CHAPTER 26
ELEVEN MEN, EIGHT HUNDRED AND FORTY PEOPLE
Matias
The pitch is a field. I have to say that plainly, because in my head, all those years before I ever came, a game meant a stadium, a real one, floodlights, a turnstile, and this is a field on a shelf of hill above the valley with a fence of concrete posts and wire that a cousin of somebody strung up in a decade nobody agrees on, and one goal leans, and the grass is more the idea of grass, worn to dust in the middle and thick and green out at the corner flags where nobody runs, and the lines are chalk — real chalk, the same as mine, laid down that morning by a man on his knees with a string — and I stood at the gap in the wire with my thermos and thought, look, of course the lines are chalk, everything here that matters somebody drew by hand.
Eight hundred and forty people live in this comune.
I have heard the number so many times it has stopped being a number and started being a boast, and I used to think it was small, and standing at that fence I understood that I had never once seen a room hold all of them, and that this was the room.
They came up the track and parked in the ditch and along the verge, they came in the little three-wheeled trucks and on the scooters and on foot with folding chairs, the old men first because the old men are always first, in the good jackets they wear to funerals and to this, and the women with the thermoses that made mine look like what it was, and the kids underfoot, and the dogs, and I stopped counting because you cannot count a thing that knows itself the way this crowd knew itself, every face turning to every other face, the whole hillside one long conversation that had been going since before I was born and would go after, and I was in it, at the edge of it, holding oranges, and I wanted so badly to be in it that my throat did a thing.
Since the table I had not been sure they would let me back in.
I am not going to lay it all out here, what I said and where I said it and how the wine stopped moving down the boards while I said it; I will only tell you that a man can spend twelve days learning exactly how large a village is by the size of the silence it can keep, and that I had spent them, and that I came to a football match the way you go back to a house you think you might have been thrown out of, quietly, with fruit, ready to be told.
Nobody told me. A woman I had shared a bench with in August took an orange off me like she was doing me a favor, which she was, and a man whose wall I had watched Malick refuse to touch clapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was ready to lose, and somebody's grandfather made room on the bench without looking up, just slid, the oldest welcome there is, and I sat, and I understood that the silence at the table and the sliding on the bench were the same people and not a contradiction.
Then the boys came out and the hillside made a noise.
Ibu plays like he has somewhere better to be, which is exactly right, because he does — he is eighteen and he wants to be in a city, any city, and he says so to anyone who will sit still, and on the pitch all of that wanting turns into speed, he is the fastest thing on that field by a distance that is almost rude, and the first time he took the ball down the wing the whole slope came up off its chairs, eight hundred and forty people and me, and I was up too, oranges in the dust, shouting a boy's name in a voice I did not plan.
The other team was from down the valley and I could not have told you their name if you paid me, and the referee was somebody's brother-in-law, and the keeper for the comune was a man of forty-five if he was a day who works, I am fairly sure, at the tabaccheria, and none of it mattered and all of it mattered, which is the only kind of thing worth two hours of a Wednesday.
I did what I do. I priced it, God help me, sitting there — the gate that was free, the coffee that was better than mine, the chairs that cost nothing because everyone brought their own — I did the sum out of habit and the sum came out at zero and I still could not afford it.
Palla worked the touchline the whole first half.
She belongs to nobody and eats at every house and she had a route, in off the corner flag and along the front row where the children are careless with their food, a fat old professional going leg to leg, chip to chip, taking a whole panino off a boy who cried about it, and she did not come to me and she did not come to anyone in particular, she was a business, and I loved her the way you love a thing you have decided in secret is going to be yours and will not be.
Malick was across the pitch. I had clocked him the second I came through the fence, the way you clock the one thing in a room your body has learned, and I made myself not go over, because there is a rule I keep now that nobody wrote down, that in front of the village I give him twenty feet, and I keep it for him and not for me, and it is the hardest arithmetic I do all day.
He stood a little apart from the men, at the good corner where the grass is real, his forearms on the top wire, watching the boy, and once when Ibu skinned a defender and the slope roared, I saw his mouth go, just the corner of it, the smallest thing a face can do and still be doing something, and then it was gone and he was watching the game again, and I turned back to the pitch before anybody could see where I had been looking.
Fatou sat three chairs down with the other women and she was magnificent and she was suffering, because that is what you do when your grandson is on the field, and Ibu, when he came near the touchline chasing a ball into the corner, said something to her over the wire that I could not hear and did not need to, some rudeness, the specific casual cruelty a boy keeps for the one person he is surest of, and she waved him off like a wasp and went back to suffering, and it was the most loved I had seen anyone look in weeks.
* * *
They scored just before the break.
