Juan Cruz
11/25/2020 3:16 PM
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 11/25/2020 3:16 PM
It was immediately said that
soccer had died
.
In reality, this man whose resistance was scratched glass was dying, like one who hacks a grave in the name of life.
He attacked himself as if he were sure that the health that preceded him would already be health forever.
And he attacked himself
with the arrogance of an immortal and Argentine god
.
He settled in facets that were not just those that claimed him from the loneliness of gold and shit that constitutes sports triumph.
He believed that he was more than a footballer, because he came from such a humble origin that by lifting an ounce of gold, he already felt that nothing could knock him down.
Not God.
Not death.
He climbed paths of politics and his demagogies, and felt that he
could be both Gabriel García Márquez and Fidel Castro, equally legendary.
He believed, then, that he was infallible like God when he touched the ball with his hand to convert even superstitions into a goal.
He made of his personal life, and that of his family, the collective portrait of a madness;
He turned it into multicolored cellophane, to finally cover it with the gray of the old back covers of idols that leave a trace of misery next to a gawking idolatry.
He ascended the altars of the football fields with the same arrogance, so often childish, with which he sought the civil notoriety of a war hero.
And he would come down from those pedestals to pretend that from all those toxic adventures he came out fresh as from a training session.
And he died, he was dying almost since he was the winner whose innumerable party was also proclaimed by those who, subtly and also rudely, were nailing the dagger of mockery to whose ice wedge he was hugging.
In addition, he ended up burned, like someone who clings to a wheel of fire.
César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda should be cited, one after the other, who wrote so much about how death is done, until the dead ceases to exist and becomes a metaphor that darkens, depending on where it comes from and where go his epitaph.
The legend precedes the death of Maradona.
Nobody has done as much to make soccer an object of worship in life as this man
who is now credited with the absolute patronage of a sport that so many parents had.
The Peruvian Vallejo used to say that that corpse that is man falls into oblivion and dies little by little;
be it the anonymous character that is settling in the zone of nothing that is the other part of the existence of the humble or the citizen who passes under a staircase, an insolent stone falls on him and, although he has dressed in gold, he he no longer eats lunch.
And the Chilean Neruda was more precise.
If we want to find a metaphor for how the physical, and later spiritual destruction of the man who reinvented football was made, which another Argentine, Alfredo Di Stéfano, had invented.
He was immortal, that he himself felt from his body and his spirit.
Pablo Neruda wrote that it is already known how things are breaking, little by little,
until everything is already broken glass, pieces of a life of which pieces remain that are recognizable only because they have become a legend despite the immense noise that precedes oblivion.
He was a legendary player because his triumph was incredible;
He was equipped to be scum, and he revolted against his fate and installed himself in the pantheon of the illustrious of all, until that breath that is the disease returned reality to him like the gift that time gives to a child who does not know since when did he die.
Maradona died.
Football is alive thanks to him.
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