I shifted in my chair and hooked an arm around her. The waist of a seventeen-year-old, I’d always told her. You’d never have guessed she’d had a child. She stared through the picture window, her wineglass halfway to her mouth.
I smiled. “So you haven’t seen Ronaldinho yet?”
She shook her head.
“You will,” I said.
She was still looking out over the patio. “It’s spring already. We really ought to clean that pool.”
* * *
—
IT WAS ARI who gave me my nickname. One Saturday in February we left the apartment together, strolling side by side. The sky was hard and blue, as it often is during the winter, and the breeze had an edge of iron to it, a subtle hint of snow. Sometimes you can smell the Pyrenees, even though they’re more than two hundred kilometers away. That morning I happened to run into a number of friends and acquaintances along the way, and a walk that would normally have taken five minutes took half an hour.
As we finally approached the bar, Ari squinted at me through his glasses. “You know a lot of people, don’t you.”
“Well, I’ve lived here for quite a while.”
“But you know everyone.”
“Not everyone.” Though I felt oddly flattered that he should think so.
He nodded. “You’re like a king.”
I stopped and looked at him.
“The King of Castelldefels,” he said.
“I like that.” I took out my packet of Camels and gestured with my lighter. “The king lights up.”
Ari grinned. “The king has his first cigarette of the day.”
“Third, actually,” I said.
I ruffled his hair, then we turned and walked into the bar, both of us chuckling.
By then, I had grown to love Ari like a son, though I was still mystified by the extent to which he failed to resemble his mother. In photographs taken when she was Ari’s age, Cristiani was dark and slender, almost undernourished. She’d had big eyes, like a waif. Ari, by contrast, had pallid skin and a physique that was doughy, unathletic. Her hair was wavy, his was straight. He wore glasses, which gave him an air that was scholarly, intense. She had never read a book in her life. Where did his looks come from? His father, presumably. Every once in a while, I would search his face for an echo of Cristiani, some nuance I had missed, and he would catch me at it and ask why I was staring. In time, though, I began to find the fact that they seemed unrelated reassuring. My love for Ari had nothing to do with the love I felt for Cristiani. It had happened naturally, of its own accord. It was unforced, honest. Pure.
* * *
—
I HAVE ALWAYS been lucky with money. Not long after I met Montse, the woman I would marry, I stopped playing the piano and went into partnership with Ferran, someone I’d known during my last two years at school. We opened a chiringuito—a beach bar—in Castelldefels, one of the first, and it did well from the beginning, especially at weekends, when people drove down from the city. Over the years, the bar expanded and became a fully fledged restaurant. Later, we opened a second restaurant, in the town center. When Montse kicked me out in 1988, I sold my share of the business to pay alimony and maintenance—we had two daughters, Beatriz and Imma, who were still very young—but I invested the leftover cash in another of Ferran’s schemes, a property development on the Costa Brava. The timing couldn’t have been better. Back then, the coast was booming, with hordes of British and German tourists looking for cheap holidays in the sun, and I had survived on the proceeds ever since. The girls were both grown up now, and they had jobs and partners of their own, so my overheads had dwindled. My investments were still paying off, though. I had plenty in the bank, enough to give Cristiani and Ari pretty much whatever they wanted.
* * *
—
WHEN CARINHOSO CELEBRATED its twenty-fifth anniversary in June 2006, I gathered a few people together—some Catalan friends, a couple of Brazilians, the dodgy Swede, and Vic, a guy from London. We had been at the club for about an hour, and I was up at the bar with Vic, ordering drinks, when he nudged my shoulder, then tilted his head towards the entrance.
“Ronaldinho,” he said.
My heart did a kind of somersault. I hadn’t seen Ronaldinho since the morning he pulled up next to me in his silver SUV. I wasn’t the only person to react. Everybody did. The air itself seemed to shift and tighten. Suddenly we all knew we were in exactly the right place. How often does that happen? In the season that had just come to an end, Barça had retained La Liga, and had also won the Champions’ League, and Ronnie had been central to the team’s success, scoring twenty-six goals in all competitions, including two against our bitter rivals, Real Madrid. Even Ari’s concerns had been laid to rest.
Ronnie was wearing a diamond-studded crucifix, a platinum R10 medallion, and a gem-encrusted watch the size of an apple, but his skin looked even more expensive than his jewelry. In fact, his whole being looked expensive. I’m not sure what it is about celebrities, but they appear to glow. Is it something we invest them with, or do they actually give off light? And if they do give off light, could it be the residue of all that flash photography, all those fascinated glances? I managed to catch his eye as he moved past, and he gave me a puzzled look, as if he couldn’t quite place me. It was hardly surprising. Think of all the people he must have met.
“I saw you about a year ago,” I told him, “on the street. It was the day before you scored that second-minute goal against La Coruña. You were in your SUV.”
“Right.” His face cleared, and he was grinning, just like the billboard outside the airport. “You’re the guy who was having trouble lighting his cigarette.”
“Trouble? What trouble?”
“The old hand was shaking a bit. Probably all those drinks you’d had the night before.”
