I sat quietly, not moving. The sun had almost set. A maid who looked Peruvian walked past.
The traffic on the Ronda lulled me…
I woke suddenly, with my face pressed against the steering wheel. I could feel its curved imprint on my cheek, and my neck was so stiff I could hardly turn my head. Darkness all around. I lifted my right arm so my watch came into view. Hours had gone by. My mouth was dry, but I had nothing left to drink. With a furtive glance in the rearview mirror, to make certain no police were lurking, I pulled the door shut, turned the key in the ignition, and drove off along the winding, hidden road that ran above the Ronda.
* * *
—
IT WAS ALMOST ONE in the morning by the time I opened my front door, and I ached all over. Had Aristides actually hit me? If not, what had caused the swelling under my eye? Even if he wasn’t responsible, and I’d sustained the injury in some other way, he must have dragged me out of the house. To think that he left me lying in the gutter like that. The gutter. How could Cristiani have allowed such a thing? Maybe Ari frightened her, just as his father—her drug-dealing ex—had frightened her. I saw him standing in the doorway with his two-bit hip-hop jewelry and his bum fluff. I would never be able to look at him again without thinking of the man who I had never met.
As I dropped my keys into a bowl in the hall, a murmur came from the lounge, and my heart jumped beneath my ribs.
“Cristiani?”
Had she got back before me?
I clicked the lounge light on. Ronnie was stretched out on my sofa, his forearm draped over his eyes. His feet were bare. A pair of Lebron James signature trainers lay on the floor nearby.
“Nacho? Is that you?”
“Jesus, Ronnie, you gave me a fright. I could’ve had a heart attack. I could’ve keeled over right there, by the front door.”
“You told me I could call by any time. You gave me a key, remember? When I saw you weren’t here, I let myself in.”
“I thought you were in Brazil.”
“I got back Friday. Thought I’d come and see my old friend.” He sat up and yawned, then looked at me for the first time. “What happened to you?”
“You should see the other guy.”
Ronnie grinned.
I sank into an armchair. The ceiling seemed to lower itself half a meter, like a lift dropping in its shaft. “Did you bring my clothes back?”
“What clothes?”
“The clothes you borrowed the other night.”
“Sorry, caballero. I forgot.”
“It’s all right.” I didn’t blame him. People as rich as he was didn’t tend to know the value of things.
“Nacho, would you make me a caipirinha?”
“Sure. I could do with one myself.”
I stood up and went out to the kitchen. Ronnie padded after me, his footsteps soft and heavy. I switched on the fluorescent strip light, which pinged and flickered and then stayed on. Since no trace of the spaghetti carbonara remained—the cleaner must have been—I decided not to mention it. No point upsetting him.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Ronnie said. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Of course.” I opened the fridge and took out four limes.
“I’ve signed for AC Milan.”
It had been a difficult season for Ronnie—he didn’t see eye to eye with the new manager, Pep Guardiola—and the papers were constantly speculating about his future. There had been a flirtation with Manchester City, and talk of a move to Italy as well, but nothing concrete had emerged. Now the man himself had confirmed it, though, I felt such a profound sense of abandonment that I stood quite motionless, the fridge door still ajar. I stared at the empty white shelves, then I lowered my eyes and stared at the limes in my hand. The glossy dark-green fruit seemed like the embodiment of melancholy.
“You’re one of the first to know,” Ronnie said.
I suppose I should’ve felt flattered, but all I could think of was that I was losing my close friend. I reached for the sharp knife I always used for quartering the limes.
“You’ll like Milan,” I said.
“You think?”
I tried to inject some enthusiasm into my voice. “It’s very stylish. Full of beautiful people.” I didn’t tell him how cold and gray the winters were—I’d played there one January, with Elsa’s band—and presumably he already knew about the lack of beaches.
“It’s less money than Manchester, but Berlusconi really wanted me—and I know people in the team. Pato’s there—and Kaká…” Ronnie was studying the kitchen floor. “We’ll keep in touch.”
“My girlfriend’s left me,” I said.
“I never trusted her.”
I swung round. “Really?”
“Careful with that knife!”
“Sorry. It’s just—I think she was my last chance—”
“Don’t be so gloomy, amigo. There are plenty more fish in the sea.”
“I don’t know, Ronnie. I just don’t know.”
He poured two drinks and put one down in front of me. “You have to remember who you are.” He raised his glass. “To the King of Castelldefels!”
“Who told you about that?” I said.
“Your boy. Ari.”
We both drank, then I toasted Ronnie’s new life in Milan. The caipirinhas kicked in, and my mind began to soar, taking my whole body with it.
“How is Ari?” Ronnie asked. “You haven’t mentioned him recently.”
“We’ve not been getting on.”
