ELEUTERIO CABRERA’S BEAUTIFUL GAME by Jordan Prosser
Winner of the 2022 Peter Carey Short Story Award
and an excerpt from the forthcoming novel BIG TIME.
Eleuterio Cabrera was in his 70s when he discovered the Anomaly. He wasn’t a scientist. He was a football fan. Born in the Puerto Madero barrio of Buenos Aires to Maria, a seamstress, and Fidelio, a longshoreman, Eleuterio led a nondescript working-class life until a rare autoimmune disorder claimed the lower half of his left leg. At this point, the young Eleuterio stopped participating in the barrio’s lively after-school football matches and became their designated umpire. Unable to play, he learned to analyse, sitting in the shade on the sidelines while his friends and older brothers dribbled circles around each other, hollering gooooooooooaaalllllll, kicking up beautiful shapes in the dust.
Secretly ashamed of his lame son, Fidelio would take Eleuterio to his favourite café on the quiet end of Avenue Azopardo every weekend to watch football on a small black-and-white television mounted in the corner above the bar. It was 1974 when Eleuterio saw his father’s team, the erstwhile blue-and-white Club Atlético Temperley, defeat Estudiantes de La Plata 3–1 and qualify for the Primera División for the first time in 37 years.
Fidelio was ecstatic. He wished his own father could have been there to see it. He plucked Eleuterio clean off his stool and swept him around the café, chanting ‘Panizo! Panizo! Panizo!’ in honour of the striker who had scored Temperley’s decisive third goal in the 81st minute.
That was the last time Fidelio saw Temperley play, and the last time he picked up his son like that. He died a week later in what the port authority described to Maria as a “pinching incident,” meaning Fidelio had been crushed to death between two large shipping containers full of black leather school shoes with tidy silver buckles.
Two years later, a coup d’état deposed the president and installed a military junta. Many young men, including two of Eleuterio’s brothers, disappeared in the months that followed. A distant cousin of Maria’s, who had emigrated years earlier, offered them a way out: a place to live and work in Falkirk, halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Maria packed one bag for herself, one for Eleuterio, and one for his remaining brother, Isidore. They took a plane to Heathrow then a taxi to London then a train to Edinburgh then a bus to Falkirk. Eleuterio attended a Scottish school, worked in a Scottish tailor shop, and saw the Scottish countryside. The first time he and Isidore visited Glasgow, they bought tickets to the Celtic v Rangers Premier League match in September 1978. Watching the game, Eleuterio felt he was home.
***
Life moves quickly – even more so for migrants. Soon Eleuterio was a postgrad engineering student at the University of Glasgow, living in Hillhead, smoking in shared apartments, slipping on ice during short winter days. He got a job with the government, optimising train lines. He fell in love with a woman, Lola, whom he married. Two children followed, Mary (after Maria) and Thomas (like the saint).
Thomas showed no interest in football, but Mary loved going to Celtic Park with her father on weekends. First she sat on his lap, then she grew into the chairs, then before long she was helping Eleuterio up the steps to the members area. Mary was offered a scholarship at Stanford University, specialising in paediatric cardiology. Without his daughter to help him up the steps, Eleuterio stopped going to Celtic Park, favouring a pub at the end of Kelvin Way where he watched the football on a 65-inch LED television mounted in the corner above the bar.
This was how Eleuterio saw Celtic beat Rangers 3–1 on the day of his 73rd birthday. Celtic’s third goal came in the 81st minute. Roderick McAlister, a 27-year-old, bow-legged, left-footed striker received a perfect pass from the right midfielder and curled the ball 15 metres into the top-left corner of the net. As the stadium erupted in green and white streamers, Eleuterio was struck by a sudden, unshakeable sense of déjà vu.
On the subway home, he thought about McAlister, who, like many modern strikers, was renowned for a particular scoring technique; the McAlister Curve, they called his. Eleuterio spent hours at the local library, studying the striker’s career, watching every goal of every game. Nothing quite resembled what he’d seen on his 73rd birthday in the 81st minute.