He was still grinning, and I was grinning too, though I didn’t have a clue what he was on about. I replayed the scene. There I was, standing at the junction in my light-brown suit and my eggshell-colored shirt, an unsparked Camel between my lips, when Ronnie pulled up in his fuck-off spaceship of a vehicle. I produced my lighter and ran my thumb over the little corrugated metal wheel, dipping my head downwards to meet the flame, then lifting my head again and releasing the first plume of smoke into the sunlit air without touching the cigarette at all. It would have looked like one fluid action, controlled and graceful, right down to the way I pocketed the lighter afterwards. It even had a certain sleight-of-hand about it, as if, in my working life, I was actually a conjuror or a magician. As for shaking, I wasn’t shaking at all. I wasn’t even trembling. The king lights up. I looked at Ronnie again and realized he was taking the mickey. It was strange, but I’d never imagined that he might be funny—somehow you don’t expect famous people to have a sense of humor—and the discovery delighted me. I gave him a playful punch on the shoulder and felt my knuckles bounce off a dome of muscle.
“How would you know I was shaking, anyway?” I said.
“I was looking right at you, cabrón.”
I laughed. “You were wearing those two-thousand-dollar shades of yours. You probably couldn’t see a thing.”
One of his bodyguards leaned down and murmured in his ear.
“Come to think of it,” I went on, “should you really have been driving?”
When I returned to my table, Emerson was sprawled on the banquette next to Cristiani. His ganja-sleepy, slightly reptilian gaze strolled across her breasts, which rose temptingly out of her scoop-neck Custo T-shirt. A young blond woman sat on the other side of him. She wore an off-the-shoulder dress that looked like it was made of scrunched-up golden tissue paper. The dodgy Swede was regaling her with tales of his heroics on the golf course—last time out, he’d shot a hole-in-one, apparently—but she didn’t appear to be listening. Emerson bumped fists with me as I dropped into the narrow gap between him and Cr
istiani. I put my arm round her and leaned back. Bossa nova pulsed through the purple leatherette.
“You forgot the drinks,” Cristiani said.
I smiled at my absentmindedness. “Sorry, love. I was having a word with Ronnie.”
“Ronnie?”
“Ronaldinho.”
“He’s here?” She looked past me, into the crush of people. “I don’t see him.”
“That’s because he’s got an entourage with him. Bodyguards and all that. They’re even bigger than he is.” I told her how Ronnie had remembered me, and how I’d been wrongfooted by his sense of humor. “I wasn’t expecting it. You don’t, do you—not from a footballer.”
“He remembered you? From when?”
“That time I met him on the street. I told you.”
She shook her head. “You’re the one with the sense of humor, Nacho. You’re a funny guy.”
I kissed her neck.
“What about that drink?” she said.
I handed her a fifty-euro note. “Can you go?”
As Cristiani moved away, I turned and spoke to Emerson. “Ronnie’s here.”
“Yeah?”
“I just talked to him. He’s over by the bar.”
Emerson nodded slowly. “It’s not the first time he’s been in.”
I had heard Emerson brag about his club to anyone who’d listen—he was even proud of the walls, with their cheesy, garish murals of the beach at Copacabana—and I knew his blasé response was a cover for the bolt of gratification that had jolted through him like a speedball or a hit of crack.
He disentangled himself from the blond girl. “I guess I should go over.” Uncoiling up onto his feet, like a cobra rising from its basket, he adjusted his sheer black shirt so it lay flush against his torso. Through the rayon or viscose or whatever-the-fuck slithery fabric it was made of, I could detect the swellings and ripples he’d acquired during endless, mindless hours in the gym. He reached up with both hands, his thumbs at right angles to the rest of his fingers, and smoothed the straggling strands of hair away from his forehead, back behind his ears, then he eased forwards, into the crowd.
Cristiani returned with the drinks.
“You know, I don’t blame Emerson,” I said.
“For what?”
“For trying it on with you. You’re gorgeous.”
She took my left hand and pushed her lips into the palm, and I could feel her tongue tracing the lines, especially the one that curled past the base of my thumb, then she wedged that same hand between her thighs and, leaning over, gently bit one of my nipples through my shirt. Brazilian girls. Jesus.
“No one’s talking to me,” the blond girl said.
As if on cue, the guy from London came over and sat down next to her. He asked if she could act.
“I’ve done some modeling,” she said.
“You want to be in a movie?”
“Sure.” She picked up her cocktail and took the straw between her lips. Her cheeks hollowed as she drank.
“You make movies, Vic?” I said.
He turned to me, and I saw that his pupils were dilated.
“Me?” he said. “I do all kinds of things.”
Later, I saw Ronnie again. He had taken off his shirt and he was dancing with two girls, his moves poised, hydraulic. We didn’t get another chance to talk, but he acknowledged me from a distance, one eye closing and opening again in slow motion.
