“In this lovely, ruminative excerpt, the narrator remembers his conversations with the late, great Diego Maradona. The voice is pitch perfect, and there is a lot of fun in imagining Maradona’s life and loneliness. Ultimately, this excerpt left me eager to read more, to go further into the lives of these two soccer players and the ways in which athletes are perceived and perceive each other.” — Guest Judge Matthew Salesses
1
The part of life I wanted to live is over. Now I just have to be here.
2
The voice belonged to Maradona, who died today, and whose death prompted my recollecting this comment he made, in 1989 or 1990, on a phone call late at night, and the series of phone calls just like it that also took place late at night between us in a single week (or week and a half) on a line between Naples, the city by which he was remade and destroyed, and Salzburg, where, at the time of this and the other calls, I was clinging to the last semblance of a career in our shared profession, though to put myself or almost any other player alongside Maradona—it just confuses matters. He mangles the definition of footballer, as you likely well know, renders it libelous for all but a few comparably gifted practitioners other than himself to refer to themselves as footballers. (Being an American, this designation, footballer, is itself a problematic one for me to use, for entirely different reasons.) We spoke as we always had, in a mix of English and Spanish, our respective competencies in one another’s native tongues well short of fluency, but as ever, though we had not spoken in years, neither had any trouble understanding what the other meant, an advantage, perhaps, of not having full access to vocabularies that, finally, could only get in the way. I asked what the part of life was he’d wanted to live, the one now apparently over, though even considering the stark differences in our circumstances, we were nevertheless the same age, roughly, thirty or about to be thirty, and as such afflicted by the same torments that have troubled every other man in history who can no longer get away with behaving like a boy, and even as he responded, cataloguing the specifications of his despair, I couldn’t help thinking that his suffering was only a particular kind of gravity making itself known, that what bothered Maradona was not that he could not leave his home without being photographed, or that the president of Napoli refused to sell him, or that the Camorra, such as it was, had begun to choke the steady supply of cocaine upon which he’d become dependent, but the notion that, in consideration of all this misfortune, he might, after all, be just like the rest of us.
3
At the time of this and the other phone calls, totaling a week or so, during which I took copious but unorganized notes, sensing, as I did, that this would be the last time Maradona and I would be in any sort of contact, I was living, as I’ve said, in Salzburg, whose nearby mountains encroach by night several miles toward the city, loom over the ancient buildings, providing both protection from the world beyond and a menacing sense of indomitable scale, a foreboding reminder of the planet only being on loan to our species, and on moonless nights, trying to discern their darkness from the greater, surrounding darkness, one can never be sure exactly where they are, an effect exacerbated, at least at the time of the phone calls, by Salzburg’s habit, a charming turn of municipal unity, of turning off all unnecessary streetlights after 11pm. At the time of these phone calls—late in 1989 or early in 1990—this measure was well ahead of its time, both with regard to energy consumption and light pollution, neither of which issue had gained any traction with mainstream media, and although today we are quite sure that the planet is overheating, I don’t know if this is still practiced, though, oddly enough, where I live now, just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, in deference to the duties, both scientific and touristic, of the Lowell telescope, a good many of the city lights go out in concert with the sun setting, and the stars, much like they did in Salzburg, shine unobstructed, an array of constellations more or less identical to that above Salzburg, at least to a layman such as myself, but I’m sure with its own fingerprint identifiable to one trained to use the Lowell telescope. I’ve got the notes in front of me, the ones concerning the phone calls with Maradona, who died today, and though this diversion into astronomy is not a part of said notes, the array of said notes—written variously on paper lined and unlined, white and dyed, on napkins, the flipsides of business cards, coasters from the local biergarten in Salzburg (likely closed for good now, between the passage of time and the pandemic), and, in one instance, a 20 schilling note, which after defacing I never tried to spend—itself suggests a constellation, arrayed widely on the floor of my Flagstaff apartment, and in this way the circumstances are perhaps pushing me, like starlight, through time, for the purposes of recollection and record.
