Roberto Bolaño - The Return

Then I saw what it was: on the other side of the pedestal there was a black man, stark naked, drawing on the ground, and I knew straightaway that the black man was Buba, my teammate, my housemate, although to tell you the truth, like the rest of the players, I’d only ever seen Buba in a couple of photos, and when you’ve only glanced at someone’s picture in the paper you can’t have a clear idea of how they look. But it was Buba, I had no doubts about that. And then I thought: Fucking hell! I must be dreaming, I’m not in Chile, I’m not in La Cisterna, my father hasn’t brought me to any square, and this jerk in his birthday suit isn’t Buba, the African midfielder who just signed with our club.

Just as I came to the end of that train of thought, the black guy looked up and smiled at me, dropped the stick he’d been using to draw in the yellow earth (and it really was genuine Chilean earth), leaped to his feet and held out his hand. You’re Acevedo, he said, glad to meet you, kid, that’s what he said. And I thought: Maybe we’re on tour? But where? In Chile? Impossible. And then we shook hands and Buba squeezed my hand hard and held onto it, and while he was squeezing my hand I looked down and saw the drawings on the earth, just scribbles, what else could they have been, but it was like I could join them up, if you see what I mean, and the scribbles made sense, that is, they weren’t just scribbles, they were something more. Then I tried to bend down and get a closer look, but I couldn’t because Buba’s hand was gripping mine and when I tried to free myself (not so much to see the drawings anymore, but to get away from him, to put some distance between us, because I was starting to feel something like fear), I couldn’t; Buba’s hand and his arm seemed to be the hand and arm of a statue, a freshly cast statue, and my hand was embedded in that material, which felt like mud and then like molten lava.

I think that was when I woke up. I heard noises in the kitchen and then steps going from the living room to the other bedroom, and my arm was numb (I’d fallen asleep in an awkward position, which happened quite often back then, while I was recovering from the injury), and I stayed in my bedroom waiting; the door was open, so he must have seen me; I waited and waited but he didn’t come to the door. I heard his footsteps, I cleared my throat, coughed, stood up; then I heard someone opening the front door and shutting it again, very quietly. I spent the rest of the day alone, sitting in front of the TV, getting more and more nervous. I had a look in his room (I’m not a busybody but I couldn’t help myself); he’d put his clothes in the closet drawers: track suits, some formal wear and some African robes that looked like fancy dress to me but actually they were beautiful. He’d laid out his toiletries in the bathroom: a straight-edge razor (I use disposable razors and hadn’t seen a straight-edge for a while), lotion, English aftershave (or bought in England anyway), and a very large, earth-colored sponge in the bathtub.

Buba returned to our new home at nine o’clock that night. My eyes were hurting from watching so much TV, and he told me he’d come back from a session with the city’s sportswriters. We didn’t really hit it off at the start and it took us a while to become friends, though sometimes, thinking back, I come to the melancholy conclusion that we were never what you would really call friends. Other times, though, right now for example, I think we were pretty good friends, and one thing’s for sure, anyway: if Buba had a friend in that club, it was me.

It’s not like our life together was difficult. A woman came in twice a week to clean the apartment and we tidied up after ourselves, washed our own dishes, made our beds, you know, the usual deal. Sometimes I went out at night with Herrera, a local kid who’d come up through the ranks and ended up securing a place on the national team, and sometimes Buba came with us, but not very often, because he didn’t really like going out. When I stayed home I’d watch TV and Buba would shut himself in his room and put on music. African music. At first I didn’t like Buba’s cassettes at all. In fact, the first time I heard them, the day after he moved in, I got a fright. I was watching a documentary about the Amazon, waiting for a Van Damme movie to begin, and all of a sudden it was like someone was being killed in Buba’s room. Put yourself in my place. It’s not every day you face something like that; it would have rattled anyone. What did I do? Well, I stood up, I had my back to Buba’s door, and naturally I braced myself, but then I realized it was a tape, the shouts were coming from the cassette player. Then the noises died away, all you could hear was something like a drum, and then someone groaning, or weeping, gradually getting louder. I could only take so much. I remember walking to the door, rapping on it with my knuckles: no response. At that point I thought it was Buba weeping and groaning, not the cassette. But then I heard Buba’s voice asking what I wanted and I didn’t know what to say. It was all quite embarrassing. I asked him to turn it down. I tried as hard as I possibly could to make my voice sound normal. Buba was quiet for a while. Then the music stopped (by then it was just a drum beat really, with maybe some kind of flute as well) and Buba said he was going to sleep. Good night, I said and returned to the armchair, where I sat for a while watching the documentary about Amazon Indians with the sound off.

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.