Pensativities: Selected Essays

Nutmegged By a Verse

In my area of town, football was a reason for much celebration. We would get ready for the occasion, just as believers get dressed for their saint’s day. Sundays were a time of mythical duration. And the field situated in an area of waste ground in Muchatazina was a stadium that was bigger than the world itself. The game hadn’t yet begun and our hearts were already tired: there wasn’t a clock big enough to accommodate those ninety minutes.

It wasn’t the hunger to win. I don’t want to paraphrase Pierre de Coubertin, but the important thing was to be there, in that game of boundless performances that a football match allows. Suddenly, the place we lived in migrated and our identity travelled to worlds where all was huge and aglow. This was the great secret behind our beating hearts, behind this addiction that made us run away from our homes, skip school, leave our girlfriends waiting for us. When we were playing, we ceased being ourselves. We ceased being. And we were everything, everyone. The living and the dead were lined up in the pantheon of those who never lost.

In my glorious team, I was the striker. It was, perhaps, a euphemism to call me this, for all I did was dribble. I never shot. My nickname in Chissena reflected this ability: I was kiywa, the dribbler. A “dribbleballer,” as others teased me. On the other hand, I lacked a name for my inability.

“Hell! To win, you need to score, man! That guy’s a poet. That’s what he is: a poet.”

That’s what Joe Hotshot, our coach, said. Maybe coach was right. Maybe I wasn’t really a forward. Maybe my field really was poetry. But the beauty of football isn’t in the score. As in the art of love, the fascination lies in the preparations. The delight is in what can’t be translated into a number or even a word. A football match is always worth more than the result. The most beautiful thing in a game is what can’t be converted into goals and points; it’s what eludes the radio commentator, it’s the sighs and silences, the looks and the mute gestures of those playing both inside and outside the four straight lines of the pitch.

Let’s go back to Hotshot. The frustration of the coach, in point of fact, had an explanation: in my hometown of Beira, the neighbourhoods were territories of feigned confrontation. There were world wars between the different areas of the tiny conurbation, which disobeyed the logic of urban planning. Beira was disobedient from its outset: I was even born and grew up in zones that had been destined for Asians. And football games were held in which the various mixtures defied the racial boundaries of the time. Esturro was, at that stage, my area, my tribe, my nation. Preparations were in hand for the big derby match between Esturro and Ponta-Gea. Our fate was in our hands, or rather in our feet. Joe Hotshot decided to try out his talent as a psychologist on me.

That afternoon, the day before the game, Hotshot called me over. He wore a solemn, serious expression. He made me sit on the wall in front of my house, while he held a long stick in his hand like a huge pencil.

“See the six-yard box here?” he asked, making some scratches in the sand.

The scratches became more complicated as he talked, illustrating my chaotic movement around the pitch. Then, he once again retraced the square of the box:

“Pretend the six-yard box is a girl. That’s right, a girl, a chick. You need to open her out, caress her, kiss her. But afterwards. . afterwards. .”

“Yes, afterwards?” I asked, half asleep from all the scratching in the sand.

Afterwards. . Afterwards, I ask: afterwards, at the decisive moment, what must I do?

The allusion made by Joe, the finest coach of all time, was obvious, yet the metaphor eluded me. Love doesn’t have an “afterwards.” Love is all time, spent in an instant. And I thought of the girls who, during my fifteen years of existence, jostled at the door of my platonic dreams. And I saw Alda, Guida, Isabel, Martinha, Leila, Paula, Mónica, and more than any of the others, Laura, the most recent. And suddenly, it occurred to me: “In matters of love, I only dribble. I don’t shoot.” This was what suddenly dawned on me.

Joe Hotshot didn’t notice my glazed look, lost in other championship contests. And he continued with his carefully drawn-up tactics: the chip shot in direct free kicks, the looping centre in corner kicks, the penalty humdinger. If I lived my football through poetry, Hotshot was a master of prose. His was a language that cleared the pitch of weeds: bicycle kicks, sliding tackles, butterfinger goalies, beating your marker, being up for it, the ball in open play. But I wasn’t paying attention. Deep within me, all I could hear was the conflict between myself and my age.

The following day, sporting the colours of the most famous team in the universe, I cast my eyes over the spectators from the middle of the stadium. I can now imagine, many years later, how Cristiano Ronaldo feels when he hears the crowd’s engulfing clamour. In my local stadium, the crowd was the whole of humanity. I mainly noticed the girls in the front row, squeezed together so as not to miss a single moment of the game. Suddenly, reality overcame my daydreaming and I looked more closely at the spectators: there they were, the girls. Real, up for the fight in body and soul. There they were, unmistakable in their physique, distracting me in my movements. And in particular, there was Laura, the most beautiful of them all. My instinctive wisdom caused me to turn my gaze towards the coach. Hotshot’s mischievous grin confirmed everything: it was a plan schemed up by him. In the face of the object of my passion, there was nothing for it but for me to score goals. Without goals, no one wins. Yet again, I didn’t score in that game. And much to the sadness of our coach, we didn’t win. I don’t know why I say “we.” For in the end, I won. It wasn’t in the game. Nor in the moments that followed. It was later, when everything assumed the taste of the irreversible. You’ll understand in a minute.

The next day, I got a visit from Laura. Her voice was so full of voices that for many years, I remembered her through that abstract presence. And she asked me:

“Are you sad because of the game?”

“I’m sad because of me.”

Laura was older, she knew of things that I only suspected. She unfolded a piece of paper scrawled on in her own handwriting.

“It’s a poem,” she whispered.

“Is it for me?” I asked.

And she answered: “No, it’s for Ademir.” The other’s name hit me like a blow from a catapult, as if I’d suddenly been dropped as a striker, banned from playing. I put the paper in my pocket and screwed it up angrily. More than our defeat, it was Laura’s interest in someone else that hurt me. And off I went into my solitude. Laura even phoned a few times. I refused to take the call. In due course, she stopped trying.

I never read the poem. I met Laura again years later, when she already bore the burden of being the mother of someone’s mother. I didn’t recognize her. Only her tinkling stream of a voice brought me back to its source. It was she who reminded me how she had tried to get in touch again after her last visit. I asked after Ademir. “Who’s Ademir?” she asked, puzzled. “I’ve never met anyone by that name.” Her reply sounded convincing, so much so that I changed the subject to other gaps and lapses in our memories. When I got home, I looked around for the old bit of paper, which was still there, all screwed up. Laura had even written down the author’s name. It was a poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto, and its title was: “Ademir da Guia.” And it went like this:

Ademir imposes his game/ a rhythm (and weight) of lead,/a slug, a film in slow motion,/a man in a nightmare.//His liquid rhythm infiltrates/his opponent, thickly, from within/imposes on him what he wishes,//controlling him, putrefying him/A warm rhythm, like a walk through sand,/through the brackish water of a lagoon,/ sapping and then shackling/the most restless opponents.

Shackled to myself, that’s what I was after solving the mystery of Laura’s little piece of paper. So Ademir wasn’t “another.” Reflecting upon it, Ademir was me, stuck in the six-yard box, which is the moment of greatest happiness.

I put the old bit of paper away, and overcame a sad smile. Once again, I’d been nutmegged by some poetry. One can be coached in the skills of football. But the only coach for the challenges of life is ourselves.

Article published in İndico, the in-flight magazine

of Mozambican Airlines (LAM), May 2010.