He worked in Almirante Churruca street in La Barceloneta as a driver in a tricycle rental shop run by a national policeman who called himself Alfredo Arias. There he earned an income that allowed him to develop his main passion, boxing. From a very young age, he trained in a gym in Joaquim Costa street. Known and respected by the neighbourhood, he moved around the Raval like a champion who had won a thousand trophies for his community.
At the age of 20, boxing was his life, and out of 30 fights he only lost 2. He called himself Andrés Copena, but everyone nicknamed him La Vez, the name by which he would be known in the world of sport.
A middleweight champion of Catalonia, he quit boxing in 1960 due to an injury in a fight with a certain Folledo, who was a contender for the title. La Vez went out confidently into the ring to defend his championship belt and paid dearly for it with the challenger.
From that moment on, he went to work at the Raval gym where he had trained since he was a child. He trained the kids in the neighbourhood who, despite his defeat, still felt a certain admiration for the legend who was once the pride of the Raval.
The years took their toll on him, which he never thought he would pay, and which, of course, he refused to pay. The tricycle shop closed its doors, and La Vez was left on the street, unemployed.
With no friends to turn to, he began to become aware of a reality that was beyond him and for which he was not trained.
The first warning came when for the first time they wanted to charge him to enter to see a fight at the Grande Price. He always thought that that temple of boxing and wrestling was his home, everyone knew him and appreciated him, but the employees and managers were changing, due to retirement or dismissal, and La Vez realised that he didn’t know the new ones. It did him no good to present himself as an ex-champion.
-Go to the ticket office and get in line, or get out of the way.
This was the last time he would go to see a fight at the Grande Price.
He worked several jobs: as a porter in the Borne and the Central Market, and as a street sweeper in the same streets where 20 years earlier he had proudly strolled, greeting all the neighbours and friends he met.
The final blow came one morning when he arrived at the bar where he had drunk a carajillo every day for the rest of his life, and the master’s son, a young man whom he had seen at birth, blurted out at point-blank range:
-Don’t take my table all morning, and you’ll pay for the carajillo.
-And your father is not here?
-My father has retired, now I’m here, so from now on you know who’s here.
He left the bar, without consuming, that place was as strange to him as the people who occupied the tables on the terrace – he didn’t even understand the language they spoke.
That corner of the Rambla del Raval was not the same. He looked around again and again, trying to find a point of reference so that he could return to the pension. He didn’t succeed, the neighbourhood he knew no longer existed, it was a blur, everything started to spin around like a merry-go-round. And suddenly everything would disappear.
He woke up Pere Camps, he was in a bed with his body in a cast, a doctor with some sheets of paper in his hand was asking him in depth something about his relatives.
He had broken his hip, had been operated on, and had been in hospital for two days.
The social assistance provided him with a ground floor flat shared with an Algerian, a monthly allowance of 1,600 pesetas and a wheelchair which he could barely use to get around.
Injuries, the times he had suffered during his boxing career, and the odd accident at work, together with a bad life: smoking, drinking, venereal diseases… all combined to make him an old, weak man, who believed that only the present existed, and who at almost 80 years of age clung to the past without hope for the future.
He strolls with his chair, barely, through the streets of the Raval looking for corners that bring back to his memory images of a past that causes him pain and makes him cry.
But it is precisely the taste of these tears that is the only thing that calms his loneliness and gives solace to his sordid existence.
He has no one, he is alone.
