“I put the Napoli jersey on Maradona’s coffin”

In the convulsive, distorted and poignant hours of the day after the death of MaradonaWhile the television images of the Pibe de Oro coffin flowed before the eyes of anyone in the world, a silent but emotionally deafening detail went almost unnoticed as one approached with pain and respect the last goodbye to Diego. In the center of each shot, an integral part of each scene or shot, immobile and protagonist, was Pelusa’s coffin embraced and enveloped by the souls of the Boca Juniors and the Argentine National Team, greeted by the collected and infinite human river of Buenos Aires: the blue and gold xeneize, cheered since childhood, and the albiceleste of his Argentina, of the two fulfilled dreams of playing a world championship and winning it. The colors of a life, a career, a legend, but not the blue of Naples. Nothing. For hours. Nothing to remember at that time, in front of the whole world, the long parable of D10S in the shadow of Vesuvius, his advent, his revelation, his paradise and his hell together, the place where more than anyone else in the world he is his left foot and his simple and revolutionary soul assumed absolute sacredness, inviolable dogma, profane as never before and as never would have been afterwards.

The official number 10 sent by Italy to accompany Diego in the last farewell was expected, he was on his way and, as the Italian club attests thanks to the efforts of the club and the Italian ambassador in Argentina, it will finally arrive. It will arrive at 7:28 p.m., when the decision to close access to the public had caused outrage and protests outside the Pink House, in that Plaza de Mayo still crowded with people in religious pilgrimage, and will be immortalized and placed in the place where it should have been and that belongs to it. But it won’t be the first. A few hours before her, captured from above by the televisions broadcasting the greeting of former Argentine president Cristina Kirchner, another Napoli shirt appears that suddenly, among the hundreds who flew to Maradona, seems to bring from the town, from the heart of the town, that color that was missing from memory. A simple soccer jersey, like so many others, this time with something much bigger inside. A story.

From Morales to Maradona to Carlo and that Napoli shirt

“My life is inhabited by Maradona. She is persecuted, intertwined with Diego.” It is the enveloping and unforgettable voice of Victor Hugo Morales, the teacher “relator”, the epic singer of the cosmic kite, the most famous radio narrator in the world who thus describes himself to Federico Buffa in one of the many exceptional moments of journalism, art and culture created by the best Italian sports narrator of our time. A phrase that encompasses an entire existence and that also lends itself to telling a lesser, less famous but equally extraordinary plot: the one that unites Carlo Ferrara, 42, Diego Armando Maradona, 60, throughout his life.

Carlo, why are you in Buenos Aires?
“I am an environmental economist and I have been here for almost a year, after four in Colombia and eight in China, I work for an international company committed to the Argentine state”, he explains in a video chat with his voice still literally broken with emotion, “Excuse me, in two days I slept three hours, I did nothing but drive around town until nightfall and then go back to work and say goodbye one last time.

What happened when you found out? What was happening there?
“I was in a meeting, they told me later that I turned pale when a colleague gave me the news. I remember finishing the meeting and leaving work at five, after other meetings where we were all shocked and closed. ASAP I got on a bike and just pedaled and cried. In the ghostly silence, very few cars, only the sound of the buildings from the televisions that were broadcasting live. I went to the stadiumArgentinos Juniors, when I arrive there are small groups of people, there are still silences, sometimes a chorus for Diego, disbelief, astonishment on their faces with puffy eyes. I was moved, there was a boy with a Napoli shirt in front of a mural of Diego crying in silence. You know, here if you are Italian they call you “five“From Napoleon, because thousands emigrated from Italy. The Argentines envy us, they respect us, they like the Napoli jersey, we have lived more Diego than they …”

