange. None of us went to Guille’s funeral or visited the injured guys in hospital or showed any concern for them or their families (only some time later Tere did); actually, everything went on as if that catastrophe hadn’t happened, except for the fact that for three days we were sort of dormant, we even stopped stealing cars, and people in the district and at Rufus bombarded us with questions and the secret police interrogated us several times. But between ourselves, as far as I remember, we barely mentioned the accident, or we only mentioned it in a neutral and dispassionate way as if it had nothing to do with us. I don’t have any explanation for that either. Perhaps it was all a pose, or we were like punch-drunk boxers, or in reality the accident and its consequences overwhelmed us, and that’s why we talked so little about it. You could say that, but I’m not sure it’s true.

‘What is true is that the incident changed everything. I remember very well how the change began. One afternoon, after about four or five days of total paralysis, Zarco, Gordo and Colilla went into a villa at La Fosca beach, between Calella and Palamós, while I stood guard by the door, and they came out of there with an armour-plated safe they could barely carry between the three of them; and we put it in the trunk and tried to open it in an empty field, but we quickly realized we wouldn’t be able to without help and took it to the General’s house. The expression on the General’s face changed when we told him what we had in the car and he told us to leave the safe in the yard and then asked us to wait there. We waited there, accompanied or guarded by the General’s wife, who came in and out of the yard in silence, with her grey hair and grey housecoat and vague eyes. The General came straight back. With him came two men carrying two toolboxes. After examining the safe, the men took out some safety goggles, gloves and a pair of blowtorches and got to work. An hour later they’d destroyed the lock and opened the safe.

‘The General saw the two men out. As he did so we looked through the safe: inside were stacks of files full of documents and a gold ring with a precious stone set in it. When he came back out of the house, the General found his wife examining the gemstone against the light. When she saw him, the woman rubbed the stone against her housecoat, as if she’d sullied it and wanted to shine it up again, and then she handed it to Gordo, who in turn handed it to Zarco, who in turn handed it to the General. How much do you want for this? the General asked Zarco, after studying the ring and gem carefully. Nothing, said Zarco. The General looked at him with distrust. I don’t want cash, Zarco clarified. I want hardware. The General’s expression went from distrust to incredulity; I looked at Gordo and Colilla and realized they were as perplexed as the General or, for that matter, as I was: Zarco hadn’t said a word to them about weapons either. The General looked sceptical, scratched his sideburns and said: What happened to Guille has upset you, son. Zarco smiled and shrugged, although he didn’t say anything; his silence was his way of insisting, or that’s how the General took it, and he added: I don’t have weapons: you should know that. Yeah, I know, said Zarco. But you can get some if you want. The General asked: What do you want them for? What’s it to you? Zarco replied softly; and just as softly asked: Do you want it or not? If yes, fine; if not, fine too: I’ll find someone who does. Before the General could reply something nobody expected happened: his wife intervened in the discussion. Get them for him, she said. We all looked at her; standing between us and the General, the woman had her hands hanging down at her sides and, with her blind-woman’s eyes, she seemed not to be looking at anyone or to be looking at us all at once. It was the first time I’d heard her speak and her voice sounded cold and piercing, like the tyrannical voice of a spoiled child. After a moment of silence she repeated: Get them for him. Have you gone crazy too? the General asked then. What if they turn us in? Can’t you see they’re just little kids and that. .? They’re not kids, his wife cut him off. They’re men. As much as you are. Or more. They won’t turn us in. Give them guns. Indecisive or furious, the General put the gem in his shirt pocket, walked over to his wife, grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the back of the yard; there they stayed for a while, whispering (the General was gesturing, as well), and then both of them went inside the house and a short time later the General came out alone. What do you need? he asked briskly. Not much, replied Zarco. A pistol and a couple of sawn-off shotguns. That’s a lot, said the General. That’s a lot less than the stone’s worth, Zarco replied. The General only thought for a second. All right, he said. Come by tomorrow afternoon and they’ll be here. Before we could consider the deal done he looked at each of the four of us one by one and said: One last thing. It’s a message from my wife. She’s asked me to tell you just once and I’m only going to say it once: anyone who lets it out is dead.

‘The next day the General presented us with a long-barrelled 9mm Star pistol, two homemade sawn-off shotguns, a couple of magazines and a couple of boxes of ammunition. That same afternoon we spent several hours shooting at empty tin cans in a forest in Aiguaviva, and two days later we held up a grocer’s shop in Sant Feliu de Guíxols at gunpoint. The takings were scant, but the job was safe and comfortable, because the shopkeeper was so startled that he offered no resistance and didn’t even report the robbery to the police. I don’t know if our first armed robbery made us think that they’d all be very easy; if it did, the illusion didn’t last long at all.

‘Two days later we tried to rob a gas station on the way to Barcelona, near Sils. The plan was simple. It consisted of Zarco and Tere going into the station and pointing their guns at the guy behind the counter while Gordo and I waited outside, with the engine running, ready to drive out at full speed as soon as they came out with the money; the car, incidentally, was a Seat 124, which was the car we started to use systematically for our hold-ups because it was fast and powerful and easy to handle, and didn’t attract attention.

‘The plan was simple, but it went wrong. As soon as we stopped at the gas station, Zarco and Tere got out and started filling up the tank; meanwhile, Gordo and I stayed in the car, watching as two men waited to pay at the cash register inside the glass-walled station shop, and, when the second man finished paying and left, Gordo gave a signal to Zarco who gave a signal to Tere and they both pulled stockings over their heads at the same time, got out the guns — Zarco the Star and Tere a sawn-off shotgun — and walked into the glass-walled shop aiming them at the proprietor. I saw it all from inside the car, holding my breath beside Gordo, clutching the other shotgun and keeping one eye on the entrance to the gas station and the other on the glass-walled shop: through the huge windows I saw how the owner of the station raised his arms, how then, slowly, he lowered them and how, when he’d lowered them already, he made a strange quick movement. Then there was the thunder of a gunshot followed by a muffled swearword from Gordo, I looked at Gordo and then I looked back at the shop, but now I couldn’t see anything or I only saw shattered glass. A couple of seconds later Zarco and Tere rushed into the car and Gordo pulled away and skidded out through the entrance to take the highway in the direction of Blanes, while in the back seat Zarco explained, swearing his head off, that the money wasn’t where they’d expected it to be or where it should have been and that the owner of the gas station had tried to grab the pistol and in the struggle, while Tere shouted threats at the man, the gun had gone off and the shot shattered the window. Now we were speeding as fast as possible down the main highway, Zarco and Tere seemed calm in the back seat (or maybe it’s just that I was so nervous in the front seat) and, as we got further away from the gas station, Gordo began to ease off a bit on the accelerator, until after a little while, when we were almost going normal speed and the four of us were beginning to feel that the fright had passed, he said, looking in the rear-view mirror: We’re being followed.

‘It was true. We all turned around and the first thing we saw was one of the secret police’s Seat 1430s about a hundred and fifty metres behind us, and at that moment the driver and the officer beside him realized we’d recognized them and put the flashing light on the roof of the car and turned on the siren. What do we do? asked Gordo. Speed up, said Zarco. Although on that stretch the highway was narrow and curved, Gordo floored it and in the blink of an eye we’d overtaken a pick-up truck and a couple of cars, but the police car easily replicated Gordo’s manoeuvre and was back on our tail. It was then that the real chase began. Gordo drove the 124 as fast as its engine would go, the cars in front of us and oncoming traffic started to get out of our way, the police car got close enough to bang into our bumper and twice pulled up next to us and sideswiped us trying to push us into the ditch. Before they could try for a third time, Gordo took the next exit, which turned out to be a dirt track full of potholes that we started jolting along into a little pine forest with the police not very far behind, and at some moment the first shot was fired, and then the second and the third, and before I knew it we were in the middle of a full-scale shootout, with bullets coming through the back windscreen and whistling between us and going out through the front windscreen while Zarco and Tere leaned out the side windows and began to shoot back at our pursuers and Gordo tried to dodge the shots by zigzagging through the pines and driving off the track and back onto it and I cringed in the passenger seat, petrified with fear, incapable of using my sawn-off shotgun, silently imploring that we might get out of that trap, something that actually happened right at the moment it appeared they were going to catch us, when the track ended all of a sudden and we went down an embankment with great difficulty and landed on a sort of semi-paved forest floor while the secret police’s 1430 tried to get there faster than us from behind and halfway down the embankment flipped over spectacularly to the euphoric delight of Zarco and Tere, and also Gordo, who was watching the tumbles our pursuers were taking in the rear-view mirror and took advantage to accelerate through a network of empty streets and get us out of that ghost town or half-built housing development we’d ended up in.

‘The frustrated robbery of the gas station in Sils had at least two consequences. The first was that, although nobody made any comments on my behaviour that afternoon (or I didn’t hear any), I felt ashamed of my cowardice and swore that it wouldn’t happen again; at least not in front of Tere. The second was that Zarco decided to change objectives, and the consequence of that consequence was that from then on we stopped robbing shops and gas stations and started robbing banks, because, according to Zarco — and it was all he said to justify his decision — robbing a bank was less dangerous than robbing a gas station or a shop, aside from being more lucrative. The comment didn’t strike me as nonsense, and much later I understood that back then, before the epidemic of bank robberies that later swept the country had started, maybe it wasn’t, or not entirely, but the truth is it still astonishes me that it never even occurred to me to somehow try to put the brakes on that hell-bent scheme. It’s also significant that no one asked any questions or had any qualms about this change in strategy; significant because it reveals again our absolute trust in Zarco: one day he simply tells us we’re going to rob a bank and a few days later, after planning the job and watching a branch of the Banca Catalana beside the port in Palamós for several mornings in a row, we robbed it.

‘We met mid-morning on the chosen day, had something to drink in La Font and on the way out of the district we stole a Seat 124 station wagon. On the way to Palamós Zarco went over the plan one last time and divided up the roles: he and Tere would go into the branch — Tere with one sawn-off shotgun and him with the other — I would wait for them on the street with the Star, guarding the entrance, and Gordo would wait for us at the wheel of the car, ready to take off. We listened to the instructions and assignments without complaint, but I spent the trip digesting a decision I’d been chewing over since Zarco had suggested the bank hold-up. So, just after we arrived in Palamós and parked in a little square, with the Banca Catalana branch on our left and the sea on our right, I broke the silence in the car as we watched people coming in and out of the bank. What I said was: I’ll go in. To my surprise, the phrase didn’t sound like an announcement or an offer but almost like an order, and maybe that’s why no one said anything, as if no one entirely believed what they’d just heard. I looked away from the entrance to the bank and looked for Zarco’s eyes in the rear-view mirror; finding them I explained, emboldened by my own words: You and I’ll go in. Tere stays outside. Zarco held my gaze. Don’t talk rubbish, Gafitas, said Tere. It’s not rubbish, said Gordo. Girls are easier to recognize than guys. And I have to drive. Gafitas should go in. Zarco and I were still looking at each other in the rear-view mirror while Tere and Gordo got involved in the beginning of an argument, until Zarco asked me: Are you sure? Tere and Gordo shut up. Yeah, I answered, and I said again, more for myself than for him: You and I’ll go in. I turned around and looked at him directly, as if trying to make it clear that I had no doubts, and Zarco nodded his assent so slightly that it almost looked like a nod of capitulation. OK, he said to everyone. Gafitas and I’ll go in. Then he added: You stay outside, Tere. Give the shotgun and nylons to Gafitas.

‘Tere gave me the stocking and the shotgun, I gave her the Star, we both looked at each other for a second and during that second I saw a mixture of pride and astonishment in Tere’s eyes and felt invulnerable. Then Zarco went over the plan again and, when there were only a few minutes left before two o’clock, which was closing time for banks, Gordo switched on the engine of the 124, drove around the little square and parked on the pavement on the other side, right in front of the entrance to the branch. Zarco, Tere and I all got out of the car at once. While Tere stationed herself by the door holding the pistol at her waist, under her T-shirt and handbag, Zarco and I pulled the nylons over our heads, walked into the bank and pointed the guns at the two customers and three employees — three men and two women — who were there at that moment. What happened next was easier than we’d expected. As soon as they heard us shout at them to lie down on the floor, the customers and employees obeyed, frightened to death. After that only Zarco spoke, with an unexpectedly slow and deliberate voice or at least unexpectedly slow and deliberate for me, who was still pointing at the three men and two women with the sawn-off shotgun, sweating and forcing myself not to tremble while he tried to calm everybody down saying in his strange unhurried voice that nobody wanted to hurt them and that nothing was going to happen to them if they did what he told them to. Then Zarco asked who the manager was, and when he identified himself ordered him to hand over the money they kept in the branch; the manager — an almost completely bald man in his sixties with a double chin — obeyed immediately, filled a plastic bag with several bundles of notes and handed it to Zarco without looking at him, as if fearing he’d recognize his face disfigured though it was by the nylon. Zarco didn’t even open the bag and, as we backed away towards the door, he simply thanked everyone for their co-operation and advised them not to move for ten minutes after we left.

