Efraim Ducasse he was the worst player on the team handball of the Viamonte school. He was selected because he was skilled enough to be on the team. But, among the elect, he was the worst. He lacked strength on the pitch. He jumped short. He could dribble a couple of opponents, but not much else.

He stood out for his aerobic capacity: without speed, he ran with the endurance of a marathon runner; Y in games he never tired.

The comparison with the Nordem school, the following semester, was decisive for not going down in the rankings. It was also the classic: the “Aryans” of the North German school; against the savages of the Once neighborhood.

North There had been two German schools: one Naziand an anti-Nazi. After the war, both would align with the new position of Federal Germany and Chancellor Adenauer. But as the anti-Nazi school slowly withdrew from German politics, Nordem secretly maintained its Nazi affiliationin clandestine messages.

Eventually both plants were unified in Nordem. His handball players were some of the best in the tournament – tall, cool and fantastic shooters. The archers feared them.

At Viamonte the coach was the physical education teacher: Matsukuda Kimoto. This humble and tenacious technical director was able to get in touch with the students, in a simple, profound and stimulating language. His Spanish was neutral and rarely referred to his Japanese origin.

He wasn’t talking about judo. But in the instructions he provided, always concise, correct and effective, there were traces of ancient Japanese wisdom, his rituals and his experiences.

In this great classic against Nordem, a historical parable had united Efraím Ducasse, the worst of the team, and coach Kimoto: the Jewish student and the Japanese teacher, they would fight together against the Nazi squad. That alliance, which they didn’t verbally explain to each other or the rest of the team, allowed them to defy the circumstances.

The Nordems were obviously better players, their technique and power up to that point unbeatable. Viamonte had never won a game against them, yet It was a classic, due to the tenacity with which they had faced them for decadeseven before they merged into a single German and Nazi college.

Both Efraím and Kimoto had seen the basketball film starring Gene Hackman: the technician used cunning as spies in the Bible.

His trick was to get the worst team to take the decisive shot, which rivals would not have watched. In the film, the top pitcher finally said to the coach: “I can”. And for the first time in the storyline, Hackman accepted the joint decision of those he directed.

Kimoto and Efraím, who had never exchanged personal words before, although the relationship had always been one of mutual respect, on this occasion conspired that, towards the end of the game, if they managed to lose by just one goal, Ephraim would overwhelm, he would be sent to the far left of the area and the game ended in an unexpected draw.

He would probably throw a “dough”, but between the confusion of the opposing team and a distraction of the goalkeeper, the gimmick could work. For a time this secret was limited to Kimoto and Ephraim, and the boy felt a substantial responsibility as well as a wonderful emotion on his shoulders.

Ephraim spent three hours a day for six months, to practice shooting, until his right arm is transformed into David’s sling. That ball must have gone like the stone that had brought down Goliath.

Only a modicum of luck distracted Ephraim from his superhuman effort: the constant presence, in the classroom and in his mind, of Professor Lotremon.

The chemistry teacher presented in the morning, at an impossible hour for any other human being, a gorgeous body, a delicious scent, naked lips and, the part that excited Ephraím, a two-faced mountain range, tender and sweet, devastating.

Could fate be so diabolical that it sparked a beginning of acquaintance between Professor Kimoto, a bachelor, and Professor Lotremon, recently divorced?

They had not yet finished allying, Efraím and Kimoto, that already the toxic miasma of passion confronted them, involuntarily. Ephraim would have completed his training as the best spellcaster on the planet if Lotremon had simply offered him the reward at the end of the road. But in reality he just distracted him.

It was time to share the main move with the rest of the team. Fifteen days before the game, they discovered that a mole had revealed the plan to Nordem.

Unsurprisingly, Nordem’s technical director, the cheeky Busiche, was waiting for them. Rodolfo “Alacrán” Busiche was a former handball player, member of a Croatian team, still young, and manager of the company associated with Nordem, a brewer.

Kimoto and Efraím, with the collaboration of the teacher Eloísa Lotremon, practically Kimoto’s girlfriend by now, tried to unmask the culprit behind the leak. In vain.

The match against Nordem led to the expected failurelike the Gallic boss with no magic potion The fight with the boss by Asterix. The members of the Viamonte squad, with their secret weapon neutralized, reluctantly watched and defeated the match.

It soon became known that Professor Lotremon, infatuated with Busiche and now a partner in the factory, had given away his crush Kimoto and his students. Eloísa, from the first moment, had been “the mole”.

Kimo performed the sepuku, opened the belly into a harakiri, hours before the game and it’s expired. The Viamonte players watched the match with mourning forearms with a black bracelet. They played in the North and the relatives of the Nordems filled the wooden stands to see their victory, between songs from Nibelungen mythology and some typical words of the Third Reich.

Busiche, seated in an overstuffed chair, watched as he thought of his future victory the delivery promised by Professor Lotremon for that same evening: a horizon of his body that he had reserved for him. Nordem’s team perfectly scored both the virtuous defender of the Viamontes and the mule driver Efraim. He was not allowed to approach the area alone. The die is cast.

Ephraim overflowed to the right, the Nordems did not understand the movement nor did they see any danger in their drift. Ephraim’s hand went up as urged by King David; the ball goes out in an unexpected direction – an exorbitant fireball -: towards the defenseless face of the cheeky Busiche.

The handball ball, transformed into a missile, ruined Busiche’s nose for the rest of her life, dislocated his eye forever and gave him a concussion from which he would wake up only three days later. Professor Lotremon abandoned him: she did not like the wounded. Efraím was unconditionally expelled from the Federation and voluntarily changed schools.

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