Heaven and Earth (8)
"So to sum up — you never pressured him?"
"That's right."
"Kim has scored only two goals in the last three matches, and you scored two as well... and yet you never pressured him?"
"Only two goals in three matches? And I've only managed eleven this whole season! Maybe I could use a little pushing! Good grief — maybe you should all feel sorry for me!"
Watching Paco García's eyelids draw ever thinner, Castro finally felt something twist in his chest. This wasn't an interrogation, yet the man was interrogating him like a detective cornering a suspect.
"Ahem, don't take it too personally. I'm only relaying questions the fans have been sending in. As you know, Kim is running away with the scoring charts... it's only natural that people would feel a certain excessive affection for a player who came up through the youth ranks."
"...Anyone listening would think he was the only player we ever promoted from the academy. I was born and raised at Las Palmas, you know?"
"Oh — good point. You're right, Castro, you did climb all the way up from the youth team. So why did you advise Kim to leave Las Palmas?"
"......"
"Some people are even saying it might have been... a projection of your own childhood, going from loan club to loan club."
While Castro bared his wide-set pupils and broadcast every flicker of emotion across his face, Paco García offered a silent, inward apology.
He knew it was a rotten question. But there had been no other way to placate the segment of the fanbase currently raising hell. Aggressive questions were the only means of drawing out the sympathy of the majority.
Granted, a small dash of revenge for having his interview interrupted moments ago was also mixed in.
"Vicious. Truly vicious."
"......"
"I'd have preferred you go easy on me."
From the seat beside him, Aythami let his shoulder muscles slacken and clucked his tongue. But Castro ignored the joke and began his answer in a solemn tone.
This was an important turning point.
"Honestly, hearing all this stings. It feels like my love for Las Palmas is being called into question. Kim and I are actually quite close. At the time he was agonizing over the transfer, so someone needed to steady him. All I wanted was to help him as honestly as I could, with what I'd lived through myself. Sure, it could be misread — but if you listen to what Kim himself has said, he's admitted the conversation comforted him. So please don't go twisting my loyalty to this club too."
"Si, si. You're right. That was excessive doubt on my part."
"......"
"Hmm, still — you two are quite close, are you?"
"...Yes."
"Well, you do exchange a great deal of conversation mid-match, I hear."
Once again, Castro's instincts sounded the alarm. Despite the honeyed tone, one of Paco García's eyebrows had shot upward.
"Shall we move on to the next question, then? In the second leg of the semifinals, you made a throat-slitting gesture at Kim. What exactly did you two discuss at that moment...?"
"...Paco, what is wrong with you today?"
Castro's protest — delivered even with honorifics — carried an unspoken subtext: you've gone far off-script.
Naturally, Aythami and Nicolás were none the wiser. Amid the laughter tickling both his ears, Castro gestured with theatrical flourish, expressing the maximum possible indignation.
At the very least, he had stuck to the script.
Estadio de Gran Canaria — UD TV, Third Recording [REC]
In front of the stadium, a few more steps along the row of standing flags brought you to a bronze statue commemorating every player who had ever passed through Las Palmas.
Abril, an editor for UD TV and a member of the club's marketing team, waved toward the ticket booth window.
"Agustina! How have you been?"
"Ugh, what a miserable afternoon."
"That busy?"
While Abril unfolded the camera tripod with practiced grace, a gloomy voice drifted out through the little window of the ticket booth.
"Next time, ask whether I'm still alive first."
"Haha."
Sweeping the brown hair that shielded the tripod's spirit level out of her eyes with one fluid motion, she tossed it back over her shoulder along with a bright laugh.
"Ticket sales going well?"
"As of today... about 18,900."
"We were allocated thirty thousand, right?"
"Right. Season tickets can't be used for cup matches, so there's still 11,100 in pure revenue on the table."
At almost the same instant, the image of a 60,000-seat Copa del Rey final venue flashed through both women's minds.
Estadio Olímpico de La Cartuja.
Abril felt the thrill of a second-year employee; Agustina, in her twelfth year, felt only the deep stress of an unmanageable workload.
"...Step back for a minute. Let me smoke just one."
"Sure. We'll have to review the script before the interview anyway."
They retreated into a narrow, shadowed passage, dim and out of the light.
Agustina pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and vented the kind of grumbling you could never say to a superior.
"Interviews are the only reason I get a smoke break these days. Damn it all — the phones alone have us stretched thin."
"Just hold on a little. Once we get promoted—"
"Don't start with that. The ticket booth can't handle more than two hires, tops. And the owner will never, ever authorize even that. You know the running joke among the staff — fifty people get cut every relegation, thirty get hired every promotion. Give it fifteen years, and Las Palmas won't exist at all."
Abril could only manage an awkward smile at the middle-aged woman's lament.
For Agustina, too, it was the kind of everyday complaint that meant nothing — the conversation lapsed for a moment, and soon the ember caught at the tip of her cigarette.
Sputter, sputter—
After a few drags, Agustina glanced over the script and let out a hollow laugh.
"Season ticket sales, workload, even counseling sessions. Is there a single page that doesn't mention our little prince's name?"
"It's not that we demand you answer exactly as written... it's just that we'd appreciate it if you kept close to it. The view count difference is significant."
"I'm not complaining."
She pulled her gaze away from Abril, who stood there blankly. It had all come back in a flash — the difficult moments of her years working for Las Palmas.
It was a veteran's lonely reminiscence, hard for a second-year employee to fathom.
