Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  Exactly. An old man who’s hooked on spending his money on a surly black girl. I’m surly? Yes, very, that’s why I like you, I hate friendly people. Osembe asks him to explain the meaning of surly. He gives her a few synonyms. She looks at him with challenging eyes. We could get married, we make a good couple. You’re romantic today, cheerful, she says to him. You wanna fuck?

  Leandro is amused by her efforts to arouse him on the sofa. He stretches out his hand every once in a while to drink a sip from his glass. Don’t drink any more, she says. If you drink you can’t boom-boom. Suddenly their roles are switched. I’m cold, she says, bring a blanket. Leandro stands up and goes toward the bedroom. He pulls the comforter off the bed to bring it to the living room. It is pleasant, not very heavy, filled with down. Leandro tosses it carelessly onto the sofa. He notices that the champagne is starting to affect him. It will be a pleasure to sleep against another body. Osembe covers herself with the comforter. Stay and sleep here with me. He places himself on top. He starts to move as if he were going to make love to her.

  But barely a few seconds later the front door opens with a violent shove. The man who comes in closes it behind him without making any noise. He looks around and walks toward the sofa. Before Leandro can say anything, the guy grabs him by the arm, lifts him in the air, and throws him across the room. Leandro hits the wall, in pain. The guy has a shaved head, he’s black, well built, not very tall. He is wearing a leather jacket. Osembe has gotten off the sofa. The man walks toward Leandro and gives him two kicks in the stomach. Leandro folds, afraid. The man picks up Leandro’s pants from the nearby chair and empties his wallet of money, then tosses it.

  Osembe has started to get dressed. The man says something to her that Leandro doesn’t understand. His fragile, whitish, scared body doesn’t want to participate in the scene, not even to hear what’s being said. She points to the bedroom and the man goes over there. He hears drawers and closets being opened, rummaged through. He comes back with coats and some more clothes that he tosses to Osembe.

  He lifts up Leandro’s head. More money. Where? Jewelry? His mouth is pink inside, his tongue like strawberry chewing gum. He doesn’t speak very loudly, he has a funny voice with a strange timbre, but Leandro doesn’t laugh. There’s nothing, it’s not my house, really, it’s not my house. The man lets Leandro’s head drop and now kicks him twice right in the face. They aren’t brutal kicks. They’re moderate. But they split one of his eyebrows, which bleeds. The warmth of the blood is about to make Leandro faint. His eyes search out Osembe to try to get her protection. But she is putting on her sneakers.

  The man is now in the kitchen. He is rummaging through everything. The sound of cups and plates breaking is heard. The man comes back to the living room with an enormous knife. Leandro fears he will kill him. How absurd. Osembe says, let’s go. But the guy starts to stab the sofa cushions, tears the intense red curtains. Osembe seems to be smiling. The man passes in front of Leandro, but ignores him. He goes to the piano and starts to stab it as if it were an animal. The wood resists his violence. With the tip of the knife, he starts to carve into the varnish along the entire piano, leaving a conspicuous trail on the black shiny surface. Then he throws the knife and rips out a DVD player from beneath the television and a CD player from one of the shelves. He wraps them in one of the coats.

  Leandro lifts his head, trusting that he will see him leaving. Then he gets a kick in the thigh. It comes from Osembe. He looks toward her, but she doesn’t look at him. She kicks furiously with her sneakers three or four times. He remains immobile, shrunken. The man has opened the door and gestures toward her, she joins him, and they leave. They close the door with unexpected delicacy. Leandro, on the floor, spits out his own blood, which has slid from his eyebrow to his mouth. He feels his body, trying to calm the pain in his side. He sits up on the wooden floor. He hugs himself and discovers that from his glans hangs the useless condom, amorphous, like a dead hide. He looks around and feels panic.

  19

  Lorenzo waits for his father by the door. I’ll stay with her, there’s no rush, you can even stay out until after noon, Benita had told them. Aurora sleeps. She had greeted her son wordlessly, with a stroke of the hand. She is hot, although her cheeks have no color. Lorenzo readjusts her pillow and strokes her hair. She has lost a lot of weight. Can we go out for a walk? he suggests to his father. He doesn’t want to say more, in spite of his seriously worried tone.

