The Return

Buba

The city of sanity. The city of common sense. That’s what the people of Barcelona used to call their city. I liked it. It was a beautiful city and I think I felt at home there from the second day on (if I said from the very first day I’d be exaggerating) but the club wasn’t doing so well, and people started going kind of sour, it always happens, I’m speaking from experience, at first the fans want your autograph, they hang around outside the hotel, they’re so friendly it’s exhausting, but then you have a run of bad luck, which leads to another, and soon enough they start making faces, maybe you’re just lazy, they think, or partying too much, or whoring, you know what I mean, people start to take an interest in what you’re getting paid, they speculate, they calculate, and there’s always a wise guy who’ll come out and accuse you of being a thief or something a thousand times worse. This stuff happens everywhere, I’d already been through it once, but that was back home, in my country, and this time I was a foreigner, and the press and the fans always expect something extra special from foreigners. I mean, why else would they hire us?

Me, for example, I’m a left winger, everyone knows that. When I played in Latin America (in Chile, then in Argentina) I scored an average of ten goals per season. But my debut here was disastrous; I got injured in the third game, had to have an operation on my ligaments, and my recovery, which in theory should have been quick, was laborious and drawn-out, but I won’t go into that. Suddenly I was back to feeling as lonely as a lighthouse. That’s the way it was. I spent a fortune on calls to Santiago, but that only made Mom and Dad worry; they didn’t understand at all. So one day I decided to go whoring. Why should I deny it? That’s the way it was. Actually, I was just following some advice that Cerrone, the Argentinean goalkeeper, had given me one day. He said to me, Kid, if you can’t think of anything else to do, and your problems are eating away at you, go see a whore. He was great guy, Cerrone. I would have been nineteen at the most and I had just joined Gimnasia y Esgrima in La Plata. Cerrone was already around 35 or 40, his age was a mystery, and he was the only one of the older players who wasn’t married. Some said Cerrone was queer. That made me wary of him for a start. I was a shy sort of kid and I thought that if I got to know a homosexual, he’d try and get me into bed straightway. Anyway, maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, all I know for sure is that one afternoon, when I was lower than ever, he took me aside, it was the first time we’d talked, really, and said he was going to take me to meet some girls from Buenos Aires. I’ll never forget that night. The apartment was downtown, and while Cerrone stayed in the living room drinking and watching a late show on TV, I slept with an Argentinean woman for the first time, and my depression began to lift. Going home the next morning, I knew that things would get better and that I still had plenty of glory days to look forward to in the Argentinean League. I was bound to get depressed occasionally, I thought, but Cerrone had given me the remedy to make it bearable.

And I did the same thing at my first European club: I went whoring and it helped me to get over the injury, the recovery period and the loneliness. Did it become a habit? Maybe, maybe not; that’s not something I can really judge objectively. The whores there are gorgeous, the high-class whores I mean, and most of them are pretty smart and educated too, so it really isn’t difficult to develop a serious taste for them.

Anyhow, I started going out every night, even Sundays when there was a match on, and the injured players were expected to be there, in the stands, doing their bit as VIP supporters. But that doesn’t help your injuries to heal, and I preferred to spend Sunday afternoons in some massage parlor with a glass of whiskey and one or two lady friends on either side, discussing more serious matters. At first, of course, no one realized. I wasn’t the only injured player, there must have been six or seven of us in the dry dock — bad luck seemed to be dogging the club. But of course, there’s always some fucking journalist who sees you coming out of a nightclub at four in the morning, and the game’s up. News travels fast in Barcelona, though it seems such a big and civilized city. Soccer news, I mean.

One morning the trainer called and said he’d found out about the life I was leading: it was inappropriate for a professional athlete and had to stop. Naturally I said, Yes, I’d just been having a bit of fun, and then I went on like before, because, come on, what else was I going to do while I was still unfit to play and the team slid down the ranking and opening the paper on a Monday morning to look at the league table was a downer week after week. Also, I was convinced that what had worked for me in Argentina was going to work for me in Spain, and the worst thing was, I was right: it did work. But then the bureaucrats got involved and told me: Listen, Acevedo, this has got to stop, you’re becoming a bad example for the young and a disastrous investment for the club, we only employ hard workers here, so from now on, no more nightlife, or else. And then, before I knew it, I was liable for a fine if I broke the curfew; I could have paid it, of course, but if I was going to be throwing money away, I’d rather have sent it to someone in Chile, like my uncle Julio, so he could fix up his house.

These things happen and you have to deal with it. So I dealt with it and resolved to go out less often, once every two weeks, say, but then Buba turned up and the management decided that the best thing for me would be to move out of the hotel and share the apartment they’d rented for him right next to our training ground; it was small but kind of cozy, with two bedrooms and a terrace that was tiny but had a good view. So that was what I had to do. I packed my bags and went to the apartment with one of the club’s administrators, and since Buba wasn’t there, I chose the bedroom I wanted and took out my stuff and put it in the closet, and then the administrator gave me my keys and left and I lay down to take a siesta.

