Learning to Lose.

by David Trueba.

Part one

IS THIS DESIRE?.

1.

Desire works like the wind. With no apparent effort. If it finds our sails extended, it will drag us at a dizzying speed. If our doors and shutters are closed, it bangs at them for a while, searching for cracks or slots it can slip in through. The desire attached to an object of desire binds us to it. But there is another kind of desire, abstract, disconcerting, that envelops us like a mood. It declares that we are ready for desire and that we just have to wait, our sails unfurled, for the wind to blow. That is the desire to desire.

Sylvia is sitting in the back of the cla.s.sroom, in the row by the window, in the penultimate seat. The only kid behind her is Rainbow, a Colombian kid who's wearing the official tracksuit of the Spanish national soccer team and dozing through the day's cla.s.ses. Sylvia turns sixteen on Sunday. She seems older, rising above her cla.s.smates with her detached att.i.tude. Those same cla.s.smates whom she now scrutinizes.

No, it's not any of these. None of these mouths is the mouth I want brushing against my mouth. I don't want any of these tongues tangled in mine. n.o.body here has the teeth that are going to nibble on my lower lip, my earlobe, the bend of my neck, the fold of my stomach. n.o.body here.

n.o.body.

In cla.s.s Sylvia is surrounded by bodies that aren't fully formed, incongruous faces, ill-proportioned arms and legs, as if they were all growing in haphazard spurts. Carlos Valencia has appealing tan forearms that stick out powerfully from beneath his T-shirt, but his arrogance is off-putting. Sepulveda "the Dullard" has the delicate hands of a draftsman, but he's goofy and spineless. Raul Zapata's body is flabby, definitely not the one Sylvia wants to receive onto hers like a wave of flesh. Nando Solares's face is overtaken by zits and sometimes blends into the stucco wall. Manu Recio, oscar Panero, and Nico Veron are nice, but they are little boys; the first one has a peach-fuzz moustache, the second only speaks in fits and starts, and the third is now shoving two pencils into his nostrils to make his buddies laugh.

"The Tank" Palazon goes out with Sonia and puts his arm around her waist and smacks her a.s.s with his sausage-fingered hand in a possessive gesture that Sylvia abhors. "Skeleton" Ocana is malnourished, has grown rampantly, and has a lisp; Samuel Toran only thinks about soccer, and she'd have to turn into a ball to attract his foolish brown gaze. Curro Santiso is already, at fifteen, obviously the property registrar, drab accountant, or financial adviser he will become, completely uninteresting. "Blockhead" Sanz is out of the running because he doesn't just tend toward h.o.m.os.e.xuality, he oozes with it. He's got enough problems sidestepping ridicule from the macho kids who exaggerate his swishiness, hounding him and pushing him with their shoulders every time they cross paths. Quelo Zuazo lives on an unexplored planet and "c.o.c.ky" Ochoa treats high school with the same pa.s.sion a nuclear engineer could muster up for studying in elementary school. Pedro Suanzes and Edu Velazquez are both Goths, loners with long hair and black clothes, given a wide berth due to the suspicion that they're plotting to murder the rest of the cla.s.s in some painful way. "Hedgehog" Sousa is an Ecuadorian with spiky hair and a wall lizard's laugh. And then there's Rainbow, nicknamed for the many different colors he wears, almost the full spectrum.

The sun that comes in through the window and rests on the desks is sometimes more interesting than cla.s.s. Sylvia would love to pole-vault over her age. Be ten years older. Right now. Get up without permission, move through the rows of desks, reach the door, and leave her life behind. In spite of everything, Sylvia still hasn't achieved Rainbow's perfect indifference. Sitting behind her, he sometimes plays with his pen cap among the thick jungle of Sylvia's curls, as if he dreamed of finding a toucan or some other exotic bird beneath the mat of black hair. Sylvia doesn't like her hair. She'd rather have the adopted Byelorussian Nadia's blond locks or Alba's straight hair. They were two of her best friends at school. The good thing about hair is that at least you don't have to see it all the time. Unlike your b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Two years ago, Sylvia secretly prayed they would grow; she now suspects that her prayers were answered, to an extreme. As if wishing for rain brought floods. She doesn't dare take a step without her 38C bra, a garment that she's always found orthopedic. On the street, she puts up with constant l.u.s.tful stares focused on them, in gym cla.s.s she listens to Santiso and Ochoa joke about their uncontrollable bouncing, and in every conversation there is a moment where they monopolize all the attention, s.p.a.ce, and time. When she chooses a T-shirt or a sweater, she is competing with her t.i.ts. If they take center stage, the rest of her is ignored. Sometimes she jokes that it's a drag to always arrive a minute after her b.o.o.bs. Her friend Mai reproaches her for buying loose shirts instead of form-fitting ones. Would you rather be flat like me, no one can tell the difference between my chest and my back. But Sylvia suspects that Mai pretends to be envious just to make her feel less self-conscious.

