Keeper (15 page)

‘Tomorrow. The people from Deportivo are picking me up at nine o’clock.’

There was a question I needed to ask, but I hardly knew how to word it. I stumbled through it somehow.

‘I know you are there at the camp when I play. Will you be there in San Juan? Will I know you are there? Will you help me?’

Instead of answering he held out his hands. I gave him the ball, and he stared at it like a gypsy reading futures in a crystal ball.

‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘that it is very difficult for me to leave the forest. I have been trying to leave for a very long time.’

He lifted his face, and once again I glimpsed those specks of light, the distant stars, that were perhaps his eyes.

‘That is why I called you here,’ he said. ‘To help me leave. To end the waiting.’

‘So you can leave now? You’ll be with me at San Juan?’

‘No. I will be here. My wait is not yet over.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Are you saying that you will be here if I need you?’

Something happened to his face that may have been another smile.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it is I who need you.’

He walked away from me, toward the edge of the clearing. Bouncing the ball, catching it, bouncing it again.

‘Don’t go,’ I said.

He stopped but kept his back to me, still bouncing and catching the ball like a basketball player.

‘I will come back,’ I said.

He turned.

‘We are depending on it,’ he said.

The light failed. I looked up and saw a narrow cloud the shape of a knife blade cut the moon in half. When I looked down again, he had gone.”

S
OMETHING ODD WAS
happening to Paul Faustino. As a journalist, he was used to being lied to. It came with the job. For that reason, he was good at recognizing liars. He knew too well the heightened sincerity in a man’s voice that heralded a lie. He could spot the tiny swivel in the eye, the slightly exaggerated body language which told him that truth was being shown the door. But during the several hours he had now spent with El Gato, he had detected none of these signals. Worse, the shine he now saw in the goalkeeper’s eyes had nothing to do with the light reflected from the gold trophy on the table. It was caused by tears. The man was trying not to cry. Faustino found himself briefly considering the outrageous possibility that he was being told the truth. He cleared his throat.

“Gato? Gato, have you just described your last meeting with the Keeper?”

“Yes.”

“You never saw him again?”

“No,” the goalkeeper said. “Well, yes, I saw him — I think I saw him — in San Juan. But I’ve never met him or spoken to him since that night in the forest.”

“You’ve never been back to look for him?” Faustino asked.

“Yes. Just once.”

“And?”

El Gato massaged his face with his hands, then sat straighter in his chair. “It was the day after my father’s funeral. I waited until the quiet part of the afternoon and found the track I had always taken into the forest. It led nowhere. The curtain of leaves that I expected to open onto the clearing now opened onto even denser vegetation. I blundered around like a stupid tourist for two hours, but the clearing had disappeared. There was no sign at all of where it might have been.”

Faustino considered this. The man had, then, suffered two losses at the same time. A double bereavement. But time was getting on, so he said, “Tell me about San Juan, Gato. What was it like for a fifteen-year-old boy from the jungle to find himself in the big city?”

“I saw ordinary things for the first time. Traffic lights, policemen, umbrellas, burger joints. Shops that sold just one thing — watches, or shoes, or books. Crowds of people walking to work along sidewalks. Roads and sidewalks astounded me. I thought of the millions of tons of concrete and stone beneath the city’s feet, and the amount of human work that had put it all there. I saw children sleeping on the streets.”

“Where did you live, Gato?”

“I went to live with Cesar Fabian and his wife,” Gato said. “Cesar was, still is, a physical therapist at DSJ. A lovely man. A lovely couple. I shared a room in their house with another boy, another junior. He didn’t stay though. He left after six weeks, because he couldn’t deal with his homesickness.”

Faustino said, “And you, Gato? You were not homesick?”

It was as if the great goalkeeper had not considered this question before. After a pause he said, “No. Not really. I felt sort of unreal, as if I were in a dream. But it was a good dream, not a bad one.”

Gato was silent for a moment, and then he said, “But there was one thing that did make me feel homesick. If that’s the word for it. Sad, confused, anyway. Do you know San Juan, Paul?”

Faustino pulled a face. “Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “It stinks. I prefer cities that know the difference between a sewer and a street.”

