Keeper (16 page)

“My God,” the goalkeeper said.

“Oh, this isn’t all of it,” Faustino said. “The rest is on that computer there. One day I’ll pay one of those nerds from downstairs to put all this on disk. Then I’ll never be able to find anything, but it’ll all be very well organized.” “This is the earlier stuff. Everything I could find over the years, some of it written by me. Those are the best bits, naturally.”

Faustino rested his hand on the files. “These are in chronological order. Well, more or less.” He flipped open the lid of the first file and riffled through the collection of newspaper clippings, press releases, and pictures. Gato glimpsed a photo of the boy he had once been. “So,” Faustino continued, “this is stuff about that first season of yours as the DSJ keeper. The team finished third. Best position for, what, a hundred years?”

“Twelve, actually,” the keeper said, smiling.

“And at the end of the next season, champions. Amazing. You are voted National Player of the Year. And so it goes on. You sign with DSJ for another two years.”

Faustino stopped, looked up at Gato. “Why?” he asked. “There were bigger clubs wanting to buy you. Foreign clubs, too. Juventus, Chelsea, Atlético Madrid. But you chose to stay in godforsaken San Juan.”

The big goalkeeper shrugged. “Milton Acuna was persuasive,” he said. “He told me that yes, one day I should go to play in Europe but that, in his opinion, I was too young. I respected him. And the club offered me good money. Besides, there was my family. I was not happy at the thought of half the world separating me from them.”

This was not quite good enough for the journalist. “And it was something to do with the Keeper, perhaps? You told me that in the San Juan Park, when he half appeared to you, he seemed to be struggling to get there. Did you think there was a limit to his range, or something like that? That if you went farther away he wouldn’t be able to reach you? Or maybe that he couldn’t communicate with you if there wasn’t a chunk of your beloved rainforest handy? Was that it?”

El Gato thought about this and eventually said, “Paul, the Keeper comes with me here.” He touched his forehead with two fingers. “I haven’t seen him in the flesh for years, as I have told you.” He smiled. “Those are the wrong words, ‘in the flesh,’ but you know what I mean.”

Faustino looked hard at his friend and decided to drop the subject. He went back to the file.

“National Player of the Year the next season, too. DSJ wins the championship, blah, blah, next season they win the Cup, blah, blah. Then, at the great age of twenty, you sign for Unita and go to Italy. And in your very first season, Unita wins the European Cup.”

Faustino lifted away the top file and flipped open the next. He took out an eight-by-four glossy black-and-white photograph. “This,” he said, “is, in my opinion, one of the great pictures of all time. I’ll use it in the article.”

The photograph showed Gato lifting the European Cup above his head. How young, how triumphant, he looked! The Cup — more like a huge vase, in fact — seemed to beam the flashes of a thousand cameras down onto the young keeper’s face, giving it the radiance you normally see only in paintings of saints. A photo full of joy.

At the sight of the picture, El Gato’s face turned to stone. He pushed his chair back, went to the window, and spread his huge hands on the pane. He stood like that for perhaps half a minute; then he put his hands into his pockets and leaned his forehead against the glass.

Faustino looked at his friend’s broad back and then down at the photo. What the hell was this, now? He reached toward the
stop
button of the tape recorder, then changed his mind. He waited a few moments and then simply said, “Gato?” The goalie didn’t move. “Gato? I don’t know what the problem is. Are you going to tell me?”

Gato turned his back on the window. “Do me a favor, Paul,” he said. “Don’t use that damned photo. I never want to see it again.”

Faustino looked from his friend to the photograph and could think of nothing to say.

The goalkeeper walked across Faustino’s office and back again, then sat down in his chair. He didn’t speak, so Faustino lit a cigarette, slowly, and said, “Tell me, please, my friend,” blowing blue smoke into the yellow cone of the lamplight.