Others had sat at that same desk before her, enveloped in the same bittersweetness, that desire to desire. The Inst.i.tuto Felix Paravicino was founded in 1932, expanded in 1967 with an impersonal concrete extension that insults the beauty of the original brick one, and in 1985 went from being an all-girls school to coed. In the old building, the staircases are wide with intricate braided patterns on the floor and a wooden railing with an addictive curve that thousands of young hands caress each day. In the new building, the stairs are narrow and have a terrazzo floor, like you'd find in a bathroom, and a handrail made of cheap pine with a glossy varnish. The old building has wide French windows, where the gla.s.s is set into wood with iron latches that turn with a pleasant friction. In the new building, the windows are aluminum, with handles that creak when you pull them. The hallways of the old building are s.p.a.cious and light-filled, with art nouveau tiles. In the new one, they're tight, dark halls punctuated by tiny hollow wood doors. When someone goes from one building to the other, it's like an aesthetic slap in the face; if the world's progress were judged solely based on the expansion, we are clearly headed in an appalling direction.

On Fridays Sylvia finds the succession of cla.s.ses even more unbearable. Dona Pilar, history, first thing. Nicknamed "I Was There" because no matter how distant an event she describes, she seems old enough to have lived through it. They say she managed to suppress her death certificate to make it look like she's still alive. In the family vault, they've given her an ultimatum: they'll hold her spot for a couple months more. And Dionisio, the English teacher-his eyes shine brighter than the students' do when the bell rings, even though he doesn't seem to have anything more exciting awaiting him than the sports section, or maybe one of those Internet sites where chicks get it on with horses. Carmen, the Spanish teacher, has a nervous problem with her jaw and can only speak for ten minutes; the rest of the cla.s.s is devoted to syntactical exercises. During cla.s.s she brings her hand to her jawbone as if it were about to detach from her face, and even though she seems to be in constant pain, her students insist it's all due to her voracious oral s.e.x practices. Don Emilio, physics, tirelessly travels down the aisles between the desks like he's trying to break an Olympic record. His students imagine him arriving home proudly: honey, today I did four and a half miles in four cla.s.ses. Octavio, math, has a bushy moustache and neck paralysis, and leans to the right stiff and unstable, as if an intense wind were blowing from the other direction. He is the only one who sometimes gives them the pleasure of interrupting cla.s.s to talk about real life, commenting on a TV show or a curious news item, or helping them to calculate what inflation means when applied to their teen interests. Any chance of a second's break from cla.s.swork feels like a party. Last year they used to leave the newspaper on his desk to tempt him into commenting on it and squandering cla.s.s time. Sylvia has the feeling that her teachers have given up any other existence beyond being teachers. When she sees them on the street, they are unrecognizable, like a doctor out of his office. Like once when her mother told her about going to the theater and being greeted in a friendly way by someone in the next row, not realizing until the third act that it was her dentist.

But Sylvia doesn't have a much higher opinion of her cla.s.smates. The cla.s.s is a chorus of yawns. At the breaks, they rush off into groups, as if they were afraid of being alone for even a second. In the cafeteria and the schoolyard, they congregate in front of a magazine or a cell phone screen and exchange short text messages between loud off-key laughs. And then there's the jocks, for whom cla.s.s is intolerable bench time before continuing the never-ending game. In the schoolyard, six simultaneous soccer games are being disputed, one of them played with a tennis ball in a shrunken version of the game unfit for the nearsighted. Sylvia and her girlfriends can't let their guard down, because someone is always practicing their aim by kicking a ball at their a.s.ses or bellies, and they have to pretend it doesn't hurt while the others laugh. Those who haven't managed to infiltrate any of the main cliques wander invisible through the school grounds like chameleons concealing their loneliness. And there are the ones who take their schoolwork seriously, exchanging materials in the library and often staying in the cla.s.sroom during recess.

Sometimes, when a teacher finishes an explanation and asks if anyone has any questions, Sylvia has a desire to raise her hand and say, yes, could you start all over again from the beginning? I mean from the very beginning, from birth, because I don't understand a thing from any of these almost sixteen years I've been alive.

Summer is over. A couple of weeks ago, on the first Sat.u.r.day after school started, Sylvia went out with her friend Mai. She met a guy and they got drunk on beer. She had started drinking just three months earlier. They danced together sweatily in the heat of the packed club, and Sylvia ended up with her back against the bathroom wall, her gaze fixed on a broken tile the color of cinnamon, his saliva near, his breath, and his nervous hand that after failing to open her bra forced its fingers into her panties. The bathroom was dirty, the boy was named Pablo, and it was impossible to understand what he was saying into her ear in damp whispers because of the deafening music. It wasn't easy to get away and run through the bathroom, dodging puddles of p.i.s.s, to get some air on the street. When she looked up, he was watching her, stock-still, from the opposite sidewalk.

He wasn't gonna be the one, either.

Luckily Mai took her home and managed to erase the trail of smoke, beer, and confused desire. Don't obsess. Virginity is all in your head, said Mai. You lose it by thinking, and by jerking off, honey. You're not a virgin, Sy, you've just never been with a man.

Mai lived six blocks from Sylvia, although they'd only started hanging out in high school. She was a year older, but they shared the same corner in the cafeteria, which was like a sort of bunker Mai kept people out of with lashes of her sharp tongue. Only a select few had access to her world. Sylvia had modeled her own taste on Mai's firm criteria. Thanks to Mai, she'd worn her first short skirt and her first black tights and thick-soled boots, although she still hadn't dared to wear T-shirts without shoulder pads because of her scandalous bust. They had bought a silver ring together in a craft market and Mai had placed it on Sylvia's thumb. She started writing her name with a y y like Mai had suggested and listening to decent music. For Mai music was divided into decent and all the rest. Mai had drilled a small silver hoop through her nose, peed standing up, and had been smoking since she was thirteen. like Mai had suggested and listening to decent music. For Mai music was divided into decent and all the rest. Mai had drilled a small silver hoop through her nose, peed standing up, and had been smoking since she was thirteen.

