‘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.’