Off Side (20 page)

‘OK, OK …’

Palacín kicked the ball back when he heard the ref’s whistle, and ran forward to meet his marker face to face. He stood in front of him, with his back to the opposition’s goal, and obstructed his view of Mariscal who kicked the ball up the centre of the pitch. Behind him he felt the heavy, sweating, panting presence of Pedrosa, and the contact of his body was like a wall of flesh which he leaned against when he saw the ball coming his way. Using him as a support, he turned on his heel and put his foot out to stop the ball a couple of feet in front of him. Then he broke away from his marker to start his run towards the goal. All of a sudden he felt his knee give, and although he continued his run he wavered for a moment and lost control of the ball. It was another ten minutes before he got a ball in similar circumstances, and this time he slowed it slightly, detached himself from his marker, and ran parallel with him, preparing to shoot for goal. He kicked the ball forward into the empty space that had opened in front of the Centellas right-wing, and he headed straight for goal, jostling with Pedrosa as he went. The ball came across, ready for a header, but he was unable to reach it, because just as he began his jump his weak knee was caught by a well-placed blow from one of the
tree-trunk legs of his marker.

‘If you touch my knee again, you’ll leave this ground with a faceful of stud-marks.’

Pedrosa spat at the ground at his feet as he turned away and ran to stand guard over his goalie, who had fallen on the ball and was looking to right and left, challenging anyone to try and take it off him.

‘He’s a thinking player. But he’s been out of the game for too long.’

‘And he’s getting old.’

The spectators were beginning to exchange opinions on his performance so far.

‘A centre forward needs time to develop.’

‘Give Palacín any more time and he’ll be over the hill. Past it. He must be forty if he’s a day.’

The first half drew to a close, and Palacín felt more psychologically than physically tired. The club’s manager continued with the gesticulating and unintelligible strings of recommendations that he had embarked on at the ref’s first whistle, twitching about like an electrocuted animal on the manager’s bench. Now he was leaping around his players distributing criticism and ranting about the failings of their respective genital apparatuses. There was a special chapter devoted to Palacín. The voice was lower, and the syntax more composed: ‘Don’t stick so close to Pedrosa. Keep free of him, for heaven’s sake, Palacín. You know what the game is. Even you can beat him once you get a good run with the ball in front of you.’

The troupe nodded and stared at their boots, and some changed their dirty, sweaty shirts.

‘Stop that, Confucius! How many times do I have to tell you?! Don’t take showers in the middle of a game. You’ll chill your muscles. How can you be so bloody useless? Why do you have to wash so much? You’re worse than my daughter.’

By the time they came out for the second half, the afternoon
was wearing on and the failing light made the terraces look even older, dirtier and more derelict, and likewise the little stand from which Sánchez Zapico was presiding, surrounded by the other club directors and their families. The chairman had one eye on what was happening on the pitch, and the other on Dosrius, who was mingling with the spectators on the terraces, a philosophical onlooker apparently unconcerned by the way the match was going. Every now and then their eyes would meet, and Sánchez Zapico would narrow his eyes as if to confirm an implicit agreement.

‘God, that was close …!’

Palacín had control of the ball. He dummied and left Pedrosa sitting at the edge of the area with his heavy arse almost wedged into the ground. Then he gave a kick that sent the ball across the goal-mouth. With painful slowness it missed the goal and slid past the post. The roar and the applause from the spectators put renewed lightness into Palacín’s step as he ran back to his original position, and out of the corner of his eye he caught the vicious look that Pedrosa was sending his way. As play resumed, Pedrosa closed in, but Palacín was expecting him, and dug the studs of one of his boots into his thigh, as he jumped over his tree-trunk leg. The ref gestured as if to pull the yellow card from his pocket, but he went no further than shaking his head bad-temperedly as he struggled for breath. It was in the twenty-second minute that Confucius, the student, emerged from an absence that may or may not have been deliberate and dribbled past three of the Gramenet players, to reach the goal line. He passed the ball back to Palacín. The centre forward took in the wide open goal, and the goalie standing like an impotent statue of clay which he was now going to beat. The ball thudded into the opposition goal and lifted the net like a breeze lifting a pretty girl’s skirt, and the magic word became a collective shout: ‘Goal!’ From where he lay on the ground, Palacín glanced first at the linesman and then at the ref. The goal was allowed, even though the Gramenet players were clustered round the ref arguing that Confucius had been off
side.

