Chapter 15 Enzo
The tunnel smells like every tunnel I have ever stood in, liniment and cut grass and the particular electricity of two dozen men about to find out something true about themselves in front of the whole world.
Davide bumps my shoulder in the line. “Left channel’s yours all day. Their fullback’s slow turning. Go at him early.”
“Their fullback’s not the problem.”
“No. He isn’t.” He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. Davide never pretends. “Go at him anyway. Make him earn every minute of it.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Enzo.” He waits until I look at him. “Whatever this is today. Leave it in here. Pick it up after. The pitch doesn’t want it.”
“The pitch is the one place I’ve never brought it.”
“Good. Keep it that way for ninety minutes.”
I see him three places back in the red line. Ková?. Match face, which is no face at all. We don’t look at each other. We are professionals, and this is the most professional either of us will ever be. Both of us know exactly what the professionalism is covering.
Then the light at the end of the tunnel. The wall of sound. We walk out into it, and everything that isn’t the match falls off me like a coat I don’t need in this weather.
The pitch is clean. Out there is exactly one question. It gets asked ninety times over the course of an afternoon, and the question is only ever Can you?
I have spent my entire life answering it the same way. Yes. Watch me. Yes.
The whistle goes.
I get the ball in the seventh minute with space to run into, so I run into it.
The joy arrives right on schedule. It always has since I was six years old on a concrete pitch with a ball my brother swore up and down I was not allowed to touch.
I take the outside and I’m gone, and for two long seconds the whole stadium is mine and the cross is sitting up on my foot.
Then Ková? is there.
Of course he’s there. He read it off my hips before my hips had finished deciding, and he doesn’t dive in, because he never dives in.
He closes the angle and makes the cross worse and forces the ball back, and the two seconds end.
That’s what he does. He doesn’t stop me; he costs me.
Every duel with him is a negotiation where the price of everything I try goes up.
“Dai,” I tell myself, jogging back. Again. Come on. Again.
Someone screams at their left-back, and it’s Ková?, because it’s always Ková?, running the whole back with ten words a minute.
“Switch it,” Davide calls, drifting inside. “Make them slide. They hate sliding.”
“Then slide them,” I say, and we do.
We do. We make them slide all half. This is the best I’ve played in a year, because there is no defender alive who makes me better than the one who knows me completely.
He forces me to invent because I can’t do the thing I’ve done a thousand times when he’s seen it a thousand times. So I do new things instead. Some of them work, and the ones that work are the most alive I have ever felt with my boots on.
In the thirty-first minute, I nutmeg him.
Clean, through the legs. The crowd loses its mind.
For half a second, his head turns and I see something cross the match face.
Not anger. Closer to delight. The appalled delight of a man watching someone do the exact thing he spent all week planning to prevent.
“Lucky,” he says, chasing after me, already recovering.
“Twice, then,” I tell him, and mean it.
Nobody scores in the first half. We come in level, and I’m soaked and grinning and furious in the good way.
The mister crouches in front of us at the break. “The left is working. Keep going there. Ricci, you arrive late every single time. Arrive earlier.”
“He’s doubling the winger,” Ricci says. “There’s a free man every time Enzo draws two.”
“Then find the free man. Enzo. You hear that?”
“I hear it.”
“You’re playing beautifully. And you’re playing at one man instead of at the space. The person wants you obsessed with him. Don’t give him the gift.”
“What person?” I ask.
“The one you’ve been dueling like it’s personal.” He holds my eyes a beat too long. “Play the game, not the man. Water. Go.”
“It’s not personal,” I tell him. “It’s a quarterfinal.”
“Sure,” he says, the exact same way Davide says it to me, and he moves on to the goalkeeper.
Second half, they score.
It’s a set piece, which is an insult. Their big centre-half rises at the back post and it’s in, and the red half of the stadium becomes the only noise in the stadium. I stand in the middle of the pitch with my hands on my hips and feel the tournament tilt under my feet.
“Heads up,” Davide shouts, clapping. “There are still thirty minutes left. Go get it back.”
So I go and get it back. That’s the job. You don’t stop weather and you don’t sulk about the rain. You go and get the ball and you run at the man again, and you keep running at him until either he breaks, or the clock does.
So I run at him again. And again. And every single time a compact Czech shadow arrives at the exact instant the danger becomes real and turns my best into merely good, my goal into a half-chance, my half-chance into a tame goal kick the keeper collects without leaving his line.
“He’s still on your shoulder,” their keeper yells at him once, and Ková? doesn’t even answer, because he’s always on my shoulder, that’s the whole point of him.
In the seventy-eighth I get past both him and the rest of the back line, and it’s just me and the keeper, and I take the shot early, because I’ve learned that with him behind me there is no such thing as late.
He is always larger in the last step. That is the part television misses.
