Sky and Earth (6)
The instant the referee's whistle blew for full time, the faces of the Real Sociedad players filled with weariness and hollow defeat. A few collapsed right where they stood, but most simply bowed their heads with a long sigh.
Soon after, the Las Palmas substitutes came sprinting onto the pitch waving their green bibs overhead — David and Kirian Rodríguez, and even Ramírez and Mantovani, who had earlier been hauled off in substitutions. As if regret and disappointment were emotions Las Palmas had no intention of indulging in, playful gestures and laughter followed in their wake.
“Kim, you were brilliant out there again today. Amazing!”
Nicolás, who had come on as a second-half substitute himself, came up to me as well and held out his right hand. The way he rolled his eyes and gauged my reaction struck me as pretty funny. What's so impressive about shaking hands, anyway?
“Yeah. You played well too.”
“...Thanks.”
A belated reply and an unreadable expression. I was just beginning to retrace my own behavior, wondering what I'd done wrong this time (was a handshake some kind of insult in Argentina? Surely not), when Pedri came over with an arm slung around Ramírez's shoulder and blurted out, deadpan:
“What was that? What's with the awkward handshake?”
“Uh, I wasn't trying to shake hands either... Kim just...”
“...”
In a flash of thought, I caught on to what Nicolás had actually meant to do. This is a bit unfair. If you're going in for a high-five, you should raise your hand higher than that.
Under the Chihuahua's look of profound pity and Ramírez's snickering, Castro — who at some point had already swapped shirts with one of the opposing defenders — wandered over and lent a hand in wrecking the pleasant mood.
“Hey.”
“...”
“The penalty doesn't count. You know that, right?”
Even the man himself seemed aware of how embarrassing it was, judging by the mumble... it was honestly rather pitiful to watch.
Ramírez shook his head slowly, and Nicolás pulled a troubled face — at which point Pedri, unable to stomach the injustice, laid out a perfectly reasonable objection.
“Kim set the whole thing up for you. Why shouldn't it count?”
“So what? Since when is drawing a penalty an assist? Huh? Why don't you go help him first, then talk!”
“...Petty.”
Not a flicker of shame crossed that brazen face; if anything, it radiated the polish of a seasoned veteran. His age, for the record: thirty-eight this year. Knowing him, maybe this was how he'd spent every year — collecting small debts, one by one, from the players around him. At the idle thought, a laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it.
“Oh! He laughed!”
“Whoa.”
“First time I've ever seen Kim laugh.”
Amid all the fuss my smile folded itself away quickly enough, but the buoyant feeling that had already surfaced was beyond hiding. Well — it had been a magnificent evening; that much was simply true.
Just then, Castro shoved me square in the back without warning and pointed to one side of the pitch. Where his finger landed was near the halfway line — the spot where number 21, Martín Ødegaard, memorable for that crop of short blond hair, stood with his head bowed.
“Why?”
“Why what? Hurry up and go swap shirts before your interview.”
“...I could swap with a defender, you know.”
“Drop it. The defenders aren't giving you their shirts. Besides, he's waiting for you.”
With truly exquisite timing, Ødegaard's head whipped around, and our eyes met. Just my luck.
But between Castro's jabbing at my ribs and shoving at my back, I gave in to the pestering and set my feet moving with all the reluctance I could show.
Every single time one of these shirt-swap requests landed on me, I found myself circling back to the same fundamental question: who on earth started the custom of exchanging jerseys reeking of sweat with total strangers? Dad had recently taken up collecting the things, it's true, but running the washing machine and pegging everything out on the drying rack was mine and mine alone.
And as if that were the end of it. You couldn't very well run a stranger's bodily fluids through the machine along with everything else, so there went precious water and detergent — and extra labor on top of that. From my standpoint, then, a jersey was nothing more than an unwelcome object that devoured my personal time. Not, of course, that the damned custom was something I could refuse through sheer willpower.
“Hello.”
“...”
“I'm here to swap shirts with you.”
Those pale-blue eyes offered no particular reply, simply studying my face from above. Maybe he was taking the cup elimination hard, I thought — I was halfway to deciding it might be better to go find Assistant Head Coach Ríos, who was bellowing from a distance, when it suddenly dawned on me: from a name like 'Ødegaard,' he might not speak Spanish at all.