4
The stars are not the only confluence. There is also the matter of mountains—the ones I live among now, the ones in Salzburg, and the ones in the west of Argentina, the foothills of the Andes, where Maradona and I first got to know one another, on and off the field, during a monthlong joint training camp between his youth club, Argentinos Juniors, and mine, Platense, the clubs local rivals but hamstrung by the same limitations of financing—Argentina at least as poor a nation then as it is now—and so compelled to pool their resources so that we all could be bussed to the mountains, sheltered, and fed. I was not taking notes then, so what follows, that is, my first memory of Maradona in this place, may well not have come first chronologically, but was likely just the event that made the strongest impression, which, for whatever it’s worth, is how he is most often remembered by those who encountered him, and in my case, perhaps as it was for others, I witnessed him performing an impossible task with a ball. Even in the foothills the air was thin and the idea was that our bodies would adjust to the low supply of oxygen and we would have an easier time competing back at sea level. The morning I first spoke with Maradona he appeared to be floating. I opened my eyes from a deep sleep, the kind I never have anymore, and saw him just past the foot of the bed, the boys from both teams all filed into a single building, a retired barracks with twin rows of bunkbeds and a single shower stall at the back. He was not solidly on the ground but a few inches above it, perhaps newly buoyant in the thinner air. Much has been said, written, observed on broadcasts about Maradona’s unparalleled affection for the ball, but I like to think I was the first to truly take its measure, as it was because of that very affection that he looked so strange—he was standing on top of one, balancing with the degree of effort and minor corrections of weight displacement a mortal would deploy, say, on the deck of an ocean liner in chop. As if this weren’t enough, he proceeded to promenade the room in this manner—the ball not just a platform but a conveyance—getting close enough to each bunk he could have reached his hand out for support, should he have needed it, but he never did, and when he completed a full circuit—still no one else awake to witness this event—he somehow managed to dismount while simultaneously getting the ball from his feet to his head, where it settled as surely as a hat, and it was at this point he crossed the room to greet me. I never saw such a display from him again, and perhaps it was one he was never again capable of—just a rented ability from the god who, having already granted him so much, didn’t see what difference one more ounce of magic would make. Maradona crossed the room in bare feet and extended his hand for me to shake. I’m Diego, he said. This, of course, I already knew.
5
One certainty of chronology is that Maradona and I, whether he knew it or not, had encountered each other before this moment. The first time I saw him he was standing akimbo with his magical left foot resting on the ball, awaiting the beginning of a pickup game (this pose, as it turned out, a harbinger), and moments later dribbling directly toward me through the heart of the midfield. This was in Buenos Aires, on a patch of grass behind the church where my mother volunteered, long before the expectation that playing surfaces be reliably drained, mowed, or resodded, and while I could barely keep my footing over the uneven ground, Maradona maintained close control, guiding the ball on what must have been the only smooth trajectory between himself and the goal. I had only just started playing the sport, and while my formal training was yet to begin, I was able to grasp early on that in my capacity as a defender, it was everything to keep my hips open and facing the man I was marking, as though from my pelvis emanated a forcefield that could influence the attacker’s movement. As you may have guessed, my technique made no difference to the great one. With little more than feints of his shoulders and head, he got me turned around, looking over both shoulders and running toward my own goal, trying desperately to guess what he might do next. If you took away the ball and the field and the other players, it would have looked to an observer as though Maradona were a homicidal maniac and I his next victim, so aggressive was his pursuit, so palpable my panic. At the decisive moment, Maradona did not score, but rather, having attracted three defenders into his vicinity at the edge of the box, tapped a simple through ball to his right, which was met in stride by a player who in the years since has surely boasted to anyone who would listen that he once turned a simple pass from Maradona into an assist. For my part, I had been spared the final humiliation of standing on my heels, helpless as the back line was undone, because in my inverted pursuit of Maradona the stud of my boot had caught in the turf, hyperextending my knee and sending me tumbling to the ground. Upon seeing I was unable to put weight on the injured leg, Maradona enlisted the help of another player and helped walk me off the field. That this encounter seemed to have made no impression on him put in my mind the image of heaps of defenders, myself among them, piled one on top of the other, a mound of bodies as you might see in the smoky aftermath on a battlefield, Maradona’s victims, Maradona himself the world’s first innocent mass murderer.
