I shut myself up in my room. I needed to feel at home. I settled some overdue bills, threw out some circulars, then waited for my sister to call. It was what we’d agreed, but when the call didn’t come, I dialed her number. All I got was a message saying she couldn’t be reached. I went to bed and read L’Equipe. It was the issue from two days earlier. I skimmed it quickly. I hadn’t really missed anything. Items about doping, astronomical transfer fees, fixed matches. It struck me this was the kind of thing my boys read every day.
The Manchester United–Real Madrid match must have finished. There was silence from the living room. Then I heard the anthem from one of the World Cups. Léonard had started on the pile. I sank into sleep.
I woke at eight in the morning. I hadn’t set the alarm, because training was always in the afternoon. Since I had nothing urgent to do, I lay in bed, letting my eyes wander along the crack in the ceiling and trying to get my thoughts in order. It was then that my cell phone started ringing. I checked the number on the screen. I’d never seen it before. I hated picking up and hearing those sales people who asked you if you were satisfied with your payment plan and then tried to get you to switch to a new option. I let it ring twice more, then remembered that my sister was having problems with her provider. I picked up at the last moment.
“Madeleine here. I’m calling from the phone of a girl I’m doing the course with, so I’m not going to stay on the line for a long time.”
“You really should get a phone of your own.”
“I’ll sort that out. In the meantime, I’ll give you my roommate’s number. She’ll pass the message on if it’s urgent. The course looks brilliant. The teachers are great. I have to go, it’s not my phone, and we’re going back into class in a minute.”
“Léonard’s fine.”
“What?”
“I said, Léonard’s fine.”
“Did you take him to your training session?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but just then we were cut off. Maybe it was a problem with reception, or maybe Madeleine had hung up.
Léonard was asleep on the couch. He must have just dropped off, as he always did. The pile of DVDs had vanished, he’d gotten through the whole of it, but that wasn’t all. There were others on the table, at least twice as many, which he’d brought up from the basement himself. He must have spent the night watching them. I went to him. He was sleeping curled up, his head against his arm. My eyes came to rest on a school exercise book at the foot of the couch. I remembered what my sister had told me about these exercise books where he noted down possible chess moves. I bent down, picked it up, and leafed through it. Sure enough, the pages were filled with chess games. You could follow the movements of the pieces on the board, the attacks, the parries. It was quite impressive. And then I continued skimming through pages until I came to the last drawings. I frowned. I wasn’t sure I understood. These were no longer chess pieces that were shown, but players on a field, and the ball was moving around between them according to a very specific tactic.
I sat down on the edge of the couch. I had to face the facts. Léonard had spent the night viewing a dizzyingly large number of soccer actions. And he hadn’t just watched them. He’d carefully noted down a whole lot of combinations and tactical patterns connected with this simplistic game called soccer.
I made breakfast and waited for Léonard to wake up. I had my coffee, watching him as he lay there surrounded by the piles of DVDs. This strange specimen was trying to reduce the history of world soccer—nothing more, nothing less—to a few drawings. I wondered if I should laugh in his face or take him seriously. At last, he opened his eyes and saw the cornflakes on the table. He stood up and filled a bowl.
“I saw what you drew in your exercise book.”
He didn’t answer, but started eating. I went and fetched the exercise book, sat down next to Léonard, taking care not to face him, and opened the book at one of the pages devoted to soccer. There was a drawing of a backward pass after a successful overlap of a winger.
“You know, the most difficult thing in soccer isn’t inventing combinations, it’s actually performing them on the field in real time. You can take more cornflakes.”
I turned another page. This time the drawing depicted a kind of play typical of the Italian national team, Gli Azzurri. The scorpion tactic. You draw your opponent to you, create gaps in his lines, then hit him with a lightning counter-attack.
“If you understand what your opponent’s going to do,” Léonard said, looking down at his bowl, “it’s easier to respond.”
“You see soccer like chess, right?”
“Only simpler and more repetitive.”
“I was forgetting.”
“It’s true.”
“Even if it is, tell me one thing: if you were on the field, what position would you play in?”
He started chewing more slowly. He was thinking. He was looking at the plan he’d drawn, players facing the goal. Each player had a number, corresponding to the ones he’d seen in the videos. I wondered if he was going to answer my question. His face was more inscrutable than ever. He carefully scraped the bottom of his bowl, not leaving any of it, then his hand advanced toward the exercise book and his index finger printed to player number 1, there in the middle of the goal. The goalkeeper, of course. I should have thought of that. The final bastion. The player who defended the line and whose movements were closest to those of a chess piece.