“Shirt. Swap.”
From there I did my best to get the meaning across with the shortest words and gestures I could manage. I hooked a finger under the shoulder of his jersey and lifted it slightly, then spun both index fingers round and round... and—
“You're good. First time I've ever seen Igor fall apart like that.”
“...”
“You're going up this year, right? No — it'd be stranger if you didn't come up.”
...So he speaks the language perfectly well, then.
Out of short, clipped words he assembled one new sentence after another without pausing for breath. It was strikingly similar to the way I used to construct them.
“Today you were the better player and I came up short. But next time, I won't lose.”
“...”
“Mm. And win the final while you're at it. Whoever's on the other side, they're not a team you can't beat.”
“Yeah.”
“Right. See you next season, then. Good game.”
Delivering all of this midway through dragging his jersey — drenched, clinging to his skin — over his head wasn't exactly wise use of the moment, but the sight of him calmly owning his own inferiority left a deep impression. Above all, I liked that he didn't trot out a single petty excuse.
I accepted the jersey he held out between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, and gave his right a light, brief shake. No matter who the person was — gross was gross.
A short while later, having pushed through the commotion, I arrived in front of the interview set. I was debating where to put down the shoe bag with the jersey crammed inside when it occurred to me that losing the thing outright would hardly be a tragedy, and I just dumped it carelessly at my feet.
“I think it might be better if you wore the Real Sociedad shirt.”
“That's not happening.”
I refused the Assistant Head Coach's suggestion without a second's hesitation. Draping yourself in a contaminant for the sake of appearances would have been a foolish choice. What was wrong with a plain black short-sleeved shirt, anyway?
“Kim, you'll need to cover the brand logo on your chest before you go in.”
“Okay.”
While one of the broadcaster's staff helped me with the final touches, Assistant Head Coach Ríos gave me a quick rundown of what came after the interview. There was a doping test today, too, apparently.
“Don't forget to come.”
“I won't.”
“Kim, if you're ready, let's head straight in.”
Before I could even signal my consent to the broadcaster's staff, the voice of the middle-aged man conducting the interview boomed across the pitch.
“Kim, Kim! Time to get ready for Seville (the venue of the '19–'20 Copa del Rey final)! Get in here, quick!!”
The moment Pepe, who had gone before me, disappeared beyond the advertising boards, the vacant spot naturally fell to my humble person. And the instant I stepped inside the camera's frame, a feeling washed over me that was a little... no, a great deal different from feeling pressured.
“Good heavens, Kim! What an absolutely dazzling match. Your first final in forty-two years, since 1978. This is certain to be an unforgettable night for the Las Palmas fans!”
“No kidding.”
Once more a roar erupted from the stands and cut the interview short. The interviewer, entirely unbothered, simply kept a practiced smile floating above his bow tie.
“Everyone must be in a wonderful mood.”
“Yeah.”
“And you, Kim? How do you feel?”
“I'm happy too. Making the fans happy is my job.”
For an instant the interviewer's mouth went flat and gaping, like a flounder's; then he shrugged.
“Really happy? You only scored two goals today, didn't you?”
At the booing that erupted on cue, he waved his hands and burst into a hearty laugh.
“Haha, sorry, sorry! Kim, let me ask that again — politely, this time.”
“Fine.”
“Why only two goals? If you'd taken that penalty yourself, it would have been a hat-trick. I asked Pepe about it, and he said it wasn't an instruction from the bench.”
Beyond the floodlights trained on the advertising boards, the Las Palmas squad took on faint, shifting shapes. My eyes had drifted toward the players out of nowhere thanks to one man: Castro, glaring daggers at me from the very back row. He raised two fingers to his own eyes, then swung them around to point at me... what exactly I was supposed to do about that, I had no idea. It wasn't as if anything I had to say could get anyone in trouble.
“At that moment, I thought Castro taking it was the best call. He's been our designated penalty taker all along, after all. I figured an experienced player was the safer choice than me.”
“You felt no greed for a hat-trick at all?”
“No. I wasn't out there with a hat-trick in mind. Winning matters more.”
Truthfully, about a third of me had been thinking, here — eat this. Not that he would ever, under any circumstances, agree to count the thing as an assist.
Apparently unsatisfied with my answer, the interviewer let mischief flood across his whole face.
