City Read Online Free PDF Page A

from discovering that the gilded image of a pool table could be converted into a perfect metaphor for failure, a place that demonstrated the human inability to approach exactitude. A single evening at Merry’s could have furnished him with useful hints on the inevitable incursion of chance into any geometric figure. Under the smoky light hanging over the grease-stained green felt he would have seen faces on which was enacted, as if in hieroglyphics, the unmaking of an illusion, an illusion that harmoniously intertwined intention and reality, imagination and deed. It would not have been difficult, that is, to discover an imperfect world where it was extremely unlikely that among the physiognomies of the players you would come upon the solemn and reassuring face of God. But, as stated, you entered Merry’s only if you could produce a driver’s license, and this allowed the rector’s fine metaphor to remain for years illogically intact in Gould’s imagination, like a holy icon that escapes a bombardment. And so he found it untouched inside himself years later, on the day when he suddenly decided to devastate his life. He even had time to look at it again, at that moment, with affectionate and hopeless attention, before giving it the most brutal farewell he could imagine.
    â€œDo you have a job, Shatzy?”
    â€œNo, Gould.”
    â€œWant to be my governess?”
    â€œYes.”

2
    Behind Gould’s house was a soccer field. Children played there, while the grown-ups sat on the sidelines shouting, or in the little wooden bleachers, eating and shouting. There was grass everywhere, even in front of the goals and in the middle of the field. It was a beautiful soccer field. Gould, Diesel, and Poomerang sat for hours at the bedroom window watching. They watched the games, the training sessions, everything there was to watch. Gould took notes. He had a theory. He was convinced that every position corresponded to a precise physical and psychological type. He could recognize a forward even before he had changed and put on the No. 9 jersey. His bravura act was reading team pictures: he’d study them for a while and then he could tell you what position the one with the sideburns played and which was the right wing. He had a margin of error of 28 percent. He was working to get it under 10, and practiced whenever he could on the boys on the ball field behind the house. He was still struggling with the defenders, because although it was relatively easy to identify them, to figure out which one played right and which left was a problem. In general, the right back was physically more compact and psychologically cruder. He had a logical approach to things, and proceeded by deductive reasoning, usually without imaginative variations. He pulled up his socks when they slipped down and seldom spat on the ground. The left back, on the other hand, tended, over time, to take on characteristics of his direct opponent, the notoriously volatile right wing, who had strong anarchic tendencies and obvious mental weaknesses. The right wing transforms his area of the field into a land without laws where the only stable reference is the lateral line, a white chalk stripe that he looks for obsessively, desperately. The left back, who, as a defender, has a psychology founded on order and geometry, is forced to adapt to an ecosystem that is uncomfortable for him, and he is therefore, by vocation, a loser. The need to continually adjust his reactions to unpredictable patterns condemns him to a permanent spiritual and, often, physical instability. This may explain his conspicuous tendency to wear his hair long, to be thrown out for protesting, and to make the sign of the cross at the starting whistle. Given this, to distinguish him from a right back in a photograph is nearly impossible. Sometimes Gould was successful.
    Diesel watched because he liked headers. He felt an extraordinary pleasure when he heard the impact of skull