Keeper (3 page)

In the afternoon I went down to the plaza to watch the game. I sat on the veranda of the café next to old Uncle Feliciano, Nana’s brother, the one with the crooked leg. He bought me a Coke, paying for it with a filthy, crumpled note that he found somewhere inside his many layers of ancient clothes. Then he rested his chin on his hands, which were cupped over the handle of his walking stick. We watched the game: the arguments, the calls, the appeals to the invisible referee, the goalscorers falling to their knees with their arms raised like the players on TV.

After a while, Uncle Feliciano spoke, without turning his head to me. ‘Why don’t you play?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t feel so good. A touch of the fever, I think.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Uncle Feliciano. ‘You don’t play no more. You haven’t played for a long time. I noticed.’

I said nothing.

‘Maria says you go into the forest.’

It took me a moment to remember that my grandmother’s name was Maria.

‘Sometimes,’ I said.

‘And I can imagine what Maria says about that,’ Uncle Feliciano said, still watching the square. ‘All those nightmare stories of hers. She has told you those?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

The old man made a crackling noise that might have been laughter.

‘Old women,’ he said. ‘They have not many pleasures. One of them is to frighten young boys.’

Then he did turn to look at me, and he took a hand from his stick and stroked the side of my face with a bent finger.

‘You have seen something,’ he said.

I concentrated on my bottle of Coke.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He looked back at the game, but he was not watching it. ‘You have seen something in the forest. I can tell. Listen to me. You think I am an old fool. Maybe I am. But I bought the Coke and you can listen to me until you have finished it.’

I had about three mouthfuls left in the bottle.

‘It is about respect,’ the old man said. ‘
Respect.
You know what this word means?’

‘I think so, Uncle,’ I said.

‘I think you do not,’ he said. ‘I did not know what respect was when I was your age. But let us agree that you do know. So, if you respect the forest, there is nothing,
nothing,
in there that will harm you. Believe me.’

He made a gesture like someone clearing cobwebs from a path in front of him. ‘All this,’ he said, ‘this plaza, this metal church, the game here, all this is here only because the forest allows it. Your father thinks that the forest can be beaten, cut back. Does he still go around the house on Sundays with his machete?’

I smiled. ‘Yes, Uncle, he does.’

‘Ha! He is fighting a losing battle, and he thinks he can win it. Does he think that when he and his friends have cut down the whole forest there will be a beautiful world for him to live in? A world of red dust to be happy in?’

I had one mouthful of Coke left. I lifted the bottle to my lips. The old man reached across and stopped my arm.

‘Trust the forest,’ he said. ‘Respect it. You are not exploring it. It is exploring you.’

I finished the Coke.”

S
O
I
WENT
back in, just as I knew I would.

I didn’t look, but I knew that the moment I stepped into the clearing the Keeper appeared too. I walked, as steadily as I could, to the goalmouth. I don’t know why. Perhaps I thought I would feel safer there. I turned to face him. He was exactly the same: invisible eyes and the old leather ball in the crook of his arm. Motionless.

We stood facing each other as before. Then he began to walk toward me. My mouth went completely dry. The desire to run away was almost too strong to resist. Then he stopped, about twenty yards from me. He put the ball on the ground and stepped a few paces back from it. Somehow I knew what I was expected to do, so I did it. I bent my knees, lifted my shoulders, spread my arms. I was awkward, I know, trying to fill that goalmouth. I knew who I was: Cigüeña, the Stork.

Nothing happened.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I was amazed to hear my own voice.

Then he moved in that way of his, like one photograph melting into another. He struck the ball with incredible force. It went past me with a noise like a gasp. The net bulged and hissed, and the ball rolled slowly back out of the goal past my feet. Which were frozen to the spot. I had not moved at all.

The Keeper’s lips moved out of time with his words. ‘What were you waiting for?’

My head buzzed with questions, and I somehow stammered them out.

‘Who are you? What do you want? What do you want me to do?’

And then I found the right question: ‘Why have you brought me here?’

The Keeper walked toward me then. My whole body flinched, but I stayed there. He stooped and picked up the ball with one hand.