“Is that really all? Because from what I hear, you and Castro are quite close.”
“...”
“Even setting aside the insider whispers, the articles all say the same thing — you two trade jokes back and forth and are practically joined at the hip—”
“That's because Castro's preparing for a coaching role and teaching me on the side.”
“So you're not close?”
...Television people, honestly.
I let out a sigh, careful not to let it show. I didn't like the way he flattened human relationships into a simple binary. Not-bad didn't mean good, and not-good didn't mean simply bad, either. Still, spending our limited interview time explaining all of that would help no one.
So — fine. Whatever he wanted to hear, I'd give him the reaction he wanted.
“We don't go around 'joined at the hip,' no. But yes, we're fairly close. Castro, Aythami, and Javi Castellano all look out for me a great deal.”
“All of them Las Palmas veterans, then. Was there some particular moment you all grew close?”
...As for the morons mouthing 'lunchbox' in perfect, ghostly unison — those we shall ignore with total grace.
“It's less that there was a moment, um...”
“You could just tell me what you like about each of them, if that's easier.”
Perhaps he'd gotten drunk on the stadium's atmosphere and forgotten his actual duties, because the interviewer was now sending my head spinning in circles with questions that appeared nowhere on his script.
“...Javi is quiet and dependable, the way a captain should be. Even when the team starts to wobble, he always knows how to keep us centered. He steadies the players and gets us moving forward again.”
“And Aythami?”
It wasn't as though I was saying any of this because he turned a blind eye to my mistakes.
“I think knowing how to get back up after you've been knocked down matters more than being skillful. In that respect, Aythami has shown exactly the kind of thing that deserves respect.”
While the bulky microphone swung back toward the interviewer's mouth, I could make out the Las Palmas players, their eyes glinting bright and sharp with mischief. Mantovani and De la Bella, Íñigo and Javi Castellano. Pedri and Ramírez, and — at long last — Aythami, who had finally seized the back of Castro's neck. The way they stood rooted to the spot, not one of them budging, made it obvious: they were locked in, dead certain that at least one prime piece of mockery was about to emerge from all this.
“...And last of all — Castro?”
“Castro is a good coach. He invests his own free time teaching me a great deal. I try to keep up as best I can, but it doesn't always go the way I want, so there are times I feel bad about that.”
The man in question, the moment our eyes met, began sculpting the image of himself retching — and then took a vicious smack across the back of the head from Aythami.
Idiot.
“At the same time, he's a wonderful teammate. He knows how to flip the whole locker room's mood with his bizarre jokes... and sometimes he doesn't hold back on genuinely valuable advice, either.”
“To you? What kind of advice?”
After only a moment's hesitation, I spat out the old story I'd been holding in my mouth. The atmosphere inside the stadium felt like it would absorb just about anything, and I judged that a few verbal stumbles wouldn't throw things off by much.
“Back when I was agonizing over a transfer, I remember talking with him at the team hotel on an away trip.”
“Oh, right — there was quite a storm about a transfer at one point, wasn't there?”
“Yeah. He listened to my worries in silence, then told me the truth — objective and honest. Thinking of the team, they'd want to keep me... but thinking of me...”
The interviewer's expression tilted into confusion, and in the same instant, behind the camera, Castro frantically drew a finger across his throat. From now on, the moment something feels off, I stop. That's the lesson.
“Thinking of you...?”
“...that transferring might be for the best.”
“...”
Whoosh—
In an instant, the stadium — packed to its thirty thousand seats — was swallowed whole by a spine-chilling silence. An eeriness so complete that not even the sound of breathing remained.
“—and then he told me about his own experience. What you need to think about when you transfer. Um, and talking it all through like that, I realized I still have a lot of goals I haven't achieved at Las Palmas. Looking back on it now, I was... truly grateful for that.”
“...I see. So that's how it was.”
“Yeah. Castro is the one who made me stay.”
Even at the Spanish I'd poured out like rapid fire, the suspicious stares kept raining down without pause. Something instinctive and uneasy was grating on the Las Palmas fans' nerves. And no — it wasn't only the fans.
Caesar, pierced by Brutus's blade... performed the gesture of slitting his own throat once more. The same motion as moments ago — and a meaning so entirely different it might as well have been another language.
You idiot. You absolute moron.