The Return (17 page)

And so on, until we came to a little room, covered inside with a layer
of cement, in which there was nothing, not one piece of furniture, not a single
light, and we shut ourselves in that room, in the dark.
An embarrassing
situation, on the face of it, but for me it was like a second or a third birth;
that is, it was like hope beginning and with it the desperate awareness of hope.
Villeneuve said: Describe the place where we are now.
And I said that it was
like death, not like real death but death as we imagine it when we’re alive.
And
Villeneuve said: Describe it.
Everything is dark, I said.
It’s like a nuclear
bomb shelter.
And I added that in a place like that the soul contracts, and I
would have gone on spelling out what I felt, the void that had come to inhabit
my soul long before I died and of which I’d been unaware until then, but
Villeneuve cut me off me, saying, That’s enough, he believed me, and suddenly he
opened the door.

I followed him to the main living room, where he poured himself a
whiskey and proceeded, in a few well-measured sentences, to ask me to
forgive him for what he had done with my body.
You’re forgiven, I said.
I’m
open-minded.
To be honest, I’m not sure I know what being open-minded
means, but I felt it was my duty to wipe the slate clean and clear our future
relationship of any guilt or resentment.

You must be wondering why I do what I do, said Villeneuve.

I assured him that I had no intention of asking for an explanation.
Nevertheless, Villeneuve insisted on giving me one.
With anyone else, it would
have become a very unpleasant evening, but I was listening to Jean-Claude
Villeneuve, the greatest designer in France, which is to say the world, and time
flew as I was given a brief account of his childhood and teenage years, his
youth, his reservations about sex, his experiences with a number of men, and
with a number of women, his solitary habits, his morbid dread of harming anyone
which may have been a screen to hide his dread of being harmed, his artistic
tastes, which I admired (and envied) unreservedly, his chronic insecurity, his
conflicts with a number of famous designers, his first jobs for a fashion house,
his voyages of initiation, which he declined to recount in detail, his
friendships with three of Europe’s finest screen actresses, his association with
the pair of pseudo-artists from the morgue, who from time to time provided
him with corpses, with which he spent only one night, his fragility, which he
compared to an endless demolition in slow motion, and so on, until the first
light of dawn began to filter through the curtains of the living room and
Villeneuve brought his long exposé to a close.

We remained silent for a long time.
I knew that both of us were, if
not overwhelmed with joy, at least reasonably happy.

Before long the orderlies arrived.
Villeneuve looked at the floor and
asked me what he should do.
After all, the body they had come for was mine.
I
thanked him for his thoughtfulness but also assured him that I was now beyond
caring about such things.
Do what you normally do, I said.
Will you go?
he
asked.
I had already made up my mind, and yet I pretended to think for a few
seconds before saying no, I wasn’t going to leave.
If he didn’t mind, of course.
Villeneuve seemed relieved: I don’t mind, on the contrary, he said.
Then a bell
rang, and Villeneuve switched on the monitors and opened the gates for the
rent-a-corpse guys, who came in without saying a word.

Exhausted by the night’s events, Villeneuve didn’t get up from the
sofa.
The pseudo-artists greeted him, and it seemed to me that one of them
was in the mood for a chat, but the other one gave him a nudge and they went
down to get my body without further ado.
Villeneuve had his eyes closed and
seemed to be asleep.
I followed the orderlies down to the basement.
My body was
lying there half covered by the body bag from the morgue.
I watched them put it
back in the bag and carry it up and place it in the trunk of the car.
I imagined
it waiting there, in the cold morgue, until a relative or my ex-wife came
to claim it.
But I mustn’t give in to sentimentality, I thought, and when the
orderlies’ car left the garden and vanished down that elegant, tree-lined
street, I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of nostalgia or sadness or
melancholy.

When I returned to the living room, Villeneuve was still on the sofa,
with his arms crossed, shivering with cold, and he was talking to himself
(though I soon realized that he thought he was talking to me).
I sat on a chair
in front of him, a chair of carved wood with a satin backrest, facing the window
and the garden and the beautiful morning light, and I let him go on talking as
long as he liked.

