Learning to Lose

by David Trueba

  Lorenzo would have liked to know if Detective Baldasano was aware of his activities and if they increased his suspicions or perhaps convinced him that Lorenzo should be taken off the list of suspects in Paco’s murder. Seeing him exhausting himself over a few euros, working a full day for negligible pay, should surprise him. In case he had positioned someone to follow him around, Lorenzo made sure his days were very complicated, with no set hours or predictable routines, filled with patchy little jobs. It was surprising for someone who not long before had always held down stable jobs. If you are watching me, thought Lorenzo, welcome to the lowest rung of the labor ladder. He was amazed to see himself surrounded by Ecuadorians, with his shirt sweaty, working on sidewalks around the city.

  Daniela sometimes took him to the Casa de Campo Park on Saturday afternoons. There they’d meet up with Wilson and her friends, buy something to drink in the makeshift stands, and snack on humitas, arepas, or empanaditas cooked in smoking oil. As the sun set, they’d sit and listen to the dance music that came out of some nearby car with the doors open. Wilson hadn’t been in the country long, but he was already recognized by the entire community. Lorenzo was a sort of local partner for his entrepreneurial abilities, his aggressive need to make money. That’s why I’m here, my friend, to rake it in, was all he would say.

  There it wasn’t uncommon to find someone had drank too much or had left the soccer game on the sandy field near the lake with a grudge. Sometimes rivalries were unleashed amid races that lifted clouds of dust. If someone got violent, the others held him back. But the alcohol took its toll. One of those afternoons, it was Wilson who was involved. Daniela and her friends, among them Wilson’s cousin Nancy, pulled him out of a fight and took him home, stinking drunk, in the van. At the door, Lorenzo wanted to help them, but Wilson said he could get upstairs on his own. The next day, Daniela told Lorenzo that he had drank even more at home and he’d attacked them when they asked him to stop drinking. The girls all took shelter in Daniela’s room, but they heard him destroying the furniture with punches and kicks until he collapsed. The next day, they were unyielding, even though he apologized a million times, and that very day he moved out.

  Wilson then convinced Lorenzo to rent an apartment. Lorenzo would be the face that dealt with the owner; people don’t want to rent to us, and they won’t have any problem with you. They found an old apartment without an elevator on Calle Artistas. Lorenzo signed a contract with a trusting elderly woman whose legs were so swollen that she didn’t go with him to look at the apartment. She just gave him the keys and waited in the entryway. In just a few days, Wilson had set himself up in the best room and rented out the rest of the apartment to five other Ecuadorians. Two of them were married, but with no kids. It was a perfect deal for him. He had free housing and he even made some money to split with Lorenzo. A deal is a deal and a partner is a partner, he said as he handed him the first payment.

  By the second week, Wilson had put a mattress in a walk-in closet and was renting it out by the night. Sometimes he closed a deal with one of the new arrivals they picked up at the airport. It’s only fifteen euros, brother, he announced, until you find something better. Lorenzo had to sort out a call from the owner, who had been informed by a neighbor that the apartment was a nest of spics, as she herself put it. No, no, Lorenzo reassured her, they’re doing some work for me, but as soon as they’re done they’ll leave and me and my family will move in. And three days before the month ended, Lorenzo reassured her again with a punctual rent payment accompanied by a small tray of cakes, a detail Wilson had suggested. I have two sons, the woman explained to him, one is a soldier in San Fernando and the other works in construction, in Valencia, but they go months without coming to see me, they were the ones who convinced me to rent. And you are doing the right thing, ma’am, you enjoy the rent money, Lorenzo told her, and don’t let the neighbors breed bad blood.

  Wilson was enterprising. He had convinced Lorenzo to become a moneylender to three families. We are their guardian angels, not opportunists, he explained. They fronted them the money needed to rent an apartment and pay the deposit, which was always excessive because of the landlords’ distrust, and Wilson took care of collecting the installments with their mandatory interest. You think the banks are better than us? They wouldn’t even let these poor people wipe their feet on the welcome mat. The amount he had lent out was up to three thousand euros. Are they gonna pay? asked Lorenzo.

