Chapter Text
1988
Donostia
Unai encounters that ugly football game on a Sunday.
He is in Donostia for the weekend, having decided to forgo seeing his family attending Sunday Mass today to go to the beach instead. Last night he’d celebrated the game they’d won yesterday at a teammate’s house, and this morning he had breakfast with them. He wanted the rest of the day on his own, as his week was mostly comprised of school and training. His rest time was spent observing the world from a distance, listening to music on his cassette player, trying to finish a book for a class he couldn’t fail in.
In late September, the pavement and sand could no longer scorch your feet, the days were becoming vulnerable to episodes of bad weather, and the tourist numbers were dwindling, releasing the Kontxa Hondartza from regular suffocating crowds. The permanent fixture was always the clusters of locals out for their weekends. You could get a coffee and sit on the edge of the boardwalk, you could be unbothered by any passersby, read until your ass becomes sore, then refresh yourself with a swim.
The real draw of the beach was the boys playing football there, loud and reckless, playing rough, ruleless football, and it was as much of a comfort for him to observe as it was a small distraction. He likes Donostia for being similar to his hometown, also on the coast, several kilometres east from here — he’d also grown up playing on the beaches there. He belongs in Donostia now, even though he still doesn’t see himself as somebody who belonged in such a large, cosmopolitan city. What mattered was his place in the city’s football club, as he plays for its youth team. Football is what tied him here, and so long as he had football, he could make a habitation for himself anywhere in the world. It’s said to be a beautiful game, it was amazing how comforting and familiar it was: he could understand it, like it stood for reason in a lawless world. Football is the most beautiful thing to him, perhaps the only truly beautiful thing he knew of, perhaps the only thing besides his family and faith worth protecting.
Boys abused the beautiful game on the beaches, on the fields, on the streets, everywhere. Unai wouldn’t be bothered by it, because that abuse was necessary. The skills and strengths of young footballers refine with age. With enough of the rough and brutal experiences, they develop into players with minds refined enough to meet the high demands of the game.
On this Sunday, one such mess of a game is set up a few metres away from Unai. It’s close and intense, becoming too distracting. He can make out that the players are mostly boys younger than him, a few around his own age. There is too much unnecessary shoving, tripping, tackling. Among them were very small boys, exceptionally skilful, dribbling wildly when they steal the ball, getting tackled by boys and falling to the sand without complaint.
The smallest boy kept being shoved down, against whom there was likely a sadistic conspiracy keep from his own footing. He seemed too young to be there, though it was difficult to tell from how much he was moving. He received a bodyslam, cried out as he was bumped through the air and landed on his ass. He jumped back to his feet with remarkable speed, dashing forward and going again.
It’s tedious, futile, he gets up only to be knocked down within a minute, like a roach that refused to die no matter how many times it’s beaten. Unai considered it an admirable quality in a person. He knows that in the competitive context, some boys will despise any display of determination from an individual when it’s stubborn, unrelenting, unapologetic, ugly. An envious hatred of over-ambition, far uglier than the ambition itself, will manifest in the crude desire to annihilate that ambition.
The spectacle was more of a scrappy melee than a proper football match, and the anarchy of it becomes almost too painful for Unai to witness. The loose, faded red t-shirt is yanked off the smallest boy, eliciting a sound of frustration from him. The older boy that had stolen it scampers away, cackling, while the others laugh and taunt, “Scarred-heart! Scarred-heart!”
Unai removes his denim jacket and folds his cassette player and book into it. Scarred-heart ? He’s not heard that one before. Insults come in all forms, and that’s all normal — his only concern is his beautiful game, now violated beyond justification, and he couldn’t tolerate this match anymore.
“Red card. For stripping a player,” he referees, jogging over and pointing at the boy with the shirt balled up in his hand. They all laugh at Unai. He sighs sharply, exasperated. “I’m on your team,” he says to the boy whose shirt was stolen. His torso is pale, and over his chest is a small, luminously white, vertical scar. So that’s what that meant. The boy nods.
From observing afar, Unai generally has an idea of which team he’s on, and which goal they were aiming for. He tries to tackle the player with the ball, who gets it away from him, passing it away. Unai runs up to press him, a young teenager, who isn’t able to kick it away into the right direction, so Unai gets it, dribbles it, and gets a good shot on target, between where the goal was demarcated between two shining green bottles. The last man manages to stick his shin in front of it. One of the boys on Unai’s team gets it back, manoeuvres as Unai runs up, as he’s accustomed to, getting the cross and sending the ball through the air and into the imaginary net. Some on his team let out short cheers. Unai storms over to the boy with the shirt, and tries to snatch it out of his hand, but it evades Unai.
