Off Side

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘What a pity, what a pity. Inma and I were great friends. She wasn’t just a client, you know. One time she even stood in for one of my ballet teachers. She had a magnificent body. In fact people used to ask her to do fashion shows for them, and conferences, all that sort of thing … No. No, she didn’t leave a forwarding address. One day she was here and the next she was gone. I don’t want to be indiscreet, but are you a relative of hers?’

  ‘Her first husband.’

  ‘What a pity. Three weeks earlier and you would have caught her.’

  ‘I didn’t tell her I was coming back to Barcelona. The fact is, I didn’t decide to come until August. You know how it is between separated couples. I used to send her a cheque for the boy, every month, via a bank account. And I still do.’

  ‘Maybe the bank could tell you where she’s moved.’

  ‘Banks are usually very tight about that sort of thing.’

  ‘But she must have a forwarding address to be receiving the money.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.’

  ‘Do you know how they were getting on?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her and the boy.’

  ‘Well. Very well. I think they were having a bit of money troubles, because her husband, I mean her new husband, was having a bit of a hard time. His business went bust, and he was turning his hand to all kinds of things — sales rep, that sort of thing. I think he wasn’t doing too well. I would say that’s why they decided to leave, in the end.’

  ‘The boy was just about to change schools, though …’

  ‘I presume that’s precisely why they chose that time to leave. She didn’t say where she was going, though. Do you know her present husband?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Thanks for your help.’

  ‘It’s a real shame that Inma went. She was such an example for our other clients. She had an excellent sense of physical discipline, and it was a pleasure just watching her when she was working out in the gym. We have just about everything here: squash, underwater massage, a swimming pool, a gym, a dance studio, and a small health food restaurant.’

  Her enumeration of the establishment’s various facilities pursued Palacín to the door, whereupon the woman had to divide her charm between Palacín and some clients who were sufficiently important for her to comment effusively on the marvellous tracksuits that they were wearing.

  ‘We bought them in London in July, in the sales.’

  ‘You lucky things!’

  As he reached the street, Palacín looked at his watch. He had time either to go to his training session or to go to the bank to inquire after his son, but not both. Faced with the choice, he plumped for the training, a decision he instantly regretted as he found himself briefing the cab driver on the quickest way to the Centellas ground. Maybe he could ask the manager’s permission to leave at one, which would give him time to get to the bank before it shut. But the trouble was that the morning training session was arranged specially for the club’s three professionals, whereas the players with outside jobs had to start training at seven in the evening when they finished work. It was the start of the season; he wasn’t too confident about how his knee was going to shape up; it was the last contract he would ever get and señor Sánchez had promised him a job in one of his companies when the time came to hang up his boots. He was still dogged by regret at not having gone to the bank, as if he had a particularly ferocious marker on his heels, and his half-heartedness did not escape the eyes of Precioso, the manager.

  ‘You’re day-dreaming, Palacín. Keep your mind on the game.’

  He was about to make his request, but it hung on the tip of his tongue like a stammer. This sent him into a deep depression from which he was only finally rescued by the chill of the shower as it doused the fire in his brain. He suddenly had a recollection of taking a shower with Inma, and the boy coming in between them, and his little naked body snuggling up against his parents, and the lad laughing mischievously. He had lifted him up, and the three of them had kissed, in the water, under the shower. If he closed his eyes hard, the image shattered, as it had shattered in real life, for ever, at some moment which, when he thought about it, he located at about the time of the contract that had marked the start of his downhill run. Faced with the evidence that he had no great future in Barcelona, he had decided to sign for Valladolid. Inma had followed him like a woman going into exile, and had then lived with him like a woman imprisoned. All through it she’d had to put up with the moodiness of a hero whose head had grown too big for his crown. The end of every game meant the beginning of a via Dolorosa as he scanned the comments on the sports pages. At first they were expectant and benevolent, as befitted a young idol who was in a tight spot; then they turned into a critical but constructive hope that he would soon return to form; and finally came the dismissive phrase that was a prelude to silence. Sometimes he would retreat into the toilet to read, for the hundredth time, some of the more favourable match-reports, as if reading them could restore his sense of confidence in himself and bring back the good old days. On other occasions he would lock himself in the toilet and try to make the tears come, as a way of shifting the weight of anxiety from his chest — an anxiety which felt like the intractable lumps of dough which he used to knead as a young boy in his grandfather’s bakery in Santa Fe. As he looked back over his footballing career, he remembered the scenes of triumph: the four goals which he scored against Lorca, in a Third Division match which was being watched by talent scouts from Barcelona and Madrid; the pride of the lieutenant who had taken him under his wing during his military service in Granada, and who, instead of posting him on route marches and sentry duty, used to pace him on a motorbike around the parade ground as he did his training runs.

  ‘If you want to be a good sprinter, you have to practise long-distance.’

  And when he finished his military service, there was the semi-clandestine game which he played, disguised as one of the Figueres players, so that the Barcelona management could see him in action. Then came the signing. And his transfer to Zaragoza. And then his return. Those two goals he scored in Madrid, with De Felipe furious at the ball having passed right over his head before he’d driven it straight into the goal-mouth.

