Estoy contento de haber podido fichar a alguien como Guardiola. Guardiola intenta enfriar el entusiasmo creciente: Hemos de ir paso a paso. Es un gran honor ser su sucesor. Yo estoy a punto, estoy listo. Como entrenador del Bayern siempre tienes que jugar bien y ganar. Pep regresa a lo que necesitaba: Hoeness y Rummenigge decidieron adquirir lo que les faltaba. Su objetivo era que, transcurrido un tiempo, la marca Bayern ya no se relacionara solo con el esfuerzo, el coraje, la potencia y, por supuesto, la victoria.
Los ojos de Pep parecen transmitir la paradoja que vive el Bayern: He elegido el Bayern. Breve en las llegadas y largo en los adioses, piensa. Durante dicho tiempo, Pep ha recibido varias ofertas: El equipo iba por un camino y el club, por otro. Y el equipo lo ganaba todo. En el inicio de , algunos ojos estaban apagados. Por eso me fui. Liga, Copa y Champions. Los directivos del Bayern opinaban igual. Encantado con el ambiente de aquel partido ganaron , Pep le dijo a su amigo: Esta vez, por el Bayern.
Se vieron con el representante de Pep y pusieron las cartas boca arriba: Olfatea el ambiente, intuye lo que puede suceder, se anticipa a la siguiente jugada y brinda al equipo sus experiencias, como el centrocampista que da pases de gol al delantero. Y, por encima de todo, protege y ayuda a Pep en todo lo posible.
Por todo ello es una persona muy importante para el entrenador. Manel siempre ha sido eso: Y eso Manel lo tiene. Cuando habla de Estiarte, habla de un espejo: Por todo eso le necesito a mi lado. Bueno, aparte de eso somos amigos, claro. El City de Txiki Begiristain es insistente.
Abramovich ha desplegado todos sus encantos: Los alemanes son muy serios: El Bayern ha decidido no tener deudas bancarias. El Bayern no tiene la delicadeza de avisar previamente a Heynckes, que se siente molesto con sus amigos Hoeness y Rummenigge. Con el entrenador Pal Csernai, Kalle [Rummenigge] y yo empezamos a jugar del modo en que el Bayern ha jugado hasta Este sistema ya ha caducado.
Con Louis van Gaal. Pero las posiciones eran fijas. Pep Guardiola es el elegido para liderar la tercera fase: Ha de ser un compromiso entre ambas partes del que puede salir un buen resultado, ya que en esta plantilla hay mucha calidad. Una de las habilidades del Bayern consiste en buscar siempre caminos para progresar y hacerlo mejor. Lo hizo con Heynckes y lo hace con Pep.
Es decir, quedan tareas por hacer. Pep lo puede conseguir. Pep ha tenido mucho tiempo para analizar al Bayern y creo que tiene una idea para no copiar exactamente el juego del Barcelona, sino para mejorar el Bayern cambiando unas pocas cosas. Es un gran aliciente. Entonces, los dirigentes del Bayern empezaron a pensar en Pep. Ahora, sus herederos se unen para conseguir el mismo objetivo: Sobre el tablero de ajedrez, Guardiola juega con las piezas rojas. Buenaventura es madrugador por naturaleza. Han necesitado pocas conversaciones para completar el plan de trabajo de las primeras siete semanas.
El club ha organizado una docena de partidos antes del inicio de la Bundesliga, programado para el viernes 9 de agosto. La serie de partidos incluye una ronda de Copa y, sobre todo, la Supercopa alemana, en Dortmund, nada menos, frente al Borussia. El objetivo era simple: Con el Barcelona, Buenaventura nunca tuvo semejante posibilidad.
En el Bayern, sumando entrenamientos y partidos, los jugadores realizan unas 60 sesiones de trabajo en solo siete semanas. Es decir, se entrena como se juega. No hay carrera continua, ni series de 1. Se acercan al estadio 7. El viaje se hace largo. Por unas razones u otras faltan bastantes hombres clave: Un minuto antes de las cinco de la tarde salta al campo seguido de una veintena de jugadores, muchos de ellos del equipo filial.
El ejercicio es mucho menos fluido que cuando lo hace el Barcelona, cuyos jugadores empiezan a practicarlo siendo benjamines. Los campeones de Europa parecen algo torpes en estos rondos y Guardiola se rasca la cabeza. Pep y Buenaventura cortan a menudo para corregirles: Guardiola se rasca la cabeza preocupado. Buenaventura explica este primer ejercicio: Guardiola se rasca la cabeza de nuevo. Es la primera pista de lo que Pep quiere que sea el Bayern: Dos jugadores reciben instrucciones.
Kroos parece entenderlo sin dificultades y lo aplica en los siguientes ejercicios. El entrenamiento ha concluido: A Pep le quedan dos jugadores con los que hablar a solas. En Weiden se celebra el primer partido de Guardiola como entrenador del Bayern. Cada temporada, el Bayern se enfrenta a una de las 3. El doble pivote de Heynckes fue formidable y una de las razones por las que triunfaron en la temporada del triplete. Debo hablarles un momento de nomenclaturas.
