—I still keep them in a drawer. They liked it a lot in the surroundings of the famous coach Isaac Jiménez; best known in the world of football by the nickname Softie.
He had been the mentor of The Queen when she was young. His job as a football coach, it was suspected it had been from the beginning a perfect cover for his dirty business. A possible dark past of Softie was commented on in the world of drug trafficking, although this had never been proven. Many claimed that Isaac Jimenez had been a second father to Lucía Márquez. Isaac had advised her on several occasions to leave the world of drug trafficking and enrol in journalism, following the example of her friends. "We, we are too old to change. But you still have your whole life ahead of you, "Mireia had listened to him, telling her once. After dinner, Nicholás settled himself on the sofa to read the famous articles, with tense calm, while Mireia cleaned the kitchen.
The Region, Sunday, January 5, 2003
Who cares, if three former coaches of the Sports Club Orense, Softie, Ramón González and Diego Suances were transformed into crows, flying over Mount Santa Agueda, leaving the landscape with acrobatic grace. In search of an easy prey on the extensive map of the forge with which to feed his already grown ego. Tracing aggressive manoeuvres in the air, Softie stood at the head of the group, waving his wings with harmonic gravity as he led his team in a morning workout, while his admirers watched him stunned from the stands. Softie was a very temperamental player, so it was rare to find him sitting still on the bench. It was rare the party that he didn’t enter into a dialectical struggle with the linier, who sometimes continued in the shower.
—But, God, it was an offside as big as a house. If even the film usher saw it.
—Sit down and shut up, —warned the tranny looking linier.
Softie sat down again on the bench, grunting. "Then they complain that we do not win a match, so I'm not surprised." He kept cheering on his people with the typical topics: "Cheer kids", "with balls", "up", "they are already ours".
A hard tackle on a forward of his team, which even Stevie Wonder would have seen as a clear penalty, was sanctioned by the obtuse referee, who seemed to suffer a strange myopia that morning as missing the goalkeeper. Softie, propelled by his golden hair, jumped like a spring from his seat. Moving nervously along the whole bench completely out of his mind, muttering a series of insults in a strange dialect, which luckily the line judge failed to decipher. Of course if this were a western the referee would be the greatest of the outlaws, as he was stealing the game as if they were bullion gold. Softie reached for the holster, to remove the gun and to shoot the last cartridges of his trampled pride, before finding the game lost, with only five minutes left for the final whistle.
—Let's go kids, everybody up!
None of the more than two hundred spectators explained what sort of imaginary slate Softie had drawn up in the strategy plays, which made his team's victory that glorious day, possible. The fact was that those three valuable points served the team to maintain the category and Softie was taken to the dressing room like Cesar in the times of Rome, since he had become something more than a prophet in his land. He was the true saviour.
—God save Softie! —Pilate said, without his tunic with his afro hair and the look lost on the buttocks of a girl with sleeves. You are the true saviour of the people. Instead of that strange figurine that hung in the school on the wax, nailed hands and feet with a crown of thorns on the head, and that had so frightened him as a child, with all those wounds and that blood slipping like raindrops by his face and a sign that advertised with golden letter INRI at his feet.
That day, Softie did something very great, reason why the other crows crowned him king of Galicia.
—God save the king!
—You are the saviour.
—The only.
—The incomparable.
—We were standing with one foot in the regional and you have returned us to the national. ¡¡Oeee, oe, oe, oe, oe, Softie the king !!!!!
Songs were heard throughout the swamp. Swede and Moncho, his colleagues were happy the day of his coronation and Softie launched rockets from the Plaza de San Juan Bosco, to celebrate with his wife Susana, pecking at his armpit, before takeoff flying over the roofs of the street Council Way to the Plaza del Hierro.
—Oh, oe, oe, oe, oe, oe Softie is the king !!!!!!!
King of Galicia presented himself gallantly and proudly hanging on a branch of Millennium Bridge, to contemplate with proud spirit his vast kingdom. The kingdom of the national, the highest category of youth in Spanish Football.
—And the League next year, —he whispered in his ear with anxious restlessness. Then Moncho added:
—You are the Saviour.
—The real saviours are the players, —Peluso said, tired of his flattery. He had had a great staff at his command. They were great crows. He watched them with pride, jumping over the winding metal walkway that bordered the bridge like a gigantic anaconda.
The Region, Sunday, January 19, 2003
Two crows, scribbling strokes on canvas blue sky cracked, recognizing the ground, watercolours fuzzy colours, describing a landscape of wild and deep Galicia, drawn on scrolls of time. Don Silvio raises his tail as a polite squirrel as a cautious sign Welcome! Saluting the king of heaven.
—Good morning, Don Silvio.
—Good Softie.
—How's everything down there?
—All right, as always, Don Silvio. —The great Chief of the climbing beings with skill devises an enormous acorn, which rhymes with torn, has much of a poet and some of an orator.
Well, he's half human half squirrel. Sitting on a branch talks to the king of heaven.
—Have you read anything new, poet?
Softie is tired of flying over the peaks, nameless gorges and abandoned cliffs.