‘Outside we took the stockings off our heads and got in the car. Gordo drove normally down the main street of Palamós, without jumping a single red light, and once we were out of town took a detour towards a tennis club, but a short time later Gordo stopped in a lot where there were several parked cars, we got out of the 124, took a Renault 12 and drove back out to the highway. As we drove away from Palamós, sure now that we weren’t being followed, Zarco counted the money; most of it was hundred- and five-hundred-peseta notes: the total was less than forty thousand. Zarco announced the sum, and the silence that followed betrayed his disappointment; Tere and Gordo also seemed disappointed. As for me, I cared much less about the miserable amount of the booty than about having made up for my cowardice during the car chase that followed the hold-up of the gas station in Sils, so I tried to cheer them up with my enthusiasm.

‘It was no use. Zarco and the others experienced the success of our first bank robbery as a failure (and that false failure blurred my bravery, although I was so proud of myself, and especially of the pride I saw in Tere’s eyes just before the hold-up, that it almost didn’t matter to me). Maybe this explains why we blew that money even faster than usual, as if we looked down on it even more than usual. Whatever the case, speed calls for more speed, and from that moment on our accelerated impatient life accelerated even more and we became more impatient than ever. While we were surviving on a base of routine jobs (mostly purse-snatchings, sometimes the odd house), the mirage of the perfect heist obsessed us, as if we all planned to give up that outlaw frenzy after we did it, which was not true. We planned several bank jobs, called at least two of them off at the last minute and in the end only two came off: one at a branch of the Banco Atlántico in Anglès, which yielded loot almost as paltry as the job in Palamós, and another at the Bordils branch of the Banco Popular.

‘I remember the heist in Bordils very well and one of the hold-ups we called off. The heist in Bordils I remember because it was the last one and because for a long time barely a day went by when I didn’t think of it; I remember the frustrated hold-up because, immediately after we called it off, Zarco and I had our longest conversation of the summer. Maybe I should say our only conversation. Or at least the only conversation we had on our own and the only time back then that he and I talked about Tere. In any case, it’s the only one I remember in detail.’

‘The other day you told me that your relationship with Tere didn’t change after sleeping with her on the beach at Montgó.’

‘And it’s true. I thought it would change (or I should say: I would have liked it to change), but it didn’t change. Of course we didn’t sleep together again. Nor did we talk more than before or become more involved with each other than before or closer. In fact, I’d almost say that, instead of improving, our relationship deteriorated: Tere even stopped flirting with me, like she used to do sporadically; and if I got up my courage to get down off the barstool and out onto the dance floor at Rufus and started dancing beside her as I’d done at the Marocco, the night of Montgó beach, her response was always cold, and I soon gave up and swore never to try again. I didn’t know what to attribute her disinterest to, and I never dared ask her or remind her of what had happened on Montgó beach (just as I’d never dared to remind her of what happened in the arcade washrooms). Of course, Guille’s death and Chino, Tío and Drácula’s arrest might have had some bearing; the appearance of the weapons might also have had some bearing and the fact that with them everything became rougher, more serious and more violent, as if that change had isolated us more and made us become more introverted and more aware of ourselves, or more grown-up. In any case, just as I never had the impression that Tere regretted what happened between us in the arcade washrooms, now I did have the impression that she regretted having slept with me on Montgó beach.’

‘And in spite of that it never occurred to you to think that Tere had slept with you to get even with Zarco, because that night he went off with another girl.’

‘No: I already told you the last time we talked. It didn’t occur to me then. But by then I no longer thought that Tere was Zarco’s girlfriend. Or I didn’t exactly think she was. I thought she was his girlfriend but not his girlfriend, or that she was his girlfriend but in an elastic and occasional way, or that she had been his girlfriend and wasn’t any more but might be again or he thought she might be again. I don’t know. I told you before that I’d never seen them behaving like a couple, never seen them kissing, for example, although I had seen Zarco, especially very late at night, at Rufus, trying to kiss or caress Tere and her pushing him away sometimes with irritation and sometimes with an amused or even affectionate gesture. Anyway. The truth is I didn’t really understand too well what the relationship was between them, and I wasn’t interested in understanding it either.’

‘Do you know if Zarco found out that summer about what happened in the arcade washrooms between you and Tere?’

‘No.’

‘He didn’t find out or you don’t know if he found out?’

‘I don’t know if he found out.’

‘Do you know if he found out that you and Tere slept together on Montgó beach?’

‘Yeah. He did find out about that. I know because he told me himself, in the conversation I was just telling you about, a couple of weeks after the night on Montgó beach. That afternoon, like I said, we’d called off a heist. It was in Figueras or in some town on the outskirts of Figueras. We called it off at the last minute, when we were just about to go into the bank and a Civil Guard car drove past and we had to buzz off. The escape lasted for quite a while, because for quite a while we feared we’d been identified and that they were following us. Actually I think we only calmed down when our car was travelling under the mid-afternoon sun on a mountain road that snaked between hillsides divided by low stone walls and covered by pines, olive trees, prickly pears and shrubs. After a while we came to a town of white houses crowded together in front of the sea that turned out to be Cadaqués. We wandered the streets drinking beer in the bars along the boardwalk, and when we came out of one of them I saw a brand-new Citroën Mehari and hot-wired it with Zarco and Gordo’s permission and then, with Zarco beside me and Gordo and Tere in the back seat, drove out of Cadaqués with no intention other than to enjoy the ride.

‘I drove along the edge of the sea northwards and passed a couple of pebble beaches and a fishing village. The road got emptier and narrower and the surface more irregular and full of potholes. The wind coming in off the sea threatened to blow the top off the Mehari, and at some point (by then it had been a while since we’d seen any other cars) the road ran out, and became almost a dirt track or a half-paved track. Where are we going? Zarco asked. I don’t know, I said. Zarco was sunk down in the passenger seat, with his bare feet resting on the dashboard; I thought he was going to tell me to turn around but he didn’t say anything. In the back seat, Tere and Gordo hadn’t even heard Zarco’s question, and didn’t look impatient but rather exhausted or bewitched by the silence and desolation of that suddenly lunar landscape: a plateau of slate, grey crags and dry bushes in which only here and there, between bare gullies and rocks, did we get a glimpse of the sea. I carried on avoiding rough patches until at the end of the track I caught sight of a headland crowned by a lighthouse and beyond it an expanse of water almost as big and as blue as the sky.

‘We had ended up at Cap de Creus. None of us knew it, of course, but that was where Zarco and I had that conversation I was telling you about. We passed in front of an abandoned hut, climbed up to the headland and I parked the Mehari by the lighthouse, a rectangular building with a tower rising out of it with a cupola of iron and glass, topped by a weathervane. When we stopped we realized that Tere and Gordo had fallen asleep. We didn’t wake them up, and Zarco and I got out of the car and started walking along the esplanade in front of the lighthouse until the esplanade ran out and in front of us was nothing but a precipice that descended to a labyrinth of coves and inlets and, beyond them, a sea that stretched to the horizon, wavy and open and a little bit shadowed already by the beginning of twilight. Both of us stood there, our faces to the wind. Zarco murmured: Fuck, it looks like the end of the world. I didn’t say anything. After a while Zarco turned around, walked away from the cliff, went and sat down against the wall of the lighthouse and started rolling a joint out of the wind. I walked away from the cliff too, sat down beside Zarco, lit the joint when he’d finished rolling it.

‘That’s where the conversation started up. I don’t remember how long it lasted. I remember that when we started talking the sun was starting to set, staining the surface of the sea a pale red, and that on the right a boat appeared on the horizon sailing parallel to the coast, and when we left, the boat was about to disappear on the left of the horizon and the sun had sunk into the now dark water; I also remember how the conversation got started. We’d been sitting there for a while not talking when I asked Zarco what he was thinking of doing when summer was over; I’d asked the question most of all to escape from the uncomfortable silence, and it sounded a little incongruous, a little out of place, so Zarco brushed it off saying he’d do the same as always, and half-heartedly asked what I’d do. As well as half-hearted, my answer was innocuous — I said I’d do the same as always too — but it seemed to arouse Zarco’s curiosity. And what do you mean by that? he asked. That you’re going back to school? It means I’ll do the same as this summer, I answered. I don’t plan to go back to school. Zarco nodded as if he approved of the answer and took a pensive toke. I stopped going to school when I was seven, he said. Well, maybe eight. Doesn’t matter: it was a pain. You don’t like it either? No, I said. I used to like it, but not any more. What happened? asked Zarco. At that moment I hesitated. I told you before that I’d never mentioned Batista in front of Zarco and the rest; now, for a second, I thought I might; the next moment I discarded the idea: I felt that Zarco wouldn’t be able to understand, that telling him about my previous year’s ordeal would be to relive it, relive the humiliation and lose the self-respect I’d gained over the summer and force Zarco to lose respect for me. Then, with a blend of amazement and joy, I thought how, although the ordeal had happened just a couple of months ago, it was now as though it had happened centuries ago. Then I said: Nothing. I just stopped liking it and that was it.

‘Zarco kept smoking. The wind whipped around the lighthouse and blew our hair about and we had to smoke carefully, so a gust wouldn’t blow the end off the joint; in front of us the sky and the sea were an identical, immense blue. And your folks? asked Zarco. What about my folks? I asked. What are your folks going to say if you don’t go back to school? asked Zarco. They can say what they like, I answered. Whatever they say it’s over. I’m not going back. Zarco took another toke, handed me the joint and asked me to tell him about my family; without taking my eyes off the sea and sky and the boat that seemed suspended between the two, I told him about my father, my mother, my sister. Then I asked him the same question (and not just because he’d asked me: I told you before that I’d barely heard him talk about his family). Zarco laughed. I looked at him: like me he had his head leaning back against the lighthouse wall and his hair tangled by the wind; a bit of saliva had dried in the corner of his mouth. What family? he asked. I never knew my father, my stepfather got killed years ago, my brothers are in jail, my mother’s too busy just trying to get by. You call that a family? I didn’t answer. I turned back towards the sea, finishing off the joint, and, when I stubbed it out on the ground, Zarco started rolling another.

‘When he finished rolling it he passed it to me and I lit it. What I don’t understand is what the fuck you’re going to do if you don’t go back to school, said Zarco, picking up the conversation again. The same as you guys. Zarco curled his lip in a way I didn’t know how to interpret, passed me the joint and turned back to look at the sea and the sky, still immense, less and less blue, both turning towards a reddish darkness. Fuck, he said. I took a drag on the joint and asked: What’s up? Nothing, said Zarco. What’s up? I repeated. Can’t I do the same as you guys? Sure, said Zarco. I don’t know if I was satisfied by his answer, but I turned back towards the sea and sky as well and had another toke; after a few seconds, Zarco changed his mind: Actually you can’t, he said. Why not? I asked. Because you’re not like us, he answered. We stared at each other: that was the argument I’d used with him, at the beginning of the summer, to refuse to rob the Vilaró arcade (and then again with Tere to refuse to break into a house in La Montgoda). For a moment I thought Zarco remembered and he was turning the tables on me; then I thought he didn’t remember. I smiled. Don’t tell me you’re going to give me a sermon? I asked. In reply, he just smiled back. We kept quiet. I smoked in silence. And I said: Why aren’t I like you guys? And he said: Because you’re not. And I said: I do the same things you guys do. And he said: Almost the same, yeah. But you’re not like us. And I insisted: Why not? And he explained: Because you go to school and we don’t. Because you have a family and we don’t. Because you’re scared and we’re not. And I asked: You guys aren’t scared? And he answered: Yeah, but we’re not scared the same way you are. You think about the fear, and we don’t. You have things to lose, and we don’t. That’s the difference. I made a sceptical face, but didn’t push it. I smoked. I passed him the joint. For a while we kept staring at the sea and the sky and listening to the howling wind. Zarco took two or three more tokes, put out the joint and then went on: Do you know what happened to Chino the day he went into the Modelo prison? He paused; then said: He was raped. Three sons of bitches gave it to him up the ass. He told his mother and his mother told Tere. Funny, eh? He paused again. Oh, by the way, he added, did I ever tell you the story of Quílez? It happened the first day I was in the nick.

