How could I not love you?

I spent half the season sleeping in an eleven-year-old boy's room and the other half watching Real Madrid games on TV with him. It's worth clarifying a few things. First of all, when I slept in his bed, Ricki was at his mother's house. In fact, the boy doesn't know that, in his absence, we're using the same white SLÄKT trundle bed, 90 x 200 cm, with an AFJÄLL foam mattress.

Ricki is a Real Madrid fan, as only you can be if you're eleven years old and your parents just got divorced. His room was the ultimate expression of that. It wasn't easy to fall asleep in that bedroom with a poster of Bellingham smiling on one wall and another of Vinícius with even more teeth in his smile on the other. It wasn't easy to fall asleep with a Panini album with all the pristine Real Madrid stickers glued in place, opened to those damned pages every time I go to keep my friend company during that complicated time of having an eleven-year-old son with a broken heart because he hoped that with Mbappé they would win everything, and for now, they've lost almost everything. It was hard to overcome insomnia when, on the back of the chair where Ricki should sit more than he does to study, a damned immaculately white shirt with the number 2 and the name Carvajal, for God's sake, Carvajal, glowed in the dark.

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted Barça to win and Real Madrid to lose.

There was a strange atmosphere in that room that I couldn't get used to. It was like being on board the USCSS Nostromo. You know what happened there: there was an Eighth Passenger. It was an alien, and obviously I was there. Teenage rooms like starships that are, at the same time, refuges, mausoleums, and adamantium-lined bunkers. It's not easy to breathe when your oxygen is being taken away by the ghosts of that sadness that still hasn't been fully explained. I identified with them at their age: the world is falling apart, but you have Courtois and Mbappé, a ball, and the most fun game in the world. I'd end up falling asleep, but when I woke up, like the dinosaur, Carvajal's shirt was still there.

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted, without a shadow of a doubt, two things. One is for Barça to win, and the other, for Real Madrid to lose. If fate so decreed, let them fight for all eternity like the duelists in Joseph Conrad's novel, but always with one man winning and the other losing. Given that tribal nature, it's easy to imagine that the other half of the year when I wasn't sleeping on the USCSS Nostromo wasn't easy to manage either. Especially when there was a match between Barça and Real Madrid, which Ricki and I always watched together. His father, my friend, had better things to do and didn't support either team, as if that were even possible for that eleven-year-old boy and me to believe.

Ricki and I were couch potatoes, in all of this season's classics, where the ritual was identical. Ricki would trot down from his room five minutes before kickoff. He was wearing Carvajal's white, and the Germans were in gray, like in Casablanca. We'd stake out our bets in front of the TV. Ricki swore he wasn't hungry, but he always ended up eating all the ham and every slice of pizza. I always believed that this game—yes, that one—would be the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning; it was never entirely clear. They always lost. I believed in a comeback, but we had snatched it away from him. Rodrygo, Modric, VAR. But, blow by blow, that kid was shrinking, and I could feel his warm little body beside me, trying to do what he did in his room when no one was looking: swallow his sadness, not cry, tell himself that, after all, football is a game and a silly thing. I remembered the defeat. I remembered how painful it is to be beaten by those you hate the most. And suddenly, in one of those classics, I felt like losing. At least one game. For Ricki. For that eleven-year-old boy, with his recently divorced parents, with that damn Carvajal jersey stuck to his body like an obsession. He wanted his team to win, to be happy, to get him out of the game. It didn't seem right to happen. After a while, what happened to me disappeared. I hope for good. Ricki is better. He keeps saying that next season they're going to win everything. At his age, I used to say that too.