‘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.’