“Please,” Unai tries. This boy is a few centimetres shorter than Unai, at most he wouldn’t be any older than Unai. Pathetic, how somebody this age would bully somebody so small.
The game resumes around them, and Unai engages again, shoving a boy who shoves the smallest boy. It’s easy, though, as he assists a goal soon enough. He’s feeling confident, which is a displaced sense of confidence, buoyed only by the motivation to get that shirt back. The taunts have stopped anyway, as the game had become more serious since Unai entered, and eventually the shirt is forfeited, tossed over to the shirt’s owner, as some players give up, wanting a break for drinks.
Unai goes over to the small boy as he’s tugging the shirt back on.
“You’re welcome.”
The boy’s head pops out of the shirt, the face pouting, gaze unfixed, black hair tousled; he’s like a shard chipped off a meteor, tumbled down to the earth. “Thanks,” he mumbles.
“You’re really good, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Unai smiles slightly.
“You didn’t have to help me.”
“No, I didn’t mean to. I was just bothered by how bad the game was getting. When it gets to the point where a player’s shirt is torn off, then it’s pure chaos.”
“Yeah, that was fucking stupid.”
Unai laughs at the swear. “Oh. How old are you?”
“Six.”
“You’re incredibly good.”
“Thanks.” A small, smug smile, a shrewd discovery of opportunity. “Can you get me something?”
“You’re not going to ask me for a beer, are you?”
The child gets the joke, now grinning. “No. Coca Cola?” A bunch of the younger boys were heading to the small cafe. None of them had bothered to check on this child.
“Sure. I’ll get one too.” The child follows him, and Unai picks up his book and jacket. “What’s your name?”
“Mikel.”
“I’m Unai.”
The boys from the game are standing outside the cafe, occupying a picnic bench with an umbrella shade, already supplied with drinks and ice lollies, the older ones stand like sentinels, further back in their own circles and smoking. Some look warily at Mikel and Unai approaching, guarded attention on Unai as he picks up the drinks from the fridge. He has enough pesetas in his pocket to get himself dinner out, if he wanted to. He spends a few on the two Cokes, it’s the most expensive drink out of the selection. He and Mikel leave the area, drinking while walking along the beach.
“You’re not popular,” Unai notes.
“Whatever.”
“What’s their problem with your scar?”
Mikel scowls. “It’s nobody’s business. When I’m a footballer, a professional footballer, nobody will care, nobody will even know about it. They’ll know me for how good I am at football, not for the stupid scar.”
“The story behind a scar can tell a lot about a person. A lot more than you’d want them to know.”
Mikel scrutinizes him, eyes stormy beneath the bold brows. “If it makes you feel any better,” Unai continues. “You can see what happened to my face.” He touched his right eyebrow, slotting his fingertip into a sliver of missing hair. “Some think they should avoid me, because I get into fights. Some think it’s manly or whatever. They’re the wrong assumptions. It comes from playing football. I tripped and fell, and I was kicked in the face. The studs tore a piece of my skin off.”
Mikel sips from the bottle as his expression slightly softens, and Unai pauses. “The boys where I’m from, Hondarribia, were rough too. Maybe even rougher than the ones here in the city. Last year, my little brother Igor was playing football and I was supervising him. He’s just a bit older than you. I saw there were bullies on the pitch, picking on him, many of them older than him, boys who knew him from school. And seeing that happen — I completely lost it. I went there and joined the game on his side, like I did with you. I thought I was the oldest and the biggest there, but that didn’t mean I was the better player. I should’ve been — I know I am better — but I gave in to my anger. So I was fouling and shoving them around, trying to get payback for my little brother. They fought back. It was ridiculous. Some of those boys were heavier than me, I swear, and they defended brutally. I lost my balance and fell to the ground at some point. I didn’t realize how much agony my body was in, or the shock to my head, until I had nearly passed out from that pain.” Lost in the memory, Unai drew in a sharp breath. “Oh, god. What a pain to recount that.” He snaps his focus back to Mikel, smiling nervously. “I suppose, that’s why I don’t mind when people have a particular prejudice of me when they see it, as long as the assumption isn’t accurate. So. I know what not wanting people to know about it is like.”
Mikel doesn’t respond immediately, the intensity of his gaze disarming and unsettling from a child. “Sounds like it hurt. But also sounds so cool. You — you lived,” He finally says. “The studs could’ve ripped your face off but you lived.”
Unai winces at that hypothetical mental image, but he’s pleased that Mikel seemed satisfied with the anecdote. He could’ve reacted similarly to how Igor did, who was seven when it happened. Igor called his older brother weak and useless. His other brothers Andoni and Koldo laughed pitifully at the story. Their parents chided Unai for trying to get violent with those boys.
