SYK Publishing
The Cage and the Sea
Mateo Reyes, the best fighter in the south of Spain, meets an old man on a beach in Alicante. What follows is the slow unmaking and remaking of a champion.
Mateo is twenty-eight, his face on a billboard six blocks from his flat, and he has never once wondered whether being a champion and being a man are the same thing. A stranger on a lounger tells him, in a few calm sentences, what the cracks in his life are. Then Madrid, the loss, the quiet months, and the long road inland to find him.
The character on the cover is liú, which in Chinese means flow. It is made of two parts. On the left is the radical for water, three small marks that look like drops or tears. On the right is the older shape of a child being carried head-down by the current. Together they make a single image: the moving water that does not resist what it carries, and the small unresisting thing carried by it.
What I have come to understand is this. The flow is not a thing you achieve. It is a thing you stop preventing. The water has been moving the whole time. The work is to notice that you have been blocking it, and to stop.
From the front of the book, signed M.R.
Read the prologue
Prologue
I am writing this from a small apartment in the old town of Alicante, two streets back from the cathedral, with the windows open and the late afternoon coming in off the water. There is a cat on the wall opposite that I have been watching for the last hour. He is not doing anything. He is simply there, in the last of the sun, with his eyes half closed, and he has been there long enough that I have started to envy him.
I do not know exactly when this story begins. I used to think it began on a beach in San Juan in the summer of my twenty-eighth year, on the day I met an old man who would not give me his name. For a long time after, that was the day I would have pointed to. Everything before it belonged to one life. Everything after belonged to another, and the seam between them was a conversation that lasted perhaps thirty minutes on a stretch of sand a few kilometres north of where I am now sitting.
I no longer think this. The seam was not the conversation. The conversation was where I noticed the seam, which had been opening for years before I found the man who would name it for me. The foundation under my life had been cracking since I was a small boy, and I had been laying more weight on it every year, and the only thing the old man did, on the day I met him, was tell me what the cracks were. He did not put them there. They had been there for as long as I had.
But I did not know that yet, on the afternoon of the beach. What I knew was that I was the best fighter in the south of Spain, that my face was on a billboard six blocks from where I am sitting now, and that a man I had never seen before was looking at me from a lounger in a way I did not like. Everything that happened to me after, the loss in Madrid and the months that followed and the long road I took into the mountains looking for him, all of it began with the way that man looked at me, and with the way I looked back.
What I found is the reason I am writing this.