Buba

for Juan Villoro

The city of sanity.
The city of common sense.
That’s what the people
of Barcelona used to call their city.
I liked it.
It was a beautiful city and I
think I felt at home there from the second day on (if I said from the very first
day I’d be exaggerating) but the club wasn’t doing so well, and people started
going kind of sour, it always happens, I’m speaking from experience, at first
the fans want your autograph, they hang around outside the hotel, they’re so
friendly it’s exhausting, but then you have a run of bad luck, which leads to
another, and soon enough they start making faces, maybe you’re just lazy, they
think, or partying too much, or whoring, you know what I mean, people start to
take an interest in what you’re getting paid, they speculate, they calculate,
and there’s always a wise guy who’ll come out and accuse you of being a thief or
something a thousand times worse.
This stuff happens everywhere, I’d already
been through it once, but that was back home, in my country, and this time I was
a foreigner, and the press and the fans always expect something extra special
from foreigners.
I mean, why else would they hire us?

Me, for example, I’m a left winger, everyone knows that.
When I played
in Latin America (in Chile, then in Argentina) I scored an average of ten goals
per season.
But my debut here was disastrous; I got injured in the third game,
had to have an operation on my ligaments, and my recovery, which in theory
should have been quick, was laborious and drawn-out, but I won’t go into that.
Suddenly I was back to feeling as lonely as a lighthouse.
That’s the way it was.
I spent a fortune on calls to Santiago, but that only made Mom and Dad worry;
they didn’t understand at all.
So one day I decided to go whoring.
Why should I
deny it?
That’s the way it was.
Actually, I was just following some advice that
Cerrone, the Argentinean goalkeeper, had given me one day.
He said to me, Kid,
if you can’t think of anything else to do, and your problems are eating away at
you, go see a whore.
He was great guy, Cerrone.
I would have been nineteen at
the most and I had just joined Gimnasia y Esgrima in La Plata.
Cerrone was
already around 35 or 40, his age was a mystery, and he was the only one of the
older players who wasn’t married.
Some said Cerrone was queer.
That made me wary
of him for a start.
I was a shy sort of kid and I thought that if I got to know
a homosexual, he’d try and get me into bed straightway.
Anyway, maybe he was,
maybe he wasn’t, all I know for sure is that one afternoon, when I was lower
than ever, he took me aside, it was the first time we’d talked, really, and said
he was going to take me to meet some girls from Buenos Aires.
I’ll never forget
that night.
The apartment was downtown, and while Cerrone stayed in the living
room drinking and watching a late show on TV, I slept with an Argentinean woman
for the first time, and my depression began to lift.
Going home the next
morning, I knew that things would get better and that I still had plenty of
glory days to look forward to in the Argentinean League.
I was bound to get
depressed occasionally, I thought, but Cerrone had given me the remedy to make
it bearable.

And I did the same thing at my first European club: I went whoring and
it helped me to get over the injury, the recovery period and the loneliness.
Did
it become a habit?
Maybe, maybe not; that’s not something I can really judge
objectively.
The whores there are gorgeous, the high-class whores I mean, and
most of them are pretty smart and educated too, so it really isn’t difficult to
develop a serious taste for them.

Anyhow, I started going out every night, even Sundays when there was a
match on, and the injured players were expected to be there, in the stands,
doing their bit as VIP supporters.
But that doesn’t help your injuries to heal,
and I preferred to spend Sunday afternoons in some massage parlor with a glass
of whiskey and one or two lady friends on either side, discussing more serious
matters.
At first, of course, no one realized.
I wasn’t the only injured player,
there must have been six or seven of us in the dry dock—bad luck seemed to be
dogging the club.
But of course, there’s always some fucking journalist who sees
you coming out of a nightclub at four in the morning, and the game’s up.
News
travels fast in Barcelona, though it seems such a big and civilized city.
Soccer
news, I mean.