It was about five, and earlier that afternoon I’d put away a fideuà, a Barcelona specialty, which I’d already tried (I love it, but it isn’t easy to digest) and as soon as I flopped onto my new bed I felt so tired it was all I could do to pull off my shoes before I fell asleep. Then I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed I was in Santiago again, in my neighborhood, La Cisterna, and I was with my father, crossing the square where there’s a statue of Che Guevara, the first statue of Che in the Americas, outside Cuba, and that was what my father was telling me in the dream, the story of the statue and the various attempts to destroy it before the soldiers came and blew it away, and as we walked I was looking all around and it was like we were deep in the jungle, and my father was saying the statue should be around here somewhere, but you couldn’t see anything, the grass was high and only a few feeble rays of sunlight were filtering down through the trees, just enough to see by, to show that it was daytime, and we were following a path of earth and stones, but the vegetation on either side was dense, there were even lianas, and you couldn’t see anything, only shadows, until suddenly we came to a sort of clearing, with forest all around, and then my father stopped, put one hand on my shoulder and pointed with the other hand to something rearing up in the middle of the clearing, a pedestal of light-colored cement, and on top of the pedestal there was nothing, not a trace of the statue of Che, but my father and I already knew that, Che had been removed from there a long time ago, it didn’t come as a surprise, what mattered was that we were there together, my old man and me, and we had found the exact place where the statue used to stand before, but while we looked around the clearing, standing still, as if absorbed in our discovery, I noticed that there was something at the bottom of the pedestal, on the other side, something dark, which was moving, and I broke away from my father (he had been holding me by the hand) and began to walk slowly toward it.

Then I saw what it was: on the other side of the pedestal there was a black man, stark naked, drawing on the ground, and I knew straightaway that the black man was Buba, my teammate, my housemate, although to tell you the truth, like the rest of the players, I’d only ever seen Buba in a couple of photos, and when you’ve only glanced at someone’s picture in the paper you can’t have a clear idea of how they look. But it was Buba, I had no doubts about that. And then I thought: Fucking hell! I must be dreaming, I’m not in Chile, I’m not in La Cisterna, my father hasn’t brought me to any square, and this jerk in his birthday suit isn’t Buba, the African midfielder who just signed with our club.

Just as I came to the end of that train of thought, the black guy looked up and smiled at me, dropped the stick he’d been using to draw in the yellow earth (and it really was genuine Chilean earth), leaped to his feet and held out his hand. You’re Acevedo, he said, glad to meet you, kid, that’s what he said. And I thought: Maybe we’re on tour? But where? In Chile? Impossible. And then we shook hands and Buba squeezed my hand hard and held onto it, and while he was squeezing my hand I looked down and saw the drawings on the earth, just scribbles, what else could they have been, but it was like I could join them up, if you see what I mean, and the scribbles made sense, that is, they weren’t just scribbles, they were something more. Then I tried to bend down and get a closer look, but I couldn’t because Buba’s hand was gripping mine and when I tried to free myself (not so much to see the drawings anymore, but to get away from him, to put some distance between us, because I was starting to feel something like fear), I couldn’t; Buba’s hand and his arm seemed to be the hand and arm of a statue, a freshly cast statue, and my hand was embedded in that material, which felt like mud and then like molten lava.

I think that was when I woke up. I heard noises in the kitchen and then steps going from the living room to the other bedroom, and my arm was numb (I’d fallen asleep in an awkward position, which happened quite often back then, while I was recovering from the injury), and I stayed in my bedroom waiting; the door was open, so he must have seen me; I waited and waited but he didn’t come to the door. I heard his footsteps, I cleared my throat, coughed, stood up; then I heard someone opening the front door and shutting it again, very quietly. I spent the rest of the day alone, sitting in front of the TV, getting more and more nervous. I had a look in his room (I’m not a busybody but I couldn’t help myself); he’d put his clothes in the closet drawers: track suits, some formal wear and some African robes that looked like fancy dress to me but actually they were beautiful. He’d laid out his toiletries in the bathroom: a straight-edge razor (I use disposable razors and hadn’t seen a straight-edge for a while), lotion, English aftershave (or bought in England anyway), and a very large, earth-colored sponge in the bathtub.

Buba returned to our new home at nine o’clock that night. My eyes were hurting from watching so much TV, and he told me he’d come back from a session with the city’s sportswriters. We didn’t really hit it off at the start and it took us a while to become friends, though sometimes, thinking back, I come to the melancholy conclusion that we were never what you would really call friends. Other times, though, right now for example, I think we were pretty good friends, and one thing’s for sure, anyway: if Buba had a friend in that club, it was me.