Parece muy diferente, pero es exactamente lo mismo: Ninguno de estos esquemas puede resumir la complejidad del juego de un equipo. Weiden es una fiesta pese al del marcador final. El joven austriaco Oliver Markoutz consigue el primer gol de la era Guardiola a los 10 minutos de partido. Kroos aporta fluidez y continuidad al juego y lo hace tanto desde la izquierda, su costado natural, como desde la derecha. No solo es buen jugador, sino que es muy listo. Los defensas centrales del Real Madrid, Metzelder y Cannavaro, no supieron contrarrestar el cambio.
Fabio [Cannavaro] y yo nos dijimos: Era un viernes festivo, 1 de mayo de Fue un momento clave. Fue un secreto entre ambos. Simplemente, aplaza movimientos en busca del momento adecuado. Esta vez, en Regen. Al llegar al vestuario hay una mesa con bollos, pasteles y refrescos. Varios jugadores eligen tarta de chocolate. En realidad, obedece a una costumbre del propio Bayern. El partido se ha organizado para celebrar el En Regen decide probar dicho esquema durante el primer tiempo. Lo que Pep pretende es lo opuesto: Y, si es posible, tres. Busca jugadores que puedan ser mediocentro, defensa central o centrocampista interior, como Sergio Busquets.
O que sean defensa central, lateral en cualquiera de las dos bandas y mediocentro, como Javier Mascherano. Guardiola sabe perfectamente que dispone de jugadores con esta capacidad: Y el momento para saberlo es ahora, en la pretemporada, cuando no hay obligaciones competitivas. El Bayern vence con comodidad el segundo partido amistoso Se acabaron los pasteles.
Turistas de media Europa se agolpan en aeropuertos y carreteras y, para colmo, me equivoco de ruta: Llegar hasta el Trentino se hace largo. Doy fe de ello: Guardiola y sus hombres convocan multitudes. Tiene que ser en el Trentino, donde dispone de calma y tiempo. La llegada a Arco, centro de entrenamiento del Bayern, conlleva dos sorpresas: Al cabo de un tiempo vuelve a hacerlo.
Dicho de otra forma: No trabaja para el partido inmediato, sino para un momento dado de la temporada. A cambio, solo pide una cosa: Es un acuerdo totalmente aceptable y se lo agradezco. Que baje hasta el centro del campo y basta. Es como con los rondos: Pausa en el centro del campo. Avanzar pasito a paso, sin prisa al principio, para que ninguno de los nuestros se quede descolgado. Kroos posee esta capacidad de pausa.
Se lo tengo que preguntar varias veces: Se deshacen en elogios. El Bayern trata con mimo a Guardiola y su gente. Todos los empleados colaboran para que lleve adelante sus planes. Su profesora, hincha del Borussia Dortmund, se ha quedado en Nueva York. La tarde es calurosa y se agradece. Stefano es un hombre cultivado que nos explica algo asombroso: Arco y Riva del Garda poseen un ecosistema peculiar, dotado de un microclima que provoca semejante prodigio de la naturaleza.
En este primer domingo de julio, dos vigilantes guardan la valla de acero que blinda el establecimiento junto al lago, al que se llega tras un largo camino arbolado. Pero son reproches que lanza a media voz, sin creer demasiado en ellos. Si acaso, le estoy diciendo que hay que ir piano piano para no dar a los jugadores demasiados conceptos de golpe. La idea es la esencia de un equipo y de su entrenador.
Esto no existe en el Bayern. Antes marcaban al hombre y nosotros les hacemos marcar en zona, por ejemplo. Sorprende el modo en que los jugadores se dirigen a Guardiola. Schweinsteiger le interrumpe un rato para sentarse a su mesa y despedirse. A Pep le preocupa este hecho porque Basti es pieza clave en su modelo de juego. Hablamos con el propio Robben y sus palabras no admiten dudas: Y los jugadores de Pep demuestran tenerla.
Y a la vez, un revolucionario. Y aplicar cosas nuevas y arriesgadas. Para Buenaventura, este es un aspecto fundamental: Hoy solo lo apunta: Momento 10 Hasta que nos cansamos Arco, 7 de julio de Han entrenado como bestias. Pep Guardiola se acerca hasta el banquillo y grita: Abre y agita los brazos en uno de esos movimientos que tantas veces le hemos visto hacer durante un partido, y repite: La intensidad es formidable.
Guardiola grita y corre sin parar. Por lo general, evoluciona de manera algo distinta a lo planificado. Pep sigue dedicando muchos minutos a charlas individuales: Pep se muestra nuevamente satisfecho con este esfuerzo: Cuando el defensa central salta a presionar al delantero contrario, el mediocentro ocupa su lugar. El Bayern trabaja una y otra vez estos movimientos.
Y lo tiene sin haberlo trabajado de antemano. Un equipo es algo vivo: Un equipo nunca es una foto fija. Guardiola se acerca al banquillo visiblemente satisfecho por el trabajo realizado, y repite: Yo, porque quiero ganar con otros jugadores. A sus lados, dos centrocampistas interiores con mucha capacidad creativa: El 8 de julio de , Guardiola opina que el Bayern debe marcar las diferencias por las bandas. Conseguir la superioridad en la zona central era el sello y la identidad de Pep. Generar superioridad en el centro del campo, pero desequilibrar por fuera.
