Besides, I was never scared of Buba. Sometimes, when we were watching TV in our apartment before going to bed, I’d glance at him out of the corner of my eye and think how strange it all was. But I didn’t think about it for long. Soccer is strange.
In the end, after starting the year so disastrously, we won the League Championship and paraded through the center of Barcelona in the midst of a jubilant crowd and spoke from the town hall balcony to another jubilant crowd, which chanted our names, and we dedicated our victory to the Virgin of Montserrat, in the monastery of Montserrat, a virgin as black as Buba, strange as it may seem, and we gave interviews until we were hoarse. I spent my vacation in Chile. Buba went to Africa. Herrera and his girlfriend took off to the Caribbean.
We met up again at preseason training, in a sports center in the east of Holland, near an ugly, gray city that made me feel extremely apprehensive.
Everyone was there, except for Buba. He’d had some kind of problem back in his country. Herrera seemed exhausted, though he was sporting a celebrity tan. He told me he’d considered getting married. I told him about my vacation in Chile, but as you know, when it’s summer in Europe, it’s winter in Chile, so my vacation hadn’t been especially exciting. The family was well. That was about it. We were worried about Buba and the holdup. We didn’t want to admit it, but we were worried. Herrera and I were soon convinced that without him we were lost. Our trainer, on the other hand, tried to play down Buba’s lack of punctuality.
One morning Buba arrived on a flight that had come via Rome and Frankfurt and took his place on the team again. The preseason matches, however, were disastrous. We were beaten by a team from the Dutch third division. We tied with a team of amateurs from the city where we were staying. Neither Herrera nor I dared to ask Buba to do the blood ritual, although we had our razors ready. In fact, and it took me a while to realize this, it was like we were afraid to ask Buba for a bit of his magic. Of course we went on being friends, and one night the three of us went out to a Dutch disco, but instead of talking about blood, we talked about the rumors that always circulate before the season starts, the players who were changing teams, the new signings, the Champion’s League, in which we’d be playing that year, the contracts that were expiring or had to be renegotiated. We also talked about movies and the vacation that had just come to an end, and Herrera talked about books, but he was on his own there, mainly because he was the only one of us who read.
Then we went back to Barcelona, and Buba and I went back to our routine, just the two of us in that apartment opposite the training ground, and the Champion’s League began, and the night before the first match, Herrera turned up at our place and bit the bullet. He asked Buba what was happening. Isn’t there going to be any magic this year? And Buba smiled and said it wasn’t magic. And Herrera said, What the fuck is it then? And Buba shrugged his shoulders and said it was something only he understood. And then he made a face like he was saying, It’s no big deal. And Herrera said he wanted to keep on going, he believed in Buba, whatever it was he’d been doing. And Buba said he was tired, and when he said that I looked at his face: he didn’t look nineteen or twenty at all, he looked at least ten years older, like a player who had worn his body out. And, to my surprise, Herrera accepted what Buba had said, calmly, just like that. He said, OK, let’s drop it. What about dinner? My treat. That’s the way he was, Herrera. A great guy.
So we went out to dinner at one of the best restaurants in the city, and a press photographer who was there took a picture of us, the one I’ve got hanging in the dining room: Herrera, Buba and me, dressed up and smiling, with a lavish meal (if you’ll pardon the cliché) spread out in front of us (it really was lavish); we look like we’re ready to take on the world, although deep down we weren’t at all sure (especially Herrera and me) that we could take on anyone at all. And nothing was said about magic or blood while we were there: we talked about movies and travel (for pleasure not work), and that was about all. When we left the restaurant, after having signed autographs for the waiters and the cook and the kitchen hands, we went walking through the empty streets of the city, such a beautiful city, the city of sanity and common sense, as some devotees call it, but also the city of splendor, where you could feel at ease with yourself, and for me, looking back, it’s the city of my youth — anyway, as I was saying, we went walking through the streets of Barcelona, because, as every athlete knows, the best thing to do after a heavy meal is stretch your legs, and when we’d been walking around for a while, looking at the floodlit buildings (Herrera named the great architects who’d designed them like they were people he’d met), Buba said with a rather sad smile that, if we wanted to, we could repeat last year’s experiment.
That was the word he used. Experiment. Herrera and I kept quiet. Then we went back to my car and drove to the apartment without saying a single word. I cut myself with my razor. Herrera used a knife from the kitchen. When Buba came out of the bathroom, he looked at us, and, for the first time he didn’t shut the door behind him when he went to get the sponge and a bucket of water from the kitchen. I remember Herrera stood up but then sat down again straightaway. Then Buba shut himself in the bathroom and when he came out it was all like before. I suggested we celebrate with one last whiskey. Herrera accepted. Buba shook his head. I guess none of us felt like talking; the only one who spoke was Buba. He said: This isn’t necessary, we’re already rich. That was all. Then Herrera and I downed our whiskeys and we all went to bed. The next day we started off in the League with a six-zero victory. Buba scored three goals, Herrera scored one and I scored two. It was a glorious season, people still remember it, which is amazing, considering how long ago it was, although if I really think about it, if I exercise my memory, it seems right and proper (though I say so myself) that my second and final season playing with Buba in Europe should have been saved from oblivion. You saw the matches on TV. If you’d been in Barcelona you’d have gone crazy. We won the national League by more than fifteen points and were European Champions without having lost a single match, just two draws: with Milan at San Siro and with Bayern on their home ground. Every other game we won.
Buba became the man of the moment, top goal scorer in the Spanish League and the Champion’s League, and his value soared. Halfway through the season, his agent tried to renegotiate the contract and more than triple the annual payment, and the club had no choice but to sell him to Juventus at the beginning of the following preseason. There were lots of clubs vying for Herrera too, but since he’d come up through the ranks and been virtually raised in the junior teams, he didn’t want to leave, though I know for sure he had offers from Manchester, where he would have got more money. I had a string of offers too, but after letting Buba go, the club couldn’t afford to lose me, so they upped my fee and I stayed.