It’s not like our life together was difficult. A woman came in twice a week to clean the apartment and we tidied up after ourselves, washed our own dishes, made our beds, you know, the usual deal. Sometimes I went out at night with Herrera, a local kid who’d come up through the ranks and ended up securing a place on the national team, and sometimes Buba came with us, but not very often, because he didn’t really like going out. When I stayed home I’d watch TV and Buba would shut himself in his room and put on music. African music. At first I didn’t like Buba’s cassettes at all. In fact, the first time I heard them, the day after he moved in, I got a fright. I was watching a documentary about the Amazon, waiting for a Van Damme movie to begin, and all of a sudden it was like someone was being killed in Buba’s room. Put yourself in my place. It’s not every day you face something like that; it would have rattled anyone. What did I do? Well, I stood up, I had my back to Buba’s door, and naturally I braced myself, but then I realized it was a tape, the shouts were coming from the cassette player. Then the noises died away, all you could hear was something like a drum, and then someone groaning, or weeping, gradually getting louder. I could only take so much. I remember walking to the door, rapping on it with my knuckles: no response. At that point I thought it was Buba weeping and groaning, not the cassette. But then I heard Buba’s voice asking what I wanted and I didn’t know what to say. It was all quite embarrassing. I asked him to turn it down. I tried as hard as I possibly could to make my voice sound normal. Buba was quiet for a while. Then the music stopped (by then it was just a drum beat really, with maybe some kind of flute as well) and Buba said he was going to sleep. Good night, I said and returned to the armchair, where I sat for a while watching the documentary about Amazon Indians with the sound off.

Otherwise, everyday life, as they say, was easy enough. Buba had just arrived and he still hadn’t played a game with the first team. The club had a surplus of players at the time but there’s no point going into that. In addition to the Spaniards, including four players from the national team, there was Antoine García the French sweeper, Delève the Belgian forward, Neuhuys the Dutch center-back, Jovanovic the Yugoslavian forward, plus the Argentinean Percutti and the Uruguayan Buzatti, who were midfielders. But things were going badly for us: after ten disastrous matches we were in the middle of the rankings and it looked like we were heading down. To tell the truth, I don’t know why they signed Buba. I guess they did it to appease the fans, who were complaining more and more bitterly, but on the face of it, at least, they’d screwed up completely. Everyone was hoping they’d sign an emergency replacement for me, a winger, that is, not a midfielder, because we already had Percutti, but managers everywhere tend to be pretty stupid: they jumped at the first opportunity and that’s how Buba ended up with us. Lots of people thought the plan was to get him to do a stint with the second team, which was way down in the second division B at the time, but Buba’s agent said no way, the contract was perfectly clear: either Buba played with the first team or he didn’t play at all. So there we were, the two of us, in our apartment near the training ground, him on the bench every Sunday, and me still recovering from the injury and sunk in that awful depression. And we were the two youngest players, like I told you already, and if I didn’t I’m telling you now, although there was some speculation about that too for a while. I was twenty-two at the time, no doubt there. People said Buba was nineteen, though he looked more like he was twenty-nine, and naturally some smartass journalist claimed that our managers had been duped: in Buba’s country birth certificates were issued à la carte, he said; Buba not only looked older but was older; in short, the deal had been a rip-off.

I didn’t know what to think, really. In any case, living with Buba day by day wasn’t hard at all. Sometimes he shut himself in his bedroom at night and put on his shouting and groaning music, but you get used to anything. Anyway I liked to watch TV with the sound up loud till the early hours of the morning, and as far as I know Buba never complained about that. At the start we had trouble communicating, because we didn’t share a language, so we talked mainly with gestures. But then Buba learned some Spanish and some mornings at breakfast we even talked about movies, always a favorite topic of mine, though to tell the truth Buba wasn’t very talkative, or very interested in movies, for that matter. In fact, now that I think of it, Buba was pretty quiet. It’s not that he was shy or scared of putting his foot in it; Herrera, who could speak English, once told me it was just that he didn’t have anything to say. Crazy Herrera. He was such a great guy. A good friend, too. We used to go out a lot, Herrera, Pepito Vila, who had come up from the juniors too, Buba and me. But Buba was always quiet, watching it all as if he was only half there, and although Herrera sometimes went out of his way to speak to him in English, and he spoke fluent English, Herrera, Buba would always go off on a tangent, as if he couldn’t be bothered explaining stuff about his childhood and his country, and especially not about his family, to the point where Herrera was convinced that something bad must have happened to him when he was a kid, because he kept refusing to give away anything personal at all; it’s like his village was razed, said Herrera, who was left-wing and still is, it’s like he saw his parents and brothers and sisters killed right in front of him, and he’s been trying to erase it from his mind all these years, which would have made sense if Herrera’s assumptions had been correct, but in fact, and this is something I always knew or sensed, Herrera was wrong; the reason Buba didn’t talk much was just that he wasn’t very talkative, irrespective of whether his childhood and teenage years had been happy or traumatic: Buba’s life was surrounded by mystery because that’s how Buba was, simple as that.

But there was one thing we knew for sure: the team was in a bad way. Herrera and Buba looked like they’d be stuck on the bench till the end of the season, I was injured, and any provincial team could come and beat us on our home ground. Then, when it seemed like we’d hit rock bottom and nothing more could go wrong, Percutti got injured and the boss had no choice but to select Buba. I remember it like it was yesterday. We had to play on a Saturday, and at the Thursday training session, Percutti fucked up his knee in an accidental collision with the center back, Palau. So our trainer got Buba to take his place at Friday training and it was obvious to Herrera and me that he’d be selected for the Saturday match.

