Keeper (20 page)

“Badrenas knows,” Gato said. “He has known for some time. I told him before the final. My club also knows. I confirmed my decision to Luis Ramerez before I came here last night.”

Faustino became very agitated. “But if they know,” he said, “they will have written press releases! Everyone will know!”

“No. They are expecting you to call them this morning. In the next couple of hours, in fact. Then they will confirm my decision, and only to you. They will give you the quotes you need. Tomorrow afternoon Badrenas and Luis and I will hold a press conference. But by that time you’ll have had the story out for almost a whole day. I made them promise me this. They owe it to me, after all. Oh, and there’s also this.”

Gato took an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket.

“This is my personal statement about the reasons for my retirement. It’s written in the form of a letter. A letter to you, personally. You could print it in that form. It might be quite unusual.”

Faustino sat back in his chair and looked at the goalkeeper. His face was expressionless at first, but then a smile lifted into it like the rising sun. He stood up and went to the wall phone and took the receiver off the hook. Before he hit the buttons, he turned back to the table.

“I have always wanted to say this,” he said.

He punched the numbers, waited two seconds, and said, “Vittorio? Hold the front page.”

Faustino made two long calls, during which El Gato sat patiently.

“Sorry about that, Gato,” the journalist said when he finally sat down at the table again.

The keeper made a generous gesture. Faustino switched on the tape.

“Now,” he said. “Why? You are thirty, which is not old for a keeper. You’re at the top of the tree. You’re playing better than ever, in my opinion. And you’ve won this.” Faustino patted the bald dome of the World Cup. “So why retire now? You’ve got years left in you.”

Gato said, “The reasons, the ones I want known, are in the letter. But you’ve answered your own question, Paul. Yes, I’ve got years left in me. I’ve got a life ahead of me, God willing, and I want to do something with it. Something more important than soccer.”

Faustino recoiled in horror, raising his hands as if to protect himself from some evil apparition. “More important than soccer?” he cried. “I can’t believe I heard you say that!”

He grabbed the microphone and spoke into it very slowly and deliberately.

“The world’s top player, the great Gato, has just announced that there is something more important in life than soccer. In a moment, when he has stopped laughing, I, Paul Faustino, will challenge him to reveal what this thing is.”

For some moments the tape machine recorded two men giggling like small boys in a school bathroom.

Eventually Faustino said, “Okay, my friend, what is it? You plan to take over the world, is that it?”

“Not exactly. Just save a part of it.”

“And what does that mean?” asked Faustino, straightening his face.

“I owe a great deal to the forest,” Gato replied, “and now I want to pay something back.”

“Oh, my God,” Faustino said. “Are you telling me that you are giving up soccer to become a conservationist? One of those hippie Green campaigners?”

“Something like that,” the keeper said. “And you are going to become one too.”

“I am?”

“Of course. You’re going to write that book with me.”

“Hey,” Faustino said, “wait a minute. If — and it’s still
if
— I do this book, it’ll be because the world is interested in you. And, to be frank, because it will make me money. And I’m no saint. I’m not going to give the money to some rainforest charity.”

“No one’s expecting you to. We’ll go fifty–fifty on the book. What you do with your money is up to you. And what I do with my money is up to me.”

The journalist leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He said nothing for a bit.

“So that’s my headline in tomorrow’s
Nación,
is it? El Gato Quits Soccer to Save Rain Forest?”

The big man leaned into the lamplight and fixed his eyes on Faustino’s.

“No, absolutely not,” he said, “because that will make me sound like some sort of crank. I forbid it, Paul, really. Apart from anything else, it will spoil the surprise of the book when it comes out. You do see that, don’t you?”

Faustino did see that, yes.

“And another thing,” Gato said, “is that, as you say, I have won this.” He put a large hand on the gold skull of the trophy. “What else is there? As far as soccer is concerned, I have done what I set out to do. Needed to do. Four years ago, when France knocked us out of the Cup in the semifinals, I was devastated. The rest of the team was too, of course, but it was especially bitter for me. I felt like someone who had set out to climb Everest and been forced to give up just feet from the summit. Now I’ve got there. Four years later than I thought, but here I am.”

