Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  Aurora opens her eyes and watches Lorenzo’s movement around her. Hello, Mamá, look, this is Daniela. His mother looks up and Daniela leans down to kiss her on the cheek. The first thing Aurora notices about Daniela are her almond-shaped eyes. Daniela holds back her straight hair with her hand so it doesn’t fall onto Aurora as she bends over.

  Have you been here long? No, just a little while. I sleep almost the entire day, she explains to Daniela, I have very strange dreams, very vivid, very real. Aurora tires from speaking. Lorenzo sits on the mattress and takes his mother’s hand between his. Don’t wear yourself out. Where are you from, Daniela? She answers. Aurora’s eyes travel from Daniela to her son. She seems to shiver briefly, like a stab of pain. With a shaking of her head, Aurora tries to convey to them that it was nothing.

  The masseuse had come by that morning to exercise her muscles and Aurora was more tired than usual. It’s a luxury we can’t afford, she says, but Leandro tells me of course we can afford it, that’s what I spent my life working for. The doctor had ruled out any aggressive treatment, so it was just a matter of waiting.

  Lorenzo tried to keep in touch daily with his father. He suspected that he lacked the strength to face the illness’s onslaught without support. If there is anyone unable to live alone, it’s my father, thought Lorenzo. He belonged to the group of men who seemed independent, but had no ability to solve the most trivial of tasks. Lorenzo was pleased to see Sylvia find some time to visit her grandmother, read to her, chat with her.

  The week before, Lorenzo had gone back to the old folks’ home and sat next to the man whose house he had emptied out. What, Don Jaime, don’t remember me? I brought you your things in the suitcase, remember? They didn’t exchange many sentences. Nothing tied him to the man, beyond the destiny that had brought them together. But that same random chance wouldn’t let Lorenzo ignore him. Wilson laughed when Lorenzo told him that he had visited him twice. The crazy guy? What for? I wish I had time to waste like you, he had said.

  Lorenzo knew it was important to maintain a link with the outside world. Like that note hung on the fridge with a stranger’s phone number.

  It’s cold. Quite. It’s good in here. It’s not bad. Those few words could be a normal exchange between them. Pretty much all they said in forty-five minutes. Don’t you have any friends, family? But the man didn’t usually answer concrete questions. They remained seated. Sometimes one of them lowered the blinds if the sun was glaring in. A nun then entered and took the man by the hand to walk him down to the cafeteria.

  Wilson organized the workdays. He took his small notebook out of his pocket, which contained the precise schedule of the day’s tasks. Trips to the airport, a move. Wilson settled the money with him after showing Lorenzo the state of their accounts, loans, rents accounted for in the notebook.

  When it got cold, Wilson took over an empty warehouse. It was a former commercial space and he piled up some mattresses to turn it into a rental shelter. He waited for his customers until ten-thirty at night and at eight on the dot he was at the door to send them out. He hired some acquaintances to work on the renovation of that temporary hotel of sorts and then he shared the profits with them. If one of the tenants drank too much or made too much noise, he had to show up and calm things down. A boy who helped him with moving jobs also worked as a threatening bodyguard. It was in those moments that he earned his money, when everything didn’t look as simple as suggesting to Lorenzo the thousand different ways to make a euro.

  Really it’s all due to this crossed eye, Wilson explained to him, people take me for crazy. And everybody’s more afraid of a crazy guy than of a strong guy. Nobody wants to take on a crazy guy. Like a Swiss army knife, Wilson seemed to have the resource needed for every given occasion. The exact amount of charm and chitchat, the prescribed dose of contained violence and latent threats, the precise skill in every situation. He handled a bundle of rolled-up bills wrapped in a rubber band that became his bracelet when it was time to pay. He turned toward Lorenzo to explain, money is a magnet for money.

  They called Lorenzo into the police station to return his belongings to him, some clothes, some shoes. Even though he asked after the detective, they didn’t see each other that day. And he hardly ever turned around to check if they were following him or stopped the van suddenly at an entrance to watch the cars behind him pass. Paying his bills was more of an obsession for him. It was also something that his partnership with Wilson guaranteed without many problems.

  Lorenzo and Daniela are in Aurora’s room when Leandro returns. They greet each other. Leandro likes Daniela. Aurora strokes the girl’s hand, you have lovely skin. In the hallway, before leaving, Lorenzo asks his father if he needs anything. Leandro shakes his head.

  On the street, Daniela says to Lorenzo, your mother must have been someone very special. Lorenzo nods his head. He remembers what his mother whispered into his ear the second Daniela went out of the room to talk on her cell phone. The important thing is that you’re happy.