Last summer Mai had hooked up with a guy she met in Ireland, while she was there studying English. She spent all of July f.u.c.king, as she declared to Sylvia in laconic e-mails. "Sy, I'm a new woman. Yes, a new woman!" she wrote one day. When they saw each other again at the airport, Sylvia felt that Mai was indeed a new woman. The pimples on her chin had disappeared, she had streaked her black hair with red, and her new bangs covered one eye, the one she called her ugly eye. She had tattooed a vine with razor-blade leaves around her left ankle and now she showered almost every day. It seemed to Sylvia that Mai's mouth was more fleshy, her lips more voluptuous. But the real transformation was in Mai's laugh. She no longer laughed with her typical twisted contempt. No. Now boundless chortles bubbled up from deep inside her, a true, open laughter that to Sylvia smelled of s.e.x and satisfaction.

It's as if my p.u.s.s.y had finally become a full-fledged part of my body. Not like before, where it was more like a subletter in the apartment downstairs. Then she told her about Mateo. He's from Leon, so I didn't practice much English.

Sylvia listened to Mai talk about her relationship and she felt something strange. She hadn't yet identified it as desire whistling beside her ear.

In the pigsty, which was what Mai called her room, filled with CDs and clothes bought at street markets, there was no s.p.a.ce for romance. But now every Friday she hopped on a bus to spend the weekend with her guy in a big old house in Bierzo. You're going to turn into a red-cheeked village girl, Sylvia would tell her, the joke covering up her fear that they would grow apart.

Dani joined them at the cafeteria table. He was in Mai's cla.s.s and their friendship had sprung up spontaneously. One day Mai was tirelessly humming a song, backed up by her made-up English lyrics, and Dani touched her on the shoulder and held out a worn sheet of paper. In the margins, he had written the words to the song. Up until then, she hadn't spoken more than two monosyllabic words to Dani, with his thin silver gla.s.ses and evasive gaze. The song was by a group from Denver headed by a sinister guy who performed sitting in a wing chair surrounded by his musicians. It was called "Let's Pretend the World Is Made for Us Only" and Dani joined just that world Mai claimed to live in, the one she had built up around herself.

That Friday Mai cuts her last two cla.s.ses to catch the three-thirty ALSA bus for Leon. Sylvia sees her walking away from school with her headphones beneath her hair, her butch swagger, and her big black boots that match her exaggerated eye shadow.

At the end of the schoolday, Sylvia b.u.mps into Dani. Actually, she had been waiting to b.u.mp into him, after pacing nervously in front of the bulletin board in the lobby. Satur, the porter, reads the sports news and nods his head to each teacher who leaves; to the students, he gives only a considered disdain. At the back of the hallway is an enormous painting of the monk the high school is named after, a reproduction of a portrait by El Greco, with a slogan engraved in stylized letters: "Be neither so arrogant as to presume to be liked by everyone, nor so humble as to give in to the discontent of a few." The students' eyes had run over the sentence a thousand times without really getting it, or even paying it much attention.

Sylvia fakes running into Dani by accident and he looks up from the magazine he is reading, one of those bibles of teen taste.

Hey, Dani, Sunday's my birthday. Oh, yeah? Happy birthday. I'm having a little party at my house...Mai's coming. And a few other people. You wanna come? Dani doesn't answer right away. Sunday? Yeah, in the afternoon, on the early side. Around four-thirty, five. Um, I'm not sure if I have plans.

They walk along the street. Cars two rows deep and the sound of honking horns. The northern exit of the school has traffic jams on Fridays. The junction of avenues is presided over by a Corte Ingles department store, triumphant like a modern cathedral. A blond American actress with a suspiciously perfect nose encourages autumnal spending. Dani's jeans fall from his waist, their bottoms frayed at his heels. Sylvia is convinced that her lips are too thin and she tries to make them look bigger with an expression she's practiced in front of the mirror two thousand times, the slightly open mouth.

Will there be potato chips, Coca-Cola, sandwiches? he asks. Yeah, of course, and a clown that blows up d.i.c.k-shaped balloons. Sylvia adjusts her backpack on her shoulder. Are you gonna come? Dani nods. Sixteen, right? he adds. Yup, sixteen. An old lady.

Sylvia's hair floats up over her shoulders as she walks. She is wearing it down and as she steps off the curb it rises weightlessly and then drifts back to its original position. Dani heads toward the metro. As they say good-bye, she's about to tell him the truth. There is no party. It's all just a stupid tactic to get him alone. But she just answers his ciao with an identical one of her own.

Sylvia walks toward her house. There is a slight breeze that hits her back and pushes a curl toward her cheek. As she always does when she's nervous, Sylvia chews on a lock of hair, walking with it in her mouth.

2.

