‘That, more or less, was that for personal matters; from that point on Zarco changed his tone and the subject. He began by summing up his prison record in his own way: although he still had more than two decades’ worth of sentences hanging over his head, Zarco considered that within a year he could be eligible for conditional release, which would allow him to spend his days outside the prison, and within two or three at the outside he could be free. I was optimistic about his future (more optimistic at least than I had been before studying his prison record), but not that optimistic; even so, I didn’t raise any objections to his predictions or make the slightest commentary. It’s true that Zarco didn’t ask for my opinion either: he just went on talking about the first trial pending, the trial for which Tere and María had asked for my help. From the start he flatly denied having assaulted the Brians prison guards who had reported him. I didn’t beat them, he said. They beat me. Are there any witnesses to that? I asked. Witnesses? he asked. What witnesses? Some other inmate, I answered. Zarco laughed. Are you crazy, Gafitas? he said. You think they’re going to beat me up in front of another inmate? They beat me up in my cell, behind everybody’s back; I just tried to defend myself. That’s what happened. How many were there? I asked. Four, he answered, and listed their names by memory; pointing to the papers I had on the desk, he added: They’re the same ones who filed the complaint. I nodded. And the others? I asked. I mean the other guards. Did they see their colleagues beat you up? Would they be prepared to testify in your defence? Now Zarco stared at me, clicked his tongue, looked away and seemed to think it over for a moment, stroking his hollow, badly shaven cheeks; then he looked back at me, this time with an air of superiority. When have you ever seen one jailer testify against another? he asked. Look, Gafitas, if you’re going to be my lawyer you have to know a couple of things. And the first one is that everyone in jail wants to fuck me over, but the ones who most want to fuck me over are the guards. All the fucking guards in every fucking jail. Got that? I kept quiet; he went on: And you know what? Maybe they’re right: if I were them I’d want to fuck me over too. I interrupted him, feigning innocence I asked him why they would want to fuck him over. Because I fuck with them, he answered. And because they know I plan to keep fucking with them, so they don’t fuck me over. That’s why. And that’s why they make up stories like the one from Brians, except that this time it’s not going to do them any good because we’re going to take it apart. Yes or no, Gafitas?
‘I kept my mouth shut, but I knew that, in part, what he said was true. Zarco’s reputation in the prisons was terrible, and not only due to the resentment his fame and the privileges his fame brought with it caused: for years he had devoted himself to denouncing or insulting prison guards in books, documentaries and declarations to the press, branding them fascists and torturers and, in many of the incidents he’d been involved in, he’d attacked and taken many of them hostage; moreover, wherever he might be, Zarco meant a headache for the guards: they had to keep an eye on him, guarding him at all hours and treating him with the utmost consideration, which didn’t prevent him from constantly demanding his rights and constantly filing complaints against them. The result of all this was that, as soon as Zarco was sent to a new prison, all the guards who worked there plotted against him to make his life impossible. Yes or no, Gafitas? Zarco repeated. I answered with a gesture that meant: I’ll do what I can. This seemed to suffice; as if granting his consent he added: OK, now tell me how you plan to do it.
‘We devoted the rest of the interview to discussing the matter. I explained the defence strategy I’d sketched out over the past twenty-four hours. Zarco didn’t like it; we argued. I won’t go into details: they don’t matter. But there is one detail that does matter, a detail I intuited in a confusing way when we started arguing and by the time we finished seemed obvious. The detail is that there was something very contradictory in Zarco’s attitude. On the one hand, just as Tere had in my office, he had sought my complicity from the beginning and had treated me like a friend: just like Tere, he called me Gafitas, reclaiming in this way our old camaraderie; just like Tere, he corrected me each time I called him Zarco and asked me to call him Antonio, as if declaring that he was a man of flesh and blood and not a legend, a person and not a persona.
‘That, as I said, on the one hand. But on the other Zarco seemed to wish to establish distance, to put up a barrier of vanity between us. I mean that, at a certain moment — when we started to talk about his next trial and play the roles of a lawyer and his client — things changed, I noticed that he wasn’t prepared to let me forget that he was not just any old inmate, I felt that he wanted subtly to make me aware that I had never had nor would I ever have a client like him, who, although he was a man of flesh and blood, he was still a legend, and who, although he was a person, was still a persona. It’s not just that he tried to examine my knowledge of the law and argued with me over judicial particulars, even quoting the penal code a couple of times (both, by the way, incorrectly); this amused me and, to be honest, didn’t entirely surprise me: Zarco was famous for doing this kind of thing to his lawyers. What really shocked me was his arrogance, his haughtiness, the condescending impatience with which he listened to me, the tense conceit of some of his comments; I didn’t remember Zarco as stuck-up or self-important and, as I’ve always thought arrogance hid a feeling of inferiority, I soon interpreted this change as the clearest sign of Zarco’s helplessness. That’s also how I interpreted — as an indication of his private weakness, or his fragility — the way he displayed, in an almost high-handed way, his awareness of being a special inmate, of enjoying a special status in prison and of that being backed up by the prison authorities, because after all someone who knows himself to be strong doesn’t need to display his strength, don’t you think? Have you spoken with my friend Pere Prada yet? Zarco asked as soon as we started arguing about his defence. With whom? I asked. With my friend Pere Prada! he repeated, as if he couldn’t believe I didn’t know who he was. I soon remembered: Prada was the Catalan government’s director-general of prisons, the same man who, according to what Tere had told me the previous day, had taken an interest in Zarco’s case and facilitated his transfer to Gerona. No, I confessed, a little perplexed. Shit, what are you waiting for! Zarco urged me. Pere doesn’t know anything, but he’s in charge, I’ve got him wrapped around my little finger, he’s eating out of my hand now. Call him and he’ll tell you what you have to do. . Anyway. This was the essential contradiction that jumped out at me that first afternoon: Zarco both wanted and didn’t want to go on being Zarco, he wanted and didn’t want to bear the weight of his legend, his myth and his nickname, he wanted to be a person rather than a persona at the same time as wanting to be, as well as a person, a persona. None of what I heard Zarco say or saw him do from that day on refuted that contradiction or made me think he’d resolved it. Sometimes I think that’s what killed him.