Off Side (19 page)

‘Well, that’s about it, I suppose …’

Night was falling on his confusion.

‘The nights are drawing in.’

It was the first human voice that he had heard for centuries, and with it arrived coherence, and an awareness of the cardinal points of the room, which had suddenly become horrible, and there, clinging to his sweaty body, the incrustation of the bare mattress, as bare as the body of this real and concrete woman who repeated: ‘The nights are drawing in.’

‘What time is it?’

When she told him, he felt an immediate anxiety, and then took a few moments working out why.

‘My training session …’

‘What are you training at, snorting or screwing?’

The cynical tone of the woman was the final blow that shattered the glass of his enchantment, and Palacín leapt to his feet. But it felt as if he’d left part of his head behind, as if his skull was now composed of two irreconcilable hemispheres.

‘God — how can I go training in a state like this …?’

‘It won’t last long. You get the best bit of the high straight away. Take a deep breath.’

Her body had turned ugly again, and her eyes cynical, but there was something approaching concern in her voice.

‘Where do you train?’

‘At a stadium in Pueblo Nuevo. Centellas.’

‘What do you play? Football? At your age? And what’s the team you play for? A priests’ seminary?’

He dressed without replying.

‘And they pay you for that?’

‘They do. The ground’s a shit-heap. You can’t get a decent shower and the changing-room door doesn’t even lock. One of these days someone’s going to come in and clean the place out.’

‘You’ve got a good body. It’s been a long time since I last enjoyed looking at a man’s body. Are all footballers as goodlooking and shy as you?’

‘Every footballer’s different.’

‘I find it funny that somebody as serious as you could be a footballer.’

When she saw that he was leaving, she got up and shouted angrily: ‘Hey! What are you playing at? What about paying for the goods?’

‘I’m sorry. I thought it was included in what I gave you for the coke.’

‘Coke is coke, and screwing is screwing. At least you could give me a couple of thousand pesetas. Didn’t you like my literary screw? What more do you want? Sex and cocaine!’

She tucked the two thousand pesetas into her handbag while she grumbled something about the vulture who was always rifling through her bag, and by the time she looked up, Palacín was no longer there. She shouted after him down the stairs: ‘Don’t say anything to Conchi! The old bitch is too nosey for her own good.’

Palacín was on the landing by now and noted the message, while at the same time finding himself forced to negotiate his way past a body lying at the door. The young man who had earlier been expelled from the apartment was asleep on the floor, breathing gently, with his eyes half open. The slight movement of air caused by Palacín’s passage was sufficient to wake him, and he lay
there looking up with an expectant air.

‘Did you leave any for me?’

‘Any what?’

‘Coke.’

Palacín shrugged his shoulders and carried on down the stairs.

‘You never think of anyone else … you only think of yourselves …’

The young man hauled himself up with the aid of the banister and yelled down the stairwell a string of remon-strations that only he could hear. Then he came back and walked unsteadily towards the bedroom where the girl was struggling to get her tights on straight.

‘Is there any left for me?’

‘I’m sick to death of you … and this flat, and this street, and this bloody city.’

‘Don’t be such a bitch, Marta. Give me a bit …’

‘I’ve had it up to here with you. You’re like a parasite growing in my cunt. I can get shot of the rest of them, but not you. And all because according to you and your father I got you involved in this. But you’re wrong there. Any time there’s shit around, you’ll find your way into it. That’s because you
are
shit.’

‘Just one little line, Marta.’

‘What are you going to do with a line? You’ve got veins of plaster.’

‘Just one trip.’

She was dressed now, and from the handbag in which she kept all her worldly possessions she extracted a small white paper packet and threw it onto the mattress. As she passed by him, he tried to show his gratitude by caressing her with the back of his hand but she brushed him off and made her way downstairs. In the street the cool early evening air smelt of exhaust fumes and dustbins, but even this stagnant air wasn’t able to spoil the glory of the setting sun. It suddenly reminded her of a sci-fi film which she’d once seen. In the dark corners of a contaminated city, the
film’s heroes — some of them humans and some of them robots who looked like humans — were chasing each other and killing each other in a battle which suddenly ended when the boy and the girl decided to make a run for it, to escape, towards the sun, to the countryside. All of a sudden they emerged into light, as if the city had been at the bottom of a well. There
was
a way out. She thought back over old escape plans that she had once had, but her mechanisms of mind and memory had fallen into disuse. I can’t even remember things any more, she thought. However a fragment of a poem which she had once enjoyed, and had decided to memorize, filled her brain like a flash of light.