‘He was not off side! I saw it with my own eyes!’

‘You, ref, you couldn’t see anything, because you’re blind as a bat.’

‘The only thing you see is the bribe they gave you.’

The ref pulled out two yellow cards, or rather the same one twice, in the way that someone threatened by a vampire might brandish a cross for protection. The Gramenet players backed off and returned to the middle of the pitch with renewed urgency, while the Centellas team performed a victory war-dance around Palacín, glorying in the applause from the fans on the half-f, half-empty terraces, which as far as they were concerned could have been the most prestigious stadium in the world.

‘Don’t fall back now! Go for the bastards! Let’s have some balls now,’ shouted Precioso, partly in order to spur his players on, and partly to liven up the fans on the terraces behind him.

Sánchez Zapico was engaged simultaneously in applauding delightedly and at the same time registering the meaningful looks that were coming from the direction of Dosrius. The pressure of the Gramenet attack meant that Palacín had to shore up the defence, and every time he got a ball out of the area with one of his power-headers, a group of spectators chorused ‘Olé!’ Palacín had thrown his marker off balance, and now they changed roles, as he moved to deny him any chance of shooting, exploiting the blind, bull-like nature of his movements. The ref used his last puff of breath to give the final whistle, and some of the fans came down off the terraces intent on touching their hero. Two boys handed Palacín an exercise book and a biro for an autograph, and as he was signing he felt a profound tiredness creeping up from his feet. His team-mates were slapping him on the back. He responded to the handshake offered by the man who a short while previously had been trying to kill him.

‘Congratulations, maestro.’

‘Till the next time, matador!’

By the time they reached the changing rooms, their manager was claiming the credit for their victory, arguing that it had been a result of his tactical planning, although he was willing to recognize that in the second half they had put more balls into the game.

‘Confucius, if it wasn’t for those passes that you manage to conjure up every once in a while …’

‘Every team needs at least one intelligent player.’

The other players started jeering at Confucius, and Palacín took advantage of the general air of complacency to get first use of the scant supply of hot water in the showers. Then, as he dressed, he received a pat on the back from Sánchez Zapico, whose face had suddenly become a picture of tiredness. Palacín left the ground and turned down offers of a lift to Barcelona. After a match he preferred to walk, and he walked with a light step. Soon he was viewing the ground from a distance as if it had nothing to do with him. The Centellas club was surrounded by working-class barrios, a cheap geometry for anonymous immigrants who had added a touch of floral display to windows and terraces in an attempt to incorporate a bit of nature into that nightmare of glass, cement and brick. The Centellas ground was like a presence of something out of place, like a sort of urban folly. Like the ruins which tourists visited on the outskirts of Oaxaca, attributed to the Zapotecas or the Mixtecas; like the pyramids of Monte Albán which surge up out of the countryside, and which include the Temple of the Dancers, claimed by some to be a celebration of dance, but by others to be a pre-Columbian hospital for the sick and the crippled. Or like that stadium for ball-games where legend says that the captain of the winning team had the right to tear out his rival’s heart. He walked until he was tired, and until he entered another set of ruins, the ruins of the abandoned factories in Pueblo Nuevo, with their big sheds and their railway sidings rusting among the weeds, and the leaning bulk of threatening, macabre buildings which still retained something of their brick-built beauty, and whose long-extinct chimneys reached
towards the ceiling of the night, all waiting for the demolition which would shortly be creating the environment of the Olympic Village. When he reached the Pueblo Nuevo cemetery, he took a cab and asked the driver to drop him at calle del Hospital. The cab driver had his radio on, and he was able to catch the final items of the sports news. It was Mortimer, Mortimer all the way. Mortimer had been the hero of the day.