  ‘The Magic Ball’. The headline had run over a whole page in Sporting World, and it was like a crown placed on the head of this young hero as he leapt about the pitch, lifting his happiness to the skies. It was as if, in that toilet, in that luxury flat looking out over Pisuerga, he had a photo album in his head. Images that popped up, one after another, produced by some invisible hand that was picking out each cruel moment.

  ‘What’s wrong with Palacín? He can’t control the ball, he can’t head the ball, and he can’t run.’

  His arms trembled as he turned to the sports pages of the Madrid newspaper with the article commenting on his ‘catastrophic performance’ in the game against Bilbao Athletic. ‘A game which is best forgotten, out of respect for the Palacín we once knew, whom we all saw as the natural heir to Zarra and Marcelino.’ Sometimes, when he returned home drunk in the early hours of the morning, in order to avoid a confrontation in bed with his insomniac wife, he would take refuge in the kitchen. Its territory of crude light, tiles, and shiny surfaces accentuated the contours of his body as he collapsed, and offered only a chilly silence in response to his murmurings of self-pity. Then came the fights, the apologies, the remorse, and again the wait for the following week’s headlines, in the hopes of regaining a confidence which by then had abandoned him. One day Valladolid beat Madrid on their home ground, and the papers reported that Palacín had not only ‘played decisive football’, but also that ‘he succeeded in opening spaces, and running rings round the opposition defenders, with the kind of style that he used to show with Barcelona’. The article took him from depression to euphoria, and from euphoria to alcohol. By the time he reached home he was walking ten feet tall and not in a mood for Inma’s reproaches. That nigh
t he felt like a winner. He had hit her, and her expression had changed from one of anger to one of helpless impotence, a look which was to pursue him through the long years of their separation like a dark, evil shadow. First came her decision to go to Barcelona, to cool off and think things over. The days turned into weeks, and then months, and when he got an offer to sign for a club in the US, Inma responded more enthusiastically than might have been expected. He’d travelled to Barcelona to see her, and her response had been to hand him a letter from her lawyer, in a flat which smelt of another man — of Simago, in fact, the transfer agent who had advised him in his negotiations with Barcelona, with Valladolid, and now with Los Angeles, without ever letting on about his secret affair with Inma. She was putting on weight a bit, but she still looked good, and the kid seemed oblivious to what was going on. He gave him a picture of a monster that he’d drawn. ‘That’s you,’ he said. The picture was of a giant with two heads — one head was his own, and the other was a football, growing out of his shoulders like a cyst.

  A phone call woke Sánchez Zapico at seven in the morning to tell him that a hoist in one of his scrap metal yards had been wrecked on account of having had its cables cut. Sánchez Zapico gathered his thoughts, while his wife beside him snored and sent sour exhalations in the direction of the Murano glass chandelier which they had brought from Venice as a utilitarian souvenir of a trip taken to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. From the corner of her mouth a trickle of saliva emerged as she slept, and as Zapico lifted the bed covers he was confronted by the sight of his penis as it thrust impatiently out of the fly of his pyjamas. He would have to do something for it, and not just go for a piss. He headed for the toilet with his head full of plans and plummeting lifts, and his cock waving in front as if pointing the way. He locked the toilet door and set about masturbating over the toilet bowl, but his attempts at erotic recollection failed to provide the necessary stimulus. He mentally summoned up the following: the arse of the freckled little French girl at the Solar Sauna; the pendant breasts of one of his nieces as she had leaned over to serve him food at a family birthday gathering; and the body of his wife in one of their more successful moments of coitus, for which the scene had been a ship’s cabin on a cruise to the Canary Islands organized by the Barcelona Confectioners’ Association — an idealized image of a woman, with her youth frozen in time and embalmed in a corner of his memories. All to no avail. His premonitions of impending disaster proved too powerful for him, and he and his penis were left looking at each other. The little creature retired in humiliation, and he thought to himself: ‘Save it for another day, brother.’

  Now it was time to confront another bald-headed figure — himself, this time, viewed in the bathroom mirror as his hands automatically sought the wig perched on top of a polyurethane head near by. He put it on and combed it down at the sides. Then he brushed his teeth, and noticed that he had spat out blood with the water. Was he getting cancer? Cancer was waiting round the corner. As he walked to his office he tried to decide on the best phone call to make — the most prudent, but also the one most guaranteed to produce results. A call which would not necessitate further phone calls, but which would also not irritate the beast in question. He wasn’t going to wake it at that time of the morning, however, and he sat at his desk, with his hands in his dressing-gown pocket, watching the phone to make sure it didn’t run away. When half past eight sounded on the Swiss cuckoo clock that he had acquired on a trip to buy Gruyère cheese and to visit his Geneva suppliers and the world in general, he dialled a number from memory, decisively, and even as he dialled it he felt the strength draining out of his fingers.

