Learning to Lose (31 page)

All you ate were chocolate cookies? You could have died, said Lorenzo, shocked. No way, I got fat as a cow. Look at me. You’re not fat, not at all … My mami sees the photos I send her and she writes back, hey, fatty, you ate my daughter, where’s my daughter? They both laugh.

Then I took care of a family’s three children, but the oldest one, a nine-year-old, was hyperactive. He abused me, he insulted me, he pulled my hair, he kicked me. One day I just didn’t show up, I didn’t even have the guts to quit. I didn’t want to tell the kid’s parents the things he did. One day he told me I was his slave and that I had only come to Spain to clean up his poop. It was wrong, but I just left. He had the devil inside him, I swear that kid had the devil inside him.

Lorenzo said something to console her, it’s not the kid’s fault, it’s the parents’ fault. Then she told him about her current job. They’re a young couple, good people. And the boy is delightful. He’s like my own son to me. I barely know them, I just say hi on the stairs, confessed Lorenzo. I think he’s an administrative assistant at a company or something like that.

Daniela shrugged her shoulders. In Spain people live really well, they like to go out, be on the streets. One day the woman I work for explained it to me: we don’t want our son to steal our social life from us. That’s why I stay some nights until they come home from eating out or going to the movies. They are sweet. They seem happy.

Yeah, well, just like you said, Lorenzo replied, there are all kinds. But here people are happy, I do think so … Except on the metro, Daniela smiled. On the metro everybody’s so serious, they don’t look at one another, they don’t say hello. They all read or look at the floor like they’re embarrassed. Like when you’d get onto the elevator with me, and you’d lower your head and I’d think, what shoes am I wearing? Ay, I hope they’re clean.

After they laughed, there was a silence. Daniela asked Lorenzo about his separation, about how he manages to handle his life and take care of his daughter, if he misses his wife. Lorenzo responded honestly, but not without a slight tinge of self-indulgence.

I made a mistake, he admitted. At one point I thought my life would always be the way it was then. With my wife, my daughter, my work. I couldn’t conceive of it changing. And maybe I wasn’t careful enough. It was a mistake.

The silence that followed seemed to end the conversation. Soon the highway emptied out into an expressway. The faster cars passed Lorenzo’s van on the way to Madrid. When passing the exit for Aravaca and Pozuelo, Daniela told him she had a lot of friends who worked around there. Lorenzo told her that in Aravaca he had met the last shepherd in Madrid. Mr. Jorge. Every Christmas we used to buy a lamb from him for New Year’s dinner. They put up a block of terraced housing behind his pen and the city government forced him to get rid of the sheep. When I was fifteen years old. You weren’t born yet.

Don’t exaggerate. Daniela smiled. I’m thirty-one. I’m not so young anymore. Well, you look it, said Lorenzo. Look, this is where the president lives, he pointed as they passed the Moncloa Palace. Do you like the president? Daniela asked him. Bah, all
politicians are the same … No, no, corrected Daniela, in Ecuador they’re worse. There isn’t a decent one there … They’re four families, they all have to go. They’re rats. Rats? Corrupt.

As they entered Madrid, Lorenzo suggested they go out for dinner. Daniela said, you’ve already spent a lot of money. And then added that she was tired. You don’t want to go out dancing? I bet you’re gonna go out dancing with your friends now, joked Lorenzo. No, no. Really, no, she added. And he couldn’t get her to change her mind.

When they arrived at her door, Lorenzo turned off the engine and the headlights. Thank you so much for the trip, Daniela said to him.

The combination of the two long lines of her eyes with the line of her mouth was lovely. Her hair fell over one side, breaking the almond shape. She put her hand on the door handle and Lorenzo leaned over, governed by a force he couldn’t control. He took her by the shoulders and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she only offered her cheek, no-man’s-land. But the kiss lasted until she moved her neck away.

I knew you were going to do that, Lorenzo. It was the first time Daniela had spoken his name. I didn’t come for this, I don’t want you to think …

It was Daniela who apologized, as if she judged herself for having aroused Lorenzo. He felt uncomfortable, he tried to be tender. I like you, forgive me if … but I like you and I … Men only want one thing, Daniela told him, and then they cause a lot of pain …

Daniela spoke sweetly and her features became more beautiful to Lorenzo’s eyes. When he kissed her, his forearm brushed her breast and it gave him a shiver. Lorenzo wanted to hold her,
to reassure her, but she took control of the situation with an authority that left Lorenzo paralyzed.