  Do you know any poor person who doesn’t pay their debts? They know we’re doing them a good deed, helping others, Wilson convinced him.

  Lorenzo could never have imagined when he picked Wilson up at the airport, silent, nostalgic, out of place, that he would become a daily presence in Lorenzo’s life. But he admired Wilson’s ability to remake himself, to find yet another formula for multiplying a euro. You are my lucky charm, Wilson would say to him. To thrive here, you need a local partner.

  Daniela was the only one who didn’t seem seduced by Wilson. He drinks too much. Even though after his violent outburst he’d promised to quit alcohol, she still avoided him. Lorenzo didn’t talk to her about his stable partnership with Wilson; he knew that she didn’t trust him. Drink emboldens, Daniela would say. I suffered through that with my papá. A man who drinks is a weak man.

  Wilson justified himself to Lorenzo. That Indian girl is very uptight. What’s the harm in a few drinks after work? Lorenzo tried to get more information out of him about Daniela, but Wilson was evasive. Over there I didn’t know her very well, either. Or he got more mysterious, saying, I think that Indian girl is a saint. You may be right, conceded Lorenzo. Looking into Daniela’s eyes is quite an experience. It’s as if they wash you clean. Wilson burst out laughing.

  Lorenzo feels like someone hovering over a well-protected treasure, without daring to touch it for fear it might vanish. He remains cautiously close to Daniela’s fortress, searching for the way to make his decisive siege. He doesn’t know if someone is observing his shy advances or if Daniela herself mocks his attentions. They could be seen as just the innocent maneuverings of a man in love, or at least that’s how he sees it when he views himself from a distance.

  4

  The game you dream of is always better than the actual game. The stands of old Highbury Stadium embrace the fans’ constant chanting. It is some sort of pagan praying maintained in a murmur and only broken during the difficult plays. Then it rises to a roar. When they get to the grounds, he’s surprised at how close the surrounding houses are, as if the stadium were an intrinsic part of the neighborhood. Dragon always told them, if you want to quiet the rival supporters, hold on to the ball. The first ten minutes, don’t even worry about scoring, but keep passing the ball, one- or two-touch, right and left, in fifteen minutes the crowd will be deflated and already whistling at their own players. Trust me, hold on to the ball, the crowd is like a petty, demanding wife who’s only loyal when you’re playing well.

  They lose because of two goals on free kicks at the very start of the game. Even though Ariel’s team put on the pressure, no space opened up. The other team sent quick passes to a striker who received them in the goal area, brought the ball down to the ground, and guarded it while he waited for a foul or the arrival of a player from the midfield.

  Dragon said that soccer was a game of memory where all the situations had been seen before, but there were infinite ways to resolve them. As kids he would tell them, if you’re bored on the bus, imagine what you would do in the face of a particular play, maybe one day it will save the game.

  Ariel had become more integrated with the team. He dared to whistle to ask for the ball, and he noticed that during difficult plays his teammates started looking for him. His left leg was the only guarantee of escaping the defenders, a can opener against the fullbacks. That was soccer, ten against ten until someone breaks the dead heat. You lack concentration, the coach told them at halftime. We lack a system, he thought. There was no practiced model to use against the rival team. Their attack w
as structured like a chaotic lottery.

  Coach Requero immersed himself in his notebooks. He had the Amisco system, which studied a particular player with eight cameras, then broke down the movements, analyzed the highs and lows of his success, and with that information the coach seemed satisfied, as if the discoverer of the theory of relativity were, in comparison with him, uninformed.

  The routine: travel, concentration, game, press conference, obsessive opinions based on the most recent results, the invocation of abstract concepts like streaks, luck, crisis. In Spain they talked so much about soccer that it was impossible to emerge unscathed from the rain of words. Seventy thousand pairs of eyes fell on him when he received the ball. And there was frustration in every pair when the imagined play failed to match up to the real one.

