Roberto Bolaño - The Return

That night, after celebrating the victory, I talked with him. I asked him about the magic, the spell, the blood in the glass. Buba looked at me and went all serious. Bring your ear closer, he said. We were in a disco and we could barely hear one another. He whispered some words that I couldn’t understand at first. By that stage I was probably drunk. Then he took his mouth away from my ear and smiled at me. What he had said was: You soon will score better goals. OK, great, I said.

From then on everything went great. We won the next match four-two, even though we were playing away. Herrera scored a goal with a header, Delève put away a penalty kick, and Buba scored the other two, which were completely weird, or that’s how they seemed to me, with my inside knowledge; before the trip (I didn’t go), I’d taken part in the ceremony of the cut fingers and the glass and the blood.

Three weeks later they summoned me and I made my reappearance in the second half, in the 75th minute. We were playing the top-ranked team on their home ground and we won one-nil. I scored the goal in the 88th minute. I took the pass from Buba or that’s what everyone thought, but I have my doubts. All I know is that Buba took off down the right-hand side of the field, and I started running down the left-hand side. There were four defenders, one chasing Buba, two in the middle, and one about three yards away from me. I still can’t explain what happened next. The defenders in the middle seemed to freeze on the spot. I kept running with the right wingback on my heels. Buba came up to the penalty area with the left wingback close behind him too. Then he dummied and centered. I went into the penalty area with no hope of receiving the pass, but what with the center backs in a daze or dizzy all of a sudden and the weird swing of the ball, the fact is I found myself miraculously in possession inside the area, with their goalkeeper coming forward and the right wingback coming up behind my left shoulder, not knowing whether to foul me or not, so I just took a shot and scored and we won.

I had a safe place on the team for the following Sunday. And from then on I began to score more goals than I’d ever scored in my life. Herrera was on a roll as well. Everyone loved Buba. And they loved Herrera and me too. From one day to the next we became the kings of the city. It was all working out for us. The club began an unstoppable climb. We were winning matches and hearts.

And our blood ritual was repeated without fail before every match. In fact, after the first time, Herrera and I bought ourselves straight-edge razors like Buba’s; every time we played away, the first thing we put in our bags was the straight-edge, and when we played at home, we got together the night before at our apartment (they’d stopped keeping us together in a hotel) and performed the ceremony: Buba collected his blood and ours in a glass and then shut himself in the bathroom, and while we heard the music coming out of there, Herrera would talk about books he’d read or plays he’d seen and I just listened and agreed with everything he said, until Buba reappeared and we looked at him as if to ask if everything was all right, and Buba would smile at us and go to the kitchen to fetch a sponge and a bucket before returning to the bathroom, where he’d spend at least fifteen minutes cleaning and tidying up, and when we went into the bathroom, everything was exactly the same as before. Sometimes, when I went to a disco with Herrera and Buba stayed home (because he didn’t like discos much) Herrera and I would get talking and he’d ask me what I thought Buba did with our blood in the bathroom, because you couldn’t tell — when Buba was finished there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere, the glass we used was sparkling, the floor was spotless, it was like the cleaning lady had just left — and I said to Herrera I didn’t know, I had no idea what Buba did when he shut himself in there, and Herrera looked at me and said: If I was living with him I’d be scared, and I looked at Herrera thinking: Are you serious? but Herrera said, I’m just kidding, Buba’s our friend; it’s thanks to him I’m on the team and the club is going to win the championship; it’s thanks to him we’re tasting sweet success, and that was the truth.

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.