Six-one does not sound like much until the shoulder closes the lane and the reach arrives where the ball was supposed to be safe.
The keeper saves it with his legs. I’m on my knees on the grass with my hands in my hair, and when I look up Ková? is already turning to organize his line.
“Reset,” he tells them, flat. “Next ball. Same shape.”
Because for him the save is just the next ball. He doesn’t carry missed chances either. And I hate that we’re the same. I hate it. On my knees, I have never wanted anyone more.
We don’t score.
Four minutes of added time. I play them as if my life depends on it, which maybe it does. I get one more cross in that’s an inch from Davide’s head. One inch. The width of the entire tournament. Then the whistle, three times, final.
It’s over. Italy is out. I am out. My World Cup ends on a set piece and a Czech right-back and one inch.
Their bench empties. Red bodies run past me toward each other while I stand in the middle of it perfectly still. For me, that’s the loudest thing my body can do. I make myself take the inventory a professional takes.
I played well and we lost. I played well and it didn’t matter. That’s the sentence that’s going to live in me for a while.
Around me, the aftermath happens in pieces. Gallo sits down on the grass and stays there. Ricci has his shirt over his face. Davide stands over him with a hand on his head, saying nothing, guarding him from the cameras with his body.
He comes to me. Of course he comes to me.
Through all the red celebration he crosses to the losing winger, hand out, and I take it, because I am a professional and the cameras are on us and this is what men do.
His grip is exactly the grip from a hundred private nights.
His eyes, for one second, are not the match face at all.
“You were the best player on the pitch,” he says, quietly. Just for me. The truest thing, offered like a coin.
And there it is. The whole disease in a sentence.
“Of course I was,” I say, because I will not be small in front of him, not today of all days. “It wasn’t enough. Congratulations. Go win the whole thing.”
“Enzo...” He watches me but doesn’t say anything else. My stomach drops, waiting for the rest of what he’s not saying. What he’s not going to say and my own words of caution are already replaying in my head.
“You’ve earned the semi. Genuinely. You were the best defender on the pitch and you know it.”
“Don’t do the professional voice with me.”
“It’s the only voice I’m allowed out here.
It’s the only voice I can do right now.” I keep his hand the exact length a handshake is supposed to last, and not one second longer.
“That’s the thing I finally understand, standing here.
You can say the tender thing right now, in front of seventy thousand people, because right now it costs you nothing. ”
“That’s not fair,” he says, but doesn’t add anything else. Just stands a step away and watches me.
“Here on the pitch, Marek, everyone is watching, bu nobody sees. You could tell me you loved me on this exact spot and it would still be deniable by dinner.” I can’t stop what’s been inside me from tumbling out. “You have always been so good at walking away. Go win your semifinal.”
“Enzo, wait...”
But I am already turning, because I have somewhere to be, which is anywhere that is not standing in front of him letting him hand me tenderness he will disown the moment there is a door involved.
I go and clap my own supporters. They came a long way to watch this.
They deserve a man who can lose with his spine straight.
I don’t look back at him. I’ve gotten very good at not looking back at him.
Davide finds me in the tunnel with his arm around my neck, saying nothing, which is the correct thing. Behind us, the Czech noise goes on. The advancing noise. The sound of a team going where I’m not going.
“You want the truth or you want quiet?” he says, finally, at the dressing room door.
“Quiet. For tonight, give me quiet.”
“Quiet it is.” He squeezes my neck once and lets go. “But not the guilty kind. You didn’t lose this. Eleven of them beat eleven of us by a corner and a header. You beat him ninety times.”
“It doesn’t go in the record like that.”
“The record’s wrong. I was there. Tomorrow you get the rest of the truth whether you want it or not. That’s the friendship. Read the small print.”
Ricci sits down beside me in the dressing room and doesn’t say the thing, which I appreciate, and then says a smaller thing instead.
“You were unstoppable today. For the record. He just happened to be the one man alive who could play you.”
“I know.”
“That’s worse, isn’t it? Knowing.”
“It’s the whole tournament in one sentence, Ricci. And, yes. It’s worse.”
I take my boots off slowly. I don’t want to.
Taking them off means it’s over. It means the tournament is a thing that happened and ended, and I go back to a borrowed apartment that still smells like the last dinner I cooked for the man who just knocked me out of the World Cup with his positioning and then told me, hand in mine, that I was the best on the pitch.
The joy was real. I want that on the record, too. Right up until the whistle the joy was real and it was mine, and nothing that happened after can make it not have happened. That is the part they cannot take. I ran at a man who knows me completely and I made him work for ninety minutes.
It was the best football of my life. I lost, and the man I lost to is the man I love, and tonight all three of those are true at exactly the same time.
I sit in a concrete room with one boot on and let them be true, because that is the price of a day like this, and I have always paid my prices in full.