places. Anyway, the one I didn’t bump into again was Batista. Why do you ask?’
‘I was wondering if you hadn’t wanted to take revenge on them, if it hadn’t at least occurred to you. You could have tried to get Zarco and company to teach Batista a lesson, for example.’
‘I might have thought about it at some point, but I doubt it: I never had enough confidence with them to dare to ask them something like that. For one thing because I would have had to tell them what Batista and the rest had done to me, and I didn’t want to do that. Don’t you understand? I felt ashamed and guilty about what had happened, I wanted to erase it. I suppose that’s also why I’d gone with Zarco and Tere: to begin a new life, as they say, because I wanted to be someone else, reinvent myself, change my skin, stop being a snake and turn into a dragon, like the heroes of Liang Shan Po. That was what I wanted and, although of course I would have enjoyed getting revenge, given the circumstances it was impossible, at least for the moment. Besides, remember that I had the impression that my old friends and Zarco’s gang lived in different worlds, just like my parents and I, just like my old self and the new me; like I said before: Zarco and I lived very close to each other and very far away, separated by an abyss.’
‘The water margin.’
‘Yes, that border, Liang Shan Po: call it whatever you want.’
‘One more thing. Inspector Cuenca told me that at the time the police had absolute control of the red-light district.’
‘It’s true. Absolute or almost absolute. Later, in the eighties and nineties, everything changed: they abandoned the neighbourhood to its fate, washed their hands of it, and the neighbourhood deteriorated and ended up going to hell. Or not, depending on your point of view. In any case the district disappeared. But in my day they controlled everything: there were always a couple of secret police there, they inspected the bars and the brothels, kept an eye on the hookers, stopped people in the street at all hours, asked for your papers, searched you, asked you what you were doing, where you were going.’
‘Did they ever stop you?’
‘Lots of times.’
‘And didn’t it matter? I mean: weren’t you scared? Didn’t you think the police might tell your parents? Didn’t you think you might get arrested and locked up?’
‘Of course I thought all that, of course I was scared. Anybody would be. But that was just the first few times. Not later. After a while, getting stopped by the cops became part of the routine. Bear in mind that what my parents thought or might no longer think mattered less and less to me. And, as far as getting caught, well, I was sixteen years old and knew that at my age I wasn’t going to end up in juvenile court or a reformatory, but directly in jail, but it seems to me that for any kid that age prison, until he gets locked up there or actually sees the writing on the wall, is more or less like death: something that happens to other people.’
‘You’re right, only you weren’t just any old kid: you didn’t stop committing crimes from the time you met Zarco, or helping to commit them; in other words you didn’t stop giving them reasons to put you in jail.’
‘True, but that’s the secret: the more crimes you commit without anything happening to you, the less fear you have of everything and the more convinced you are that they’ll never catch you and that prison is not for you. It’s as if you’re anaesthetized, or armour-plated. You feel good; or to put it a better way, you feel fucking great: apart from sex and drugs, at sixteen I didn’t know anything better than that.’
‘Tell me about the crimes you guys committed.’
‘At first, more or less up to the month of August, we mostly snatched handbags, robbed houses and stole cars. Stealing cars was so easy that we’d steal them at the drop of a hat, sometimes more than one a day, not always because we needed
‘I was wondering if you hadn’t wanted to take revenge on them, if it hadn’t at least occurred to you. You could have tried to get Zarco and company to teach Batista a lesson, for example.’
‘I might have thought about it at some point, but I doubt it: I never had enough confidence with them to dare to ask them something like that. For one thing because I would have had to tell them what Batista and the rest had done to me, and I didn’t want to do that. Don’t you understand? I felt ashamed and guilty about what had happened, I wanted to erase it. I suppose that’s also why I’d gone with Zarco and Tere: to begin a new life, as they say, because I wanted to be someone else, reinvent myself, change my skin, stop being a snake and turn into a dragon, like the heroes of Liang Shan Po. That was what I wanted and, although of course I would have enjoyed getting revenge, given the circumstances it was impossible, at least for the moment. Besides, remember that I had the impression that my old friends and Zarco’s gang lived in different worlds, just like my parents and I, just like my old self and the new me; like I said before: Zarco and I lived very close to each other and very far away, separated by an abyss.’
‘The water margin.’
‘Yes, that border, Liang Shan Po: call it whatever you want.’
‘One more thing. Inspector Cuenca told me that at the time the police had absolute control of the red-light district.’
‘It’s true. Absolute or almost absolute. Later, in the eighties and nineties, everything changed: they abandoned the neighbourhood to its fate, washed their hands of it, and the neighbourhood deteriorated and ended up going to hell. Or not, depending on your point of view. In any case the district disappeared. But in my day they controlled everything: there were always a couple of secret police there, they inspected the bars and the brothels, kept an eye on the hookers, stopped people in the street at all hours, asked for your papers, searched you, asked you what you were doing, where you were going.’
‘Did they ever stop you?’
‘Lots of times.’
‘And didn’t it matter? I mean: weren’t you scared? Didn’t you think the police might tell your parents? Didn’t you think you might get arrested and locked up?’
‘Of course I thought all that, of course I was scared. Anybody would be. But that was just the first few times. Not later. After a while, getting stopped by the cops became part of the routine. Bear in mind that what my parents thought or might no longer think mattered less and less to me. And, as far as getting caught, well, I was sixteen years old and knew that at my age I wasn’t going to end up in juvenile court or a reformatory, but directly in jail, but it seems to me that for any kid that age prison, until he gets locked up there or actually sees the writing on the wall, is more or less like death: something that happens to other people.’
‘You’re right, only you weren’t just any old kid: you didn’t stop committing crimes from the time you met Zarco, or helping to commit them; in other words you didn’t stop giving them reasons to put you in jail.’
‘True, but that’s the secret: the more crimes you commit without anything happening to you, the less fear you have of everything and the more convinced you are that they’ll never catch you and that prison is not for you. It’s as if you’re anaesthetized, or armour-plated. You feel good; or to put it a better way, you feel fucking great: apart from sex and drugs, at sixteen I didn’t know anything better than that.’
‘Tell me about the crimes you guys committed.’
‘At first, more or less up to the month of August, we mostly snatched handbags, robbed houses and stole cars. Stealing cars was so easy that we’d steal them at the drop of a hat, sometimes more than one a day, not always because we needed
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