Many years later, when Gilbert Chevalier faced a firing squad under a burning midday sun in the yard of Fort Dimanche, the worst place to be in Haiti, the volatile love of his life, and the captain shouted ready!, then aim!, to his ear, a long, pregnant pause preceded the final command, so Gilbert began begging God for mercy, while also begging the soldiers for a ceasefire, for the captain to take his time stretching the final order, delaying the coming mortal blows for as long as possible, because there were many guns aimed at him, the pain their bullets promised was going to be savage, and careless as he had been with the feelings of others his entire young life, Gilbert was not good with pain, and not at all ready to die, here, today, for no just reason he could think of, but the silence greeting his begging was loud and immense and not shrinking, and obviously wouldn’t last forever, a terrifying concession by a reflexively optimistic man during this most awful moment of his life, the bitter end, so close, so unexpected, and so, so unwanted. His executioner exhaled, and the next breath would command fire, and breathe it out like a dragon, there would be explosions, dozens, fired bullets, torrents of them, and they would pierce his body and burn his entrails, enter through his eye sockets and shatter his brain, yes they would, they will, and the realization turned Gilbert’s spine into soup, and then molten rage, making him hiss, seethe, eyes watering and widening in horror of the pending verdict of the glistening barrels of machine guns.
Machine guns! Fucking Haitians. They can’t get most things right in life, but they’re going to execute me. A mere football player. With machine guns! They’re going to waste their ammunition on me, with ten men shooting at close range. Me! What’s wrong with these people? Our planet? The universe! What the fuck?! Why is Haiti doing this to me? I never hurt anybody! Or broke a law other than the lightweight numbers of the Ten Commandments. So, what the fuck, God? Jesus! Please talk to Your father and get me out of this mess. What did I do in my life that was so wrong to deserve this fate? Talk to me, Lord. Un peu de pitié quand même. Je mérite mieux. Whisper the secrets of Your mercy, and my folly, in my ears. Surely You can do me this last favor, quickly, considering my predicament. You can move faster than speeding bullets when You want to, yes? That’s the book on You, isn’t it? Jesus, save me. Please, holler at your boy, soften my enemies, bribe the devil. Halt my crucifixion.
Yes, when Gilbert, full birth certificate name Gilbert Ernst
Chevalier, before his childhood friends shortened his name to Gil and his New York City friends spiced it up to Gil the Voodoo Child, aka Kid Haiti, aka Coconut Head, aka Le Walking Heartbreak, aka Le Green-eyed Nigger, aka Frenchie, aka That Kraut Nigga, aka Curly Hair Boy, and before his football friends called him Le Savior, aka Black Jesus, aka Orfeu Negro, the last one came from a mouth-watering Brazilian beauty on a toe-curling happy night in Belo Horizonte that nursed his wet dreams for years all the way to this, his dying day, when Gilbert saw death, his death, coming, he was bewildered and tried to reconnect with God, which was not easy since during his brief, wondrous life he felt and lived like a god among men. Americans call the sport soccer, the rest of the world calls it football, and therein lies the rub, the disconnection at the heart of the schizophrenic All-American life of Gilbert Chevalier. When football fans in the world outside America say the word, football becomes mystical, part child’s play, part religion, a dreamy pleasure, an enchantment, the word football itself becomes an incantation, a magical theater of feet and ball, gravity and grass, head, hips, torso, and speed and balance, most unnatural combinations, but these skills have fascinated the world since the sport’s conception in China in the fourth century Before Christ, and definitely since it’s been popularized by England via its empire, such skills, timing, and intelligence seem otherworldly, full of bursts of supernatural grace. For a species that uses hand-eye coordination for practically everything it does every second of every single day, football sounds awkward and alien, therefore a skilled footballer moves through the world differently and is perceived like a stranger, part primitive, part demigod. Football players can afford to be average-looking men and women of varying heights and builds, but they are capable of feats with their feet that no one should have time to develop, or be blessed with, oh those lucky bastards, footballers. Fans often look at football players with a fervid awe. Why them and not me? Why are my feet useful merely for ambulating my body to and fro while footballers can play with their feet and a ball and thrill crowds to no end? How can they bend space and time and opponents with such efficient speed and delicacy and score goals, moving the ball past goalkeepers from odd angles despite the brutish ferocity of defenders? Why did God or the gods or Mother Nature bless only a few of us on this planet with those wildly entertaining powers? Why not me, God? Gil was born with the gift of footballing and so many other blessings to enjoy that he never found time to question them. Well, until today, his death day. As is customary for the exponentially gifted among us, Gilbert Chevalier’s gifts for playing football, not soccer, with its robotic evocation of socks and fouls, but football, poetic, sensual, democratic football, earned him triumph and glory and even a brief siesta on top of the world. The world! Not a world, THE world, but it wasn’t the entire world, was it? He didn’t end any wars, cure diseases, or give birth, hell, he didn’t even bring peace to Haiti, not between Haitians or between Haiti and the United States of America, its mighty frenemy, or did he? It’s among the questions at the heart of this tale of a gifted young man and the demands of his passions, his family, his politics, and all the things he couldn’t control but felt satisfying and overwhelmingly important, that one afternoon in Brazil, for example, sure felt ecstatic to Gilbert Chevalier and everyone who witnessed it or followed it on the radio or got secondhand word of his performance on the steamy pitch of the Mineirão in Belo Horizonte, for World Cup football touches everyone in the world, whether they want it to or not, whether their nation played in it or did not, whether they even liked football or not, were good at it or never tried to kick a damn football, indifference was hard to hang on to. What the hell is football? Why would someone try to be good at that? But even those skeptical souls would hear of Gilbert Chevalier, the magical Haitian, and if they didn’t, if they merely saw him walking past a window of their restaurant in Manhattan, Barcelona, Port-au-Prince, or Belo, they sensed the boyish man with the commanding posture was exceptional, they knew he was special, and if they knew football they told him how much he meant to them, wherever he went in all the continents, the game against England had come to define him, protect him, gild him, until, abruptly, it didn’t, an unmarked grave beckoned, he was on the verge of losing his life for another world, and the memory of his moment of glory and all the loving meaning attributed to it by thousands of strangers was slipping away, fading to near black as a firing squad stood a fraction of a second away from killing him, a slightly funny thing was happening inside him in this instant before his death, when he looked at all those black men brandishing big black machine guns filled with black bullets aimed at his skinny black body, just ten feet away, Gilbert Chevalier’s life flashed before his eyes. The devil grew impatient. He hated this part of stealing souls like most people hated advertising. Sometimes the flashbacks happened after a person suffered a blow, or a heart attack, or a blow that triggered a heart attack, or the blow of a heart attack, or too much booze, or a heart attack triggered by too much booze, or sex, great sex, booze and heart-pounding sex, the best kind, yes, Gil Chevalier had had all types of sex, the heart-stopping kind in particular, his and his lovers’ hearts stopped, in sync, he died, she died, they really did, die, resting in orgasmic peace, then, slowly, gingerly, his eyes opened, tenderly, his lover’s eyes opened too, their breathing restored, softly, my god, woman, he’d whisper, voice scratching like sandpaper, I didn’t know anyone could feel so sweet, how could you? How did you? Who made you!?! Oh we’re good together, I’m keeping you in my life for sure, he’d continue, come here, sweet thing. We gonna die together. Let’s die again?
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From Death of the Soccer God by Dimitry Elias Léger. Used with permission of the publisher, MCD. Copyright © 2026 by Dimitry Elias Léger.
