‘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?’