***
Maria died from pneumonia. Isidore retired to Leeds. Thomas moved to the Western Republic of Australia. Mary stayed in California. When Eleuterio sold the family home in Falkirk, he found a pile of old suitcases in the attic, and in one, a paper coaster from the café on the quiet end of Avenue Azopardo. This was how Eleuterio suddenly remembered Buenos Aires: the taste of sweet cola on hot days, the chanting and flag-waving in the streets. He remembered being lifted up in his father’s arms, spinning so fast he thought his foot might never touch the ground again. And he remembered Temperley v Estudiantes – the third goal in the 81st minute – Panizo, a bow-legged, left-footed striker, accepting a perfect pass from the right midfielder and curling the ball 15 metres into the top-left corner of the net.
Eleuterio spent the next year searching for any record of the 1974 Primera Championships. Elderly fans in online forums still reminisced about the Temperley v Estudiantes game. With his rusty written Spanish, Eleuterio asked one Temperley supporter, a retired 80-year-old bricklayer who still lived in the Virreyes house he was born in, if he remembered Panizo’s decisive goal – but the bricklayer stopped replying to Eleuterio’s messages. He had died, and his children had sold the Virreyes house to buy real estate in China.
With the help of his tech-savvy nephew, Michael, Eleuterio sifted through thousands of hours of grainy, digitised archival footage, but the Temperley v Estudiantes game had apparently never made its way online. Eleuterio told Michael what it had been like during the coup, when smoke filled the barrio and the electricity blinked on and off all day. Many of the television stations had fallen under military control, their executives disappeared and their archives destroyed.
Eleuterio lay awake at night in his Hillhead flat. When he did sleep, he dreamt of men in liquorice-green army fatigues pouring petrol onto piles of celluloid.
In desperation, he wrote directly to Club Atlético Temperley:
Dear Sir / Madam,
My name is Eleuterio Cabrera. I am Argentinian-born, but write to you from Scotland, my home. Temperley has been my no. 1 football team ever since I was a child. I remember a 3–1 victory over Estudiantes in 1974. It was a game that was very special to me, and to my father, who is with God. Does your club keep recordings from this era? I recall it was a beautiful game, and I would very much like to see it again.
Viva Temperley!
Sincerely,
Eleuterio Cabrera
Then he waited. Two Scottish winters came and went. Eleuterio even saw a full day of snow, though the ground was too warm for it to settle. He went to the railway museum and looked at the old engines. He visited Celtic Park but couldn’t quite make it up the steps. Isidore died. Lola died. Michael moved to London. Mary had two of her own children now, quarter-Argentinian, quarter-Scottish, half-Americans with sandy hair and brown eyes who loved to surf. Eleuterio kept a photo of them on his fridge.
Then, one shimmering spring day, he got a letter. It said:
Dear Señor Cabrera,
Thank you for supporting Club Atlético Temperley for so many years.
We have some audio-visual material from the 1970s, though our archives have not been organised for some time. If you ever find yourself again in Buenos Aires, you are welcome to come and look.
Kindly,
Anita Gonzalez, Executive Assistant
And so, on the eve of his 76th birthday, Eleuterio took a train to London then a bus to Heathrow then a plane to Houston then another plane to Buenos Aires, setting foot in Argentina for the first time in six decades.
***
He asked his taxi driver to take him through Puerto Madero. The docks had been moved further up shore, away from the city. The place where his father died in a pinching incident was now a steakhouse. The café on Avenue Azopardo was a massage parlour. Eleuterio asked the driver to take him to Estadio Alfredo Beranger, the home of Club Atlético Temperley.
Anita Gonzalez was a tall woman with thin lips and surprised eyes – surprised, at least, to find the old man who had written her a letter two years ago leaning against the reception desk, asking to see the club archives. She made him tea and helped him to the basement, piled high with cardboard boxes on wobbly steel shelving. Anita explained that Temperley had gone into receivership between 1991 and 1993; what they were looking at now was everything the club hadn’t catalogued from before then: receipts, ribbons, medals, merchandise, and hundreds of thousands of photographs. Eleuterio thanked Anita, blew on his tea, and got to work.
He spent his days in the basement and his nights at a small hotel off the Avenue Hipólito Yrigoyen. He sat up in bed with the window open, listening to the motor scooters and street vendors below. He felt the warm air and missed Glasgow’s chill. He ate parilla and missed neeps and tatties. He looked at his amputated leg on the bed. He had never missed his lower limb at all.