When we told him that afternoon, in the hotel where they were keeping us together (although we were playing at home against a theoretically weak opponent, the club had decided that every match was vital), Buba looked at us as if he was sizing us up for the first time, and then he came up with some excuse and went and shut himself in the bathroom. Herrera and I watched TV for a while and worked out when we’d go join the card game that Buzatti was organizing in his room. Naturally we weren’t expecting Buba to come.

After a little while we heard this wild music coming from the bathroom. I’d already told Herrera about Buba’s taste in music and the way he shut himself in his bedroom with that damned cassette player, but he’d never heard it for himself. We sat there listening to the groans and drums for a while, then Herrera, who knew a lot about music and the arts and stuff, said it was by Mango something or other, from Sierra Leone or Liberia, one of the stars of world music anyway, and we left it at that. Then the door opened and Buba came out of the bathroom, sat down beside us, quietly, as if he was interested in the TV show too, and I noticed a slightly odd smell, like the smell of sweat, but it wasn’t sweat, a rancid smell, but not exactly rancid either. He smelled of moisture, of mushrooms or toadstools. He smelled strange. It made me nervous, I have to admit, and I know it made Herrera nervous too, both of us were nervous, we both wanted to get out of there, to run to Buzatti’s room, where we were sure to find six or seven friends playing cards, stud poker or eleven, a civilized game. But the fact is that neither of us moved, as if Buba’s odor and his presence beside us had robbed us of all initiative. It wasn’t fear. It had nothing to do with fear. It was something much faster. As if the air surrounding us had condensed and we had turned to liquid. Well, that’s what I felt, anyway. And then Buba started talking and told us he needed blood. Herrera’s blood and mine.

I think Herrera laughed, not a lot, just a bit. Then one of us switched the TV off, I can’t remember who, maybe Herrera, maybe me. And Buba said he could do it, as long as we gave him the drops of blood and kept our mouths shut. What can you do? asked Herrera. Make sure we win the match, I said. I don’t know how I knew, but the fact is I had known from the very first moment. Yes, make sure we win the match, said Buba. And then Herrera and I laughed and maybe we looked at each other; Herrera was sitting in an armchair, I was sitting at the foot of my bed, and Buba was sitting at the head of his, waiting deferentially. I think Herrera asked some questions. I asked a question too. Buba replied with numbers. He raised his left hand and showed us his middle, ring and little fingers. He said we had nothing to lose. His thumb and index finger were crossed as if they were forming a lasso or a noose in which a tiny animal was choking. He predicted that Herrera would play. He talked about responsibility to the colors of the shirt and about opportunity. His Spanish was still shaky.

The next thing I remember is that Buba went back into the bathroom and when he came out he was carrying a glass and his straight-edge razor. We’re not cutting ourselves with that, said Herrera. The razor is good, said Buba. Not with your razor, said Herrera. Why not? said Buba. Because we don’t fucking feel like it, said Herrera. Am I right? He was looking at me. Yes, I said: I’ll cut myself with my own razor. I remember that when I got up to go to the bathroom, my legs were shaking. I couldn’t find my little razor, I’d probably left it at the apartment, so I grabbed the one provided by the hotel. When I came back in, Herrera was still gone and Buba seemed to be asleep, sitting at the head of his bed, though when I closed the door behind me, he raised his head and looked at me, without saying a word. We said nothing until someone knocked at the door. I went to open it. It was Herrera. The two of us sat down on my bed, Buba sat opposite on his and held the glass between the two beds. Then, with a rapid movement, he lifted one of the fingers on the hand that was holding the glass and made a clean cut in it. Now you, he said to Herrera, who performed the task with a little tiepin, the only sharp thing he’d been able to find. Then it was my turn. When we tried to go to the bathroom to wash our hands, Buba beat us to it. Let me in, Buba, I shouted through the door. All we got by way of reply was the music that Herrera had described a few minutes earlier, somewhat hastily (or that’s what I was thinking at least), as world music.

I stayed up late that night. I spent a while in Buzatti’s room, then I went to the hotel bar, but there weren’t any players left there. I ordered a whiskey and drank it at a table with a good, clear view of the city lights. After a while I sensed that someone was sitting down beside me. I started. It was the trainer, who couldn’t sleep either. He asked me what I was doing awake at that hour of the night. I told him I was nervous. But you’re not even playing tomorrow, Acevedo, he said. That makes it worse, I said. The trainer looked out at the city, nodding, and rubbed his hands. What are you drinking? he asked. The same as you, I said. Well, he said, it’s good for the nerves. Then he started talking about his son and his family, who lived in England, but mostly about his son, and finally we both got up and put our empty glasses on the bar. When I got back to the room, Buba was sleeping quietly in his bed. Normally I wouldn’t have switched on the light, but this time I did. Buba didn’t even move. I went to the bathroom: all clean and tidy. I put on my pajamas and got into bed and switched off the light. I listened to Buba’s regular breathing for a few minutes. I can’t remember how long it took me to fall asleep.