El Gato stared at the surface of the table and said, “That moment, that moment in that picture, was magical. Soon afterward, it became bitter. We’d won the European Cup, and Giorgio Massini handed it straight to me. We had a wild time that night, believe me. It was well after eight o’clock when the TV and the papers and everyone had finished with us, and then we went out on the town. We flew back to Rome the following day, all of us a bit the worse for wear, but still very, very high. At the airport, we were met by two open-top buses painted in the Unita colors and paraded through the streets, Massini and me in the front of the first bus with the Cup. Amazing scenes. Flowers, clothes, banners, money thrown at us. Fantastic. We ended up at some flash hotel or other. We did a press conference, interviews, photos. After all of that, most of the players went to their homes, wives, families, girlfriends, whatever. I was exhausted. I decided to stay at the hotel. I ate some food in my room and went to bed.”

Faustino had been at that press conference, but this did not seem the right moment to mention the fact.

“I slept like someone who had died,” Gato continued, “so when the hammering at the door started at seven the next morning it took me some time to come around. I stumbled out of bed and opened the door. A small woman stood there, fiddling anxiously with a large bunch of keys. She spoke urgently to me in Italian, pointing to the telephone beside my bed. I’d pulled the plug out of the socket before I’d gone to sleep — I hadn’t fancied reporters calling in the middle of the night. I plugged the wire back in and picked up the phone. Someone said something in Italian, then a distant, distorted voice came through. I wasn’t wide awake, and for just a moment I thought that it was the Keeper, even though the idea of him using a telephone made no sense at all. But there was an echo on the line, a shadow to the voice, that made me think it might be him, and although I knew the voice I didn’t recognize it.

It said, ‘Gato? Is that you, Gato? This is Ernst Hellman.’ Hellman! Oddly enough, my initial thought was that I’d never known his first name.

I said something like, ‘Señor Hellman, it is nice of you to call.’ I thought he was phoning to congratulate me.

‘Thank God,’ Hellman said. ‘It’s taken me three hours and sixteen calls to find you.’

I began to get a nasty feeling, a sort of cold sickness.

‘Is everything all right, Señor Hellman?’

Hellman didn’t reply right away. I listened to the sound, like the wind, in the phone. Then he said, in his blunt way, ‘No. Listen, Gato. There has been an accident.’

Then I knew.

‘My father.’ It was all I could do to speak just those two words.

‘Yah, Gato. Your father. It’s a terrible thing, telling you this. This day, of all days. He is dead, Gato. He was killed this morning.’

So I went home. It took me sixty-two hours.”

“A
FTER THE FUNERAL
, in a long conversation with Hell man, I found out what had happened, more or less.

The Cup final had been an evening game in Holland, so the live TV coverage back home had kicked off at about two in the afternoon. It was a Wednesday, but Hellman had given everyone the afternoon off. I imagine he’d done some impressive yelling into that phone of his to swing that with head office.

Several families in the town, including mine, had TV now, but of course the only place to be for the game was in the café, where they’d rigged up two extra sets, big ones. The men swarmed in, still in their work clothes and filthy boots, yelling for beer. My father had pride of place, a chair in front of the TV nearest the bar. Some of the men were already tipsy by the time the priest squeezed his way through the crowd and climbed onto a table. He made a little speech, saying that it was good to see so many men gathered in one place to witness something they were passionate about. He said he looked forward to the same thing happening in his church one day. But, he said, this was a great event for the town, and especially for one of its families. Then he said a prayer for me, warned the crowd about the dangers of drink, ordered a glass of red wine, and settled down to watch the game.

Do you remember the game, Paul? You were there.”

“Yes, I was there. What I remember is that you had a great game, and no one else did, really. It wasn’t what you’d call a classic.”

“No. For the first twenty-five minutes or so, we concentrated on keeping possession of the ball, as did Real. There were several slow buildups that came to nothing much. All I had to do was clear a few back-passes and watch a long-range shot go well wide of my goal. The crowd got very impatient. Back in the café, there was a great deal of expert opinion flying back and forth. According to Hellman, my father was silent, just nodding when he was spoken to. Hellman said that he looked very pale and was visibly shaking with tension.

It was our captain, Massini, who woke the game up, if you remember. He cut out a rare, sloppy pass close to the halfway line and set off on one of his great galloping runs. No one came to meet him; the Real defense retreated, keeping their marking very tight. Massini looked up; saw that the keeper, Ruiz, was busy screaming and pointing to his defenders; and took a chance. He shot from almost thirty yards out, and he hit the ball so fiercely that when it struck Ruiz’s left-hand post I heard the impact through the howling of the crowd.

