The Sports City Coliseum in Havana was unlike anything Ángel had ever seen in Mexico. It was an imposing structure, a reinforced concrete dome of futuristic architecture that resembled a flying saucer that had landed by mistake amidst the island's lush and chaotic tropical vegetation. Inside, the place exuded a dense mixture of sporting hostility and an ancient respect for strength. The air wasn't the dry, dusty air of the gyms in Mexicali; here, the atmosphere was an amalgam of stale humidity, sweat accumulated over decades on the mats, and the persistent salty scent of the nearby sea that seeped through the cracks in the structure. Ángel, with his 1.82 meters of height and his skin tanned by the relentless Baja California sun, felt like an intruder, a foreign organism in an ecosystem specifically designed for predators.
Before his weight class was called for the first bout of the "Cerro Pelado" tournament, Ángel sought refuge in solitude. He sat in a secluded corner of the worn wooden bleachers, their splinters telling the stories of thousands of spectators who had passed through. He adjusted his headphones and let the chords of Linkin Park's "In the End" set the rhythm of his pulse. For the first time in years, he didn't take a physics book out of his backpack. In that Havana atmosphere, where survival was etched on the hardened faces of the local coaches, academic theory was superfluous. His eyes wandered over the intricate structure of the domed ceiling, and inevitably, his mind drifted back to Mexicali, to the wrestling matches at the Arena Nacionalista. He thought about how professional wrestlers "sold" every blow to the audience, creating a visual spectacle; but here, in Cuban Greco-Roman wrestling, no one sold anything. Here, reality was binary: either you withstood the punishment or you broke under the pressure.
His first match was a trial by fire that bordered on the savage. He faced Lázaro, the young rising star of the Cuban national team, an athlete who resembled an ebony sculpture with muscles like piano strings stretched to their breaking point. There were no pleasantries, no familiar exchanges of distances. At the whistle, Lázaro launched himself with a ferocity Ángel had never experienced on the Mexican national circuit. In the first clash of heads, a collision that sounded like two millstones striking one another, Lázaro delivered an "accidental" headbutt that cleanly split Ángel's left eyebrow. Blood gushed out immediately, hot, thick, and blinding, trickling down his cheek and staining his competition lycra a deep red.
"It's Mexican blood, kid, not water! Show him what you're made of or go home!" yelled a Cuban coach from the sidelines, his hoarse voice a perfect blend of mockery, challenge, and a strange kind of encouragement.
Ángel wiped his face with a sharp flick of his forearm, leaving a crimson trail on his skin. The referee stopped play for a few seconds so the medics could check the depth of the cut. Víctor, his coach, approached the corner and looked at him with a seriousness that cut through the air.
"Can you continue, Ángel? Your vision will blur as soon as you start sweating again," Víctor asked, searching for any trace of doubt in his student's eyes.
"Yes," Ángel replied. His voice didn't tremble. His gaze had turned icy, devoid of any trace of pain or fear.
Instead of panicking over the wound, his brain—honed by solving complex problems under pressure—entered total focus mode. He began to analyze Lázaro with the same coldness he used to analyze a vector diagram. The Cuban was a force of nature, but he always attacked from a predictable diagonal angle, blindly trusting that his pushing power was superior to that of any foreigner. Ángel remembered Roberto's words about strategy: "Don't run into a wall, look for the door." If he tried to resist Lázaro's brute force, the cut above his eye would reopen completely, and he would lose by medical decision. He had to be the flowing water, not the resisting rock.
In the second round, Lázaro charged again, visibly convinced that the Mexican was scared by the blood. Ángel feigned an awkward retreat, lowering his center of gravity and deliberately giving ground. When the Cuban launched himself with his full weight to lock in a waist lock and end the fight, Ángel executed an arm drag with a technical ferocity that silenced the Coliseum. Taking advantage of the giant's momentum, Ángel didn't stop there; he spun around and locked in a high-arcing suplex. He lifted Lazarus above his head, tracing a perfect parabola in the air, before slamming him onto the canvas with such a dry impact that the crash was he rose above the surrounding din.
The crowd, which at first had shouted insults and jeers, fell into a deathly silence for a couple of seconds, processing the technical beauty of the execution. Then, the Coliseum erupted in thunderous applause. It wasn't a polite, diplomatic round of applause, but the genuine recognition of an island that breathes wrestling for a warrior who had just demonstrated mastery. Ángel stood up slowly. His face was covered in a mixture of blood and sweat, his eyebrow throbbed rhythmically, and his uniform was ruined, but he showed no emotion. He didn't celebrate, he didn't shout. He had won in the mecca of wrestling, and he had done it on his own terms.
At the end of the tournament, after winning the international gold medal in his category, something unusual happened. The Cuban national coach himself, an older man with a face etched by a thousand battles, approached him in the weigh-in area and shook his hand with surprising strength.
"You have the hands of a surgeon and the strength of an old ox, Mexican," the man told him in a voice that seemed to emanate from the depths of a cave. "But be very careful. This sport is jealous; it takes much more than it gives if you don't find something more than metal medals to fight for. Don't let the mat be the only thing that defines who you are."
That night, in the dim light of his Havana hotel room, Ángel stared at himself in the mirror for a long time as he carefully cleaned his wound. The reflection showed him someone he no longer quite recognized. He thought of Mónica and the pact of fire they had made; he thought of his parents in Mexicali and the torn poster of the Arena Nacionalista that had intrigued him so much. He had conquered Cuba, the Everest of amateur wrestling, but the words of the old Cuban coach had remained etched in his memory like a stigma.
He was barely fifteen years old and already an elite international champion. He no longer had a school to return to, exams to pass, or a childhood to reclaim. He was beginning to understand, with the bitter maturity that early success bestows, that being the best in the world came with an exorbitant price, and that the blood spilled on the mat in Havana was only the first installment of a debt he would have to pay for the rest of his life. The desert had made him strong, but the island's salt air had made him acutely aware of his own solitude at the top.