The Return (19 page)

That night, after celebrating the victory, I talked with him.
I asked
him about the magic, the spell, the blood in the glass.
Buba looked at me and
went all serious.
Bring your ear closer, he said.
We were in a disco and we
could barely hear one another.
He whispered some words that I couldn’t
understand at first.
By that stage I was probably drunk.
Then he took his mouth
away from my ear and smiled at me.
What he had said was: You soon will score
better goals.
OK, great, I said.

From then on everything went great.
We won the next match
four-two, even though we were playing away.
Herrera scored a goal with a
header, Delève put away a penalty kick, and Buba scored the other two, which
were completely weird, or that’s how they seemed to me, with my inside
knowledge; before the trip (I didn’t go), I’d taken part in the ceremony of the
cut fingers and the glass and the blood.

Three weeks later they summoned me and I made my reappearance in the
second half, in the 75th minute.
We
were playing the top-ranked team on their home ground and we won
one-nil.
I scored the goal in the 88th minute.
I took the pass from Buba or that’s what everyone
thought, but I have my doubts.
All I know is that Buba took off down the
right-hand side of the field, and I started running down the left-hand
side.
There were four defenders, one chasing Buba, two in the middle, and one
about three yards away from me.
I still can’t explain what happened next.
The
defenders in the middle seemed to freeze on the spot.
I kept running with the
right wingback on my heels.
Buba came up to the penalty area with the left
wingback close behind him too.
Then he dummied and centered.
I went into the
penalty area with no hope of receiving the pass, but what with the center backs
in a daze or dizzy all of a sudden and the weird swing of the ball, the fact is
I found myself miraculously in possession inside the area, with their goalkeeper
coming forward and the right wingback coming up behind my left shoulder, not
knowing whether to foul me or not, so I just took a shot and scored and we
won.

I had a safe place on the team for the following Sunday.
And from then
on I began to score more goals than I’d ever scored in my life.
Herrera was on a
roll as well.
Everyone loved Buba.
And they loved Herrera and me too.
From one
day to the next we became the kings of the city.
It was all working out for us.
The club began an unstoppable climb.
We were winning matches and hearts.

And our blood ritual was repeated without fail before every match.
In
fact, after the first time, Herrera and I bought ourselves straight-edge
razors like Buba’s; every time we played away, the first thing we put in our
bags was the straight-edge, and when we played at home, we got together the
night before at our apartment (they’d stopped keeping us together in a hotel)
and performed the ceremony: Buba collected his blood and ours in a glass and
then shut himself in the bathroom, and while we heard the music coming out of
there, Herrera would talk about books he’d read or plays he’d seen and I just
listened and agreed with everything he said, until Buba reappeared and we looked
at him as if to ask if everything was all right, and Buba would smile at us and
go to the kitchen to fetch a sponge and a bucket before returning to the
bathroom, where he’d spend at least fifteen minutes cleaning and tidying up, and
when we went into the bathroom, everything was exactly the same as before.
Sometimes, when I went to a disco with Herrera and Buba stayed home (because he
didn’t like discos much) Herrera and I would get talking and he’d ask me what I
thought Buba did with our blood in the bathroom, because you couldn’t
tell—when Buba was finished there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere, the
glass we used was sparkling, the floor was spotless, it was like the cleaning
lady had just left—and I said to Herrera I didn’t know, I had no idea what
Buba did when he shut himself in there, and Herrera looked at me and said: If I
was living with him I’d be scared, and I looked at Herrera thinking: Are you
serious?
but Herrera said, I’m just kidding, Buba’s our friend; it’s thanks to
him I’m on the team and the club is going to win the championship; it’s thanks
to him we’re tasting sweet success, and that was the truth.

Besides, I was never scared of Buba.
Sometimes, when we were watching
TV in our apartment before going to bed, I’d glance at him out of the corner of
my eye and think how strange it all was.
But I didn’t think about it for long.
Soccer is strange.

In the end, after starting the year so disastrously, we won the
League Championship and paraded through the center of Barcelona in
the midst of a jubilant crowd and spoke from the town hall balcony to another
jubilant crowd, which chanted our names, and we dedicated our victory to the
Virgin of Montserrat, in the monastery of Montserrat, a virgin as black as Buba,
strange as it may seem, and we gave interviews until we were hoarse.
I spent my
vacation in Chile.
Buba went to Africa.
Herrera and his girlfriend took off to
the Caribbean.

We met up again at preseason training, in a sports center in the east
of Holland, near an ugly, gray city that made me feel extremely
apprehensive.

Everyone was there, except for Buba.
He’d had some kind of problem
back in his country.
Herrera seemed exhausted, though he was sporting a
celebrity tan.
He told me he’d considered getting married.
I told him about my
vacation in Chile, but as you know, when it’s summer in Europe, it’s winter in
Chile, so my vacation hadn’t been especially exciting.
The family was well.
That
was about it.
We were worried about Buba and the holdup.
We didn’t want to admit
it, but we were worried.
Herrera and I were soon convinced that without him we
were lost.
Our trainer, on the other hand, tried to play down Buba’s lack of
punctuality.

One morning Buba arrived on a flight that had come via Rome and
Frankfurt and took his place on the team again.
The preseason matches, however,
were disastrous.
We were beaten by a team from the Dutch third division.
We tied
with a team of amateurs from the city where we were staying.
Neither Herrera nor
I dared to ask Buba to do the blood ritual, although we had our razors ready.
In
fact, and it took me a while to realize this, it was like we were afraid to ask
Buba for a bit of his magic.
Of course we went on being friends, and one night
the three of us went out to a Dutch disco, but instead of talking about blood,
we talked about the rumors that always circulate before the season starts, the
players who were changing teams, the new signings, the Champion’s League, in
which we’d be playing that year, the contracts that were expiring or had to be
renegotiated.
We also talked about movies and the vacation that had just come to
an end, and Herrera talked about books, but he was on his own there, mainly
because he was the only one of us who read.