The next day we won three-nil. Herrera scored the first goal. That was his first for the season. Buba scored the other two. The journalists made some cautious remarks about a substantial change in our game and highlighted Buba’s excellent performance. I watched the match. I know what really happened. Actually, Buba didn’t play well. Herrera did, and Delève and Buzatti. The backbone of the team. Actually, for quite a lot of the match, it was like Buba was somewhere else. But he scored two goals and that was enough.

Maybe I should say something about his goals. The first (which was the second goal of the match) came after a corner kick from Palau. In the confusion, Buba swung his leg, connected, and scored. The second one was strange: the other team had already accepted defeat, we were in the 85th minute, all the players were tired, ours especially I think, they were clearly playing it safe, and then someone passed the ball to Buba, expecting him to pass it back, I guess, or just slow the game down, but Buba went running down the sideline, fast, moving much faster than he had all match, and when he got to about four meters from the penalty area, and everyone was expecting him to send it back to the center, he took a shot that surprised the two defenders in front of him and the goalkeeper, a shot with a spin on it like I’d never seen before, the sort of diabolical shot the Brazilians seem to have a monopoly on, which snuck into the top right-hand corner of the goal mouth and sent the crowd wild.

That night, after celebrating the victory, I talked with him. I asked him about the magic, the spell, the blood in the glass. Buba looked at me and went all serious. Bring your ear closer, he said. We were in a disco and we could barely hear one another. He whispered some words that I couldn’t understand at first. By that stage I was probably drunk. Then he took his mouth away from my ear and smiled at me. What he had said was: You soon will score better goals. OK, great, I said.

From then on everything went great. We won the next match four-two, even though we were playing away. Herrera scored a goal with a header, Delève put away a penalty kick, and Buba scored the other two, which were completely weird, or that’s how they seemed to me, with my inside knowledge; before the trip (I didn’t go), I’d taken part in the ceremony of the cut fingers and the glass and the blood.

Three weeks later they summoned me and I made my reappearance in the second half, in the 75th minute. We were playing the top-ranked team on their home ground and we won one-nil. I scored the goal in the 88th minute. I took the pass from Buba or that’s what everyone thought, but I have my doubts. All I know is that Buba took off down the right-hand side of the field, and I started running down the left-hand side. There were four defenders, one chasing Buba, two in the middle, and one about three yards away from me. I still can’t explain what happened next. The defenders in the middle seemed to freeze on the spot. I kept running with the right wingback on my heels. Buba came up to the penalty area with the left wingback close behind him too. Then he dummied and centered. I went into the penalty area with no hope of receiving the pass, but what with the center backs in a daze or dizzy all of a sudden and the weird swing of the ball, the fact is I found myself miraculously in possession inside the area, with their goalkeeper coming forward and the right wingback coming up behind my left shoulder, not knowing whether to foul me or not, so I just took a shot and scored and we won.

I had a safe place on the team for the following Sunday. And from then on I began to score more goals than I’d ever scored in my life. Herrera was on a roll as well. Everyone loved Buba. And they loved Herrera and me too. From one day to the next we became the kings of the city. It was all working out for us. The club began an unstoppable climb. We were winning matches and hearts.

And our blood ritual was repeated without fail before every match. In fact, after the first time, Herrera and I bought ourselves straight-edge razors like Buba’s; every time we played away, the first thing we put in our bags was the straight-edge, and when we played at home, we got together the night before at our apartment (they’d stopped keeping us together in a hotel) and performed the ceremony: Buba collected his blood and ours in a glass and then shut himself in the bathroom, and while we heard the music coming out of there, Herrera would talk about books he’d read or plays he’d seen and I just listened and agreed with everything he said, until Buba reappeared and we looked at him as if to ask if everything was all right, and Buba would smile at us and go to the kitchen to fetch a sponge and a bucket before returning to the bathroom, where he’d spend at least fifteen minutes cleaning and tidying up, and when we went into the bathroom, everything was exactly the same as before. Sometimes, when I went to a disco with Herrera and Buba stayed home (because he didn’t like discos much) Herrera and I would get talking and he’d ask me what I thought Buba did with our blood in the bathroom, because you couldn’t tell — when Buba was finished there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere, the glass we used was sparkling, the floor was spotless, it was like the cleaning lady had just left — and I said to Herrera I didn’t know, I had no idea what Buba did when he shut himself in there, and Herrera looked at me and said: If I was living with him I’d be scared, and I looked at Herrera thinking: Are you serious? but Herrera said, I’m just kidding, Buba’s our friend; it’s thanks to him I’m on the team and the club is going to win the championship; it’s thanks to him we’re tasting sweet success, and that was the truth.

Besides, I was never scared of Buba. Sometimes, when we were watching TV in our apartment before going to bed, I’d glance at him out of the corner of my eye and think how strange it all was. But I didn’t think about it for long. Soccer is strange.