He caressed the textured gold of the trophy. “It’s not especially attractive, is it?”

Faustino switched the tape recorder off, stood up, stretched. “There’s a couple of things I have to do. One more call to make. Turn things off. Then we’ll go and chow down on a serious breakfast. Is that okay? Five minutes?”

El Gato dragged his gaze away from the World Cup. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever. Do you mind if I have a quick look around the Paul Faustino Library of Useless Knowledge?”

Faustino already had the phone in his hand. “Be my guest,” he said. Then he started talking rapidly into the receiver.

He was still talking when Gato came out of the other room and said, “Paul?”

There was something, a vibration in his voice, that made Faustino look around immediately. The goalie had a book in his hands. Faustino recognized it. It wasn’t a book exactly; it was a photo album. An old one, with padded covers of faded brown leather. Gato was holding it open, staring down at it.

“What, Gato?”

The keeper laid the book down on the table, in the lamplight, beside the World Cup. There was something so intent in the way the big man stared at it that Faustino said into the phone, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up. He went over to the table.

“What team is this?” Gato said.

Faustino looked at the photo, a small black-and-white picture fixed to the page with yellowing mounts. It showed eleven players in an old-fashioned group pose: five in front, crouching; six players behind, standing with their arms folded. A short man in a terrible suit stood at the end of the back row. The stocky man in the middle of the front row was obviously the captain. His hand was resting on a soccer ball. The shirts they wore had high collars and broad vertical stripes. Below the photograph, handwritten in fading ink, was a list of names arranged to match the players’ positions in the picture.

“Don’t you know?” Faustino said.

“Paul, I wouldn’t have asked if I did,” Gato said. There was impatience in his voice.

“Sorry,” Faustino said. “I’m just surprised. But I suppose there aren’t many photographs of these guys. This is the national team of 1948 to ’50. The greatest team we ever had, or so they say. The Lost Ones.”

“The Lost Ones? What do you mean?” El Gato didn’t lift his eyes from the photo.

“They vanished,” Faustino said. “By all accounts they were brilliant. Didn’t lose a single game for two years. They were favorites to win the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro in 1950. These guys were better than Hungary or Italy. Way better, some say. They were going to bring the Cup here for the first time.”

“What happened?”

“The team took off for Rio three days before the finals. But they never got there. Their plane went down in the jungle, presumably. It was pretty much all jungle between here and Rio in those days. They reckon they ran into one of those electrical storms. The army sent planes out for a week, searching. But they never found a thing. The jungle just swallowed them up. Terrible.”

The phone rang. “Excuse me,” Faustino said, and went to answer it. Seconds later he heard the door close and looked around. Gato had gone. Faustino said “Wait” into the phone and went out into the corridor. It was empty, but the elevator doors were shut, and the red indicator light was moving down the floor numbers.

Faustino went back into his office. He should have gone back to the phone but didn’t. He went to the table and moved the photo album farther into the light of the lamp and studied it. He looked carefully at the photo of the Lost Ones. In particular, he looked at the tall figure in the middle of the back row. It was hard to get any real impression of what he looked like because he was wearing an old-fashioned cap, and the peak of it threw a dense shadow over the upper part of his face, entirely concealing his eyes.

Faustino was squinting at the names below the photo when he realized that the World Cup was no longer on the table.

T
HE HAWK RODE
the rising air with the morning sun behind her. Her yellow eyes were fixed on the reddish-black track that cut through the trees far below her. This was the track along which the shiny, fast animals ran. This was the track where the hawk fed now. She no longer had to trouble to hunt in the forest canopy, because the shiny, fast animals killed but did not stop to eat. They left meat on the track where they had killed it, and then ran on, their low howling slowly dying away. The hawk did not understand this, or care about it. All she had to do was wait on the wind for a kill and then stoop to take it.