Then we went back to Barcelona, and Buba and I went back to our
routine, just the two of us in that apartment opposite the training ground, and
the Champion’s League began, and the night before the first match, Herrera
turned up at our place and bit the bullet.
He asked Buba what was happening.
Isn’t there going to be any magic this year?
And Buba smiled and said it wasn’t
magic.
And Herrera said, What the fuck is it then?
And Buba shrugged his
shoulders and said it was something only he understood.
And then he made a face
like he was saying, It’s no big deal.
And Herrera said he wanted to keep on
going, he believed in Buba, whatever it was he’d been doing.
And Buba said he
was tired, and when he said that I looked at his face: he didn’t look nineteen
or twenty at all, he looked at least ten years older, like a player who had worn
his body out.
And, to my surprise, Herrera accepted what Buba had said, calmly,
just like that.
He said, OK, let’s drop it.
What about dinner?
My treat.
That’s
the way he was, Herrera.
A great guy.

So we went out to dinner at one of the best restaurants in the
city, and a press photographer who was there took a picture of us, the one
I’ve got hanging in the dining room: Herrera, Buba and me, dressed up and
smiling, with a lavish meal (if you’ll pardon the cliché) spread out in
front of us (it really was lavish); we look like we’re ready to take on the
world, although deep down we weren’t at all sure (especially Herrera and me)
that we could take on anyone at all.
And nothing was said about magic or
blood while we were there: we talked about movies and travel (for pleasure
not work), and that was about all.
When we left the restaurant, after having
signed autographs for the waiters and the cook and the kitchen hands, we
went walking through the empty streets of the city, such a beautiful city,
the city of sanity and common sense, as some devotees call it, but also the
city of splendor, where you could feel at ease with yourself, and for me,
looking back, it’s the city of my youth—anyway, as I was saying, we
went walking through the streets of Barcelona, because, as every athlete
knows, the best thing to do after a heavy meal is stretch your
legs, and when we’d been walking around for a while, looking at the floodlit
buildings (Herrera named the great architects who’d designed them like they
were people he’d met), Buba said with a rather sad smile that, if we wanted
to, we could repeat last year’s experiment.

That was the word he used.
Experiment.
Herrera and I kept quiet.
Then
we went back to my car and drove to the apartment without saying a single word.
I cut myself with my razor.
Herrera used a knife from the kitchen.
When Buba
came out of the bathroom, he looked at us, and, for the first time he didn’t
shut the door behind him when he went to get the sponge and a bucket of water
from the kitchen.
I remember Herrera stood up but then sat down again
straightaway.
Then Buba shut himself in the bathroom and when he came out it was
all like before.
I suggested we celebrate with one last whiskey.
Herrera
accepted.
Buba shook his head.
I guess none of us felt like talking; the only
one who spoke was Buba.
He said: This isn’t necessary, we’re already rich.
That
was all.
Then Herrera and I downed our whiskeys and we all went to bed.
The next
day we started off in the League with a six-zero victory.
Buba scored three
goals, Herrera scored one and I scored two.
It was a glorious season, people
still remember it, which is amazing, considering how long ago it was, although
if I really think about it, if I exercise my memory, it seems right and proper
(though I say so myself) that my second and final season playing with Buba in
Europe should have been saved from oblivion.
You saw the matches on TV.
If you’d
been in Barcelona you’d have gone crazy.
We won the national League by more than
fifteen points and were European Champions without having lost a single match,
just two draws: with Milan at San Siro and with Bayern on their home ground.
Every other game we won.

Buba became the man of the moment, top goal scorer in the Spanish
League and the Champion’s League, and his value soared.
Halfway through the
season, his agent tried to renegotiate the contract and more than triple the
annual payment, and the club had no choice but to sell him to Juventus at the
beginning of the following preseason.
There were lots of clubs vying for Herrera
too, but since he’d come up through the ranks and been virtually raised in the
junior teams, he didn’t want to leave, though I know for sure he had offers from
Manchester, where he would have got more money.
I had a string of offers too,
but after letting Buba go, the club couldn’t afford to lose me, so they upped my
fee and I stayed.

By then I’d met a Catalan woman who would soon become my wife and I
think that influenced my decision not to leave.
I don’t regret it.
That season
we were champions in the Spanish League again, but in the Champion’s League we
came up against Buba’s team in the semifinals and we were eliminated.
They beat
us three-zero in Italy and Buba scored one of the goals, one of the most
beautiful goals I’ve ever seen, from a foul, or a free kick, as you guys say,
more than twenty yards from the goal, what the Brazilians would call a dead
leaf, an autumn leaf, when the ball looks like it’s heading over the top and
then suddenly it drops like a falling leaf, Didí could pull it off, so they say,
but I’d never seen Buba do it, and after that goal I remember Herrera looked at
me—I was in the wall and Herrera was behind me, marking an Italian
player—and when our goalkeeper went to get the ball from the net, Herrera
looked at me and smiled as if to say, Well, what do you know, and I smiled too.
It was the first goal for the Italians and after that Buba virtually disappeared
from the game.
They took him off in the fiftieth minute.
Before leaving the
field he hugged Herrera and me.
After the match we spent some time with him in
the passage to the locker rooms.