Aurora broke her hip in a completely unspectacular way. Getting out of the bathtub, she lifted her leg over the edge and suddenly heard a small crunch. She felt a slight shiver and her legs turned rubbery. She fell slowly, with time to brush the tips of her fingers along the wall tiles and prepare for the impact. Her elbow hit the fixtures, causing a cold pain, and a second later she was lying down, naked and overcome, on the still-damp bottom of the bathtub. Papa, she wanted to shout, but the sound came out weak. She tried to raise her voice, but the best she could do was emit a repet.i.tive, well-s.p.a.ced-out lament.

Papa...Papa...Papa.

The murmur reaches the little back room, where Leandro is reading the newspaper. His first reaction is to think that his wife is calling him for another one of her ridiculous requests, for him to get down a jar of spices on a too-high shelf, to ask him something silly. So he answers with an apathetic what? that gets no reply. He leisurely closes the newspaper and stands up. Later he will be ashamed of the irritation he feels at having to stop reading. It's always the same: he sits down to read and she talks to him over the radio or the ringing telephone. Or the doorbell sounds and she asks, can you get it? when he already has the intercom receiver in his hand. He goes down the hallway until he identifies where the monotonous call is coming from. There is no urgency in Aurora's voice. Perhaps fatalism. When he opens the bathroom door and finds his fallen wife, he thinks that she's sick, dizzy. He looks for blood, vomit, but all he sees is the white of the bathtub and her glazed, naked skin.

Without exchanging a word, in a strange silence, Leandro prepares to pick her up. He takes her old whitish body in his arms. The flaccid flesh, the melted b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the inert arms and thighs, the veins that show through in violet lines.

No, don't move me. I think I broke something. Did you slip? No, all of a sudden...Where does it hurt? I don't know. Don't worry. In a gesture he can't quite explain, Leandro, who has been married to Aurora for forty-seven years, grabs a nearby towel and covers his wife's body modestly.

Leandro notices the bottom of the bathtub. It's worn down by the water's chafing and repainted in some stretches with white enamel that doesn't match the rest. Leandro is seventy-three years old. His wife, Aurora, is two years younger. The bathtub will soon have served them for forty-one years, and Leandro now recalls that two or three years ago Aurora had asked him to replace it. Look for one you like and if it's not too much of a ha.s.sle we'll have it put in, he said to her without much enthusiasm. But why had he stopped in that moment to think about the bathtub?

What am I doing? he asks, lost, unable to react. Call an ambulance. Leandro is overcome by an irrepressible shame. He thinks of the commotion it will cause in the neighborhood, the explanations. Really? Yes, come on, make the call. And get me dressed, bring me my robe.

Leandro calls the emergency number. They connect him with a doctor who recommends that he not move her and asks for information about the fall, the pain symptoms, her age, general health. For a moment, he thinks the only attention they are going to get is over the phone, like any other kind of customer service, and then, terrified, he insists, send someone, please. Don't worry, an ambulance is on the way. The wait is more than twenty minutes. Aurora tries to dress herself, she's managed to stick her arms into the sleeves of her robe, but every movement is painful. Put a nightgown in a bag, and a change of clothes, Aurora asks him.

The EMTs bring noise, activity, which is somehow comforting after the tense stillness of the wait. They take Aurora downstairs on a stretcher to the ambulance. Leandro, disoriented and out of place, is invited to accompany her. His gaze searches through the ring of neighbors for a familiar face. The widow from the first-floor-right apartment is there, the one they locked horns with over her no vote on the installation of a communally funded elevator in the old building. She looks at him with curiosity in her miserable little eyes. He asks Mrs. Carmen, who lives on their floor, to go up and close the door that he left open. On the way to the hospital, beneath the high-pitched blasts of the siren, Aurora takes Leandro's hand. Don't worry, she tells him. The nurse, in his ridiculous phosph.o.r.escent jacket, looks at them with a smile. You'll see, it's nothing.

Call Lorenzo from the hospital, keep trying, he usually carries his cell phone. Sylvia will be in cla.s.s, but don't frighten them, okay, don't frighten them, warns Aurora. Lorenzo is their only child and Sylvia is their granddaughter. Leandro nods, holding Aurora's hand, uncomfortable. I love her, he thinks. I've always loved her. He doesn't say anything because at that moment he's afraid. It is a paralyzing and menacing fear. From inside the windowless box, he senses the speed at which they are moving through the city. What hospital are we going to? asks Aurora. And Leandro thinks, of course, why didn't I think to ask, I should be taking care of these things, but his head is a confused static of a thousand jumbled feelings.

3.

Lorenzo listened to the morning arrive, as if on tiptoe. The rhythm of the cars increasing. The garbage truck. The first hums of the elevator. The metal gate of a storefront opening on the street. His daughter's alarm clock, with those three minutes of respite it grants her before ringing again. He listened to her shower quickly. Eat breakfast standing up and leave the house. The police helicopter that crosses over the city at that time of day. Some horn, a car that's having trouble starting. His hands tensely grip the top of the sheets. As he releases them, he notices his fingers are stiff; they've been clenched for hours, grabbing the bedspread like a mountain climber would his rope. The autumn sun has started to beat against the blinds and warm the room.

He runs his hand over his head. He's lost so much hair in the last few months...When he was younger, he'd had a receding hairline, but now it was devastating. He took Propecia and bought an anti-hair-loss shampoo, after less conventional methods failed. At first Pilar laughed when she saw him counting the hairs left in the comb or meticulously placing a lock. Then she realized what a big deal it was for him and avoided the subject. f.u.c.k, I'm going bald, Lorenzo said once, and she had tried to ease his mind, don't exaggerate. But he wasn't exaggerating.

