When I Was Mortal Read online

  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.

  “And whose turn is it today?” I replied. “Are you going for a repeat, or having a change?”

  He laughed.

  “I’ll only go for a repeat if there’s no alternative.”

  “A collector, eh? What else do you collect? I mean, goals apart.”

  He sat thinking for a moment.

  “That’s all really, goals and women. A different woman for every goal, that’s my way of celebrating,” he said, smiling, so that it seemed a mere joke rather than a fact.

  In the league championship alone he had scored about twenty goals so far that season, six or seven more in the Cup and the European competition. I usually follow football, in fact, I would have preferred to talk about the game, ask him questions like any other admirer, any other fan. But he must have been tired of all that.

  “Were you always like that? When you were in Hungary, at Honved?” He had been signed up from that team in Budapest, where he’d been born.

  “Oh no, not in Hungary,” he said seriously. “I had a girlfriend there.”

  “And what happened to her?” I asked.

  “She writes to me,” he said succinctly and without the glimmer of a smile.

  “And you?”

  “I never open her letters.”

  Szentkuthy was about twenty-three then, a boy, I was amazed that he would have the strength of will, or the absence of curiosity necessary to do such a thing. Even if you knew the probable content of those letters, it would be difficult not to want to know how it was phrased. You’d have to be quite hard.

  “Why? And she still writes to you despite that?”

  “Yes,” he replied, as if ther
e were nothing strange about it. “She loves me. I don’t have time for her, but she doesn’t understand that.”

  “What doesn’t she understand?”

  “She sees things in terms of for ever, she doesn’t understand that things change, she doesn’t understand why I don’t keep the promises I made her one day, years ago.”

  “Promises of eternal love.”

  “Yes, who hasn’t made promises like that, but nobody actually keeps them. We all talk a lot, women make you talk, that’s why I learned the language here so quickly, they always want you to talk, especially afterwards, I prefer not to say anything afterwards, or before, like in football, you score a goal and you let out a yell, there’s no need to say or promise anything, people know you’ll score more goals, and that’s all there is to it. She doesn’t understand, she thinks I’m hers, for ever. She’s very young.”

  “Perhaps she’ll learn with time, then.”

  “No, I don’t think so, you don’t know her. As far as she’s concerned, I will always be hers, always.”

  He said that last word in an ominous, respectful tone, that “always” which was not his but hers, and which he denied every day by his actions and by the distance he had placed between them, as if that “always” nevertheless had more force than any of his denials, than any of his goals for Madrid and his volatile, interchangeable women. As if he knew that one can do nothing against an affirmative will, when your own will merely faffs around and says no, people convince themselves that they want something as a more efficient means of getting it, and those people will always have the edge over those who don’t know what they want or only know what they don’t want. Those of us in the latter group are defenceless, we are afflicted with an extraordinary weakness of which we are not always aware and so we can easily be destroyed by a stronger force that has chosen us, and from which we only temporarily escape, there are forces which are infinitely determined and infinitely patient. From the way Szentkuthy had said the word “always”, I knew that he would end up marrying the young woman who wrote to him from his own country, I didn’t think this with any particular intensity at the time, indeed it was just a circumstantial, anecdotal thought, I really didn’t care, I would only see Szentkuthy after that on the television or in the stadium, as often as I could, to be sure, I loved the way he played.

  Some of the dancers were returning to the table, so I said to him:

  “Watch out, Kentucky, one of the three women you haven’t yet had is coming home with me tonight.”

  He let out a loud, elemental guffaw that superimposed itself on the music and then he returned to the dance floor. From there, before he began dancing again, he shouted:

  “And she’s yours, is she? Yours for ever!”

  She wasn’t, but she and I left before he had exhausted his extra time on the dance floor and found out whether that night he would have a change of partner or be forced to repeat himself. That afternoon he had scored three goals against Valencia. I thought for a moment of his compatriot Kocsis, an inside-forward for Barcelona who, I believe, bore the nickname “Goldilocks”, he committed suicide years ago, some time after retiring. I don’t know why I thought of him and not of Rubala or Puskas, who knew how to have a good time and went on to have careers as trainers. At least that night Szentkuthy was having a good time.

