To Lisandro and Matías Scalona
Every once in a while Enrico returned to the sixth and as if drawn by an ineffable secret to the Tablada, to the surroundings of the Central Córdoba court where he used to recover the smell of dark green grass and wet from the dew of autumn mornings. Enrico felt a kind of revelation there, something like a feeling of the ancient, emanating from a nature prior to everything real, even to time, and trying to recover that experience, he sat on a bench in the train station, stalked by the idea that in life everything tends to a close relationship between a beginning and an end and simultaneously, with the rare premonition of something lost in the present and not yet of something to come. The day was cloudy and the forecast called for some rain. Indeed, a slight drizzle was not long in coming and Enrico, enveloped and absorbed by the harmony of that music, was not long in dreaming, half asleep, of absent Gods who tried in this way to rejoice in the presence of good men. When he came back to himself, or thought he came to, he found at the end of the bench a very humble-looking man who had taken shelter. He was a very advanced man. Don’t be alarmed, he said, I usually sit here every morning to distinguish between what always exists without ever becoming and what passes without subsisting in the same thing.
Enrico was amazed at the unexpected enunciation that revealed a complexity and a certain knowledge that contradicted mere appearance. Somewhat disconcerted, the only thing that occurred to him was to ask: Is he from around here?… Yes, he replied, always. I have worked on the railway and played in Central Córdoba. And you? No, said Enrico, I come from time to time. I’m from the Sixth, but… the field is a reservoir of memories.
I believe it, said the other, while the face took on a glowing expression, I played here with Collins, Constantino, Morales, and Fernández. One afternoon in 1932 I shouted three cheers for the ones in slippers and a scarf… “The ones in slippers and a scarf?” Enrico questioned.
Yes, Irigoyen’s radicals… it was the time when the military had executed Penina, in the saladillo, when they carried out the Uriburu coup. I will never forget, the people cheered us and the leaders sanctioned me. But, he added, you don’t know anything about that.
Of course not, Enrico hastened to answer. I am an anarchist and I know the history of Penina and I also know who you are talking about… and you, he added, what is her name?
Gabino, he said, but my name won’t tell you anything.
Enrico remembered the Saturdays and Sundays, when with his father, his grandfather and one of his uncles, sitting on the boards in the prelude to the game, they greeted the presence of an old Gabino Sosa, mixed among the fans, as if he were a presence sacred, which was hidden in the collective explosion before the entrance of the team.
Nowhere else had I felt such a multitudinous communion of passion, fueled by the underlying idea that a team is the ongoing collaboration of one another, an ideal that aspires to archetypal perfection. Surely influenced by his reading, he understood that soccer does not only imply rolling a ball, but what at some point, a moment in early age, identifies us with colors that determine belonging, something of unconscious fidelity to the childhood, the neighborhood, friendship, something that absorbed in the whirlwind of passion a gale of collective signs that homologate life with play and with a kind of agonism. After all, in the rite of each game, there is an alternation between winning or losing and the possibility of a rematch in the next game, which life itself rarely allows. In short, fidelity to an immanent experience of the difference in each one subordinated without a doubt to the ideal of a collective transcendence…
After a moment of silence, Gabino added: Today everything is different, success contaminates everything. We entered the field as one enters a temple, as if the beauty of the game could attract the presence of ancient gods to the playing field, one god in each of the eleven who encouraged the game as an experience of the world and beauty. of a truth destined to consecrate and celebrate, despite, or despite, the absence of an almighty God in heaven and on earth.
Those words made Enrico turn his gaze towards the stadium, which erected in its modest architecture, an emblem of the neighborhood, connecting and gathering around itself, the unity of those trajectories and anonymous relationships in which victory and defeat, hope and ruin, birth and death, determine the condition of human beings who made the place their home.
Turning to Gabino, Enrico thought he saw that he was returning along the side of the track, into the presence of the distant, and a deep nostalgia seized him. He sought shelter from the elements, under the rain that seemed to him a blessing under a sky full of fortune and also of mistakes. A few loose phrases about the essence of the game, which he had heard on the radio once, reiterated the concept of soccer as a dynamic of the unthinkable and that Enrico permuted from the beginning of his teaching activity, in a logic in motion. The art of the round, that round that comes from an Archimedean solid that he obtained by truncating each vertex of an icosahedron with thirty two faces, twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, whose shape, after 1,700 years, continues to captivate men. It is not strange, therefore, that Enrico interpreted soccer, beyond the misuse that different powers made of its popularity, as a game whose essence is the exercise of a truth that he translated as an art. An art that, for greater satisfaction, the momentary interpreters of it, came mostly from the villas, and that consequently, beyond the contradictions, constituted one of the few happinesses of the poorest.
Before crossing 27 de Febrero he moved towards Necochea, because the drizzle was not abating and was already soaking through his bones. There he was able to take the 102, to get to his home quickly. In the bustle he was able to verify with some complacency that he had not only traveled south, but also into the past. The neighborhood hadn’t changed much; essentially it was the same as his childhood. At the corner of Necochea and Cerrito, to the east, towards the river and the poor area on the banks, some boys played soccer with a rag ball. The window glass superimposed a reflection of his own aging face. Around seventy-seven he had stopped going to his love club in Arroyito, but in that instant illuminated by the momentary and unforeseen vision, and an anesthetized desire that suddenly awoke, he decided that he would return on Sunday.