6
Over the phone in 1989 or 1990, Maradona sounded tired, tired in the way that portends the end of an athlete’s playing career, though of course he would persist for several more years, in fact the better part of a decade, aware, perhaps, that the world held no accommodations for him away from the field of play. Such tiredness is not merely physical, but an exhaustion of the psyche, and that made sense given the fervor that surrounded him in Naples, known well outside the ancient city even before the proliferation of the internet. Today, if you go there and walk among its basilicas and cathedrals, you would think no one there had ever actually heard of Jesus Christ, or, if they have, he’s been supplanted by Maradona, a newer, more effective model of savior. Christ, after all, never won them the league. This morning, he said over the phone in 1989 or 1990, a woman threw herself in front of my car. She wanted three things: a photograph, an autograph, and for me to juggle for her. She handed me an orange. I juggled the orange and she took a photo. The orange was also where she wanted my signature. But she hadn’t brought anything to write with. She got angry when I didn’t have a marker. I was with Claudia and Dalma and the baby and it was early, before seven, and we were trying to go out for a quiet breakfast, do something normal for Dalma to remember. Do you have a family? What have the years brought to your door? I listened to Maradona but also to the sounds surrounding him, in spite of myself, I suppose, just as interested as the rest of the world in what he got up to when he was away from the eye of the camera, though it was all more or less an open secret, his exploits witnessed by enough people to be elevated from rumor to fact, though there is something in us, isn’t there, that prefers the rumor, which like legend, can expand without boundary? Was that the clink of a wine glass, the rustle of a plastic baggie? Was he alone or in a room full of sleeping, naked bodies, strewn around like all those slain defenders?
7
Yes, I said, I have a family. Well, I said, it’s complicated. And it was. I told him I was in Salzburg but my son and his mother were in Rennes, where I had played last, which perhaps he already knew, but I didn’t presume, and that she was French and refused to live in Germany or anywhere German speaking. In telling Maradona this I imbued or attempted to imbue my voice with the requisite dose of regret and wistfulness for the relationship not working out, and hoped in doing so to avoid any further inquiry into my personal affairs. And while I’m sure Camille, the woman I was not with, indeed harbored no particular affection for Germany and her sisters, I’m also sure that was a handy excuse for not wanting to raise a child with me (though, good French Catholic that she was, there was never any question the child would be raised). He asked if my son had seen me play. I had to think about it. I could recall Camille bringing Max to the training grounds once or twice when he was a newborn. That didn’t seem to count, though as I thought about it there was something wonderfully innocent and rich about the memory of her having done that, the three or four occasions when after finishing a scrimmage I was able to walk to the sideline, kiss my child and then the mother of my child, and pretend for a moment that I possessed the capacity for sustained partnership and steady parenting. The coaches forbade these visits after a few instances, citing distraction. My daughters have never seen me play, Maradona said. It’s too dangerous for them to come to the stadium. We pay a security team but they accept bribes to get close to me. They do it all the time. We have to work around that. This must have been 1990, because looking at my notes I see that above the scrawl accounting for the conversation at hand is a short arrow leading to the words AUGUST—THEY WILL TEAR HIM APART, a reference to the World Cup, forthcoming that year in Italy, and a prognostication on par with noting that the sun will rise tomorrow. If he never does see you play, I’ll be happy to tell him the truth, Maradona said, that you were the only defender that ever made me doubt myself. Those weeks in the mountains, I still think about them. I have already told you what it was like to defend Maradona, and how I fared. I understood, but didn’t mind, that Maradona was flattering me because he needed someone to talk to.
