Even though Italian is the language of my paternal great-grandparents, I don't know how to speak it. It goes wrong, I mix it with Portuguese and French and make a miserable cocoliche.
The first time I went to Naples I was desperate, I could barely make myself understood in English. It was spring and I went into an ice cream shop. I wanted to try the typical pistachio ice cream. I tried to ask the employee and when it came to indicating the size the mess began with my tongue. At that, the employee shouted into the ice cream shop: "Vieni qui! La donna parla eats Maradona!" .
The other employees came running; Smiling they asked me: "Parla, parla di piú". They liked to hear my accent, our Argentine lisp, which evoked to them the glory days of Napoli, champion several times during Maradona's seven-year stay at the club. In short, I was served a giant pistaccio and cioccolato ice cream.
A year ago I was in Panama and pressed by the heat, I stopped in the street to take a scrape. A kind of glass with crushed ice, sweet syrup and condensed milk. In Palermo Hollywood they would call it smoothie. The street vendor asked me where I was from. "Rosario, Argentina," I replied. (Clarification: a Rosarino of law never answers that he is from Santa Fe). He was puzzled. "Rosario," I explained, "where is Messi from."
The man listened devoutly when I described to him what the Abanderado Grandoli court was like where the Flea debuted as a child. I remembered Messi saying: "You leave Rosario, but Rosario doesn't leave you."
