I didn’t look at anything else. A title on the socket when I turned on the TV when I came back from lunch. Behind that news there would surely be the time and the manner, but the truth is the socket. Sometimes sockets are complex or intentional, well or ill-intentioned. At other times they have defects. The kids who write the zócalos tend to be semi-distracted with the language or simple words and on many occasions I suspect that they don’t know how to spell carrot. So many times I felt like insulting them for being rude or inattentive and yet I wished they were wrong, but when they have to do damage, television sockets are armor-piercing bullets that no armor can stop.
César Luis Menotti died “sito”. The “site”. The skinny. I am full of stories never published, also minimal suspicions of their different nature. From loves before loves and towns that nearby have him like the one who once was in a bed where he couldn’t. The Communist Party should seek testimonies of his appearance as prosecutor. In my case I would have to return the package with two dead and gutted bunnies for a rabbit stew that Graciela would make in Buenos Aires and that the mother would send with my travel bag from Rosario to Buenos Aires when we were both already on the same flight of her life. . He as what he was, plane and engine. Many, including myself, as passengers.
They should confess that all those who, one a month, both he and the thrush Oliva, managed to leave the country during terrible years, were saved. Bishop Zazpe did the same. Reutemann too. All survivors should tell it. In the case of Lole, I know this because direct relatives, with my blood, survived with that system of leniency of murderers towards people they could not kill or silence.
The skinny one was an impossible silence, he would always talk. The tremendous doubt is whether, if it had been another, clumsier, cruder guy, without complex thought structures and not very inclined to conjugate verbs in his time, they would have forgiven him for his ability in football as well as his ease in life. The problem with him was not sports, it was society and sports and the right did not like that, because those who think bother and the left, because those who do not think like one also bother. Since when the UOM had power and Perón was the government, the soldiers did not remove him because… the UOM had power. The skinny guy was a sponge that absorbed knowledge and the most tremendous thing: he knew the difference between good and evil. Better said: between Good and Evil.
Life created so many crazy things (in our lives) that one is enough for me to sustain that, the madness of a life that never stops, until a socket destroys that certainty. The “thrush” Oliva, after the ’78 World Cup, did x-rays and that matter of blowing and analyzing sputum and the sea in the car on lungs. It was two packs of black cigarettes a day. Maybe more. His lungs looked like those of a kid who had just started with the vices of a little man. That brought me certainty: he was immortal.
When we signed the first contract with PUMA “the black one” Pelé was angry. And it bothered the skinny guy that they came to sign, in a very short time, something similar with Maradona. Che, the skinny guy saw Maradona born and kept Kempes on the team. He managed to tell Messi what Messi doesn’t know if he says it well, but that he simply congratulates him because he understood the game.
The life of the weak is reduced—as an unappealable formula—to those who understand and do not understand the game. I struggled with that for a long time, until I understood that I was skilled at identifying those who are like me, those who don’t understand the game. I only know that he died and it is too much for a friend because it is true, something of us disappears.