In the end, after starting the year so disastrously, we won the League Championship and paraded through the center of Barcelona in the midst of a jubilant crowd and spoke from the town hall balcony to another jubilant crowd, which chanted our names, and we dedicated our victory to the Virgin of Montserrat, in the monastery of Montserrat, a virgin as black as Buba, strange as it may seem, and we gave interviews until we were hoarse. I spent my vacation in Chile. Buba went to Africa. Herrera and his girlfriend took off to the Caribbean.

We met up again at preseason training, in a sports center in the east of Holland, near an ugly, gray city that made me feel extremely apprehensive.

Everyone was there, except for Buba. He’d had some kind of problem back in his country. Herrera seemed exhausted, though he was sporting a celebrity tan. He told me he’d considered getting married. I told him about my vacation in Chile, but as you know, when it’s summer in Europe, it’s winter in Chile, so my vacation hadn’t been especially exciting. The family was well. That was about it. We were worried about Buba and the holdup. We didn’t want to admit it, but we were worried. Herrera and I were soon convinced that without him we were lost. Our trainer, on the other hand, tried to play down Buba’s lack of punctuality.

One morning Buba arrived on a flight that had come via Rome and Frankfurt and took his place on the team again. The preseason matches, however, were disastrous. We were beaten by a team from the Dutch third division. We tied with a team of amateurs from the city where we were staying. Neither Herrera nor I dared to ask Buba to do the blood ritual, although we had our razors ready. In fact, and it took me a while to realize this, it was like we were afraid to ask Buba for a bit of his magic. Of course we went on being friends, and one night the three of us went out to a Dutch disco, but instead of talking about blood, we talked about the rumors that always circulate before the season starts, the players who were changing teams, the new signings, the Champion’s League, in which we’d be playing that year, the contracts that were expiring or had to be renegotiated. We also talked about movies and the vacation that had just come to an end, and Herrera talked about books, but he was on his own there, mainly because he was the only one of us who read.

Then we went back to Barcelona, and Buba and I went back to our routine, just the two of us in that apartment opposite the training ground, and the Champion’s League began, and the night before the first match, Herrera turned up at our place and bit the bullet. He asked Buba what was happening. Isn’t there going to be any magic this year? And Buba smiled and said it wasn’t magic. And Herrera said, What the fuck is it then? And Buba shrugged his shoulders and said it was something only he understood. And then he made a face like he was saying, It’s no big deal. And Herrera said he wanted to keep on going, he believed in Buba, whatever it was he’d been doing. And Buba said he was tired, and when he said that I looked at his face: he didn’t look nineteen or twenty at all, he looked at least ten years older, like a player who had worn his body out. And, to my surprise, Herrera accepted what Buba had said, calmly, just like that. He said, OK, let’s drop it. What about dinner? My treat. That’s the way he was, Herrera. A great guy.

So we went out to dinner at one of the best restaurants in the city, and a press photographer who was there took a picture of us, the one I’ve got hanging in the dining room: Herrera, Buba and me, dressed up and smiling, with a lavish meal (if you’ll pardon the cliché) spread out in front of us (it really was lavish); we look like we’re ready to take on the world, although deep down we weren’t at all sure (especially Herrera and me) that we could take on anyone at all. And nothing was said about magic or blood while we were there: we talked about movies and travel (for pleasure not work), and that was about all. When we left the restaurant, after having signed autographs for the waiters and the cook and the kitchen hands, we went walking through the empty streets of the city, such a beautiful city, the city of sanity and common sense, as some devotees call it, but also the city of splendor, where you could feel at ease with yourself, and for me, looking back, it’s the city of my youth — anyway, as I was saying, we went walking through the streets of Barcelona, because, as every athlete knows, the best thing to do after a heavy meal is stretch your legs, and when we’d been walking around for a while, looking at the floodlit buildings (Herrera named the great architects who’d designed them like they were people he’d met), Buba said with a rather sad smile that, if we wanted to, we could repeat last year’s experiment.

That was the word he used. Experiment. Herrera and I kept quiet. Then we went back to my car and drove to the apartment without saying a single word. I cut myself with my razor. Herrera used a knife from the kitchen. When Buba came out of the bathroom, he looked at us, and, for the first time he didn’t shut the door behind him when he went to get the sponge and a bucket of water from the kitchen. I remember Herrera stood up but then sat down again straightaway. Then Buba shut himself in the bathroom and when he came out it was all like before. I suggested we celebrate with one last whiskey. Herrera accepted. Buba shook his head. I guess none of us felt like talking; the only one who spoke was Buba. He said: This isn’t necessary, we’re already rich. That was all. Then Herrera and I downed our whiskeys and we all went to bed. The next day we started off in the League with a six-zero victory. Buba scored three goals, Herrera scored one and I scored two. It was a glorious season, people still remember it, which is amazing, considering how long ago it was, although if I really think about it, if I exercise my memory, it seems right and proper (though I say so myself) that my second and final season playing with Buba in Europe should have been saved from oblivion. You saw the matches on TV. If you’d been in Barcelona you’d have gone crazy. We won the national League by more than fifteen points and were European Champions without having lost a single match, just two draws: with Milan at San Siro and with Bayern on their home ground. Every other game we won.