  The first sign was the wound on his father’s face. I fell in the stupidest way, Lorenzo told him. He had a cut through his eyebrow. I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to worry you, I must have slipped on the ice along the sidewalk. Did you go to a doctor? Yes, yes, there’s nothing broken. When was it, after Sylvia left? No, that night, coming back from dinner. I didn’t mention it to her so she would go to the station without worrying. Sylvia had gone to spend the weekend with Pilar. Your mother got scared when she saw me, but it’s nothing, insisted Leandro.

  On Monday Lorenzo worked with Wilson from early in the morning, a trip to the airport and moving an old refrigerator and a sofa from one Ecuadorian’s house to another’s. That night he received a call from Jacqueline. She introduced herself, I’m Joaquín’s wife, I don’t know if you remember him. Of course, said Lorenzo, but he couldn’t hide his surprise. They agreed to meet the next morning, it’s important, it’s about your father, she said with a strong French accent.

  Leandro puts on the coat hanging from the rack and follows Lorenzo out of the house. They go down the stairs, not saying anything until they reach the street. Let’s go this way, toward the park, indicates Lorenzo. No, it’s really dirty, there are benches in the plaza. The kids usually get together in the park on weekends and they aren’t cleaned until Wednesday, they’re filled with bottles and plastic cups, cigarette butts. Lorenzo doesn’t really know where to begin. That same morning, he had met with Jacqueline in an apartment near Recoletos. She had him come in and, barely saying a word, she showed him the living room. The stabbed piano, everything upside down, the gutted sofas, the curtains on the floor. I arrived yesterday from Paris, the doorman called me, obviously I slept in a hotel last night. Lorenzo could only express a puzzled face. He didn’t dare ask, why are you showing me all this? He sensed that nothing good could come from the bitter curl on the woman’s lips. Joaquín chose not to come, to save himself from seeing this, even though it’s all his fault.

  Lorenzo remembers Joaquín. As a boy, he saw him often when he visited from Paris and his sporadic visits were always celebrated events. When he made his First Communion, Joaquín sent a Belgian bicycle with a backpedal brake. There wasn’t another one like it in the neighborhood. It was Joaquín who asked me to talk to you instead of your father. My father? Jacqueline looked up and fixed her light eyes on Lorenzo’s. What’s behind all this? A fit of insanity, Leandro getting carried away with envy? Why would he do something like this?

  She told him what she knew from Joaquín. Leandro had asked to borrow the apartment to bring a woman there Friday night. Then, on Monday morning, the doorman, Casiano, a completely trustworthy man, had the keys picked up from the mailbox, as agreed, and went up to have a look at the apartment, as a matter of course. And this is how he found it. Someone will have to take care of this disaster, clearly.

  Look, all this is taking me a bit by surprise. Let me talk to my father and don’t worry, there must be an explanation.

  I don’t want explanations, I’m not interested in that, I just want someone to take care of the repair costs, for everything to go back to the way it was. Besides, in addition to what you see, there are clothes missing, things broken.

  The French accent, with those impossible r’s, was risible, but Lorenzo didn’t laugh. Perhaps stifling it was making him feel more and more resentment toward Jacqueline as she spoke. He just nodded, took down her phone number, and left without even showing any emotion. He was turning over in his head the idea of his father in the borrowed apartment on a dat
e. Had he lost his mind?

  When Lorenzo listens to his father, he has the feeling that everything he’s telling him is a big lie. He can’t believe it. They walk along the street and stop in the middle of some sentences, but without looking each other in the eye they continue in no particular direction. Leandro has adopted a neutral tone, he speaks in a liberating way, without dramatizing. He talks about Osembe without using her name; he refers to her as just a prostitute, someone he called from a newspaper ad. I thought of using Joaquín’s apartment for the meeting, you understand, I don’t know, it was a stupid idea, and then everything happened so fast, it was so unexpected. I guess they took advantage of me and I was absolutely unaware of the risk I was taking.