  He came back from Buenos Aires convinced he was going to break up with Sylvia. But her appearance at the airport changed everything. That long walk to the parking lot, keeping their distance, made all his desires to hold her come rushing back. Sylvia’s proximity transformed everything. There was no loneliness or pressure, no anguish or anxiety, only the shadow of a full life. He was living a fake existence, in a city where he had no roots, and Sylvia had shown up and given it meaning. The waiting, the distance, the return trip, the training schedule, the hasty shower in the mornings, even his nap now had importance. Because he had someone to talk to, someone to laugh with, someone to feel close to.

  Sylvia took possession of the house, of that empty, soulless house that Ariel wanted to leave as soon as possible. I have a five-year contract, they might be the best years of my life, and I don’t want to spend them in this unfriendly house, pushing open these ugly doors in ugly doorframes with ugly handles, with these narrow stairs that lead to an ugly bedroom where I’ve never felt at home.

  Now the corners of the anonymous house hide Sylvia’s smile, a gesture of her hands. Even the throw pillows piled up on one end of the sofa held her presence long after she’d gone.

  Ariel decided to buy an apartment in the real world, the world he had no right to be in. At least he could look at it from his terrace, like he had envied that rooftop in Belgrano Walter now enjoyed. Just like he loved the time spent with Sylvia, people-watching from a bar or from his car. It was a break from that obsessive gaze others fixed on him.

  If you could see the people in the stadium, Sylvia told him one day, when you get the ball they lift their butts up a little off their seats, like they’re levitating. It’s like they’re moving with you on the field, whether it’s an old man with a hacking cough or a guy who smokes cigars or a teenager eating sunflower seeds. And they all fall back into their seats when you lose the ball, as if it were rehearsed, you ruined their fantasy. It makes sense when they curse you up and down, of course …

  Sylvia was watching it all for the first time. She asked questions, she wanted to know stuff, she noticed the over-the-top details that everyone else saw as normal. She repeated his answer in a television interview, noticed his constant gesture of running his hand over his sock as if it were falling down, the way he pressed his upper lip when he didn’t like a play, or gazed toward the sky to avoid the stands. There were times when Ariel didn’t really indulge her curiosity, responding only in monosyllables; then she felt instantly belittled. The demands on Ariel never let up. This will consume me and when there’s nothing left of me that surprises her, she’ll leave me behind forever, thought Ariel one day.

  She recognized his moods instantly. Sometimes Ariel felt overwhelmed. He appreciated Sylvia’s youthful intensity, but he needed breaks. She defined his absence as fucking soccer. Sometimes she said to him, if they took soccer away from you, you’d be empty.

  Sylvia maintained the modesty of their first days together, which was attractive to Ariel. Nothing was easy and what happened the day before wasn’t something that could be taken for granted the next time they got together. One afternoon, because theirs was an afternoon love, she might let Ariel caress the entire length of her body with his tongue, but the next day she might ask him to turn off the light before taking off her bra and bombachas, as she liked to say, having picked up the Argentinian word for panties. One day her hands were barriers and on another they were curious and demanding. Then, she would say things to Ariel that made him laugh unexpectedly: a dick is a pretty absurd thing; it looks like a turkey’s wattle, don’t you think? Did you notice that our feet make love at their own pace, not coordinating with the rest of our bodies?

  Sylvia was capable of stopping him mid-caress and saying suddenly, I know you want me to suck you off now, but I don’t feel like it, okay? Or if he threw himself onto her, she’d stop him, you already ran me over once, all right. Other times she’d interrupt their long kiss before going up to his room, I think we don’t know how to love each other any other way, I’m not in the mood to fuck today.

  Perhaps they were adolescent games, but Ariel preferred to take part in them. He didn’t want to be in charge. He was afraid, sometimes, of turning Sylvia into too sexual a woman, of raising the bar of his desire too high. He remembered a teammate from his Buenos Aires team who had broken up with his lifelong girlfriend and had confessed to Ariel, somewhere between irritated and ironic, I don’t know what I’m complaining about, I was the one who turned her into a whore, when I met her she was just a little girl, and I molded her into someone who needed to have a ready cock nearby all the time, and she went looking for it elsewhere when I wasn’t around. “Dragonfly” Arias’s girlfriend cheated on him, the others said, but Ariel never forgot his complaint.