—I read something by Manuel Rivas. Great narrator and Poet, of course it has not been known to be recognized outside Galicia as he should, although his greatness grows every day.
Don Silvio shows several leaves, scrawled with “agarimo” on which you can read several sentences of "The pencil of the carpenter".
—You are a plagiarist, —adds the king of crows.
—No, I'm just trying to get some sentences that give me ideas to fit my stories. That's what everyone does, but I change them and change the meanings. This is how you can come up with something. I wonder who’s work Manuel Rivas reads and what methods he uses to succeed? It is difficult to get into the head of another. I've been writing for years, I've read them all.
I copied sentences of all, that most finished in the mud, because they did not fit my history. I began a thousand novels, but I felt limited, as a prisoner between the cells of the plot, the descriptions of the characters, the very structure of the work, as well as the final outcome. They were no more than cells for me, whose bars I could not penetrate. I felt as if my creativity were clinging, like the monotony of rain drops. Stories of love, murder, intrigue, espionage, sex. All the same, few impacted me. Until I read "Missed Calls", "In Wild Company". Then I understood. I was too blind with the garbage that filled the bookstores with books by Stephen King, Anne Rice, and the typical Americans. Not that they were bad, they all taught me a lot. But at the same time I needed to get rid of them. I stacked them in a huge Eiffel Tower and set them on fire.
It was time to break away from my past, to stop wandering the bogs of fiction and back to reality, back home, forests, the parapets of time. That's how I chose to be a squirrel. And he opened another sheet, Don Silvio on which he scribbled a poem: We were half squirrels, half human, and we were continually putting our hand in. Softie and the Swede watched him in astonishment: he was certainly a great orator, a poet in the woods. Don Silvio raised his tail. This made him rise like an airplane flying without engine from one oak to another. Softie and Swede were already on the roofs of the forest. The king of the sky made a double turn in memory of Rosalía de Castro, the largest.
Escaping from the literary glar
e, Don Silvio’s acorns devoured as the pages of a novel Charles Bokowski, eating E, then R; After chewing it swallowed the E of blow, the two CCs were zapped, to finish with the following letters, that completed the word ERECTION. He was going on page ninety-four and he still had a hundred and fifty more.
—Bah! Bukowski, you drunk! Anything they call literature. Arrogant Yankees, who heads the world believe, for them to know that here in Galicia, hidden in this accursed forest dwelling older narrators with more than a hundred centuries of life. Hidden among the Celtic Castros, as prophets of old, and teachers of this decade when, Galicia, joins, to vindicate his independent, creative and feverish narrative. After the Dark Ages when it comes to return power to our ancestors —stated Don Silvio as he turned the pages of a masterpiece, Vicente Risco with its bushy tail arrived.
The Region, Sunday, January 26, 2003.
At more than thirty meters in height, Softie slowed down, until the wind was no more than a sigh in his face, whispering sweet words of love to his twenty-two henchmen, who formed the complete youth squad of Sports Club Orense. Most of the crows did not bother to learn the most fundamental flight manoeuvres; it was to play football what mattered most to them: the technique of passing and dribbling, as well as the well-known Swedish bicycle, which had practiced well- Spanish League, as Ronaldo and Denilson. But Isaac Jiménez, better known by all as Softie, did not mind too much being a football coach, but flying, that was his true hobby. This way of thinking made him especially popular among his players, as he directed his team clearing themselves of them flying across the lawn, with his legs glued with an aerodynamic gesture against his body, getting fame, slippery: this earned him the nickname " The Baron".
—Why don’t you coach like other coaches? —His assistant, Swede, scolded him. Look, flying is very nice, but you can’t score all the goals with the head, you have to touch the ball with your feet.
Softie tried obediently, so the next few days he passed the band rather than flying like the other players, but he was too fat for that, so he forgot everything and decided to dedicate himself to leading the team. It was not long before softie returned to direct the training of his team from the sky, changing the continuous race for the gliders to a height of two hundred meters, fluttering with all his forces. He flew over the valleys of Vilarchao in the direction of Orense, in less than eight seconds he flew at more than eighty miles an hour, at which speed the wings began to ache. Even so, he increased his speed to one hundred and twenty, to squeeze more of his followers. It was then that due to its high speed plummeted lurching without control.
—I already told you, chief, that you are no longer here for these exhibitions! —The Swede scolded, while softie fell on the calm waters of the Minho, taking a small dip near the Velle reservoir.
He rose again to pursue Don Silvio, who made his appearance on the New Bridge on the back of his horse POSEIDON, riding between the cars until he reached Calle Curros Enríquez. Then he walked down The de la Habana Boulevard, trotting into the Municipal Sports Pavilion, jumping control of the door to sneak into the tunnel leading directly to the pool; The only one of all Galicia with Olympic measures. The bathers were frightened away, while he on one side and the horse on the other, plunged into the chlorinated waters, pursued by the whistles of the hall guards who were running wild.
The Region, Sunday, February 6, 2003.
Don Pablo, with his owl face, had become a kind of bird with night vision. By day, walking through the Forest City, he saw all the ladies dressed elegantly in their feathers and their corsets. In the evenings, his changing vision, of course, accelerated by his rhythmic heart rhythm, stared at the same mysterious birds, bare, naked and highly sexy, with the tension of an electric cable, his penis piercing like a militia rifle.