Books and a typewriter. Peaches. A conversation with her mother, woman to woman, calmly, one afternoon. How could she ever hope to return to all that?

‘Will you be coming up later?’

She raised her eyes, and there stood señora Concha, leaning over the rail of her boarding-house balcony.

‘Sure.’

And she walked on towards calle de Robadors, but with such lack of interest that in the end she decided that she couldn’t be bothered. She still had the three thousand pesetas from the coke deal and the two thousand which the footballer had given her; her nerves weren’t jangling for once, and she wasn’t in the mood for lone reminiscences. She retraced her steps and shouted up to Doña Concha: ‘I’ll be up now.’

Doña Concha was waiting for her at the door, and her milky coffee was waiting in the kitchen.

‘Right now I’d prefer a sandwich and a glass of wine.’

‘That’s what I like to hear. I’ve got some very good wine. A bit
sweet, perhaps, but very good. I like good wine. You have to give yourself a treat every once in a while. You don’t take your money with you when you die, do you!’

‘You must have some little corner stuffed with greenbacks.’

‘I’ve got an account with the savings bank, with not a lot in it, and I keep the rest at home, just in case. But it’s well hidden, because out of the six guests staying here I only trust one, and that’s the footballer. Oh — and an old age pensioner who’s as good as gold.’

‘Does the footballer have money?’

‘He paid four months in advance, and he seemed to have a fair amount of money. He’s single, with no vices …’

‘All men have vices.’

‘Well, he lives a very simple life. Come and look. I’ll show you his room.’

A single bed; a bedside table rescued from some secondhand furniture shop; a wardrobe that had been restored to life with laminated plastic; a table on which there was a pile of carefully folded sports newspapers; and a framed photograph of a woman and a boy. Marta took the picture and studied the slender beauty of the woman with the powerful mouth, and the frank laughing features of the young, fair-skinned boy.

‘Who are they?’

‘No idea. He doesn’t talk about his private life. Take a look in here, in the bathroom.’

A shower and a toilet bowl, and over the wash-basin a shelf on which were scrupulously arranged his razor, his aerosol shaving cream, his aftershave, his toothpaste and toothbrush, his cologne, and his deodorant, all lying next to each other in an order which was evidently immutable. Behind the mirror was a cupboard with three shelves full of spray bottles and aerosols which were incapable of keeping their smells to themselves. A hospital sort of smell.

‘They’re all liniments and special sprays for muscle pain. Look
at it — there’s a year’s supply there!’

‘The thrifty sort! And where does he keep his money?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Who keeps money about the house, these days?’

‘You do.’

‘But sometimes so well hidden that even I can’t find it.’

‘I bet one of these days you’ll kick the bucket and the mice’ll end up eating your money.’

Doña Concha crossed herself.

‘You should never talk about death, dear. Not even in jest.’

The club masseur was complaining because someone had hijacked his bottle of liniment.

‘I’ll kill the bastard who’s stolen my liniment.’

‘Keep your hair on. I’ve got it.’

‘I’m the one who does the massages in this club. That’s what I’m here for.’

The bottle passed hand to hand from one player to another, all of them in various states of undress, and when it reached the masseur he held it up to the light of the dressing room’s sole and tin-shaded light bulb.

‘You’ve wasted three quarters of it. Come Sunday you’ll have to do your own bloody massages.’

‘Can you do me a bandage for my knee?’ Palacín asked.

‘That’s what I like to hear. If any of you needs liniment, come and ask me. That’s what I’m here for. But you’re not seriously thinking of going out to play with a bandage on, are you? You should stop molly-coddling your knee.’

Like the manager, the club’s masseur was also employed by Sánchez Zapico, and the two of them had something in common — a similar thin, hunted look, a similar feeling that they were creatures to be reckoned with within the four walls of Centellas, but amounting to nothing outside it. The manager was giving his
final instructions.

