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against ball, and every time it happened, every single time, he said, “Amazing,” a big smile on his face. Amazing. Once, a boy hit the ball with his head, the ball hit the bar, ricocheted off, the boy hit it again with his head, it struck the wood, and he dived forwards and went for the header before it touched the ground, just grazing it and getting it in the net. Then Diesel said, “Really amazing.” Usually, though, all he said was “Amazing.”
    Poomerang watched because he was looking for a move he had seen years before, on TV. In his opinion it was such a good play that it couldn’t have disappeared forever; it must be roaming the soccer fields of the world, and so he was waiting for it to show up there, on that children’s playing field. He had found out the number of soccer fields in the world—one million eight hundred and four—and he was perfectly aware that the chances of seeing the move take place right there were minimal. But Gould had calculated that the chances were not much less than those of being born mute. So Poomerang was waiting. The move was the following: the goalkeeper makes a long throw, the striker, a little beyond midfield, sends the ball on with his head, the opposing goalkeeper comes out of the penalty area and kicks it on the fly, the ball sails back beyond midfield, skipping over the heads of all the players, hits the ground at the edge of the penalty area, and, bouncing over the stunned goalkeeper, goes into the net just grazing the wood. From a strictly soccer point of view, it was lamentable. But Poomerang claimed that in a purely aesthetic sense he had rarely seen anything more harmonious and elegant. “It was as if everything were happening in an aquarium,” he didn’t say, trying to explain. “As if everything were moving through water, slowly, smoothly, the ball swimming through the air, unhurried, and the players turned into fish, scattered and wandering, looking up open-mouthed and all together rolling their heads to the right and to the left, while the ball bounced over the goalkeeper, his gills wide open, and in the end a wily fisherman caught in his net the fish-ball and the eyes of all, a miraculous catch in the absolute, deep-sea silence of an expanse of green algae with white lines made by a mathematician diver.” It was the sixteenth minute of the second half. The match ended two-nothing.
    Every so often Gould went out and sat down at the edge of the field, behind the goal on the right, next to Prof. Taltomar. Minutes passed, and they said nothing. Always with their eyes on the field. Prof. Taltomar was of a certain age, and behind him were thousands of hours of soccer watching. The game mattered relatively little to him. He observed the referees. He studied them. He always had an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth, unlighted, and from time to time he muttered phrases like “too far from the play,” or “play the advantage, asshole.” Often he shook his head. He was the only one who applauded decisions like a sending-off or a retake of a penalty kick. He had some questionable convictions that he had summarized in a single maxim, and for years it had been his comment on any discussion: “Hands in the penalty area is always intentional, offsides are never in doubt, all women are whores.” He claimed that the universe was “a match played without a referee,” but in his way he believed in God: “He is the linesman, and always screws up offsides.” Once, half drunk, he admitted in public that he had been a referee, as a young man. Then he retreated into a mysterious silence.
    Gould attributed to him, not wrongly, an infinite knowledge of the rules and sought in him what he could not find in the illustrious academics who were daily coaching him for the Nobel: the assurance that order was one of the properties of infinity. This was what happened between them:
    Gould arrived, and, without