He could hear the tick tack of his heart like the sound of a steady beat, in the thick jungle of the ladies' pubic hair.
Softie entered the tavern of the forest with his lady, tall, thin, blond and young, with the eyes of famous dolls and the figure of the Mexican singer Paulina Rubio, who unfolded by jumping in the void on the neon stage of the Television firm Abellás would have spiked his spikes, being a hedgehog, but when he was a skunk, he spread his smelly stench all over the room, staring at the screen in the three-dimensional plane, which detached the cathode tubes inside the box. Wood brand Sanyo. Don Silvio laughed at the performance of the Mexican woman in her super-tight leather pants and appetizing bones, moving over the neon lights of the Riazor stadium.
—How good she is! —Said Manuel Marquina, the judge, with his polar fox eyes on the singer's divine waist.
—You do not understand women! —Protested Don Silvio, whose absent girlfriend had a waist that looked like a trucker's.
—I would eat those bones one by one, to make a broth in a large pot of eroticism. I'm going to have to stop bringing my wife around with those perverted ideas, —Softie told Don Silvio.
—Do not worry, my friend, I already have Marisa and I already have enough; Even though she’s got a pretty big ass, psychologically, she is the most attractive squirrel in the forest. Even with a miniskirt she is beautiful, with her white face, like the Asturian milk.
Abellás, who had not yet found a partner, spent time browsing MAN magazines, the best naked skunks in the world. But at the same time without taking his eye off Paulina's elusive body that he wanted to give her a little bite.
Nicholás left aside, reading the stories of Mireia. They were fantastic! You're the best, he whispered into her ear as he thrust his tongue into the lobe of her left ear, and she shuddered in sighs.
—Did you really like my stories? —Mireia asked.
—They're wonderful, they say Softie abandoned the drug trade for football, —Nicholás said.
—It's not really clear that he did it. As far as I know their income was due, more to gambling and cheating, than to drug trafficking. The narcotics were more of the band of his colleague and assistant, one of the favourite mules of The Queen, known as "the Swede", although his real name was Diego Suances.
—Other of the characters in your stories. What about Don Silvio and the rest of the characters?
—I think they're clean; I only related them to Isaac, because they used to frequent the cafe he ran. If you want my opinion I think Isaac was never too involved in the drug business, that this is just an urban legend like so many, that circulate around the city. He was a guy with too much class to mingle in that world, he, who considered it marginal and dangerous. He was only in charge of introducing Lucía to the chiefs, who really took over the business. That was how The Queen got her contacts. In exchange for never making sales or transactions at his place, he wanted to stay out of running any kind of risk and at the same time benefit from the gambling addiction of many of the mules that The Queen later sold the merchandise to.
—Isaac was intelligent, I doubt that he stopped passing the opportunity to make money at the expense of drug trafficking. Do not be naive! Of course he is a singular type that stands out because of his ambiguity, as a kind of cultured gangster: an ideal character for your stories, no wonder you won some prize with them, —Nicholás commented.
—Yes, I managed to blend reality and fiction. Can you imagine waking up one day to becoming a deer?
—That will happen to you someday as long as you're going out with me, —Nicholás said in reference to the antler.
—Why? You keep thinking about her, do not you? —Mireia asked in reference to Lucia.
Nicholas did not answer. There was a long silence, which seemed to devour some of the light from the room.
—Easy, I understand. I'll help you, if that's what you want. I do not want to be an obstacle in your love’s way. In the meantime, you can continue to take advantage of me for as long as you want, do not feel remorse. You are the best thing that has happened to me in my life and maybe nothing good will ever happen to me again. If at the end you return to her, the times we shared will not be taken away by anyone. —Nicholás
did not answer, seemed to be far away, immersed in his own thoughts.
An hour later, the flames crackled on the fireplace fed by thick wooden logs, casting the lovers' shadows on the wall screen. She, mounted on the man's body, accelerated her movements until she succeeded in provoking the climax that precedes a fraction of a second totally devoid of thought, a total mental vacuum, a few seconds of magisterial clairvoyance, ending in a chain of orgasms, provoking ecstasy masculine and of course also the feminine. Mireia broke away from Nicholás's body, lying on her back on the sofa bed, her eyes open, staring into the nothingness of the ceiling. It was not the first time they made love in the living room. They loved it at the end of the act, staying there lying on their back naked as God brought them into the world, watching the flames, feeling the heat of the fire on their sweaty skin.
Nicholás, faced with the possible departure of Lucia from prison some day, hoped that not very far away; He felt charged with energy. Although, on the one hand, it hurt him to leave Mireia to return to Lucia's arms. She was an excellent friend and lover. However, it appealed to him to confront the unknown. Lucia was passionate, younger and more beautiful than Mireia. Of course it was difficult to choose between two jewels. I wish I could have them at once, one on each side of the bed, making him happy for the rest of his days. But that possibility was a utopian thing to not even come up with. Mireia was the first to speak after the outbreak.
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