Off Side (6 page)

‘All in due course,’ Sánchez Zapico would say when the club’s more impatient directors started pressing the merits of some of the more lucrative offers-to-sell.

On other occasions he would wax more lyrical: ‘For as long as I live, Centellas will live, and without this ground Centellas would die.

‘Centellas depends on its ground,’ he declaimed, at the end of the speech with which he introduced Palacín to the other players and to around two hundred fans spread out on the club’s
time-worn terraces, not forgetting three trainee journalists, recently emerged from the Faculty of Information Sciences who were there to cover third-hand news events with fourth-hand tape recorders bought in the flea market in Plaza de las Glorias.

‘Our intention in signing Palacín is to improve club attendances. Palacín isn’t just a name. He’s a centre forward to his core. He’s got balls.’

The journalists noted down the phrase ‘he’s got balls’, but then, when their offerings finally appeared in their respective newspapers, they went no further than to say that, in the opinion of Sánchez Zapico, Palacín was ‘well furnished’. The new signing merited only one photograph, which, in the event, was not published, although a small headline at the bottom of the last page of sports news seemed keen to stir public interest in the reappearance of Alberto Palacín. ‘Centellas is obviously taking next season seriously, as we see from the fact that they have signed Alberto Palacín, the centre forward who was hailed as the new Marcelino in the 1970s, but who then ran into bad times because of injury. He continued his career in American football, and ended up playing for Oaxaca in Mexico. He was a popular player and established himself as one of the highest goal scorers in the Mexican League. At the age of thirty-six, Palacín has committed himself to helping Centellas to promotion to the Third Division. Then, he says, he will retire. On the pitch he looks to be in fine form, although the passing years have clearly left their mark.’ This was written by a twenty-two-year-old journalist, in other words, a journalist of no age at all: this was the thought that ran through Palacín’s mind as he read the article and had a vague recollection of the youngster who for a few minutes had accorded him the role of a star.

‘Don’t take any notice of what they say in the papers. I never take any notice of the press,’ the club’s chairman urged him, thinking that the bit about his age had hurt him. ‘A journalist is like a man with a gun. He thinks that just because he’s got a pen in his hand, he’s got more balls than you. I want you to show balls
when you’re out there. This club needs players with balls.’

The Centellas manager, Justo Precioso, operated by similar standards. He was an accountant in one of Sánchez Zapico’s factories, and had become the club’s manager-in-residence after an obscure period as a Second Division player, first as a right-wing defender and by the end as a sweeper. He was a thin, miserable little man, bald, with a three-day growth round his chin and an Adam’s apple which looked like a third testicle as it strove to rival the club’s chairman in his metaphorical reference to the players’ sexual impedimenta.

‘Toté, I want more balls!’ he shouted to the club’s mid-field defender. ‘Pérez, let’s have more balls up front’ — this to the man who until that season had been the club’s centre forward but since the arrival of Palacín had been playing inside forward.

Every now and then he went over to an old blackboard, to try and plan out moves, but he couldn’t always find the chalk, and, when he did, it screeched and set the more sensitive players’ teeth on edge. His real forte was training with the players, out on the pitch. ‘Out there, that’s where it matters. I want to see intelligence and balls,’ he would say, as he stood next to the south-end goal, onto which the club’s parsimonious lighting had been focused in a sort of half light which left the rest of the pitch in the dark, a ghostly landscape for the antics of these nocturnal footballers.

‘I don’t want to overdo it with my knee,’ Palacín warned him.

‘Do you mean just today, or for always?’ the manager asked, his Adam’s apple suddenly paralysed with alarm.

‘Gives me trouble every now and then. When I’ve had a bit of a warm-up, I’m fine.’

‘So I should hope. You just play the way you want to play. But I want balls, Palacín. Midfield players in the regional League are a lot more lethal than what you find in the Second or Third Division. Compared to most of them, Pontón was an angel.’ And he winked knowingly, because he had just named the player who
had been responsible for crippling Palacín’s knee.