  12

  There is no crunch. No electric current running up his leg. Just the feeling that his foot is separating from his body. The rival player falls onto him, with a brush of his breath and sweat and a brusque push to soften the blow against the grass. They are barely fourteen minutes into the game, the time it takes to size up your opponent. The crash was during a simple play. He received the ball with his back to the goal and turned, trying to get clear. The fullback stepped on Ariel’s foot as he lay on the grass waiting for someone to kick the ball out. The crowd whistles, as always. They make fun of the injured. My ankle, my ankle, indicates Ariel to the doctor when he kneels beside him.

  At the level of the field, Barcelona’s stadium is lovely. The stands don’t emerge drastically like in other stadiums. Sylvia is at the opposite corner of the field, with a distant perspective on the game. In fact, a minute earlier she had thought that she wouldn’t have Ariel close by until the second half. Then she started eating sunflower seeds. Now she sees him leave on a stretcher in a ridiculous little motorized cart driven by a blond girl with a reflective vest. Ariel’s coach has sent a player from the bench to warm up. Ariel disappears into the tunnel to the locker rooms.

  Sylvia is left alone amid people. She looks around as if she expected Ariel to show up a moment later next to her or to send someone to find her. But nothing happens. The game draws everyone’s attention, but not hers.

  After the trip to Munich, they were together all the time. The following day, Ariel went to pick her up in an alley by the high school. If a classmate sees me getting into your Porsche, I can start looking for a new high school. Why don’t you get a different car? They went to eat at a barbecue place on the highway to La Coruña. She ordered a Coca-Cola, he a white wine. The team doctor won’t let us drink Coca-Cola, he says it’s the worst, explained Ariel. Any of the few diners could think they were siblings from their attitude. Ariel had said that to her one day, don’t freak out, but most people who see us think I’m taking my little sister around Madrid. They ordered pork chops, but Sylvia first ate shrimp, to his horror, I could never eat those. When she takes the head off one of them, the murky liquid squirts into Ariel’s face and they both laugh.

  Later they went to Ariel’s house. They took a hot, messy nap, their bodies burning like heaters. They maintained an uncomfortable embrace that neither of them wanted to break. When night fell, Ariel took Sylvia home.

  The next day, Ariel went to Barcelona with the team. Sylvia took a morning flight. Ariel had reserved a room in the same hotel the team was staying in. After an early lunch, Ariel left his teammates shouting as they played cards, drinking coffee, and he escaped to the eighth floor, where Sylvia was waiting for him in bed, surrounded by school notes. She threw them to the floor when she heard him arrive.

  It’s ridiculous. I can’t study, I think about you all the time. Don’t blame me when you fail your classes, please. Can I help you? he asked. How much time do we have? We have to be downstairs to go to th
e stadium in two hours. Sylvia’s expression twisted. I have bad news, I have my period. It doesn’t matter, this way we can use the time to study. Ariel tried to read a page of her notes. I had my period timed to coincide with your league games, it was a perfect schedule, but today it got screwed up, of course. Don’t worry about it, I didn’t bring you here to fuck. What are you studying?

  Two hours later, his teammates traveled down the hall toward the bus parked at the hotel entrance. The place was filled with fans. The police were discreetly keeping an eye on the surroundings. Kids were asking for autographs. Even violence became part of the routine and they always expected insults from some group, some rocks getting thrown at them near the stadium. Madrid se quema, se quema Madrid, Madrid is burning, sang others. If some people didn’t want to kill us, there wouldn’t be others willing to die for us, a player in Buenos Aires used to say when things sometimes got ugly on the way out of a stadium. There they would keep the local fans in the stadium for thirty minutes postgame to give the visiting team time to get back to their neighborhoods. But the ride with police escort was pleasant; the bus ignored red lights, like they were VIPs in a world that stopped to make them a priority.

  Sylvia’s gaze found Ariel’s when he went out among his teammates. He winked at her; she smiled. He was still on the bus when Sylvia called him on the phone. I’m on the Ramblas, it’s full of tourists, she told him. Is it pretty? asked Ariel. There are human statues with costumes on, they remind me of mimes, I don’t know why they make me sad. Mimes make you sad? I always want to kill them, said Ariel. Every two steps is a stand selling soccer jerseys, but I don’t see yours. Well, I’m on the rival team. Yeah. Sylvia kept describing what she saw. A guy offering cans of drinks that he carried in a backpack, bars open to the street, pets in cages, pigeons that ate parakeets’ birdseed, a herd of Japanese tourists with wheeled suitcases, portrait artists who used up charcoal reproducing the impossible faces of their occasional clients and exhibited pathetic caricatures of celebrities. Once, when I was little, my father insisted on having my portrait done on the street, I had to ask my mother to hide it, it was horrible. Sylvia, I have to go, we’re getting to the stadium. Good luck.

  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.

  13

  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 squeak
ing 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.