‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, I’ve always heard it said that, in personal relations, the first impression is what counts. I don’t think it’s true: I think the first impression is the only one that counts; all the rest are just additions that do not alter anything essentially. At least that’s what I think happened to me with Zarco. I mean that there in the Gerona prison, Zarco might have looked like human scum, and he surely was, but that didn’t mean I could stop seeing him as I’d seen him with my teenage eyes the first time I’d seen him, walking into the Vilaró arcade with Tere, and as I’d seen him during that summer. That’s the first thing I understood: that for three months of my adolescence I had admired Zarco — I’d admired his serenity, his courage, his audacity — and since then I haven’t been able to stop admiring him. The second thing I understood is that, as well as admiring him, I envied him: now, in the Gerona prison, seen with the perspective of time, Zarco’s life could seem like a wasted life, the life of a loser, but the truth of the matter is that, if I compared it with mine — which had so often seemed to me a false and borrowed life, a misunderstanding or, even worse, an insipid yet convincing simulation of a misunderstanding — his seemed to me like a full life, that had been worth living and that I would have traded for mine without hesitation. The third thing I understood is that Zarco had always been aware of playing the role of Zarco, or at the very least he was aware now of having played this role for years.’
‘Is that what you meant when you said that at this moment the persona disappeared and only the person remained?’
‘Exactly. Let me tell you about one of the last conversations Zarco and I had, in the prison’s interview room. That afternoon we’d been talking for a while as usual about the summer of ’78 when, after I mentioned the prefabs in passing, Zarco interrupted me and asked me what I’d said. At that moment I understood that, without realizing it, I’d just called the prefabs by the nickname I’d always had for them, so I said I hadn’t said anything and tried to change the subject; Zarco wouldn’t let me, and repeated the question. Liang Shan Po, I finally confessed, feeling as ridiculous as a guy who accidentally says his lover’s pet name out loud in public. That’s what you called the prefabs? Zarco asked. I nodded. I tried to keep talking so I wouldn’t have to give him an explanation, but I couldn’t; Zarco frowned, his eyes narrowed until they looked like two slits and he asked: Like the river in The Water Margin? Zarco greeted my surprise with a black and toothless smile. You remember the series? I asked. Fuck, Gafitas, Zarco protested. You think you’re the only one who ever watched TV? He immediately started talking about The Water Margin, about the dragon and the snake, about Lin Chung and Kao Chiu and Hu San-Niang, until he stopped short in mid-sentence, frowned again and looked at me as if he’d just deciphered a hieroglyphic on my face. Hey, he said. You didn’t fall for that old song and dance too, did you? What song and dance? I asked. He took a couple of seconds to answer. The Liang Shan Po thing, he specified. The honourable bandits. All that shit. I wasn’t sure what he meant. I told him so. He explained: You didn’t believe that whole Water Margin spiel, did you? That whole story about you lot on that side being worse sons of bitches than we are on this side, and vice versa; that thing about the only difference between me and you is that I was born in a wrong neighbourhood of the city and on the wrong side of the river, that society’s to blame for everything and I’m innocent of everything and this that and the other. You didn’t believe that, right?
‘At that moment I knew it. It wasn’t only in his words, it was in the sarcasm that drenched his voice, in the disappointment and irony and sadness of his old man’s eyes. What I knew was that Zarco was definitively finished, that the persona had disappeared and only the person barely remained, that lonely, ill and washed-up quinqui I had in front of me, on the other side of the interview room. And I also knew or imagined that, deep down, Zarco had never believed in his own persona, had never seriously thought that he was the true Robin Hood of his time, or the great reformed delinquent; it had just been a pretend, strategic identity, which he’d used when it suited him but never really believed or he’d only believed it fleetingly and almost without meaning to, an identity that he hadn’t believed in for a long time in any case and that, in those days of terminal lucidity when he no longer had the energy to laugh or cry, was only pitiful.
‘That’s what I knew then (or what I imagined), thanks to that conversation.’
‘I would have imagined something else as well.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The opposite: that perhaps Zarco no longer believed in his own persona, but he believed that you did believe in it. That he believed, in some way, that you still believed he was an innocent victim, that you were the last one who thought of him as the Robin Hood of his day, or as the great reformed delinquent. That you weren’t really either his lawyer or his friend, but the last admirer he had left. Or the last deputy: the last honourable man Lin Chung had left on the far side of the Water Margin. After all, the questions Zarco had asked you were rhetorical, weren’t they?’
‘You might be right.’
‘And didn’t you say anything? Didn’t you try to disabuse him of that notion?’
‘More or less. I told him I hadn’t believed his song and dance, as he’d called it, that of course I’d never thought that society was to blame for everything and he was just a victim of society. Zarco replied by asking then why did I call them the outlaws of Liang Shan Po, and I answered because at first I did believe it, that after all in the summer of ’78 I was sixteen years old and at sixteen you believe things like that, but later I stopped believing it, only by then it was too late to change the nickname so it stuck. That’s what I told him, more or less, though I realized he didn’t believe me and I didn’t want to insist.’
‘So you let Zarco hold onto a false idea of what you thought of him.’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
‘I thought the truth was very important to you.’
‘It is, but a virtue taken to extremes is a vice. If one does not understand there are things more important than the truth one doesn’t understand how important the truth is.’
‘You didn’t talk about the matter again?’
‘No.’
‘And neither of you mentioned the Liang Shan Po again?’
‘Not that I recall.’
‘And Tere? You haven’t even mentioned her today.’
‘She hasn’t come up. What do you want me to tell you? That summer we saw each other quite often. Tere had lived in Barcelona for a while but the last two or three years she’d moved back to Gerona, or rather to Salt, where she had a job cleaning various council properties. She’d given up her nursing studies and was going out with the local librarian, a guy with a ponytail and a goatee who went everywhere on his bicycle, spoke Catalan-inflected Spanish and rented an allotment on the banks of the River Ter where he grew tomatoes and lettuces. His name was Jordi and he was ten years younger than Tere. We got along well immediately (as far as he was concerned I was just Zarco’s lawyer, and Zarco was just Tere’s famous, unruly relative), so some Saturdays I’d show up at the allotment and spend the afternoon watching him and Tere working the land, talking politics (he was a separatist) or about Salt (he’d been born there and hoped to die there, though he’d travelled all over the world) and having the odd toke of his marijuana; when it got dark we’d go back into the city, them on their bikes and me in my car, and have something to eat at Jordi’s place or in some bar in the old quarter.