I’m not upset, I just want you to know that I …

And Daniela’s silence seemed to explain it all.

Thank you for a very nice evening, she said, and hopped out of the van. She walked toward her doorway. Lorenzo felt a stab in his chest, like a cruel pinch. He was slow to start the car up and drove like a sleepwalker toward his house. When they had gone through one of the rooms at the monastery, among the biblical tapestries woven in gold, Daniela had turned toward Lorenzo and said, in a very soft voice, like a whisper, thanks for what you’ve done for Wilson. Then, feeling her breath very close to his face, Lorenzo had wanted to sleep with her, take off her clothes, make love to her.

He understood his mistake, his precipitation. He sensed wounds in Daniela that he had been oblivious to, but the rejection still made him feel bad, desolate.

It was Saturday night, but Lorenzo went home early. He felt he was driving in the opposite direction from the rest of humanity.

When he got home, the soccer game was already over. He watched an American movie beside his daughter for a little while. Her Saturday got screwed up, too, he thought, but he didn’t ask any questions.

Sunday ended with the same feeling of emptiness it had started with. On Monday he sleeps in. He finds a note from Sylvia underneath two oranges placed next to the juicer. “I won’t be home for lunch.” He hears chairs moving in the apartment upstairs and thinks it’s a coded message from Daniela, communicating her disdain.

Wilson calls while Lorenzo’s having breakfast. He’s got a moving job and asks if he wants to join him with his van. Yeah, sure, great. Tomorrow at eight, then. Lorenzo writes the address down on Sylvia’s note. You’ll have to get up early, sorry, because I can see now that you’re not an early riser, says Wilson on the other end of the line. I got up a while ago, says Lorenzo in his defense. Your voice is weak, you sound like you’re still in bed. You know what my old lady used to call it? Pillow voice.

Lorenzo showers and shaves listening to the radio. In the news they don’t mention him. In front of the mirror, he says, I am a murderer. It’s strange how easy it is for him to forget it, leave it behind. Buried in the day-to-day. I am a murderer. Looking at his freshly shaved face, he wonders, have I changed? And he repeats it to himself.

Have I changed that much?

He has gas. He’d had a bad night. He squats to try to release the air. He lies down on the floor and massages his belly. He lifts his legs up. Then he thought, I’m not the man I once was, am I? In that absurd position, with his back on the damp bathmat, he hears the doorbell. The noises in the apartment upstairs have stopped and he is confident for a moment that Daniela had come down to see him, maybe to apologize. I was abrupt with you the other night.

But when he looks through the peephole, his heart starts racing. Detective Baldasano is accompanied by four policemen. They’re here to arrest me, it’s all over. For a second he’s glad. The anguish is over. Then comes the insecurity. Losing it all. He doesn’t want to take too long to open the door and he ends up opening it brusquely. The detective speaks in a reassuring tone.
Good morning, forgive the intrusion. Lorenzo invites them in while he checks to see if any neighbors are peeking from the stairwell. We have a search warrant. It’ll be a few minutes. Are you alone? Lorenzo closes the door behind them.

Yes, I’m alone.

It was him. He’s the one who started it. He sent the first message at sundown on Sunday. “Hello. You want to get together tomorrow?” Almost all the soccer games of the day on both continents were over by then. The results would allow his team to move up three spots in the standings. “OK, but not too late.” At night he’d watch the rebroadcast games in the Argentinian league. But he still had some hours to kill. “At five? In the usual spot?” He knew he would eventually send the message to Sylvia, but he tried to put it off as long as he could. I want to see her. “OK.” She conveyed a strange calmness. It was her clean gaze, her almost childish mannerisms, the lack of calculation, a certain innocence. He remembered her trembling caresses, somewhat furtive, her unfamiliar body, her kisses where she lets her head drop, partly terrified and partly aroused, her nervous, tentative smile. It all seemed so close that Ariel couldn’t believe he’d let so many days pass before seeing her again.

She responded instantly to the messages. They were short, direct. Of course. I set the cold tone, admitted Ariel. “But not too late,” she had written. It was a subtle way of saying, we won’t end up in bed this time. And Ariel understood that. The
night has its own rules. Theirs will be an evening love, like teenagers, he thought. With orders to be home before eleven.

