I walked into the house. It was silent and dark. I switched the lights on in the corridor and went straight to the kitchen. My note was still on the table: clearly, Léonard hadn’t left his room while I was away. I thought for a moment. What Catherine Vandrecken had told me had been going around and around in my mind on the drive home. It was the kind of moment of decision you get in the locker room. You don’t have much time. There are lots of unknowns. You have to choose one option and believe in it. The worst thing, always, is to do nothing.
I went to Léonard’s room. The door was shut. I put my hand on the handle. It was the point of no return. Léonard was sitting on the bed. He had his back to me. He was looking straight ahead, his shoulders slumped, his head a little tilted.
“I think if I have a look,” I began, “I should be able to find a video of penalties. But if you really want to play, that won’t be enough. You must be able to react even when you don’t have anything to relate it to. Otherwise, I’ll never be able to put you into a real match. And that’d be a pity because you’re very good. I really think that. So do your teammates. You saw it for yourself, they didn’t make fun of you when you missed that penalty. They were surprised, that’s all. You think they would have let you off that easily if they didn’t respect you?”
Léonard slowly raised his head. He kept his back to me, but I knew he was paying attention.
“Now, nobody’s forcing you to play, especially not me. But if you want to continue, we can think about a method. Every player has a weakness, and it’s often the thing that becomes his strength. Zidane was slow. That slowness made it necessary for him to develop his vision of the game, and he realized that the ball would always go faster than his legs. He became the greatest passer of all time. I can train you to expect the unexpected. But it’s impossible if you don’t want it. So it’s up to you. Now I’m going to make something to eat.”
I took a pizza from the freezer and put it in the oven. I had time to take a shower. I saw my face in the mirror and it struck me that I really needed a shave. This was the man whose arm Catherine Vandrecken had taken to go to the theater. That didn’t make any sense.
When I came out of the bathroom, Léonard was already in the kitchen looking for the flatware. It wasn’t an obvious thing for him to do, because since he’d been here, I’d always laid the table, whether for breakfast or for dinner. I didn’t want to interfere because I thought he was responding, in his way, to the proposition I’d made him in his room: to tackle the unexpected. I sensed from a distance that he was making an enormous effort to open the drawers without knowing what they contained, that what for any other kid would have been curiosity was for him a source of anxiety. I went and changed in order to be more comfortable, but also to avoid my presence embarrassing him even more. I put on an old sweat suit, one that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away even though it had quite a few holes in it.
By the time I got back to the kitchen, the table was laid. Léonard had solved the brain teaser, which was what finding the flatware, the napkins, the glasses, and everything needed for the meal must have been for him. But he’d done more than that. He’d arranged the plates in such a way that we could have dinner facing each other. I took the pizza out of the oven and cut it into slices. It was a simple meal, which suited both of us.
“If you like, once we finish eating we can watch a penalty shootout that’s gone down in soccer history. It’s the one in the final of the Superclásico between Brazil and Argentina at the Buenos Aires stadium in 2012.”
Léonard was listening. He had a slice of pizza in his hands and was slowly chewing. His eyes were fixed on an imaginary point to the right of me, but I was used to this peculiar manner of his by now, and it didn’t disturb me anymore.
“The radio was broadcasting the match live, the television interrupted its programs to give priority to what was happening. Taxes stopped. People swarmed into cafés that had a TV or radio. The ground floors of apartment buildings, too. The whole city went crazy.”
That was when he raised his head a little and his eyes came to rest on me. “Who won in the end?”
I was so surprised, I paused for a moment. His face was still that enigmatic mask I knew, but his eyes met mine, at least for two or three seconds; it felt like an eternity.
“Brazil,” I replied.