Off Side (21 page)

‘How many shots on goal?’

‘Six.’

‘How many goals?’

‘Two, as well as laying one on for Mendoza.’

‘We couldn’t hope for better. Mortimer has shown today that he’s the kind of centre forward the club so badly needs. It’s only the fifth day of the season, and already Mortimer’s presence has given an incisiveness to the forward players which has been missing for the past two seasons. It has taken just one afternoon for the fans to discover Mortimer for what he is: the king of the pitch. It’s not often that we see a player so instinctively able to control his area. He shakes off his markers. He opens spaces. He knows how to wait for the ball with his back to the goal, and swing round in an instant ready to shoot.’

The fans emerged slowly from the stadium with smiles of satisfaction on their faces and the name of Mortimer hanging from their lips like a festive garland. As Carvalho reached the stairs that led down to the changing rooms, he paused to watch as an impressive air of solitude descended on the terraces, and then went off in search of Camps O’Shea. He found him leading the club’s manager into the press room. The dozen private security guards were posted discreetly about the place, their eyes and muscles alert for any eventuality. The floodlights of the various TV channels bathed the changing room door in a harsh light which caught the players unawares as they came out and made themselves available to answer a string of leading questions.

‘What difference would you say it has made to have Mortimer joining the team?’

‘Why did you pass so few balls to Mortimer?’

‘How do you feel when people say that your team consists of ten people plus Mortimer?’

‘Is Mortimer the start of a new era?’

‘How does it feel to be playing next to a superstar like Mortimer?’

In the harsh light of the TV lamps it struck Carvalho that the players looked so young that it was easy to forget that they were the solid, determined, uniform figures that he had just seen
dominating the pitch, invested with all the significance of heroes of the afternoon, as Camps O’Shea might have said. They looked more like little boys who had been landed with a role which was actually beyond them, and whose main interest was to get their photos taken so that they could file them in their photo albums. And there was Mortimer, as a kind of blond shadow whom they accepted because he gave them a place in the limelight as the privileged colleagues of the hero of the hour. And when Mortimer himself came out and stood framed in the doorway of Gate 1, the mikes and the cameras were only for him.

‘Did you give a hundred per cent this afternoon?’

‘Do you expect to keep up your English average of two goals per match throughout the season?’

‘What difference do you find between the Spanish style of defence and the English?’

‘What did you feel when the fans all started chanting your name when you scored?’

Mortimer used an interpreter that the club had placed at his disposal in order to explain that the day’s win had come about thanks to a good team effort and the manager’s strategy. The interpreter managed to render this in a surprisingly large number of words, which could have been expected, seeing that he was considered one of the best translators of James Joyce into the Catalan. Camps O’Shea had hired him in the manner of a literary patron, so that when he wasn’t interpreting for the club, he’d be able to continue with his translation of
Daedalus
, which, hopefully, would have the same select cult success as had been enjoyed by his
Ulysses
. Now he appeared to stumble as he replied to the journalists’ questions, as if he was the dummy to Mortimer’s ventriloquist. He replied either in Castilian or in Catalan, according to the language of the questioner, and contrived to have the kind of accent attributed to English people when they try to speak foreign languages. Mortimer recognized Carvalho and winked in his direction, with the amiable smile of a likeable adolescent aware
of his role as the saviour of a Sunday afternoon’s football which would help thousands of people to suffer the harsh reality of Monday morning with the hopes of another Sunday, of another exhibition by Mortimer, and of other goals on which they would eventually construct a new legend. Carvalho followed the crowd of journalists, photographers and TV cameramen, who were insatiable in their demands for Mortimer to continue answering the kinds of questions that were asked every Sunday, but which in this case were magnified by the status of the star. Camps O’Shea arrived from the press room, where a scattering of hardened hacks had now finished their ritual of asking the club’s manager all the usual questions, and he cleared the way for their new star to approach his Porsche, which was staked out by security guards at each of its four corners.

‘OK, gentlemen. Time to let him go. You’ve got a whole season ahead to pick his brains. Save a few questions for next Sunday.’

