When this Friday he takes the field leading the line of players of Argentinos Juniors – or on Wednesday, for the Copa Libertadores, if they decide to preserve him due to the drag of an injury – Miguel Torrén will have one more game and one brother less.
He will be only three games away from being the player with the most presences in the history of the club and will face it, as he said, "putting him forward, because if I stay lying at home I will get into a blind pit from which I will not be able to get out".
The Torréns were six siblings but only two remain.
The other four were killed in Rosario. The last one, this weekend.
His family tragedy is an X-ray between the lines of Argentine society, almost 50 years after a boy named Diego Maradona appeared in the world of football at the same club where Torrén is now captain.
The Torréns' mother died before Miguel was three months old. She was electrocuted by a fan cable.
Poor households have no circuit breaker.
The tragedy of that humble death led to a father working all day to feed seven mouths and children growing up alone, between the precarious attention of older brothers and the harsh unreason of the street.
Miguel was playing ball, wiry and barefoot, when a man saw him, offered to go to the court of his club, talked to his father and took him home.
The boy ended up staying to live with that surrogate family that, the player remembers today, saved him.
The other brothers did what they could.
One was shot dead while riding a motorcycle. Another was killed inside the canchita of a village in Rosario. The third, in a atrocious family fight with two brothers-in-law.
The last one would have been shot by the long shadow of the narco trigger.
There was a knock on his door, he opened it and shot him five times in the chest without saying a word.
Did you consume and not pay? Did he distribute and not be held accountable? Did he want to open up and they wouldn't let him?
They are the first police hypotheses about his crime.
Marginality lurks and kills in a thousand ways. Football saves but only sometimes.
Maradona had a similar origin, but 30 years earlier.
The change of destination could have been a stroke of chance – while the father worked, Diego and his brothers did have their mother to take care of them – but it also contains a desperate cold fact: there are more chances of dying in Rosario in 2023 than in Villa Fiorito in the 60s.
Drugs and violence in daily life have only increased since those years.
And back then a poor family was closer to ascending to the middle class than to falling into the darkness of the margins.
All the boys still went to school.
Torrén is captain of the team of which president Alberto Fernández is a fan.
His announcement that the Army would go to Rosario to urbanize the emergency neighborhoods turned as much in the void as the inauguration of the train to Mendoza that has never arrived.
Unfulfilled promises with different consequences.
And the gendarmes who patrolled Aníbal Fernández's visit for TV?
Torrén's brother was alive when the government went to Rosario to deal with the narco issue "to the bone" two months ago. Not anymore.
When Aníbal arrived on March 8, Rosario had 65 dead for the year. Now it has 132.
Social degradation crosses decades and geographies of Argentina with the edge of an impious razor.
The same failures to address identical problems are an infuriating and eternal Groundhog Day.
The last irony is a historical synthesis.
Torrén is the emblem of the only Primera team that we call, simply, Argentinos.
