“Hey,” she said while wiping the grease from her hands, “I have to tell you.”
Oscar frowned. Was her voice shaking?
“We haven’t known each other for very long, but it feels like I’ve known you all my life. It’s obvious that we have chemistry and...” Almudena swallowed, “and, I-I’d love to keep getting to know you.”
Oscar cleared his throat but she carried on.
“Thanks for looking after me. You’re a great friend.”
A deep sound like a transatlantic foghorn blasted inside Oscar’s head. Did she say ‘friend’, he thought. That’s enough. I’d better kick her out now before things get worse.
“Almu, if there’s one thing I value it’s that people are direct.”
She stared at him.
“And seeing as we are being honest,” he continued, “I think you ought to know that sitting with you on the metro every morning has become the highlight of my day, although I’ll never admit it because my pride doesn’t allow for that kind of thing.”
Almudena raised her eyebrows and held her breath.
“Another secret, that I hope you don’t even tell yourself, is that I’m dying to kiss you.”
The next thing he did was calmly take off his apron, leaving it on top of the ice machine, walk around the bar and stop in front of her, as his heart raced. She’d just declared their friendship but he could do it, and he knew how. If there was one thing that Oscar did better than anyone (apart from making burgers) it was throwing caution to the wind. He stroked her hair and without taking his eyes off of hers, he kissed her. Their breathing was the only sound you could hear for the next few seconds in that humble burger bar in Madrid, that night was the centre of their universe.
Lying in his bed, Oscar smiled thinking of what Daniel would say to all of that. He’d felt so alone since his friend wasn’t around, although sharing those little secrets made him feel closer to him. He missed him.
I wish you were here, loser, he thought as a tear slipped under his eyelashes and landed on his pillow.
The first rays of dawn slipped through the old wooden slatted blinds. Mist blanketed Buitrago and the wind cleared patches through which you could just make out the town walls.
Daniel stretched his arm over to the bedside table to grab his watch. It was half past six in the morning and he hadn’t got a wink of sleep all night. He’d spent hours looking into space, mulling over lots of things. He’d imagined Oscar with Almudena on his arm (the image he’d painted of her). They shared a stick of candy floss as they walked and laughed together. He was happy for him, but he still didn’t understand why he hadn’t visited in all these months. As well as his unbelievable love story, Oscar had talked to him about basketball in his email. The new season had started and Eric was the coach for another year. According to Oscar, the team wasn’t the same without Daniel.
That led Daniel to think about the inevitable meeting later that day. He had the most important hours of his life ahead of him. The day that had just started would always be remembered. The debut with the first team, they would all say around the dinner table on Christmas Eve in a few years time. For now he wasn’t going to ask to jump onto the court (not without being fully recovered and having trained with the team), but just the fact of being part of the team and his name appearing in the next day’s sports column was enough motivation to stay awake all night.
He put his jacket on over his pyjamas and slipped out of his room stealthily so as not to wake Jorge. In the garden, the moist dawn air stuck to his skin. In his slippers, he crossed the garden and headed to the village.
His disquiet was so strong, he could almost see it seeping out of his pores. Since he had seen little Sofia carving the messages into the wooden bench, his regret had grown. How stupid he had been to have forgotten his first love when he saw her that night in the bar. How selfish and cowardly had he been to use Bea as an excuse to avoid the affections from the girl who he had truly loved and that now he missed so much. It was that same remorse that made Daniel wander the village, looking for something he didn’t even understand. The sun peeked over the wall by the time he had emerged in front of the courtyard between the mist. He’d arrived.
A blackened metal gate stood before him. Disappointed at not being able to enter, he leant his head between two bars and scanned the interior of the courtyard, as a prisoner might well do on his first night in jail. That morning the courtyard looked different. The church watched over in silence, amid the morning mist, at the same time as the first rays of sunlight joined the startling silence.