En el Bayern, Guardiola lo imagina parcialmente distinto: Por tanto, hemos de ir por fuera. Ser superiores por dentro, pero abrir en diagonal hacia fuera. Estas son sus ideas en el mes de julio. Porque tiene ingredientes diferentes. Este es el plus que tiene Pep. Es otra manera de preparar los partidos: Lo hace tras el desayuno, con un discurso breve, pero elegante. Hace un mes que Matthias Sammer, el director deportivo, le ha comunicado que el Bayern deseaba traspasarlo.
Y hace las maletas. Su acuerdo con el Bayern esta totalmente cerrado y solo falta que Rummenigge llame a Sandro Rosell. Thiago lleva tres semanas de vacaciones y apenas empieza a entrenarse por su cuenta. Todas las que puedan imaginar. Cruyff, por supuesto, la primera. La creatividad de Guardiola es de este tipo. Y Laudrup fue un falso 9 portentoso. Ya conocemos los resultados. Desestructurar un movimiento, desmontar las piezas y fabricar con ellas otro movimiento parecido, pero que obtenga otro rendimiento. Significaba eliminar las deficiencias de un movimiento y reconstruirlo a partir de otros principios, pero manteniendo su fundamento: Es un tipo brutal, que se ha germanizado, con todo lo que esto significa de bueno.
El entrenamiento matinal es de una intensidad formidable. De hecho, como todos los entrenamientos de la temporada. Se habla mucho de sus ojos de poeta, pero en realidad lo que se oculta tras ellos es un feroz buscador de victorias. Por encima de todo, quiere ganar.
Guardiola es un competidor apasionado: Guardiola ha descompuesto todas las posibles acciones del contrario y para cada una de ellas ha buscado soluciones. Sus jugadores se han entregado tan a fondo que Estiarte se muestra exultante: Guardiola, como siempre, es precavido: Solo les falta la pausa. Incluso ahora, en el Bayern, reflexiona sobre este asunto: Es la parte negativa de manejar una plantilla corta. Alguien recuerda que no hace muchos meses, en la primavera de , se pelearon a golpes en el vestuario del Allianz Arena durante un Bayern-Real Madrid de Champions.
El entrenamiento matinal, unido a las numerosas sesiones previas, impide que el juego sea fluido. Solo contiene dos puntos: Revisarlos, ver detalles y pensar posibles movimientos nuevos o repasar errores. Es un proceso creativo similar al que realiza cuando analiza a un rival. A menos que llegara Thiago. De todos modos, dudaba de que fuera razonable someterle a semejante prueba: Toni era la primera de esas alternativas, siempre que estuviera bien rodeado: No la han cumplido.
Yo hice mi etapa y me fui. Por lo tanto, me fui a 6. Probablemente, fue desacertado el modo y el lugar elegidos para estallar porque los periodistas alemanes no comprendieron los detalles. Thiago llegaba dispuesto a todo: Pep empezaba a mostrar sus intenciones para la final de Dortmund: Con Thiago de mediocentro, fueron Lahm y Kroos quienes ocuparon las otras dos plazas de centrocampistas.
Para el Barcelona tampoco era un enfrentamiento atractivo. Llega a su primer partido oficial con demasiadas bajas. A partir de esas ideas propias, instruye a sus ayudantes para que busquen variantes con el empleo de potentes ordenadores. De hecho, Pep siempre duda. Le da mil vueltas a todo: En la duda, opta por su credo: Quita a Philipp Lahm del centro del campo y lo devuelve al lateral derecho. La Supercopa alemana es para el Borussia sin paliativos Hermosa manera de iniciar un trayecto. Me refiero al juego de estrategia y no a asuntos colaterales.
El once de Dortmund, formado en su tradicional , es el siguiente: Medio equipo es baja. Su equipo se ha situado sobre el campo en del siguiente modo: El dato es suficiente para comprobar que, en casa, el Borussia es una roca, y no digamos si a los cinco minutos recibe un regalo del visitante.
Klopp usa la primera de ellas, en el minuto 24, con el marcador a favor. Mientras los protagonistas beben y se refrescan, el entrenador del Dortmund convoca a sus defensas para darles instrucciones. A pocos metros, Guardiola habla con sus delanteros: No le dura el cuero en los pies porque domina bien los espacios en los que puede correr. No le disgusta verse sometido. Tras el intermedio, el entrenador del Bayern mueve las piezas de su ataque: Solo con eso, en principio poca cosa, cambia todo. Dos jugadores visitantes dan un paso hacia delante: La cabeza de Robben empata el partido y, con ello, el Bayern parece llegar a la cumbre.
Pese a todo, el Bayern va a por el empate y logra que sucedan tres cosas: Thiago simboliza este doble efecto: Los que entrega en ataque se transforman en un gol y un larguero; el que pierde en defensa significa el cuarto gol en contra. Klopp y Pep aparecen juntos. Divaga en algunos momentos. No ha estado especialmente fino durante los noventa minutos. Durante la rueda de prensa conjunta, Guardiola parece estar pensando en este detalle. Solo es la segunda final que pierde como entrenador.
La primera fue en , la Copa del Rey ante el Real Madrid, sin embargo, se ha mostrado espeso y pesado, como el clima bochornoso de Dortmund. Pero acepta deportivamente la derrota ante Klopp, a quien felicita con rotundidad: Los tres hijos visten camiseta blanca con rayas rojas. Abriendo paso en el momento de la derrota.
