Keeper

by Mal Peet

  The save, thinks Faustino, watching it, is pure genius. Even in slow motion, it’s hard to work out how it’s done. Klarsfeldt’s run approaches the ball at an angle. Klarsfeldt has only one good foot, his right. The angle of the run suggests that he’s going to turn his foot and send the shot hard to Gato’s right. It also suggests that he’ll lift the ball, because only experts like Lindenau can keep that kind of shot close to the grass. And Gato seems not to have worked this out. He commits himself in the wrong direction, throwing his weight onto his left foot. And Klarsfeldt glances up and sees this. So, Faustino realizes, if Klarsfeldt had intended to switch the shot, or had even just thought about it, that glimpse of Gato preparing to go to the left makes up his mind for him. He goes for the shot to the right. And what Gato does is power himself off the ground with the wrong leg, the left leg, into the flight of the ball. It looks clumsy, at first, then beautiful. The man flies. Gato’s left arm is high; it looks as if he might catch onto the bar and swing from it. His right arm stretches; his huge hand opens and palms the ball over the bar.

  Faustino looked at Gato and saw that he was smiling.

  “No big deal, Paul. I was ninety percent certain that Klarsfeldt would go for that particular shot. So was he. All I did was make it one hundred percent certain for both of us. I just took doubt out of the equation.”

  Onscreen, the camera roamed the crowd again. This time, the German supporters had their heads down. Faustino glimpsed a young couple, their faces painted in horizontal bands of black, red, and gold, holding on to each other as if they were at a funeral, not a soccer game. The camera cut to Walter Graaf as he walked toward the goalmouth. At the moment Graaf stopped and looked around in amazement, Faustino paused the video once again.

  He said, “And at last we come to the final act. We come, Gato, to where you do that thing you do. The thing that everyone in this city, this country, and for all I know in the whole world, has been talking about these past two days.”

  Gato said nothing, apparently studying the German goalkeeper frozen on the screen.

  Faustino said, “I need to know exactly what was going through your mind. Explain what you were thinking, what you were feeling.”

  Explain? Was it possible? Gato thought not. He would fail at this, this final thing. Because there was no way of saying it, or because he had said it already.

  He had picked the ball up from where a boy in a tracksuit had rolled it, and didn’t know why. His part in this was over now. But he held the ball and looked up the field and met Masinas’s eyes. Masinas spoke, or rather his mouth moved. No words. No sound at all now. The vast rumble of the crowd withdrew, like a wave, and didn’t come back. He was fifteen years old, walking as if in someone else’s dream down through a mob of loggers, away from his astonished father, down to a rough soccer field, drawn with chalk on red dirt. There was a white spot twelve yards from the goalmouth on which everything depended — his life and the lives and deaths of others. His legs took him there, past a man called Walter Graaf, who looked as if he were underwater but still trying to breathe. None of this mattered. He watched his hands put the ball down on the scuffed, white spot, and at that moment the delayed wave came back, the wave of sound. Howling, birdcalls, the vibration in the air of a billion insects, the fierce irresistible wind hurling through the trees, hurling through him. He looked up at the hundred hard, brilliant moons that burned down, canceling out his shadow. The light and the sound were part of him and he was part of them. He looked into the goal where, a moment or an hour earlier, he had seen the drowning man, Graaf. A frightened boy, a boy called Cigüeña, stood there, all arms and legs and worried hands. The dark wall of a forest rose behind the boy. For a moment he felt sorry for Cigüeña, knowing that he would have to destroy him. He felt sorry for the boy because the path the ball was going to take went past him, straight into the web, and the boy couldn’t see it. But he walked away from the ball anyway. He stood and looked into the boy’s eyes, his own eyes, Graaf’s eyes, and saw the fear in them. He made sure the fear was strong and deep-rooted before he began the run. The contact with the ball was beautiful; it was as if he made the flight into the net himself. In among the outrageous roar that came from the forest he heard the hiss of the ball against the net. Joy stretched inside him like a big cat after a kill, and the storm was saying, Gato! Gato!