Suddenly the gate gave way to Daniel’s weight and it opened inwards producing an uncomfortable screech. It was open!
As soon as he entered he had the absurd feeling that this place had been abandoned for a long time. The grass, always well-trimmed, had turned into thick weeds which were starting to take over more land between the cobblestones covering the ground. He made to head towards the western wall when something startled him. The bench where Sofia had inscribed her messages wasn’t there. All the benches had disappeared. Only the stone monolith remained in its place. The wind battered the branches of the trees whose blossoms had painted the inside of the castle a few days ago; no that morning, all the branches were bare.
Daniel looked back at the gate. A shiver ran down his spine and he took a step back. The gate was wide open. His heart rate abruptly sped up. Caught in a panic attack, he left the courtyard, looking back every step he took. When he passed under the archway, he ran home, and didn’t turn back until he arrived. When he got home, he saw from the garden a light coming from the living room window. Jorge was awake.
He tiptoed in and went to the living room. He found his father in the middle of the sofa, lit up by the yellow light from the lamp. He was looking at the wall without blinking, as if he was in another dimension.
“Jorge?”
Jorge remained silent.
Daniel understood what was happening when he too looked at the wall, and he felt like he’d gone back in time. A mechanical contraption with a bulging lens and several discs was projecting a series of images on the wall. The device was a Super 8, and it was playing an old film. The quality of the images was poor, in sepia and a few sections were blurry or scratched. It didn’t have any sound, the only thing that could be heard was the mechanical whirring of the discs.
Daniel had a bad feeling when he recognised the main characters of the film. Three individuals made up the scene: a woman in her thirties with two boys. One was a newborn and the other around the age of first communion. The woman held the baby in her arms while talking to the camera. She wore a smile that only new mothers have.
Daniel immediately recognised his mother’s face and asked himself what she might have been saying at that very moment. The film was an old home video recorded by his dad when he was just a few weeks old. The other boy must be Ricardo, running around non-stop.
Our old kitchen! Daniel realized with a lump in his throat.
He’d never seen those images, of when they had still been a happy, normal family. It suddenly hit him how much he missed all of that he had been on the verge of forgetting forever.
But there was something strange about the images. Although he could clearly see his mother’s face, he wasn’t able to make out a single feature of his nor his brother’s. Their faces were all blurred.
There must be a fault in the picture, the film is really old, he thought.
He glanced at his father, his gaze remained lost in the reproduction. His eyes sparkled a brighter blue than ever, and a strange smile full of relief lit up his face.
Daniel’s mother got up off her seat, left the baby in his cot and came towards the camera. Daniel felt a shiver when his mother’s face took up the whole wall –it was as if she were still alive and was there with them in that dark living room. She blew them a kiss and then stretched her arm out towards the camera with her palm open. She was beckoning them. Never before had Daniel seen an expression so full of peace as the one
his mother wore right then. He wanted to go with her more than anything else in the world when all of a sudden... PUFF! The projector let out a dry snap and the wall went back to blank, bringing them back to the present.
Daniel sighed. His father was still smiling but a stray tear tracked down his bony cheek and disappeared between his lips. Daniel went and sat beside him.
“Dad, can I ask you something?”
Jorge turned to face him, still entranced. With a shaking hand he dried his eyes and answered.
“Of course, son.”
“When mum died, where did you get the strength to carry on? I mean, how did you not just lose it?”
Jorge squinted until his eyes looked like two black lines. Then he got up and walked over to an old cupboard on the other side of the room. It was as if he had a leak somewhere in his body that sapped all of his energy. He opened a drawer and took out an envelope. Breathless, he shuffled back to the sofa. He looked to have aged fifteen years from one day to the next.
“Are you ok, Dad?” Daniel asked.
“Here, here’s the answer to your question.” Jorge handed him the envelope and ignored his son’s question.
Daniel took out an old letter and stared at it without reading it. It was handwritten. He couldn’t understand anything.