El camino vuelve a empezar, empinado, siempre cuesta arriba. Es el primer interrogante que se plantea Guardiola. Thiago no se entrena. Los planes inmediatos ya son firmes: El segundo objetivo es que el equipo aprenda el tipo de juego que quiere Pep, que progrese y avance; que a final de temporada el equipo juegue mucho mejor que ahora.
Tantos tontos tópicos by Aurelio Arteta
Empieza con un gesto: Peto amarillo para los cuatro. Durante cuarenta minutos, Pep se dedica exclusivamente a explicarles los movimientos de cobertura. Javi sufre y Dante goza. Es un barullo mental para el jugador navarro, que nuevamente empieza desde cero. Es una tarde de perros llena de correcciones. Transcurren casi tres cuartos de hora bajo la tormenta de rayos y truenos en la sede muniquesa.
El trabajo sigue implacable. Sin embargo, tiene poco de ballet. Pero solo es un efecto placebo. El entrenador, en realidad, bromea sobre algo serio: Al lado de Pep, Lorenzo Buenaventura lo explica: Se mete en el vestuario y sigue bromeando con ellos. Partido en campo muy reducido: El partido, de 45 minutos largos, es otro suplicio para Javi.
En ese caso, a los cuatro minutos Hermann Gerland toca el silbato para hacer una pausa. No hay tregua para Javi. Incluso Dante se anima a gritarle para ayudarle. Los siete atacan con todo y los cinco se defienden a morir. El reset mental ha sido absoluto: Y Guardiola le cuenta al detalle los movimientos que generaban ventajas: Tres chavalines rubios corren y saltan sobre el campo de entrenamiento: Patea balones que le sirve desde la esquina un lanzador peculiar: Es la distancia promedio a la que se situaban los cuatro defensores, que habitualmente fueron Lahm, Boateng, Dante y Alaba.
El dato no es ninguna casualidad, sino fruto de la propuesta que Guardiola trabaja sin descanso: Han de evitar que se pueda entrar en ellos con facilidad. Mientras, el mediocentro ha de bajar a cubrir el puesto del segundo central. Los hijos de Robben se han ido camino de la cena, y el resto de jugadores se prepara para marcharse. Se aprende mirando y pensando. Siempre me ha interesado mucho la defensa porque exige practicar y desarrollar mucho trabajo. La ciudad deportiva del Bayern se llena pronto de futbolistas.
Pellegrini corrige a sus jugadores. Boateng es totalmente autodidacta. Lorenzo Buenaventura nos explica las razones de este tipo de progresiones: Recuerdo los primeros entrenamientos de David Villa. Thomas no es capaz de alcanzar el nivel que Pep le pide en el centro del campo: Por lo que dice y por lo que demuestra durante el ejercicio, el suyo acostumbra a ser el que mejor funciona. El entrenamiento matinal se limita a hacer rondos. Guardiola se rasca la cabeza: Un equipo con personalidad poco equilibrada. Hay tres factores para ello: Esa primera media hora es un festival de juego y de ocasiones: Por lo general, Pep es muy intervencionista desde el banquillo.
Cuando se pone a hablar de este juego es capaz de perder el sentido del tiempo y que transcurran las horas sin darse cuenta. Esto puede suceder en cualquier momento. El asunto sobre el que debatir puede ser tan prosaico como el movimiento de un defensa lateral cuando se acerca el extremo del equipo contrario. Ocurre a diario en los entrenamientos. Pero en esa primera media hora de partido contra el City, Pep permanece silencioso y quieto.
Es la primera vez en que Pep muestra que no le molesta en absoluto jugar con otro registro diferente al suyo habitual. Se muestra satisfecho al acabar el encuentro: Estoy sorprendido con el equipo: Al ser un amistoso Pep ha hecho siete cambios: Pep estrena despacho en el Allianz Arena. Un sencillo banco de madera les permite sentarse. La foto de cada jugador corona su taquilla. En el otro, las camillas de los fisioterapeutas. Siempre ha querido estar fuera porque considera que es un espacio reservado a los futbolistas. Le gusta estar tranquilo antes de los partidos, lejos del bullicio del vestuario.
Prefiere mantenerse alejado y concentrado mientras los fisios vendan tobillos y Lorenzo Buenaventura dirige el calentamiento, que siempre es breve e intenso. Empieza su primera Bundesliga.
This Side of Paradise (Webster's Spanish Thesaurus Edition)
Para el estreno, Guardiola viste un impecable traje gris. El inicio no admite dudas y en apenas 15 minutos el Bayern ya vence por Llega tras una falta sacada por Robben desde el costado, defendida por ocho jugadores del Gladbach y atacada por solo tres del Bayern. Simboliza otra de las ideas de Guardiola: Con su equipo a pleno rendimiento, Guardiola recibe una sorpresa: Es decir, hace justamente lo opuesto a lo que Guardiola les pide desde hace siete semanas: Uno de sus mejores defensas, el joven Alaba, parece haber olvidado todo lo aprendido.