His hair was the first of a long list of lost things, thought Lorenzo. His hands gripped the sheets in a protective gesture, trying to hold on. As if losing everything wasn't an abstract fear but rather something that was happening to him right here and now.

What have you done, Lorenzo? What have you done?

It's almost ten a.m. when the phone begins to ring insistently. He had turned off his cell phone and put it away in the bedside table. But the landline kept ringing and ringing. In the living room and in the kitchen. Each with its own ring. The cordless in the living room, more high-pitched, more electrical. He wasn't going to pick it up, he wasn't going to answer. He wasn't home. He heard it ring for a while and then stop. A short pause and it rang again. It was obvious that it was the same tenacious person calling repeatedly. Weren't they ever going to get tired? Lorenzo was afraid.

What have you done, Lorenzo? What the h.e.l.l have you done?

The night before Lorenzo had killed a man. A man he knew. A man who had been, for several years, his best friend. Seeing him again, in spite of the unusual circ.u.mstances of their meeting, in spite of the violence that was unleashed, Lorenzo couldn't help remembering the last time they had seen each other, almost a year ago. Paco had changed, a bit fatter. He still had his hair, with the same pale wave as always, but he seemed slower, heavier in his movements. We've both changed, thought Lorenzo, crouching in the dark. Paco had a placid face. Was he happy? wondered Lorenzo, and the mere suspicion that he was could extenuate what would later happen. No, he couldn't be happy; it would be too unfair.

Lorenzo had fled with Paco's gray eyes still fixed on his. It isn't easy to kill a man you know, to fight with him. It's dirty. It has something of suicide to it: you are killing a part of yourself, everything you shared. It has something of your own death in it. It's not easy to remain motionless in front of a dying body, either, trying to tell if it has stopped breathing or just fainted. Then go over every mistake, every movement, thinking of the person who will later arrive to figure out what happened. p.r.i.c.k up your ears to make sure no one is listening, prepare your cowardly getaway. Is there such a thing as a brave getaway?

Lorenzo went out the same way he had come in. Over the rear fence, after running his hand along the back of the dog, who had licked his boots. He had left the hose in the garage running, to flood the place. Turning it into a fish tank would help to eliminate prints, make reconstructing the scene more difficult. He raised himself up, looked both ways, and jumped over the fence. He could be seen by a neighbor, recorded by a security camera. He walked to his car, taking his time. Someone could be watching him, jotting down his license plate, remembering his face. It wasn't an exclusive neighborhood, but in that area of Mirasierra, filled with single-family homes and buildings with few apartments, strangers attract attention. It wasn't dawn. It was eleven-fifteen on a Thursday. A normal, workaday hour, not a criminal time of day in the slightest. He had killed a man in the garage, a man he knew. It had all been an accident, a mistake fueled by the grudge Lorenzo held against Paco. Men shouldn't listen to their resentment; it gives them bad advice.

Lorenzo didn't consider his crime something cold, something calculated. It wasn't what he intended to do. But when he was taken by surprise by the car's headlights, when he raised the garage door and hid behind the barbecue grill wrapped in its green cover, he already knew what was going to happen. He didn't hesitate.

Lorenzo had brought a machete. When he bought it, just in case, he was thinking more about the dog than about Paco. Even though he knew it was a friendly dog, who barked at first but then was thrilled to have visitors. But that dog could have since died and been replaced by a different one, a really violent one. So the dog had justified the machete. But when Lorenzo extended his hand and grabbed the handle at the bottom of the sports bag, he knew the machete had always been meant for Paco. He remembered being in the mountaineering store, feeling the sharpened blade. What had he been thinking of then?

Afterward, Lorenzo followed his established plan. After changing in his car, he sprinkled gasoline over his clothes and the boots two sizes too big. He left them burning in the dumpster at an out-of-the-way construction site, but anyone could have seen the flames, even though it was on the other side of the city, and made a connection between the man who started the fire and the murder. They would describe Lorenzo as a stocky man in his forties, bald, yes, they'd say bald, who drives an old red car, and if they were someone who knew about makes, they could even specify it, an Opel Astra. The time that it would take for them to put the evidence together is the time that Lorenzo took cover between the sheets, with an aching forearm from the night before. He still hadn't seen the intense bruises that his friend Paco's fingers had left on his forearms, a sign of the struggle. When he sees the oval-shaped marks as big as coins, he'll recognize the physical stamp a man leaves as he's trying to cling to the life slipping away from him. The telephone rings again. Like a threat hanging in the air.

4.

Ariel is the kind of person who never could've imagined himself crying in an airport. As moving as he finds other people's tears in those bastions of farewells and reunions, he had been convinced that embarra.s.sment would keep him from ever shedding them himself. Now he's glad that he's wearing sungla.s.ses, since his eyes are flooded.

The head of security for the soccer club, Ormazabal, told him to ask for angel Rubio, the airport commissioner. The officer at pa.s.sport control heard his boss's name spoken and looked up. He recognized Ariel behind his sungla.s.ses and let him pa.s.s with a complicit smile. So Ariel was able to accompany his brother to the boarding gate. At that time of night, on a Sat.u.r.day, the airport was quiet. At check-in, he had been struck by the sight of his brother's suitcase, metal, enormous, covered with stickers, dragged along by the conveyer belt. The suitcase, the same suitcase that had arrived with them a month and a half earlier. It was leaving. And Ariel was being left behind in this city he still hasn't conquered, in an enormous house where he would only be greeted by the echo of his older brother Charlie.