Jorge stood and started walked away. From the doorway of the living room he said:
“Try and get some rest. In a few hours we’ll set off for Madrid.” Unexpectedly, a sinister laugh escaped his lips. “You’re about to start a new life, son.”
Once he was alone, Daniel read the letter carefully. As soon as he had finished, he broke down in tears.
30
That night I hadn’t slept at all. As morning came, I had felt like an idiot for having lost hours of sleep over someone I didn’t even know. I had spent a whole month missing a guy whose face was completely unknown. He could well be the most deformed, dirty, wrinkly man on the planet, and even so I hadn’t been able to get him out of my head. Not the way he looked, but the idea of his existence, of his capability of influencing my vital signs. All that with four clever lines and peculiar handwriting. What wouldn’t he be capable of face to face, at the table of a nice restaurant or, come to think of it, beneath the sheets? I was dying to find out. I had been desperate to find out for a while if I was being honest.
When the clock struck seven in the evening I was already rigidly standing beside the door. Just like someone waiting for water to boil in the kettle, I watched the heartless door without blinking.
As the wait became unbearable, I began pacing back and forth without knowing what to do. That uncomfortable stomach pain had started to intensify when a paper slid over the very primitive line that marked reality from the unknown. This time it wasn’t a sheet of notebook paper that awaited me on the floorboards, it wasn’t even a normal piece of paper. I slowly picked it up as if scared of tearing it. It was a envelope from Prague, maybe the place he had been all last month. Holding my breath, I opened it. Something fell to my feet, a dried rose. It was beautiful. And the thought, enchanting. The postcard said the following:
I’ve been looking forward to coming back and seeing my favourite door.
I smiled nervously and without stopping to think about it, I wrote a reply. To hell with it, I said to myself. There were no longer plans or rules. In fact, it was more than likely that the game had finished. I crouched down and pushed my reply to the other side.
You’re daft. How was your trip? You won’t believe it, but I actually missed you.
I had made my choice. My heart was beating at a devilish rate. Whatever it was that was happening was the most exciting experience of my life. Prepared to have my first ever blind date –where the word ‘blind’ was used in the strictest sense– I awaited his reply. All of the tension I’d bottled up this month ran through my veins. I was dying to shout, jump and dance around the whole flat. But no, I needed to maintain my composure to make a good impression. Finally, the old notebook paper from before slid under the door with the answer.
Angie, that’s enough pretending. It’s enough of absurd games. I’ll tell you something that I’d never dare say to your face (pros of being separated by a door): I’m dying to make love to you. I want to make you the happiest woman in the world. It’s up to you if that happens one day. It could be next week, it could be tonight.
My heart almost burst. Every part of my body warned me of danger. That was bad, really bad, but I wasn’t in any state to decide for myself. What should I do? Someone sensible would have done exactly the opposite of what I did. Still dizzy from the words of his last message, I put my hand to the doorknob and, finally, I opened the door.
31
When he was younger, Daniel had read his parents’ old books about stress and failure: they were directly related.
They could cause a person temporary paralysis and even traumas that they would remember no matter how much time passed. Daniel understood the meaning of those words when he found himself in the locker room, alone, waiting for them to call his name over the loud speaker.
He had spent almost the whole journey back to the capital looking out of the window of his dad’s car. An odd regret took over when he looked through the wing mirror at the silhouette of Buitrago one last time. It wasn’t nostalgia, it was something more, something he couldn’t explain. But he felt satisfied. Not only had he recovered from his dramatic injury in record time, but he’d also closed some old wounds from the past. He remembered the morning he had woken up in hospital and it seemed like an awful nightmare that had happened an age ago. He was keen to get back and hug his friends and go back to playing basketball, but above all to fix some of the mistakes of his past. He also felt like he’d left a piece of his heart in Buitrago, it was as if an important chapter of his life had come to an end, and that hurt.
