Keeper

by Mal Peet

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘What do you see?’

  I had no idea what he meant me to say. I looked down the length of the clearing at the goal and the gray net hanging from it, and behind the net the shades of green deepening into the forest.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘I see the goal. Is there something else?’

  ‘Try again,’ he said. ‘I ask too much of you, perhaps. Look at the crossbar.’

  This time I saw something, some sort of very small animal, moving along the bar. From that distance, it was just a reddish brown blur without edges or detail.

  The Keeper lifted his face. I thought I caught two glints of light where his eyes should have been. ‘Look at the sky,’ he said. ‘Just there, look. What do you see?’

  The sky was all one color, something like bright metal. It was hard to look up into it. I narrowed my eyes and saw a hawk hovering, its wingtips spread, holding the air, striped tail tilted downward. Tiny from where we stood.

  ‘Now,’ the Keeper said, ‘what does the hawk see?’

  I shaded my eyes with my hand, and as I did so I felt a kind of lurch, as if the space around me had shifted somehow. The Keeper repeated his question, but this time his voice seemed to come from somewhere inside my own head. What does the hawk see? Look!

  And I saw through the eyes of the hawk. Far below me, the emerald-green regular shape of the clearing was like a mistake in the infinite forest. I looked down on it as if through a powerful telescope, a telescope focused on just a few inches of the grainy crossbar of the goal, which I saw in fantastic detail. And something moved into the focus of the hawk’s eyes. A mouse of some sort. Or a rat. A little mammal with small flickering eyes, large ears, long tail. Scuttling along the crossbar, stopping now and then, sniffing the air anxiously. I felt its fear, and something else, too; there was a connection between the hunter and the victim. It was like a thread that tied them together, like the string of a kite attached to the hand of the child flying it. The instant I realized this, the hawk folded its wings into itself and followed the invisible thread downward at relentless speed, spreading itself at the last possible moment, breaking its fall at the second its claws daggered into its prey. And then it was back in the air, the corpse hanging from its feet.

  I lowered my hand from my eyes and was back on the grass in the clearing with the Keeper.

  ‘Get in the goal,’ he said, and walked the ball away from me. He was maybe twenty-five yards out when he stopped and turned to face me. I stood in the center of the goal in a state of shock. The Keeper had shifted the limits of my world, or maybe simply rubbed them out. Now, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he was preparing to take a free kick at me.

  It was a beautiful free kick. It went off to my left around a wall of imaginary players, then turned and dipped toward the top left-hand corner of the goal. But I knew it would go there. I could see the path it was on. It was as if the ball were flying along an invisible thread that was attached to my hand. I took off like a bird and reached out to it, and I palmed it over the bar. My legs were everywhere, and I landed in an ugly heap, almost crashing into the upright.

  When I got to my feet, the Keeper was standing at the spot from which he had taken the kick.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘At least you can see.’”

  EL GATO EXCUSED himself and set off for the men’s room, which — and this was another source of grief to Faustino — was at the far end of the seventh floor. The journalist leaned back in his chair and considered the options. The first and most obvious was that the world’s greatest goalkeeper was barking, moonstruck mad. This idea was itself crazy; the man’s calmness, his absolute control over stress, was legendary. On the other hand, Faustino reminded himself, nutcases were sometimes like that: completely normal to all appearances, calm as milk until someone or something hit whatever hidden switch or lever it was that sent them into some other orbit. But no. He’d known the man for years, and if there’d been any sign of buried craziness, he’d have spotted it. Besides, Gato’s tone of voice was so matter-of-fact, with none of the passion of the fantasist. Okay, then: this jungle story was an elaborate, carefully thought-through scam. But what for? If this was all bullshit, and it was printed under Paul Faustino’s name, Paul Faustino’s credibility — and his job — would go down the drain. Was that it? Did Gato have some reason to destroy the reputation of someone he called a friend? The thought made Faustino reach for his cigarettes. Had he ever done anything, written anything about the man that deserved this kind of vengeance? At panic speed, Faustino ran through the history of their friendship and found nothing.

  So: rule out madness, rule out deliberate, systematic lying. . . . What was left? Faustino had no idea. There was clearly nothing to do other than let the goalkeeper talk this thing out, and then review the situation. Take advice, maybe. But from whom? Was there anyone who could back up this wild story? Had Gato told all this to anyone else? Now there was an interesting thought. . . .

  Faustino sighed and lit up. One thing was certain: this was not going to be the one-hour interview he’d planned on. It looked like a long night ahead.

  The goalkeeper came back into the office and sat down. He regarded Faustino silently. Faustino met his eyes and had the very uncomfortable feeling that Gato knew exactly what he had been thinking. Neither man spoke. Eventually Faustino simply leaned forward and pressed the record button. The goalkeeper began to speak again. That same measured tone of voice.

