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by Eluney. . 67 reads.

My tribute to Diego Armando Maradona in NS.

You will have to excuse me
Eduardo Sacheri
translation done by me

You will have to excuse me. I know that a man who claims to be a good person must behave according to certain norms, accept certain precepts, adapt his way of being to certain stipulations agreed upon by all.

Let's be more explicit. If one wants to be a coherent guy, one must measure his behavior, and that of his fellow men, always with the same and identical fairness. One cannot make exceptions, otherwise your ethical judgment, your critical conscience, your legitimate criteria will be bastardized.

You cannot go through life disapproving of your rivals and apologizing to your friends for just being one. Nor am I so naive as to suppose that one is capable of withdrawing from their affections and passions, that one has the ability to sacrifice them on the altar of pristine impartiality.

Let's say that one goes around trying not to stray too far from the right path, trying not to let love and hatred irretrievably disrupt logic.

But you will have to excuse me, gentlemen. There's a guy I can't with. And I try. I say to myself: there can be no exceptions, there shouldn't be.

And the apology I require from you is even greater, because the guy I speak of is not a benefactor of humanity, nor a holy man, nor a brave warrior who has consolidated the integrity of my country. No, none of that. The guy has a much less important, much less transcendent, much more profane activity. I am anticipating that the guy is an athlete. Imagine, gentlemen.

I have written two hundred and sixty-three words talking about ethical criteria and its limitations, and all for a simple gentleman who kicks a ball for a living.

You can tell me that that makes my attitude even more reprehensible. Maybe you are right. Maybe that's why I started these lines by apologizing.

However, and although I am perfectly clear about these things, I cannot change my attitude. I am still unable to judge him with the same fairness that I judge other human beings. And beware that not only is he not a poor boy saturated with virtues.

It has many flaws. It has perhaps as many defects as the one who writes these lines, or the most. For the case it is the same. Despite everything, gentlemen, I still feel incapable of judging him. My critical judgment stops before him, and he dispenses it.

It's not a caprice, careful. It is not a simple craving. It's something a little deeper, if you will allow me to qualify it that way. I will be more explicit. I apologize because I feel that I owe him something. I owe him something and I know I have no way to pay him back. Or maybe this is the peculiar coin I have found to pay him. Let's say that my debt finds comfort in this habit of always avoiding any eventual reproach.

He doesn't know, watch out. So my payment is absolutely anonymous. As anonymous is the debt that I keep with him. Let's say that he does not know that I owe him, and ignores the enormous efforts that I make over and over again to pay him.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the opportunity to exercise this habit often presents itself. It is that talking about him, among Argentines, is almost one of our national sports. To praise him to the stratosphere, or to condemn him to the perpetual grill of hell, Argentines seem to like to summon his name and memory.

That's when I try to get serious and distant, but I can't. The size of my debt prevails. And when they invite me to speak, I prefer to dodge the problem, change the subject, give up my turn at the coffee agora in the afternoon. Nor is it that I am on the side of his perpetual flatters. Nothing of that. I avoid superlative and bombastic praise as much as poisoned and treacherous darts.

Furthermore, over time, I have seen more than one change from the side of the inquisitors to the side of the clapping plaintiffs, and vice versa, without a hair fluttering. And both sides seem absolutely obnoxious to me, by the way.

So I keep quiet, or change the subject. And when sometimes one of the boys won't allow it, because he corners me with a direct question, which crosses the air bearing specifically my name, I take a breath, pretend to think, and say some nonsense in the style of "I don't know, we should think about it "; Or maybe I risk a "who knows, there are so many things to consider".

It is that I am too modest to expand on the way I do here. And I am incapable of condemning my friends to the torrid torture of listening to my arguments and my justifications. To begin with, I would have to tell them that time is to blame for everything. Yes, as you hear it, time. The time that insists on passing, when sometimes it should remain detained.

The time that makes us break the perfect, immaculate, unforgettable, complete moments. Because if time stayed there, immortalizing beings and things at their right point, it would free us from disappointments, corruptions, the tiny betrayals so typical of us mortals.

And actually it is because of that defective character of time that I behave as I do. As a way to remedy, in my modest scope, those unjust atrocities that time does to us.

In each occasion in which his name is mentioned, in each opportunity in which they invite me to the feast of worshiping and reviling him, I withdraw myself from this absolutely profane present, and with the memory that the human being conserves for essential facts, I go back to that day, to the unforgettable day that I was forced to seal this pact that, until today, I have kept secret.

A pact that can lead me (I know), to someone accusing me of being a jingoist. And although I am one of those who dislike the mix of the nation with sport, in this case I accept all the risks and potential sanctions.

Let's say that my memory is the safe conduct to return time to the crystalline place from which it should not have moved, because it was the exact place where it deserved to stop forever, at least for football, for him and for me.

Because life is like that, sometimes it combines to illuminate moments like that. Moments after which nothing returns to the way it was. Because he can not. Because everything has changed too much. Because through the skin and the eyes something has entered us from which we will never be able to get rid of.

That morning will have been like all of them. Noon too. And the afternoon starts, apparently, like so many others. One ball and twenty two guys. And other millions of guys eating their elbows in front of the TV, in the most distant points of the planet. But beware, that afternoon is different. It is not a match.

Better said: it is not just a game. There is something else. There's a lot of anger, and a lot of pain, and a lot of frustration accumulated in all those guys who watch TV. They are emotions that were not born by football. They were born elsewhere. In a much more terrible place, much more hostile, much more irrevocable.*

But for us, those of us here, we have no choice but to answer on a field, because we have no other place, because we are few, because we are alone, because we are poor.

But there is the field, the football, and it is them or us. And if we are, the pain will not disappear, nor will the humiliation end. But if they are. Oh, if they are. If it is them, the humiliation will be even greater, more painful, more intolerable. We're going to have to stare at each other's faces, silently saying "you realize, not even here, not even this was given to us."**

*The author refers here to Argentina's defeat against England in the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War.
** The author refers here to the football match between Argentina and England in the 1986 World Cup, in which Argentina was champion.


And a nice Bombadil´s summary of the origins of football in Argentina that further clarifies the importance of Maradona to the country.

“In the 1920s, as Argentina, a booming immigrant nation, sought a sense of identity, it became apparent that football was one of the few things that bound its disparate population together. No matter what your background, you wanted the team in the blue and white striped shirts to win – and that meant the way the national side played was of political and cultural significance.

The debate was played out in the pages of El Gráfico, and a consensus emerged that Argentinian football stood in opposition to the game of the British, the quasi-colonial power having largely departed by the beginning of the first world war. On the vast grassy playing fields of the British schools, football was about power and running and energy. The Argentinian, by contrast, learned the game in the potreros, the vacant lots of the slums, on small, hard, crowded pitches where there was no teacher to step in if it got a bit too rough; their game was about being streetwise, tight, technical ability – and cunning.

If a statue was to be erected to the soul of the Argentinian game, El Gráfico’s editor Borocotó wrote in 1928, it would depict “a pibe [urchin] with a dirty face, a mane of hair rebelling against the comb; with intelligent, roving, trickster and persuasive eyes and a sparkling gaze that seem to hint at a picaresque laugh that does not quite manage to form on his mouth, full of small teeth that might be worn down through eating yesterday’s bread.

His trousers are a few roughly sewn patches; his vest with Argentinian stripes, with a very low neck and with many holes eaten out by the invisible mice of use … His knees covered with the scabs of wounds disinfected by fate; barefoot or with shoes whose holes in the toes suggest they have been made through too much shooting. His stance must be characteristic; it must seem as if he is dribbling with a rag ball.”

Eluney

Edited:

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