‘I was waiting for him to tell me the story of Quílez when I heard him say: Look at her. I turned around: it was Tere, who’d just come around the corner of the lighthouse and was walking towards us. I conked out, she said when she came up beside us, crouching down. And Gordo? I asked. Out for the count, she answered. Zarco rolled and lit a joint and passed it to Tere, who smoked for a while before passing it to me. Then Tere stood up and walked over to the cliff and stayed there, facing the sea, her hair whipping around like crazy in the wind and her silhouette standing out against a cloudless, darkening sky and choppy, darkening sea. That was the moment Zarco started talking to me about Tere. First he asked if I liked Tere; I pretended he was asking what he wasn’t asking and quickly said of course. Then Zarco said that’s not what he meant and I, knowing what he meant, asked him what he meant and he answered that he meant would I like to shag her. Since I’d guessed the question, I didn’t have to improvise the answer. No, I lied. Then why did you shag her? asked Zarco. I froze. Just at that instant, as if she’d caught a snippet of our conversation (impossible, because she was too far away and the howling wind and the noise of the iron and glass rattling in the lighthouse cupola drowned out the words), Tere turned around and opened her arms wide in a gesture of admiration or incredulity for the sky and sea behind her. I passed the joint to Zarco, who held my gaze for a second with a neutral look in his eyes; the dried saliva had disappeared from the corner of his mouth. What did you think? he asked. That I didn’t know? I didn’t answer, and we both looked back at Tere: shielding her eyes with her hand from the sun’s last rays of the evening, at that moment Tere was looking towards an abandoned building a hundred metres or so to our right, on the same headland. Who told you? I asked. She did, he answered. It was only once, I lied again; I specified: The night we went to the Marocco. Are you sure? he asked. Yes, I answered, thinking about the washrooms at the Vilaró arcade. Yeah, said Zarco. And he passed me the joint. I took it, smoked and watched how Tere pointed to the empty building and shouted something and started walking, jumping from one rock to the next and holding her bag against her body, towards where she’d been pointing. So it was just once, said Zarco. Yeah, I said. What’s the matter? he asked without irony. Didn’t you like it? Of course I liked it, I answered, and immediately regretted the reply. So? he asked. I reflected. I took several drags on the joint. I said: I don’t know. Ask her. I passed the joint to Zarco and that was it.’

‘You didn’t talk any more?’

‘No. Zarco didn’t push it and I was desperate to change the subject.’

‘And you were thinking that Tere wasn’t Zarco’s girlfriend.’

‘I thought she was and wasn’t, I told you already. Anyway, I don’t know. . I think that at some point I had a sense that this friendly conversation might be a trap, that it might actually be a scheme of Zarco’s, a way of testing me or an attempt to make me talk; ultimately, that it might be his way of telling me that Tere was his and that I should keep my distance. I don’t know, it was just a feeling, but a very vivid feeling, and I did not feel comfortable. It’s even possible that later I began to think that Zarco had been looking for an opportunity like that for a while to bring up the subject of Tere and the night on Montgó beach, and I might have also thought that, deep down, what Zarco wanted was for me to leave the gang so I’d get away from Tere.’

‘Did he tell you to leave the gang?’

‘Yes. That same day, just before we left the lighthouse. I, to stop talking about Tere, had started talking about that afternoon’s thwarted heist, and then we were silent for a while smoking and listening to the wind rattling the iron and glass of the lighthouse cupola, watching Tere approach the abandoned building and wander around it and disappear behind it, and the sun beginning to sink into the sea and the boat to disappear off to the left of the horizon, and at some point Zarco asked what we were talking about and I said that afternoon’s thwarted heist and he said: No, before. I said I didn’t remember although I remembered perfectly well and then, to my relief, I heard him say: Oh yeah, the story of Quílez.

‘And then he told me about Quílez, a long story that he later left out of his memoir and never told in any of the interviews he gave or any of the ones I’ve read, something which I at least found rather shocking because, as you know, Zarco told the journalists everything. What he told me is that the story had happened on his first day in prison, in the Modelo in Barcelona, at the time it would have been more or less a year before. He told me that afternoon, when he came out to the main courtyard at exercise time, he met two friends of his brother Juan José who’d been locked up in the prison for months (though not in the same cell block as him) and started talking to them. He told me the yard was full of prisoners calmly talking and walking and playing football. He said the calm shattered when the crowd seemed to stop all of a sudden while a circular wall of men formed in the middle of the yard, and in the middle of that wall was a blond, corpulent man, and in the blink of an eye another man, this one pale and very thin, hurled himself on him and, with a homemade stiletto fashioned from a mattress spring, with a single slash, opened his chest and then ripped out his heart and held it up in his hand, fresh and gushing blood in the afternoon sun. And he told me that as he displayed his trophy the murderer let out a long rejoicing shriek. He also told me that it all happened so fast that, before falling down dead, the victim didn’t even have time to shout in horror or for help. And he told me how the prison guards evacuated the yard and left the heartless corpse sprawled on the ground, and that he didn’t ask anyone anything but soon knew that the murderer’s name was Quílez and the murdered man was a guy reputed to be a snitch who’d arrived at the Modelo that very day, just like he had, except that he’d been transferred from another prison. And finally he told me — and when he told me this, I thought his voice trembled — that night, after the guards locked up Quílez in solitary confinement, his name was chanted in a righteous murmur that travelled through the cell blocks of the Modelo like a prayer or a triumphal lullaby.

‘When Zarco finished telling me the story of Quílez we sat in silence. After a few seconds he stood up and stretched and took a few steps away from the lighthouse towards the cliff, stuck his hands in his pockets and stood there for a while in front of the darkened sea and sky. Then, all of a sudden, he turned back towards me and spoke with an irritated look on his face. Look, Gafitas, I’m going to tell you, he began. You do whatever the fuck you feel like, but at least don’t say that I didn’t tell you. After a pause he went on: If it’s up to me, you can stay with us. You turned out to be tougher and more of a son of a bitch than you look like, so there’s no problem there. Do what you want. Now, he added, if you want my advice, drop it. He took his right hand out of his pocket and cut the air with a horizontal slash, much more violent than his words. Drop this, he repeated. Don’t come back to La Font or the district. Get lost, man. Forget the gang. Go back to your family, go back to school, go back to your life. There’s no more to this, don’t you see? You’ve already seen all there is to see. Sooner or later we’ll get caught, just like they caught Guille and the others. And then we’re fucked: if you’re unlucky you end up dead like Guille or in a wheelchair like Tío; and if you’re lucky you end up in the slammer, like Chino or Drácula. Although for a guy like you I don’t know which would be worse. I spent a few months in the slammer, but the slammer’ll crush you, it’ll be the end of you. That’s another reason you’re not like us. Besides, we don’t have a choice, this is the only life we have, but you have another one. Don’t be a dickhead, Gafitas: drop it.

‘That’s more or less what he said to me. I didn’t answer, in part because I had nothing to answer and in part, as I told you before, the conversation about Tere had made me uneasy, but especially because at that moment Tere showed up at the lighthouse with the news that the abandoned building was a Civil Guard post and the suggestion that we should check it out. It was almost dark by then. Zarco pointed the long, dirty fingernail of his index finger at me and said as if he hadn’t heard Tere’s suggestion: Think about it, Gafitas. I stood up. Tere looked at me; then she looked at Zarco. What does Gafitas have to think about? she asked. Zarco patted her on the ass and answered: Nothing. We went back to the Mehari and drove away.’

‘And that was the last time you and Zarco talked about Tere that summer.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you consider leaving the gang after Zarco advised you to?’

‘Yes, I think so. Not because I wanted to leave, but because I had the suspicion that Zarco had advised me to leave the gang and return to my previous life to get me away from Tere, and that there was a threat hidden behind that advice. In any case he didn’t mention the matter again, and the truth is there was barely any time for me to consider it seriously: shortly after the conversation at Cap de Creus it was all finished.’

‘You mean the gang.’

‘Of course.’

‘When did it finish?’

‘In the middle of September, a couple of weeks after my parents got back from their holiday. That was the worst moment of the summer for me. On the one hand I felt increasingly ill at ease in the gang or in what was left of the gang, because that conversation with Zarco had injected me with the poison of distrust. On the other hand my relationship with my parents didn’t improve on their return; quite the contrary: after a few days of truce even the rows and shouting matches multiplied and worsened, especially with my father, who must have seen me as an unrecognizable and furious monster, full of contempt. I don’t know: now I think I probably felt trapped, and felt that everything could explode in those days at home or in the gang; finally everything exploded in the robbery of the Banco Popular branch in Bordils.

‘It was our last job and it was a disaster. The reason for the disaster is obvious. For a start it has to be said that we planned it all in no time and so clumsily that we didn’t even check out the branch and barely had a look around outside it. Add to this that the people who participated in the heist were not the best suited: we couldn’t count on Tere, who was in Barcelona because one of her sisters had just had a baby, and, after Zarco sounded out the district, Latas and some other guys, the one who ended up filling in for her was Jou, who’d never robbed a bank and had no experience with guns. And to top it off we were unlucky. . All this is true, but it doesn’t explain the disaster; the explanation is simpler: there was a tip-off. We never found out who it was, or at least I never found out. It really could have been anybody: any of the guys Zarco sounded out to participate in the heist, any of the guys those guys talked to, any of the guys we’d talked to. Keep in mind as well that all the bars of the red-light district were full of police informers, starting with La Font; there were also snitches at Rufus. We knew it and, although Zarco was always demanding discretion, the truth is we talked to too many people and too cheerfully. And the first to do so was me.’

‘Do you mean that it might have been you who let it slip?’

‘I’ve often thought so.’

‘Why?’

‘Because two days before the heist, when we were all set to go and just needed to find someone to take Tere’s place, I spent a couple of hours drinking beer with Córdoba while waiting for my friends in La Font. I’ve told you about Córdoba, right? I don’t remember what we talked about that day, but Córdoba and I were friends and I trusted him, although I’ve often thought since that he wasn’t trustworthy. I don’t know. It might have been him. Which is to say: it might have been me.’

‘Haven’t you asked Inspector Cuenca?’

‘No. I’ve never talked to the inspector about those days: I never wanted to talk to him and he never tried to talk to me about it. What for? Besides, I don’t think he could tell me anything I don’t know. The thing is there was a tip-off and, thanks to that, the police were able to set a trap for us.

‘At first we didn’t notice that they were waiting for us, and everything seemed to go according to plan. We arrived in Bordils at about one or one-thirty, Gordo parked very close to the door of the bank, in a sidestreet that led to the highway and, a few minutes later, Zarco, Jou and I got out of the car and walked into the branch pulling the nylon stockings over our heads. That was the first unusual thing I noticed: only two of us should have gone into the branch, not three; the role Zarco had assigned to Jou was to stay outside guarding the door: that’s why he had the pistol. I soon noticed other unusual things. At the same time as Jou and I aimed our weapons left and right and Zarco pronounced the words he’d prepared in his habitual tone (“Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t be nervous. Nothing’s going to happen. Please don’t be heroes. Keep still and nobody’ll hurt you. We just want the bank’s money”), I saw that there was an alarming number of customers in the branch, among them two women with children; I also saw that there were two doors instead of just one: the main door we’d just come through and a back door that seemed to go into an alley; and I noticed that the employees were isolated from the rest of the branch in a reinforced booth or a booth that looked reinforced, and that booth was not open. Zarco must have noticed these things too, or at least the first and the last, because while he asked the women and children to lie down on the floor and some of the children began to cry, he ordered the employees to open the door of the booth. There were three employees, but for the moment none of the three moved; there’s no way of knowing if one of them was weighing up the insane idea of resisting the robbery or if they were simply paralyzed by panic and, to clear up the doubts, Zarco grabbed a customer by the collar of his shirt, dragged him to the door of the booth, put the barrel of his sawn-off shotgun under his chin and said: Open up right now or I’ll shoot this guy.