El propio Alaba completa el marcador al transformar un penalti. Para entonces, el partido se ha convertido en un correcalles, con ambos equipos corriendo arriba y abajo. Pep se rasca la cabeza sin parar porque esto no le gusta nada. El Bayern ha de lanzar dos penaltis para conseguir el gol que cierra el partido Esta vez Guardiola prueba a Shaqiri en el centro del campo, junto a Schweinsteiger y Kroos, pero tampoco logra el control permanente del juego.
El Bayern mantiene la capacidad de aplastar al rival: A veces, con Schweinsteiger entre los cuatro: Para Pep, esto es un precepto. De hecho, lo quiere todo. Guardiola se rasca la cabeza sin parar. Estamos cenando y han llegado las primeras visitas: Ha sido un partido raro, de sensaciones ambivalentes. Acaba de telefonear para pedir que le esperemos para cenar, pero a los 10 minutos vuelve a llamar para advertir de que no puede, que le duele demasiado el pie como para salir a la calle y se queda en el hotel. El Bayern ha jugado un primer tiempo horrible, atenazado.
Y de inmediato el entrenador dispara una de sus grandes explicaciones: Hay que esperar, ha dicho el padre, porque llegan los primeros amigos de Barcelona. Pep solo ha pedido a sus jugadores que sean ellos mismos, sin timidez. Toma del brazo al amigo americano y le dice: Afterward he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke: Under the full light of a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a widening circle of blood.
Amory thought of the back of that head that hair— that hair The car turned over. Sloane, with his shoulder punctured, was on another lounge. He was half delirious, and kept calling something about a chemistry lecture at 8: The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where some one handed him a sheet to put over the body. With a sudden hardness, he raised one of the hands and let it fall back inertly. The brow was cold but the face not Spanish calling: He looked at the shoe-laces—Dick had tied them that morning. He had tied them, and now he was this heavy white mass.
All that remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had known oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and squalid so useless, futile Amory was reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of his childhood.
Next day, by a merciful chance, passed in a whirl. When Amory was by himself his thoughts zigzagged inevitably to the picture of that red mouth yawning incongruously in the white face, but with a determined effort he piled present excitement upon the memory of it and shut it coldly away from his mind. Isabelle and her mother drove into town at four, and they rode up smiling Prospect Avenue, through the gay crowd, to have tea at Cottage. The clubs had their annual dinners that night, so at seven he loaned her to a freshman and arranged to meet her in the gymnasium at eleven, when the upper classmen were admitted to the freshman dance.
She was all he had expected, and he was happy and eager to make that night the centre of every dream. At nine the upper classes stood in front of the clubs as the freshman torchlight parade rioted past, and Amory wondered if the dress-suited groups against the dark, stately backgrounds and under the flare of the torches made the night as brilliant to the staring, cheering freshmen as it had been to him the year before.
The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of six in a private dining-room at the club, while Isabelle and Amory looked at each other Spanish alley: Scott Fitzgerald 89 tenderly over the fried chicken and knew that their love was to be eternal. They danced away the prom until five, and the stags cut in on Isabelle with joyous abandon, which grew more and more enthusiastic as the hour grew late, and their wines, stored in overcoat pockets in the coat room, made old weariness wait until another day.
The stag line is a most homogeneous mass of men. It fairly sways with a single soul. A dark-haired beauty dances by and there is a half-gasping sound as the ripple surges forward and some one sleeker than the rest darts out and cuts in. Then when the six-foot girl brought by Kaye in your class, and to whom he has been trying to introduce you all evening gallops by, the line surges back and the groups face about and become intent on far corners of the hall, for Kaye, anxious and perspiring, appears elbowing through the crowd in search of familiar faces.
For a delicious hour that passed too soon they glided the silent roads about Princeton and talked from the surface of their hearts in shy excitement. Amory felt strangely ingenuous and made no attempt to kiss her. He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears, and she slipped her hand into his under cover of darkness to be pressed softly. As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. He had arrived, abreast of the best in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was returned.
Turning on all the lights, he looked at himself in the mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities that made him see clearer than the great crowd of people, that made him decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will. There was little in his life now that he would have changed Oxford might have been a bigger field. How conveniently well he looked, and how well a dinner coat became him. He stepped into the hall and then waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps coming. It was Isabelle, and from the top of her shining hair to her little golden slippers she had never seemed so beautiful.
As in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that half-minute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point of vanity, the crest of his young egotism. Amory stood there, covered with remorseful confusion. He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could leave in the morning and not care.
It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror. Perhaps she suspected this. At any rate, Amory watched the night that should have been the consummation of romance glide by with great moths overhead and the heavy fragrance of roadside gardens, but without those broken words, those little sighs He had told her a lot of things. You just sat and watched my eyes. He rose abstractedly and they walked to the foot of the stairs. Scott Fitzgerald 95 They were at the head of the stairs, and as Amory turned into his room he thought he caught just the faintest cloud of discontent in her face.
He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much he cared—how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanity whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for romance. The early wind stirred the chintz curtains at the windows and he was idly puzzled not to be in his room at Princeton with his school football picture over the bureau and the Triangle Club on the wall opposite.
He was out of bed, dressing, like the wind; he must get out of the house before he saw Isabelle. What had seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. He was dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an ironic mockery the morning seemed!
