Learning to Lose (50 page)

Ariel went out on the field on the terrazzo stairs. Cleats echoed like horseshoes. Some players crossed themselves, others ripped up a blade of grass when they leaped onto the field, others carried out highly elaborate superstitious rituals. In Argentina he played with a center halfback from Bahía Blanca who went out onto the field with his right foot, then had to place his left hand on the field and kiss the crucifix he wore against his chest five times and say, mother, mother, mother three times. No strategy for feeling protected was too small in this profession, to survive in the void.

Less than an hour later, a car takes him with the doctor to a clinic in the upper part of the city. There he is subjected to an
X-ray that reassures them. It’s just a sprain. Two weeks of recovery, the doctor says, and for the first time Ariel feels able to relax the tense line of his lips. A more serious injury would have left him out of the end of the championship. He knows, like everyone does, that the last ten games are as important as the last ten minutes of each game. No one remembers the dull first half after an electrifying end, no one remembers the whistles in the middle of the season when they hear the ovations at the end of the championship. An old Argentinian midfielder who had come back to San Lorenzo after almost a decade of European soccer always told them, a shitty season is saved by a decisive goal in the last minute of the last game. This amnesiac business was just that absurd.

The doctor speaks calmly to him about the recovery process. They get into a taxi directly from the clinic to the airport. They gave him a crutch so he doesn’t put any weight on the ankle and wrapped it up tightly in a bandage. The doctor asks the driver for the results of the game, and Ariel feels guilty about not having worried all that time about the score. They lost. At the boarding gate, he is joined by his teammates, heads bowed, tired, not in the mood to talk. Everyone asks about his injury, the coach comes over to talk. Ariel finds him cold, he blames him for the result of the game, which complicates their chance for winning the title. Amílcar sits next to him in the waiting area. We missed you on the field, there was nowhere to pass the ball.

Sylvia didn’t make the flight. She sends him a late message. I couldn’t find a fucking cab in the area. Later she writes again to tell him that she’s getting on a flight at almost midnight. In Madrid, Ariel doesn’t go with the team to the bus. I’ll get a
cab, he says to the delegate. He shouldn’t drive, so he leaves his car in the parking lot. When enough time has passed, he tells the taxi driver that he forgot something at the airport and he has to go back. The man kindly insists he’ll wait for him, but Ariel says it’s going to take him a while and gives him a generous tip.

He goes to sit far from the door where Sylvia’s flight is set to arrive. Husky calls him on his cell phone. I guess you’re already at home, how’s your ankle? Ariel chats with him for a while. He’s out drinking. He tells him about the game. I didn’t travel to cover it because the newspaper’s cutting costs. Soon I’ll be back to writing about games while I listen to them on the radio like when I started out. Then he says I wish you came back out to play, you playing lame could have done more than some of them with two good legs. I think your team only got in three shots at goal in the whole ninety minutes. In one of them, the goalie almost insisted on scoring a goal on himself, he must have been bored.

Ariel waits another half hour until he gets Sylvia’s call. Where are you? He explains. She finds him sad, his forearm resting on the crutch. Is it serious? We’ll have to take a cab. Sylvia picks up his bag off the floor and carries it over her shoulder, they walk slowly to the taxi stand. I was about to go out and scalp my ticket. How boring. My substitute didn’t do a good job. No, even though he’s pretty cute. That guy? They call him “the Mirror” because he spends almost two hours combing his bangs, he’s a real pretty boy.

The cabdriver looks into the rearview mirror when they are already out of the airport. Are you out of it for a long time? No, no, nothing broken, luckily, just two weeks. From that point
on, Ariel finds himself forced to maintain a long conversation with him, focused particularly on the endemic problems, as the driver calls them, of the team. Sylvia makes mocking gestures, showing two fingers like a pair of scissors for him to cut it short, but Ariel shrugs his shoulders. In my day, says the man, players were on a team for life, it was a marriage, but, now, it’s a little like well-paid whores, excuse the expression, they put out for one night and if they lose, well, it’s the fans who suffer, because the players couldn’t give two shits.

Don’t say those things in front of my sister here, please, says Ariel.