“Yeah, I got lucky,” he says with a laugh, Mikel grins back at him. A couple of his front teeth are missing. Unai quickly pushes the topic from himself back to football. “So which team will you play for? Real Sociedad?”
“Yeah. Maybe, but I really hope it will be Barcelona .” He relishes the name. “They’re the biggest right now. The biggest team in the world I think.”
“You’ve got talent now. And the personality to fight for it. A big team would suit you well. Anyway, I play for Real Sociedad. I mean, I’m in the youth team.”
“Really?” Mikel’s eyes widen. Big eyes, bright green irises like fresh, broad leaves on a tree, catching sunlight.
“You’re better than I was, at six years of age. Well, you are definitely more plucky than I was.”
Mikel gets over a brief state of stupor. “What’s plucky?” He then says.
“That means you have a courageous nature. You’re brave, you know, especially when you’re faced with a challenge. When those boys were beating you down, you fought back, never giving up. That means you’ve got pluck. You should have the best coach, and better teammates.”
Unai knows what it’s like, at this age he’d played amongst wild groups of boys, and because he hated how rough it would get, he was happy and satisfied that his talent was recognized when he was accepted into a good football academy, no less than Real Sociedad. He knew it would still be difficult, even more so than it was on the beaches. But teammates and coaches left him wanting more, and Unai would be frustrated, with coaches neglecting to give him clear instructions, or helping him with his weak areas. More so, he’d be frustrated with himself and his inability to sometimes understand or get along with teammates. After attempting to figure training routines and tactics out for himself, he’d attempt to instruct teammates, which inadvertently led to fights, and Unai could see how he was a freak in the coach’s eyes, solely because his teammates treated him differently. At one point, he had receded into a period where he thought he wasn’t interested in becoming a professional footballer anymore; ultimately, that wasn’t an option.
He couldn’t just like football anymore, he had to be in love with it. And he had to change his character, too, as football became loveable to him, he himself had to become loveable to others. Self-aware, self-effacing, less confrontational, more passive. It wasn’t necessarily courage or anything like that which he’d incorporated into his character. That’s something he and his peers assumed they had, and took for granted the fact they had it, despite not demonstrating it very often.
Mikel nods. “I had to be brave, from when I was born,” He says, a child’s way of beginning a story. Unai looks at him, imploring him to continue, because Mikel hesitates. “I was born with a bad heart, so Ama and Aita got it fixed right away so that I wouldn’t die. They gave me their brave-ness when I was a baby, so I wouldn’t be scared when the doctor cut my chest open to heal my heart.”
“I see, so you’re a survivor.”
Mikel grins. “I had to be brave... and lucky too. But it means that I still have a weak heart. My teachers knew it, and they would be worried when I’m running around too much, that’s how the others learnt about it. I’m not supposed to run too much, you see. My heart can’t handle it. They think the scar is my weakness. So I’m not supposed to play football, even though I always wanted to.”
Unai couldn’t help but smile back. “It’s stuck in your mind; that means you are supposed to play.” Ultimately, Unai owed it to that persistent thought for keeping him in football, it was planted into his mind before he could remember, and it blossomed into love in his adolescence, it stained his heart like a drop of black ink in a glass of milk.
A heart can be so strong; a human heart will defy expectations with its strength. It’s so poetic, so cliche, Unai can’t be helped, and his friends call him an old soul because he’s always listening to love songs. He doesn’t have to say it aloud — not because the boy is too young to know about love, but because the boy understands that already, albeit not yet consciously. He understands, because at this age, the one thing he loves besides his Ama and Aita is football, and these can be the only real loves he’ll have in his entire life. He can be happy.
Mikel is down to the dregs of the bottle. He looks out to the sea, sighing with satisfaction. The water, the sky, all the same steel-blue that dims as the sun abstracts itself behind a long, smooth cloud just above the mountains.
“I wonder what time it is,” he worries. Unai checks his watch, a hand-me-down from his older brother. “It’s almost half-past-six. Do you need to go home?”
“Yes.” He groans, a high-pitched sound of frustration. “I think I’m going to be late for dinner. Thank you for the Coke. Thank you for getting my shirt back.”
“It was nice to meet you.” Unai holds out his hand, the boy takes it with his hand and mechanically shakes it. “Do you need help getting home?”
“Oh, I know the way back.” He smiles before running off in the south-west direction. The light of a stubborn meteorite falling through the sky. Unai reminds himself to keep an eye out for Mikel in the future. One day they could be in the same club, playing together, one guiding the other. The days until then are tests for Unai to become better and stronger, to devote himself to football. He’s not yet shed all the dirt of his youth, and he’ll have to, for the beauty of his game, for the day he will have to be good enough to protect it. There’s nothing else.