‘They immediately opened the door. The man who did looked like a hunting dog with a face as white as plaster. While the children’s crying filled the branch and began drilling into my head, the man stepped away from the door stammering that he couldn’t open the safe. Zarco let his hostage go, approached the man and asked: Are you the manager? I can’t open the safe, answered the man. Zarco slapped him. I asked if you were the manager, he repeated. Yes, said the man. But I can’t open the safe. Open it, said Zarco. Open it and nothing will happen to anybody. I can’t, the manager whined. It has a delayed opening mechanism. How long does it take to open? Fifteen minutes, answered the manager. Then Zarco hesitated, or I sensed him hesitate; the hesitation was logical: if he didn’t force him to deactivate the delay mechanism, the result of the robbery would be a failure: another one; but, if he forced him to deactivate it, the fifteen-minute wait for the safe to open would be the longest and most anguished fifteen minutes of our lives, and nobody could guarantee that we could keep the situation under control during that time. I mustn’t have been the only one guessing at Zarco’s doubts, because at that moment a man who was on the floor by the back door took the opportunity to open it and escape (or maybe he hadn’t been on the floor by the back door, but had crawled or dragged himself to it without us seeing him). Everything happened in a second, the same second in which Zarco hesitated or in which I sensed Zarco hesitating: the next second Jou shattered the glass of the door the man had escaped through with a shot; the next an insane uproar erupted in the bank and the next Zarco tried to quiet it down by firing his shotgun at the ceiling and shouting that everyone should stay on the floor until we’d left. Then Zarco ordered the manager to forget the safe and give us all the money that wasn’t in it. The manager obeyed, we grabbed the money and rushed out of the branch.

‘On the street the police were waiting for us. As we ran as fast as we could towards the car we heard a shout to halt; instinctively we kept running, instead of surrendering, and, before we could get into the almost moving car, the shots began. All at once I heard them and felt a burning in my arm. All at once we got in the car and Gordo headed for the highway to Gerona while the shooting behind us intensified and my arm smarted and started to bleed. Although I must have been swearing out loud, nobody noticed that I was wounded, among other reasons because at the Bordils ramp there was an undercover cop car parked across the road. Gordo braked or took his foot off the accelerator, until Zarco screamed at him to step on it; he slammed the pedal to the floor, and with a single charge rammed the cop car almost onto the hard shoulder. The blow opened up a spectacular gash on Gordo’s brow, which had hit the steering wheel and began to bleed copiously. In spite of that he floored it again and we kept going, at first pursued by two undercover cars that we started to pull away from as we crossed Celrà and Campdorà running red lights and stop signs, overtaking and dodging everything in our way, so by the time we got to Pont Major we had the impression that we’d left our pursuers behind. At that moment a helicopter began flying overhead. It was obviously after us, and Jou seemed to realize that at the same time as he noticed the blood flowing from my arm and Gordo’s brow, and he lost his nerve and started shouting that they were going to catch us, and then Zarco told him to shut up and Gordo turned right and crossed the bridge over the Ter in the direction of Sarrià while the undercover cars reappeared in the distance behind us, coming down the road from Campdorà. They must have been a kilometre or a kilometre and a half away, and Gordo took advantage of that to try to lose them once and for all in the narrow streets of Sarrià. For a while he seemed to have managed it, but in all that time the helicopter stayed hovering in the sky, without losing sight of us for an instant, and after a few minutes the undercover cars appeared again in the distance. Gordo floored it again and got us out of Sarrià and back onto the main highway, only this time not on the coastal road but the one that goes to France but instead of taking us to the border and away from the city it was taking us back to it. Gordo was following new instructions from Zarco and I suppose he was acting sensibly, because it seems like it would be easier to escape a helicopter in a city than in open country, but the truth is that, as soon as I saw where we were going, I felt we were getting ourselves into a rat trap and were not going to get out of it.

‘I was right. At the beginning of La Barca Bridge just at the entrance to the city and already with La Devesa in sight, a big truck loaded with gas cylinders was heading straight for us; Gordo tried to miss it by yanking the steering wheel, lost control of the car and we flipped over and started rolling across the tarmac. What happened after that is difficult to tell. Although I’ve tried to reconstruct the sequence of events many times, I’m not entirely sure I’ve been able to; I have been able to reconstruct some links of the sequences: enough, I think, to have an approximate idea of what happened.

‘They’re six links that are six images or six groups of images. The first link is formed by the image of myself lying facedown on the crushed roof of the car, dazed and feeling around for my glasses and finding them intact, hearing meanwhile a sharp buzzing in my head and hearing Jou groaning and cursing and hearing Zarco shout that Gordo was unconscious and that we had to get the fuck out of the car. The second link is formed by the image of myself trying to crawl out of the twisted metal of the car through one of the back windows as I see how thirty or forty metres away a car brakes and two plain clothes cops get out and run towards us. The third link is not formed of one image but two: the image of Zarco yanking me out through the window and the image of both of us running across La Barca Bridge behind Jou, who’s a few metres ahead of us and who, out of instinct or because Zarco shouted it, at the end of the bridge turns off up Pedret and heads for the district. The fourth link is not formed of two images but rather a sort of chain of images: first Zarco and I get to the end of the bridge and run towards La Devesa in the hope of giving the police the slip there, then Zarco trips on the uneven slope that goes down to the park and hits the ground, then I stop short and run back and grab Zarco’s arm and he grabs me and for a few seconds we try to keep going like that, stumbling, Zarco running on his hurt leg and me dragging him; finally Zarco falls down again or throws himself on the ground while shoving me away and saying in a low, hoarse, panting voice: Run, Gafitas! And there’s the fifth link, the penultimate image of the sequence: lit by the midday sun that shines through the crowns of the plane trees of La Devesa, Zarco is still kneeling on the ground and I am still standing at his side while the two cops are about to reach the slope into the park and catch us. The final image is predictable; it’s also a double image: on the one hand it’s a diaphanous image, the image of myself running through La Devesa leaving Zarco behind; on the other hand it is a blurry image, half-seen as I turn around to see if they’re following me: the image of Zarco tangled up in a jumble of arms and legs, struggling with the two cops.

‘That’s where the six links end, and that’s all I remember.’

‘So you abandoned Zarco.’

‘What was I going to do? What would you have done? He couldn’t save himself; I couldn’t save him: sacrificing myself would have been stupid, it would have done no good. So I decided to save myself. It’s what Zarco would have done; that’s why he told me to run, to go. And maybe that’s why he fought with the police (or that’s why I’ve always thought he fought with them): to give me time to get away, so I could save myself.

‘That’s what I did. I ran through the empty park like a flash, passed the football pitch, the rifle range and the model-plane runway and ended up taking shelter in a grove of poplars stuck in between the Ter and the Güell, between the sports pavilion and the municipal dump. Dazed, I stayed in that hiding place for a while, trying to get over my fear, the pain of my wounded arm and the buzzing in my head. Although the buzzing soon stopped, the wound wouldn’t stop bleeding and the fear rushed back when the police helicopter flew low over the grove a couple of times, but I managed to think with sufficient clarity to understand that I should get out of there immediately and that I only had one safe place to go.

‘Making sure no one saw me, I left the poplar grove, got to Caterina Albert and went home.

‘When I got there everything happened very fast. When I went in, my whole family was eating. My mother and my sister cried out to high heaven when they saw my T-shirt soaked in blood; my father reacted differently; without a word he took me to the bathroom and, while I explained to all of them that I’d fallen off a motorcycle, he examined my wound. Once he’d examined it, my father asked my mother and sister to leave the bathroom. This is not from a fall, he said coldly when they left, pointing at my arm. Go on, tell me what happened. I tried to insist on my lie, but my father interrupted me. Look, Ignacio, he said. I don’t know what mess you’ve got into, but if you want me to help you, you have to tell me the truth. Without affection, he added: If you don’t want me to help you, you can leave. I understood he meant it, that he was right and that, no matter how badly he reacted to the truth, it would be a thousand times worse if the police arrested me; besides, by then I was coming down hard off the adrenaline and was so scared it was as if I’d injected myself in one single shot with complete awareness of the danger I’d exposed myself to in my forays of the past months.

‘I agreed. As best I could I told my father the truth. His reaction calmed me down a little, almost disconcerted me: he didn’t yell at me, didn’t get furious, he didn’t even seem surprised; he just asked me a few very specific questions. When I thought he’d finished I asked: What are we going to do? He didn’t even take a second or two to think. Go to the police station, he answered. A chill made my legs go weak. You’re going to give me up? I asked. Yes, he answered. You said you’d help me, I said. That’s the best thing I can do to help you, he said. Dad, please, I begged. My father pointed at my wound and said: Wash that off and let’s get going. Then he left the bathroom and, while my mother came back in and washed the wound with the help of my sister, I heard him speaking on the phone. He spoke for quite a while, but I didn’t know what about or with whom, because the telephone was in the front hall and my mother and my sister were harassing me with questions; they were also trying to comfort me, because I’d started to cry.

‘Back in the bathroom, my father asked my mother to pack a suitcase for him and for me. I looked at him with my eyes full of tears; my father looked at me as if he’d just recognized me or as if he was about to burst into tears as well, and at that moment I knew he’d changed his mind, and that he wasn’t going to turn me in. Where are you going? my mother asked. Pack the suitcase, my father repeated. I’ll explain later. In silence and without looking at my face again, my father finished cleaning out the wound, disinfected and bandaged it. When he finished he left the bathroom and for a couple of minutes I heard him speaking to my mother. He came back to the bathroom and said: Let’s go.

‘I followed him without questions. First we went to Francesc Ciurana Street and parked outside the door of a building where a close family friend lived, a lawyer from my parents’ hometown called Higinio Redondo. My father got out of the car and asked me to wait and, while I waited, I deduced that it had been Redondo he’d spoken to on the phone, after I told him what happened. After a while my father returned to the car alone and we crossed the city and left it by the highway to France. On the way he told me we were going to a summer home that Redondo had just bought in Colera, a remote coastal village; he assured me that, if the police went looking for me at home on Caterina Albert (something which was highly probable), my mother would not hide our whereabouts; he explained in detail what I had to tell the police in the event, also highly probable, that they came to Colera to interrogate me (what I had to say was, in short, that we’d spent a week there, just the two of us, stretching out the last days of the summer holidays). An hour later we arrived in Colera. The village streets were deserted; Redondo’s house was very close to the sea. As soon as we got in, my father started unpacking our things and arranging them in the wardrobes, or rather disarranging them and messing up the dining room, the kitchen, the bathroom and bedrooms, so it would look like a house where we’d been living for several days. Then he went shopping and I stayed in one of the rooms, lying on the bed and watching a tiny portable television. I hadn’t recovered from the fear or the exhaustion. I fell asleep. When my father woke me up I didn’t know where I was. Someone had turned off the TV and the light in the room was on. My arm didn’t hurt; I vaguely sensed that it was night-time. There’s someone out there who wants to talk to you, my father whispered. He’d crouched down beside me; running his hand down my other arm he added: It’s a policeman. He didn’t say anything else. He stood up, left the room and Inspector Cuenca came in.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘Of course. And he knew me. We’d often seen each other in the district and he’d interrogated me at least a couple of times. That night he interrogated me too. Standing beside the bed, without asking me to get up — I had sat up just a bit: I was sitting on the mattress with my legs flexed and my back leaning against the wall — he asked the predictable questions and I gave him the answers my father had told me to say. While I was speaking I read in the inspector’s eyes that he wasn’t believing me; he didn’t believe me: when the interrogation was over he told me to get dressed, to pack some clothes in a bag, that I had to go with him. I’ll wait outside, he said, and walked out of the room.

‘I realized that all was lost. I don’t know exactly what happened during the minutes that followed. I know that fear suffocated me and I didn’t obey the inspector and didn’t get up off the bed; I know that I battled the imminence of the catastrophe by imploring in silence that all that had happened over the past three months hadn’t happened or had been a dream, and that I implored as if I were crying or as if I were praying, begging for a miracle. No miracle occurred, although what did happen is the closest thing to a miracle that has happened in my life. And do you know what it was?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. At some point the door to my room opened and Inspector Cuenca appeared. Naturally, I thought it was the end. But it wasn’t; in fact, it was the beginning. Because what happened was that Inspector Cuenca just stood there, silent, standing still, looking at me for a couple of endless seconds. And then he left.

‘Nothing else happened that night. Inspector Cuenca slammed the door on his way out, and after a moment my father came back into the room and sat down beside me on the bed. His face was as rigid as wax. As for me, at that moment I realized I was sitting on top of sheets that were drenched in sweat. I asked my father what had happened and he said nothing. I asked him what was going to happen. Nothing, he repeated. Although I had just woken up, I had the feeling of not having slept for months; I must have looked it, because my father added: Go to sleep. Obedient, as if I’d just suffered a sudden regression to childhood, I slid down and stretched out, not caring about the dampness of the sheets, and the last thing I noticed before sinking into sleep was my father getting up off the bed.’

Chapter 8

‘Up until the beginning of July I wasn’t really pursuing Zarco’s gang. Why did it take me so long? Well because, as I said, up till then I hadn’t managed to find a clue — the clue I dragged out of Vedette — and I didn’t have the slightest suspicion that the gang I was after was Zarco’s gang.