I told Ronnie about the first time Ari said he wasn’t coming to the bar. Later that day, I found the dishwasher wrenched loose from the wall, and smashed crockery all over the kitchen floor. The evidence of violence had come as a shock to me.
“You should try and talk to him,” Ronnie said. “Kids that age, you have to make an effort. Be patient.”
I remembered what had happened in Tossa and shook my head. Then I refilled our glasses. Ronnie was drumming on the Formica work surface with an egg whisk and the wrong end of a spatula. The fact that he was famous always made me feel as if I was younger than he was, but then he would do or say something that brought it home to me that I was old enough to be his grandfather.
“Watch this,” he said.
Scooping a red Fuji apple off the kitchen table with his right foot, he flicked it up onto his knee, where he bounced it four or five times before flipping it onto his left shoulder and rolling it slowly over the back of his neck. There was a moment of absolute stillness, then his right shoulder twitched, lobbing the apple high into the air, and as it came down he volleyed it right-footed through the kitchen window, which just happened to be open, and I heard it thud against the next-door neighbor’s fence.
“Gol-gol-gol-gol-gol-gol-gol-gol-gol-gol!” he roared, imitating one of the football commentators on the radio, and he danced round the room with his eyes on the ceiling and his arms lifted heavenwards, the middle fingers of each hand tucked into the palm.
“I was going to eat that,” I murmured.
Still. The things he could do.
As I began to put together a fresh pitcher of caipirinhas, there came a faint banging from overhead. Ronnie froze.
“It’s only Maite,” I told him. “She’s got this broomstick. I think she might be a witch.”
“Oh, now I get it,” Ronnie said.
“Get what?”
“Why Cristiani’s so upset with you.”
“What are you on about?”
Ronnie gave me a knowing look. “Maite the witch.”
“You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” I said. “You really have.”
“What stick’s that? A broomstick?”
I laughed, then tasted my new drink. “I make a pretty good caipirinha, if I say so myself.”
“No flies
on you, Nacho.”
“Can I play something for you? Would you like that?”
As he followed me across the hallway, I could feel the buzz of the cachaça coming off him like a voltage, but he was nodding.
“It’s a piece I’ve been working on,” I told him. “Something Earl Hines used to play.”
Ronnie paused on the threshold to the lounge and leaned one shoulder against the wall.
“Make yourself comfortable,” I said.
“I’m fine here.”
“You’re going to slip out in the middle, aren’t you. Like last time.”
Ronnie’s grin lacked its usual certainty.
“You leave whenever you want,” I went on. “I won’t be offended. Just don’t try and cook, okay?”
I sat down in front of my Yamaha and switched it on, then I lowered my hands onto the keyboard, lightly as two butterflies landing on a flower.
* * *
—
THE FIRST MESSAGE came on a Sunday at the end of August 2008. Ronnie had been gone for a couple of months, and I’d had no contact with him at all. Every now and then, I would make the trip up to the house where he used to live. Sometimes I heard music, sometimes just the hiss of a lawn sprinkler. Once, the electronic gate slid open, and a Jaguar with tinted windows eased out into the street. It was so shiny I could see myself in it. I wondered who’d moved in. A local politician, maybe—or a member of the Bulgarian mafia. They were everywhere these days.
That Sunday, Ronnie was making his debut for AC Milan. His first touch was nothing special—a simple layoff to Clarence Seedorf—but the TV cameras were alive to the presence of the club’s new signing, and they zoomed in on his face. That was when he winked at me. I’m serious. Ronnie could do things like that. You might be in a completely different world, but he could still communicate with you. It was the psychic equivalent of lobbing the ball over an advancing defender. A kind of sombrero mental. Only a few days earlier, I had watched a rerun of FC Barcelona’s thumping of Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in November 2005. As Ronnie scored his first goal—Barça’s second—I was struck by the way he seemed to vibrate or shimmer as he ran, as if electricity was flowing through his veins instead of blood. And then there was the sheer speed at which he moved. He appeared for those ten or fifteen seconds to have shifted into overdrive. But you had to be operating at a level close to his for the effect to register. If players like Sergio Ramos and Casillas were humiliated that night, it was because they were good enough to be humiliated. After Ronnie scored his second goal, in the seventy-seventh minute of the game, the massed ranks of supporters in the Bernabeu rose to their feet in their white shirts and applauded. This was unheard of, and their faces were grave, almost ashen. They couldn’t hide their admiration, though. They had witnessed something that could never be repeated. They had a sense of how fleeting greatness is, and a sense too, I think, of the sweet brevity of life. Not just Ronnie’s. Their own as well.