There was a knock at the door. He took a sombre satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had been nothing except what he had read Spanish anticlimax: Yet that was what she had objected to in him; and Amory was suddenly tired of thinking, thinking! It seemed a stupid way to commence his upper-class years, to spend four hours a morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring school, imbibing the infinite boredom of conic sections. Rooney, pander to the dull, conducted the class and smoked innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked equations from six in the morning until midnight.
Scott Fitzgerald 97 The room was a study in stupidity—two huge stands for paper, Mr. Rooney in his shirt-sleeves in front of them, and slouched around on chairs, a dozen men: McDowell that Amory very nearly pushed him out of the open window when he said this Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that filled the room would come the inevitable helpless cry: He found it impossible to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing defiantly through Mr.
Somehow, with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the Princetonian board and the slaughter of his chances for the Senior Council. There was always his luck. He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered from the room. Your stock will go down like an elevator at the club and on the campus.
Why rub it in? Amory returned the gaze pointedly. He was, of course, immediately sorry for what he had lost. His philosophy of success had tumbled down upon him, and he looked for the reasons. My own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck broke. Get a better one quick, or just bum around for two more years as a has-been? If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated, the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his earliest years: Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis. That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity.
The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly, half-accidentally chucked the whole thing and become again: The incongruity of death with either the beauties of Lake Geneva or with his Spanish appeared: He decided that burial was after all preferable to cremation, and he smiled at his old boyhood choice, slow oxidation in the top of a tree.
The day after the ceremony he was amusing himself in the great library by sinking back on a couch in graceful mortuary attitudes, trying to determine whether he would, when his day came, be found with his arms crossed piously over his chest Monsignor Darcy had once advocated this posture as being the most distinguished , or with his hands clasped behind his head, a more pagan and Byronic attitude.
Barton, of Barton and Krogman, their lawyers, and himself, that took place several days after the funeral. The total expenditure that year had come to something over one hundred and ten thousand dollars. The rest was fully taken care of, and there were invariably items which failed to balance on the right side of the ledger. In the volume for Amory was shocked to discover the decrease in the number of bond holdings and the great drop in the income.
Very little of the oil had been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed. The next year and the next and the next showed similar decreases, and Beatrice Spanish advocated: About the exact state of things Mr. Barton was quite vague and confused. There had been recent investments, the outcome of which was for the present problematical, and he had an idea there were further speculations and exchanges concerning which he had not been consulted. In fact, Beatrice wrote that she was putting the money into railroad and street-car bonds as fast as she could conveniently transfer it.
This Ford person has certainly made the most of that idea. So I am instructing Mr. Barton to specialize on such things as Northern Pacific and these Rapid Transit Companies, as they call the street-cars. I shall never forgive myself for not buying Bethlehem Steel. You must go into finance, Amory. You start as a messenger or a teller, I believe, and from that you go up almost indefinitely. Before I get any farther I want to discuss something. Bispam, an over cordial little lady whom I met at a tea the other day, told me that her son, he is at Yale, wrote her that all the boys there wore their summer underwear all during the winter, and also went about with their heads wet and in low shoes on the coldest days.
It not only inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile paralysis, but to all forms of lung trouble, to which you are particularly inclined. You cannot Spanish bonds: Scott Fitzgerald experiment with your health. I have found that out. I will not make myself ridiculous as some mothers no doubt do, by insisting that you wear overshoes, though I remember one Christmas you wore them around constantly without a single buckle latched, making such a curious swishing sound, and you refused to buckle them because it was not the thing to do.
The very next Christmas you would not wear even rubbers, though I begged you. I warned you in my last that the lack of money to do the things one wants to makes one quite prosy and domestic, but there is still plenty for everything if we are not too extravagant. Monsignor was growing a trifle stouter and his personality had expanded even with that, and Amory felt both rest and security in sinking into a squat, cushioned chair and joining him in the middle-aged sanity of a cigar. I want to hear the whole thing. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate. Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and join the Lafayette Esquadrille.
If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any Spanish accomplish: I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall. It never seems the sort of thing I should do. You brushed three or four ornaments down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them.
The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next thing! It was a pose, I guess. I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive without struggle.
Some nuances of character you will have to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present. Do write me soon. Henry, John Fox, Jr. The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that year than had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years before.
Things had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie. At least so Tom and Amory took him. So they surrendered Tanaduke to the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better there. Scott Fitzgerald Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed easy epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups of admirers every night.
Well, here we are, your hundred sheep, Tune up, play on, pour forth Still, still I meet you here and there A radical comes down and shocks The atheistic orthodox? And, sometimes, even chapel lures That conscious tolerance of yours, That broad and beaming view of truth Including Kant and General Booth And so from shock to shock you live, A hollow, pale affirmative Scott Fitzgerald That down the noisy aisle-ways beat Forget on narrow-minded earth The Mighty Yawn that gave you birth. The evening was so very young that they felt ridiculous with surplus energy, and burst into the cafi like Dionysian revellers.
Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and watched. If you ask me, I want a double Daiquiri. They were mostly from the colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway, and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl.
On the whole it was a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. Their party was scheduled to be one of the harmless kind. But strange things are prepared even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the cafi, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.
Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a state of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who usually assisted their New York parties. They were just through dancing and were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware that some one at a near-by table was looking at him. He turned and glanced casually Scott Fitzgerald watching their party intently.