A while later, the taxi searches for Sylvia’s address. She has her hand on Ariel’s thigh, which seems like it’s about to bust through the worn denim. Come to my house, he says, stay with me tonight. I can’t. The cabbie keeps talking. Soccer today is pure business, money, money, and money, it’s the only thing that matters. Ariel decides to get out with her.

They walk to the high step of the doorway. The street is dark. They sit down. Ariel extends his leg. I’d rather be out in the cold than listen to more of that guy’s chitchat. I’d invite you up to my house, but my father will be there. This isn’t the time of night to introduce me to him. Can you imagine? We can go into his room and wake him up. Sylvia laughs. Look, Papá, look who I brought you. Does it hurt? Ariel shrugs. I don’t remember a single day in the last three years that my legs didn’t hurt.

Now seriously, there’s nothing I’d like more than seeing your room.

Sylvia is surprised to hear whispering voices in her father’s room. At first she thinks he’s talking on the phone, which would be unusual at that time of night. But from her room, while she undresses, she hears a restrained and sporadic female voice. Although the conversation reaches her as an unintelligible murmur, the movement, the brushing of sheets, the squeaking of the bed frame, and a bridled panting convinces her that they are making love. In her bed, she has two feelings. On one hand she is happy her father is with someone. On the other she is terrified by who that someone will be. Although she tries to repress the idea, she wonders if it will be someone whom she will have to develop a new, as of yet undefined, relationship with. Her independent coexistence is threatened. Today the house is a pit stop, a refuge, a rest, she doesn’t think she can accept it becoming a couple’s home again, and finding herself obliged to participate in their lives.

The tiredness, the hours of missed sleep, helps Sylvia fall asleep in spite of the hushed voices that come from the room next door. She left Ariel at home with his ankle resting on the living room coffee table. That afternoon, Sylvia had found him more worried than other times. Somewhat caught up in himself. Team problems, he explained. The two weeks off had been, at first, good news for Sylvia. They broke the routine of separations and trips. But soon she realized that not playing was tragic for Ariel. Decisive games are coming up, he complained.

That evening they didn’t make love. Sylvia had stopped to buy pasta at the Buenos Aires—Madrid deli. On the brick wall,
they had hung a long picture with a printed phrase: “There’s only one thing Buenos Aires has that Madrid doesn’t: Buenos Aires!” How’s the chief? asked one of the owners. Fine, recovering from his sprain. Oh, he has a sprain? Yeah, Sylvia explained, he can’t play. The girl insisted on giving him a box of
dulces de leche
. He loves them, tell him they’re from me.

Ariel saw all the games on television, while Sylvia skimmed through some notes on his lap. Can you call me a taxi? she said when she looked at the clock and was surprised to see it was almost eleven. He gave her money; he always had an envelope around somewhere filled with bills. The trip to her house cost a fortune, but he gave her extra money. You don’t have to give me so much, she protested. You paid for the pasta and the cab here. Keep it, and that way you have some for the next few days. But this is three thousand euros, that’s quite a chunk of change. So? Aren’t you with me for my money? said Ariel. It’s obviously not for my brains.

Sylvia leaves the house before there is any movement from her father’s room and his door remains closed. The morning of classes holds some charm of normality for Sylvia. She sees her schoolmates and laughs at their jokes more indulgently because she knows that in the evening she will be far away. She enjoys her lunch break with Mai, the conversation with Dani when he joins them. A normal life hemmed in by the gray walls of the high school.

Mai had been a bit low since she broke up with her boyfriend, Mateo. He moved to Barcelona, to a squat. She went to see him with hope of reconciliation. She had gotten Ma+Ma tattooed onto the inside of her arm, in gothic letters. Mai plus Mateo, she explained, but it ended horribly. There I was washing
everybody’s dishes. The house stunk, there was a group of French kids who had never heard of the invention of the shower, I can’t even tell you … And on top of it all, they had dogs covered in fleas. Is it completely necessary to be so skanky? Fuck, it’s one thing to be against the system and another thing altogether to be against soap. She carried over her annoyance to the small inconveniences of the cafeteria, the schoolyard. She now used her sharp wit for aggravation rather than irony. The failed relationship had made her lose a lot of her self-confidence, even though she talked nonstop. When I came back I showed my mother the tattoo. I did it for you, I told her, and she got all choked up. Sylvia appreciated the interruptions from other students and Dani’s arrival, despite the fact that she sometimes detects his sad eyes.

