“Look at you, crying your eyes out!” she said with a surprised expression. “You look like a widow.” Her tone was one of reprimand, like always, and yet this time there glimmered a hint of genuine concern. What else could I do but tell her my problem.
Her reaction was totally unexpected, at least by me. Instead of scolding me for still being interested in the wild game for boys, as she had every afternoon since she moved in with us, she listened carefully as I told her about my visit to the club and, once I’d finished, she offered to help.
My grandmother’s solution was to write a formal letter of complaint to the director of the sports club.
“You will see how he consents right away,” she said, confident in her strategy. Even though her idea seemed totally absurd I didn’t dare argue with her. I was ready to do whatever it took to get into the league, and that included taking my grandmother’s advice. It was also the first time she had cared about something that involved me and, beyond that, she was ready to be on my side. After criticizing me for so many months, after calling me a tomboy and I don’t know how many other names, she finally accepted my affinity for soccer. That, in and of itself, was already a small victory.
As could be expected, the arguments in the letter my grandmother wrote as my guardian to those distinguished people did not invoke equality of the sexes, nor the right of girls to play whatever sport they want. Instead she spoke of how difficult it was for an old woman to take care of two children with an abundance of energy all by herself and of the ordeal she faced. She also wrote that she couldn’t watch me during the day and preferred a thousand times over to pay to know her granddaughter was in a safe place dedicating herself to a sport, not in the streets playing with strangers. My grandmother went in person to deliver the letter to the office that had rejected me. On the heading where she had put her address, as typical for every correspondence, I saw she had written “cc: João Havelange, FIFA Director.” I had gone with her to the club but preferred to wait outside. I didn’t want to face another rejection.
The meeting didn’t last more than fifteen minutes. The director accompanied my grandmother to the door with a smile on his lips and asked me which of the different teams I wanted to join. I explained that my brother and the other boys from my building were Vikings and that was the team I wanted to play for.
“Go to the field and ask for Jerónimo, the coach, so he can give you a tryout.”
My grandmother didn’t take her eyes off me. There was a grim look on her face and it was impossible to decipher her thoughts. When the director left, she gave me a kiss on the cheek. A kiss, Dr. Sazlavski! The first kiss in the entire time she’d been at the house. It was the most unexpected thing in that moment — even more unexpected than my joining the mini-league — and it left my mind blank for a few seconds.
“I’ll see you at home,” she said as she left. “You’d better pass this tryout now.”
It went well. Knowing that it had always been my position, the coach put me on defense. We practiced Tuesday afternoons and had games from ten to twelve on Saturday mornings. I put everything I had into those practices and I don’t think my performance was bad at all. Nevertheless, not everyone was pleased with my being there. Anyone who was used to seeing me play in the plaza wasn’t surprised, but the team had taken on new players who didn’t live in our unit and traveled several miles twice a week to play with us. For them, having a girl on the lineup wasn’t only risky, it was also embarrassing. They said we would look ridiculous because of me. Everyone knows it’s not so easy to play when your teammates are hostile toward you. Even so, I think I did a good job of holding my own. They kept me on the bench for the first three games and after that would let me in during the second half, as long as we were ahead. Little by little, I was earning my place among the other players. When at last I gained definite legitimacy on the team, a new obstacle arose, foreseeable by many, perhaps, but something I had not at all anticipated: as if it had suddenly taken on a life of its own, my body sabotaged me. The first thing I noticed was a hypersensitivity of my nipples that got worse from rubbing against my jersey. It made chest traps impossible. Every time I took a shot to the chest, I would fall down in pain. I was scared; if that happened in the middle of an official game, the shaming shouts would immediately rain down on me, things like, “Tits, get off the field!” which I had already heard more than once with no provocation beyond my presence.
In a dream one Friday night, I discovered that for the entire time my brother and I had been living with my grandmother, Dad had been living in our country house with a different family. I woke up certain I would find him there and decided to confirm it. What would I have done, Dr. Sazlavski, if, after all that had happened lately, I were to actually see him? Would I have demanded he explain, or reproached him for leaving us to our fate? That morning I got up very early and left the house unseen. I brought with me a change of clothes and a thousand pesos in bills of fifty that I’d taken from my grandmother’s cash box. It was the first time in my life that I’d gone through the gates of Villa Olímpia by myself, which ended up being easier than I’d expected. I got a taxi near the entrance and asked the driver to take me to the Taxqueña bus station. Luckily, the taxi driver didn’t ask me to tell him the route, like they all usually do, because I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to get there. As soon as I stepped inside the station, I walked up to the first window I saw and asked for a ticket to Amatlán, Morelos. Not once did the clerk at the counter ask about my parents. It surprised me that I was walking so freely around the streets and the halls of the station, enormous in my eyes, and no one seemed shocked to see a little girl alone. My entire life, I had heard stories about how children and preteens are kidnapped in our city if they get separated from their families by five inches. As I climbed onto the bus, I had time to realize that I wasn’t the only one. Other young kids like me were moving around on their own, unaccompanied. Some were just passengers, others were at work selling gum or carrying luggage. I sat in one of the first seats, and when we arrived I set off wandering toward the center of town for a few minutes, until I recognized a street that would take me straight to the house. I had to walk a half an hour before reaching the wooden outer door. Despite how nervous the idea of finding my father was making me, I also felt exalted by the adventure and proud of myself. I was ready to face whatever. Neither possible outcome, the absence nor presence of my father in this place, would defeat me. It was with this conviction that I rang the bell. I was going to scale the fence if nobody opened the door. The six feet of stones posed no challenge to my feet, so used to climbing trees and scaling all kinds of crevices. I also needed to know what had happened to the house we hadn’t been to in these long months. Was somebody still paying the gardener? I had considered almost every possible outcome, except for the one I found when the door finally opened and a woman dressed as a nurse greeted me. It took me a few minutes to be able to speak.