  Let me get this straight, Papá, they beat you up, they robbed you, they could have killed you. You have to report it.

  Leandro shakes his head. He does so insistently, without saying anything, as if he wants to reject the idea with his head. We can’t do anything. Tell me how much it costs and I’ll pay it.

  Lorenzo understands his father’s silence. He realizes he’s a victim. He imagines him beaten, treated badly, humiliated in that apartment. The image is more powerful than the one of his father as a mere client of a prostitute, while his wife slowly dies in her bed. Well, I’ll talk to the French lady and work it all out.

  Should we go home? asks Leandro. Lorenzo feels pity for his father, a man he once feared for his strictness, his firm convictions, that he later ignored and even later learned to respect. His humbled father moves through the hallway and Lorenzo watches him go into his room. Who am I to judge him? If we could expose people’s miseries, their errors, missteps, crimes, we’d find the most absolute dearth, true indignity. Luckily, thinks Lorenzo, we each carry our secret defeats well hidden, as far as possible from others’ eyes. That’s why he hadn’t wanted to dig into his father’s wound, to know all the details, humiliate him any more than he must have already been at having to tell his son the truth.

  From the kitchen comes an intense smell of potatoes and onions frying, probably a frittata. You staying for lunch? asks his father. He understands how hard it can be for a father to show a child his most shameful, pitiful face. He can’t even conceive of children judging their parents; they owe them too much. Lorenzo wants to console him, show his father that he’s even worse. Papá, you should see me, what I’ve done.

  Lorenzo says, no, I have work and then he brushes his father’s elbow. Don’t worry about anything, he whispers, I’ll take care of it, you just take care of making sure Mamá’s comfortable, okay?

  That’s all you need to take care of now.

  20

  Ariel holds the photos up to his eyes, feeling like he’s looking at a stranger. He’s not the one in the photos, and it’s not him sitting in the club office having another conversation he never imagined. Yet in the photos he recognizes Sylvia and finds her beautiful, young, and exultant. It’s her curly hair, her expansive smile, the cheerful way she hangs off his neck. He sees her in Munich, in a snowstorm, holding hands, and in Madrid, too, kissing on the street. They are foreign, dirty photos, devoid of beauty. They are stolen photos that don’t capture the value of the moment; they are just evidence of who knows what crime.

  It might bother people to know the girl is a minor, you know how everyone turns into a moralist when it comes to judging others. Ariel looks up toward the sports director. The manager is there, too, a guy he barely knows, with gray hair, a sky-blue tie, and an absent expression, as if only numbers excited him, not human passions. Ariel is about to respond to Pujalte, to use the word blackmail, but he doesn’t. He chooses to keep quiet. Beside him is the young agent they chose to negotiate with the club, thinking he would get Ariel out of any uncomfortable meetings. But that same morning he had called, alarmed, I think you’d better come with me.

  Yesterday as Ariel left practice, the journalists looked for him with their microphones and their cameras. He lowered the car window and answered their questions for a moment. There were rumors of his possible transfer to another team. I’m committed to this club and its fans, so I’m going to give it my all. Soccer is played out on the field, not in offices. Give me a little time and I’ll prove it was no mistake to bring me here.

  Words fill the sports pages every day, saturated with sensational, emotional, passionate declarations that no one pays much attention to anymore. Emphatic quotes are ashes the next day. Naïve, Husky told him, as much as you insist on playing the role of the good boy, you’re just naïve. Ariel mentioned that in a few days he would be ready to compete again and he was already planning on defending himself on the field. That morning, after his statements, someone called into a radio sports chat show to defend him, he’s the best on the team, he shouldn’t leave, all the others should.

