La Noche Antes

LA NOCHE ANTES The night before. A few hours of it. ———————————————— The right knee is talking to me again. It does this. It has been doing this for about a year. Not constantly — some weeks I forget about it entirely. Tonight it is not letting me forget. The hotel mattress is firmer than the one at home and the angle is wrong for the way I sleep, which is on my left side with the right leg drawn up. I cannot get comfortable. The knee is talking. I am listening. What it is saying is what it has been saying for a year. Not loudly. Just persistently. We are not in our twenties anymore. We have done what you asked us to do, for as long as you asked us to do it, and we are going to continue to do it for as long as we can. But we are telling you what is coming. We are telling you so that when it arrives, you cannot say nobody warned you. I always answer it the same way. I hear you. I am not asking for forever. I am asking for tomorrow. The knee accepts this. It always has. It has been a fair partner. I do not resent it. ———————————————— Sofía is asleep at home with the girls. I called her at nine. She did the thing she does where she does not ask me how I feel about tomorrow because she knows I will tell her if I need to. She told me about Camila losing her second tooth. She told me Ana has decided she wants to be a marine biologist this week. Last week it was a veterinarian. The week before that it was, I believe, a princess who does taxes. The list rotates. Sofía files all of it for me because she knows that when I am away I want to hear the small things, not the large ones. She did say one thing. Near the end of the call. She said: Tomi, sea cual sea el resultado mañana, ven a casa. Whatever the result is tomorrow, come home. I told her of course. Of course I will come home. She did not need to ask. But she asked anyway, and now I am sitting here at — I do not want to look at the clock — at some hour, thinking about why she asked. She asked because the man I am fighting tomorrow is the man I am fighting tomorrow. And she has watched him too. She watches everything. She does not announce it but she watches. ———————————————— Wone. I have prepared for this man. I have watched every match he has fought in this federation. I have watched the matches that are not in this federation, the ones the office's media team has compiled, the ones I have asked for separately. I have studied the way he stands in his corner. I have studied the way he removes the coat. I have studied the small leather book and the way he reads from it before each match and the way he closes it without changing his expression. I have studied him the way my father taught me to study people — not to find what they cannot do, because every fighter at this level can do what they need to do, but to find what they will do, given the choice. Wone, given the choice, will administer damage at the maximum precision the position permits. He does not improvise. He does not perform. He executes from preparation. The preparation is what he is, and the execution is the only thing he allows the audience to see. I respect him. I want to be precise about that. I am not afraid of him in the way the audience expects me to be afraid of him. I do not believe he is going to do to me what he has done to other men. I have watched the way he selects his treatment of opponents and I have, I believe, identified what he sees when he looks at me — a fighter who came to the cage honestly, who carries the work his family handed him, who does not deserve the second column of his attention. He has been, in his own way, courteous to fighters like me. I expect tomorrow to be a fight. I do not expect tomorrow to be punishment. What I expect tomorrow to be is precise. He is going to give me his cleanest version. He is going to expect me to give him mine. The match is going to be decided by which of us can produce a moment the other did not prepare for. I have been preparing for fifteen years. He has been preparing for, I believe, much longer than that, in a way I do not fully understand. I am not going to pretend that I do. I will say this — to nobody, in this room at three in the morning. The man hears something I do not hear. He has said as much. He has not been asked to elaborate and he has not elaborated. I do not know what it is. But I have spent enough time around fighters to know when a man is fighting his own match and when he is fighting a match somebody else is also in. Wone is fighting a match somebody else is also in. I do not know who. I do not know what it asks of him. But I am going to be in the cage with both of them tomorrow, and I have to be honest with myself that the math of that is not what the broadcast graphics will say it is. I have decided to fight the version of him that is in the cage with me. The other one, whatever it is, is between him and itself. I cannot prepare for what I cannot see. ———————————————— The wall. I keep coming back to this. The federation has not built it yet. They will. Every federation that lasts builds one. There will be a list, and the list will start somewhere, and the somewhere will be a name, and the name will be the first name that ever held the championship. I am sitting in a hotel room thirty hours before the match that will decide whose name that is. Mine, or his. If it is his name, the list begins with a man whose origin nobody can verify. The wall will, for the lifetime of this federation, begin in mystery. The first thing every new fighter who walks into the building reads will be a name with no story behind it. That is a kind of beginning. It is not a bad one. It is honest in a way I respect. If it is my name, the list begins with a man whose grandfather wrestled in rooms that were never written down. The wall begins with a name that points backward. Reyes-Montoya. My grandfather is dead. My father is alive. My father will be in his living room tomorrow night, watching the broadcast, in the chair he has been watching from for forty years, and he will see his last name on a championship for the first time in a federation that uses lights and cameras and pay-per-view and his last name will be on something that lasts. That is a different kind of beginning. It is the one I am here for. I am not pretending I do not want it. I have stopped pretending. Sofía does not ask me to pretend. My father has never asked me to pretend. The audience has stopped asking me to pretend somewhere around the third week of this tournament. I want it. I have wanted it since I was nine years old. I am thirty-six. I have wanted it for twenty-seven years and tomorrow I either get it or I do not. ———————————————— The knee is quieter now. I think it is because I have stopped fighting the mattress and started just lying still. There is a lesson in that. I will think about it later. I should sleep. I am not going to. I am going to lie here for another hour, maybe two, and then I am going to get up and stretch and eat the meal Diego prepared for me and call Sofía one more time before she takes the girls to school. I am going to drive to the arena with the radio off. I am going to tape my own wrists in the locker room because I always have. I am going to walk to the cage when they call me, and I am going to touch the top of the door frame the way my grandfather touched the top of the door frame, and I am going to enter the structure that this federation built, and I am going to fight the man in front of me. If I win, I will see my father on the screen on the wall in his living room and he will be crying. He does not cry often. He will be crying. If I lose, I will see my father on the same screen and he will not be crying. He will be nodding. He will say what he has always said, which is bien hecho, hijo. Vuelve a casa. Well done. Come home. Either way I am going home. Sofía already asked. The knee is quiet. I think I might be able to sleep now. — TRM