The 2017–18 season. With five matches left in the Primera Liga, Las Palmas had to accept relegation without so much as a token fight.
And so the layoffs came — from the front office, the scouting staff, the coaching team at the top, down to the cooks, the cleaners, and the ticket-booth crew she belonged to.
Between May and the end of August, the termination notices came one after another.
Then the following year, the 2018–19 season. With finances slashed and staff gutted, Las Palmas finished twelfth in LaLiga 2.
Just as the mediocre results dragged down season-ticket sales and attendance, and the mood inside the club slid into a full-blown slump — a monster burst out of the youth team.
A boy who turned people's indifference into astonishment, and their chants and cheers into awe and celebration.
The 2019–20 season. Season-ticket sales more than doubled year over year, and the atmosphere within the club turned so joyously rowdy that some worried it might go slack entirely.
So even though Agustina called herself a cantankerous old bat — even she found it impossible to speak ill of this particular prince.
"Just talk freely. About the mood inside the club, the change in ticket sales — whatever comes to mind, and I'll edit it down nicely."
"All right."
"...Just don't go too hard."
She shook her thick-nosed head and dismissed the useless request in a heartbeat.
"What do you expect from a woman who's spent twelve years in the booth growing thick skin? If you wanted a soft-touch interview, you should've gone to the canteen and found 'our granny' — that's what we call Paulina, the cook."
"Well, the thing is, Paulina's never actually seen Kim... haha."
"Not once, all this time?"
"Mm, Kim is a little... unusual, you know."
"...Players who reach the top are always a little different, aren't they."
Tss— Flicking the cigarette butt into the bin, Agustina added a few requirements of her own.
Since she was doing it anyway, she figured she'd do it rough and unvarnished. She fully intended to gush shamelessly.
Mercado Altavista — UD TV, Fourth Recording [REC]
It was Friday, and the wide market lane was packed with shoppers.
A couple strolling the stalls with their young son came to a halt in front of a shop called Baro's Coloso.
The countless sculptures on display behind the glass would have drawn the eye on their own — but the deciding factor was the glaring intensity of the camera and its lights.
"Dad, look at that."
The man glanced at the watermelon-sized head sculpture sitting beside the shop's owner, then gave his son a nod.
As a Las Palmas fan, failing to recognize that particular sculpture would have been the real embarrassment.
"That's Kim's."
They had barely been watching the interview for a few minutes before the boy's whining about his aching legs won out; the man scooped his son into his arms and vanished toward another corner of the market.
Whatever fragments of conversation leaked out the door were rather intriguing — but being a dad came first.
"...I just opened the door and walked out. That was the whole thing. Like I said, nothing to it."
"But the conversation you shared with him in your car did influence his decision to stay, didn't it? Especially the part where you spoke with Kim at the very end—"
"He already seemed to have made up his mind through his talks with his counselor. Let's not say I fanned some ember into flame just because I stoked it a couple of times."
The shop's owner, Baro, calmly chewed over his lingering grudge against his grandson.
A few bragging remarks dropped around the dinner table had somehow — through some cursed device, computer or mobile phone, who knew — become the root of all this trouble.
According to the shoot's director, the fan forum had been flooded with requests for an interview. Even with Benjamín Saúl's and Kim's permission, Baro couldn't shake the worry that this might wound the boy deeply. The dark look returned to the old man's face once more.
The young staffer from UD TV had been passionate, certainly — but something about him fell short of trustworthy.
"I understand. Will you be going to the final?"
"Of course."
"Do you have any expectations for Kim?"
"None."
At the unexpectedly blunt answer, the interviewer could only stammer, lips flapping. Baro exhaled a small sigh and added an explanation.
"I'm seventy-three this year. My wife left us early to illness, but thank God, two children and three grandchildren have filled the empty places in my life. Weekday dinners all together, weekend evenings watching matches at Gran Canaria — somewhere along the way, that routine passed thirty years. Even without asking for anything special, my children and grandchildren have already given me more than enough joy and happiness."
"Mm."
"I think football isn't so different from life. Las Palmas, Kim — they're good company, the kind you can be content with just by having alongside you. So rather than heaping premature burdens on them, I'll simply step back and cheer quietly."
The interviewer nodded a few times, then — with a small smile and a playful turn — pushed back.
"Still, if we lose the final, it would hurt, wouldn't it? The fans can't help but hope for a great performance from Kim, can they?"
Just as a brief silence fell and the interviewer hastily began retracing his own words — the old man began to speak, in a tone slow and heavy as settling stone.
"...My father was a carpenter."
"I'm sorry?"
"When I was a boy, he carved me a little wooden horse, and oh, how happy I was. Maybe that's why, at my age, I sell these second-rate sculptures — trying to feel that flutter in my chest one more time. This old heart of mine has been worn down by the years; nothing moves it anymore except blood pressure pills."
"Oh..."
Feeling an inward awkwardness at sounding like every old man who only ever pulls out his ancient stories — Baro nevertheless pressed on to bring the interview to a close.
His left hand, quite on its own, was stroking the boy's head sculpture on the desk.
"But ever since I met Kim, this old heart doesn't just beat — it rampages. I look in the mirror and see nothing but wrinkles... strange, isn't it? It's like I've gone back to being five years old."
"Ah."
"...So even if we lose, it's fine. We'll get back up. Next time, they'll show us something even better."
"Yes! They will!"
"And if anyone still feels sour about it — tell them to shut their mouths and clap."
"......"
[End of Recording]