During this first training session, the players were watching as much as playing. Palacín was the object of their evaluation, and in skirmishes for possession of the ball they were respectful but also at pains to demonstrate that they were not dazzled by the residual splendour of his past. Especially Toté, the central defender, who marked him so closely that it felt like having a limpet on his back. Each time that Palacín slowed down, protected the ball with his body, and was about to swing on one leg so as to wrong-foot his marker, an elbow would knock him off balance, or a knee in his thigh would stop him in his tracks. During one of these encounters, when Toté’s knee made contact with his old injury, Palacín suddenly went wild. He left the ball and went for his team-mate, grabbing him by his vest, and pulling him face to face as if he was about to chew his head off.

‘You just fucking take it easy, bastard …’

‘You too. We don’t play like young ladies here.’

‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ The manager ran up, arms flailing, to separate them.

It wasn’t necessary. The two players backed off, knocking the earth from their boots. The manager put one arm round Toté’s shoulder and took him to the corner of the pitch, where he gave him a quiet talking to. Then he came over to where Palacín was cautiously checking his knee for damage.

‘I’m sorry about that. The man’s a bit of an animal …’

‘Exactly what I was just telling him.’

‘No need to get all worked up. Don’t let him upset you.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘Come on! Let’s see you running! Hup, hup, hup!’

The players broke from their statue-like immobility, and started running in Indian file, hopping alternately on one leg and then the other, and moving their arms and necks in a way that made them look dislocated. The trainer ran alongside, moving up and down the line to check how willingly or unwillingly his
troupe was performing. He had banned the wearing of watches during training, but some players had them up their sleeves and checked them surreptitiously as they waited for the whistle that would signal the end of the session.

‘Look at your arse, man! You look as if you’re running sitting down! All of you, I want you to feel your balls, feel them bouncing, OK? Hup! Hup!’

He finally ran out of breath and ideas for things to shout, and gave the long-awaited blast on his whistle. The line of players broke up, and some of them ran ahead to get to the changing room before the others. Sometimes there wasn’t enough hot water for everyone to shower, even though Sánchez Zapico had presented the club with a powerful gas water heater, the inauguration of which had been attended by the whole team, the club directors, and their respective wives and children. The water heater was about the only thing on the premises with any future. The changing room was full of leaks and the walls were decorated with damp patches and flaking paint, and whether the players’ lockers were lockable or not depended on some arcane logic which no carpenter in the past ten years had ever succeeded in fathoming. Palacín took his boots off and put them on the floor. The two showers were already occupied, so he kept his shirt on in order not to get cold.

‘Sorry about that,’ Toté said, as he walked past, completely naked, and reached out to shake hands with Palacín.

‘He’s a decent sort of person when you get to know him,’ said a blond-haired player as he sat next to Palacín and began taking off his boots. ‘He’s not got anything against you. It’s just that his contract ends in June, so he’s got to put on a bit of a show.’

‘I see.’

‘My dad tells me that you were brilliant in your day.’

The lad’s eyes consumed him as if he was an elixir, an alchemical residue of his former glory.

‘I’m a bit over the hill, these days.’

‘I was there when you scored in the match with Madrid Athletic, when the whole stadium was on its feet.’

‘Other times they were all booing me.’

‘You win some, you lose some. That’s what my dad says. He says you had a neck like a pile-driver. Boom, when you headed a ball it would go off like a rocket. He says you had as much power heading a ball as kicking it.’

‘That’s impossible, son.’

‘I know. But that’s what he says. I play midfield.’

‘Yes, I saw you.’

‘What do you think of the way I play?’

‘Very good. You play with your head up, and that’s very important for a midfield player. But you have to listen out more. Keep eyes in the back of your head.’

‘Why?’

‘A midfield player has to be able to feel the waves of air coming off the player who’s following him, and when he’s got the ball and he’s looking for who to pass it to, he needs eyes in the back of his head, because that way he knows who’s coming up behind him. That’s the sort of thing you learn over the years.’

‘The trainer says I’m very intelligent.’

The lad gave him a look that was obviously seeking confirmation, and Palacín laughed.

‘For sure. It shows.’