The night Ariel got injured in Barcelona, when they returned to Madrid on different planes, they ended up sneaking into her room. He asked to with a childish smile and she agreed with a challenging expression. Sylvia opened the door without making any noise, but could barely stifle her laughter when Ariel went through the living room, in the half light, hopping with his crutch. From her father’s bedroom came some monotonous snores that stopped abruptly when Ariel crashed his crutch against the edge of the coffee table. Is that you? Yeah, Papá. What time is it? Sylvia approached the door. One-thirty, see you tomorrow.

Sylvia put a T-shirt over her desk lamp, creating an orange glow in the room. Ariel looked the place over. The computer on the desk, the messy pile of CDs, the clothes overflowing from the open closet, hanging from the door and the knob, on the chair, and at the foot of the bed. There is a teddy bear on the
bed and a yellowed poster of the vegetarian singer of a British band. Who is that? asked Ariel. You still haven’t given me a photo of you. They laughed, sitting on the bed, and talked in a whisper. Every once in a while, she lifted up her hand and shushed him, listening to make sure her father wasn’t moving around the house. They kissed for a long time. Sylvia noticed his erection beneath his pants. You want me to jerk you off? Ariel threw his head back. How can you ask me that? My God, you’re so crazy … Then Sylvia led him back to the door of the apartment. They parted in silence on the landing. He waited to call the elevator until she had gone back to her room.

In the afternoon, she stops by to visit her grandmother before taking a cab over to Ariel’s apartment. She finds her weak, unable to have a long conversation. Your father came to introduce us to the girl he’s dating. Her grandmother’s remark surprises Sylvia so much that she reacts strangely. Oh, yeah? He introduced her to you? She pretends she had met her already and adds a nod of the head when her grandmother says she seems like a nice girl. Sylvia thinks that Lorenzo’s interest in meeting her boyfriend and finding out about her relationship was just a way to open the door for him to introduce her to his own new partner.

She’s shocked to discover that her grandmother is wearing a diaper. Her grandfather comes in to change it and makes her leave the room. Sylvia peeks through the half-open door of her grandfather’s studio. The piano lid is open and there are scattered scores. Your grandfather’s going to start teaching his student again, Aurora had told her with excitement.

Her grandparents’ home conveys an atmosphere of illness and lack of life. Even the stairs of the building are sad like worn
tears. She had promised her mother she would spend this weekend with her. That was before Ariel got injured. And now she doesn’t want to leave him alone. When she calls her mother from the street and suggests postponing the trip for next weekend, Pilar responds with an extended silence.

I knew this would happen, that we wouldn’t see each other for weeks. And it sounds more like she’s punishing herself than recriminating Sylvia. Come on, Mamá, we talk on the phone every day. I just have to do some work for school, with other kids in the class. I swear I’ll come next weekend for sure. It’s not such a big deal, is it?

Yeah, but I’m not seeing you grow up, isn’t that something?

Sylvia laughs into the telephone. Relax, Mamá, I promise I haven’t grown up. I don’t grow anymore. If anything, only my ass is growing.

It’s the third time in ten days that the bus drops him in the plaza, beside the jardinières glistening from recent watering. From there he walks three streets, to the blocks of apartments with small balconies and green awnings. Móstoles is a remote and unfamiliar place to Leandro, a man raised in old Madrid, ignorant of those margins, cities around the city. Osembe gave him the name of the street, the number of the building, and the apartment. He wrote it down and then searched for the most accessible route in the street atlas, put together the itinerary as if it were an adventure. He left from the traffic circle under
construction in front of the old North Station, and the bus went along the highway to Extremadura.

It was a shared apartment, divided into small rooms, originally designed to house a conventional family and which thirty years later held seven people. Osembe had told him that she shared the apartment with six girlfriends. It was quite messy. The kitchen was a corner filled with furniture and junk. At that time of day, they were alone. They cross through the square living room, where the blinds are down, and light from the outside barely enters. She leads him directly to the room. She says, this way, and then, how nice to see you again. She is wearing jeans with a gilded design along the hem. She seems younger and more cheerful than in the chalet. But when she closes the door and invites Leandro to sit on the bed, she regains her old serious expression and her mechanical style. The money first, of course, she says. She wears pink slippers with thick soles.