In a Madrid nightclub the narrator encounters a famous footballer, then, later, his girlfriend. It turns out badly. I like the whole of Marías’s line that weaves in and out between reportage, film reviews, memoir, pondering, making up stories about the past. This one’s about writing about football, which I like. And about the relationship between time and language, football and sex.
Many of his short pieces are factual, about the “real” Marías, it seems. But, as with anything, once it’s written down and given to someone else to read, that becomes its status: a story on the page. Any other attributes: truth, fictionality, genre, person; they’re all only notional now. It’s all stories.
First published in Spanish as ‘En el tiempo indeciso’ in the collection Cuentos de futbol, Alfaguara, 1995. First published in English in When I Was Mortal, Harvill, 1999
A Personal Anthology 