Seis

SEIS A garage in Monterrey. Four days, taken between shows. ———————————————— The mat is still up the wall. It has been up the wall since before she could reach the top of it — a section of old competition surface, sun-bleached to the colour of weak coffee, bolted vertically because there was never enough floor in here for both the mat and the car and the car had to go somewhere. There are two more sections down flat, seams taped, the tape replaced so many times it has become its own material. The photographs are where they have always been, above the bench. Men in masks. A woman in a mask. Her grandfather in a photograph so old it has gone the colour of tea, in a pose nobody uses anymore. It is thirty-four degrees in here at nine in the morning and Efraín has not turned on the fan, because the fan is for guests. "Otra vez," he says. ———————————————— Marisol takes the wrist. Turns the hips. Threads the leg. She is working on Beto, who is nineteen and enormous and has been coming here since he was twelve and who has been instructed, this morning, to resist honestly and not to be gallant about it. He resists honestly. He is not gallant. Twice already he has nearly pulled his shoulder free and both times she has heard her uncle make a small noise from the bench that is not a word. She threads. Settles. The web goes on. "Uno," Efraín says. "Dos. Tres." Her forearm finds the hip. The knee finds the shoulder line. "Cuatro. Cinco." And there it is — the last arm, out and loose and available, and everything in the hold telling her it is available, and the whole architecture asking for the sixth point the way a sentence asks for its last word. She checks it. It is not even a pause. It is the width of a breath. It is the amount of time it takes a person who has been taught properly to confirm that the thing she is about to do is the correct thing to do. Beto's arm is gone. He rolls, gets a knee down, and is out. Efraín says nothing at all. ———————————————— They do it eleven more times. She gets five, eleven more times. At the eighth she stops mid-thread and sits back on her heels and says a word her tía would have objected to, and Beto has the decency to look at the ceiling. At the eleventh Efraín stands up off the bench, which at seventy-three takes him a moment, and walks over, and crouches down beside the mat with a hand on his own knee for the descent. "Cuenta tú," he says. "Out loud. Your own count this time. I am tired of doing it." She resets. Beto resets. "Uno," she says. "Dos. Tres. Cuatro. Cinco." Silence. "Say it." "There is no six." "There is a six," Efraín says. "There has been a six every single time. I am watching it from a metre away and I am an old man with reading glasses in his hair." He does not raise his voice. He never has. "Say the true thing, Marisol." She lets go of Beto. Sits up. Wipes her forearm across her eyes and it is not entirely sweat and neither of them is going to mention it. "I had it," she says. "At Behind Closed Doors 10. Five anchors, in the middle of that cage, with the lights gone red and no ropes for her to reach and nowhere in that room for her to put a hand. I had the best hold of my life on the champion of that company and I had it a full second before she knew it was happening." "And?" "And I checked." ———————————————— The fan does not come on. Beto, who is nineteen and not stupid, goes to get water for three people and takes a long time about it. "You told me," Marisol says. "The night before. On the telephone, while I was mending the hem. You said do not check the door twice. You said I ask permission." She laughs, once, with nothing in it. "You had said it eleven hours earlier and I still checked, Tío. So it is not that I did not know. Knowing is not the problem. I would like it to be the problem." Efraín takes the glasses down out of his hair. Cleans them on his shirt. Puts them back up into his hair. "May I say a hard thing?" "You have been saying hard things since I was fourteen." "Yes, but I have always thought about it first, and I want the credit." He settles onto the edge of the mat properly, with a grunt. "There is a girl coming for you at this next show. The Brazilian one." "Camila Ferreira." "She says everybody in that company is slow and comfortable. She has said it in public, more than once, and everyone treats it as the noise a young person makes." He looks at her. "I said it first." Marisol does not answer. "I said it to you in this garage in July, on a laptop, and I have thought about it every day since, because I am the one who made you like this." He holds up a hand before she can speak. "No. That is not an apology. I would give you the condition again tomorrow. At fourteen you were a child who wanted to do the impressive thing before you could do the correct thing, and if I had let you, you would have had a beautiful three years and a finished career at twenty-two. The condition was right." "Then what." "The condition was right for a girl of fourteen and I never took it off you." He rubs the back of his neck. "You are thirty-one. You have seventeen years of foundation under you and you are still asking me for permission to stand on it. That is my fault, not yours, and I am fixing it in a garage in August because I did not think to fix it in June." ———————————————— "She is nought and four," Marisol says, after a while. "Sí." "I am one and four." She is looking at the taped seam on the mat. "I want you to hear that properly, Tío, because I have been carrying it around Europe and Japan and now here and I have not said it out loud to anybody. I began at fourteen. Under instruction. I did not rush and I did not take the short way and I built the foundation the way you told me to, and there is a woman in São Paulo who taught herself in a place where nobody was going to teach her anything, whose technical wrestling is rough, who fights out of a muay thai gym and a neighbourhood, and who arrives at this match one win behind me." "One win." "Seventeen years. One win." She finally looks up. "So what was it for?" ———————————————— Efraín does not answer quickly, which is how she knows he is going to answer honestly. "Nothing," he says. "Yet." "That is not comfort." "I did not come out to the garage to comfort you, I came out to the garage because you rang me from an airport at four in the morning." He waves a hand at the mat. "Listen. Cinco anclajes is not five-sixths of a hold. It is not most of a hold. It is not a hold at all — you know this, you have known it since you were twenty-two, you had it drawn onto your arm precisely so you would not be able to forget it." He taps her wrist, twice, on the web. "Even distribution, or it does not hold. There is no partial. The mat does not give partial credit. Your words, on a telephone, in a rented room." "Yes." "So." He shrugs. "Seventeen years that arrive late are not seventeen years. They are a very well-built thing that was not there. That is all your record says. It does not say the foundation was wrong. It says you have never once put your whole weight on it." He gets up, slowly, and puts a hand on the wall to do it. "The Ferreira girl has no foundation and she has nothing to arrive late with. She simply goes. That is why she is nought and four, and that is also why she will be dangerous for a long time after tonight, and I would not say that about most of them." He looks down at her. "She is not your enemy, mija. She is the question, walking into the room in white boots, on the correct night." ———————————————— Beto comes back with the water. They go again. Uno. Dos. Tres. Cuatro. Cinco. And on the fourth attempt after the water — with the nineteen-year-old genuinely fighting her, and her uncle counting from the bench, and the fan still off because the fan is for guests — the last arm is loose and available and she does not look at it. She takes it. "Seis," Efraín says. Beto taps three times, hard, on her forearm. She lets go immediately, because that is also the condition and always was, and she sits back on her heels and breathes and waits for her uncle to say something. He does not say bien. He does not say there, you see. He does not say the thing she is thirty-one years old and still, humiliatingly, waiting to hear. He picks up the water. Drinks. Sets it down. "Otra vez," he says. ———————————————— She flies out on the Thursday. The robe goes in the case first, folded her own way, the mended corner facing up where she can see it. At the door of the garage she stops, the way she always stops, and Efraín is already looking at her from the bench with his glasses in his hair. "Reyes de todo," he says. "Tío." "Six," he says. "The first time you see it. Not the second time. Not after." "Six," she says. And then she goes to the airport, and she does not call him the night before, and he does not expect her to.