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.