  “As the days and weeks went by, my moods changed like the sky. Sometimes I would come out of the forest really high, you know? Exhilarated. At other times I would be almost in despair, certain that I would never master the skills the Keeper was trying to teach me. Very often I was lost in thought, rerunning the afternoon in my head. I became distant, I suppose. So my family became more and more worried. My mother was particularly anxious. When she asked what I had been doing, I told her I had been ‘exploring.’ To try to reassure her, I told her about the things I had seen: flowers, animals, insects. But I had to make a lot of this stuff up because, in fact, I no longer took much notice of what I saw in the jungle. My travels into the forest now had only one purpose: to get as quickly as possible to the clearing and the Keeper. All the same, my mother clung to the notion that I had some sort of scientific interest, and this is what she told my father. He was uneasy but made a joke of it, and for a while he called me ‘the Explorer.’ ‘And what did the Explorer discover today?’ he would ask when we all sat down to eat. Then I would talk about beetles and plants and so on.

  Looking back now, Paul, I find it surprising that my father knew very little about these things himself. Not just surprising, but sad, too. He was in the forest every day of his working life but seemed to know so little about it. When he spoke about his work, his stories were mostly about the men he worked with. When he spoke about the forest, his talk was about the difficulties and successes he had met while cutting it down. He was expert at calculating the weight and balance of a tree, and the direction in which it would fall if the saws made the right cuts. When he looked at a tree, he saw what it might be turned into: houses, boats, furniture, telephone poles, paper. Money.”

  Faustino did not miss the faint bitterness that had seeped into Gato’s voice.

  “But as you said earlier, my friend, that was his job. Surely it’s a good thing that he did it well.”

  “Of course, of course.” A touch of impatience in Gato’s voice. “I’m not saying that my father was a vandal. All I’m saying is that it’s sad and strange that those men like my father who lived and worked in the forest knew nothing about it. And I know they didn’t, because I worked alongside them for a while.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, but I’m getting ahead of the story here. I’ll come to that. So, anyway, I encouraged my mother to believe that I was the budding naturalist. The problem was, it got harder and harder to make stuff up. That’s the trouble with lies: you have to remember them all, tell the same ones every time,
so that you don’t get caught.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Faustino.

  “Of course not, Paul. You’re a journalist.”

  Faustino put on a big, innocent smile.

  “So,” Gato continued, “I had to do some work on this cover story of mine. I had to begin taking notice of what I saw on my way to the clearing and back, so that I could tell my mother something new each evening. I started to bring things back. Leaves, flowers, dead beetles in a matchbox, skins that small snakes had shed, little skulls. They didn’t mean much to me. I just left them lying around. Then one Sunday my father spent the afternoon fixing up shelves in my room, and my mother proudly arranged all these bits and pieces from the forest on them. I hadn’t known that she had collected and kept them. Later that week she went to the market and bought me three big notebooks, several ballpoint pens, and a tin of colored pencils. Which made my sister very envious, of course. And which made me feel trapped. Now I had to take the whole business seriously.

  Most evenings, after dinner, I would sit at the table beneath the moth-flickered light and record and draw the things that I had found. At first, it drove me crazy, because what was buzzing in my head wasn’t plants or insects but soccer. Then, after a while, I began to enjoy doing it. For one thing, it was a way for me to calm down. And it made my mother happy, and I loved her, so that was good.”

  “What about your father?”

  “A hard question, Paul. He was led by my mother, so if she was happy, he was happy too. For a while, anyway. His problem was that he couldn’t see the point of it. We lived in a logging town. The only reason the town existed was to cut trees. My father knew for a fact that when I left school, I would work for the logging company. There was no alternative. In my town, boys grew into loggers, girls grew into the wives of loggers, they would have children who became either loggers or the wives of loggers, and that was that. So he didn’t see the point in my becoming an expert in the ways of the forest. He thought it was unnatural. My mother had a bigger vision of the world. She had begun to imagine me as a professor, giving lectures in Rio, or New York, or Europe. Her mistake was to share these dreams with my father, when he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want the safe rhythms of his life upset by ambition. That’s how people got hurt. So now and again he’d snap, like a rope carrying too much weight. Then there’d be shouting and tears.”

  “You heard them, these rows?” Faustino wanted to know.

  “Oh, sure. Like I said, the walls in our house were thin. My father hadn’t been thinking about arguments when he built them.”

  The goalkeeper went once again to the window and looked down at the city.

  “I bet you,” he said, “that down there, in thousands of buildings, thousands of parents are arguing about what they want their children to be. And in almost every case their children will turn out to be something their parents never even thought of. There’s nothing unusual about what happened to my family. My mother and father fought the same fight that’s going on down there. The only difference is that they fought the battle in the middle of the jungle.”

  Faustino had different thoughts about the ordinariness of what had gone on in El Gato’s childhood, but he kept them to himself.

  The big man returned to the table. “Can you remember what your parents wanted you to be, Paul?”

  “They wanted me to be a doctor,” said Faustino, lighting up again. “They are, of course, deeply disappointed.”

  “You must earn a lot more than the average doctor,” Gato said.

  “Sure I do,” replied Faustino. “But that doesn’t make any difference. As far as my parents are concerned, I’m just a failed doctor.”

  “And as far as my mother is concerned,” said El Gato, “I am a failed naturalist who just happens to have won the World Cup. She still hopes that one day I will settle down and do something worthwhile.”