Charlie was the noise and the euphoria, the ruckus, the decisions, the temperament, the voice. In Buenos Aires, when the murmuring about some Spanish team's interest in him went from rumor to reality, Ariel didn't hesitate for a second. You'll come with me, Charlie. His brother was evasive. I've got my life here. My wife, two kids, I'm not a guardian, a babysitter, a chaperone. He never said yes, but during the negotiations there was talk of plane tickets for both of them, three trips for two per season, the house where they would live, the day they would arrive, their best interests.

At the Ezeiza airport, when Charlie's two children hugged him good-bye, Ariel felt selfish. He needed his brother to go with him, to have him close, someone who could solve everyday matters. But he also knew he was doing Charlie a favor. He was suffocating in Buenos Aires, work and family life were crushing him, as he used to say. Although he heard him comforting the boys, don't worry, it's Uncle Ariel who's leaving, I'll be back real soon, he knew that Charlie was glad to escape, that he longed for Madrid. He was dragging his older brother along because he knew that he was enjoying the adventure. Ariel's soccer career had always been an experience Charlie lived vicariously, even more so since his brother had become a professional player.

They left their parents behind, he with his job as a munic.i.p.al engineer and she acting tough, although she quit the act the day they left and warned, I'm not going to the airport, I've got to protect this heart. Their father did come, remaining on the other side of security, holding tight to his two grandsons' chests and with Charlie's wife at his back. She was crying. She might be losing a husband, thought Ariel then. But their old man wasn't crying. He was witnessing, with a mix of pride and tension, his son Ariel leap into adult life.

They knew other players who left Argentina to try their luck in Europe traveled with an entourage. Family members, nannies, and friends became professionals in the business of creating an intimate circle. Fair-weather friends, as "Dragon" Colosio would say, the kind who disappear when a storm blows in. Club and cabaret friends who manage to make closing hour less abysmal. One had to protect oneself from the void, from the unknown. When Ariel suggested he come to Madrid, his father had answered him, don't be like those morons who let the people around them burn up their cash and their life. Take this chance to get to know another country and face up to it like you should, for yourself. When he found out Charlie was going with Ariel, he just shrugged his shoulders.

With Charlie by his side, Ariel could close his eyes on the plane and sleep for most of the flight, his brother restlessly nearby, watching all the movies at once on the channels of his screen, asking for another beer when he still had half of one left, speaking loudly, flirting with the flight attendant, So are all the chicks in Spain as pretty as you? He radiated the confidence of an older brother, the same confidence he'd had when he had taken four-year-old Ariel by the hand and walked him to the Admiral Curiel Preschool on the first day. When they stepped onto the run-down playground, Charlie said, if anyone touches you or gives you any s.h.i.t, get their name and tell me later. Don't you get into it with anyone, okay?

Ariel felt like that same kid on the first day of school when he landed at Barajas Airport on a soupy summer day in July and found himself cornered by a troupe of photographers and television cameras shooting questions at him about his expectations, his favorite position to play, what he knew about Spanish fans, and the supposed controversy surrounding his jersey, that Dani Vilar didn't want to give him the number seven. Charlie guided him toward the exit with a lopsided smile, repeating, there'll be plenty of chances for questions, gentlemen, plenty of chances. Then he met up with the club's representative, the first time he had seen Ormazabal, and said authoritatively, where the h.e.l.l is the car? He was the same brother who, at ten years old, had convinced Ariel on his fifth birthday that he would always be twice his age, just as he was then. When you're ten, I'll be twenty, and when you're fifty, I'll be a hundred. And even when math denied that forced logic, Ariel had never doubted his brother was always twice what he was, in everything.

But now Charlie was leaving. That's why Ariel hadn't taken off his sungla.s.ses, even in the VIP room where they waited for boarding to start. He didn't want anyone bothering him for an autograph, but he also wasn't sure he'd be able to hold back his tears, even though his brother was downplaying the separation. It's time for me to be getting back. It's a bit sooner than I had thought, sure, but these things happen.

Charlie reviewed with Ariel all the things that were organized and in order. The house rented by the club, on the outskirts of town, in an exclusive housing development where there were retired politicians, successful entrepreneurs, a couple of television stars, a place where a soccer player didn't turn anyone's head. Emilia and Luciano were the couple who took care of the house. He did the gardening and repaired anything that needed fixing; she cleaned and cooked. They both disappeared at three in the afternoon. When Ariel apologized one morning for the living room table filled with empty beer bottles, ashes, and b.u.t.ts left by Charlie, Emilia told him not to worry. These past two years we had a British executive and, honestly, I've never met anyone so disgusting. Suffice to say that Luciano had to repaint the walls and even change the toilet bowl lids. And this guy was the head of a multinational company that makes cleaning products. But then, the shoemaker's children often run barefoot.