After months of sorting, filing, cross-checking and cataloguing, Eleuterio found an index card in a storage container referencing six reels of film from the 1974 Primera Championships that had been loaned out to the Argentine Football Association. Eleuterio shaved, ironed his shirt, then held Anita’s hand as she helped him up the steps to the AFA headquarters. After twenty minutes of frowning at a computer screen, a tired archivist disappeared into another basement and returned holding a waterproof box. Inside: the only surviving footage of Eleuterio’s game.
They gave the film to a man in an electronics shop who said it would take a couple of weeks to convert to a digital file. Eleuterio checked out of his hotel, took Anita to a lovely steakhouse to thank her for her help, then took a taxi to the airport and a plane to Dallas then another plane to Heathrow then a train to London and a bus back to Glasgow. He walked along the River Clyde and waved at some familiar faces. He wrote Christmas cards to Thomas and Mary but heard nothing back.
When at last the file arrived, Eleuterio watched it through on a laptop in the kitchen of his Hillhead flat, dabbing away small tears the whole time. In the 81st minute, after the stunning left-footed goal, he said to the empty kitchen: ‘Panizo, Panizo, Panizo.’
As night settled, he found a recording of the Celtic v Rangers match from his 73rd birthday and watched it from start to finish. Then he watched Temperley v Estudiantes again. Then he watched Celtic v Rangers. Temperley v Estudiantes. Celtic v Rangers. Focusing on different players each time, Eleuterio chronicled their every move on colour-coded Post-it notes that he arranged side-by-side along the sitting room floor.
As dawn broke and his windows blossomed with moisture, Eleuterio wrote to his tech-savvy nephew, Michael:
If I send you two video files, is there a way you could line them up to play side by side? Or superimpose one atop the other, to be watched simultaneously? Will you indulge an old man who might be losing his mind?
Michael made the comparison video – a video that clearly confirmed what his uncle had discovered. Eleuterio wrote to FIFA and got a response from a robot. He penned very polite letters to the sports editors of the Scottish Daily News and the Buenos Aires Times, but received no reply. So Eleuterio turned to his nephew again:
What if we made the video available on the internet? For more people to be able to see?
It took two days for the comparison video to catch the attention of a small online community of football analysts. From there, it got back to the clubs themselves, and to other industry insiders, bookkeepers, and sports reporters. After one week it was headline news across the globe. After two weeks it was the most-viewed online video of all time.
Plenty of football matches have ended with the scoreline 3–1. Of those matches, plenty still have had those goals scored in the 26th, 31st, 33rd, and 81st minutes. Of those matches, a very small handful have had that 81st-minute goal come off the left foot of a bow-legged striker. The Temperley v Estudiantes and Celtic v Rangers games had all these things in common – but then they also had: substitutions at the 71st, 79th, and 85th minute; yellow cards at minutes 9 and 18; one red card in the second minute of overtime in the first half; a 58.8% to 42.2% possession split; four saves from each team; two and three offsides respectively; nine corners; and twelve headers from players in the exact same positions on the pitch at the exact same time.
The similarities ran deeper than statistics. Take Horacio Agostinelli (Temperley) and Colin McGraw (Celtic), both wing defenders. During their respective matches, the men moved as if mirroring each other through time. 12 touches and 8 assists at precisely the same moments. One yellow card at minute 18. At the 61-minute mark, Agostinelli absent-mindedly ran his left cleat twice through the dirt then picked his nose with the middle finger of his right hand. So did McGraw. They thought no one was watching, and at the time, nobody was. But soon people would be analysing every movement and mannerism, no matter how small, of all 44 men across all four teams across both games, searching for the slightest deviation – and finding none.
The games were carbon copies down to the very last detail. Not merely similar, but perfectly identical. It was the same game, played twice over, 70 years apart.
***
An angry mob who’d lost money on the Celtic v Rangers match burned down a bookies’ in Finnieston. A class-action lawsuit was brought against the clubs by punters claiming the game must have been rigged. For their part, the Scottish Football Association put an immediate hold on all games and launched an official investigation, although what they hoped to find, nobody knew. Perhaps 22 well-paid athletes from two famously adversarial football teams had chosen that particular game to join forces and enact a highly orchestrated, rigorously rehearsed, utterly obscure practical joke that would take one septuagenarian Argentinian migrant four years to figure out? The investigation found no wrongdoing and the season was resumed.