‘Why should I lie to you: from the start I was too optimistic, thought it was going to be an easy job. After all my idea was that I was confronting a group of kids, and I didn’t think it would be complicated to catch them; the reality is that it took me more than two months to break up the gang. This delay can, of course, be put down to the fact that Zarco was razor sharp and knew every trick in the book; but it’s especially down to the fact that, at least during the month of July, my bosses’ interest in catching Zarco and his gang was more theoretical than actual, and I could never count on the support and men that I needed. The summer, moreover, was a bad time to do a job like that: you can imagine that between people off on holiday and Operation Summer — a surveillance measure that came into effect for the season every year on the Costa Brava — the station was often down to a skeleton staff. The first result of those two things was that, although I tried to make Deputy Superintendent Martínez and Inspector Vives understand that Mejía, Hidalgo and I couldn’t cope and that without more help we would take a lot longer to accomplish the mission we’d been assigned, they always had good arguments to refuse my requests for reinforcements; and the second result was that, since neither Hidalgo nor Mejía gave up their vacation time, and since both of them were sometimes detailed to Operation Summer (especially as bodyguards for politicians on holiday), I often found myself working on my own, wandering the alleys and strip clubs of the red-light district looking for a clue that would guarantee that the criminal gang I was after was Zarco’s gang and give me the chance to catch them.

‘At the beginning of August I thought the chance had arrived. That was when we arrested several members of the gang after they tried to rob a farmhouse in Pontós, near Figueras, and they crashed their car on the Bàscara bridge while trying to outrun a police car; one of them died in the accident and another ended up a quadriplegic, but I was able to interview the other two in the station. During the interrogations I confirmed without any room for doubt that the gang I was looking for was Zarco’s gang. That was the good news; the bad news was that I realized that Zarco wasn’t a typical quinqui like the others and catching him was going to be more difficult than I’d thought. The two gang members I interrogated were called Chino and Drácula. I knew them from the district, just like the rest, and I knew they were Zarco’s subordinates and not tough guys, so, when I started interrogating them, what I was after was not to charge them with the frustrated robbery of the farmhouse in Pontós and a few other jobs — I was already taking that for granted — what I wanted, as well, was for them to give up Zarco and the rest of the gang, but especially Zarco, because I was sure that bringing down Zarco would bring down the whole gang. Although to be honest, that’s also what I would have been after if Chino and Drácula had been tough guys and hadn’t just been mere subordinates.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What I mean is that back then everything was possible in the station, not like now, for us that was still a time of — how shall I put it? — impunity; there’s no other word: although Franco had been dead for three years, at the station we did whatever we liked, which is what we’d always done. That’s the reality; later, as I say, things changed, but that’s what it was like then. And, frankly, in those circumstances, it was unlikely that a sixteen-year-old kid, no matter how tough, would endure, without caving in and singing everything singable, the seventy-two hours we could hold him in a station house before bringing him before a judge, seventy-two hours without the right to a lawyer that the kid would spend between a darkened cell and interrogations lasting hours and hours during which the odd fist might slip, and that would be a best-case scenario for him. Frankly difficult, like I say. So imagine my surprise when Chino and Drácula held out. How do you like that? The thing is that’s the way it went: they took all they had no choice but to take, but they didn’t give up Zarco.’

‘Do you have an explanation for that display of bravery?’

‘Sure: that it was no display of bravery; in other words: Chino and Drácula were more scared of Zarco than they were of me. That’s why I said that was when I realized that Zarco was a real tough guy and catching him was going to be harder than I’d thought.’

‘I’m surprised you say Zarco was a real tough guy; for some reason I’d got the idea that you thought he was just unfortunate.’

‘And he was. But real tough guys are almost always unfortunate men.’

‘It also surprises me to hear you say his friends were scared of him.’

‘You mean the kids in his gang? Why does that surprise you? The soft ones fear the tough guys. And, maybe with the odd exception, the kids in Zarco’s gang were softies; so they were scared of him. Starting with Chino and Drácula.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I told you already: because, if they hadn’t been very afraid of Zarco, they wouldn’t have spent seventy-two hours in the station house without giving him up. Believe me. I was with them during those three days and I know what I’m talking about. And as far as whether or not Zarco was really a tough guy, just look at what he did after Guille’s death and the arrest of the others.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Getting hold of guns and starting to hold up banks.’

‘I’ve heard that back then it was less dangerous to rob a bank than a gas station or a grocery store.’

‘That’s what Zarco said.’

‘And isn’t it true?’

‘I don’t know. It’s true that the person behind the counter of a gas station or a grocery store was sometimes the proprietor and might feel tempted to resist the robbery, while the employees of banks would almost never entertain such crazy thoughts for the simple reason that they wouldn’t lose anything in the robbery of the bank, which anyway had the deposits in all their branches insured and gave their employees orders that in the case of a heist not to run needless risks and hand over the money without a second thought; and it’s also true that back then we hadn’t imposed the security measures on banks that two or three years later were obligatory and finally ended the craze for bank robberies: armed guards, double entrance doors for branches, security cameras, bullet-proof enclosures for the tellers, hidden retractable drawers, correlatively numbered bank notes, push buttons that activated alarms that sounded in the headquarters or even at the police stations. . Anyway: all that’s true. But, man, it’s also true that it takes balls to walk into a bank armed with a rifle, threaten the employees and customers and make off with the money that’s there; especially if you’re sixteen years old, don’t you think?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s what Zarco started to do in the middle of that summer. And by doing that he began to run greater risks every time. And, the greater the risks he ran, the closer we came to the moment of catching him.

‘It seemed to be coming, but it didn’t arrive. During the month of August, while the pressure from my bosses grew to crush this gang as soon as possible, we were on the brink of catching them a couple of times (one afternoon at the beginning of August, near Sils, after they hit a gas station that we knew they’d been lurking around the previous day because the owner had filed a complaint, Hidalgo and Mejía chased them by car until flipping over on an embankment while they got away; in Figueras, a couple of weeks later, a Civil Guard thought he recognized them outside a bank and followed them for several kilometres, but also ended up losing them). The fact is that by the beginning of September I was desperate: I’d been working on the case for two months and things had only got worse; Deputy Superintendent Martínez and Inspector Vives knew it, so when they came back from their holidays they put me between a rock and a hard place: either I solved the problem or they’d have to assign someone else to solve it. Relieving me of the case would have been a tremendous failure, so I got my act together and in the second week of September found out that Zarco’s gang was going to hold up a bank in Bordils.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘I found out.’

‘Who told you?’

‘I can’t tell you that. There are things a policeman cannot say.’

‘Even when thirty years have gone by since they happened?’

‘Even if sixty had gone by. Look, I once read a novel where one character said to another: Can you keep a secret? And the other replied: If you can’t keep it yourself, why should I keep it for you? We cops are like priests: if we’re no good at keeping secrets, we’re no good as cops. And I’m good at being a cop. Even if the secret is a trivial one.’

‘Is this one?’

‘Do you know any that aren’t?’

‘Cañas thinks he was responsible. Apparently, two days before the Bordils hold-up he was drinking beer with Córdoba, an old district character he’d befriended.’

‘I remember that guy.’

‘Cañas thinks he might have got carried away and told Córdoba about the planned heist and Córdoba took the tale to you.’

‘It’s not true. But if it was true I’d still tell you it wasn’t true. So don’t insist.’

‘I won’t insist. Go on about the Bordils hold-up.’

‘What do you want me to tell you? I suppose, when I add it all up, it’s one of the most complicated operations I set up in my whole career. I can’t say I didn’t have the time and resources to prepare it, but the truth is I was so reckless that Zarco and company were on the brink of getting away. My only justification is that back then I was an ambitious greenhorn and I’d expended so much effort to nab Zarco that I didn’t want to put him in jail just to have him released a few months later. That’s why the operation I set up was designed to catch Zarco once he’d committed the heist and not before, so the crime he’d be charged with wouldn’t be a minor offence or an attempted offence and that the judge could lock him away for a good long time. Of course, letting Zarco act in this way, not arresting him before he went into the branch office and held up the bank, meant running an enormous risk, a risk I shouldn’t have run and only a couple of years later wouldn’t have run. Keep in mind that we couldn’t give the manager or employees of the branch prior warning, so they wouldn’t let the cat out of the bag and not to alarm them over nothing, because we couldn’t be sure our tip-off was good, or even, supposing it was true, that Zarco wouldn’t back out at the last minute. In any case, the truth is that Martínez and Vives came through, they trusted me and gave me command of the operation and half the squad: eight police inspectors in four undercover radio cars. Those were the forces at my disposal. First thing in the morning I put a car on the way into town and, as time went on, the rest of us set about positioning ourselves discreetly (one on the way out of town, another in the parking lot to the left of the branch and mine twenty metres in front of it), in such a way that, when we finally saw Zarco and two of his guys go into the branch after midday, the trap was set to close around them.

‘But, in spite of all that preparation, everything seemed to go wrong straight away. Three or four minutes had passed when a shot was fired inside the branch; almost immediately there was another. When we heard them, the first thing I did was alert the other cars and tell those on the way in and out of town to cut off access to the highway; then I called the station and told them I’d changed plans and was going in. I didn’t finish talking: at that moment Zarco and the other two kids who’d gone in with him came out of the branch taking the stockings off their heads. I shouted at them to halt, but they didn’t stop and, since I was afraid they were going to escape, I fired a shot; beside me, Mejía fired too. It was no use, and before we knew it the three of them had jumped in the car and were fleeing towards Gerona. We went after them, saw them charge into the car blocking the ramp onto the highway and carry on, and then I had a good idea. I knew that, in a car chase, they’d have the upper hand, not because the car they were driving was better than ours, but because they drove as if they knew no fear, so I called the station and talked to Deputy Superintendent Martínez and told him that, if he didn’t send us one of the helicopters they were using for Operation Summer, the armed robbers would get away again. Again Martínez came through for me and the helicopter soon appeared and thanks to it we didn’t lose their trail (or we lost it but we found it again). Finally their car overturned as they took the curve onto La Barca Bridge, on the way into the city, and that was the end of Zarco.

‘It happened more or less like this. We arrived at the bridge just after they’d flipped over, just when they were crawling out of the car, which had stopped upside down on the asphalt. There were four of us, two cars, we stopped twenty or thirty metres from the accident and, when we saw the robbers take off running across the bridge, we ran after them. Although there had been four in the car, there were three running, and we instantly recognized Zarco, but not the other two, or not with certainty. One of my officers stayed to examine the overturned car and, when we got to the other side of the bridge, I shouted to the other to run after one of them, who’d fled on his own in the direction of Pedret. Mejía and I followed Zarco and the other kid. We were lucky: on the way into La Devesa Park Zarco tripped and fell and broke his ankle, and that’s how we caught him.’

‘And the other one?’

‘The one who was with Zarco? If you’ve been talking about this with Cañas, you already know what happened: he got away.’

‘You didn’t follow him? You let him get away?’

‘Neither. What happened is that Zarco kept us busy long enough that Gafitas was able to get away.’

‘Do you think he did it on purpose?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Were you sure the guy who’d got away was Gafitas?’

‘No, but that was my impression, and Mejía’s too. What I was sure of (I think I told you this already) is that, as soon as we brought Zarco down, the gang was finished.

‘And it was. That very evening I began to interrogate Zarco and the other two members of his gang we’d nabbed that afternoon, who turned out to be two kids called Jou and Gordo (Gordo, who lost consciousness in the accident on La Barca, I interrogated a few hours after he’d been admitted to hospital; Zarco didn’t even get there: a doctor put a cast on his leg in the station house). The interrogation lasted the regulation three days but there was no surprise; it wasn’t even a surprise that from the start all three detainees piled as much shit as they could at the doors of Guille and Tío, who could take all the shit in the world because one was dead and the other quadraplegic. I don’t know if it was a strategy they’d prepared beforehand, in case they got caught, or if it occurred to each one on their own, but it was the most sensible thing they could do. Of course it didn’t surprise me that Zarco was astute enough not to cop to any more than strictly necessary either, and much less that he didn’t give anyone up for anything; I knew this was what was going to happen: not only because Zarco was the toughest in the gang and the one with most experience, but also because he was their leader, and a leader loses all his authority if he turns into an informer. However, I did get Gordo and Jou to give up Zarco for a couple of things (I tricked them: I told them he’d already copped to it himself, and they swallowed it), but I didn’t get them to give up Gafitas, or the girls or any of the others who’d participated at some point in the gang’s misdemeanours without actually being part of it. This didn’t matter to me too much — why should I lie to you — because, like I said, I thought that once I’d thrown the book at Zarco the gang would be out of action, and sooner rather than later the fringes would end up coming undone and falling of their own accord. So I rushed through the interrogations, took the greatest of care writing up the affidavit and put Zarco and the rest before a judge. And that was it: the judge sent them to the Modelo prison to await trial and I never saw Zarco again. In person, I mean; like everyone else, I later saw him often on TV, in magazines, newspapers and such. But that’s another story, and you know it better than I do. Are we done?’