‘To keep goal,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

‘I do not know that,’ I said. ‘I am not a goalie. I cannot play soccer. I have stopped playing soccer.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you stopped so that you could start to learn. We have a lot of work to do. Let us begin.’”

El Gato put the tips of his long fingers together and rested his hands on the table. “Two years, Paul. Almost every afternoon for two years. And at the end of that time I knew pretty much everything I know now. Okay, I have played professionally for fourteen years, two of them in Italy, and I am stronger and maybe a little faster than I was back then. But everything I know, really
know,
about soccer and keeping goal I learned in the forest.”

Faustino could not think of anything to say, which was a new experience for him. He looked sideways at the goalkeeper, wondering if perhaps this story was a complicated joke of some sort. But Gato’s face was quite settled and without mischief. So the writer cleared his throat and said, “And how did it work, this, er, training regime in the jungle? Was it just the two of you?”

“Well, yes and no. I discovered that there are many teachers in the forest. I will come to that. But on that first day the Keeper began by crushing me — completely wiping me out. He simply put shot after shot past me, saying nothing, just placing the ball on the grass, stepping back one or two paces, fading slightly, then coming back into focus and shooting into the net. I jumped and twitched in the goalmouth like a hooked fish but never once got so much as a finger to the ball. My eyes filled with sweat and tears of frustration. After a while I stopped trying to block his shots and just stood there between the posts watching him. And when I stopped, he stopped, too.

‘Good,’ the Keeper said. ‘You have already learned to keep still. Stay there and tell me where this next shot is going.’

‘How? What do you mean?’

‘Watch me, boy. Not the ball, me. And when my foot hits the ball, tell me where the shot is going. High, low, left, right. Shout it. Don’t move, don’t try to stop it, just shout out where the shot is going.’

He placed the ball on the grass and stepped back. I watched him take two quick paces, and as he struck the ball, I yelled, ‘High, right!’ The ball flew into the top corner of the net above my right shoulder.

‘Again,’ the Keeper ordered. I rolled the ball to him. While it was still moving, he dropped his right shoulder slightly and shot at me with his left foot.

‘Low, right!’ I screamed. The ball streaked into the net to my right, one inch above the grass. I picked the ball out of the net and turned to face him.

‘The hard thing,’ he said, ‘is to know how we know something. Explain how you knew where those shots were going.’

‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘I just guessed.’

The Keeper put his hands on his hips. ‘Give me the ball,’ he said. ‘And let us test your guesswork some more.’

He put ten more shots past me, and I called them correctly eight times.

‘You are reading the body,’ he said. ‘When a player shoots at your goal, he will do things that tell you where he wants the ball to go. He will lean slightly to the left or the right to put weight into the shot, and his own weight onto one foot or the other. He will drop one shoulder, and almost always his shot will be in a line with that shoulder. Most players cannot help glancing, for a fraction of a second, at where they intend to send the ball. A right-footed player may fake a shot, but if he lifts his right arm up and back, he will then shoot. These things can be learned. But an instinct for them is a gift. As I thought, you have this gift.’

I was pleased with myself. But for just a few seconds, because the Keeper then said, ‘But this gift is nothing in itself. It does not make you a keeper.’ He put the ball on the ground a few yards out from the middle of the goal. The place where the penalty spot would have been.

‘Now you have to beat me,’ he said. He walked past me into the goalmouth, moving in the blurred way I was slowly becoming used to. I shrank away from him as we passed.

I was no great shot, Paul. Like I said, I was a tall, skinny kid, and I was never sure where my balance was. But I had listened to what the Keeper had told me. I thought about how to disguise my shot. I decided to take it with the inside of my right foot and put it low to the Keeper’s left. I didn’t look at him, or at where I was sending the shot. I looked only at the ball. I hit it well. And when I looked up, the ball was in the Keeper’s hands, and he was no longer in the middle of the goal. He had somehow, magically, arrived at exactly where I had aimed the shot.

He threw the ball out to me. ‘Again,’ he said.

And this time, just as I made the shot, he lifted his right arm and the ball flew into his hand as if I had aimed it there. He threw the ball out to me.

