What we have left over is the past, the future is what we are missing. The human condition is forgetfulness, but some memories always await us. Observe the photo. You can tell that both former presidents feel comfortable. Their body postures, their careful, bright smiles work very well. Faces that accumulate a powerful identity, a clean image that suggests to the observer a neatness of moral character, firmness in ideas, existential honesty. Hence the belief that the face is the mirror of the soul. The photo penetrates, opens, perforates, melts. There is something subversive about it. This is explained by the very nature of power, which is, by definition, like money, insatiable. An aesthetic cared for the epic, but paradoxically, it bares a sumptuous scenography of the void and an untamed pornographic political and economic power. Guys with beards on the inside who live the faith of the market with the excessive passion of converts.
At a certain point in life each one can choose the way to flee. A part of the past just happened. Mauricio Macri has withdrawn from the presidential candidacy. A pity. Certainly a hasty decision. He could have done a two for one and also got out of football. But not. He looks like he resists. And he goes in search of the “other” presidency, more powerful, more in his style, more opaque in his accounts: the omnipresent FIFA. An entity where peacocks abound. With no other future than scratching his sex with both hands.
Soccer no longer walks alone. Perhaps I have never done it. He always had his role in the theater of dreams that is politics. Macri knows it. He adopted this sport to climb himself up the right side of power. A discipline that engages, infects and captivates. A sublime game that whitens passion. A way to release the legs. Today we know that, from time to time, the former president made the ball run along with certain robes of the judiciary. A “picadito” with judges who, in addition to loosening his legs, relieved some of his judicial contractures. It is what football has, it gathers wills. Between pipes, rabonas, free throws, a precautionary, a barbecue, a preventive, a confession, the country is becoming. That football of “friends”, the one of a lifetime, of dominant dynasties that mate without rest, institutionalizing their privileges.
Sometimes these privileged classes are a true engine of class consciousness. I don’t know if Donald Trump and Mauricio Macri are aware that they are creating more “Bolivarians” than there really are. Many who have not been one in their lives have doubts as to whether they may be one and they had not realized it. It is known that there is a special art to knowing how to “leave”. Macri has said goodbye to the homeland with elegance. What a talent. He deserves it. He’s going to take a breather. We also. A kind of rest for the soul. He has left behind that moment where he suffered the delusion of believing himself eternal. He stays with soccer. pure despair. Sheer hopelessness. You have to wash the face of hardness. In the portrait of a society that no longer exists, the end of the world, says the poet, will not come with a bang, but with a groan.
Former Vélez player and Tokyo 1979 World Champion.