Massini’s near miss should have inspired us; instead, it fired up Real. They went for us like wolves. Ernesto Pearson, their Argentine forward, was especially dangerous; he tore our defense apart. I had to make six or seven saves in the last ten minutes of the first half.

It was during this period that men in the café started buying my father beers. He was not a drinker, my father. Okay, he’d sometimes have a couple of beers on a Saturday night, but he’d always come home early and fall happily asleep after winding Nana up a bit. But that day in the café he was bought a beer for each of the saves I made. And he was so worked up that he drank them all.

Well, you know what happened, Paul. We scored in something like the sixty-fifth minute. We didn’t mean to go on the defensive after that, but the Spanish gave us no choice. They came at us more and more desperately. It was like trying to beat back the sea. But we hung on. We won.”

Faustino let out a little snort of laughter. “There are just a couple of small details you forgot to mention, my friend. The fact is that
you
won that game. You stopped two direct free kicks, one of which you cannot possibly have seen until it was almost past you. And you saved Pearson’s penalty four minutes from the end. That’s what killed Real.”

“I think it also killed my father,” the goalkeeper said. “If the game had ended differently, it is likely that my father would still be alive.”

“The word
if
can drive you mad, Gato. There should be a law against it. Tell me what actually happened.”

“Well, you may remember that when Massini picked up the European Cup, he didn’t lift it above his head in triumph, which is what captains usually do. He handed it straight to me, and I lifted it. In the café, that image of me holding the Cup, the same one as that photograph, filled all three TV screens, and that’s when my father was hoisted up onto a table. He was already fairly drunk, according to Hellman, and had to be supported by men holding his legs. He would have been embarrassed and overjoyed at the same time, and when he felt in that mixed-up state he had a habit of nodding his head like a donkey bothered by flies. I can imagine the scene. I am so angry at the old fool. So angry.”

Paul Faustino stayed silent.

Gato, too, was silent for a moment, and then he continued. “Anyway, that’s when the men started calling for
cachaça.
”

“Ah,” murmured Faustino. “The demon rum.”

“That’s the stuff. And this was the local rum, smooth as silk and vicious as a whip. My father never drank the stuff. My mother wouldn’t have it in the house, anyway. And here he was, reeling about on a tabletop with a glass of it in each hand, while the mob chanted his son’s name.

Hellman left the café at this point, but he pieced together the rest of the story during the next two days. The celebrations in my honor went on for the rest of the afternoon. When my father eventually managed to get out of the door he instantly collapsed in the street as if he had been shot. This was, of course, very funny. A couple of guys brought a table from the café and placed it upside down next to my father. They heaved his body onto it, and then four men, all wearing blue shirts with my name and number, somehow got the table onto their shoulders and set off, wobbling dangerously, across the plaza in the general direction of our house. They were followed by a crowd of chanting, cheering drunks.

My mother was not delighted to have this drunken rabble of her son’s fans turning up at her door. When she realized that the arms and legs dangling from the upturned table were her husband’s, she almost fainted. My grandmother, of course, assumed that my father was already a corpse and wailed horribly while beating one of the table-bearers about the head with a soup ladle.

My father was still alive, in fact. He didn’t die until the following day. He was lifted off the table and put to bed. He came around, just for a while, about an hour later. He managed to drink some water, then slept right through until the morning. My mother was horrified to find him awake and getting dressed for work at six o’clock. He looked like hell. She begged him not to go. He said that he had never missed a day’s work in his life — which was probably true — and didn’t intend to start now. So he went.

There was light, unbroken rain that morning, and the men huddled inside their ponchos in the back of the pick-up. Most of them were in the same sort of state as my father, red eyed and shaky. My father threw up twice. Another man took out a small bottle of greenish liquid and persuaded Father to drink some. Whatever this brew was, it seemed to do the trick. Hellman told me that when the truck reached the camp, my father seemed okay. The rest of the crew didn’t, though, and Hellman was half-minded to send them all home. But my father said no, they’d be fine. He was the team boss, and he’d make sure everyone was careful. So Hellman said okay. He congratulated my father on my success and went back into his office. The crew got into their bright green waterproofs — my father’s had a broad orange band across the back — and set out for the cutting. The rain was heavier by now.