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Other funerals: when Rio greeted Garrincha, he cried and called poor and naive Manè the “Joy of the People”; when Belfast welcomed what was left of George Best, it felt like goodbye to Bobby Sands: only tragic knights and martyrs in that damned corner of the world.
Now we just have to wait What will happen in Lanús, south of Buenos Aires: his first “court” will become a place of pilgrimage, like the modest house. A beatification process that began in life for the Great Sinner, for the Scorpion King, for the despised, excluded, avoided by those who always hope that a good example will be set. Diego never gave it. In any case, wrong. A Lucifer who, just leaving the higher spheres, is going to hell. It was the “left”, the devil’s foot – but his was not the goat’s – and he used it with a natural sweetness that aroused the envy of those who have always fought with the ball. It was a fleeting feeling: everyone loved him, even when their intuitions mocked them, as sudden as a little page on Schubert’s piano.
One day, still bloated just detoxifiedShe was as a guest of Raffaella Carrà and she wore one of those department store dresses, with an uncertain line and uncertain colors. Raffaella was talking to him and he, in the center of the scene, was hitting balls that came from all sides. He hit them on the neck, on the heel, in the middle of the heel, one did not miss and meanwhile he spoke, he spoke of himself, of the world. Diego was also a great rhetorician, a Loco that Shakespeare would have liked: “The truth is a dog that must be kept in a kennel.” He often freed her.
Have you ever had a teacher? Does the question make sense? With all that hair she was a small, irreverent Fluff. Who knows if the others who played with him enjoyed it. Destiny, for someone like that, was beyond the sea, like Alfredo Di Stefano, the Saeta Rubia. The third would have been Lionel Messi, who left as a child because he was not growing: in Barcelona they did something for him and Leo became a Catalan like Alfredo from Madrid. Diego, a Barça player on his first landing, chose to be a Neapolitan because it was written: mind, tastes, sweetness, arrogance, light, darkness. Malaparte would have known him, this adult urchin would have ended up in the pages of “La Pelle”, those of a Naples of lights and an underworld, happy and saturnine.
The faces, the transformations, the metamorphoses, life in the open air that great actors yearn for, death on stage, the body that changes: Maradona was a thin child, a kid, when he bargained in the delirium of his first baptism in Fuorigrotta, he swelled and grew fat until a distortion of features, of expression, ended in a bloody drool when they took him to an emergency service in Bairense (cocaine is the most ruthless of his companions), he lost a few palms of intestine because his plumbing system would work again, he began to throb, to fail, and something in the brain had coagulated. A small oak that attracted lightning, what Hamlet called “the shots of the sling and the darts of atrocious luck.” Hard, die hard.
Someone said a deep boundary, a moat runs between Diego in the field and Diego outme, but the dialectical hyperbole, the behavior, the excesses were the same: only a genius from the lamp (benign? evil?) can engineer the climb to Italy ’90: in the final with a company that was Brancamaradona’s army . A miracle, a miracle, that vanished in one of the ugliest finals, decided by a penalty that who knows if today’s mischief would have been conceded. The defeated Diego ended up becoming invincible.
The images that everyone knows, they have inside, well preserved, and that now continue to flow. “The barrier was a wall, then I saw that ball go up and down and I said to myself: he cheated on me”Stefano Tacconi has been counting for many years that punishment for two in the area that is a black pearl, a rhapsodic intuition. Other goalkeepers suffered and thought they were entitled to an eternal extra role for having been there when he invented a shot, a touch: Giovanni Galli in the ’86 World Cup, Peter Shilton in that same Mexican summer of fraud and masterpieces, Giuliano Giuliani who was ignored by a long parable conceived after a quick glance. And Diego Armando in Mexico perfected what Pelé had experienced in another World Cup, in ’62, against Czechoslovakia.. And in turn he was chased by Messi with a long, tight crescendo, never agitated, built on small imperceptible feints. Genes don’t copy, they steal: Picasso said so too.
Because Diego had an innate, natural, instinctive, wild unity between thought and gesture.He had the time and the coordination and that is why he also scored a header, not as imperious as Pele’s: one, hitting with his head flush. His intuitions rested on a singular rationality, only his own. And that is why today it is difficult to say what will be the image that each of us will carry inside: it does not embrace him with the powerful, not his livid and tragic nights, not his physical decay, not his wandering around unimportant benches. Better him, alone, with a look full of a serenity that has passed. Time to hit a ball and find out where it would go.
