He hammered these questions at me, and they stung me like wasps defending their nest. They were so aggressive that they brought hot tears to my eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ I shouted. ‘I don’t know!’
Silence. And in that silence another flick of lightning and a grumble from the bruise-colored clouds.
The Keeper did not react to my outburst or to the distress in the sky.
He said, ‘If I had asked you such questions about the room you sleep in, would you have answered in the same way? Isn’t it true that you know exactly the space and shape of that room? Isn’t it true that you can find your way around that room in the dark as easily as in the light? Isn’t it a fact that you have a very clear picture of that space in your head? More than that — don’t you feel that space when you are in it?’
I began to understand.
‘What were the first words I ever spoke to you?’ the Keeper asked me.
I hadn’t forgotten. Those words had blown through my dreams for an entire night. ‘You said, Your place. You belong there.’
He nodded. ‘And do you believe that now?’
‘I think so.’
‘Think?’ The word was hard-edged.
‘I believe it. Yes, I do,’ I said.
‘You are a keeper?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am a keeper.’ And although I was astonished to hear myself say it, I did, in fact and at last, believe it. I was filled with relief, the kind of relief you feel when you give in to some irresistible force. When you know that there are no other choices to make.
The sky groaned. I looked up, and my eye was caught by a cobweb in the angle of the goalpost and the bar. It had not been there earlier. One of those flies that storms conjure up was struggling in the sticky threads of the web, and the spider was making her way swiftly toward it. Her legs were tiger-striped in bands of brown and ginger. I wondered whether I was the spider or the fly. I didn’t speak the thought aloud, so I was shocked when the Keeper said, ‘You are the spider. For you, the goal will not be a vulnerable place needing your protection. It will be a trap. It will be where you hunt.’
Another blue flare in the sky. The storm was almost on top of us now.
‘I need to be sure that you understand me,’ the Keeper said. ‘Nothing is going to work if you do not own that space you are standing in. You must always be aware of how far, exactly how far, you are from either post. Without looking to check. You must know exactly what you have to do to get yourself into the unprotected parts of your goal. You have to understand how your body occupies the goalmouth. You must be able to imagine what your goal looks like to anyone who wants to attack it, from any direction. If you can make this goal, this web, your own, you can make any goal your own. They are all the same.’
The Keeper turned his head slightly, and the sky was bleached by what might have been the flash of a vast camera. The lightning arced into the forest so close to us that I could taste the electric charge in the air. When the blue light faded, it was as if night had already fallen. The first sheet of rain swept through the clearing.
Still the Keeper didn’t move. Perhaps he was waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t think what that might be. At last he said, ‘I think the light is not good enough for practice today. I think you might as well go home.’
By the time I got back to the house, I was drenched and coated to my waist in mud. Nana took one look at me and went ballistic.”
PAUL FAUSTINO SNEAKED a glance at his watch, and El Gato saw him do it.
“Are you worrying about your deadline, Paul?”
“I’ve pretty much given up on that. This piece was meant for tomorrow’s edition, but even if we’d finished, I don’t think I could get this on the street tomorrow.”
“Does that mean trouble for you?” Gato said.
“From my charming editor? Oh, she’ll give me the Death Glare, but I’ll survive it. Right now, I’m more likely to die of starvation. How about I get some coffee and sandwiches sent up? Or send out for pizza?”
“Sandwiches would be fine.”
Faustino went over to the wall phone and jabbed four numbers. “Hi. Paul. Hello. Yeah, I’m good. Coffee, yes. Yeah, in a thermos, that’d be nice. And can you manage a big plate of sandwiches? Anything except cheese. Great.” He listened. “Yep, that’s who I’m talking to. He’s really here, yes. Yes, I’m sure he’ll autograph a photo for you.” He laughed. “Of course it’s for your son, not you.”
Later, the tape running again, Faustino sipped black coffee and once more pondered the mental health of his friend. It was a subject to be approached on tiptoe, if at all.
“Gato,” he said, “I have to say, this isn’t the kind of interview I’d imagined having with you.”
“I’m sorry,” Gato said.
“No, no. This is great stuff. Really. But, well . . . it’s a bit, er, weird.”
The goalkeeper said nothing.
“What strikes me,” Faustino said, “is that when you talk about these . . . these experiences of yours, you seem, well, very calm. You must have been a very well-balanced child. If something like that had happened to me, I would be in a mental hospital now.”
“Well, I don’t know about being well balanced. I was terrified. And that dark, wet afternoon, dashing home through the storm, I thought that yes, perhaps I was going mad.”
Faustino blinked, hearing the word “mad” spoken aloud, but stayed silent.
“And it was only later, much later, that I understood what the Keeper was doing.”
“Which was?”
The goalkeeper leaned forward and fingered the air in front of him as if he were feeling for the right words.
“He was teaching me things, skills, of course. But he was doing something else as well. He was showing me what weakness and fear were. But in a safe place. That clearing in the jungle was like a place taken out of the real world, separate from it. Do you know what I mean? It was a place where I was allowed to feel frightened, hopeless, awkward, ashamed, but it was a place where no harm could come to me. I was protected there. I could get things wrong but have other chances to get them right. So that, later, out there in a bigger and more dangerous world, I would be able to manage those things. He, the Keeper, was getting me ready for the life he knew I would have.”
