The Thirty-Seventh

by Bielsian Intensity, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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In the eighty-sixth minute the bombo behind the Pantanoso goal was still going, and Gonzalo Techera could feel it through the soles of his boots: a double beat and a rest, a double beat and a rest, coming up through the dry October grass the way the dough mixer at El Molino came up through the floor tiles at three in the morning. One–one. A draw was enough. Everyone at the ground knew that a draw was enough. The forty supporters of Sordos del Cerro knew it. They had painted the club's name on a bedsheet, and under the name the club's sign, an open hand drawn in green. So did the two hundred from Pantanoso along the rest of the rail, and so did the referee, Ruiz, a heavy, patient man who carried a small yellow flag in his left hand. Each time he blew he raised it, so that eleven men who could not hear a whistle would know that one had gone.

On the touchline Washington Albín stood with his hands in the pockets of the port authority anorak he had kept when he retired from the cranes. He was sixty-one. He had not sat down since the second half began, and the bench behind him, a plank on two crates, had nobody on it but the water bottles and the substitutes' tracksuit tops, folded.

Techera looked at him, because at a corner or a throw-in every one of them looked at him: it was the only way the bench could reach them. Albín took one hand out of a pocket and signed distances, two flat palms drawn apart and pushed together again, and put the hand back.

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Albín had come to them in March. He had learned Uruguayan Sign Language at the evening classes in the old school on Avenida Grecia, for reasons he did not give and nobody asked, and he signed the way he must once have driven the gantry over the container ships: large, slow, exact, every movement finished before the next one began. Facundo Iturbide, the right winger, who repaired motorbikes and had opinions about everything, said that Albín signed like a man reading out a contract. By the second week the players had given him his name-sign. It was the right index finger crooked into a hook and lowered twice, gently, as a load is lowered onto a quay, and Albín, when he understood what it was, had stood very still for a moment and then signed thank you in the formal way, with both hands.

At the first session he did not bring cones. He brought a list.

It was typed, two pages, and he held it in one hand and signed from it with the other, which made his signing slower still. Thirty-six ways in which a pass could say something to the man who received it. Here. Now. Turn. Don't turn. Give it back. Keep it. Go past him. Don't go past him. He is behind you. He is not behind you. Hurry. Take your time. He had counted them, he signed, over many years. He wanted to know whether they agreed.

They did not, entirely. Pocho Méndez, the goalkeeper, pointed out that hurry and now were the same pass with a different face on the man who played it, and Albín looked at the list for a long time and then signed that the face was part of the pass, and kept them both. Then Iturbide took a ball from the bag without asking and walked out to the right touchline, and signed to Techera to go and stand on the edge of the penalty area, and signed to Albín: watch.

Iturbide played the ball inside, into the empty ground ahead of Techera. He hit it under the middle with the side of the foot, so that it went out fast and spinning backwards against itself, and it came off the grass on its second bounce, slowed and stopped, a metre in front of Techera, at exactly the place where his next stride would land. It did not come to his feet; it came to the ground just ahead of them. Techera had not moved, and the ball still waited for him, at the right place, as a bus stops.

Albín asked for it again. Iturbide played it again. Albín asked for it eleven times in all, from eleven places, and on the eleventh he walked out onto the grass and stood where the ball had stopped and looked down at it for some time, the way he must once have looked down from the cab at a container that had landed square.

What does it say? he signed.

Iturbide thought about it. Go, he signed. Don't give it back. I'm not coming. It's all yours now, to the end.

Albín wrote at the bottom of the second page, in pencil, 37, and underlined it twice, and the players saw him do it and laughed, and he let them. Then he made the only rule of the season that he made in front of all of them at once.

When Iturbide plays it, the right-back goes. Every time.

Techera signed: Every time? What score? What minute?

Every time, Albín signed. If you go only when it is safe, they will learn when it is safe. Then they know when you will not go. Then they know everything.

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From March to October Techera went sixty-three times. He counted, because Albín counted, and because at El Molino, between the first and second batches, there was a quarter of an hour in which there was nothing to do but stand by the ovens and count. Nineteen times the move came to nothing. Twenty-six times it ended in a cross that somebody cleared. Nine times it ended in a goal, five of them headed in by Benavídez, who was a metre ninety-two and a plasterer and could not head a ball badly if he tried. Nine times he lost it, and of those nine the other team scored twice, once against Racing del Oeste in May and once in the first leg against Pantanoso, and both times Albín had been on the touchline with his hands in his pockets and had signed nothing at all.

They had come up the table one place at a time. There had never been a club of deaf players in the first division of the Liga Amateur del Oeste, and there would be one now, if a draw was enough, and it was.

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In the eighty-seventh minute Pantanoso's left-back went with Iturbide too far infield, as he had been going all afternoon, because he was young and had been told to stay close, and he had not yet learned how close. Iturbide turned him once and came out on the other side of him with the ball and the whole touchline in front of him, and he did not look up, because he did not need to look. He knew where Techera was. He knew where Techera always was.

Techera looked at the bench.

Albín's hands came out of his pockets. They rose together to the height of his chest, flat, palms down, the beginning of a shape that every one of them knew, because it was one of the first signs anyone learns: two hands pressing down on the air, stay, wait, stop there. Techera saw the hands begin it. He saw them stop at his chest with the palms still flat. He saw them go back into the pockets of the anorak, slowly, one and then the other, as a man puts away his keys.

Iturbide played the thirty-seventh.