8
These notes, while in their way thorough, are not dated or in any way sequenced, and so I cannot say for sure on which night Maradona brought up the subject of my father, the Nazi hunter, the reason my family was in Argentina at that time that Maradona and I first met, for the purpose of my father, on behalf of the American embassy, being able to locate and identify members of the Third Reich who at various points in the preceding twenty or thirty years had made their escapes via rat lines and were living out their days anonymously as presumed innocents. (I suppose my disdain for Germany and her sisters ought to have been as pronounced as Camille’s.) One imagines, given how long it had been since we’d spoken, that it was probably not the first night, though with Maradona, yoked as he was only to his own impulses, anything is possible, and it would have made sense, having just brought up our time in the mountains, for him to mention my father. At any rate, the subject of my father came up. Maradona asked if he was still alive. I said yes, as far as I knew, basing the assessment off the last time we’d communicated, another phone call, one that took place on Christmas, which in the fullness of time has become our ritual, the only time we communicate all year, and I find it remarkable, given the total lack of context for our relationship otherwise, how easily we speak when the day rolls around each winter. My mother had died of cancer during the time we lived in Argentina, and my father left the country shortly thereafter, having applied to the embassy for a new assignment, and the idea was that given that I was nearly an adult (seventeen) and embedded in the Platense academy, it didn’t make sense to inflict any further logistical disruption to my life. In May, just before the season began, he departed for South Africa, where he met the woman he would eventually make his second wife, and to whose children, two girls and boy, he would become stepfather. I have met them a handful of times, variously in the years before these phone calls at night with Maradona, and during those meetings I felt not like a stepbrother, but like a visiting uncle, my father’s brother, which, given the way it had all gone following my mother’s death, was a dynamic I think my father was happy to cultivate, and likely why our annual conversations on Christmas Day are so pleasant.
9
My father died, Maradona said, but then came back to life. He was painting the shutters on the windows of the house, early in the morning before the heat of the day and before anyone else was awake. He had a heart attack on the ladder and slumped right over on top of it. Somehow he didn’t fall. The ladder held him perfectly still until my sister went out to take laundry off the line, and at first she didn’t even notice anything was wrong. He’s a prodigious sleeper. He’s fallen asleep eating dinner, in the middle of a medical examination, behind the wheel of a car, and when she noticed him she thought he was taking a short nap on top of his ladder, like an overlarge cat. She shouted for him, first calling him Papa and then by his name. It took four other fathers from the neighborhood to get him down safely, two holding the ladder and two carrying my father. The can of paint he had been working from fell and splattered, like an advertisement for what should have happened to him, and they laid him down inside of the paint to do resuscitations while they waited for the ambulance. I’ve got a heart like that pumping inside me, Maradona said.
10
I never felt lonely in Salzburg until Maradona started calling. There was the relief, perhaps like my father might have felt upon departing Argentina, of having evaded the duties of parenthood and domesticity, and the steady rhythm of practices, games, dinners out with my teammates, the mild recognition of the Salzburgians to keep my mind occupied. The Austrian Bundesliga has never been among the world’s best, and at the time of my entry it was still an adolescent league, not yet twenty years old. This alone should have signaled to me that I was on the downslope of my playing career, but this was before the era when the identity of an athlete could carry one through an entire lifetime. Some grim portrait of workaday reality awaited me after my playing days, and I was in no hurry to meet it. As I’ve said (have I?), I lived alone, in a converted attic apartment, the sort of space meant for storing coats and family heirlooms, and one that lent my spirit a sense of calm for its smallness, much like how dogs must feel inside their kennels. In the three stories beneath me lived the landlady, Frau Müller, a widow who had raised four children, none of whom still lived in Austria, but all of whose rooms were nevertheless perfectly intact for whenever they visited. Frau Müller showed no obvious interest in me beyond our financial arrangement (she had never even heard of the Bundesliga), but I wonder now, all these years later, myself estranged from the little family I managed to build in this world, whether she might have hoped for a breach in our contract from me—that if I had suggested, one day on the first of the month as I handed over my rent, that we might have dinner together, or, more simply, that I might sit in her living room with the evening paper, perusing the sports page as my father always had, just another consciousness in her living space, more or less the same age as her children—would she have smiled softly, imperceptibly, so as not to open herself prematurely to any