This didn’t stop one of them thrusting a microphone right under Mortimer’s nose as he sat at the wheel, and as he moved to drive off he all but took the arm off the journalist holding it. The journalist returned the mike to his own lips in order to give the final touches to two hours of communication with his audience: ‘Mortimer seems satisfied, but he tells us that he wasn’t firing on all cylinders today. The golden boy of European football in the season of 1987–88 obviously still needs to get acclimatized to the Spanish style of football, and only time will tell how he’ll handle an experience which has broken plenty of other good foreign players. It’s one thing playing on your home ground, backed up by fans who will protest against the slightest foul, but it’s another thing playing away at some of those grounds where the opposition’s tactics tend to be, shall we say, over-vigorous. Anyway, I’ll return you now to the studio with one final observation, in the commendably honest words of the club’s manager: “With players like Mortimer, any coach is bound to win.” We’ll hold you to that, mister. If the club doesn’t win, it won’t be Mortimer’s fault.
He’s ready to set the heavens ringing. So, now we leave this great stadium, with the impression that a new god has taken his place on the altars of our city: Jack Mortimer, the golden boy of European football in the season of 1987–88, has now become the idol of the Barcelona fans at the start of what promises to be a very good season.’

Carvalho emerged from the stadium in the wake of the departing fans, who were moving slowly like ants in an ant colony, following in the footsteps of the people in front of them, slowly divesting themselves of their condition as a collective subject and recovering the memory of their own realities as each step took them nearer home and back to everyday reality. Night had fallen suddenly, as if to assist in the expulsion of the multitude from the stadium and its surrounds, and everywhere you looked there were streams of people and cars attempting to flee this scene which had now given all that had been expected of it.

Several groups of young fans were giving loud cheers for their club, although what they were actually cheering was themselves, and the sole topic of conversation was an open-ended post-mortem on Mortimer’s style of play and the goals he had scored. Next to the big stadium rose the other sporting facilities of the powerful football club, but nobody had so far succeeded in dislodging from the locality the cemetery of what had once been a town in its own right, but which had now been swallowed up into Greater Barcelona. Carvalho had a half-memory that one of the former glories of this selfsame club was buried in that cemetery — one of those players whose exploits were as invented as they were real. The player had asked to be buried there, because that way, even though he would no longer be able to see the goals scored in the stadium, at least he would be able to sense them from the shouting of the fans. Maybe you’ll be able to hear the goals, but will you ever know who scored them? Carvalho stood next to the cemetery railings in silent communication with this former glory, a part of the scrapbook of his childhood days when that player
used to be billed as the main attraction on the posters announcing the next game. The posters used to hang in the windows of the most frequented shops on the street — like the bakery where the inevitable black bread of the post-War period was baked; or the laundry which boasted the four daughters of señora Remei, four plump girls who courted a chorus of lascivious wolf-whistles every time they crossed the street — the co-owners of a collective carnality inappropriate in a post-War period characterized by austerity and rationing.

‘Today’s goals were scored by Mortimer,’ Carvalho said, out loud, as he stood next to the railings. He waited for a moment, half expecting a reply.

There was none. He shook his head, began to doubt for his own sanity and went to retrieve his car, which had been beached high on the pavement by the departing fans. He pointed it in the general direction of Vallvidrera and switched on the radio, which was devoting itself to an endless chewing-over of the afternoon’s footballing highlights, and an equally endless listing of the results, the pools draws, the league tables, as well as the opinions and pontifications of managers and players alike. The droning noise of the sports news became a kind of aural wallpaper as he engaged his brain in demolishing the notion that the Mortimer case had even the slightest degree of plausibility. Who on earth would want to kill the kid? Why? What motive could there possibly be? Every day that passed meant more money in the bank for Carvalho, but he was a man who found pointless work even more repellent than useful work. Either way, work makes you tired, whether you’re working usefully or pointlessly. All at once something caught his attention on the radio. The commentator was busy clearing out the rest of the day’s junk, and he was in the process of giving the results for the third division games, and other results. All of a sudden a name illuminated a corner, a half-forgotten memory in the storehouse of Carvalho’s memory:

‘Centellas 1 — Gramenet 0.’