Amory turned to Fred, who was just sitting down. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the thing to do in order to keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a state to do his own thinking. Never would he forget that street It was a broad street, lined on both sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted with dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see, flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor. He imagined each one to have an elevator and a colored hall-boy and a key-rack; each one to be eight stories high and full of three and four room suites.
He wondered if it sounded priggish. That was all; for at the second that his decision came, he looked up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the cafi, and with his jump of astonishment the glass fell from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan.
Amory looked him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after a fashion, down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind that is called frank, and he had steady gray eyes that moved slowly from one to the other of their group, with just the shade of a questioning expression. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid.
The feet were all wrong It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain. He wore no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half Spanish astonishment: Scott Fitzgerald moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them to the end They were unutterably terrible The man regarded Amory quizzically Then the human voices fell faintly on his ear: As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the sickly electric light of the paved hall.
Ten, fifteen steps away sounded the footsteps. They were like a slow dripping, with just the slightest insistence in their fall. With the instinct of a child Amory edged in under the blue darkness of the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight for haggard seconds, once bursting into a slow run with clumsy stumblings. After that he stopped suddenly; he must keep hold, he thought.
His lips were dry and he licked them. Was every one followed in the moonlight? When again the pale sheen skimmed the cornices, it was almost beside him, and Amory thought he heard a quiet breathing. Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were not behind, had never been behind, they were ahead and he was not eluding but following He began to run, blindly, his heart knocking heavily, his hands clinched.
Far ahead a black dot showed itself, resolved slowly into a human shape. But Amory was beyond that now; he turned off the street and darted into an alley, narrow and dark and smelling of old rottenness. He twisted down a long, sinuous blackness, where the moonlight was shut away except for tiny glints and patches The steps ahead stopped, and he could hear them shift slightly with a continuous motion, like waves around a dock. He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as he could.
During all this time it never occurred to him that he was delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things could never give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove Spanish blackness: Scott Fitzgerald everything that had ever preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem whose answer he knew on paper, yet whose solution he was unable to grasp. He was far beyond horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of that, now moved in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls were real, living things, things he must accept.
Only far inside his soul a little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling him down, trying to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After that door was slammed there would be only footfalls and white buildings in the moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the footfalls. He remembered calling aloud: Oh, send some one stupid!
When he called thus it was not an act of will at all will had turned him away from the moving figure in the street; it was almost instinct that called, just the pile on pile of inherent tradition or some wild prayer from way over the night. Then something clanged like a low gong struck at a distance, and before his eyes a face flashed over the two feet, a face pale and distorted with a sort of infinite evil that twisted it like flame in the wind; but he knew, for the half instant that the gong tanged and hummed, that it was the face of Dick Humbird.
See a Problem?
Minutes later he sprang to his feet, realizing dimly that there was no more sound, and that he was alone in the graying alley. It was cold, and he started on a steady run for the light that showed the street at the other end. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air.
If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air on Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw.
Then Broadway broke upon them, and with the babel of noise and the painted faces a sudden sickness rushed over Amory. Old remorse getting you? His knees were shaking under him, and he knew that if he stayed another minute on this street he would keel over Spanish assimilate: Scott Fitzgerald where he stood. In the doorway of his room a sudden blackness flowed around him like a divided river. When he came to himself he knew that several hours had passed. He pitched onto the bed and rolled over on his face with a deadly fear that he was going mad.
He wanted people, people, some one sane and stupid and good. He lay for he knew not how long without moving. He could feel the little hot veins on his forehead standing out, and his terror had hardened on him like plaster. He felt he was passing up again through the thin crust of horror, and now only could he distinguish the shadowy twilight he was leaving. He must have fallen asleep again, for when he next recollected himself he had paid the hotel bill and was stepping into a taxi at the door. It was raining torrents. The presence of a painted woman across the aisle filled him with a fresh burst of sickness and he changed to another car, tried to concentrate on an article in a popular magazine.
He found himself reading the same paragraphs over and over, so he abandoned this attempt and leaning over wearily pressed his hot forehead against the damp window-pane. Tom was standing in the centre of the room, pensively relighting a cigar-stub. Amory fancied he looked rather relieved on seeing him. Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor, loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the shelf. Outside the wind came up, and Amory started as the wet branches moved and clawed with their finger-nails at the window-pane. Tom was deep in his work, and inside the room only the occasional scratch of a match or the rustle of leather as they shifted in their chairs broke the stillness.
Then like a zigzag of lightning came the change. Amory sat bolt upright, frozen cold in his chair. Tom was looking at him with his mouth drooping, eyes fixed. He saw nothing but the dark window-pane. What face did you just see? Some of them had been freshmen, and wild freshmen, with Amory; some were in the class below; and it was in the beginning of his last year and around small tables at the Nassau Inn that they began questioning aloud the institutions that Amory and countless others before him had questioned so long in secret.
It was distinctly through the Spanish accident: Amory, through Kerry, had had a vague drifting acquaintance with him, but not until January of senior year did their friendship commence. Or another ship sunk? About one-third of the junior class are going to resign from their clubs. Burne Holiday is behind it. The club presidents are holding a meeting to-night to see if they can find a joint means of combating it.