‘More or less. Can I ask you one last question?’

‘Sure.’

‘What happened with Gafitas? Did he end up falling of his own accord?’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘I’ve got Cañas’ version already.’

‘I’m sure it’s right.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But I’d like to hear yours as well. Why don’t you want to tell me?’

‘Because I’ve never told anybody.’

‘That makes it even more interesting.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with your book.’

‘Maybe not, but that doesn’t matter.’

‘Will you give me your word that you’re not going to use what I tell you?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. You’ll see. At dusk on the day I arrested Zarco I showed up alone at Gafitas’ house. I didn’t want to waste time: I’d just interrogated Zarco and his two accomplices in the Bordils bank robbery for the first time at the station and, while I left the three of them stewing in their cells before waking them up in the early hours to begin the interrogation again, I decided to go after him, who was the one I suspected of being the fourth. As soon as his mother opened the door I knew I’d guessed right. It wasn’t the poor woman’s terror that betrayed her but the huge efforts she was making to hide her terror. She was so distraught that she didn’t even ask me why I was looking for her son, all she managed to say was that for the last week he had been with his father at a friend’s place, in Colera, taking advantage of the last days of the holidays; then, before I had time to ask for it, she gave me the address. An hour later I got to Colera, an isolated little seaside village, near the border at Portbou. I asked where the house was and found it not far from the beach; it was dark and looked uninhabited, but there was a car by the door. I parked beside it. I let a few seconds pass. I went and rang the bell.

‘It was his father who opened the door, a man in his forties, thin, dark-haired with no grey, who at first glance looked very little like his son. I introduced myself, told him I wanted to talk to Gafitas; he answered that he was sleeping at that moment and asked me what I wanted to talk to him for. I explained. There must be a mistake, he replied. I was with my son all morning out at sea. Are there any witnesses to that? I asked. Me, he answered. No one else? I asked. No one else, he answered. That’s a shame, I said, and added: In any case I still need to talk to your son. With a gesture that combined resignation and surprise, the man invited me in and, as we walked through the dining room, told me that he and his son had been in Colera for a week and had been going out fishing every day, although that morning they’d come back earlier than usual because of an accident. My son got a scratch from a lure when he was casting, he told me. On his arm. It was a bit gory but nothing serious; we didn’t even have to go to the doctor: I saw to it myself. When we got to the door of a room he asked me to wait there while he woke him up. I waited, seconds later he showed me into the room and I asked him to leave me alone with his son.

‘He agreed. Gafitas and I talked for a while, him sitting up in bed leaning against the wall, with his arm bandaged and his legs wrapped in a tangle of sweat-drenched sheets, me standing at the foot of the bed. Just as with his mother, I only needed to look in his eyes — more bewildered than frightened behind the lenses of his glasses — to know what I already knew: that he was the fourth man in the hold-up of the Bordils bank. I asked him a couple of procedural questions, which he answered with fake composure; then I told him to get dressed and bring a change of clothes, and finally I told him I’d wait for him in the dining room. He didn’t even want to know where we were going.

‘I walked out of the room and told the father I was arresting his son. The father listened without facing me, sitting in a rocking chair in front of the empty fireplace, and didn’t turn around. In a whisper he said: It’s a mistake. Maybe so, I accepted. But a judge will have to decide. That’s not what I mean, he clarified, turning towards me in the rocking chair, and looking at him I had the impression that he’d just removed a mask with features very similar to his own; when he spoke again I didn’t note in his voice supplication or anguish or sorrow: just total seriousness. I don’t know if my son has done what you say he’s done, he explained. I’m not saying he didn’t. But we’ve talked and he’s told me he’s sorry. I believe him; I’m only asking that you believe him too. My son is a good kid: you can be sure of that. Besides, everything that’s happened is not his fault. Have you got children? He waited for me to shake my head. Of course, you’re still very young, he went on. But I’ll tell you one thing in case you do have some one day: loving your children is very easy; what’s difficult is seeing things from their perspective. I didn’t know how to put myself in my son’s shoes, and that’s why what happened has happened. It won’t happen again. I guarantee it. As for you, what will you gain from putting him in prison? Think about it. Nothing. You told me you’ve arrested the ringleader, that you’ve broken up the gang; well, now you’ve got what you wanted. You’ll gain nothing from putting my son in jail, I tell you, or you’ll only create another criminal, because my son is not a criminal now but he’d come out of prison converted into one. You know it better than I do. What is it you’re asking of me? I cut him off, feeling uncomfortable. Without an instant’s hesitation he answered: That you give my son a chance. He’s very young, he’ll mend his ways and this will end up just being a bad memory. He’s made mistakes, but he won’t make them again. Forget about all this, Inspector. Go home and forget about my son. Forget we ever met. You and I don’t know each other, you haven’t been here tonight, you never entered this house, never spoke to me, it’s as if this never happened. My son and I will be eternally grateful. And you’ll thank yourself too.

‘Gafitas’ father stopped talking. During the silence that followed, as I held his gaze, I thought of my father, an old Civil Guard about to retire back in Cáceres, and said to myself that he would have done the same thing for me that Gafitas’ father was doing for his son, and that he might be right. You might be right, I said. But I can’t do what you’re asking of me. Your son has made a mistake, and he has to pay for it. The law is the same for everyone; if it weren’t, we’d be living in the jungle. You understand, right? There was a silence and then I went on: For my part I understand, and I’ll do what I can to soften the affidavit; with a bit of luck and a good lawyer he won’t spend more than a year or a year and a half in prison. I’m sorry. That’s all I can do. I expected Gafitas’ father would answer, maybe had the silly expectation that he’d admit I was right, or partially right; he didn’t, of course, but he nodded his head slightly as if he did, took a deep breath and, without a word, turned back to the fireplace and slumped back down in the rocking chair.

‘I waited for Gafitas, but, since he didn’t come out, without saying anything to his father I went to get him. When I opened the door to his room I found him exactly as I’d left him: sitting on the bed and leaning against the wall, his bare legs sticking out of a tangle of sweaty sheets; exactly as I’d left him or almost: the difference was that there was no longer any trace of the faked composure and his eyes weren’t the bewildered and startled eyes of Gafitas, but those of a little boy or those of a rabbit dazzled by the headlights of the car about to run over him. And then, instead of demanding he get dressed and come with me, I stood there in the doorway, quietly staring at him, without thinking anything, without saying anything. I don’t know how long I was there; all I know is that, when the time passed, I turned around and left. How do you like that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Is that the end of the story?’

‘Almost. The rest isn’t of much interest any more. Although this is a small city and everybody knows each other here and everybody’s paths cross, I didn’t see Gafitas again for a long time. I did see his father a couple of times, in the street, and both times he recognized me, looked at me and greeted me with an almost invisible nod, without approaching or saying anything to me. Gafitas reappeared many years later, ten or twelve at least, but by then he was no longer Gafitas but Ignacio Cañas, recently graduated from Barcelona and starting to make a professional name for himself in the city. The first few times we met in that period we pretended not to know each other, didn’t even say hello, but at the beginning of the nineties I was named the civil governor’s security advisor and, since the civil government building is almost right across the street from Cañas’ office, we began to see each other with some frequency and more than once we had to talk about work-related things. That was when our interaction changed; I won’t say we became friends, but we did maintain a cordial relationship. Needless to say we never talked about the past, about when we’d met and how we’d met and such. In fact, I think a moment arrived when I almost forgot that Ignacio Cañas had been Gafitas, just as he must have forgotten that I’d been the same cop that had pursued them, him and Zarco’s gang, through the dives of the district. Later I left my job at the civil government and Cañas and I practically stopped seeing each other. And that is the end of the story.

‘And now we are done, right?’

Chapter 9

‘After the robbery of the Bordils branch of the Banco Popular and Inspector Cuenca’s visit to Colera, my father and I stayed in the village for several more days. I don’t know why, though I imagine that the fact that the morning after our arrival I woke up with a fever must have had something to do with it. It was a Thursday, and for forty-eight hours my temperature remained high and I didn’t get out of bed, sweaty and tortured by nightmares of persecution and prison, victim of a simple summer cold according to the doctor who came to see me, victim of a panic attack as I now believe. My father didn’t leave my side. He brought me fruit, water and instant soup and spent hours sitting by my bed, reading newspapers and cheap novels that he bought at the kiosk in the plaza, barely speaking or asking any questions, whispering into the phone in the dining room every once in a while to my mother, who he convinced to stay home.

‘On the Saturday I felt better and I got up, but I didn’t go outside. That was when my father’s questions started coming. There were so many, or I had so much to tell him, that we spent the whole morning talking. Right after the bank robbery in Bordils, in the bathroom at home and during the trip to Colera, I had told my father the basics; now I told him everything, point by point: from the day Batista moved to our school to the day of the bank robbery in Bordils. My father listened to me without interrupting, and when I finished made me promise not to set foot in the red-light district again and to go back to school as soon as classes began; he in turn promised that Batista would not bother me again. I asked him how he was going to manage that; he answered that when he got back to work he’d talk to his father, and asked me to forget about the matter.

‘For lunch we ate a roast chicken with potatoes that my father bought in the village restaurant and in the afternoon we watched a movie on TV. When it ended, my father went to turn it off, but just at that moment I noticed that an episode of The Water Margin was starting and I asked him to leave it on. It wasn’t just any episode: it was the final one. I had almost stopped following the series when I’d joined Zarco’s gang and, as soon as the episode began, it struck me that it seemed to belong to the same series and at the same time to a different series. The opening, for example. It was the same as ever, but changed at the same time, because the images, which were the same as ever, now meant other things: now the ragtag army of men on foot and horseback carrying weapons and standards was a known army, an army formed by honourable men who in the previous episodes had been cast out beyond the confines of the law by the evil Kao Chiu and who, episode by episode, had been joining up with Lin Chung and the rest of the honourable outlaws of Liang Shan Po. The phrase recited in a voice-over at the beginning of each instalment (“The ancient sages said: Do not despise the snake for having no horns, for who is to say it will not become a dragon. So may one just man become an army”) now also had another meaning: it was no longer conjecture but fact, because Lin Chung had now become an army and the snake without horns had become a dragon. At least that’s how I have always remembered the opening of the episode and the whole episode: the same and different. And a couple of nights ago, knowing I was going to talk to you about the days in Colera, my curiosity was piqued and I downloaded the episode and confirmed that it was just as I remembered it. Shall I tell you?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘As the episode begins, Lin Chung and the outlaws of Liang Shan Po are threatening the capital city of China, where Kao Chiu, the emperor’s favourite, has his lord practically sequestered and the population subjugated by martial law, misery and fear. Kao Chiu has devised a plan to take power: he means to take advantage of the fear of war provoked by the arrival at the gates of the capital of the army from Liang Shan Po with the aim of accusing the emperor of weakness, assassinating him and founding a dynasty of his own. To thwart this strategy, Lin Chung opts to strike with a coup de main; he and his deputies will infiltrate the city, get to the emperor, reveal Kao Chiu’s deceit and then do away with him. The coup de main is successful and, thanks to Lin Chung’s courage and cleverness and that of his deputies, the capital rises up against the tyranny and Kao Chiu is left with no choice but to flee the city in defeat.

‘Here begins a sort of epilogue that abandons the realism of the series to delve into a hallucination. Kao Chiu flees across a desert of black sand in the company of several soldiers who collapse one by one, weakened by hunger and thirst, until the emperor’s former favourite is left alone and, as he falls from his horse, which runs off, and drags himself pitifully across the sand, reality dissolves around him in a delirium inhabited by his victims from times gone by, with threatening expressions on their faces, with illusory lances, horses, riders, standards and fires that drive him mad and threaten to devour him, until the Liang Shan Po men finally find him and Lin Chung kills him in single combat. This is the finale of the adventure, but not of the episode or the series, which ends with two didactic speeches: the first is delivered by Lin Chung and it is a speech to his deputies in which he announces that, although they have now defeated evil in the form of Kao Chiu, evil can return in other forms and they must remain ever vigilant, ready to fight and defeat it, because Liang Shan Po is not really just the name of a river but rather an eternal symbol, the symbol of the struggle against injustice; the second speech is delivered by an off-camera voice and it is a prophesy: while Lin Chung and his deputies ride off into the sunset, the voice-over announces that the heroes of Liang Shan Po will reappear whenever necessary to prevent the triumph of injustice on earth.

