IN UNCERTAIN TIME
I SAW HIM twice in the flesh and the first time was both the happiest and the most unfortunate, although it was only unfortunate retrospectively, that is, it is now but it wasn’t then, so really I shouldn’t say that it was. It was in the Joy discotheque, very late at night, especially for him, you imagine that a footballer should go to bed really early, always thinking about the next game, or just training and sleeping, watching videos of other teams or their own, watching themselves, their successes and failures and the missed opportunities that go on being missed for all eternity in those films, sleeping and training and eating, living the life of married babies, it’s good if they have a wife who can be a mother to them and supervise their timetable. Most take no notice, they hate sleeping and hate training, and the really great players only think about the game when they actually run out onto the pitch and realize that they had better win because there are a hundred thousand people who have spent the whole week thinking about the confrontation or wanting vengeance against their hated rivals. For great players those rivals only exist for ninety minutes and for one reason only: they are there to stop them getting what they want, that’s all. Later they would happily go out for a drink with those same adversaries, if it wasn’t frowned upon. Resentment is for the mediocre players.
He, of course, was not a mediocre player and for some time it was thought that he would become a great player, once he was more mature and more focused, which never happened, or happened perhaps too late. He was Hungarian, like Rubala and Puskas and Kocsis and Czibor, but we found his surname much less easy to pronounce, it was written Szentkuthy and people ended up calling him “Kentucky”, which sounded more familiar and more Spanish, which is why people sometimes rather rudely referred to him as “Fried Chicken” (which didn’t tally at all with his athletic build), the bolder and more outspoken of the radio commentators allowed themselves to get carried away when he stepped on to the pitch: “For Barcelona tonight it looks like it could be out of the frying pan and into the fire.” Or else: “Kentucky is really cooking with gas tonight; he’s looking to give the other side a real roasting. This boy is pure boiling oil, he’s hot, he’s slippery and someone might just get their fingers burned!” Journalists got a lot of mileage out of him, but they have short memories.
When I bumped into him at the Joy discotheque, he had been in Madrid for a season and a half and already spoke good Spanish, very correct, though somewhat limited, with a pronounced but perfectly tolerable accent, it seems that people from Central Europe all have a facility for languages, we Spaniards are the least gifted when it comes to learning other languages or pronouncing them, that’s what the Roman historians said, a people incapable of pronouncing an initial S, as in Scipio or Schillaci or Szentkuthy: Spaniards say Escipión, Esquilache, Kentucky, linguistic tendencies have changed. Szentkuthy (I’ll call him by his real name, since I only have to write it not say it) had already had time to get over the novelty of a country that was new, fun and luxurious compared to his previous harsh existence, but not yet long enough to take it as natural and inevitable. Perhaps he had reached the point that follows every important attainment, when what you have achieved no longer seems to you like a mere gift or a miracle (you recognize it as an achievement) and you begin to fear for its permanence or, rather, to look with horror on any possible return to a past to which you were once resigned and which you tend therefore to erase, I am not who I was, I am only now, I come from nowhere and I do not know myself.
We were brought together at the same table by mutual acquaintances, although he only came over from time to time in order to recover his glass for a second and take a sip between dances, a form of training, a tireless athlete, at least he would have the energy to keep going for ninety minutes and into extra time. He was not a good dancer, he danced too enthusiastically and with no sense of rhythm, he lacked the necessary talent to bring harmony to his movements, and some of the people at the table were laughing at him, in this country there’s an element of cruelty in every situation, even when there’s no reason for it, people take pleasure in hurting or thinking that they do. He dressed better than when he had first arrived, according to the photos I saw in the press, but not as well as his Spanish colleagues, who were keener students of fashion, that is, of fashion advertisements. He was one of those men who always gives the impression that he’s got his shirt hanging out of his trousers, even if he hasn’t, of course, on the pitch he wore his shirt outside when the referee allowed it. He did, at last, come and sit down and, laughing and gesturing, ordered everyone else onto the dance floor so that he could watch them while he was resting, now it was his turn to have some fun, though doubtless without malice or cruelty, perhaps merely hoping to learn other movements less awkward than his own. I was the only one who did not obey him, I never dance, I just watch. He didn’t insist, not because he didn’t know who I was, we’d not been introduced — that didn’t seem to bother him, certain that everyone knew who he was — but because of the definite way I said no. I shook my head the way we city-dwellers do when we refuse alms to a beggar and pass by without even slackening our pace. The comparison isn’t mine, it was his:
“You look like someone refusing me alms,” he said when we were alone, the others were all out on the dance floor just to please him. He used the “usted” form like any good foreigner who still sticks to the rules, his vocabulary wasn’t bad, the word “alms” isn’t that common.
“How do you know? Have you ever been refused alms by anyone?” I said, and I, on the other hand, called him “tú” because of the difference in age and because of an unconscious superiority complex, which I became instantly aware of and which was why I added: “Why don’t we call each other ‘tú’.” And even that I did as if I were giving him permission.
“Who hasn’t? Alms come in many different forms. I’m Szentkuthy,” he said, offering me his hand. “Nobody ever introduces anybody here.”
He was an intelligent chap: he behaved in accordance with reality (everyone knew who he was), but his words gave the lie to his behaviour. That is, he distinguished between the two things, which is not easy to do without appearing either unbearably hypocritical or detestably ingenuous. I told him my name, added my profession and shook his hand. He didn’t ask me about that profession, so far removed from his own, he wasn’t interested not even in order to make polite conversation, an unexpected and probably undesired conversation, he had hoped to be left alone at the table to watch the dancing. His fair hair was parted in the middle and combed back in two wavy, almost symmetrical blocks, as if he were the conductor of an orchestra, he had a very wide smile like a character in a comic, a rather broad nose and very small, twinkling blue eyes, like little fairy lights.
“Which one are you with?” I asked, indicating the women on the dance floor with a movement of my nay-saying head, the women had all gone up to the dance floor as a group. “Which one’s your girlfriend? Which one of them are you with?” I insisted in order to make the question clearer.
He seemed to like the fact that I didn’t immediately start talking about the team or the training or the championship and perhaps that’s why he replied without embarrassment and with an almost childlike smile. His pride was neither offensive nor humiliating, not even to the women, he said it as if they had chosen him, not the other way round, and perhaps that’s how it was:
“Of the six at the table,” he said, “I’ve already been with three. How’s that?” And he held up three fingers on his left hand, what with all the noise it wasn’t easy to hear. He was still addressing me as “usted”, and that reiteration made me feel rather old.