‘Again,’ he said.

Time after time, and every time, he drew my shots to him. He seemed to make no effort at all. He was simply, easily, in the place where I did not want him to be.

‘You are reading me,’ I said.

‘No. I am telling you where I want the ball, and you are obeying. Let me tell you something. When there is a penalty kick, most people think that the penalty taker is in control. But they are wrong. The penalty taker is full of fear, because he is expected to score. He is under great pressure. He has many choices to make, and as he places the ball and walks back to make his run, his mind is full of the possibility of failure. This makes him vulnerable, and it makes the keeper very powerful.’

‘Are you saying that the keeper can decide where the penalty shot goes?’

‘Yes. Great keepers can do this. But as I said, you have a long way to go. For one thing, you do not know what your eyes can do. Come here tomorrow, and I will teach you to see.’”

“I did go back, of course, that next afternoon, and he was standing there, as before, with his back to the dark wall of the forest. Waiting.

I walked into the clearing. Now it seemed less strange to do so. I went to the ancient, silvery goalmouth and stood between the posts and looked at him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Come and stand here.’

I did not want to. I was still very, very afraid of being close to him. I had seen his huge hands seize the soccer ball, and my grandmother’s superstitions had taken root in my imagination.

I stood a short distance from him. The shadow on his face was as dark as ever, and he did not seem to have any eyes at all.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘What do you see?’

I had no idea what he meant me to say. I looked down the length of the clearing at the goal and the gray net hanging from it, and behind the net the shades of green deepening into the forest.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘I see the goal. Is there something else?’

‘Try again,’ he said. ‘I ask too much of you, perhaps. Look at the crossbar.’

This time I saw something, some sort of very small animal, moving along the bar. From that distance, it was just a reddish brown blur without edges or detail.

The Keeper lifted his face. I thought I caught two glints of light where his eyes should have been. ‘Look at the sky,’ he said. ‘Just there, look. What do you see?’

The sky was all one color, something like bright metal. It was hard to look up into it. I narrowed my eyes and saw a hawk hovering, its wingtips spread, holding the air, striped tail tilted downward. Tiny from where we stood.

‘Now,’ the Keeper said, ‘what does the hawk see?’

I shaded my eyes with my hand, and as I did so I felt a kind of lurch, as if the space around me had shifted somehow. The Keeper repeated his question, but this time his voice seemed to come from somewhere inside my own head.
What does the hawk see? Look!

And I saw through the eyes of the hawk. Far below me, the emerald-green regular shape of the clearing was like a mistake in the infinite forest. I looked down on it as if through a powerful telescope, a telescope focused on just a few inches of the grainy crossbar of the goal, which I saw in fantastic detail. And something moved into the focus of the hawk’s eyes. A mouse of some sort. Or a rat. A little mammal with small flickering eyes, large ears, long tail. Scuttling along the crossbar, stopping now and then, sniffing the air anxiously. I felt its fear, and something else, too; there was a connection between the hunter and the victim. It was like a thread that tied them together, like the string of a kite attached to the hand of the child flying it. The instant I realized this, the hawk folded its wings into itself and followed the invisible thread downward at relentless speed, spreading itself at the last possible moment, breaking its fall at the second its claws daggered into its prey. And then it was back in the air, the corpse hanging from its feet.

I lowered my hand from my eyes and was back on the grass in the clearing with the Keeper.

‘Get in the goal,’ he said, and walked the ball away from me. He was maybe twenty-five yards out when he stopped and turned to face me. I stood in the center of the goal in a state of shock. The Keeper had shifted the limits of my world, or maybe simply rubbed them out. Now, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he was preparing to take a free kick at me.

It was a beautiful free kick. It went off to my left around a wall of imaginary players, then turned and dipped toward the top left-hand corner of the goal. But I
knew
it would go there. I could see the path it was on. It was as if the ball were flying along an invisible thread that was attached to my hand. I took off like a bird and reached out to it, and I palmed it over the bar. My legs were everywhere, and I landed in an ugly heap, almost crashing into the upright.