‘Now I understand why you don’t want this story told in the book. Readers might think Zarco killed Batista.’
‘Maybe he did kill him. Or had him killed. Sometimes I think he did it, and by killing him thought he was doing me a favour, that it was his way of repaying me for what I was doing for him. But other times I think he couldn’t have killed him: that he had no money to hire a hitman (although the truth is that someone like him might not need money for that) and that he couldn’t have committed the murder so cleanly and he wouldn’t have had enough time, that morning, to get from the prison to Montjuïc and surprise Batista on his way out of his house (although the truth is that perhaps he would have had enough time and that Zarco probably knew how to kill as professionally as any hitman). I don’t know. And, now that I think of it, maybe you should recount this story in your book, just as I’ve told you: after all what it’s about is readers getting to know the truth about Zarco. And this, including my doubts, also forms part of the truth.’
‘Aren’t you afraid some readers might think you’re lying, or diluting or massaging the truth, and that it was you who induced Zarco to kill Batista, to get revenge without getting your hands dirty?’
‘Do you think I would have told you if I had? Besides, I didn’t want to get revenge on Batista, for me it was a forgotten story or almost forgotten, I’m not saying what I said to Zarco was entirely false, I’m only saying it was one of those things that get said sometimes when you have a few too many and nobody takes seriously, or a momentary and unimportant letting off steam, which I immediately regretted. . Anyway, do what you think best, or what’s best for your book: if you think it advisable, tell it; if not, don’t. Later we’ll see.
‘But getting back to our story, because the evenings of cheerful friendship and beers with Zarco at the bar of the Royal soon came to an end. Practically from one day to the next the friendship and good cheer evaporated and Zarco’s head betrayed him again; or that’s the impression I had: that the persona had once again got the better of the person. Before, during my visits in the interview room at the prison, it was common for Zarco to complain about his lack of freedom, of the stupidity of the regulations or mistreatment from the guards; now, when he’d only been spending his days outside the prison for a few months, Zarco fell back into his unstoppable habit of complaining, and his fatal old blend of arrogance and seeing himself as a victim began to poison our conversations again: Zarco said that his work folding and unfolding cartons at the factory in Vidreres was slave labour, that his hours were slavery hours, that his salary was slaves’ wages and that he’d come out of prison to live the life of a slave as bad or worse than the one he’d been leading inside. Hearing this I began to think I’d been too optimistic in judging his state of mind, I went back to fearing his fear of liberty (a liberty that would soon be complete and no longer partial), I began to fight his despondency as best I could. It’s not true that you’re leading the same life you led in prison, I reasoned. You’re leading a much better life. And, of course it’s not a slave’s life: it’s the life most people lead. Look at the other inmates, look at the guys who work with you. And what do they matter to me, Gafitas? answered Zarco. I don’t give a shit what people do: if they want to get fucked, let them fuck themselves; it’s up to them. What I give a shit about is not fucking myself up. You get that, right? And right now I’m just as fucked outside jail as in. Several times I told him I knew that the work he was doing wasn’t very satisfying, and I could get him another job. Oh yeah? asked Zarco. Doing what? Whatever you want, I answered. Everybody wants to hire you. Don’t talk bullshit, Gafitas, he replied. What everybody wants is to be able to say they’ve hired Zarco and be able to show me off like a fairground monkey as propaganda for their business, just like my boss does. It’s not the same, is it? Besides, he concluded, I don’t know how to do anything at all, and by now I’m not going to learn, so all I can do is slave labour.
‘With slight variations, conversations like this were repeated for weeks at the Royal between one beer and the next, and I participated in them with increasing anxiety as Zarco’s nervousness grew and his physical state degenerated before my very eyes (as I later discovered, in part because he’d gone back to using heroin); also as I watched unfold before my eyes, in the things that he said, the oft-repeated spectacle of the irreconcilable contradiction between his person and his persona: again he wanted the world to forget Zarco once and for all, that it let him be Antonio Gamallo, a normal man with a normal life like the majority of people; but, at the same time, once again he didn’t want to be a normal man, he didn’t want anybody to forget he was Zarco nor did he want to dispense with his pride and the privileges of being Zarco, among them that of not living the life of slavery that the majority of people lived. He didn’t want to and, in part, maybe he couldn’t: as much as he aspired to be a normal person, a new person, he panicked at the thought of not being Zarco any more, because that meant no longer being who he’d always or almost always been; likewise, as much as he aspired to live outside prison, he panicked at the thought of doing so, because it meant no longer living where he’d always or almost always lived.
‘But all this is mere speculation, or not much more. What’s certain is that at some point, perhaps tired of me arguing with him and telling him what he had to do, or simply tired of complaining, Zarco stopped coming to my office after work and I practically stopped hearing anything about him. Two or three months later — eight months after getting his third-stage parole, to be precise — the government granted him a limited pardon and conditional release. This was the premature culmination of the project we’d set in motion almost two years earlier, and, in spite of my melancholy premonition that Zarco was heading for disaster, I received the news as a triumph: not only because I’d done my work conscientiously and got Zarco out of prison in record time, or because I would be able to get the highest propaganda value out of his case this way; most of all because in those months I’d reached the conclusion that I could only get Tere back when Zarco got his freedom back and we were free of him: our relationship had always been hindered by Zarco, by our need for him as teenagers and by his need for us as adults, by the suspicions and mistakes and doubts those needs had provoked, and I imagined that, once Zarco was no longer depending on us nor us on him, Tere and I could start over again, picking up our relationship where Tere had left it in suspension a few months back, after the night we’d rescued Zarco from La Creueta. So I waited impatiently for news of the pardon and, as soon as I got it, I rushed to phone Zarco to tell him.
‘It was a late morning in early June or mid-June. I phoned his workplace in Vidreres and asked for him, but they told me he’d been off sick for a couple of days and hadn’t left the prison. I phoned the prison and again asked for him, but they told me he was in Vidreres. The misunderstanding didn’t surprise me. For some time the businessman who’d hired him had kept me informed of Zarco’s absences from work; this, combined with his constant lack of punctuality and refusal to submit to drugs tests, had led to the prison superintendent drafting a report advising against Zarco’s pardon and recommending rescinding his third-stage parole status with the argument that he was not ready for release. Luckily, no one had paid the report any attention, and that morning I wondered whether or not I should call the superintendent. Then I wondered whether or not to call María. I hadn’t talked to her for months, but I knew from Tere that she was fed up with her sham marriage and barely saw Zarco, which was not preventing her from turning into an increasingly popular public persona, although in her appearances on the radio, in the press and on television she talked less and less about Zarco and more and more about herself.