  “GATO?”

  He was at the window, he realized. There was a dirty yellow tinge in the sky, and the night was separating into different kinds and depths of darkness. The stars were dying. Daybreak.

  “Gato,” Faustino said again. “Gato, you’ve said nothing. Come on. Sit down and talk to me. What am I going to write? What am I going to say?”

  “Say that I did what I was meant to do,” El Gato said.

  Faustino looked at the man leaning against the window — the same man who, on the screen, was being carried on the shoulders of his fellow players with the World Cup in his hands.

  “I’m tired,” Gato said. “We can look at it again. We’ve all the time in the world.”

  Faustino kept his voice under control. “My friend, we do not have all the time in the world.”

  He went back to his desk, sat down, and held up the three cassettes he had taped; there was a fourth still in the machine. As calmly as he could, he said, “We have talked all night. There is more than enough material here for three really strong stories. Have you any idea how much work I’ll have to do to edit it all into shape? Even if I could go without sleep for another eighteen hours, I’d struggle to get the first piece into tomorrow’s edition. So come on, please. Take me through that last penalty.”

  El Gato walked over to the table and sat down opposite Faustino. “We’ll do it another time,” he said.

  Faustino lost it. “Christ Almighty, Gato! Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  The keeper didn’t so much as blink. He said, “Haven’t you been listening to me, Paul?”

  “What?”

  “Paul, I’ve told you things tonight that I’ve never dared speak about before. Not to anybody. Do you think I did that just to entertain your readers?”

  Faustino suddenly looked like a man who’d found a snake in his car. “What the hell do you mean?”

  Without shifting his eyes from the other man’s, Gato said, “None of this, none of what I’ve told you tonight, is going to appear in your newspaper.”

  Faustino sprang up as if a stiff dose of electricity had been pumped through his chair. He put his hands flat on the table and leaned into the lamplight, which, hitting his face from below, made him look ghoulish and crazed.

  “What? What is this, Gato? Are you trying to tell me that all of this has been off the record? Is that it? Let me tell you something. It isn’t. You agreed to this interview. You took the damned money. And I’m going to print it. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

  The keeper lifted his hands, palms toward Faustino. “Paul, listen. I’m not trying to stop you publishing this. It’s what I want you to do. Sit down. Please.”

  Faustino sat, eventually.

  Gato said, “There’s something I want you to think about.”

  Faustino was already thinking. He was thinking about lost sales. He was thinking about a lost bonus, about losing his job. He was thinking about lawsuits.

  The goalkeeper said, “Paul, I want you to write a book.”

  “A what?”

  “A book, Paul. Look, if all this ends up as a newspaper article, what will happen to it? It’ll end up in the garbage with everything else. What will anybody learn from it?”

  “What they will learn,” Faustino said, with heat in his voice, “is a lot of fascinating stuff about the man who just won the World Cup. You have a problem with that?”

  “Yes,” said El Gato, “I do have a problem with that. Because no matter how well you write it, the story will be all about me. That’s how you’ll sell the papers, by putting my name all over the front of them. But the story I’ve been telling you tonigh
t is not just about me. It’s about all sorts of people. It’s about animals; it’s about the forest. Most of all it’s about a ghost, a genius, a shaman, a conjuror, a nonexistent person with no name. Do you think a newspaper that will end up in the garbage can is the best place for this?”

  Faustino clamped his hands on the top of his head as if to stop it blowing off. “Gato, Gato,” he said, “what the hell are you doing to me here? I’m a journalist. I draw a salary. Your agent and my boss made a deal, a deal for an exclusive interview. Okay, I’m going to be a day late with it, but when she sees what I’ve got for her, she might even like me a little bit. The damned crocodile might even love me. We could sell an extra million papers. And you are asking me not to give her any of it? You’re crazy.”