possible hurt, and said, yes, that would be fine? As it was, I never said more than two words on any single occasion to Frau Müller, and the closest we ever got to one another, other than when I handed her my rent, was on the evenings that Maradona called, after we hung up, when, suddenly gripped by the loneliness of the stranger in a strange land, I felt newly compelled to walk the streets beneath the stars, to be anywhere other than the attic apartment, among the few other Salzburgians out at the later hours, and thereby not technically alone. I would leave the attic apartment as quietly as I could, not because Frau Müller was asleep (this she hardly ever did) but because in the evenings she devoted herself to the radio, listening to the classical station, which, unlike the others, never went off the air, and the symphonies and sonatas that emanated from the small, crackly speaker entranced her in a way that seemed like it would be dangerous to disrupt. Past a certain age, living alone, we become a haunting. Frau Müller did her radio listening just one floor beneath the attic, hunched forward in her chair, watching the radio as though it were a television, but on the evenings I snuck past the open door of her room, all the way down the stairs, I half expected, as a result of her imagination, to encounter other figures, her late husband or any one of her children, manifested from her memory, there to go about their business but never to interact with Frau Müller. Loneliness experienced alone is one thing, but set alongside that of another person’s, it becomes unwieldy.
11
As I’ve said, the streets of old Salzburg went dark at night, which, whether by design or not, encouraged many Salzburgians to stay in after sunset, as though we lived in mutual accommodation with a horde of bloodthirsty nocturnal creatures, but for those who did venture out in the evenings there was another accommodation—that of small phones mounted to light posts at select corners. There was no number to call, nor any rotary or buttons with numbers to press. You simply opened the box that held the phone, lifted the receiver, and waited. The line would ring, there would be no answer, and then, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the lamps at the top of the posts would begin to illuminate. The service existed as a safety measure, a disincentive for any murderers, rapists, or robbers who might lurk in the shadows, but as I walked the slowly brightening streets of Salzburg those evenings, turning over in my head the most recent conversation with Maradona, it seemed to me there was a paradox at work, that in providing the supposed preemptive solution to such crimes, the city of Salzburg, in a manner similar to Schrodinger’s cat, was also providing the possibility of them, and that even having lifted the phone and gotten your brightened street, you were not out of danger. Perhaps it was to do with the theatrics of the streets when lit, that in imagining your own suffering at the hands of the murderer, rapist, or robber, and never having actually suffered such an attack, you would necessarily make it fictive, dramatic, and, on the stage of your mind, lit in a way much like how the streets appeared.
12
Maradona would ascribe what I have just said to the fact that I was a defender. From my notes I can see he brought this up several times over the course of our conversations, my position on the back line speaking clearly to my personality and way through the world, not a guide of my own destiny or leader of others but purely reactive. You have no capacity for deceit, he said. No agenda. He believed strongly in such prejudices, and applied them equitably across all positions. You learned all you needed to know about a person from where they found themselves on the field. Goalkeepers were mother hens and control freaks, and like all true control freaks in fact controlled very little, despite yelling their desires at people constantly. Defensive midfielders were analytical, overly identified with their intellects, and while valuable to any formation entirely too prone to having their egos bruised by a misstep or a loss. A valuable liability, Maradona called them. Wingers, the airiest of the bunch, could just as likely find themselves on surfboards as in their cleats, and strikers, the true goal scorers, Maradona swore, were almost always only children, dependent on positive external reinforcement and compelled to seek individual glory above any of the team’s fortunes. According to my notes, and I have no reason to doubt them, I asked, And what about you? The number 10. The fulcrum of the attack. How would you be diagnosed? This must have been several nights along, a comfort level established by the fact that Maradona had kept calling, though in reading the notes I am reminded of the cold panic running through me that in not continuing to be an acolyte, I had sacrificed my access to him, that on the other end of the line there was a receiver set down on a table, nobody coming to answer it, just like the phone that illuminates the streets in Salzburg. Probably it was only a matter of five or ten seconds, the sequence elongated in the moment such as when an extraordinary goal is scored during a match, or an injury is incurred, the mind needing to stretch itself to accommodate the extra information. Maradona said, I give permission. I am the extension of God’s will. The ball is going where it is going. That’s what nobody else understands. We have no control over that. So I move the people.