Faustino considered this. “It seems to me,” he said, “that you are describing what a father should do for his son.”
“I do not want to criticize my father,” Gato said sharply.
“No, of course not,” said Faustino. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just that you speak about the Keeper as if he took that role. As if he were doing certain things for you that your father couldn’t do.”
“Of course my father couldn’t do those things for me. My father was a logger. He left in the morning dark and came home in the evening dark. His role, to use your word, was to keep his family going. And that’s what he did, successfully. There are plenty of men who fail at that.”
The goalkeeper was again agitated, and Faustino backed off.
He smiled. “That’s true enough,” he said. “I meant no disrespect to your father, my friend.”
El Gato leaned back in his chair. “That’s okay, Paul,” he said after a pause. “Let’s go on.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Time is stretchy stuff,” El Gato said. “When you’re defending a one-goal lead against a frantically attacking side, two minutes of added time can last an hour. And in the clearing with the Keeper, time didn’t seem to work in the same way as it did elsewhere. It was as if we were in a glass box where the ordinary ticking of the world didn’t reach us. I often came out of the forest and was surprised to find that it was an hour, perhaps more, later or earlier than I had thought, that I was out of step with the outside world. This sense I had of being in another time zone came from the Keeper, I think. He was constant. He didn’t age or change. He’d disconnected himself, somehow. He’d escaped tim
e. Often I felt this same freedom myself, the freedom of living untouched by the hands of the clock. Of the months marching past me, not dragging me with them. It was an illusion, of course. Looking back now, my time with the Keeper passed incredibly quickly.
By the time I was fourteen and a half, I hardly resembled the skinny kid who had crept wide-eyed into the clearing eighteen months before. At school I was still Cigüeña, the Stork, of course. In places like that, names stick. In the café, old men called each other by nicknames they had been given half a century earlier. But there was nothing stork-like about me anymore. I was taller and bigger and stronger than my father. On Saturday evenings, if he had enjoyed a couple of beers, he liked to get me to give him piggyback rides. He’d ride me around the outside of the house, whooping like a rodeo rider, until my mother appeared, laughing and scolding at the same time, to herd us inside.
And, after eighteen months, the Keeper was showing some signs of satisfaction with my progress. I remember the first time he used the words ‘keepers like us.’ Like us! I could almost feel my heart getting bigger. Usually, though, a nod of approval was the richest reward I would receive. He would force me to make a sequence of very difficult reaction saves from close range, and if I blocked every one, he would say something like ‘That was almost good.’ The ‘almost’ would sting me like a whip at first, but I got used to it. I think now that it was part of the training, denying me praise. I remember making a particularly difficult save in my second game for Unita, getting my left foot to a deflected shot, and when I watched the video, the commentator called it a ‘lucky stop.’ Goalies get that all the time, and I’ve known some who let it eat into them. The Keeper taught me to expect it, and survive it.
During our second year, he spent a great deal of time teaching me the skills of an attacking player. He himself was very good. He had somehow, somewhere, mastered the art of the free kick. I have since come up against players who were better than him at using the ball to deceive a keeper, but not many. He made me see, through the eyes of a forward, how the goalmouth looked from different angles and how those angles might tempt one kind of shot or another. You know those clear plastic protractors you use at school to mark and measure angles? Whenever I had to lay one on a sheet of paper, I saw a goalmouth from above. While the other pupils measured the angle between one line and another, I was thinking about how a player would use his foot to send the ball along that angle. As a result, I always did badly in the geometry tests. But I learned to measure, and calculate, and anticipate with my eyes.
We worked, the Keeper and I, on penalty kicks, over and over. I never beat him. No — I did beat him once, but only because I slipped on the grass and miscued the ball on a day when it was raining heavily.
At home, my notebooks took up more and more space on the shelves, crowding the little exhibits I had gathered on my journeys in and out of the forest. By now there were thirteen of these books. The earliest ones were filled with random, higgledy-piggledy notes, drawings, and little bits of information swiped from school textbooks. Slowly, though, they became more organized: a whole book about trees, another about moths, another about fruits and what ate them. My father stopped calling me ‘the Explorer.’ Now both he and Uncle Feliciano called me ‘Professor.’
Uncle Feliciano came to the house once or twice a week, in the early evening. We would hear the tapping of his stick and the drag of his twisted leg on the gravel, and then he would appear around the corner of the house and sit down, with difficulty, on the chair next to mine. He would summon his sister, my grandmother, and request a glass of tea. Then he would take out his spectacles, which were held together by sticky tape and twisted paper clips, park them on his nose, and squint at my work. If I had drawn a centipede, he would count the body sections and legs, twice, to make sure I had got them right. He would criticize the colors I had used in drawings of plants. He also enjoyed teaching me the local names of the things I’d drawn.