  I saw him play for two more seasons, in which he had some ups and downs, but he left behind him some indelible images. The one that stays in my mind is the one that must stay in everyone’s: in a European Cup match against Inter of Milan, in which one goal was needed to reach the semi-finals, there were only ten or twelve minutes left when Szentkuthy got the ball in his half of the pitch after a corner rebounded off his own goal. He was left alone to mount the counterattack, there were two straggling defenders between him and the opposition’s goalkeeper; he outran one and dodged the other before reaching the goal area; the goalkeeper ran desperately out to meet him, Szentkuthy swerved past him as well, avoiding the penalty the latter tried to force on him; then he looked at the empty goal, all he had to do was kick the ball from the edge of the area in order to score the goal that the whole stadium could already see and was waiting for with that remnant of anxiety that always exists between what is imminent and certain and its actual occurrence. The murmur of excitement became sudden silence, concealing a cry that lay unuttered in a hundred thousand throats: “Shoot, for God’s sake, shoot now!”, once the ball was in the net, everything would be certain, but not before, we had to see it in the net. Szentkuthy didn’t shoot, though, he simply continued moving towards the goal with the ball glued to his foot, under control, as far as the goal line and then he stopped the ball with the sole of his boot. For a second, he held it still, captive beneath his boot on the grass or the chalk line, not letting it go over. Another two Italian defenders were racing towards him, as was the now recovered goalkeeper. They couldn’t possibly get there in time, Szentkuthy only had to push it across the line, but in football, nothing is certain until it happens. I can’t remember a more suffocating silence in a stadium. It was only a second but I don’t think a single one of those spectators will ever forget it. It pointed out the gulf between what is unavoidable and what has not been avoided, between what is still future and what is already past, between “might be” and “was”, a palpable transition which we only very rarely witness. As the goalkeeper and the two defenders hurled themselves on him, Szentkuthy rolled the ball an inch or so forward and then stopped it again once it was over the goal line. He didn’t send it flying into the back of the net, he pushed it just far enough forward so that what might be a goal was one. Never has the invisible wall that stands before every goal been made so manifest. It was an act of disdain and insolence, the whole stadium went wild and was filled with waving handkerchiefs, it was a combination of admiration for his actual play and a sense of relief after the unnecessary suffering Szentkuthy had inflicted on a hundred thousand people and on the several million more who had lived through it in their homes. The radio commentators were forced to postpone their cry of “Goal”, they only gave it when he wanted them to, not a second before. He had thwarted imminence, and it was not so much that he had stopped time as that he had set a mark on it and made it uncertain, as if he were saying: “I am the instigator and it will happen when I say it will happen, not when you want it. If it does happen, it is because I have decided that it should.” You can’t think about what would have happened if the goalkeeper had arrived in time and grabbed the ball from beneath his boot. You can’t think about that because it didn’t happen and because it’s too terrifying, no one forgives anyone who toys with luck if luck then turns its back on him as a punishment, having, until then, been entirely in his favour. Any other player would have shot at the empty goal from the edge of the goal area when there were no further obstacles, showing a positive will to win the qualifying round and to win it as soon as possible. Szentkuthy’s will was, at the very least, vacillating, as if he wanted to emphasize that nothing is inevitable: it’s going to be a goal, but look, it could just as easily not be.

  But it was not a good season for his team despite that game or perhaps because of it, and the season after that was disastrous. Szentkuthy seemed bored, he barely scored any goals and only played occasionally, he was injured in January and didn’t recover for the whole of the rest of the championship, he hardly appeared at all.

  On one occasion I was invited to watch a game from the President’s box, and Szentkuthy happened to be sitting to my left; on his left was a young woman with a rather old-fashioned look about her, I heard them speaking in Hungarian, at least I assumed it was Hungarian, I didn’t understand a word. Needless to say, he didn’t recognize me, he scarcely looked at me, he was absorbed in the game, as if he were there on the pitch with his colleagues, tense and alert. Sometimes he would shout to them in Spanish because, from where he was sitting, he had a clear view of what they had to do at each lost opportunity. It was obviously painful to him not to be down there w
ith them. When the goals were over, he would only have women, I thought. When he retired, he would still be too young.

  At half-time, he returned to reality, but he didn’t move from his place despite the cold, sunny afternoon. It was then that I dared to speak to him. He was better dressed, with a tie and an overcoat with the collar turned up, he had seen more advertisements by then; he smoked one cigarette in each half, in front of his bosses and the cameras.

  “When will we see you back on the pitch, Kentucky?” I asked him.

  “Two weeks,” he said, and he raised two fingers as if to confirm the fact with a deed. It was the month of February.

  The young woman, who obviously knew little Spanish, but enough to understand that, made a doubtful face, gave a modest smile and raised three fingers, then a fourth, as if reminding him of the truth of the matter. Her intervention allowed me to ask him:

  “Is the young lady Hungarian too?”

  “Yes, she is,” he said, “but she’s not my young lady.” He had the literalness of someone speaking a language not his own. “She’s my fiancée.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, and I held out my hand and added my name, introducing myself, this time with no mention of my profession.