  “If the story can sell a million papers, it might sell a million books,” Gato said.

  Faustino let out a long breath. Then he got up, picked up his cigarettes and lighter, and walked to the brightening window. Facing it, he lit a cigarette. Three deep drags on it seemed to calm him.

  “A ghost story. With me as the ghostwriter. Is that it?”

  The goalkeeper laughed. “Yes. That’s good. I have a title: Keeper. What do you think?”

  Still facing the window, Faustino shrugged. “It’s okay. Whatever.” He turned and faced the goalkeeper. “Look,” he said, “let me be honest with you. I can’t really get my head around the Keeper business. All that supernatural stuff . . . I know you’re not lying to me. The problem is I don’t believe you, either.”

  Still smiling, Gato said, “I know you don’t. You’ve made that obvious.”

  “Have I?”

  “Oh yes. But it doesn’t matter. You’re a good writer. You can write about things you don’t believe in.”

  Paul Faustino had written three books. The last one had a nice photo of him on the back of the jacket. He knew how good it felt to hold something you’d written, something quite heavy, in your hand. Something with your name on the front cover. He wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but he had several times typed his own name into an Internet search engine and been delighted when that photo popped onto the screen. But that had been an easy book to write, really. Just a collection of sports anecdotes strung together, stuff out of his files. El Gato seemed to be thinking about something entirely different. Faustino didn’t know if he was up to it.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Gato waited. It was like tempting an opposing forward. He could sense that the journalist was just beginning to imagine himself as a Writer with a capital W. In a minute, Faustino would start to think about money. Gato had been in Faustino’s car, an imported English Jaguar that needed expensive repairs every couple of months. And he knew enough about clothes to guess roughly what Paul had paid for the jacket he was wearing. So he helped his friend to think about the money.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve thought about this, Paul,” he said, “but what do you reckon you’d get for this as a newspaper article? A nice bonus on top of your salary? A couple of thousand? I have no idea what we might make from the book, but . . .”

  Faustino came back to the table. He exhaled smoke through pursed lips. He jabbed his cigarette into the ashtray.

  “Yes, okay, maybe. I like the idea. But listen to me, please, Gato. You mention money. My paper is paying you a certain amount, I don’t know or care how much, for this interview. I ask you, what am I going to say to my editor when I go up to her office and tell her there is no interview? That I am saving it all up for a book? She will skin me alive, Gato, and nail the skin to the wall as a warning to others. I can’t do it.”

  “You will give her an interview. We’ll do that as well.”

  “But Gato,” Faustino said — or, to be more accurate, wailed — “she paid for an exclusive! Something special! You know what that means?”

  “Sure I know what that means,” Gato said. “And if I give you, and her, an exclusive, will you do the book with me?”

  “What exclusive?”

  “I’m quitting,” said the world’s best player.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Quitting. Retiring. We just watched my last game.”

  “What?” The word came out of Faustino like a hurt dog’s yelp.

  PAUL FAUSTINO HAD quit pacing and smoking and ruining his haircut with his hands, and had sat down again opposite the keeper.

  “The first thing I need to ask you, Gato, is if you have told anyone this. Does your club know? And does Badrenas know? Badrenas is the best coach the national team has had in twenty years, but I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me. If he finds out about this from an article of mine, he will have me killed. I really think he will.”

  “Badrenas knows,” Gato said. “He has known for some time. I told him before the final. My club also knows. I confirmed my decision to Luis Ramerez before I came here last night.”

  Faustino became very agitated. “But if they know,” he said, “they will have written press releases! Everyone will know!”

  “No. They are expecting you to call them this morning. In the next couple of hours, in fact. Then they will confirm my decision, and only to you. They will give you the quotes you need. Tomorrow afternoon Badrenas and Luis and I will hold a press conference. But by that time you’ll have had the story out for almost a whole day. I made them promise me this. They owe it to me, after all. Oh, and there’s also this.”