She did not have to wait long. The track was still half shadowed by the low sun when the first stream of dust and the first glint of light reflected from the shell of a fast animal caught her eye. She readied herself, tilting slightly on the hot air.

The car was a slightly beaten-up Japanese four-wheel drive. Not the kind of vehicle to attract attention, which is why the man driving it had hired it, rather than the new Mercedes-Benz he had been offered. The road was rough in places but much better than he remembered it. Traffic was light; logging in the forest ahead of him was just starting, and the heavy trucks carrying timber back down the road had not yet set out. Once or twice he swerved to avoid small animals. He reached the town at the time he had meant to — after the men had left, after the children had gone to school, and before the women had left their houses. He was surprised to see a sign on the road telling him where he was. It had not been there when he was last here. The town had no name to put on a sign back then.

The driver parked the Toyota beside the church and got out. After looking about him for a second or two — looking for watchers, perhaps — he opened the back door of the car and took from the seat two small bunches of white flowers and a small, leather rucksack. He locked the car and then followed the rough pavement that led to the graveyard.

Although the graves were arranged in straight lines with equal spaces between them, no two graves were exactly alike. Some were gaudy, covered with tiny painted statues, plastic flowers, toys, little dishes filled with candy, written messages, even soccer emblems and cigarette-card portraits of players. Some were covered in clean white gravel, while others were bare rectangles of dusty earth outlined by rough stones. Most had plain white-painted headstones made of concrete, inset with little square hollows containing photographs behind glass. The photographs all showed people who looked as if death was the last thing on their minds.

Gato stopped in front of two graves side by side. Both were neatly bordered in pale pink stone and covered in white gravel. The headstones were unusual in that they were slabs of expensive marble. On one, the photograph was of a happy middle-aged man with a halo of wiry hair. On the other, the picture was of an old woman called Maria who had stared into the camera as if it had been a gun. Gato placed a bunch of his white flowers on each grave. Then, kneeling, he unzipped the rucksack and took out a medal attached to a loop of gold and purple ribbon. With his hand he dug a hollow in the white gravel of the man’s grave, put the medal into it, and covered it over. After a few moments he stood up, lifted the bag, and walked away.

He had expected some difficulty in finding the house, but it was easy. What surprised him, and worried him, was that it no longer stood at the edge of the forest. The town had hacked the trees back; the area behind the house where pigs had rooted and chickens had scuffed was now a rough street with cars parked in it. New houses sprouting TV antennas and satellite dishes occupied the space from which his paths had once wound into the forest. But the dark wall of trees was still there — pushed back, but still there; still close, still dark — and this gave him hope. He made his way around the back of the houses and, without much difficulty, found the track he was looking for. He followed it, feeling very uncertain because the last time he had tried to return he had failed and got lost. But this time the forest opened to him, led him in. He walked deeper into the trees, through the shattered darkness, as if he were following someone he could trust. So this time when he pushed aside the curtain of thick, glossy leaves and walked into the impossible turfed clearing, he was not in any way surprised. He walked into it like an ordinary man strolling onto his lawn on a summer’s morning.

He walked through the dense silence to the goalmouth and put his hand against the left upright, feeling its ancient texture. Then he turned and went to the center of the clearing, to the center of the green space that had changed his life. He slid the leather rucksack off his shoulder and placed it on the grass. Then he stepped back a pace and waited.

The Keeper came out of the trees, a mixture of himself and his own shadow, as always. When he reached the edge of the trees’ shade and moved into the light, his outline seemed to grow steadier. As before, his eyes were lost in the darkness below the peak of the old-fashioned cap. Five yards from El Gato, he stopped.

El Gato had, of course, practiced what he would say. Or, more accurately, he had practiced many small speeches without choosing one. He did not know how much the Keeper already knew. He had hoped that the Keeper would speak first, but that didn’t happen.