Buba became the man of the moment, top goal scorer in the Spanish League and the Champion’s League, and his value soared. Halfway through the season, his agent tried to renegotiate the contract and more than triple the annual payment, and the club had no choice but to sell him to Juventus at the beginning of the following preseason. There were lots of clubs vying for Herrera too, but since he’d come up through the ranks and been virtually raised in the junior teams, he didn’t want to leave, though I know for sure he had offers from Manchester, where he would have got more money. I had a string of offers too, but after letting Buba go, the club couldn’t afford to lose me, so they upped my fee and I stayed.

By then I’d met a Catalan woman who would soon become my wife and I think that influenced my decision not to leave. I don’t regret it. That season we were champions in the Spanish League again, but in the Champion’s League we came up against Buba’s team in the semifinals and we were eliminated. They beat us three-zero in Italy and Buba scored one of the goals, one of the most beautiful goals I’ve ever seen, from a foul, or a free kick, as you guys say, more than twenty yards from the goal, what the Brazilians would call a dead leaf, an autumn leaf, when the ball looks like it’s heading over the top and then suddenly it drops like a falling leaf, Didí could pull it off, so they say, but I’d never seen Buba do it, and after that goal I remember Herrera looked at me — I was in the wall and Herrera was behind me, marking an Italian player — and when our goalkeeper went to get the ball from the net, Herrera looked at me and smiled as if to say, Well, what do you know, and I smiled too. It was the first goal for the Italians and after that Buba virtually disappeared from the game. They took him off in the fiftieth minute. Before leaving the field he hugged Herrera and me. After the match we spent some time with him in the passage to the locker rooms.

In the return match on our home ground we tied with the Italians zero-zero. It was one of the strangest games I’ve ever played. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion and in the end the Italians eliminated us. But overall it was a memorable season. We won the Spanish League again, Herrera and I were both selected for our national teams for the World Cup, and Buba went from strength to strength. His team won the Italian League (the famous Scudetto) and the Champion’s League. He was the star player. Sometimes we’d call him and chat for a while. Not long before we left for summer vacation (it was going to be shorter than usual because that year the international players had to start preparing for the World Cup almost right away) the news hit the front page of the sports papers: Buba had been killed in a car accident on the way to the Turin airport.

We were stunned. What more can I say? Honestly, we were just stunned. The World Cup was terrible. Chile was eliminated in the quarterfinals, without having won a single match. Spain didn’t even get to the quarterfinals, although they did win once. My performance was appalling as I’m sure you remember. The less said the better. Buba’s team? No, they were eliminated in the qualifying round by Cameroon or Nigeria, I can’t remember which. Even if he’d been alive, Buba wouldn’t have been able to go to the World Cup. As a player I mean.

The seasons went by and there were other championships and World Cups and other friends. I was in Barcelona for another six years. And four more years in Spain after that. Throughout that time, I had other days and nights of glory, of course, but it was never the same. I finished my soccer career with Colo-Colo, playing as a midfielder, not a left winger (left wingers have an expiration date). Then I set up my sports store. I could have been a trainer, I did the course, but by then I was tired of it, to tell you the truth. Herrera played for a couple more years. Then he retired at the height of his fame. He played more than a hundred international matches (I only played forty) and when he quit, the Barcelona fans paid him a really exceptional tribute. Now he has I don’t know how many businesses there, and he’s doing well, as you’d expect.

We didn’t see each other for many years. Until recently, when they made a TV program, a nostalgic kind of show, about the team who won the first Champion’s League. I got the invitation, and although I don’t like traveling any more, I accepted, because it was an opportunity to meet up with old friends. What can I say? The city’s just as beautiful as ever. They put us up in a first-class hotel and my wife went straight off to see her family and friends. I decided to lie down on the bed and take a nap, but after a quarter of an hour I realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Then a kid from the production company came to get me and took me to the TV studios. I ran into Pepito Vila in the makeup room. He was completely bald and I almost didn’t recognize him. Then Delève turned up and that was the killer. They were all so old. But my spirits rose a bit when I saw Herrera, before going onto the set. Him I would have recognized anywhere. We hugged and exchanged a few words, enough to make it clear that we’d be having dinner together that night, whatever else happened.

The program was long and detailed. There was stuff about the Cup, what it had meant for the club, about Buba and his first year in Europe, but there was also stuff about Buzatti and Delève, Palau and Pepito Vila, and me, and especially about Herrera and his long sports career, an example for the young. There were six ex-players, three journalists and two celebrity fans: a movie actor and a Brazilian singer who turned out to be the most fanatical supporter I’ve ever come across. She was called Liza Do Elisa, though I don’t think that was her real name, and when the interviews were finished (I said hardly anything, a few dumb remarks, my stomach was all in knots) she came to dinner with us, with Herrera and me and Pepito Vila and one of the journalists, maybe she was a friend of journalist’s, I don’t know, anyhow, suddenly I found myself in a dimly lit restaurant with all these people, and then in a disco, which was even darker, except for the dance floor, where I danced, sometimes on my own, sometimes with Liza Do Elisa, and then, some time after midnight, I ended up in a bar near the port, sitting at a grimy table, drinking coffee with a shot, along with Herrera and the Brazilian singer — the others had gone.

