A LIFETIME REAL FRIEND

The city of Guayaquil sits by the mighty Guayas river which is the eternal withness of its history, a history of people who, the need may come, would shed their blood in the legitimate defense of their rights. Photo taken in 1956

My job was basically to deliver the morning’s bread while collecting the previous day’s delivery money. At the beginning I had some difficulties pedaling the heavy tricycle, but not long after, I found this job not only interesting, but challenging as well, I got to know many people, plain people owning their small grocery stores who had been in the same place for ten, twenty, thirty and even forty and more years, some even for two and three generations. These people were basically honest, hard working people, with little or no education, who found amazing the fact that, being so young and small, I was working so early in the mornings and then going to school in the evenings. I found not one of these men and women who would try to discourage me from what I was doing; on the contrary, they encouraged me to go ahead, to try harder to be able to sow a better living. At about eleven O’clock in the morning I had my second and last delivery for the day.

The work was hard, but it was fun. One of the grocery stores I use to deliver bread to, was located at the intersection of Chile St and Portete Ave, it was owned by a solitary man, Don Pedro Quevedo, a widower who had never had any children, a soccer fan whose store was located only about two blocks from “El Astillero” (the old shipbuilding yard), a neighborhood where the two most popular soccer (and arch rival) teams in Guayaquil, Emelec and Barcelona had their headquarters. Don Pedro more than a soccer fan was an ultra fan of Emelec. He was always talking to his customers about his team and how great players were “el flaco Raffo (Raffo the skinny one): “el loco Balseca” (Balseca the crazy one); el “chino Yu Lee” (Yu Lee, “the Chinese” goalie), and other

Don Pedro was always debating about either the last game, or about the coming one, and wondering what was going to be the score and who the scoring players. His life always rotated around his grocery store, soccer and Emelec. He was always heatedly debating with the Barcelona fans. By that time, even though I liked soccer very much, I had not decided which team I was going to be a fan of, Don Pedro knew this and he started to talk to me about becoming an Emelec fan. A game confronting the two rival teams was approaching, and Don Pedro thought the time was ripe to enroll me as an Emelec fan. As I delivered his bag of bread on a Friday, he handed me, together with the money to pay for the previous day delivery, a ticket to attend the game at the George Capwell Soccer Stadium, located only a few blocks away from his grocery store. He asked me to meet him at six PM on Sunday, so we could go together to watch the game.

I did so. Even though we arrived forty five minutes before the scheduled time, the fifteen thousand seat stadium was packed; there was no room for a standing pin in the whole place, the game started at seven PM. I was thrilled, I felt like I was transported to another world as this was the first time I attended a night game in what then appeared to me a mammoth stadium. The noise, the cheering and the drum banging from such a big crowd could be heard miles away, the crowd was split about half and half, most of Barcelona fans were wearing gold-yellow shirts and waved yellow banners, while the Emelec fans displayed light blue banners and light blue shirts, the color of the team’s own shirts . After the first half of the game, Barcelona was winning one to nothing, Don Pedro was sitting right next to me and spend most of the fifteen minutes break between halves, arguing about the fact that the Barcelona goal as he said, “should have been nullified, because in his opinion, the player who scored was in a clear off-side position. “Don’t you think so Rafael?”, he kept asking. I was not in a position to say yes or no, because it all occurred so fast I was unable to judge. He must have been wrong, because the newspapers did not even mention this fact the following day and neither did the radio commentators.

The second half of the game started and the cheering intensified, the crowds were going nuts. Ten minutes after the game restarted, Emelec scored after a beautiful combination between El Loco Balseca and el Flaco Raffo. It was a masterpiece of the unparalleled Balseca dribbling, which left the defense player on the ground, then “the crazy one” made a perfect pass to Raffo who, with no custody in sight, shut the ball to the other side of the goal leaving the goalie lying on the floor, biting the dust and banging his hands on the floor.
The game was all square now. Don Pedro was jumping from his seat in ecstasies, “you see Rafael, I have told you” he kept saying, “Nobody, but nobody can stop these two guys when they decide to play good”. The minutes went bye and the stadium seemed like a madhouse. One minute before the end of the game, a fault was committed against El Flaco Raffo inside the eleven yard “fire zone” right before he was ready to shoot with an open goal in front of him. The referee blew his whistle and Barcelona was punished with a penalty kick which el Flaco Raffo himself shot and scored, leaving no chance for the Barcelona goalie to catch the ball.
Three minutes afterwards the game was over. Two to one was the final score, Emelec won.

In three minutes all the yellow shirts were gone from the stadium, only blue shirted people remained in the tribunes, the blue ones stayed for about almost half an hour afterwards, loudly singing, chanting, cheering and making fun of the losers. I had never seen Don Pedro as happy as he was this night. That was the day when I became an Emelec fan and so I told Don Pedro. He was extremely happy and offered to buy tickets for me for any future games between the two classic rival teams. “You are going to be my buddy going to these classic games”, he said and I was happy to oblige

I learned a great lesson and gained a lifetime friend. Don Pedro was a solitary soul who had found refuge from his solitude in the love for soccer and EMELEC, the team i'm sure he would have given his own life for. He never had any children and desperately needed to have a real friend. Emelec was his reason to live and I became his only real friend. Many years later, the day when I graduated with honors as an Economist at the University of Guayaquil, I invited him to be my guest, and, though he was already seriously ill, he attended the ceremony and was sobbing with pride as he embraced me after the big ceremony. He said he felt as proud of me as he would have felt for a son if he ever had one. He died in a public hospital only a couple of months after my graduation and I attended his burial ceremony to which only eleven people, most of them neighbors attended. That was the first time I felt I had lost a real friend.