The family story refutes with facts one of my first memories, but I still refuse to consider it apocryphal. I saw the 1978 final in a rocking chair on my mother's lap, who was jumping with Kempes' goals and I was going to the ground. I keep in my retina the display of the Clockwork Orange on the green carpet of the Monumental and the glorious final rain of little pieces of paper. The problem is not that he remembers that chromatic contrast when he was only three years old, but that there was no color TV at home until the 80s.
In any case, it was also the World Cup of a suspicious defeat of Peru and of the ignominious propaganda of the dictatorship with that of "Argentines are rights and humans" that many prefer to forget. The one that my generation does remember with pride is the one from Mexico '86, the one with the "cosmic kite" and "the hand of God." I close my eyes and see myself at school filling out the grid of eighths and quarters on the way to the long-awaited final. The "children" of that ferocious dictatorship redeemed in a democracy that had managed to imprison the genocidal people believed that everything was possible and in fact it was. I am sure that we carry in our memory not only the "goal of the century", but also the much more modest but definitive one by Burruchaga, almost at stoppage time in the final, when he received the magical gift from Diego when he broke the goal line. the German centrals.
Since then we have reaped nothing but disgust and frustration, from Italy 90 and the disastrous years of Menem to the debacle of 2001, from the failure of Korea 2002 to the Macri scam. They will tell me that I confuse everything: the political and social with the sporting, but it is a house brand. Argentine passion is like that. And the Messiah era did not free us from that, not even with Pelusa on the bench, because the World Cup was the only title that resisted him like a curse. It had to be in the last championship of the "son of God", after the Nietzschean and unexpected death of that one in 2020, so that he would bring us the expected redemption in a heart attack final. “First you have to know how to suffer...”, said Homero Expósito in Naranjo en flor and without a doubt Qatar taught us more than tango. But also that football sometimes, just sometimes, blends with poetry. As much for the beauty of the calligrams that Leo triangulated in his head before drawing them on the field or for the fantasy of Dibu Martínez, as for his sense of justice. That it is Messi's World Cup is poetic justice.
I am aware that another debate is now opening that may never be resolved about the best player in history, if the Father or the Son, although I would prefer the Holy Spirit. Because the one in Qatar is a final that I already have the memory of, the one with the namesakes who deserve the glory. That of the other Lionel, Scaloni, the true architect in all the modesty of his miracle. And that of my dear namesake Mathias Énard, the Mbappé of Gallic letters, whom I did not dare to console and who showed me, with his sincere congratulations, that he is one of the writers who knows the most about poetry and its ineffable justice. .