I don’t remember which of them brought it up. Maybe Liza Do Elisa was talking about magic, she could’ve been, or maybe it was Herrera who got her onto it, I think she mentioned black magic and white magic, and then she started telling stories, true stories, things that had happened to her as a child, or when she was young and making her way in the world of show business. I remember looking at her and thinking she was a formidable woman: she was speaking in the same forceful, vehement way as she’d spoken in front of the TV cameras. She’d had to struggle to make it and she was permanently on guard, as if she could be attacked at any moment. She was a pretty woman, about thirty-five, with a nice rack. You could tell her life hadn’t been easy. But Herrera wasn’t interested in her life story, I realized that straightaway. Herrera wanted to talk about magic, voodoo, Candomblé rituals, black people’s business, in short. And Liza Do Elisa was happy to oblige.

So I finished my coffee and let them talk, and since, to be honest, I wasn’t all that interested in the topic of their conversation, I ordered a whiskey and then another, and when daylight was already beginning to shine in through the windows of the bar, Herrera said he had a story a bit like the ones Liza Do Elisa had been telling, and he was going to tell it and see what she thought. Then I shut my eyes, like I was sleepy, although I wasn’t sleepy at all, and listened to Herrera telling Buba’s story, our story, but without saying that Buba was Buba and pretending that he and I were some French players he’d met a while back, and Liza Do Elisa went quiet (I think it was the first time she’d been quiet all night) until Herrera came to the end, to Buba’s death, and only then did she speak up and say yes, it was possible, and Herrera asked about the blood that the three players spilled into the glass, and Liza Do Elisa said it was part of the ceremony, and Herrera asked about the music that came from the bathroom when the black guy shut himself in there, and Liza Do Elisa said it was part of the ceremony, and then Herrera asked about what happened to the blood when the black guy took it into the bathroom, and about the sponge and the bucket of water with bleach, and he also wanted to know what Liza Do Elisa thought the guy did in the bathroom, and the Brazilian singer replied to all his questions by saying that it was part of the ceremony, until Herrera started getting annoyed and said obviously it was part of the ceremony but he wanted to know what the ceremony was. And then Liza Do Elisa said, Nobody raises his voice to me, especially not — and I quote — if he wants to fuck me, to which Herrera replied with a laugh that reminded me of the good old days — the Herrera of the Champion’s League and the two Spanish Leagues we won together, I mean, the two we won with Buba and the five we won overall — and then he said he hadn’t meant to offend her (Liza Do Elisa took offense at the slightest little thing), and repeated his question.

The singer seemed to be deep in thought for a while, then she looked at Herrera and me (but she looked much more intensely at Herrera) and said she didn’t know for sure. Maybe he drank the blood, maybe he poured it down the toilet, maybe he pissed or shat on it, maybe he didn’t do any of those things, maybe he took his clothes off and smeared himself with blood and then took a shower, but it was all speculation. Then the three of us sat there in silence until Liza Do Elisa said that whatever he did, one thing was for sure: the guy had suffered and loved deeply.

And then Herrera asked her what she thought about this black guy who had played in the French team: did his magic work? No, said Liza Do Elisa. He was crazy. How could it work? And Herrera asked, How come his teammates started playing better? Because they were good players, said the singer. And then I weighed in and asked what she meant when she said he’d suffered deeply, how do you mean? And she replied, With his whole body, but more than that, with his whole mind.

“What do you mean, Liza?” I insisted.

“That he was crazy,” said the singer.

The bar’s metal gates had been pulled down. On a wall I noticed various photos of our team. The singer asked us (not just Herrera, me too) if we’d been talking about Buba. Not one muscle in Herrera’s face moved. I might have nodded. Liza Do Elisa crossed herself. I got up and went to take a look at the photos. There we were, the eleven of us: Herrera standing with his arms crossed next to Miquel Serra, the goalkeeper, and Palau, and, in front of them, squatting down, Buba and me. I was smiling, as if I didn’t have a care in the world, and Buba was serious, looking straight at the camera.

I went to the bathroom and when I came back Herrera was paying at the bar, and the singer was standing beside the table, smoothing her close-fitting, deep red dress. Before we left, the bartender, or maybe he was the owner, the guy who’d put up with us until dawn, anyway, asked me to sign another one of the photos decorating the wall. It was a photo of me on my own, taken just after I arrived in the city. I asked him his name. He said he was called Narcis. To Narcis, I signed it, affectionately.

It was already getting light when we left. We walked through the streets of Barcelona, like in the old days. I wasn’t surprised to notice that Herrera had his arm around the singer’s waist. Then we hailed a taxi and they accompanied me back to my hotel.