  Every afternoon they went through the security check into the housing complex and Sylvia asked him for those tacky sunglasses he always wore, to protect herself from the guard’s gaze. They’re horrible, but they pay me thirty thousand euros a year to wear them once in a while, Ariel said as he put them back in the glove compartment. Sylvia laughed. And when are they going to tattoo some brand name on your forehead, while they’re at it …

  Emilia, of course, had let a few hints drop to make him aware that she knew he wasn’t alone at night. Today I left meat for two in the fridge. A few days ago, Sylvia had spent the night at his house. They were awoken by the sunrise. She was terrified at how her father would react. They dressed quickly. Ariel tried to calm her down. He avoided running into Emilia, who had already started to bustle about the kitchen. Ariel kept her occupied while Sylvia went to the garage unseen. On the way home, Sylvia cursed. I don’t know what I’m going to say to my father. The traffic jam on the highway made everything worse. It turned them into something they didn’t want to be. Her into a fraught teenager talking to her father on the phone, telling him that she had fallen asleep at a girlfriend’s house. And him into an inconvenienced, shifty lover.

  A little while later, he dropped her on a corner near her high school and Ariel felt ridiculous again. He read the newspaper in a café, surrounded by construction workers. He confirmed the greasiness of porras, the fried dough he had seen people eating for breakfast so many times in Madrid. One of the articles mentioned him: “Ariel Burano has seized up and he’s nothing like the unstoppable young man who played in San Lorenzo. There is no trace of that player with frenetic jinks who knew how to mark the pace of the game. The Argentinian is now a sloppy player flustered when he has the ball at his feet.” The worst thing was he was convinced everyone had read the article and agreed with it.

  This Wednesday you guys are gonna win, right? said the man with sunken eyes and yellow teeth working behind the bar. Throw us a bone, come on. Ariel smiled and nodded, to reassure him. In Madrid older men had that punishing air to them, they never gave a compliment without a threat hidden behind it. This year we’ll do a double or you’ll all be sent to dig ditches. There was no bar that didn’t have a photo of the team and a pile of sports newspapers getting stale along with the day’s tapas. Soccer spread like hope or a curse. People gave it such an exaggerated importance that Ariel suspected they didn’t truly care.

  They lose th
e game. The referee marks the end with a cruel triple whistle. Ariel thinks of the guy in the café. They haven’t been eliminated, but the next matchup makes it complicated, an Italian team or a Spanish rival that knows how to play you where it hurts. They hadn’t had time to do more than look at London through the bus window, the roundabouts, the huge airport. All cities look the same to him. In Heathrow Ariel watches a family sleeping on an airport bench, their flight delayed. They look like Pakistanis. An obese woman eats chocolate bonbons. As they board, the pilot greets them with, you lost, huh? From the looks on your faces. I don’t really follow football, honestly. The flight attendants seem tired. They return to Madrid after midnight, doomed to train the next day like unruly schoolboys. Amid whispers, the vice president invites a few players to have one last drink at a topless bar near Colón. Ariel isn’t in the mood for anything, but the laughter of some teammate or other and the naked dancers arouse him enough to buy time in a private room with a Brazilian with a tattoo of an eagle on her back. After a short dance she gives him quick fellatio. Ariel lets himself do it; anything that can separate him from Sylvia is welcome. He needs to focus on his work, get everything else out of his head. I don’t want to see her anymore, I shouldn’t see her anymore.

  5

  Sylvia opens the door to her apartment. Her key ring is an A encircled in metal. A gift from Mai, she explains to Dani. I don’t know if my father’s here. It’s three in the afternoon and from the kitchen echoes the TV news theme song. Sylvia peeks into the kitchen and finds her father sitting down. Hello, Papá, this is Dani. Come in, come in. Lorenzo stands up and extends his hand. Dani shakes it, somewhat uncomfortable. Then he sits down. There’s plenty of food, says Lorenzo. Sylvia takes the plates and glasses out of the dishwasher. It is a tacit agreement she and her father have, to use the dishwasher as a cabinet, and when it’s completely empty, they put the dirty dishes from the sink in there and turn it on again.