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“The World Cup thing? My daughter has been losing her mind about the World Cup thing.”
“He is part of the World Cup thing.”
Damián extends his hand. His English arrives careful, slightly formal, third in line behind Czech and German. “Damián. Nice to meet you.”
She shakes his hand and gives me a look I choose not to translate.
We order the lamb barbacoa. Maria makes mine with extra cilantro because seven months ago she heard me say prosím and asked what language and I said Czech and she said “you’re Czech?” and I said “yes, I am Czech” and she said “I had no idea” and I said “the information did not seem relevant to tacos” and the conversation evolved from there. We have a rhythm now. The cilantro is part of that rhythm.
Damián and I eat on the stools at the counter, shoulder almost to shoulder. The lime is sharp and the cilantro ratio is correct.
“This is very good,” Damián says in Czech. Our private conversation out in public.
“I know.”
“You walked until you found this place?”
“Yes, I walked. The Beltline is twenty-two miles end to end and I’ve done most of it in pieces, mornings before practice, afternoons after. Walking’s the method. You notice which places have a line at the wrong time of day. You notice which places the air outside smells like the thing inside. That’s how you find the food. Yelp doesn’t tell you any of that.”
“Most people use Yelp.”
“Yelp doesn’t know how Maria looks at people. That’s a real metric. It’s the most reliable one I have.”
He smiles. The smile stays on his face longer than smiles usually stay on his face when he’s in public.
We leave and Maria says, “See you Tuesday, Tuesday,” and I say, “See you Tuesday, Maria,” and out on the path Damián’s arm goes around my shoulders.
The gesture is casual. I’ve seen him make it a hundred times with teammates, the arm draped, the weight even, the physical vocabulary of a sport where men touch each other constantly and the touching means brotherhood. I know what this gesture means. It means his body speaks the way footballers’ bodies speak, with contact, with proximity.
His hand lands on the outside of my arm and stays. His thumb moves against my arm in small circles. One centimeter against the fabric, a motion so small it could be nothing, and my body knows it’s not nothing because my body has been waiting six years for exactly this nothing.
I don’t pull away. I don’t lean in. We walk.
A man passes us going the other direction. His eyes land on Damián’s arm and slide off and slide back. Two seconds of his attention, then he is past us, and the moment is already nothing again except I am keeping a record.
“This is different from Munich,” Damián says, after a moment. “We have a system there. The same café for breakfast, the samephysio at the same hour, the same route to the training ground. I’ve walked it for four years and I don’t think the man at the café knows my name. He knows my order. That’s a different thing though. Here you’ve walked yourself into the city. People know what your smile looks like.”
“It took nine months.”
“It would take me nine years.”
“Less. You’re easier to know than you think.”
He doesn’t answer that. We walk another twenty steps and his arm has not moved and then his voice picks up, warm and light. “Your sport makes no sense to me. You play on frozen water. You hit a piece of rubber with a stick. You fight each other.”
“Your sport makes less sense. You run for ninety minutes and the score’s often zero to zero.”
“Zero-zero is a result. It means the defenses were good. You don’t understand. Ninety minutes of two teams trying to break each other and failing is the most beautiful thing in sport. The patience. Hockey is fireworks. Football is the slow build that doesn’t always pay off, and the not paying off is part of the beauty. You’re allowed to disagree. You’re wrong, but you’re allowed.”
“Hockey is also a slow build. People think it’s chaos because the puck moves fast, but the puck moves fast because of decisions made three plays earlier. Anarchy with skates is what people who don’t watch hockey say about hockey. People who watch hockey know it’s chess on ice. You just bleed sometimes while you play.”
“That’s an aggressive description of chess.”
“Marchetti calls the yellow cards in football stationery.”
“Marchetti seems wrong about most things.”
“He’s wrong about most things. He’s right about the stationery.”