Emilia, Charlie told him, will treat you like a son. You've already seen how she cooks. The car issue was solved twelve hours after their arrival in Madrid. The club had offers from all the manufacturers, and Charlie chose a platinum Porsche Carrera after visiting the dealership with the publicity manager's a.s.sistant. Charlie's response to Ariel's hesitations was categorical: it's a bold car, to make it clear to everyone that you've come to be seen. On this team, you have to earn your spot even in the stadium parking lot. And if you get tired of it, you'll just switch, the brands are all dying to have soccer players drive their cars. At the airport, Charlie warns him, now don't go changing your car for a SUV, I know how you can be. Only moms drive that kind of car here, to feel more protected in their little tanks.

In the club, there were no more mysteries to be revealed. Ariel knows the staffers who are useful to him. The president was a man who had earned his stripes in the construction business, but he now presided over a true empire of private protection, with more than a hundred thousand employees: a manufacturer of armored cars, trucks for transporting money, alarms, reinforced steel doors. He wasn't interested in soccer unless he was getting insulted in the stands; then he was irascible, unpredictable, and childish in his reactions. He was unappealing, slightly hunchbacked, with graying hair; the players called him "the mother from Psycho." Psycho." In the first training sessions, he had come down to the field to greet the players, and when he shook the hand of the captain, Amilcar, a veteran Brazilian player who had become a nationalized Spaniard, the president said, are you still here? I thought you'd retired by now. Even though he was serious, everyone laughed at the joke. He compared his business success with game philosophy. I want my team to have the best defense in the league, no one should steal the ball from us. During Ariel's official presentation, before the ridiculous tradition of showing him to the television cameras kicking around the ball alone on the field in his jersey, the president spoke to the journalists. I'm still determined to sign defenders, to have a team as safe as a fort, and they told me the Argentinians are good kickers and they work their tails off on the field. Ariel found himself forced to laugh and joke around with the journalists. They always told me that the best defense is a good offense, without knowing for sure if the club owner was aware that he'd just signed a left winger. In the first training sessions, he had come down to the field to greet the players, and when he shook the hand of the captain, Amilcar, a veteran Brazilian player who had become a nationalized Spaniard, the president said, are you still here? I thought you'd retired by now. Even though he was serious, everyone laughed at the joke. He compared his business success with game philosophy. I want my team to have the best defense in the league, no one should steal the ball from us. During Ariel's official presentation, before the ridiculous tradition of showing him to the television cameras kicking around the ball alone on the field in his jersey, the president spoke to the journalists. I'm still determined to sign defenders, to have a team as safe as a fort, and they told me the Argentinians are good kickers and they work their tails off on the field. Ariel found himself forced to laugh and joke around with the journalists. They always told me that the best defense is a good offense, without knowing for sure if the club owner was aware that he'd just signed a left winger.

It was the sports director who was really in charge, a former player for the team, a center back whose mantelpiece, they said, boasted several tibias, quite a few fibulas, and even the femur of some opponents hunted on the playing field. His career in the team's offices was based on opposite tactics: he was a devious and inscrutable negotiator. They still called him by his nickname as a player, Pujalte, and when Ariel asked what his real name was, he answered, forget about it, everybody calls me Pujalte, it's simpler.

The coach, on the other hand, had never been a great player. He had made a name for himself on a modest team that had been promoted to the Second Division. He lowered his head almost imperceptibly around Pujalte, who spoke to him with an almost physical authority, challenging him with his experienced past as a player. His name was Jose Luis Requero and he practiced laboratory soccer, preferring the chalkboard to the gra.s.s. His laptop was filled with statistics, and he always had a delicate, shy young man nearby, some relative of the president, who spent his time recording and editing games in order to correct the team's errors or prepare for confrontations with rivals. Requero claimed to use group psychology. He gave long tactical talks based on jottings from the notebook he always carried with him, and when some journalist suggested he was starting to be known as "the professor," he smiled with open pleasure. It was his second season with the club, after a discreet year without t.i.tles. The first day of training, he introduced them to his a.s.sociates, including a physical trainer with two a.s.sistants who looked almost exactly like him; the ma.s.seurs; the head equipment man with his small troupe; and the goalkeeper coach, a former goalie born in Eibar with pre-Neanderthal features. Then he gave every staff member a copy of the book Shared Success Shared Success, written by two young American entrepreneurs, which opened with a maxim: "When you celebrate a triumph, don't forget that you would have never achieved anything without the help of those around you." Just a few days into the preseason, the book was already the object of widespread mockery in the locker room, particularly because of a sentence pulled from page twenty-six that they claimed was charged with hidden h.o.m.os.e.xual content: "a man and another man by his side are much more than two men." Yeah, sure, two big f.a.ggots, summed up the fullback Luis Lastra to the delight of his audience.

Ariel had worked with different coaches since he had been signed, at seventeen, to San Lorenzo. Up until that point, he had been a player with just one teacher, Sinbad Colosio, who ran a soccer school near the old Gasometro where hundreds of players had trained for a small team that played in the Fifth Division. He had invited Ariel to join them at twelve years old, after seeing him play in a city championship. He always said to Charlie, the only way to get anything out of your brother's left leg is to keep him away from the professional teams for a while. Save him from this country's sick obsession with finding a new Maradona. Ariel had him as technical director for five years, and it was with him that he became a soccer player. In Buenos Aires you have to get to the big leagues in a submarine, because here the expectations kill you as fast as a dagger, Ariel heard him say on one occasion.

