‘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.’