Centellas. Did Centellas really still exist? His recollection was of going down a road with his mother in the 1940s. They used to leave the city, sometimes going to the south, other times to the north, seeking out particular houses in the countryside where the black-market was able to supplement the routine and scanty foodstuffs provided by your ration card. To the north, in between orchards and allotments run by full-time or Sunday market-gardeners, he remembered the perimeter wall of the Centellas Football Club, faced with cement, and topped with broken glass. For Carvalho, the club’s name and the memories that it brought flooding back were an inextricable part of his childhood, and to discover that it still existed, and that Centellas could still win one-nil (and beat Gramenet, what’s more) was like suddenly finding in his trouser pocket a crust of the black bread that they used to eat after the War.

Dosrius agreed: ‘Yes. One-nil.’

‘Things aren’t going too well.’

‘We shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry.’

‘It’s starting to get urgent now. If we’re going to make anything out of the rescheduling of the Centellas ground as a residential area, it’s vital that we keep a firm grip on the agreement — while of course making sure that nobody knows that any such agreement exists. I think we were all clear on this.’

‘You need patience, Basté.’

‘I’m a very patient man, as well you know. Patience is almost always a good thing, except when it’s stupid, and in this case it’s beginning to be stupid. I don’t trust Sánchez Zapico.’

‘He’s the one who’s got most to lose. We’ve set him up as chairman of Centellas, and he knows that he’s there for a reason. But he’s right when he says we should let him go at his own pace.’

‘Dosrius, the team won. And that creates fans. Imagine what might happen if they win their next away match. It’s going to mean more people coming to the ground, and every bar in the barrio is going to start hanging up photographs of the team, and the kids will be … In a situation like that, nobody’s going to want to shut the club and sell the ground.’

Dosrius opened his wallet and toyed with some banknotes, without venturing so far as to give business overtones to his conversation with Basté de Linyola. He knew that Basté liked rituals, as long as they were brief, and he had learned the art of combining ritual with brevity. Basté regained his humour, and returning behind his rosewood desk he indicated that he could begin.

‘Sánchez Zapico’s problem is that he always tries to be all things to all people. At the end of last season, the Centellas board were putting pressure on him to beef up the team. They escaped relegation and instant death by the skin of their teeth. If you like I’ll show you the gate receipts. Right. Sánchez, who is far from stupid, sells them the idea of putting out feelers to Alberto Palacín, a centre forward who, by the way, once played for your team, about ten years ago, and who also played in the national squad once or twice. I don’t know if you remember, but Pontón, who had a reputation as a bit of an animal, gave him a particularly nasty foul which left him just about fit for the knacker’s yard. And that’s more or less where he ended up. He went to play in the American League, then signed for Oaxaca, and he was working out his last contract when he got the call from Sánchez Zapico. Sánchez consulted me about it, and I gave him the go-ahead. Palacín had a pretty good name as a player, and people remember him, but actually he’s all washed-up. His personal life is a disaster. He’s separated from his wife, and he’s got himself hooked on cocaine.’

Dosrius paused for a long moment to watch the effect of this last piece of information on Basté. There was a flicker of interest — brief, but sufficient to show that it had been registered.

‘As soon as he arrived in Barcelona, I had him followed. He booked himself into a cheap boarding house in one of the streets of the Barrio Chino, if that’s still what it’s called. I can’t keep up with the changes these days. Anyway, I had to wait for a few weeks, while he settled in with his team, and while he spent some time trying to locate his wife and son. He only ever left the boarding house to go to the stadium, or to try and trace the whereabouts of his family. His wife has shacked up with Simago — I don’t know if the name means anything to you. He specializes in buying and selling footballers, and signed up a number of good players in the early 1970s. That was before things started going badly for him — so badly in fact that he had to make a hasty exit to America, because he was being pursued by creditors on all fronts.