The quick answer is for my daughter, for my wife, because I have a Catalan family. But if you ask me seriously why I'm still here, in Barcelona, in these horrible and boring times, it's because I'm forty minutes by train from the best football in history.
I mean, if my wife and my daughter decided to go to live in Argentina right now, I would divorce and stay here at least until the Champions League final. And it is that you never saw something similar inside a soccer field, at any time, and it is very possible that it does not happen anymore.
It's true, I'm writing in hot. Redact this the same week in which Messi made three for Argentina, five for Barça in the Champions League and two for Barça in the League. Ten goals in three games of three different competitions.
The Catalan press does not talk about something else. For a while, the economic crisis is not the starting point in the news. Internet explodes. And in the middle of all this I just had to go through the head a strange theory, very difficult to explain. That is precisely why I will try to write it, to see if I finish flying.
It all started this morning: I'm watching non-stop goals from Messi on Youtube, I do it with guilt because I'm in the middle of the closing of magazine number six. You should not be doing this.
By chance I click on a compilation of fragments that I had not seen before. I think it's a video more than thousands, but I see right away. They are not goals of Messi, nor his best plays, nor his assists. It's a strange compilation: the video shows hundreds of images - from two to three seconds each - in which Messi receives very strong fouls and does not fall.
Do not strip or complain. He is not looking for a direct free kick or a penalty. In each frame, he follows with his eyes on the ball while finding balance. He makes inhuman efforts so that what they did to him is not a fault, nor is it yellow for the opposing defender.
They are many pieces of fierce kicks, obstructions, trampling and traps, treacherous treads and traps; I had never seen them all together. He goes with the ball and receives a guadañazo in the tibia, but it continues. They hit him on the heels: stumble and continue. They grab him from the shirt: he stirs, heaves, and goes on.
I was suddenly stunned, because something was familiar to me in those images. I put every fragment in slow motion and I understood that Messi's eyes are always focused on the ball, but not in football or in context.
The current football has a very clear regulation by which, many times, to fall to the ground is to secure a penalty kick, or to get admonished against the opposing defender is conducive to future kickbacks. In these fragments, Messi seems to understand nothing about football or opportunity.
He is seen as in trance, hypnotized; He only wants the ball inside the opposing arch, he does not care about the sport nor the result nor the legislation. You have to look well in the eyes to understand this: it puts them squint, as if it costs him to read a subtitle; Focuses the ball and does not lose sight of him or even stab him.
Where had I seen that look before? In who? I found that gesture of introspection unreasonable. I left the video paused. I zoomed in on his eyes. And then I remembered it: they were the eyes of Totin when he lost his reason for the sponge.
I had a dog in childhood that was called Totin. Nothing touched him. It was not a smart dog. Thief's came in and he watched them take the TV. The bell rang and did not seem to hear. I vomited and he did not come to lick.
However, when someone (my mother, my sister, myself) grabbed a sponge - a certain yellow sponge to wash the dishes - Totin went mad. He wanted that sponge more than anything in the world, he died for taking that yellow rectangle to the cucha. I showed it in my right hand and he focused it. I was moving her around and he never stopped looking at her. He could not stop looking at her.
It did not matter how fast I moved the sponge: Totin's neck was identical in the air. His eyes became Japanese, attentive, intellectual. Like the eyes of Messi, who stop being those of a precocious preadolescent and, for a fraction of a second, become the scrutinizing eyes of Sherlock Holmes.
I discovered this afternoon, watching that video, that Messi is a dog. Or a dog man. That is my theory, I regret that they have come here with better expectations. Messi is the first dog playing football.
It makes a lot of sense not to understand the rules. Dogs do not pretend to trip when they see a Citroën come, do not complain to the referee when a cat escapes through the medianera, do not seek to get double yellow to the sodero. In the beginnings of football humans were like that too. They were behind the ball and nothing more: there were no colored cards, no forward position, no suspension after five yellows, nor goals of visitors were double. It used to be played as Messi and Totin played. Then football became very rare.
Right now, at this time, everyone seems to be more interested in the bureaucracy of sport, its laws. After a major match, we talk a whole week of legislation.
Did Juan admonish exprofeso to skip the next game and play the classic? Did Pedro really pretend the fault within the area? Will they let Pancho play by accepting clause 208 that indicates that Ernesto is playing U17? The coach gave the home side the lead with an ingenious free kick routine. Did the boys disappear when the party got two to one, and reappeared when it was put two by two? Will the club appeal the double yellow of Paco in the Court of Sports?
Did the referee correctly deduct the minutes that Ricardo lost for protesting the sanction that received Ignacio because of the loss of time of Luis when doing the side?
No sir. Dogs do not listen to the radio, do not read the sports press, do not understand if a party is friendly and inconsequential or a cup final. The dogs always want to take the sponge to the cucha, even if they are dead of sleep or they are killing the ticks.
Messi is a dog. Beat records of other times because only until the fifties played football men dog. FIFA then invited us all to talk about laws and articles, and we forgot that the important thing was the sponge.
And then one day a sick boy appears. As in his day a sick monkey stood erect and began the story of man. This time he has been a rosarino boy with different abilities. Disable to say two phrases in a row, visibly antisocial, incapable of almost everything related to the human picaresque. But with an astounding talent to keep something round and inflated in his power and carry it to a net fabric at the end of a green plain.
If they let him, he will not do anything. Bring that white sphere to the three clubs all the time, like Sisyphus. And again. Guardiola said, after the five goals in a single match:
"The day he wants, he'll make six."
It was not a compliment, it was the objective expression of the symptom. Lionel Messi is a sick man. It is a rare disease that excites me, because I loved Totin and now he is the last man dog. And it is to verify in detail that disease, to see it evolve every Saturday, that I continue in Barcelona although I prefer to live elsewhere.
Every time I go up the inner steps of the Camp Nou and suddenly I see the glow of the illuminated grass, in that moment that always reminds us of childhood, I say the same to myself: you have to be very lucky, Jorge, so you'll like it Much a sport and you play to be contemporary of its best version, and, trascartón, that the court you stay so close.
I enjoy this double fortune. I treasure it, I have nostalgia for the present every time Messi plays. I am fan fanatic of this place in the world and of this historical time. Because, it seems to me, in the Last Judgment we will be all the humans that have been and will be, and a corro will be formed to talk about football, and one will say: I studied in Amsterdam in 73, another will say: I was architect in São Paulo in 62, and another: I was already a teenager in Naples in 87, and my father will say: I traveled to Montevideo in 1967, and one more back: I listened to the silence of Maracana in 50.
Everyone will count their battles with pride until the wee hours. And when there is no one left to speak, I will stand and say slowly: I lived in Barcelona in the times of the dog man. And a fly will not fly. There will be silence. All others will lower their heads. And God will appear, clothed in Final Judgment, and pointing to me he will say: you, the fat one, are saved. Everyone else, to the showers.