Woodrow thought they should be abolished and all that. How do they feel up at Cap and Gown? They get one of the radicals in the corner and fire questions at him. This time it began as purely a mental interest. With other men of whom he had thought as primarily first-class, he had been attracted first by their personalities, and in Burne he missed that immediate magnetism to which he usually swore allegiance. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward and it was almost time that land was in sight.
Tom and Amory and Alec had reached an impasse; never did they seem to have new experiences in common, for Tom and Alec had been as blindly busy with their committees and boards as Amory had been blindly idling, and the things they had for dissection college, contemporary personality and the like they had hashed and rehashed for many a frugal conversational meal. Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other things as well. Economics had interested him and he was turning socialist. Pacifism played in the back of his mind, and he read the Masses and Lyoff Tolstoi faithfully.
I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things to make me think. Whitman is the man that attracts me. How about you, Tom? They both look things in the face, and, somehow, different as they are, stand for somewhat the same things. Burne Holiday was so evidently developing and Amory had considered that he was doing the same. He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of decadence now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year and a half seemed stale and futile a petty consummation of himself He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals a Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.
Being Burne was suddenly so much realler than being clever. Then he remembered an incident of sophomore year, in which Burne had been suspected of the leading role. Dean Hollister had been heard by a large group arguing with a taxi-driver, who had driven him from the junction. Bought and Paid for. It took two expert mechanics half a day to dissemble it into its minutest parts and remove it, which only goes to prove the rare energy of sophomore humor under efficient leadership.
Then again, that very fall, Burne had caused a sensation. A certain Phyllis Styles, an intercollegiate prom-trotter, had failed to get her yearly invitation to the Harvard-Princeton game. He was unversed in the arts of Phyllis, and was sure that this was merely a vapid form of kidding. Before an hour had passed he knew that he was indeed involved. Phyllis had pinned him down and served him up, informed him the train she was arriving by, and depressed him thoroughly. Aside from loathing Phyllis, he had particularly wanted to stag that game and entertain some Harvard friends. What can you do against Phyllis?
There were Burne and Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the lurid figures on college posters. They had bought flaring suits with huge peg-top trousers and gigantic padded shoulders. On their heads were rakish college hats, pinned up in front and sporting bright orange-and-black bands, while from their celluloid collars blossomed flaming orange ties. On a clanking chain they led a large, angry tom-cat, painted to represent a tiger. She was vociferously greeted and escorted enthusiastically across the campus, followed by half a hundred village urchins to the stifled laughter of hundreds of alumni and visitors, half of whom had no idea that this was a practical joke, but thought that Burne and Fred were two varsity sports showing their girl a collegiate time.
She tried to walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a little behind but they stayed close, that there should be no doubt whom she was with, talking in loud voices of their friends on the football team, until she could almost hear her acquaintances whispering: From that root had blossomed the energy that he was now trying to orient with progress About a hundred juniors and seniors resigned from their clubs in a final fury of righteousness, and the clubs in helplessness turned upon Burne their finest weapon: Every one who knew him liked him but what he stood for and he began to stand for more all the time came under the lash of many tongues, until a frailer man than he would have been snowed under.
They had taken to exchanging calls several times a week. I suppose I have it coming. Burne had gone into the biology of this, and then: Well, I suppose only about thirty-five per cent of every class here are blonds, are really light yet two-thirds of every senior council are light. I worked the thing out with the Presidents of the United States once, and found that way over half of them were light-haired, yet think of the preponderant number of brunettes in the race.
Call them remarkable-looking or anything you want but ugly they certainly are. Walking at night was one of his favorite pursuits, and one night he persuaded Amory to accompany him. And this very walking at night is one of the things I was afraid about. There were the woods looming up ahead, just as they do now, there were dogs howling and the shadows and no human sound.
Then I thought of my watch. There is no such thing as a strong, sane criminal. It seemed to him that life and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often self-deluding; in politics and business one found him and among the old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed and their courses began to split on that point. Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits.
He voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point. He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him.
Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold. Never enters the Philadelphian Society. He has no faith in that rot. Matthew attributes it to Christ. Amory wandered occasionally to New York on the chance of finding a new shining green auto-bus, that its stick-of-candy glamour might penetrate his disposition. One day he ventured into a stock-company revival of a play whose name was faintly familiar.
The curtain rose he watched casually as a girl entered. A few phrases rang in his ear and touched a faint chord of memory.
- Tantos tontos tópicos (Spanish Edition).
- .
- WHEEZERS WORLD.
- Tiers?
Then he seemed to hear a voice whispering beside him, a very soft, vibrant voice: He found a blank space on his programme, and began to scribble rapidly: Yawning and wondering an evening through, I watch alone I can always outguess a ghost. Take a bedroom, for example. If you use any discretion a ghost can never get you in a bedroom. Now, the first thing to do is to get the room cleared to do this you rush with your eyes closed into your study and turn on the lights next, approaching the closet, carefully run the stick in the door three or four times.
Then, if nothing happens, you can look in. Always, always run the stick in viciously first never look first! If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head. The sense of going forward in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was stirring and shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored enough surplus energy to sally into a new pose. Monsignor took him several times to see Thornton Hancock, and once or twice to the house of a Mrs.
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