It was after four when we got home, and I went straight to bed, but Cristiani said she wasn’t tired. I wondered if she would call Brazil. She usually did when she’d been drinking. It would be midnight in São Luis. Her mother would still be up. She’d be sitting in front of her tiny 13-inch TV, the picture fuzzy and washed out, like a window display that has seen too much sun. Cristiani, are you crazy? she would say. This must be costing you a fortune. Then they’d talk nonstop for half an hour. Or if her mother didn’t answer there was always her good-for-nothing brother, who worked for the post office in Recife. He would weigh tourists’ letters and charge them for the stamps. When the tourists had gone, he would put the stamps back, toss the letters away, and pocket the money. He was more than doubling his salary. These days, though, thanks to advances in technology, people were writing fewer letters. Pretty soon he’d have to find another scam. As my head sank down onto the pillow, I heard Cristiani uncork a bottle. She was the kind of woman people take one look at and say, I don’t know where she puts it all. There was a clatter as ice cubes tumbled out of the dispenser on the fridge. Most of them would miss her glass. Go skidding across the kitchen floor. I imagined them melting, half a dozen little pools of water in the dark, and then, just before sleep took me, the stereo started up, pumping out the first bouncy chords of one of her favorite reggae CDs from Salvador Bahía.
* * *
—
I HAD AN AFFAIR with Elsa Slump. I was living in Vienna then. We all were. When Elsa was naked, she looked like a sculpture by Giacometti. High conical breasts. Thin tapering legs. Long feet. Her skin so black it had a bluish tinge to it. She reminded me of something pulled from a blaze, all charred wood and a lick of blue flame round the edges. I would show up at her apartment to find her wandering about in a cream silk robe she’d bought in the flea market, hugging the points of her elbows and muttering to herself. She drank whiskey for breakfast and kept goldfish in every room. If the water tilted in their bowls, she would know an earthquake was happening. They don’t have earthquakes in Vienna, I told her. Baby, she said in her dehydrated voice, there’s always a first time. Before she went to sleep, she would soak a bath towel in the sink and lay it on the floor next to the bed in case the building caught fire in the night and she needed to escape. She left the lights on too. She had the habit of sleeping in her shoes. She would take them off to make love, then put them on again afterwards. Some people smoke after they’ve had sex. Elsa put her shoes back on.
Drugs and alcohol: they brought us together, and kept us together—for a while, anyway. Elsa carried a leather-coated hip flask everywhere with her. Inside was the opium tea she bought from a young aristocratic type who claimed he was also an arms dealer. His name was Florian. Strange I should remember that. And I remember a party in a building out near the Ring, one vast room after another, and double doors so tall you could’ve ridden through the apartment on a horse. Elsa rolled a joint as big as the trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho. It took an age to smoke. Later, she massaged the fingers of my left hand with such focus and intensity that I began to feel off balance, like a seesaw with a fat man sitting on one end. Then I was sprawled across her bed with a half-empty bottle of schnapps, and her with nothing on—someone must have given us a lift or else we walked—and her skin glowed all over, except for her heels and elbows, which were dusty gray and rough as pumice, and I moved away from her mouth, which tasted of summer even though it was snowing outside, and as I kissed her throat I became aware of a flicker on the sideboard, by the wall, a goldfish darting but the water steady, no earthquakes happening that night, and I wondered if goldfish ever slept, and if so, did they lie on the bottom of their glass bowls or did they float on the surface, and did they close their eyes? The glare from the naked bulb pushed into every angle and crevice of that drafty room. It seemed a bright transparent box had dropped from somewhere high above, a box made to slot perfectly into the space. Elsa pushed my face away from her breasts, they were too sensitive, and when she came, a humming or keening spilled out of her, a kind of talking, but all mixed up and unintelligible, as if she was speaking in tongues. Hairs prickled at the apex of my spine, and I blacked out. The next day I asked what she’d said, but she had no memory of saying anything at all. She thought I was the crazy one—hearing voices, as she put it, and lying in the middle of the road to make a taxi stop. Did I do that? I said. She forced me to feel the back of my coat, still damp from all the melted snow. I never saw no on
e get as stoned as you, she said. Later, when there was no longer anything between us, people told me she was schizophrenic, but everyone I knew had problems of one sort or another, and Elsa didn’t seem different enough to have earned a special label of her own. She was just Elsa.
We lasted several months, and though we were never in love our two lives or the way we looked at things seemed eerily aligned. Huddled under a pile of blankets on a winter morning, we would notice the shape of a car edging along the top of the orange cloth she had draped over the window in place of a curtain, some kind of shadow or reflection from outside, and we would marvel at how small the car was, like a toy, or we would be sitting over a grosser brauner in our local café and the door would swing open, cold air gusting, and we would look up to see a bearded man in a green hunting jacket and we’d both know, and know it with certainty and in the very same instant, that he had poisoned his wife and got away with it. There were moments during live performances—in Paris or Cologne or Amsterdam—when I would chance on harmonic progressions or melodic lines that rode along with her voice, and her eyes would meet mine across the sparkly half-darkness up onstage, amusement on her face, and a gentle pity, and even, sometimes, a glimmer of mockery or malice, at the thought that I might have the nerve to follow her, because she knew she could sing herself right out of where she stood, she could leave me for dust if she wanted to.
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