On Saturday he had experienced the tedium that precedes a game. Expectant tedium. A stroll through the street with hundreds of kids asking for autographs, lunch with the team, the tactical discussion, the fifteen-minute prep video of the rival team, the nap, the brutally harsh conversations of men in a group. Lastra had come up with a new nickname for the coach. Lolailo. It’s like in songs, he explained, when they don’t know what to say, there’s always a chorus that goes lolailo. That’s what it seemed like to them, that once he’d used up the three concepts and three details that they had to look out for in their rival, the coach would start talking to himself, repeating the chorus. And in a whisper some of the players murmured lolailo, to make the guys who couldn’t hold it in burst out laughing. A bit childish, but effective. The technical staff appreciated a good atmosphere. When the joke spread, Lastro turned to one of the younger guys. Don’t you say a word of this, we all know you’re a stool pigeon. The boy tried to deny his bad reputation, but the group imposed its own law.

He had tried to nap, but Osorio, his roommate, called his girlfriend and spent two hours whispering sweet nothings into his cell phone. When he hung up he turned toward Ariel, she’s already got a car out of me, the bitch. Then he became engrossed in playing a video game on his PlayStation. Amílcar came to find Ariel for a coffee. Someone said that Matuoko was fucking a local celebrity in his room, somebody related to a duke of who-knows-where. The Spaniards all seemed to know her from television. She called him up on the phone in his room, just like that, brazen as can be, said Matuoko’s
roommate. The chick must be fortysomething, but she’s amazing, said another.

They loaded the bags into the bus, since they’d go straight from the stadium to the airport. Don’t leave anything in the hotel, warned the delegate. This guy left his blow-up doll, shouted one of the players. And you and your fucking mother, they answered from the back of the bus. When a frantic Matuoko was among the last to board, his teammates received him with a burst of applause that he acknowledged with a show of his enormous teeth and pink gums. The coach lowered his head, somewhat somber. The head of equipment told two or three very celebrated jokes. My wife screams so much when she’s screwing, sometimes I hear her from the bar. Some people put on headphones; others chatted.

At the entrance to the stadium, a group of local fans insulted them, showing their fists. They threw oranges that burst open against the bus windows. A drunk fat guy lowered his pants and showed them an ugly, hairy ass. Paco, don’t look, you might like it, shouted Lastra between laughs. I prefer your fucking mother, answered Paco from his seat up front.

The hour and a half before the game seemed to last forever. Warm-up on the field. The murmur of the people who started to fill the stands. Changing in the locker room. The smell of lotions. Ariel kicked around a ball made of two knee socks with one foot. One, two, three, four, he kept it in the air, passing it from one foot to the other. Some players watched him, smiling. Another shouted, on the field, man, on the field. Then they waited in the hall from the locker room. That was the moment when Ariel felt the most nervous. Someone shouted, come on, come on, come on. We have to win. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go
guys, we have to win, we have no choice, the goalie coach reminded them. If things get ugly, strike hard, advised the second coach.

The game was grueling. The play was interrupted by constant fouls. The team playmaker kept the ball close to his foot instead of making long passes. Dragon used to ridicule that kind of player, they’re mailmen, he used to say, they come up beside you, shake your hand, ask you about your kids, and nothing can get them to let go of the ball. You should touch the ball a lot but hold on to it as little as possible. Ariel grew frustrated by the lack of passing. His marker followed the first feint and when Ariel recovered the ball unexpectedly he got knocked down. The referee showed the defender a yellow card halfway through the first half and that kept him off Ariel’s back a bit. Three or four times he went over the sideline and managed to cross the ball. But it seemed like Matuoko’s headers were badly placed, as if he couldn’t locate the goal. His shots were high and off-mark. On one rebound, Ariel took a chance with a bicycle kick, but the goalie managed to knock it the other way from above the crossbar. It would have been a gorgeous goal, the kind they replay on TV for days.

Finally, because of an awkward clearance, a ball came over to him near the penalty box. He moved into the box and toward the endline, searching for a teammate coming up behind him. He saw the fullback going down to the ground to take the ball off him and he just had to make his foot meet up with the defender’s leg. Ariel fell in the box and the referee whistled the penalty shot. Amílcar scored with a powerful shot at mid-height.