He frowned as he suddenly thought of Steve. Over the past few days he had come to forge a bizarre friendship with the British expert in focaccias and parmesan, right up to spending whole afternoons in his restaurant. Once, he had even let him try out the pizza oven. At times, just to unburden himself, Daniel had talked to him about the problems he had with his father, Ricardo and one or two friends. He felt comfortable there.
Before leaving, Daniel had headed over to the Danilo to say goodbye to his friend. A few metres away from the door of the restaurant, Daniel noticed something offbeat. The narrow backstreet that went to the restaurant was dark and cold, especially for midday, and a dirty, burnt sheen covered the stone wall at the front. The door was ajar. Daniel tried pushing it but without much success, he even peered in through the mouldy windows. It was useless. The Danilo wasn’t just closed today, it looked like it had been for years. It was completely abandoned. How was that possible? He’d been there two days ago and, it although it had never been the tidiest place on the planet, it was open and presentable. And the owner had been inside. Where was Steve now?
Then the wall clock came to mind, the one that had no hands but still worked. And the lotus flower, and the fact that no other customer had ever come in while he had been there. What was happening in that place?
Feeling sorry at not being able to say goodbye to his friend but keen to get away from that place, he took a step back without taking his eyes off the main door, when he bumped into something. No. Someone.
“Dad! What are you doing here? You scared me half to death.”
Jorge’s lips twitched into a fine line that was almost a smile, but to Daniel seemed a dismal expression. Day by day, his dad seemed to age several years. The skin on his cheeks was tight, lining his cheekbones with strange shadows. His pale skin had taken on a yellow tinge.
“I was coming to get you, I knew I’d find you here.” That was weird, as Daniel had never talked to his dad about Steve and the restaurant, it had been something he had wanted to keep private. “We should head off soon.”
Jorge finished the sentence with a coughing fit.
“Dad, are you OK?”
> Daniel held on to his father, fearing that he would pass out.
“Perfectly,” Jorge replied once he’d got his breath back. “Better than ever I’d say. Come on, let’s go or we’ll be late to Madrid.”
“Can you drive?”
“What a question.”
Father and son disappeared between the shadows of the cold backstreet, but before, Daniel dedicated one last fleeting look at the door of the Danilo.
When Daniel caught sight of the arena through the windshield, he was awestruck. From the outside, the pavilion was no more than a simple grey building in a square where several backstreets of a residential neighbourhood met, but at that moment, to Daniel it was more impressive than the Taj Mahal.
Everything around was calm apart from Daniel’s heart. Seeing himself there, he realised that this was the most important moment of his life. Over the last few months he had been so focused on getting better that he hadn’t stopped to think how he was going to face the challenge that lay ahead of him.
The plan was simple: Jorge would drop him off at the pavilion. He would park the car and Daniel would go into the president’s office on his own to sign the new contract as a member of the first team. Then he would be introduced to his coach and new teammates, who would go out onto the court to warm up before the game. Meanwhile, Daniel would wait in the changing rooms for the guy on the speaker to announce his name so that he could be introduced before the game started. That way no one would miss it.
No sooner said than done. After the protocol greetings, signatures and introductions, which to Daniel seemed like a blurry but very pleasant dream, the moment of truth finally came.
That afternoon, the locker room felt like a psychiatric hospital ward. When he was one bite away from making his nails bleed, he told himself enough was enough and he opened his locker. Inside was his new kit. Excited like a child opening birthday presents, he took the jersey delicately and sat looking at it for a while. His name was written on the back, and just below, the number ten. It had been his number since he was a boy. Daniel was fighting back his emotions when something inside his locker caught his eye. At the back hung a jacket. Pulling it from its hanger, Daniel took out an elegant black dinner jacket. He frowned, confused –just another thing to add to the list of times he had felt confused over the past few days– until he saw a piece of paper sticking out one of the pockets. He read what it said.
Reflections in the Mirror Page 14