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That was the deal, and I’m not going to break it.’
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‘Don’t worry: if you don’t want it to go in the book, I won’t use it if I do use it and you don’t like how it sounds, I’ll cut it. But unless I do you won’t understand how and why I met Zarco.’ ‘I’ve never told anybody this well, nobody except my analyst. But before I tell you that story I should tell you another one.’ ‘Because at sixteen all borders are porous, or at least they were then. ‘And how did you cross it? I mean, how did a middle-class kid make friends with a kid like Zarco?’ And all this is why I told you that back then I lived very near and very far away from Zarco: because there was a border separating us.’ I didn’t really know quite what they were and I’d never been there, but I knew they were there or that it was said they were there, like a legend that nobody had confirmed or denied: actually, I think that for us, the neighbourhood kids, the very name of los albergues added a touch of prestige by evoking an image of refuge in inhospitable times, like an inn or a hostel in a tale of epic adventure. Some perhaps didn’t even know they existed, or pretended not to know. In fact, I’m sure that the majority of the people who lived on Caterina Albert (not to mention the people from the city) never set foot anywhere near the prefabs. Or, of course, with the people who still lived in the prefabs. In a way it was also an incomer neighbourhood, but the people who lived there weren’t as poor as most charnegos usually were: most of the families were those of middle-class civil servants, like mine - my father had a low-level position working for the council - families who weren’t originally from the city but who didn’t consider themselves charnegos and in any case didn’t want anything to do with real charnegos or at least with the poor ones, the ones in Salt, Pont Major, Germans Sàbat and Vilarroja. I lived on Caterina Albert Street, in the neighbourhood now called La Devesa but back then it was nothing or almost nothing, a bunch of gardens and vacant lots where the city petered out there, ten years earlier, at the end of the sixties, they’d put up a couple of isolated tower blocks where my parents had rented a flat. And I lived barely two hundred metres away: the difference is that he lived over the border, across from where the River Ter and La Devesa Park marked the divide.
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‘No: Zarco lived with the dregs of the dregs, in the prefabs, los albergues provisionales, temporary housing on the city’s north-east border, set up in the fifties for the influx of workers and still in use somehow. What you might not know is, as I was saying, at the end of the seventies the city was ringed by charnego neighbourhoods: Salt, Pont Major, Germans Sàbat, Vilarroja. The word’s fallen out of fashion, but in those days it was used to refer to immigrants from other parts of Spain who’d come to Catalonia, incomers, people who generally didn’t have a cent to their name and who’d come here to try to get by. At that time, for example, the city was surrounded by outlying neighbourhoods where the charnegos lived. In its way, Gerona at that time was still a post-war city, a dark, ecclesiastical dump, encircled by the countryside and covered in fog all winter I’m not saying that today’s Gerona is better - in some ways it’s worse - I’m only saying it’s different. ‘That’s almost better: the city today has very little in common with what it was back then. We lived very near each other, and very far away from each other.’ I was sixteen years old back then, and so was Zarco. Franco had died three years earlier, but the country was still governed by Franco’s laws and still smelled exactly the same as it did under Franco: like shit. ‘Yes, I know, we’ve talked about that too. Anyway, the story I’m going to tell you isn’t Zarco’s story but the story of my relationship with Zarco with Zarco and with.’ ‘You mean you were interested in Zarco before you were asked to write about him?’ ‘Well, it’s not every day you get an opportunity to write about a character like El Zarco, if that’s what you mean.’ ‘Yes, I know, but is that the only reason you agreed?’ I’m a writer, that’s how I make my living.’ ‘Didn’t I tell you already? For the money. ‘Why have you agreed to write this book?’ ‘Yes, but first let me ask one more question. We get so used to disguising ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.įrançois de la Rochefoucauld Part I.