Touch Villoro from the middle:
Granjuán, today we are embarking on a long road that will be short and will not take us very far.
World Cups are rare: this certainty that something is going to happen that will hold our attention for a month.
It doesn't usually happen: the news, the stories, the facts that hold her back suddenly, unexpectedly, settle like a bully friend on the sofa.
But not this one: we've known for years what it's going to be, we just don't know what it's going to be.
So, throughout this month, we will see it.
Then it will end and so much will have happened and nothing will have happened.
But first of all, we have to find the names.
Everything is in the nomination: the privilege of man, a god told him to try to cajole him, is to decide the names of things.
I must give you a name, Granjuán, to guide us in this correspondence.
It is appropriate, then, I think, to call you his Excellency, because your excellence is what the rare jury of a foundation founded by Gabriel García Márquez (a) Gabo, who gave you his Ditto Award, has just highlighted.
So you will be, for me, throughout this long month, his Excellency or, if anything, tacky that I am, Your Excellency, butterfly monarch.
Your Excellency: I have named you, we must define what we are going to talk about.
It's strange: this football festival starts and it seems that, first of all, we should talk about other matters: how it was invented, made possible.
A few days ago, in this same newspaper, my friend Enric González –never on a sofa– reminded us that Qatar had won its right to host this party because a French president of France named Sarkozy wanted to sell him combat planes and then he threatened a president Frenchman from UEFA called Platini to settle the matter for him.
Platini did it – and later they fired him for corruption – and Sarkozy sold his weapons – and later they judged him for corruption.
It was said by the then Swiss FIFA president named Blatter, who was also fired for being corrupt.
And that, to seal that friendship,
Meanwhile, the emirate put together the necessary scenarios.
For that, firm in its tradition as a New York village, it bought a million immigrants to build its stadiums, hotels, avenues, subways, urinals – you don't know, Your Excellency, the amount of urine that a World Cup engenders.
Since they were cheap – the immigrants, not the urinals – he took little care of them: around 7,000 died working.
Seven thousand people, men from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, who sacrificed themselves for Qatar to have its batuque.
I proposed in a magazine from your homeland that, at least, we offer each martyr his minute of silence: if we did, each of the 64 games that are coming now would be preceded by more than one hundred silent minutes.
The world would suddenly look so different:
It's not very likely to happen.
Because football has that privilege: it makes almost anything else improbable.
It makes us, to begin with, improbable ourselves.
It makes us other, it transforms us.
Much has been said: it allows us to be children for a while.
I agree and I disagree: sometimes, when I hear it, I feel like vindicating the noble group of children and saying that what turns us back is something else.
Of course I don't, because of not starting to spit up so early.
Like football, viper, poisons me: I'll look at it, I'll apologize for looking at it, I'll keep looking at it.
At times, following this World Cup seems almost as incoherent as continuing to use Twitter.
But football allows you to exercise with a certain impunity that contradiction that occurs so many times, with so many other faces: enthusiastically doing something that, well thought out, seems wrong to you.
The examples would be numerous but they embarrass me: if you dare –and if you agree–, you can give a few, or keep them quiet.
In any case, the 22nd World Cup – recalls the famous
Trap
–, the fifteenth of our football life, is already launching: for a month God will be round and I, a convinced atheist, am going to pray to him with shouts and songs.
Soccer, then, in industrial quantities, in industrial qualities, at its peak.
Throughout this long defeat we will talk about that and about this.
As your brothers from the North say, “I can't wait”.
I never understood if it was that they were impatient or that waiting for what they expected seemed like a mistake: that everyone chooses what is best for them.
But let's not talk anymore, the ball almost rolls and silences us.
That is what it is used for, among other things.
Hugs, Your Excellency.
May our god distribute luck.
