The 'Chino' Laborde sings in the tribute to Diego Maradona performed by the Buenos Aires Tango FestivalEnrique García Medina
Between glory and tragedy, Diego Armando Maradona's life was pure tango. The rise of the greatest Argentine soccer star from his earthly cradle in the Villa Fiorito neighborhood to the pantheon of popular gods had been predicted before his birth. "The boy slept and had that night / The most beautiful dream he could have / The stadium was full, glorious Sunday / At last they were going to see him in first class," says
The Kid's Dream
, composed by Reinaldo Yiso and Juan Puey in 1942. and interpreted by numerous singers later, among them the same Pelusa. Contemporary themes immortalized his feats with the ball and a selection of them served to honor him ten months after his death at the Buenos Aires Tango Festival and World Cup.
The pace of the 2x4 moved him to tears. “I went abroad [to play in Europe] at the age of 22 without knowing tango. When I came back, I came back with a tango in the truck, crying, ”Maradona said in a television interview. It was
Clavelitos
, the song by Miguel Moreno that accompanied him when he returned to football in his native country, in 1993. He was already a consecrated player after having won the World Cup with the Argentine team in 1986 and made Naples champion of Italy, but he also had a history of drug addiction, especially cocaine.
Nostalgia, the essence of tango, flew over the entire tribute to the idol who died on November 25, at the age of 60. “Oé, oé, oé; Die-go, Die-go! ”, Intoned the director of the festival, the dancer Natacha Poberaj, when the show opened on Tuesday afternoon. The audience of the Centenario Park amphitheater quickly joined in the chant before giving way to Mauro Caiazza, in charge of the Kaia Za San project, the first of the twenty artists who passed through the stage.
Tango versions of songs like
La Mano de Dios
, popularized by the quarterer Rodrigo or
La vida tombola
, by Manu Chao, were performed alongside unpublished works, such as the instrumental
El gol del Siglo
, or some of El Diego's favorite songs, such as
Cucusita
, also from Montero. That song, which the footballer sang in 1992 at a charity event in favor of a center for the disabled, was performed at the festival by an emotional Hernán
Cucuza
Castiello while images were projected behind with Diego's best plays.
Almost a decade earlier, when he was a Barcelona player, one night he stepped onto the Camp Nou in a suit instead of wearing a Barça shirt.
Caminito
sang
along with Julio Iglesias and Plácido Domingo in front of more than 70,000 people. “I love tango. I do it very badly, that is also true, but whoever does not try, never knows how it will go. So I always like to try, "he said in another television interview.
His voice reached the audience through an emotional recording made by the Cachivache Orquesta. He was heard singing
El Sueño del Pibe
from the small television of the house where he lived in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Paternal, around the Argentinos Juniors stadium, the club with which he made his first debut. In the video, projected on a giant screen, Bruno Tombari and Rocío Lequio dance through the different rooms of that house, now a museum, in which the legend began to be forged.
“They will tell you so many things about me, but everything is a lie, nothing is true, because I… because I no longer die…, because I no longer die. I who was an imperfect god, the insurgent side of eternity, today I am already part of everyone's air, nobody's, my property. Today, twenty-five of a month of any year, what could matter! Today, like yesterday and tomorrow, my flag will be the heir rage of the marginal South ”, Castiello sang in the tango
Yo no muero
, with lyrics by Alejandro Szwarcman and music by Pablo Covacevich.
“Diego belongs to everyone and we all have him in our hearts,” Javier
Cardenal
Domínguez
continued, amid applause
, before performing a tribute to Maradona with lyrics by the poet Horacio Ferrer accompanied by Hernán Reinaudo on guitar.
"The songs remain, as well as their magic," later said another tango singer,
Chino
Laborde, when he performed
To see you dribble.
Magic in the feet.
Maradona's eternal with the ball;
the ephemeral one that springs from some dancers in the milongueras nights of Buenos Aires.
The festival brought together tango and soccer on stage in a show that ended almost as it had begun, amid applause and chants of “Maradó, Maradó”.
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