  ‘Is that you, Germán? I’m sorry for calling at this time of the morning, but I had to talk with you. It looks like your friends have lost patience with me. You know what I’m talking about. We need to talk.’

  ‘Very well. Now.’

  Now. An abrupt ‘now’ which sent a shudder through his arms, his shoulders, and his entire frame. If Germán said now, then now it would have to be. He shuffled across the floor to his wardrobe. He chose the blue suit with white stripes, and a silk tie which his daughter had brought back from a trip to Italy after she had finished her course at the Hostess School. He went to the kitchen and prepared himself a ham sandwich, and a cup of milky coffee, because you think better with food inside you. He fetched his car from the parking lot and drove the four blocks that separated him from the flat of Germán Dosrius, the lawyer — as it happened, his lawyer. When this business was finally sorted out, he planned to issue him with an ultimatum. Whose side are you really acting on? But when he came face to face with him, on a balcony terrace overlooking Turo Park, ushered in by a half-asleep servant, what came from his lips was not an ultimatum but solicitous comments regarding the welfare of the plants which Dosrius was watering.

  ‘I water them every morning. I know it’s not the best time of day for watering, but I never know how the rest of my day is going to turn out, and anyway it gives me time to plan my day. When do you plan your day?’

  ‘In the morning, the same as you. In the toilet, in fact.’

  ‘A good place to do it. Very intimate. Shall we take breakfast together?’

  ‘I’ll just have a little coffee; I’ve already had a sandwich.’

  And as he was about to drink his coffee, Dosrius broke off from buttering his toast to ask: ‘So what’s this all about?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I want to know. What’s this all about, Dosrius? Don’t play around with me like this. We’ve been friends all our lives, Dosrius. Somebody has sabotaged a lift in one of my warehouses … It’s obvious that it was deliberate …’

  ‘It doesn’t take much for a lift to break down.’

  ‘Well what about the warehouse fire in the sweet factory, eh?’

  ‘You’re insured, aren’t you? I’ll sort out the paperwork.’

  ‘Look, Dosrius, you talk with whoever you need to talk to, and just tell them to be patient. This is a complicated business. You can’t build a house from the roof down. I know that the pressure’s on, but everything’s under control. Just let me get the season under way, and when things start to go badly, that’ll be the moment to provoke a crisis.’

  ‘What if things go well, though?’

  ‘What are you saying? How can things possibly go well? I’ve got a team of cripples and an idiot for a manager; we lost a thousand members last season; and we lost three of our first four games in the League.’

  ‘But you’ve just signed a star player.’

  ‘A star player?’

  ‘Palacín. He’s international status.’

  ‘Madre de deu … Star player — that’s ridiculous! See — you’re making me so nervous that I’ve started speaking Catalan.’

  ‘It would do you good to speak Catalan.’

  ‘Stop it, Dosrius. Palacín has a plastic kneecap. I got him from Raurell, who’s one of the shadiest agents there is. I signed him against medical advice — in other words, I did a deal with the doctor. The trouble is, you don’t understand. I can’t be chairman of Centellas and start the season without signing up someone so as to show that I want the club to survive. That was what we agreed. Tell that to whoever you need to tell it to. You know perfectly well that when we met in that restaurant in Castelldefels, with those people you brought, everything was left very clear. You work at your own speed, Sánchez. That’s what they said. That’s what you said. And that’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘The Olympics are getting closer.’

  ‘We’ve already made our agreement. No problem. The ground will be yours.’

  ‘Ours.’

  ‘All right, ours. But don’t go getting so impatient.’

  ‘I want to be frank with you.’

  But he delayed being frank until he had finished eating his toast and had taken a long sip at his coffee, a sip which seemed to last an age.

  ‘They’ve no confidence.’

  ‘In whom?’

  ‘They�
��ve no confidence.’

  ‘You mean they don’t trust me?’

  ‘There are too many loose ends. Imagine what’s going to happen if your club members decide to prolong Centellas’s death throes right up to the Olympics. By then land speculation will be spreading like wildfire, and any bit of ground within three miles of the Olympic Village is going to be worth its weight in gold. By then it’ll be too late. Our group — I repeat, our group, as much yours as mine — won’t have the weight to compete with other buyers when it comes to buying the Centellas ground. Don’t forget, there will be foreign buyers too. Use your imagination, and you’ll tremble even to think of it.’

  Zapico trembled accordingly, and mustered a feeble smile.

  ‘But …’

  ‘No buts, Juanito … Just use your imagination.’

  ‘But … you must think I’m stupid. It can only be a question of months. We’ll be bottom of the League within a fortnight. Even if my idiot manager doesn’t do the trick, I’ve arranged with one of my players to fix Palacín’s knee again.’

  ‘You don’t mean you’ve got someone else involved?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got him firmly under my thumb, and anyway, I’m not dealing with him directly. As soon as we’re bottom of the League, and Palacín’s been dealt with, I’ll call a board meeting, and an emergency meeting of the club members, and I’ll say: “Gentlemen, the time has come to call it a day”.’