One morning the trainer called and said he’d found out about the life
I was leading: it was inappropriate for a professional athlete and had to stop.
Naturally I said, Yes, I’d just been having a bit of fun, and then I went on
like before, because, come on, what else was I going to do while I was still
unfit to play and the team slid down the ranking and opening the paper on a
Monday morning to look at the league table was a downer week after week.
Also, I
was convinced that what had worked for me in Argentina was going to work for me
in Spain, and the worst thing was, I was right: it did work.
But then the
bureaucrats got involved and told me: Listen, Acevedo, this has got to stop,
you’re becoming a bad example for the young and a disastrous investment for the
club, we only employ hard workers here, so from now on, no more nightlife, or
else.
And then, before I knew it, I was liable for a fine if I broke the curfew;
I could have paid it, of course, but if I was going to be throwing money away,
I’d rather have sent it to someone in Chile, like my uncle Julio, so he could
fix up his house.

These things happen and you have to deal with it.
So I dealt with it
and resolved to go out less often, once every two weeks, say, but then Buba
turned up and the management decided that the best thing for me would be to move
out of the hotel and share the apartment they’d rented for him right next to our
training ground; it was small but kind of cozy, with two bedrooms and a terrace
that was tiny but had a good view.
So that was what I had to do.
I packed my
bags and went to the apartment with one of the club’s administrators, and since
Buba wasn’t there, I chose the bedroom I wanted and took out my stuff and put it
in the closet, and then the administrator gave me my keys and left and I lay
down to take a siesta.

It was about five, and earlier that afternoon I’d put away a
fideuà
, a Barcelona specialty, which I’d already tried (I love
it, but it isn’t easy to digest) and as soon as I flopped onto my new bed I felt
so tired it was all I could do to pull off my shoes before I fell asleep.
Then I
had the weirdest dream.
I dreamed I was in Santiago again, in my neighborhood,
La Cisterna, and I was with my father, crossing the square where there’s a
statue of Che Guevara, the first statue of Che in the Americas, outside Cuba,
and that was what my father was telling me in the dream, the story of the statue
and the various attempts to destroy it before the soldiers came and blew it
away, and as we walked I was looking all around and it was like we were deep in
the jungle, and my father was saying the statue should be around here somewhere,
but you couldn’t see anything, the grass was high and only a few feeble rays of
sunlight were filtering down through the trees, just enough to see by, to show
that it was daytime, and we were following a path of earth and stones, but the
vegetation on either side was dense, there were even lianas, and you couldn’t
see anything, only shadows, until suddenly we came to a sort of clearing, with
forest all around, and then my father stopped, put one hand on my shoulder and
pointed with the other hand to something rearing up in the middle of the
clearing, a pedestal of light-colored cement, and on top of the pedestal there
was nothing, not a trace of the statue of Che, but my father and I already knew
that, Che had been removed from there a long time ago, it didn’t come as a
surprise, what mattered was that we were there together, my old man and me, and
we had found the exact place where the statue used to stand before, but while we
looked around the clearing, standing still, as if absorbed in our discovery, I
noticed that there was something at the bottom of the pedestal, on the other
side, something dark, which was moving, and I broke away from my father (he had
been holding me by the hand) and began to walk slowly toward it.

Then I saw what it was: on the other side of the pedestal there was a
black man, stark naked, drawing on the ground, and I knew straightaway that the
black man was Buba, my teammate, my housemate, although to tell you the truth,
like the rest of the players, I’d only ever seen Buba in a couple of photos, and
when you’ve only glanced at someone’s picture in the paper you can’t have a
clear idea of how they look.
But it was Buba, I had no doubts about that.
And
then I thought: Fucking hell!
I must be dreaming, I’m not in Chile, I’m not in
La Cisterna, my father hasn’t brought me to any square, and this jerk in his
birthday suit isn’t Buba, the African midfielder who just signed with our
club.