13
It is hard to find zero credibility in his assessment, although it was my size, not my personality, that originally dictated my position. A growth spurt between my twelfth and thirteenth birthdays saw me reach a height several inches above six feet, nothing special on the basketball courts of America, but well above average in the world’s game. It simplified matters, reduced possibilities. Had I had any foot skills, or aptitude for timing headers off a corner or cross, I might have become a number 9, a target man, and if I’d had reflexes that were even a little bit noteworthy, I would have been a goalkeeper, but as it was, my feet were just unclumsy enough for me not to trip over, I could kick the ball a good distance for clearances, and fear guided my pass selection, made me so averse to risk that I almost always made a good decision and retained possession for my team. And so, I was a defender. Of course, I didn’t grasp this at first as a teenager. Nobody dreams of being on the back line, the solid, responsible sort. The ones whose incisive passes are never acknowledged, because they occur too far away from the final result for the credit to trickle back upstream. You dream of the crowd beginning to react before the ball has reached the net, at the moment they realize the goalkeeper is beat. You dream of their roar, the stadium seeming large enough for all those bodies but not for the sound they produce. You dream of the sensation, nearly fear, that your teammates will catch you, giddy as children, to tackle you and celebrate.
14
Although funnily enough I had never even dreamed of playing football (forget my American accent—this is the name of the game). And if you asked me today I wouldn’t be able to say what I did dream of. As I’ve said, my family was rootless, moving every three years, if not sooner, until I was fifteen. As I believe I’ve said, it was just the three of us, myself and my parents, and I suppose in the eyes of the American embassy, my father’s employer, that made him a good candidate for nomadism. By the time we got to Buenos Aires, I no longer minded being displaced, and in fact had trouble wrapping my head around the apparent permanence of our latest arrangement. Some tension of the human spirit had resolved in me after so many years of being rootless—I felt, truly, that I would never need what other people seemed to—houses, wives, children, and all the things and activities that come with them. In knowing that every home was temporary, and my decisions while there were essentially without meaning, I felt I had permission to simply be happy with each friend, each day of school, each meal, knowing that we would be gone before any friend could betray me, any schooling could become tedious, any meal dull. All I had known was change, and to me that would be the world. After a few months in our apartment in the center of the city I realized I had also, in the unmoored years, been spared the burden of having to be curious about who my parents were, as they too had subjected their identities to the relentless churn of culture, custom, and language (to say nothing of my father’s erstwhile duties of espionage). All that rootlessness might have galvanized another family into closeness, but I had been largely raised by caretakers up to that point, and my mother, my father and I had been more or less indistinguishable from strangers who might have boarded the same airplane, crashed in the mountains, and now found themselves the only survivors of the wreck. The distances between us were not something we ever discussed, but in the evenings, when we ate together and then shared the sitting room, where gentle breezes passed from one end of the apartment to the other, I felt I could sense the same question emanating from each of us as we did all we could to remain focused on our respective documents—my mother with her novels, my father with his newspapers, I with my schoolwork—lest the question make its way out of one of our mouths: Who are these people?
