In the new novel by Eduardo Mendoza (‘Three enigmas for the Organization’) the narrator remembers the Barça players “lifting the European Champions Cup at Wembley, on that distant day in 1992…”. In the same novel (Seix Barral), another of the crazed protagonists of this hilarious book confuses the Camp Nou with another monument in the city and, in general, everything seems so loud and grotesque that in the end the laughter raises morale of so much misfortune shared by the characters masterfully drawn by the best narrator of present-day Spanish literature.
I am relieved to recount these football events that have only those casual mentions of the glories of the past, but that are illuminated in a novel that I now recommend. for those who, like me, have a frozen smile, a contrite future and the desire to throw joy overboard which at one time we had even when Barça won by playing decently.
Now the team that until June 30 still belongs to Xavi, its coach, lives inside a sad novel, dictated by a former player who still does not know what illness his defeats are made of. Everything happens as if it were a bad dream in which even the shield fades. The footballers, urged to be better, are getting worse every time, illuminated by a light that comes from doubt and that, as in this Saturday’s game, turns into unmitigated misery.
Imagining a worse script would be possible if right now the game were resurrected and they told us, from the Barça bench or from the presidency, that everything is a lie, that everything is fiction and that, immediately, as soon as the nightmare is over, it will come to illuminate history a total rectification of what has happened.
This is not going to happen, of course, because what happened with Barça is reality, a concrete fact, a dark lighting against a wall of terror that has made clumps of footballers who, Except for youth exceptions, such as Pedri and Yamal, they are leaving behind the modesty of playing.
Xavi’s Barça has already finished with its dose of palliatives. To imagine him again saying that he is strong is to grant him an extension from which he himself must get rid of, if it does not happen that, while I write this lament for the painful novel that we have been reading with Barça letters, what for him, now, has not occurred. itself, it would be a relief. But, no, he says he’s leaving in June. Wow, the month of Saint John.
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This is a cruel world, you know; There are terrible things happening in the world, and football is just an epiphenomenon, something we find wrapped in trash or newspapers. So there is no need to exaggerate the damage., but this is our game, we have made ourselves wanting this team to win, thanks to him, in the past that was evoked, for example, by the narrator of Mendoza’s novel, we have become participants in an invincible illusion. But now Barça is starring in a sad crime novel in which the airs of farce stand out.
I think that all those who want relief from this fatal, human moment should go to the neighborhood bookstore, or the library, and pick up ‘Three Enigmas for the Organization’. There you will find some keys to take away sadness from sadness, as Alfredo Bryce Echenique wrote elsewhere.