The keeper laughed. “That’s the Old City you’re talking about, the port. But between the Old City and the New City there’s what people in San Juan call the Park. About a hundred years ago the Old City got too small for all the people who swarmed in it, so they hacked away the forest behind the port and started to build the New City. But they decided to leave a chunk of the forest alone, a sort of breathing space between the filthy Old City and the clean New City. They built a cage of railings around it. So now there is a piece — a very big piece, in fact — of wilderness imprisoned within the city. Monkeys, birds, butterflies, live in this prison. That’s where Cesar and his wife took me on my second day in San Juan. They thought I’d be glad to see it. In fact, the Park was like a joke about my life and my father’s life. A fake wilderness with asphalt paths and picnic tables and litter. It made me squirm like a worm on a hook. All the same, I went there quite often, just to remind myself of what the sky looks like when you see it through a web of trees. And every time I went there, yes, I did feel homesick.”

Faustino thought, Yes, I could make something of this. A piece to touch the reader’s heart. Need more facts, though. So he said, “Tell me about your day-to-day life in San Juan, Gato. You were under contract. What did you have to do? What do kids who belong to soccer clubs actually do?”

“To my great surprise,” Gato said, “we went to school. Every morning, five days a week.”

“Soccer school?”

“No, proper school. Math, writing, science, history. My mother was delighted when I wrote and told her this. She had thought that soccer and education were enemies. She’d thought that when my father wrote his slow name on Señora da Silva’s contract he had sentenced me to two years of stupidity. She was very happy to learn from me that I was receiving an education, free.”

“And were you?”

“No. The year I went to DSJ there were eighteen other boys like me. Boys from all over the country. From small towns, from city slums, from the kind of backwoods place I was from. Of those eighteen, ten had never held books in their hands. They could have recited the names of the Boca Juniors team of 1976 but couldn’t have read those same names from a piece of paper. I sat in classes where we were taught the alphabet.”

Faustino could imagine a big, smart kid sitting in a schoolroom trying not to look too clever while his classmates grappled with the simplest structures of their own language.

“So did you learn anything?”

“Yes. I learned to be quiet. I learned to watch. I learned that it was perfectly possible for someone to be an idiot in the classroom and a genius on the field.”

Faustino, smoking, considered this for a moment or two. Then he said, “And after school?”

Gato said, “Two afternoons a week we worked as drudges. Cleaning, sorting gear, following the groundsmen around, carrying equipment from one place to another, being yelled at, sweeping, running errands. Three afternoons a week we trained. Hard. Milton Acuna was in charge of the Junior training program, and he didn’t pull any punches. He was fierce. I was okay with this, because he wasn’t as hard as the Keeper. Some of the other boys suffered though.”

“Were you the only keeper among the Juniors?”

“That year, yes. That meant that sometimes I worked with the first team goalie, Pablo Laval, and also with his understudy, Ramos.”

Faustino leaned back in his chair so that his face went out of the lamplight. “I knew Pablo quite well,” he said. “In fact, he was the first person who told me about you. He was a fine keeper. Did you have a good relationship with him? I ask this because you took his place on the DSJ team, and he never got it back. That must have been tough on him.”

“I would not have taken his place if he hadn’t fractured his collarbone in a Cup-tie against Palominas. Pablo was excellent. It was an education, watching him play. He was very generous toward me. I had no problem with Pablo.”

Faustino leaned forward and said, “I interviewed Pablo Laval when he announced his retirement. I remember what he said. He said, ‘At halftime, in that first senior game the kid Gato played, I knew I was finished. I saw that the lad knew more about keeping goal than I ever would. I knew I’d never get my place back.’ Okay, he was thirty-two years old, but he didn’t have to quit. But he did, right then. And it must have hurt him.”

El Gato then also leaned into the light and looked his friend square in the face. “I tell you again, Paul: I had no problem with Pablo. After that game, he took me down to the locker room and gave me his shirt. It was a sort of ritual. He said that the number 1 was mine now. I said that I had only played one good game and he had played hundreds. I said that I could not take the shirt. But you know Pablo. He doesn’t take no for an answer. He made me take off my number 23 shirt and put on his. While my head was still inside the shirt I heard the locker-room door slam. I pulled the shirt down over my head and turned around to look where Pablo was looking. It was Ramos, still in the full uniform he had been wearing as he’d sat on the substitutes’ bench.”