Biscuter had tucked himself away in his kitchen; Charo was suffering an attack of indignation, and needing attention; Bromide was sick and scared — Carvalho’s family was falling apart, and he decided he needed to spend a bit of time putting it back together. He called to Biscuter to make his presence known, and when his assistant emerged from his lair, with his lank red hair bristling up in tufts and his large mournful eyes wide with surprise, Carvalho had a sudden revelation — that, in Biscuter’s case, time actually
stood still. Of all the members of Carvalho’s bizarre family, he alone had remained unchanged since the day Carvalho had first met him, thirty years previously, in Aridel prison. The little hair he had was red, and he still looked like a foetus that had been abandoned by its mother in horror at the ugliness of the creature she had brought into the world. For all that he disliked admitting the passing of time, Carvalho reckoned that Biscuter had to be over fifty by now. Time passes with its own inexorable logic, and only the artist’s technique can cheat it by freezing it in films and novels. Time was there, for all to see, in himself, in Biscuter, in Charo and in Bromide, and in each case it betrayed its victims in a different way. Charo, by a tendency to put on weight, Bromide by the fact that he was slowly rotting away inside, and Carvalho by the fact that he was ever-increasingly a passive spectator of his own time and of other people’s. For the time being, though, time had spared Biscuter — perhaps because it had already marked him from the moment of his birth. Biscuter was born ugly, and it was as if time had settled its account with him from the moment that he emerged from his mother’s womb.

‘Jesus, boss. So you’ve finally noticed that I exist!’

Carvalho leapt to his feet abruptly and thumped the table.

‘Not you too, Biscuter! I seem to be surrounded by manic depressives. Why do I have to spend my life providing a shoulder for other people to cry on?’

‘It’s not that, boss. The problem is, these days you don’t seem to care if I’m alive or dead. I told you the other day I’d bought the
Gastronomic Encyclopaedia
. It cost me a small fortune, and you didn’t even ask to see it. And you never tell me if my cooking’s any good or not, or if I’m doing it right. I’ve always stood by you, boss, and every shopkeeper in the area knows it. I’m not asking for a reward or anything, but people are always telling me how lucky you are to have an assistant like me.’

‘Go and see Charo, and tell her that Bromide’s ill and she should take him to the doctor’s. If she starts throwing things at
you and saying that I can come and tell her myself, tell her I’m tied up for the moment. I’ll ring her later.’

‘And I’ve got no security, either, boss. Do you ever stop to think about that? God forbid, but supposing something happens to you one day? What’s going to happen to poor old Biscuter? Out on the scrap heap?’

With a vehemence that alarmed him, Carvalho assured him that this would not be the case. Biscuter was sufficiently alarmed to leave the office at a prudent speed, albeit with the satisfaction of a man who has just spoken his mind: ‘That told him,’ Biscuter repeated to himself as he went down the stairs, and he had the impression that his words had not passed unheard. Carvalho was perplexed, a state of mind which he found particularly repellent — a philosophical luxury unbefitting in a person of even average intelligence. He needed to clear his brain. He opened the desk drawer and took out a bottle of vintage Knockando, a good whisky for states of fundamental perplexity. He served himself three fingers in a large glass, and drank them in three long sips. This triple charging and discharging of alcohol and inhaled air did him good, and he was just preparing to go out and reconquer the streets and his state of mind when the phone rang. Even before the first words took shape at the other end, a kind of malignant vibration told him that it was Charo ringing to acknowledge receipt of Biscuter’s message.

‘Would señor José Carvalho happen to be in? Could his majesty come to the phone and oblige his humble servant by telling her exactly what was on his mind?’

Carvalho decided to stick to the bare bones of conversation and ignore the provocative tone. Yes, she would be happy to go with Bromide, because Bromide was a nice person, not like some people she could name. In fact, a very nice person. Not like some people etc. Why in God’s name did he have to send a messenger? Had he forgotten her phone number? Surely at least he could have remembered her phone number, even if he seemed to have
forgotten her. And sending Biscuter round just showed what a bad-mannered pig he was.