15
During this time, my mother grew a cancer and, concurrently but unrelatedly, because she did not know about the cancer right away, rediscovered her faith. The small cross around her neck spoke for an upbringing she had never seemed interested in recreating for me, but as our first Christmas in Argentina approached, she began attending Mass, first on Sundays, soon several mornings a week, and before long she was volunteering her time every evening to help with light maintenance of the local church. More often than not, by the time my father got home, she’d have already prepared a dinner and left instructions for how to heat it, and my father and I would devour our portions in separate parts of the apartment—he at the kitchen table with his newspapers, I in front of the television, watching programs to learn the language. My mother’s absence brought relief to the house—one less consciousness to ponder. It suited my father for us to behave like bachelor roommates, and I was content to go along as well, but it was those very newspapers, always spread across the kitchen table and left for someone else to tidy up, that complicated matters. It seemed fairly sensible that as a dignitary abroad it served his interests to be up on current affairs, but one morning, after he’d gone to work and before Rosa, our housekeeper, had thrown the newspapers away, I noticed they were each—four or five of them—turned to their respective sports page, and, as often happens between sons and fathers, I was suddenly and irreversibly admitted into a chamber of his heart without his knowledge or permission. (Or so I believed.) I installed myself in the chair where he’d been sitting and observed the pages without touching them, as though at a museum, trying to imagine and inhabit the exact nature of his attention. My father was an athlete in the sense that he made a habit of running the streets of our neighborhood, or lifting weights in the basement of our apartment building on inclement days, but I had never seen a ball in his hands or at his feet, and had no sense of any team to which he might have had an allegiance. Still, there before me, undeniably, was an object of his attention, and I suppose, at the age I was then, fifteen, I sensed that our time together was short and, never having made much of the years up to that point, it seemed worth getting into his good graces, if only as a kind of insurance policy.
16
Also, Maradona said, the number says it all. The number ten. A one and a zero. One-zero. A lead in the game. It is what must be achieved.
17
It was not long after seeing my father’s newspapers that I began haunting the local fields, not implicating myself in the games but needing like a vampire to be invited in. Even in a country as football mad as Argentina, I had never taken note of just how many fields there were, nor how they were everywhere, not only on patches of grass in parks, but on streets between lines of parked cars, on rooftops with potted plants as goalposts, in narrow alleyways behind restaurants where chefs, in their white aprons, in five stolen minutes, would complete a one-on-one match. I soon realized I would never be invited into a game that was already in progress, and so instead purchased a ball and began getting to the fields early, sometimes when only a few other players were there, sometimes when it was only me. I figured, sooner or later, by my sheer presence alone, a game would naturally begin around me that I would unavoidably be a part of, but so often the cast of characters was set, the teams long ago worked out to achieve maximum parity and now not worth changing. And then, one day: luck. An injury. My life as an athlete began as so many others do, with the misfortune of another player, in this case, a boy named Eduardo whom I had seen score many goals, his foot skills nothing to get excited about, but with a deft first touch and the ability, like so many great strikers, to read and selectively occupy space. He often played barefoot, and that day stepped on the remnants of a beer bottle, one that, you could surmise, had been flung against the wall of the adjacent apartment building late the night before, sending shards of glass all over the field. This was not an uncommon hazard—the players had in fact taken the trouble to inspect and clear the grass before starting to play, but the bottle had been green, and someone, quite understandably, had missed the piece that wound up in the arch of Eduardo’s foot. It was odd—in playing his role on the field, one that had surely been his for years, perhaps already a decade, there was something undeniably grown up about Eduardo, a fluency with his task that I associated with the way adults, in that bored yet engaged way, get on with the business of their lives—our lives, I should say—but in injury, he was returned swiftly to childishness, his composure undone by the sight of bright red blood spurting from the soft tissue just shy of his heel, the shard of glass sticking out like a shark’s dorsal fin. He began to cry and to shriek urgently for his mother, and tried to crawl, hop, run away from the suddenly unrecognizable body part, as if, having occurred so recently, the moment that encompassed the injury could be unstitched and removed from the surrounding fabric of time. I would come to know this feeling well.
Raf Richardson-Carillo holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and has had stories published in the Sycamore Review and the Beloit Fiction Journal. Despite being in his mid thirties he remains fully convinced that with a month to get in shape he could still play several sports professionally.