“Ah,” Faustino said, “Ramos. I was going to ask. You were, what, just sixteen at the time? The youngest team member ever to play for the DSJ Seniors. And Ramos had been Pablo’s deputy for something like two years, am I right? And you’d been chosen over him. I take it he was not pleased.”

“He hated me,” Gato said flatly.

“Imagine that,” said Faustino.

“As a keeper, Ramos was okay. But he was moody, and often reckless. He had a mean streak. He’d earned a lot of yellow cards in a fairly short career. And when he came into the locker room and saw me in Pablo’s shirt, he went off like a volcano. I think he’d have killed me if Pablo, with his one good arm, hadn’t grabbed him by the throat and pinned him against the wall.”

Gato paused, remembering. “In fact, not long after that, he did try to kill me. To have me killed, anyway.”

Faustino sat up straight. “You’re kidding.”

“You must not print this, Paul, because I couldn’t prove it. But I know it was Ramos.”

“What happened?”

“Well,” El Gato said, “I kept my place on the team. I was all over the newspapers. Ramos was insane with resentment. He had more poison in him than a pit viper. When one newspaper interviewed me, I was careful to say good things about him, and that made matters worse, if anything. Anyway, one Sunday I went into the city by myself and went into the Park. The cleared areas were full of families having picnics. I guess I was feeling lonely. I walked a long way into the trees along narrow paths until I could no longer hear voices. I started to feel both at home and homesick.

I stopped and leaned against the mossy ribs of a great cinchona tree and peered into the beautiful gloom of this imprisoned jungle. I was thinking about the Keeper, of course, imagining him, waiting . . . And then I saw him. I saw him begin to materialize out of the dark ferns and creepers. I was overjoyed, just for a second or two. But then I saw that he was in great distress. He seemed to be struggling to make himself real, to stay visible. He flickered in and out of focus, never quite there, like a film projected onto glass. I could see, though, that he was pointing — at me, I thought — and that his mouth was moving, twisting. He was trying desperately to speak, but no words came. I don’t understand how, but I suddenly realized that he was trying to warn me. I pushed away from the tree and turned, fast.

The two guys were about ten yards from me. They weren’t much more than kids, really. A year or two older than me. Pale, skinny kids with long hair. They wouldn’t have been particularly frightening if it hadn’t been for the long narrow-bladed knives they were carrying. We faced each other, frozen, for a heartbeat. Then they came at me, and I started to run. I ran off the path straight into the dark heart of the forest. Something, some memory or instinct, must have kept me from stumbling. They came in there after me, but not very far. They were city boys and wouldn’t have liked cobwebs on their faces or the thought of slithery things in dark places. Their crashing and cursing faded away behind me. Eventually I felt safe enough to stop. When my heart and breathing had steadied, I moved cautiously toward the distant sound of traffic. After twenty minutes I came out onto the boulevard between the Park and the Old City.”

“Jesus,” Faustino said. “And you reckon these guys weren’t just ordinary muggers? Junkies? What makes you sure that Ramos had sent them after you?”

“When I reported for training on Monday afternoon, Ramos was getting out of his car. The look on his face when he saw me told me everything. And he knew that I knew.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was transferred before the end of the season,” Gato said. “The last I heard, he was playing in Colombia. But that was years ago.”

“And you remained DSJ first keeper for the rest of the season,” Faustino said. “And as they say, the rest is history. I have it here.”

He got up and went across his office, opened a door, and flicked a light switch. Turning in his chair, El Gato saw that the door opened into a smaller room with no window. The two walls he could see were lined with shelves crammed with files and scrapbooks and cardboard folders stuffed with paper. Faustino said, “My colleagues call this the Paul Faustino Library of Useless Knowledge. They fail to understand that no knowledge is useless. They also fail to understand my filing system. That’s because there isn’t one.” He disappeared into the room, then emerged again carrying three enormous, old-fashioned box files. Each one had a label on which
El Gato
had been written with a fat, felt-tipped pen.