It was Ibu, of course it was Ibu, a ball over the top and that speed eating the space and the keeper coming out too far the way keepers do, and then the boy did the thing that is not speed, the cold little pause, the wait, before he put it past him, and the hillside came apart.
I have been in loud rooms. I grew up in a country that is loud on purpose.
I had never heard a sound like the one eight hundred and forty people make when the sound is also relief, and grief, and every winter they have got through, and the price of the diesel, and the funeral last month, all of it going up off the slope at once in the name of a fast boy, and I was on my feet in it, and here is the thing I have to tell you straight because I promised myself I would stop lying in these pages —
I cheered half a beat late.
I always do. There is a lag in me, a hair of a second, between the room going up and my going up with it, and I have had it since the first afternoon at the long table, and nobody has ever caught me at it except the one man who is too far to see, and I stood there with my hands going and the joy real, absolutely real, do not let anyone tell you it was not, and underneath the joy that half-beat sitting there like a stone in a shoe, and I clapped through it, because that is what I know how to do.
And down the far side, at the good corner, Valerio was on his feet too, with his hands over his head, shouting the boy's name — Ibu's name, the right way, the village way — shouting it with his whole gallant chest, and there was nothing under it.
I looked, because I have learned to look at him now, I have learned to wait for the second face, and there was no second face.
He loves the boy. He comes to the games.
He shouts, and he means it, and I hated that there was nothing under it more than I have ever hated anything I could have named.
Nella found me at the whistle. She always finds you; she is seventy-two and she moves through a crowd like water finds the low ground, and she had a thermos cup for me that I had not asked for and did not want and took, because you take it, and she started in before she sat, about the keeper, about the referee who is her nephew and a disgrace, about her hip, about the boy, and I let it run over me warm, I did not empty it, I never empty a silence when I can fill it and I never stop anyone else filling one either, we are the same disease, and that is why I did not see it coming.
"He's a good boy, Ibu," she said, "for all he wants to run off to Rome and break his grandmother's heart," and then, in the exact same breath, in the exact same key, pleased with herself, patting my arm, "and it's you we have to thank he came at all, you know, or half of it — well, Valerio."
"Sorry?" I said. "The boy?"
"You. The house." She said Mattia, the way she says it, folding it up small and fond.
"You think a house like that finds an American on its own?
Valerio rang the cousins. Down in — where is it, where your people went, the same as everyone's people.
" She waved a hand at the whole southern half of the world.
"Buenos Aires. That summer, before you ever came.
Rang them up and said there's an American asking after property, and Americans pay cash, no waiting, no bank, and wasn't that a stroke of luck for the cousins, and for you, and here you are, so.
" She sipped. "He does that. He knows everyone. It's how he is."
My hands were still going. I want that on the record. The whistle had gone for the half and the slope was sitting back down and I was still clapping, gently, out of a rhythm my body had not been told to stop, while the floor of the afternoon opened very quietly under my chair.
Rang the cousins. That summer, before I came.
There is a thread on my phone from last autumn, a consular thing, a tab I opened once in a fluorescent room down the valley with an ink thumb and a ticket number and then closed and never opened again, and I thought of it now, that closed tab, the number I did not call, and I thought about all the paper I have never been able to read here, and about a man on his knees that morning laying a chalk line by hand, and about how you could stand in a field your whole life and never once see the string.
Cash, no waiting. A stroke of luck. Here you are, so.
I knew about the four years already, I carried that up every morning when I chalked the door; but I had let myself believe, the way you let yourself believe the thing that lets you sleep, that it had been weather, that it had happened to me the way rain happens to you, that I had walked into a piece of bad luck the size of a man's life and there had been no hand in it, nobody's hand, just the market and the money and the sad ordinary way things go.
And here was Nella, kind as bread, telling me there had been a hand.
There had been a phone. There had been a summer afternoon and a call and a good word about cash, and the good word had been done for me, on my behalf, warmly, by the same voice that was still ringing off the far slope shouting a boy's name the right way, and I had eaten at his table and taken his wine and let him walk me to the good end of it and thanked him, I had thanked him, and Nella thought she was giving me a nice story.
She was. That is the part I cannot get past even now. It is a nice story, and I sat there with a cup I did not want going cold in my hand, holding two things that would not fit in the same hand, the joy of the goal and the shape of the phone, and I could not put down either one.
Down at the good corner Ibu was pulling his shirt over his face the way the young ones do, and the men were reaching to cuff the back of his head, and Palla had got up onto the bench where the children were and nobody stopped her, and the whole eight hundred and forty of them were settling in for the second half with the low good roar of people who have somewhere to be and it is here.
"Wasn't that lucky," Nella said, and turned back to the game, and down the touchline Valerio was shouting the boy's name.