‘Jack Mortimer, the golden boy of European football in the season of 1987–88, has now become the idol of the Barcelona fans at the start of what promises to be a very good season. This man is solid gold, and will set the turnstiles clicking in every club in Spain … Now I’ll hand you back to the studio.’

He turned off the straight line of pasaje de Martorell that marked his homeward route and went in search of the Boqueriá market, with its bars for black men and its huddles of beggars in the La Garduña parking lot. As he passed the Jerusalem Bar, he saw her sitting at the counter, staring obsessively into a small glass of beer. He carried on walking, but stopped a few yards further on and turned back. He wanted to find a way of striking up conversation with her, but didn’t know how.

‘Well, look who’s here. The footballer!’

‘I just happened to be passing.’

‘I thought as much. Would you like something to drink? Do you want a beer?’

He ordered a beer, but barely touched it. He had something to say, but didn’t dare say it.

‘What are you doing round here? Looking for something?’

‘Could you arrange the same as the other day?’

‘No problem. Very simple. Do you have money?’

Palacín nodded, and the girl got off the bar stool as if it was burning a hole in the seat of her pants.

Basté de Linyola ushered the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia and the Mayor of Barcelona into the lift serving the chairman’s box. He was rewarded with contented smiles and a slap on the back.

‘That was an unforgettable game.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Ja tenim equip!’
exclaimed the general commanding the Barcelona military region, parading a recently acquired commitment to showing that the army these days regarded the Catalan dialect with favour, on the grounds that it was one of the ‘treasures of the pluralism of a united Spain’.

The club’s directors had lit their Montecristo Specials at the moment when Mortimer had scored his second goal, and by now some of them were on their second. They were no longer moving their cigars in and out of their mouths as if they were guests for whom it was difficult to find house-room, nor were they biting on the foreskins of these delights as if they were being subjected to oral rape; now the cigars had become welcome guests at the party, and were ushered in and out of their mouths like much-cherished princes as they emitted smoky signals of relaxation and contentment. The personalities from the world of politics and culture who had been specially invited to be present at Mortimer’s debut allowed themselves to be sought out by radio reporters, and tried to find a suitable language with which to connect with their respective political and cultural audiences. So, on the one hand, a representative from the Convergencia i Unio, the ruling party in the Catalan Assembly, declared that ‘If this club goes forward, then the country goes forward too, and vice versa,’ an admirable sentiment which compromised him neither with the club nor with the country; on the other hand, an organic
intellectual of the Partit dels Socialistes Catalans, also a member of the European Parliament, expressed the opinion that: ‘Up until now the club has been inward-looking, but now the team seems ready to take on a new sense of the other. A sense of the other in which they will be scoring goals.’ The radio journalists were in their element, waving their microphones under the noses of the city’s notables as if offering a chilly hertzian kiss in exchange for a bit of free public relations. The stadium vomited spectators out from its various orifices into the dusk which was settling early, thanks to the end of summer time. Now that the game was over, they turned on their transistor radios so as not to miss the post-mortems. After an away game the previous Sunday, Basté de Linyola had declared: ‘Mortimer’s debut will give the team a new identity’; this Sunday he felt up to substantiating his expectation: ‘Mortimer’s debut has given the team a new identity.’ All this stuff had to be listened to. It was a necessary part of being able to survive the working week that was about to start. Then came the results of the other games. And the pools. And the league tables. And who had been sent off. And comments on how the refs had behaved. The players themselves were no longer the protagonists of the scene, because by now an army of young radio reporters, microphones at the ready, were preparing to squeeze out, drop by drop, the last mortal juices of the day’s various battles and their heroes.

‘Pere Rius? Pere Rius at the computer centre — are you on-line?’

No, it wasn’t a call to mission control at Houston prior to a space launch.

‘Pere Rius is at the computer centre, and he’s going to tell us how many minutes Mortimer had control of the ball.’

‘Eight minutes.’