  But in a sports paper from Barcelona, a journalist let slip the rumor that Ariel’s Italian nationality was in question, along with some other players’ origins, and that the public prosecutor was looking into the matter. If it was revealed to be a hoax, he could no longer occupy the spot of a European player and his departure from the team would be irremissible. No one is happy with the performance of a player they expected much more from. One after the other, the club knew how to deliver direct blows to convince him to obey their order. Accept what they decide. On the Web site of an Argentinian newspaper, there was already talk of the scandal over the trucho passports, as they called the forged birth certificates used to pass off Argentinian players as Europeans. Ariel’s name appeared on a list with four or five other names.

  Now they forced him to sit at that table to contemplate what could turn out to be the final staging of real power.

  As you will understand, no one is interested in this continuing, says Pujalte. There are a lot of things to hide on your side, more than on ours. Not to mention how your brother left the country. I think that in everything, and I mean everything, you have the team on your side. These are innocent photos, they were brought to us by an agency that wants us to have them, and you are lucky they want to maintain a good relationship with the club, they put us before their news interests. This happens every day. Last year we had some pornographic photos of one of your teammates that some girl wanted to sell. What did the magazine do? They bought them for us. Well, they know that we both need each other. Without our umbrellas, you players would be prey, like partridges in the field, and, at the end of the day, who cares about one more or one less partridge in the bag? We are the only ones protecting you.

  The sports director crossed and uncrossed his fingers as he spoke. Ariel slowly opens a bottle of water. He drinks a sip. Pujalte continues without letting Ariel’s eyes meet his at any point.

  What’s happening is that you’re trying to get the fans on your side. The executives, we’re the bad guys, and you players are the good guys.

  I only said I want to stay here, the same thing I said to you.

  Look, if your Italian credentials are finally annulled, everything gets more complicated. I’ll tell you one thing, without moving a finger, you’d lose your status as a member of the European Union, then forget about finding a team easily. It also works against us, but if you think we give a shit … If that’s what you want, I already told you the press only gums up the works.

  Ariel wants to get up and leave that room where the walls are adorned with the exploits of the club’s legendary players. The manager has barely said anything; he gathers the photos from the table and puts them away in his folder. Ariel’s young agent tries to lighten the tone of the meeting. We are in favor of a sale, not a transfer. Perfect, Pujalte cuts him off, give us some asshole willing to pay the termination clause, we’re not going to give away a player. We can negotiate. That’s what we’ve wanted from the first day, to encourage an elegant exit.

  Ariel remembers Pujalte the day he gave him the club jersey to wear in the press conference announcing his signing. In just a few months, their relationship had changed. But Ariel is wrong to judge him and he knows it.
Everyone plays their part: surely Pujalte is only trying to save his ass and his salary after a bad year. The same things that today seem loathsome to him could have been charming if things had gone well.

  Let us talk with your agent, you forget about the whole thing. You still have some games ahead of you, we have a lot at stake, and that’s what you should be focusing on. I’ll tell you one thing, that’s what you should have been focused on from day one.

  Ariel doesn’t respond. The sports director talks to him about the possibility of going to the Italian, the French, the English league. Ariel asks, why not to another Spanish team? And he answers, no one likes to strengthen rival teams with their own players, I don’t know why but they’re always particularly motivated the day they play against you. People don’t understand that kind of transfer.

  Ariel wants to ask him if there is a possibility of going back to Buenos Aires, but he’d rather leave it all in the hands of his agent and Charlie. He knows that in Argentina no one would be able to pay his signing price. He sees himself in Russia, on a shady millionaire’s team, like so many others.

  He hasn’t seen Sylvia in a few days. On the weekend, she went to see her mother. The day before, he traveled to La Coruña for an Argentinian friend’s birthday. Players from all over the country were there. Those days had given him time to think about their relationship, distance himself again.

  Several of them had met up in the lobby of a hotel on the outskirts of the city, many of them Argentinians scattered throughout the Spanish teams; three even came from Italy. They were picked up at the hotel and taken to a house in the countryside. Some didn’t know one another, but they all had friends in common. Many had met on the field, had chatted during halftime or at the end of a game; others had exchanged a few words at the door to the locker rooms after a shower. A kind of school camaraderie quickly developed.