I had watched the match in a bar, with Ari, and I remember him explaining how injuries affect a footballer. They hurt him more than they would hurt you or me, he said in the patient, earnest voice he’d had as a young boy. There’s the pain of the injury itself, and then there’s another, far more agonizing pain—the pain of knowing that you’re missing the moment. After all, you don’t know how many moments you will have. As I watched the game again, three years later, I thought of Ronnie and his melancholic tendencies. His was an archetypal story—a unique and mercurial talent, a meteoric rise from rags to riches—but in the end he was a footballer, and he could only play for a limited amount of time. His powers would fade. Then what? A kind of afterlife—all the glory left behind, beyond retrieving. I thought of the gifted English player, Gascoigne, who almost drank himself to death in China towards the end of his career. How long would Ronnie be able to keep going? Though he was only twenty-five when he scored those goals at the Bernabeu, he had appeared to be at the top of his game. Would he ever be that good again?
The only time I touched on the subject was on his terrace one evening, the shadows lengthening across the pool.
“Do you think about what happens after this,” I said, “when you’re no longer playing?”
He gave me what I called his free-kick look—calculating and steady, from beneath his eyebrows. “Do you think about dying?”
I didn’t answer. I simply held his gaze.
“It’s the same question,” he said. “I don’t think about not playing. I just play.”
* * *
—
I PROP MYSELF ON MY ELBOWS and look around. I still have no idea whose trousers I’m wearing, but the night is warm and the lawn feels soft and away to my left, oddly enough, is a white football that seems to glow in the darkness, as if lit from the inside.
One of these days, I expect to see Ronnie again.
He’ll almost certainly surprise me, pulling up next to me in some top-of-the-range SUV. Diamond ear studs, black bandana. Bass notes pumping through the open window, loud enough to shake the neighborhood.
Or else I’ll find him stretched out on my sofa, one arm draped over his eyes.
If he shows up when I’m not home, he always does the same thing. He rings the bell and waits a few moments, then he lets himself in.
After all, he still has a key.
THE CARPENTER OF MONTJUÏC
THE FIRST TIME I SAW Vic Drago, he was on his own. I was waiting at the bus stop outside my building when the glass front door swung open and a stocky man with thinning black hair emerged. He was wearing a maroon jacket, a black shirt, and black trousers with sharp creases. A gold chain bracelet glinted on his left wrist. He stopped to light a cigarette, then strode off along the street, smoke flowing over his shoulder as he exhaled.
I saw him again the following week, in the evening. This time he passed me on the pavement. He was with a heavy middle-aged woman who was carrying two Caprabo bags loaded with groceries, and he walked in front of her, his eyes on his phone, a newspaper tucked under one arm. Something about the way they talked to each other without looking at each other told me they were married. His choice of wife surprised me. I would have expected him to be with someone younger, more glamorous.
Two weeks later, the lift door opened one morning and he was facing me, his back to the fake teak paneling.
“Going down?” I said.
He nodded and yawned, both at the same time.
I stepped inside. The lift was small, with barely enough room for two people, and once the door was shut I was so close to him that we were almost touching. He smelled of cigarettes and aftershave. Something acrid, lemony.
“You speak English?” he said in castellano.
“Yes,” I said.
He switched languages. “Do you live in the building?”
“I’m on the third floor, at the front.”
“I’ve got the penthouse. Sobreatico.” He ran a hand over his hair, the gold chain bracelet shifting lazily on his wrist. “What a night.”
“Were you out late?”
“I haven’t been to bed yet.”
I raised my eyebrows and nodded, as people do when they’re impressed. After all, he wasn’t a young man. Mid-forties, I would have said.
The lift jolted to a halt, then swayed a little on its cables. The door slid open. We crossed the lobby with its beige leatherette sofa and its plants rooted in beds of gray pebbles.
Outside, on the pavement, he asked if I would join him for a coffee. I glanced at my watch. I had a meeting in Sarrià at ten.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I won’t keep you long.”
I felt ungracious then.
We went to a bar round the corner, on Plaça Kennedy, where he ordered a carajillo. I had my usual café con leche. It was a cool, sunny morning, and we sat outside. I asked him how long he had lived in Barcelona. Three years, he sa
id. Before that, he lived in London. Did I know London? I had studied there, I told him. In the mid-nineties. He hadn’t wasted time with college, he said. He couldn’t wait to get out in the real world. Start making money. These days, he owned three warehouses in North London, not far from the M1. I asked what the warehouses were used for. Storing documents, he said. It was lucrative, and the business pretty much ran itself. That was why he’d decided on a change of scene. I mean, why live in London if you don’t have to? He spent an hour online every morning, then made a few phone calls. That was his working day.
“Sounds like you’ve got your life under control,” I said.
He smiled complacently, then adjusted his gold bracelet. “What about you?”
“I translate books. Fiction, mostly.”
He asked if the work was well paid. I told him what I earned—between three and five thousand euros per book. He was curious to know how long it took to translate a book. Three months, I said. Sometimes longer.
“Jesus,” he said. “And you can live on that?”
I smiled. “I get by.”
We both quietly sipped our coffees.
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