Eight Scottish players checked into rehab facilities. One, Arthur Garrison, a 29-year-old forward, drove his Maserati into a pylon near the Auchenshuggle Bridge. After the funeral, his family discovered a secret stash of journals in which Garrison expressed a newfound belief that his actions were controlled by unseen forces – that his life was not his own – that none of our lives were, or ever had been – and that Eleuterio Cabrera had simply found proof. Garrison’s journals sold at auction for £2 million. His family used the proceeds to create a not-for-profit organisation that helped struggling A-listers adjust to this new paradigm.
Worldwide, professional sports entered an erratic phase that lasted many years. Nobody wanted to be the next Celtic v Rangers, or the next Arthur Garrison. Fearing themselves puppets in an invisible feedback loop, athletes acted out, intentionally defying their instincts and years of training. The final score in one Bundesliga football match between Bayern and Hoffenheim was 138–3. The Super Bowl drew 0-0. Wimbledon matches lasted thirteen days. 84 compound fractures were recorded in a single NBA season. Water polo players drowned by the dozen. Olympic biathletes took potshots at each other. In the semi-finals of the US Open, reigning champ Tobias Marten simply stood at the service line, eyes closed, racket outstretched. After his 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 defeat to Japanese upstart Hideo Nakomori (seeded no. 429 in the world), Marten told reporters: ‘If I were meant to win, I would have won.’
Breakfast news programs and late-night talk shows crowded their couches with football analysts, sports writers, physicists, mathematicians, spiritual mediums and chronophenomenologists. The Pope gave a special interview on USA Today to temper the fears spreading through televangelist channels in the South, where children were disappearing from schools, squirrelled away in bunkers dug by their parents, reciting Hail Marys, eating tinned beef and counting bullets.
A psychic in Chicago had a column go viral, suggesting the Celtic and Rangers players had been possessed by the souls of the Temperley and Estudiantes players so as to relive a match from their glory days – despite the fact that three of the Argentinians were still alive (albeit in their late 90s).
Meanwhile, a loosely-affiliated group of ecologists, etymologists, and marine biologists published an opinion piece in the periodical Science suggesting that the Anomaly, as it had become popularly known, was little more than a testament to human vanity. Who, they asked, was to say that coincidences didn’t occur at this scale quite commonly in the natural world? Who’s to say that the migratory patterns of the elusive beaked whale, or the breeding habits of Amazonian cicadas, or just the general seasonal ebb and flow of life, already rhythmic and highly ordered, didn’t frequently reach this level of exactitude, right under our noses? Perhaps if we paid as much attention to the natural world as we did to professional football, very few things would seem anomalous at all. The physicists said an endless universe meant endless opportunities for coincidence; on a long enough timeline, everything would eventually happen twice. The mathematicians estimated the probability of the Celtic v Rangers match playing out the way it did at roughly 1 in 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which wasn’t very helpful.
The simulation theorists just crossed their arms and smirked.
World leaders discussed the event at what was intended to be a climate summit in New Bangkok. Insurance companies overhauled their liability terms to exclude anything deemed an “EXTREME COINCIDENCE”. Game shows sprung up in which football fans were tasked with re-creating other famous matches from throughout history. Players got book deals. Life rights were bought and TV movies were made. Managers, handlers, and literary agents came pounding at the door of Eleuterio’s Hillhead flat, offering money and representation. He never answered, even as printed cut-outs of his face were held aloft at doomsday rallies and his name was embossed on the covers of peer-reviewed journals – even as the Anomaly, known in scientific circles as the Cabrera Effect, fundamentally altered our relationship to time. It seemed that time could no longer be taken for granted; time was alive.
***
Eleuterio Cabrera died on his 78th birthday. Neither Mary nor Thomas could make it back in time. But Michael, his nephew, caught a train from London and was there during his final hours. He brought him coffee from a machine when the nurses weren’t looking, and opened up the curtains so they could see Glasgow at night. Michael told his uncle there was a candlelight vigil for him at the foot of Big Ben; people mourning before the biggest clock they could find.
In his last moments alive, Eleuterio was thinking of the game – of the café on the quiet end of Avenue Azopardo where he was lifted up in his father’s arms. He wasn’t bothered by the political, philosophical, or ontological repercussions of what he’d discovered; it was a beautiful game, and he’d lived to see it twice.