Just as I came to the end of that train of thought, the black guy
looked up and smiled at me, dropped the stick he’d been using to draw in the
yellow earth (and it really was genuine Chilean earth), leaped to his feet and
held out his hand.
You’re Acevedo, he said, glad to meet you, kid, that’s what
he said.
And I thought: Maybe we’re on tour?
But where?
In Chile?
Impossible.
And then we shook hands and Buba squeezed my hand hard and held onto it, and
while he was squeezing my hand I looked down and saw the drawings on the earth,
just scribbles, what else could they have been, but it was like I could join
them up, if you see what I mean, and the scribbles made sense, that is, they
weren’t just scribbles, they were something more.
Then I tried to bend down and
get a closer look, but I couldn’t because Buba’s hand was gripping mine and when
I tried to free myself (not so much to see the drawings anymore, but to get away
from him, to put some distance between us, because I was starting to feel
something like fear), I couldn’t; Buba’s hand and his arm seemed to be the hand
and arm of a statue, a freshly cast statue, and my hand was embedded in that
material, which felt like mud and then like molten lava.

I think that was when I woke up.
I heard noises in the kitchen and
then steps going from the living room to the other bedroom, and my arm was numb
(I’d fallen asleep in an awkward position, which happened quite often back then,
while I was recovering from the injury), and I stayed in my bedroom waiting; the
door was open, so he must have seen me; I waited and waited but he didn’t come
to the door.
I heard his footsteps, I cleared my throat, coughed, stood up; then
I heard someone opening the front door and shutting it again, very quietly.
I
spent the rest of the day alone, sitting in front of the TV, getting more and
more nervous.
I had a look in his room (I’m not a busybody but I couldn’t help
myself); he’d put his clothes in the closet drawers: track suits, some formal
wear and some African robes that looked like fancy dress to me but actually they
were beautiful.
He’d laid out his toiletries in the bathroom: a
straight-edge razor (I use disposable razors and hadn’t seen a
straight-edge for a while), lotion, English aftershave (or bought in
England anyway), and a very large, earth-colored sponge in the bathtub.

Buba returned to our new home at nine o’clock that night.
My eyes were
hurting from watching so much TV, and he told me he’d come back from a session
with the city’s sportswriters.
We didn’t really hit it off at the start and it
took us a while to become friends, though sometimes, thinking back, I come to
the melancholy conclusion that we were never what you would really call friends.
Other times, though, right now for example, I think we were pretty good friends,
and one thing’s for sure, anyway: if Buba had a friend in that club, it was
me.

It’s not like our life together was difficult.
A woman came in twice a
week to clean the apartment and we tidied up after ourselves, washed our own
dishes, made our beds, you know, the usual deal.
Sometimes I went out at night
with Herrera, a local kid who’d come up through the ranks and ended up securing
a place on the national team, and sometimes Buba came with us, but not very
often, because he didn’t really like going out.
When I stayed home I’d watch TV
and Buba would shut himself in his room and put on music.
African music.
At
first I didn’t like Buba’s cassettes at all.
In fact, the first time I heard
them, the day after he moved in, I got a fright.
I was watching a documentary
about the Amazon, waiting for a Van Damme movie to begin, and all of a sudden it
was like someone was being killed in Buba’s room.
Put yourself in my place.
It’s
not every day you face something like that; it would have rattled anyone.
What
did I do?
Well, I stood up, I had my back to Buba’s door, and naturally I braced
myself, but then I realized it was a tape, the shouts were coming from the
cassette player.
Then the noises died away, all you could hear was something
like a drum, and then someone groaning, or weeping, gradually getting louder.
I
could only take so much.
I remember walking to the door, rapping on it with my
knuckles: no response.
At that point I thought it was Buba weeping and groaning,
not the cassette.
But then I heard Buba’s voice asking what I wanted and I
didn’t know what to say.
It was all quite embarrassing.
I asked him to turn it
down.
I tried as hard as I possibly could to make my voice sound normal.
Buba
was quiet for a while.
Then the music stopped (by then it was just a drum beat
really, with maybe some kind of flute as well) and Buba said he was going to
sleep.
Good night, I said and returned to the armchair, where I sat for a while
watching the documentary about Amazon Indians with the sound off.