About the Author:
Eduardo Sacheri was born in 1967 in Buenos Aires. He is a professor of history as well as a writer of fiction. His first collection of short stories was published in Spain in 2000, and three later collections have become best sellers in his native Argentina. The film adaptation of his novel The Secret in Their Eyes won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and the book was published in English the following year by Other Press.
Mara Faye Lethem has translated novels by David Trueba, Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo, Patricio Pron, and Pablo De Santis, among others. Her translations have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010, Granta, Paris Review and McSweeney’s. She is currently translating a novel by Marc Pastor.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
When Mono finished high school he had his future crystal clear. The next year they would offer him a professional contract to play for Vélez. In three or four seasons he would become the best number four in Argentina. At twenty-three—twenty-four, at the most—he would be traded for millions to an Italian team. Then he’d play about twelve seasons in Europe. Finally, he’d return to his country to finish his career with Independiente and retire on a high note. But the verbs Mono was conjugating in a self-assured conditional tense didn’t stop there.
Once he retired, and in order to continue his association with the world of soccer, he would become a coach. He’d start running a minor-league club and after a few seasons of experience he’d make the t some point, before or after, as a player or as a coach—or better yet, before and after, as a player and as a coach—he would take Argentina to another world title, after defeating England or Germany in the semifinals and Brazil in the final game.
He had dreamed of it so many times, and he had talked about it so many times—because Mono was convinced that you shouldn’t keep your great joys quiet, not the ones in the past tense and not the impending ones—that his friends could repeat his future biography to the smallest detail. Fernando and Mauricio both saw it as a waste of their time, but Ruso would get really excited about it, taking on the roles of agent, masseur, assistant coach, or image consultant, de-pending on his mood.
Sadly for both of them, when Mono turned twenty he was called in to see the secretary of Vélez Sarsfield, and they notified him of the only verb in conditional tense he wasn’t prepared for: he would be released, because the club had decided they had no need for his services.
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