  Faustino’s laugh turned into a cough, and when it had calmed, Gato said, “My parents, after many nights of fighting, came to an agreement. My mother had to admit that it would be incredibly difficult for me to have an education after I left school. The only place for someone like me to get more education was at the Advanced College, and that was in the regional capital, Puerto Madieras, which was two hundred fifty miles down the other side of the river. My mother had a cousin there who might be persuaded to let me live with her, but all this would cost a great deal of money. My father said that the only way to find this money would be for me to work for the logging company for maybe two years, and for the family to save all the wages I earned to pay for my time at the college. My mother agreed that this must be the way. I guess my father thought that two years of real work would put an end to all these crazy ideas.

  And I heard these discussions through the wall, feeling sick with guilt. Because I knew I would never go to Puerto Madieras and learn how to become a naturalist. Because I knew that although my mother would spend hours, days, writing difficult letters to her cousin and to the college, I would never go there.”

  El Gato sat silently for several moments. Faustino kept quiet too. He could see that the goalkeeper had taken a long journey back in time and space to a hot, troubled house, and the journalist was in no hurry to bring him back.

  The tape machine made a tiny grinding sound as it recorded the silence.

  “THERE WERE TIMES when I hated him,” El Gato said. Faustino was confused. “What? Who, your father?”

  “Of course not. Of course not! I’m talking about the Keeper, obviously.”

  The big man’s sudden anger was like lightning from a clear sky, and Faustino was taken aback. “Oh, right,” he said. “Of course. Sorry.” He waited for the other man to calm. It was an interesting process, like watching clear water sluice away a stain. When it was done, Faustino tried again.

  “What made you hate him?”

  “He was hard, unemotional. He didn’t seem to know what praise was. He was building me, and he did it ruthlessly. Much of what we did was as you’d expect — push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, sprints — all in increasing repetitions as time went by. I would meet one target, and instantly he would set another. And while I was working — usually when I was beginning to fade — he would suddenly blast the ball at me, and if I failed to get a hand or foot to it I would feel his icy disapproval. A few times he reduced me to tears, and when this happened, he would simply turn his back and wait for me to pull myself together. He was driving me, hard. The thing that puzzled and disturbed me was that he didn’t seem to be doing this for my sake, but for his. So, sometimes, I hated him.”

  Faustino had to ask the obvious question. “So, why didn’t you quit?”

  Gato seemed to find this surprising. “It never occurred to me.”

  “No? Not once?”

  “Not once.”

  “Okay,” Faustino said.

  “Besides,” Gato said, “it worked, this discipline. I gained stamina. I grew stronger. My body looked less and less like a bundle of sticks tied together with string. My arms and shoulders and thighs began to fill out. My big feet started to look appropriate. I was rather pleased with myself. I began to think that sometime soon the Keeper would announce that he was pleased with me too. I should have known better.”

  Gato poured himself a glass of water and drank from it. Faustino was quite sure that this break in the story was meant for dramatic effect.

  “One day,” Gato resumed, “I came into the clearing and was surprised to see the Keeper already in the goalmouth. It was a hot, heavy afternoon. The sky was stacked up with dark, grumbling clouds, and the light seemed unnatural. The air in the clearing shifted uneasily from side to side. A storm was brewing not far away.

  As soon as I stepped onto the turf, the Keeper moved a short distance out of the goal and told me to take his place. I stood more or less halfway between the posts. He watched me, silently, holding the ball under his arm. A glimmer of lightning flickered behind his left shoulder. I began to feel awkward but didn’t know what
to say, or even if I was expected to speak. I shifted my feet, embarrassed. Then at last he spoke.

  ‘What do you feel?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not a difficult question. Tell me what you are feeling, standing there.’

  ‘Um . . . there’s a storm coming,’ I said. ‘And I’m wondering what you are going to make me do today. I’m wondering what you want me to say.’

  ‘No, no,’ the Keeper said. ‘Those are things you are thinking, and that is not what I asked you. You are standing in a special place. I want you to tell me what it feels like.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  He regarded me for a few moments.

  ‘Okay,’ he said eventually. ‘I want you to walk to the goalpost to your right.’

  I did.

  ‘Now, put your hand on the post. No, face me, not the post. What do you feel?’

  What I felt was the coarse grain of the wood. Was that what he meant? I didn’t think so. I didn’t answer his question.

  ‘Very well. Now walk to the other post. Put your hand on it. What do you feel?’

  What the hell was he expecting me to say? This was stupid.

  ‘It’s an old piece of wood,’ I said. ‘The other post is an old piece of wood. The bar is another old piece of wood.’

  The Keeper’s shadowed face told me nothing. He may have felt my impatience but clearly it was of no importance to him.

  ‘How long did it take you to pace from one post to the other?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What is the distance from one post to the other? How fast could you travel that distance? How far above your head is the bar? When you lift your arm straight up, how big is the gap between your fingertips and the bar? How far behind you is the net? Can you imagine the angle between your right post and the top left corner of the net? How would that angle change if you stepped one pace forward? Or two paces? If you looked at the goal from above, what shape would it be? If an opposing player were standing at the left corner of the penalty area, what would the goal look like to him?’