‘How is it that you became a lawyer if you have this opinion of lawyers?’
‘Because before I became a lawyer I had absolutely no idea what it meant to be a lawyer. Well, I’ve told you my life story.’
‘Yes. I’d like you to tell me now what your relationship was with Zarco during the years you didn’t see him; that is: how did you follow the creation and destruction of the Zarco myth?’
‘First you tell me exactly what you understand by the word myth.’
‘A popular story that is true in part and false in part and that tells a truth that cannot be told only with the truth.’
‘You’ve obviously given it some thought. But tell me: whose truth?’
‘Everyone’s truth, one that concerns us all. Look, these kinds of stories have always existed, people invent them, can’t live without them. What makes Zarco’s a little different (one of the things that makes it a little different) is that the people didn’t invent it, or not only people, but most of all the media: the radio, the newspapers, TV; also songs and movies.’
‘Well, that’s how I followed the creation and destruction of the Zarco myth: through the press, books, songs and films. Like everyone. Well, not like everyone: after all I’d known Zarco as a kid; or rather: not only had I known him but I’d been one of his guys. Of course that was a secret. Apart from my father and Inspector Cuenca, no one who hadn’t hung out in the district back then knew that at the age of sixteen I’d belonged to Zarco’s gang. But my father had never made the slightest mention of the matter and, as far as I know, neither had Inspector Cuenca, at least until I said you should talk to him. The thing is that during those years I assiduously followed everything that appeared about Zarco, clipped out and saved articles from the newspapers and magazines, watched the films based on his life, recorded the reports and interviews they showed on television, read his various memoirs and the books others wrote about him. That’s how I put together the archive I lent you.’
‘It’s magnificent. It’s making my job much easier.’
‘It’s not magnificent. There are things missing, but nothing important is missing. Besides, a lot of things I didn’t get hold of when they appeared, but years later, in newspaper libraries and street markets. I’m sure my wife and friends thought my passion for Zarco and for everything that had anything to do with quinquis odd and sometimes irritating, but not much worse than a childish fixation with stamp collecting or model railways.
‘I remember, for example, the day I went with Irene to see Wild Boys, the first of the four movies about Zarco that Fernando Bermúdez made. I knew more or less what it was about because I’d read about it in the papers, but, as the story advanced and I realized that it was in part a re-creation of some of the things that had happened to us in the summer of ’78, I started to get palpitations and to sweat so much that after a quarter of an hour we had to rush out of the cinema. The next day I went back on my own to see the movie. I actually saw it three or four times, obsessively searching for the reality hidden behind the fiction, as if the film contained a coded message that only I could decipher. As you can imagine, I was mostly interested in the Gafitas character: I wondered if that was how Zarco saw me or had seen me in the summer of ’78, as a faint-hearted middle-class teenager who toughened up when he joined the gang and seems ready to betray him to contest his leadership and his girlfriend, and at the end of the story he does, he betrays him and on top of that he’s the only one to escape from the police in that unexplained finale that disconcerted so many people and I thought was the best thing in the film.
‘I also remember how I saw on television the press conference that Zarco gave in Barcelona’s Modelo Prison, in the spring or summer of 1983, when he managed to convert a frustrated escape into the most famous prison riot in the history of Spain. The night of the day that happened was the first time I went to Irene’s family’s house, so I remember very well that she’d introduced me to her parents and we’d been having an aperitif with them for quite a while when suddenly I saw on the other side of the dining room, on a television with the sound turned down, the image of Zarco. It was a confusing image: Zarco’s hair was very long and he was wearing a tight, short-sleeved T-shirt that accentuated his pectoral muscles, and he was lit by television lights and flashbulbs, surrounded by journalists and prisoners, he seemed to be requesting silence, with the bicep of one arm squeezed by a rubber band he held in his mouth and a syringe in his hand, about to inject himself with a shot of heroin with which he apparently meant to denounce the massive presence of drugs in the prisons. At that moment I was talking with Irene’s father and, as she told me later, without giving the least explanation I stood up, leaving the good man in the middle of a sentence, walked over to the TV, turned up the volume while behind me Irene was trying to save face by making a joke. I never said he was perfect, she said, or says she said, because I didn’t hear her. He has a weakness for quinquis; but, if the quinqui is Zarco he goes off the deep end. Would have been worse if he’d gone in for wine, don’t you think? (Later, when we separated, Irene was less generous and less jovial, and often threw my obsession with quinquis in my face as a symptom of my incurable immaturity.) I also remember having seen on the television at Xaica, a self-service restaurant on Jovellanos Street where Cortés, Gubau and I used to go for lunch, the final images of the escape from the high-security prison Lérida II, the images of Zarco lying facedown on the asphalt of a suburban street corner in Barcelona, beside two of his accomplices, all three of them with their hands cuffed behind their backs, the three surrounded by plainclothes cops walking among them brandishing their pistols, perhaps waiting to take complete control of a situation they seemed to have completely under control, perhaps waiting for an order to remove the fugitives, perhaps simply savouring the minute of glory they were due for having caught, after a 24-hour search by land, sea and air, the most famous and most wanted criminal in Spain who in spite of being on the ground and facedown did not stop talking or screaming or protesting for an instant between the furious screeching of the sirens, according to him complaining to the police that he had a bullet in his back and needed a doctor, according to the police threatening them and cursing their families and their dead, according to some witnesses alternating between the two. And of course, I remember very well that because of Zarco I lost a possible client for Redondo — who moreover was an acquaintance of his or of his wife’s — shortly after starting to work at his firm. What happened was that, while the lady in question was almost in tears telling me something about an inheritance, on the television in the café bar in Banyoles where we were having the meeting the incredible and chaotic images appeared of Zarco’s escape from the Ocaña penitentiary during the cocktail party for the press screening of The Real Life of Zarco, Bermúdez’s last film, when, in the presence of a group of journalists, Zarco and three other inmates in cahoots with him took Bermúdez, the prison superintendent and two guards hostage and walked out of the prison without anyone being able to do anything to prevent their escape. I forgot Redondo’s acquaintance’s tears and her inheritance and stood up to see the footage and listen to the news standing in front of the television in the midst of a circle of seated people, open-mouthed and in silence, totally oblivious to the drama and incredulity of my client, who had left by the time I returned to our table, which resulted in Redondo coming down on me like a ton of bricks that same afternoon.