And so?
“I cut the whole city, I go from there to Candy box. In the neighborhoods, people began to gather, the luminous signs that gave directions all had the same writing: Thank you Diego. When I arrive I find a very different environment, more and more people, the strongest refrain was “The one who does not jump is an Englishman”, when “Diego, Diego” starts to cry again. I always tried to respect the distances but it was difficult, we cried and hugged each other, I remember the banner that arrives, it unrolls ”.D10S He is with God “… Then I go to the Obelisk and then to the Casa Rosada where they are already fixing the barriers, until three, three thirty in the morning, I go out while the family was about to arrive and they began to set up the funeral home. Three hours of sleep, and then go back to work, I go out at one o’clock to go say hello for the last time. There were two lines, the one for ordinary people and another dedicated to institutions, athletes and foreigners, in this regard. My turn and when I entered I stay in a corner crying, minutes, I don’t know how many. At the end I leave a flower and the Napoli shirt that I had, 2015/2016, that my friends from Roma gave me when I went to South America. You can see it clearly on TV because fortunately it is placed on the side with respect to the things that arrived and that accumulated in front. I cared a lot about that shirt but it was good that I left it there, I regretted that there was no Napoli shirt there to remember it. I left, I was overwhelmed A, also began the first dist urbios around the news that the entrance would soon be closed. I shared what I had done on social media, it seemed right for people to know that Naples was there, even there, even at that time, and since then I have continued to receive messages from many people thanking me for doing it. I’m happy, Diego deserved it and Naples deserved it. That gesture, that shirt represented a whole generation that it is fair that there is, there, at that moment.

Napoli, Maradona, Scudetto, meeting between Havana and Beijing

Maradona has been with you all your life, you told me before …
“Yes, my parents lived in Milan for work, but I was born in Naples in 1978 because my mother comes home to give birth. Then we return to live there in the summer of 1984, precisely that of Diego’s arrival. We arrived together, and from then on he will always be present in my life. I am the son of a Napoli fan, who always took me to the stadium to watch the game: we went four, five hours before, it was a party, you learned many things, it was carnival every Sunday. I will be eternally grateful to my father for letting me live all this. Napoli had his place in the world, they had the strongest player in the world, as a child you think that’s normal. And not just San Paolo, thanks to the friendships built by my family in the years of work in the north also left Juve-Naples, I Milan-Naples, the Bury-Naples, I Verona-Naples, I remember the naivety when I asked my father what that writing with marker left us as a welcome in the stands of the Bentegodi “Welcome samples but wash yourselves”, the posters “Welcome to Italy”, “Wash yourselves” …Diego was redemption and revenge for the entire South ”.

“I was 8, 9 years old when Napoli won their first Scudetto. I remember my father’s tears of joy and his words:” Now you are a child, you think that all this is normal … but it is not, one day you will understand. “.” And as I got older I understood, I understood when he asked me why he wanted to leave Marseilles, when I began to open my eyes to what Naples was, when we found ourselves playing in Serie C … I remember when as a child I heard that word, doping, they hurt me, they betrayed me, but then I discovered the human side of the champion, the battles he was carrying out … I also remember the San Paolo in Italy-Argentina in World Cup 1990, the stadium that was divided in love for the national team and that for Diego, I remember NapoliStuttgart, Napoli-Bayern, that NapoliReal Madrid, Francini’s goal, the header from bald and Buyo sitting on the balloon …

And after Naples?
“I experienced everything Maradona live, then I find it incredibly in Cuba: I was there to prepare the thesis on Cuban environmental economic policies, on the alternative that questioned to the bone the myopic choices of the Western economic model, of theoretically infinite growth without considering the stress and limits of our planet, and it arrives precisely in that moment on the island to be helped by Fidel, his great friend. I never liked the onslaught of the fans that he had to endure every day of his life, all about him wanting a piece of Diego, but when he was there for five days I tried at least to see him but he was isolated from everything else. Then to Beijing, in the final of the 2008 Olympic Games, Argentina wins the gold medal with Riquelme, Mascherano, Di María, Agüero and Messi in the field (and Lavezzi that I know and he in the stands a few meters from me, now I’m here in Buenos Aires in an absurd and dramatic period when he leaves. With him goes all the joy of life, a presence that in one way or another has always accompanied me, as it has with billions of people. ”

What was Maradona for a child, a child, a Neapolitan?
“The good that Diego did me, the emotions, the joy that he made me live, is something that goes beyond. I will be grateful to him for life. Maradona was a sense of justice that does not exist in the world. Peel, It is not Ronaldo, it’s not a pretty cover. It is from the Villa and has never left it. He united the Davids of the whole world against the Goliaths, even paying dearly for it. He always put a face on it, paid for every mistake and every battle in the first person. He did not want to be an example and yet he has been converted. And the last lesson, the one he did not give, is his life for young people. He does it dying so young, in his sixties, in bad shape, it is the last warning, the last lesson he could not give in life.