‘You, Toté, I want you to play libero, but watch out for their number eleven, Patricio, because he’s likely to have the upper hand over Ibañez. I’m not saying this to put you down, Ibañez, but he’s got a good half a yard on you with every step he takes. I want to see your balls take you there, even if your legs won’t, Ibañez. If you neutralize Patricio, you’ll neutralize Gramenet, because Patricio is Gramenet. And you, Palacín, I want balls. A lot of balls! If I have any technical advice to offer, it’s precisely that — balls! A centre forward without balls is like a potato tortilla without eggs! Ha, ha!’

‘Thus spake Confucius,’ said Mariscal, the midfield player who was a second-year student of Information Sciences.

‘As for you, Brains, I want you to put everything you’ve got into this. You’re a lot of Confucius and not a lot of balls. I want you to play with your head up and your prick as your gunsight. When you see Palacín opening spaces, pushing the ball forward, watch out for the offside … be very careful about the off-side, because linesmen nowadays get their flags up quicker than a prick in a brothel. Now: do you remember the game-plan? A, B, D. Let’s see, who’s A?’

‘Me,’ shouted Mariscal.

‘And B?’

‘Yessir.’

‘And who’s D?’

Palacín raised his hand.

‘That’s right. And you, Monforte, I want to see you in there with the opposition, putting it about with your elbows. You know what I mean. And I want a lot of balls, because if we lose today we’ll drop out of the bottom of the league. By next season they’ll be putting us up against teams from the orphanage. It’s Palacín’s first match today. I don’t want you playing just for him, understand? But I want you to take him into account, because the poor bastards who are coming to see the match will be watching for
Palacín. And you, Palacín, forget about your knee, for God’s sake.’

‘I’ll make sure my knee’s got balls!’

‘That’s what I like to hear. Now, come on. Join hands!’

The Centellas manager had introduced a number of psychological techniques into the dressing room, and his particular favourite was the moment of communion prior to the match, when the players all joined hands and shouted: ‘Centellas, Centellas, All Together’. Then they formed into a raggedy line, on boots badly worn by the abrasive nature of the bare earth pitches that they were accustomed to playing on, where grass, in so far as it existed, was nothing more than a memory of its former self. They went up the wooden stairs to the pitch, remembering to take special care over the non-existent fourth step which had been broken since the season of 1979–80. The terraces were half full or half empty, according to your point of view, and from the fans came the sound of scattered applause and a few catcalls, because they hadn’t forgotten the three successive defeats that the team had suffered in their last five league games. But when Palacín stepped forward to be photographed by a nephew of the club’s chairman, he was applauded as the club’s big hope, and he couldn’t resist raising his arms in a V-shape, whereupon the applause increased and showered onto him as if his raised arms marked the outer edges of a basket designed to receive it. He hadn’t played a competitive game for the best part of eight months, ever since he’d left Oaxaca, where he’d been a substitute, and the atmosphere of the game that was about to start filled his lungs with a painful euphoria. It fell to him to kick off, under the eyes of a fat ref who began to sweat from the moment he struggled to toss the coin. The way in which the stadium was built, with a running track round the pitch, meant that the public were kept at a distance, and Palacín preferred it this way, because he needed to disappear from the game every once in a while, to conceal his tiredness. He looked round and picked out Pedrosa, his likely marker: a young lorry driver with legs like tree trunks and a right elbow that was
legendary in the second division. Pedrosa had also spotted him, and was sizing him up from a distance with the hungry look of a hunter and a growing confidence in the light of Palacín’s apparent fragility. He had received explicit instructions from his manager: ‘You’re off the leash now, Pedrosa, don’t forget.’

‘OK, I know, I’m off the leash …’

‘You know there’s no one who can match you one for one. Think of Palacín like he’s an old fox, and remember that he plays as much without the ball as with it. Remember that he’s got a knee like glass, but the rest of him is dynamite. Keep the pressure on all the time. Stick to him like glue, and don’t let him move that ball more than half a yard. In a yard he’ll leave you standing, Pedrosa. And don’t forget, you’re off the lead, so go for it …’