Sinbad Colosio had been a second father to Ariel. His own father's lack of interest in soccer, which he labeled our "homegrown opiate" or "national disgrace" depending on the degree of irritation its ubiquitous presence provoked in him, had handed over young Ariel to the old coach. Colosio was a sad-looking man in a worn sweatsuit, with graying hair, who spoke slowly as he took you by the shoulder. Ariel's father didn't want to repeat with his younger son the mistakes he felt he had made with Charlie. His determination to keep him out of sports and off the streets had only meant his older son ended up an unskilled worker in the business of some friends who owed him favors. Charlie married young and at twenty-two already had two kids. During Charlie's teenage years, their relationship was more like that of two rabid dogs than father and son, so when Ariel's turn came, his father opted for calm and relaxed, which allowed Ariel to devote most of his time and energy to soccer and not worry too much about his grades.

They called Colosio "Dragon." The nickname had stuck from his days as a player. Now sometimes they called him Sleeping Dragon, because he seemed to have mellowed, that is until he exploded with a fierce lash like the irascible dragon he must have been back when, they said, just the sound of his breath made the forwards lose the ball. He came to pick up Ariel in Floresta three times a week, in his white 1980 Torino. By then he had already picked up Macero and Alameda, who lived in Quilmes and Villa Esmeralda, at the bus stop. The three boys sat in the backseat, Ariel gave them his extra trading cards from the championship collection, and they waited for Dragon to tire of his own silence and offer them some soccer anecdote. About soccer from the fifties and sixties, when the young players had to shine the veterans' shoes, when the b.a.l.l.s were sewn, when the only drugs in the locker room were a thermos of strong black coffee and the first amphetamines, when the goalie called you "sir" when asking for the ball, when there was no television and you had to store the crackerjack plays in your own memory and recount them like Fioravanti, when making a living playing soccer was a luxury for only the best. He spoke without nostalgia, without mythologizing the past, and always ended by grumbling, what c.r.a.ppy years, kids, what c.r.a.ppy years.

Dragon Colosio had taught him to play angry, to not go onto the field looking to make friends, to curse at the fullbacks, to practice for fifteen minutes at the end of each game because if you're not thinking about the next one you're not a soccer player, to step on the lime sideline when you forget that you play left wing, to not cry over losses because crying is for tangos. And when Ariel wanted to sign with a pro club at fifteen and Charlie insisted he accept, Colosio told him something that perhaps today, in the Madrid airport, was still valid: Ariel, your brother is your brother and you are you. Then Ariel stayed, as much as Charlie tried to convince him, Dragon is a loser and you can't let a loser run your career. Now he was alone again and thinking, Charlie is Charlie and I'm me. But who am I?

Your routine will keep you busy, Charlie was saying to him, you won't have time to be lonely. Charlie is the last one to board, almost defiant toward the airline employees. He hugs Ariel and whispers into his ear, in a very soft voice, finally referring to the reason for his hasty departure. I f.u.c.ked up, Ariel, that's why I don't deserve to stay by your side. I don't want to tarnish you. Now you have to fly solo. I hope you'll make us proud. Deal?

Deal.

He squeezes Ariel's back hard, pulling him toward him. Don't cry, you dope, someone who earns two and half million dollars a year can't cry. And he disappears into the breezeway that leads to the plane.

Ariel retraces his steps until he gets to the car parked in front of the terminal. He goes back to the hotel where the team is spending the night before the next day's game. Pujalte had given him permission to leave the pregame preparation and take his brother to the airport; of course, family comes first.

When he enters the hotel, he sees some of his teammates chatting in small groups before going up to their rooms. Amilcar waves to him. He is the team's most veteran player. Beside him is Poggio, the reserve goalie who has been warming the bench for five years straight, which makes me the highest-paid a.s.s in the world after Jennifer Lopez, he declares. There's also Luis Lastra, a guy from Santander who joined the team the previous season and has a contagious laugh with which he loudly celebrates his own jokes. Standing, resting an immaculate sneaker on a chair, is young Jorge Blai, who readjusts his straight bangs again and again. At the bar, the Ghanaian Matuoko, a compact human refrigerator, surrept.i.tiously drinks a gin and tonic, moving it away from him after every sip as if he wants to make believe the drink isn't his. There are two or three more players nearby, the group of Brazilians, and the goalie coach who eats olives in bunches and shoots the pits into a distant trash can like a machine gun.

Ariel returns their greetings, but doesn't join the group. He walks toward the elevators and someone speaks to him by the reception desk. Did your brother leave already? I would have liked to say good-bye. Ariel turns. He recognizes the sweaty face beneath the red curls and the thick black plastic-framed gla.s.ses. He's a journalist. His name is Raul, but everybody calls him Husky because he sounds as if he has barbed branches in place of his vocal cords. A regular at practice and press conferences, in his newspaper columns he always wrote favorably about Ariel. They have had dealings on a few different occasions, but Ariel avoids creating any fake intimacy, doesn't trust journalists. They write about fishing, Dragon used to say about them, when the only fish they've ever seen in their life is the one served to them in restaurants. Husky has jotted down his phone number on a hotel business card and holds it out with two fingers. Call me if you need anything.

Ariel shoots him an appreciative expression. In the elevator mirror, he will check if his eyes are red, if they give away that he's been crying. Before he heads off, he hears the journalist saying to him, with his raspy, weak voice, good luck tomorrow.

5.