Authors: Javier Cercas
‘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?’
‘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.’
‘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.