The ball went out fast and spinning, and came off the grass, and checked, and waited, a metre in front of Techera's right foot, at the place where his stride would land, and he was already going, and he took it without breaking the stride. He was in the space behind the left-back with twenty metres of grass in front of him and the bombo coming up through his boots faster now, no longer double beats, one continuous thudding, as when the mixer was full. He saw Benavídez arriving at the far post, his mouth wide open, shouting, which made no difference to anybody. He saw the goalkeeper begin to move across. He set himself to cross.

Pantanoso's number six had not gone with his man. He had stayed where he was, at the corner of the penalty area, a thin boy with a shaved head who had been in the stand in the first leg with a phone, filming, Techera remembered now. He stepped across Techera as Techera's foot came down to cross, and took the ball off the end of the boot as cleanly as a man takes a cup out of another man's hand, and first time hit it long, over everyone, into the grass where Techera had been standing six seconds before.

Techera turned and ran back. He ran faster than he had run forward. It made no difference either. Pantanoso's nine was through, alone, with Méndez coming off his line, and the nine went round him on the left and put it into the empty net, and the whole of the stand on the railway side rose at once, two hundred people with their arms in the air and their mouths open, and the ground under Techera's boots did something it had not done all season. It shook. Then Ruiz's yellow flag went up.

In the ninety-first minute it went up three times, and that was the end.

The Pantanoso players ran to their stand. The forty from the Cerro stayed where they were behind the bedsheet, and some of them signed to the players across the rail, small, careful signs: well played, next year, come here. Benavídez sat down on the grass at the far post with his hands hanging between his knees. Iturbide walked across to Techera, stopped in front of him, and signed before Techera could sign anything.

It was the right pass.

Techera looked at him.

Don't, Iturbide signed. I know what you're going to say. It was the right pass. You were right to go. He signed right twice more, hard, the fist striking the flat palm, as if he were knocking a nail in. Then he went to pick Benavídez up.

On the touchline Albín shook hands with the Pantanoso coach, and with Ruiz, and with the linesman, and then he walked along the line of his own players as they came off and touched each of them once on the shoulder, and did not sign anything at all.

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On Sunday nights the first batch at El Molino went in at two. Techera left the house at twenty past one and walked down Grecia towards the bakery, under the streetlamps, with the wind off the bay smelling of the oil refinery and salt. The bar on the corner at the bottom of the hill was still open. It was always open. Through the window he could see a dozen men at the counter under the television, which was showing a replay of the derby from the Estadio Centenario. There was a woman behind the bar wiping glasses. At the table by the window, with his back to the television, sat Albín.

He had a laptop open in front of him, and a cortado beside it with the foam gone flat, and a plate with the crust of a sandwich on it. He was leaning so close to the screen that its light was on his face. As Techera watched, the men at the counter all rose at once, their arms going up, their mouths open, because somebody on the television had scored. Bottles jumped on the counter. The woman stopped wiping. Albín did not look up. He touched a key, and the light on his face changed, and he touched it again.

Techera went in. Albín did not see him until he was standing at the table. Then he looked up and saw who it was, and did not seem surprised, and turned the laptop round so that it faced the empty chair.

It was the club's own camera, from the top of the stand on the Cerro side, a long way off. The eighty-seventh minute. Albín had stopped it at the moment the ball left Iturbide's foot.

He touched the key. One frame. The ball was a white mark on the green, a little smudged. Another frame. Another. He signed with one hand and kept the other on the key. Look at the ball. Techera looked. In the fourth frame you could see it check on the second bounce. In the sixth it had stopped, and in the seventh his own right foot came down beside it, small, at the bottom of the screen.

Thirty-seventh, Albín signed. Correct. He went on. Techera's run. Correct. The number six, staying where he was. Albín stopped the picture there and held it, and pointed at the boy with the shaved head with the end of a teaspoon.

He watched us, Albín signed. In the first leg. He was in the stand with his phone. I saw him. He put the teaspoon down. Good. That is good. It means the thirty-seventh is a thing that exists now, outside our club. Other people know it. So next year it needs a second form. He signed next year without any change in his face, the hand moving forward from the shoulder as if it were simply the next thing on a list.

Techera signed: I saw your hands.

Albín looked at him for some time. Then he took his hands off the table and put them in his lap, and then, because a man cannot speak with his hands in his lap, he brought them up again.

Yes, he signed. At eighty-seven I started to tell you to stay. I am ashamed of it. I want to say it to you directly and not to the others first. If I had finished it, and you had stayed, we would have gone up today. He stopped, and Techera watched him choose the next signs, slowly, the way he chose everything. And on Tuesday I would have had to stand in front of eleven men and explain to them that the rule is a rule until the minute it matters. Then it is not a rule. Then it is just something I say when we are winning.

Behind him the men at the counter had sat down again. One of them was laughing and beating the flat of his hand on the bar, and Techera could feel it faintly through the legs of the chair.

Sixty-three times, Techera signed. Nine goals.

Sixty-four, signed Albín. Today counts. Ten times you lost it. He picked up the cortado, found that it was cold, and drank it anyway. Tuesday. Seven o'clock. The first drill is the thirty-seventh. Facundo will play it. You will go.

Techera looked at the clock above the counter. It was ten to two. He would have to run the rest of the way to El Molino, and the mixer would already be loaded, and old Saravia would have started the first batch without him and would not say anything about it, which was worse.

He did not get up. Albín turned the laptop a little further towards him and moved the picture back eight frames, to the moment before Iturbide's foot touched the ball, and pressed the key and let it run. The ball went out, white, spinning, and checked, and waited. At the bottom of the screen, small, in a green shirt, Techera was already going.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Bielsiānō Intentiōnis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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Bielsian Intensity Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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