  Gato took an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “This is my personal statement about the reasons for my retirement. It’s written in the form of a letter. A letter to you, personally. You could print it in that form. It might be quite unusual.”

  Faustino sat back in his chair and looked at the goalkeeper. His face was expressionless at first, but then a smile lifted into it like the rising sun. He stood up and went to the wall phone and took the receiver off the hook. Before he hit the buttons, he turned back to the table.

  “I have always wanted to say this,” he said.

  He punched the numbers, waited two seconds, and said, “Vittorio? Hold the front page.”

  Faustino made two long calls, during which El Gato sat patiently.

  “Sorry about that, Gato,” the journalist said when he finally sat down at the table again.

  The keeper made a generous gesture. Faustino switched on the tape.

  “Now,” he said. “Why? You are thirty, which is not old for a keeper. You’re at the top of the tree. You’re playing better than ever, in my opinion. And you’ve won this.” Faustino patted the bald dome of the World Cup. “So why retire now? You’ve got years left in you.”

  Gato said, “The reasons, the ones I want known, are in the letter. But you’ve answered your own question, Paul. Yes, I’ve got years left in me. I’ve got a life ahead of me, God willing, and I want to do something with it. Something more important than soccer.”

  Faustino recoiled in horror, raising his hands as if to protect himself from some evil apparition. “More important than soccer?” he cried. “I can’t believe I heard you say that!”

  He grabbed the microphone and spoke into it very slowly and deliberately.

  “The world’s top player, the great Gato, has just announced that there is something more important in life than soccer. In a moment, when he has stopped laughing, I, Paul Faustino, will challenge him to reveal what this thing is.”

  For some moments the tape machine recorded two men giggling like small boys in a school bathroom.

  Eventually Faustino said, “Okay, my friend, what is it? You plan to take over the world, is that it?”

  “Not exactly. Just save a part of it.”

  “And what does that mean?” asked Faustino, straightening his face.

  “I owe a great deal to the forest,” Gato replied, “and now I want to pay something back.”

  “Oh, my God,” Faustino said. “Are you telling me that you are giving up soccer to become a conservationist? One of those hippie Green campaigners?”
<
br />   “Something like that,” the keeper said. “And you are going to become one too.”

  “I am?”

  “Of course. You’re going to write that book with me.”

  “Hey,” Faustino said, “wait a minute. If — and it’s still if — I do this book, it’ll be because the world is interested in you. And, to be frank, because it will make me money. And I’m no saint. I’m not going to give the money to some rainforest charity.”

  “No one’s expecting you to. We’ll go fifty–fifty on the book. What you do with your money is up to you. And what I do with my money is up to me.”

  The journalist leaned back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He said nothing for a bit.

  “So that’s my headline in tomorrow’s Nación, is it? El Gato Quits Soccer to Save Rain Forest?”

  The big man leaned into the lamplight and fixed his eyes on Faustino’s.

  “No, absolutely not,” he said, “because that will make me sound like some sort of crank. I forbid it, Paul, really. Apart from anything else, it will spoil the surprise of the book when it comes out. You do see that, don’t you?”

  Faustino did see that, yes.

  “And another thing,” Gato said, “is that, as you say, I have won this.” He put a large hand on the gold skull of the trophy. “What else is there? As far as soccer is concerned, I have done what I set out to do. Needed to do. Four years ago, when France knocked us out of the Cup in the semifinals, I was devastated. The rest of the team was too, of course, but it was especially bitter for me. I felt like someone who had set out to climb Everest and been forced to give up just feet from the summit. Now I’ve got there. Four years later than I thought, but here I am.”

  He caressed the textured gold of the trophy. “It’s not especially attractive, is it?”

  Faustino switched the tape recorder off, stood up, stretched. “There’s a couple of things I have to do. One more call to make. Turn things off. Then we’ll go and chow down on a serious breakfast. Is that okay? Five minutes?”