‘That last image is no more than flatulent cliché, a postcard sweetened by epic sentimentalism, but when I saw it that afternoon, in Higinio Redondo’s summer home, I burst into tears; I’m lying: actually I’d already been crying for a long time. I cried for a long time there, in silence, sitting almost in the dark beside my father in that half-empty dining room of some house in a village in the back of beyond, with a despair I neither recognized nor recalled, with the feeling of having suddenly puzzled out the complete meaning of the word failure and having discovered an unknown flavour, which was the taste of adult life.

‘That happened on a Saturday. Sunday morning we drove back to Gerona, and that day and the following ones I was anxious. Classes were just about to start again and, as I told you, I’d promised my father that I would go back to school and not go back to the red-light district. I kept my word, at least as far as the district was concerned (and intended to keep it about school as soon as I could). No, the anxiety didn’t come from that side; it didn’t come from my family either: suddenly, in just a few days, my relationship with them went from being very bad to being very good and, as if we’d all decided to respect a code of silence, nobody at home mentioned the escape to Colera or the circumstances surrounding it again. I insist: the anxiety was not from there; it came from the uncertainty. I didn’t understand why Inspector Cuenca hadn’t arrested me in Colera, and feared that at any moment he might come back to my house and arrest me. Also, during the feverish days in Colera I’d begun to nurture the suspicion that it could have been me whose tongue had slipped before the bank robbery in Bordils, unintentionally provoking the police ambush, and I was scared that Zarco, Gordo and Jou would have arrived at the conclusion that I had provoked it intentionally and had decided to inform on me in revenge. So I was plagued by a dilemma during those days. I didn’t want to break the promise I’d made to my father not to go to the district and I didn’t want to run the risk entailed in going to the district (especially the risk of bumping into Inspector Cuenca), but at the same time I wished I could go there. I wanted to know if Zarco, Gordo and Jou were going to give me up or had already given me up and if any of the others had been arrested and were thinking of giving me up, but most of all I wanted to see Tere: I wanted to make clear to her that I hadn’t given anybody up or caused the police ambush outside the bank in Bordils, at least not on purpose; I also wanted to make myself clear about her, because, although part of me was starting to feel that she’d been left behind and had just been a strange and fleeting summer fling, another part was feeling that I was still in love with Tere and I wanted to tell her that, now that Zarco was off the scene, nothing was standing in our way.

‘On the Tuesday at midday I resolved my dilemma: I went to the district without going to the district; in other words: I went to the prefabs to look for Tere. I told you some days ago that I’d never been there and didn’t know exactly where they were; the only thing I’d known since I was little was that they were just across from La Devesa on the other side of the Ter. So I walked from one side of La Devesa to the other (retracing in reverse the route I’d taken the previous week, as I escaped from the police after the bank robbery in Bordils), left the park and crossed La Barca Bridge. On the other side I turned left, went down some steps that led to the river bank, went back up and, walking along a dirt track, passed by a wheat field, a farmhouse with three palm trees by the door and a ravine where reeds, poplars, willows, ash and plane trees all grew together. The prefabs stood at the end of the track. As I also told you some days ago, I had always had a vague and legendary idea about the prefabs, adorned by romantic suggestions from adventure novels, and somehow none of the anecdotes and comments about them I’d heard that summer in Zarco’s gang had done anything to contradict it; on the contrary: those stories had been the perfect fuel for my imagination to add to the prefabs epic tinges of honourable outlaws from a Japanese television series.

‘That’s as far as my fantasies went: as I got closer to the prefabs I began to understand that the reality had nothing to do with them.

‘At first sight the prefabs struck me as a sort of workers’ housing colony composed of six rows of semi-detached barrack huts, with concrete walls, corrugated roofs and floors raised a few centimetres above the ground, but as I walked along one of the streets that separated the barracks — a street that was not a street but a mire that stank of sewage where swarms of flies hovered above naked babies, domestic animals and heaps of junk, from empty rabbit cages to broken bedsprings and old or useless cars — I began to feel that, rather than workers’ housing, that garbage dump was the apotheosis of misery. Fascinated and disgusted at once, I kept going, jumping over streams of foul water, leaving behind the barracks whose walls had once been white, bonfires in broad daylight, children with dirty faces and children on bicycles who stared at me with indifference and mistrust. I went on sleepwalking, my courage shrinking by the second, and when I reached the end of a street I snapped out of it and was about to turn around and flee, but at that moment I noticed a woman watching me from the door of the last barrack hut, just a few steps away from me. She was an obese woman, with extremely white flesh, sitting in an office chair; she had a baby in her arms, her hair wrapped in a dark scarf, her big eyes fixed on me. The woman asked me what I was looking for and I asked after Tere. Since I didn’t know her surname, I started to describe her, but, before I could finish, the woman told me where she lived: In the third hut on the last street, she said. And she added: The one closest to the river.

‘The barracks hut where Tere lived was identical to all the rest, except for the fact that a double row of clothes were hung out to dry across the front and a slightly taller television antenna stuck out of the roof. It had two windows closed with blinds, but the door was ajar; as I pushed it I heard some cartoon laughter, my nostrils were saturated with a sickly-sweet smell and, as I stepped over the threshold, I took in the whole dwelling in a single glance. It was barely forty square metres lit by a couple of naked bulbs and divided into three separate spaces by curtains: in the main space there was a woman cooking on a portable stove, with a dog curled up at her feet, three children were glued to the TV on a sofa made out of a sheet of wood and a mattress, and, beside them, sitting on a folding chair by a brazier table, a very young mother was breastfeeding a baby; in the secondary spaces I just saw some mattresses lying on the floor on top of a bed of straw. Tere was standing on one of them, in front of an open chest of drawers, with a pile of folded clothes in her hands.

‘As soon as I stepped inside everybody turned towards me, including the dog, who stood up and growled. Noticing that Tere was blushing, I blushed and, before anyone could say a word, my friend left the clothes on top of the chest of drawers, grabbed me by the arm, said she’d be right back and dragged me outside. A couple of steps away from the door to the hut she asked: What are you doing here? Looking for you, I answered. I just wanted to know if you were all right. Have you got any news of Zarco and the other guys? My words seemed to calm Tere, who soon went from defensive surprise to curiosity: as if she hadn’t heard me, she pointed to the bandage on my arm and asked what had happened. I began to tell her about the bank robbery in Bordils. She didn’t interrupt me until I explained that the police were waiting for us when we came out. They must have got a tip-off, she said. Yeah, I said. Then she said she wasn’t surprised, and I looked at her uncomprehending. She clarified: It’s Zarco’s fault. As soon as I told him I couldn’t go with you guys he started talking to anyone who would listen; and it never fails: when you talk to anyone who will listen you end up talking to someone you shouldn’t have talked to. He was the first to make the rule and the first to break it.

‘You can’t imagine how relieved I was to hear Tere say that. Free of the need to demonstrate that I’d had nothing to do with the tip-off, I continued my tale, though I didn’t say anything about what had happened after our car rolled over on La Barca Bridge: nothing about Zarco’s arrest, nothing about fleeing to Colera with my father, nothing about Inspector Cuenca’s visit to Higinio Redondo’s house. When I finished, Tere told me what she knew about Zarco, Gordo and Jou. She told me that the three of them were all right, though Zarco had a cast on one leg, and that, after having been interrogated at the station house over three days and nights, they’d been handed over to a judge, who’d sent them to Barcelona and had them locked up in the Modelo. Now they’re awaiting trial, Tere concluded. But who knows how long that’ll take; you know how long ago Chino and Drácula got nabbed and they’re still waiting. But nobody’s going to save them from four or five years, that’s for sure: they’re going to have to take the rap for the guns, car theft, bank robbery and at least three or four other charges. Not as bad as it could have been, but it won’t be nothing. They haven’t said anything about us, nothing about you, nothing about me or anybody else, and they won’t. If you were worried about that, you can forget it.

‘I was a little humiliated that Tere guessed what I was thinking; but only a little: by then the opinion Tere might have of me had begun to stop mattering. While she kept talking I glimpsed over her shoulder, across the river and into the trees, no more than three hundred metres away, the apartment blocks on Caterina Albert, and at that moment I thought — it was the first time I thought this — that my house and the prefabs were at once very close and very far apart, and only then did I feel that it was really true that I wasn’t like them. Suddenly all that had happened over the past months seemed unreal, and it felt comforting to know that I belonged on the other side of the river and that the waters of the blue border had now returned to their course; I suddenly understood that I had cleared up my feelings about Tere and that Tere had just been a strange and fleeting summer fling.

Tere kept talking while I had started to look for a way to get out of there. She was talking about Zarco; she was saying that, whatever sentence was passed on him, he wouldn’t spend much time in prison. He’ll escape as soon as he can, she said. And that’ll be soon. I nodded, but made no comment. Two little boys on bikes followed by a dog went by a couple of metres from where we were, splashing mud on my shoes. Just then the hut door opened and the sounds of a fake gunfight and a real baby crying came from inside at the same time as the head of the girl I’d seen breastfeeding the baby peeked out and told Tere she was needed. I’ll be right there, answered Tere, and the door closed again. Tere touched the beauty spot beside her nose; instead of going in she asked: Have you been back to La Font? No, I answered. Have you? Me neither, she answered. But if you want we could meet there tomorrow afternoon. I’m seeing Lina. I thought for a moment and said: OK. Tere smiled for the first time that day. Then she said goodbye and went into her house.

‘The next day I didn’t go to La Font and I didn’t see Tere again until the middle of December. Over those three months of autumn I completely changed my life; or rather: in a certain sense I went back to my former life. The life I’d had before Tere, before Zarco, before Batista and before everything. Although, as I say, I only went back to it in a certain sense, because the person going back was no longer the same one. I told you when we started talking about Zarco: at the age of sixteen all borders are porous, or at least they were back then; and it’s true that the border formed by the Ter and the Onyar rivers was as porous as that of the Liang Shan Po, or at least it was for me: three months before I had gone from being a middle-class charnego to being a quinqui from one day to the next, and three months later I stopped being a quinqui overnight and went back to being a middle-class charnego. Things were as simple as that. And as quick. The disbanding of Zarco’s gang made it all easier, of course: most of them were in prison or not around any more, the ones who were still on the outside didn’t come looking for me and I didn’t go looking for them. That radical change in my relationship with my family also made it easier. I told you already that after those days in Colera my relationship with them became really good again and that, although my father knew everything that had happened that summer, he never asked me any more questions; my mother and my sister didn’t either, so in my family it was as if what had happened that summer hadn’t really happened.

‘But what made my return to this side of the water margin irreversible was going back to school, or the way I went back to school. Term started two days after my visit to the prefabs. The first day of school started with a clear sunny morning, the sky a perfect blue and the football pitch gleaming as if it had just been watered. In the octagonal courtyard outside the entrance to our wing, while waiting for the doors to open and classes to start, I greeted some of my old Caterina Albert Street friends from a distance, but not Batista, who didn’t show up first thing. In spite of that, I didn’t even have a chance to consider the possibility that he might have changed schools because the teacher read out his name from the list when he took attendance.

‘Batista came in halfway through the morning, though we didn’t exchange a word until classes finished at lunchtime. I was on my way out by the back door, where the parking lot was, when, as I rounded the corner of the school cafeteria, I saw him a few metres away from me, leaning on the gas tank of his Lobito, which in turn was leaning against the wall; in front of him, talking to him, were all the guys: Matías, the Boix brothers, Intxausti, Ruiz, Canales, and maybe one or two others. As soon as I appeared they fell quiet and I knew it was a chance encounter; also, that I had no alternative: unless I wanted to avoid them ostentatiously or turn around and go back inside and out the front door of the school, I had no choice but to walk past Batista and the rest of them. Plucking up my courage I kept walking but before I walked by Batista he stood up from the Lobito and blocked my way by holding out his arm. I stopped. Long time no see, catalanufo, said Batista. Where’ve you been? I didn’t answer. In light of the silence, Batista nodded at my bandaged arm. What’s that? he asked. A mosquito bite? I heard some nervous or stifled laughter; I didn’t know who was laughing and didn’t bother looking around to find out. Then, without having planned it, I answered in Catalan. No, I said. It was a bullet. Batista laughed loudly. You’re so funny, Dumbo! he said. After a silence he added: Hey, don’t tell me you’re only going to speak in Catalan now? At that moment I turned to him, and got a surprise as I looked him in the eye. With an unexpected sensation of victory — feeling almost like Rocky Balboa on my pinball machine, muscular and triumphant, wearing shorts with the American flag printed on them and raising my arms to the cheering stadium while a defeated boxer lies on the canvas in the ring — I realized that I didn’t care if Batista called me Dumbo or called me a catalanufo. I realized that Batista was just a half-assed bully, a harmless loudmouth, a weak, spoilt brat, and I was astonished at myself for ever having been scared of him. Even more astonishing, I realized that I no longer felt any need to get revenge on him, because I didn’t even hate him any more, and that’s the best revenge.