‘This one, this beetle here, we call the Bullfighter. You know why? It has one very good trick to defend itself. There are birds who like to eat him, because he is big and juicy. So when he comes up against one of these birds, he pulls this big blob of red stuff, like blood but more sticky, out of his head with his front legs, and puts it on the ground next to him. For some reason, the bird goes for this red blob, not the beetle. Like a bullfighter using the red cape, you know, to distract the bull? And so the beetle escapes.’
He’d lick his finger — and I wished he wouldn’t — to turn to the next page.
‘Hah! Now, this one has a rude name: Stinkbutt. When he is attacked, he turns around and makes a terrible smell from his back end. If you are unlucky enough to be near him when he does it, you can hear the noise it makes, like a tiny gun: pap-ap!’
On most of Uncle Feliciano’s visits, we were not alone at the table. My mother took great pride in my books and liked to be there when Feliciano looked through them. I always felt a little flood of shame run through me when she praised my work and shared her ambitions for me with another person. But there was one evening I particularly remember, because Uncle Feliciano and I were alone at the rickety table below the bare light bulb. He flicked his dampened finger through my latest pages, but he seemed less interested than usual. He closed the book and looked out at the moon.
‘You know why I call you “Professor”?’ he asked.
‘You like to tease me, Uncle,’ I said.
‘No. I call you Professor to please your mother. To help you with your deceptions.’
I suddenly felt my insides clench up. I said nothing, hoping for an escape from the conversation. I knew there wouldn’t be one.
‘It is unusual,’ he said, ‘for a boy with such big hands to be good at drawing. In your hands, the pencils look like straws in a pig’s fist. Your drawings are surprisingly good, considering this. And it is not just your hands. You have become big in many ways. Your family thinks this is normal. I do not. I remember the conversation we had when we watched the boys play in the plaza. You hid from me then, and you are hiding from me now. Boys do not change as much as you have changed by drawing flowers and insects. You do not get big, strong hands and buffalo shoulders doing that.’
I swallowed, and said, ‘I cannot help having big hands, Uncle Feliciano. It’s just the way I am.’
He stared straight ahead of him at nothing in particular. I was a little shocked when he leaned forward and spat into the darkness. He was angry with me because I was being dishonest with him. Or that’s what I thought. So I was very surprised when he stretched out his arm and rested his hand gently on mine and spoke to me in a voice that had nothing but kindness in it.
‘I am not upset in any way that there are things you cannot tell me, or things you cannot tell your family,’ he said. ‘People who have nothing private, who have no secrets, are empty people. I meet such people every day. This town, like all towns, is full of them. But it might be useful for you to know that you are not the first person who has discovered how to live by immersing himself in a dangerous place.’
I could think of nothing to say.
‘You know now what you want to be?’ Uncle’s voice was very quiet now. ‘You have found out? You are sure?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Uncle Feliciano picked up my notebook. ‘Have these anything to do with it?’ he asked. ‘All these books of yours your mother is so proud of?’
‘No.’ Saying that little word was like dragging a bone out of my throat.
He sighed. ‘I won’t tell her,’ he said. He still held my notebook in his hand. He looked at it for quite a long time and then gave it back to me.
‘I would look after these books anyway,’ he said. ‘You never know. Life changes. One day you might look around for these, and if they have been lost, you might feel lost as well.’”
“MY FIFTEENTH BIRTHDAY was racing toward me like the shadow of a dark cloud running over the forest. I hadn’t talked to the Keeper about it. I suppose he must have known t
hat I would soon have to leave school and go to work, that these afternoons were coming to an end. But we didn’t discuss it. I never admitted it to myself, but I think I was hoping that he could somehow prevent it. That he would perform some miracle to rescue me. Perhaps that was why he never spoke about it. Perhaps his silence on the subject was evidence that he had a plan.
By now, I had made that goal web my own. My eyes were good at knowing where the ball was and where it was going to be. I was big and strong and fast.
The Keeper was not satisfied.
‘You are doing only one thing with your body when you make a save,’ he said.
‘And that is wrong?’ I asked the question resentfully; I had made a number of good saves from difficult positions that afternoon.
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘That is what good keepers do. But it is not good enough for you.’
‘I don’t understand.’ How many times had I said that to him? And how many times had he been patient with my ignorance?
‘A good keeper,’ he said, ‘gives all his body to making the save. Every muscle, every nerve, goes into the save. You do that. But it is not enough.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because a save, even a very good save, does not always end anything. You may reach a ball that should be impossible to reach, but that does not mean your job is finished. You could get injured, and you have to know how to protect yourself from that. And the ball may remain in play. So, while your body is flying through the air, even at the moment when you know you will get to the shot, even at the moment when you are congratulating yourself for getting to it, your body should be adjusting itself for what might happen next. This has nothing to do with thinking. It’s important that you understand this. It is not a brain thing we are talking about here. Your body must know what to do. Your body must know what to do by itself.’
‘How is that possible?’ I said, feeling lost. ‘My body can only do what I tell it to do. You have taught me to believe that I can make my body do what I want it to do. You are confusing me.’