‘Batista held my gaze for a second, during which I was sure that he knew what I’d realized, what I was feeling. His laughter froze in his mouth and, as if in search of an explanation, he looked at Matías and the others; I don’t know what he found, but he turned back to me and slowly, without taking his eyes off me — eyes in which there was no longer the slightest trace of sarcasm or contempt, only bafflement — lowered his arm. As I carried on towards the exit I said in Catalan, loud enough so that everyone would hear: Well, I’m not speaking Spanish to you, Batista. That day I had lunch with my father, my mother and my sister. After we’d finished, my father took me aside and asked how the first day of term had gone; he’d already asked during the meal, and I repeated my reply: I told him that everything had gone well; then I asked him if he’d already talked to Batista’s father. Not yet, said my father. I was thinking I’d do it tomorrow. No, don’t, I said. You don’t need to any more. My father stared at me. It’s all sorted out, I explained. Are you sure? my father asked. Completely, I answered.

‘I wasn’t so sure, of course, but it turned out I wasn’t wrong and our encounter in the school parking lot must have convinced Batista of the fact that over the summer I had changed from a serpent into a dragon. So Batista’s first defeat was his last, and from the second day of term he seemed like a different person. He didn’t bother me again, he avoided me systematically, barely spoke to me and, when he found himself obliged to do so, it was always in Catalan. My friends from Caterina Albert also seemed like different people: Matías immediately, and gradually the rest, began to distance themselves from Batista (or maybe he distanced himself from them) and tried to seek my friendship again, and I learned that power is lost as easily as it’s gained and that one on one people are always inoffensive, but in groups we’re not.

‘The reconciliation with my friends from Caterina Albert Street was a done deal, but towards the middle of that autumn, without any shrillness or bad vibes, also without any explanation — as if it were obvious that our friendship had run its course and given all it had to give — I began to spend less time with them and more with a group of students doing their COU (Curso de Orientación Universitaria), in their final year of high school before going on to university. That’s how I met the first girl I ever went out with. Her name was Montse Roura and, despite the fact that she wasn’t doing her COU at the Marist Brothers’ school (she was actually only in her second year, and with the Carmelites), she was part of the gang because her brother Paco was. Montse and Paco were from Barcelona, had moved to Gerona two years earlier, when they were orphaned, and they lived in a building with several of their aunts and uncles in the old part of the city, a building where they had a flat to themselves. This made them the centre of the group, because their door was always open and not many Friday or Saturday nights went by when we didn’t get together at their place to listen to music, talk, drink and smoke. Also to take drugs, although that only happened once I’d started hanging out with them, simply because I was the only one who knew anything about them and how to get them, which turned me into the group’s dealer. In short: that was a magnificent time in my life, full of changes. During the week I studied hard and on the weekends I cut loose with my friends and Montse. I recovered my self-esteem and then some. I signed a definitive peace accord with my parents. I almost forgot Zarco and Tere.

‘It was my role as weekend drug dealer that led to my seeing Tere again. I already told you it happened in the middle of December; however, I haven’t told you that on that day I was with two of my trusty escorts on those weekly incursions into the underworld: one was Paco Roura and the other Dani Omedes, another regular in our gang. Paco had passed his driving test that summer and had the use of a Seat 600 belonging to one of his uncles, so every Friday evening he’d drive me over to the Flor, in Salt, where a couple of the dealers Zarco, Tere and the rest of us used to buy drugs from in the summer still hung out: Rodri and Gómez. That evening neither of the two was in the bar, and no one could tell me where I might find them. We waited for more than an hour, and eventually had no choice but to start driving around the city, first looking for them and then looking for any small-time dealer. We asked here and there, a bit by chance, in some bars in Sant Narcís and in the old town — at the Avenida, at the Acapulco, L’Enderroc, La Trumfa, the Groc Pub — and didn’t find anything. At some point I felt tempted to go back to La Font, but I resisted. It was almost ten when somebody told us about a bar in Vilarroja. Without much hope we went up to Vilarroja, found the bar, I left Paco and Dani in the car and went in.

‘As soon as I was through the door I saw her. She was sitting at the back of the bar, a tiny place, filled with people and smoke, with porcelain plates adorning the walls; beside her, around a table full of beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays, were three guys and a girl. Before I could get over to her table, a smile of recognition lit up her face. She stood up, made her way through the crowd, came up to me and asked me the same question she’d asked three months earlier, when I went to look for her in the prefabs, except in a cheerful and not suspicious tone: What are you doing here, Gafitas? As I already told you, during those three months I’d almost forgotten Tere and, when I did remember her, I only remembered the domestic, miserable, defeated quinqui that I’d fled from that day in the shithole of the prefabs; now I saw her again as I’d seen her the first time I laid eyes on her at the Vilaró arcade and as I saw her all summer long: sure of herself, teasing and radiant, the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen.

‘I avoided her question by asking if she wanted a beer. She smiled, accepted, we went to the bar, ordered two beers and she asked again what I was doing there, on my own. I answered that I wasn’t on my own, that two friends were waiting for me outside, in the car, and I asked her how she was. Fine, she answered. While they poured our beer it occurred to me that Tere could probably get me some gear, but also that I was obliged to ask another question. I asked the other question: How’s Zarco? Tere replied that he was still in jail, that like Gordo and Jou, he was still awaiting trial in the Modelo, and that she’d gone to Barcelona two or three times to see him and he’d seemed fine. Then she went on: she told me that — unlike Zarco, Gordo and Jou — Chino and Drácula had been tried and sentenced to five years, which they were serving in the Modelo; she told me that she hadn’t been going to La Font or the district for a few months now because after the arrest of Zarco and the others things had got ugly and there had been raids, arrests and beatings; she told me that the raids, arrests and beatings had not been confined to the district but had reached the prefabs and some bars in Salt and Germans Sàbat, that harassment from the cops had ended up dispersing the remnants of the gang and that, although none of the rest of them had been arrested, many people had ended up in jail. Do you remember the General and his wife? asked Tere. Of course, I answered. He’s in the nick, said Tere. They accused him of selling weapons to Zarco. But they killed his wife. Well, they had to kill her: when the cops went to pick them up at their house, she started shooting at them; in the end she took one of the pigs down with her. Tere looked at me with an expression of joy or admiration, or maybe of pride. You see, she said. And there we were thinking the old gal was blind.

‘She finished bringing me up to date with a piece of good news or what she considered good news: she didn’t live in the prefabs any more; actually, the prefabs no longer existed: they’d torn them down and, just over a week earlier, the people who were still in them had been relocated to La Font de la Pòlvora, nearby, where they had gone from living in barrack huts to living in recently constructed flats in recently constructed tower blocks in a recently constructed neighbourhood. While Tere was talking about her new life in La Font de la Pòlvora, it occurred to me that the end of the prefabs meant the end of Liang Shan Po, the definitive end of the blue border, and when she finished talking I feared she would ask about my life since we’d last seen each other. Before she could change the subject I did. I need some hash, I said. I went to the Flor, but neither Rodri nor Gómez were there, and I’ve spent all evening trying to find some. You need it right now? she asked. Yeah, I answered. How much? she asked. Three talegos should do me, I answered. Tere nodded. Wait for me outside, she said.

‘I paid for the beers, went outside and walked over to the field where my friends were waiting in the Seat 600. Dani rolled down the window and asked: What’s up? We’re in luck, I said, standing beside the car. Paco looked like he hadn’t taken his hands off the steering wheel, as if he was ready to start the engine and get out of there. I hope so, he said. This place gives me the creeps. After a few minutes Tere came out of the bar and I walked over to meet her. She reached into the pocket of her raincoat and pulled out three thin little bars of hash wrapped in tinfoil; she handed them to me: I took them in one hand while passing her three one-thousand-peseta notes with the other. Having made the exchange, we looked at each other in the shadows, standing between the long light extending out the door of the bar and the circle of light shining from a nearby streetlamp. The night was damp and cold. We weren’t very close to one another but the double spiral of vapour coming from our mouths seemed to envelop us in a shared mist. I pointed vaguely towards the Seat 600 and said: They’re waiting for me. Three men came out of the bar and walked past us; while they walked away up the street talking, Tere turned towards them and, without taking my eyes off her in the dimly lit street, I suddenly thought of the washrooms of the arcade and Montgó beach and for a moment I wanted to kiss her and almost had to remind myself that I was no longer in love with her and that she had just been a strange and fleeting summer fling. Tere turned back to me. I have to meet some friends tonight, I said very quickly, with the feeling I’d been caught red-handed and that I’d already said that; I asked: Are you busy tomorrow? No, answered Tere. If you want we could meet up, I suggested. You’re not going to stand me up this time? asked Tere. I immediately knew she was referring to the last time we saw each other, at the door of her hut in the prefabs when we’d arranged to meet at La Font the next day as we said goodbye and then I didn’t go. I didn’t want to pretend that I’d forgotten. Not this time, I promised. She smiled. Where should we meet? she said. Wherever you want, I said, and remembered the moment when Tere taught me, in the Marocco, that to dance you don’t have to know how to dance you just have to want to move, and added: Do you still go to Rufus? Not any more, said Tere. But if you want we can meet there. OK, I said. OK, she repeated. She kissed me on the cheek, said see you tomorrow and went back inside the bar.

‘I went back to the car. Have you got the hash? asked Dani as soon as I opened the door. I said yes and, as he put the car into first gear and accelerated, Paco celebrated. Cool, he said. And the chick? What chick? I asked. The one who sold you the gear, Paco said. What about her? I asked. Quite the quinqui, he said. Where do you know her from? Dani interrupted: Yeah, she’s a quinqui, sure, but is she a fox or do all chicks look good at night in the distance? She’s pretty good-looking, I said. But don’t get your hopes up, I only know her to see her. I’m not getting any hopes up. Though get to know her a bit better she might suck you off. Stopped at an intersection, Paco let go of the steering wheel for a moment to simulate a blowjob. Hopes? he said, grabbing the steering wheel again. Fuck, I wouldn’t let that chick suck my cock if I was dead: she might bite it off. Dani burst out laughing. Say what you like, dickhead, I said. But don’t you dare say anything to Montse. I don’t want her ripping mine off, and for nothing. She’s a right one, your sister. Now it was Paco’s turn to laugh. We’d left Vilarroja, were driving past the cemetery and I suddenly felt sick, as if I was carsick or coming down with something. In the front seats, Paco and Dani kept talking as we drove back into the city centre.

‘I spent that night and the next day thinking about Tere. I was full of doubts. I wanted to see her and didn’t want to see her. I wanted to go to Rufus and didn’t want to go to Rufus. I wanted to leave Montse and my friends for one night and didn’t want to at the same time. In the end I didn’t see Tere or go to Rufus or abandon my friends, but Saturday night was a strange night: although I was at Paco and Montse’s place until very late, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that I’d stood Tere up again or stop imagining her at Rufus, bombarded by the changing lights that flashed over the dance floor, dancing to the same songs or almost the same songs as the summer before that I’d watched her dance to so many times from the bar while her body adapted to the music as naturally as ever — as naturally as a glove fits a hand and as a fire gives off heat — dancing alone while waiting for me in vain.

‘On Sunday morning I woke up feeling anxious, with the guilty certainty of having committed a serious mistake the night before, and to remedy it I decided that very afternoon I’d go and look for Tere at the bar in Vilarroja where I’d run into her. But as the morning wore on reality weakened my determination — I had no one to drive me to Vilarroja, I couldn’t ask Paco, couldn’t be sure of finding Tere and, on top of everything, I’d arranged to meet Montse and the others after lunch — so, feeling like that really was the end of the water margin, that afternoon I didn’t go to Vilarroja. And it turned out really to be the end, because it was all over then.’

‘Do you mean that was the last time you saw Tere back then?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t hear anything more about Zarco either?’

‘No.’

‘How about we leave it there for today.’

‘That’d be just fine.’