Peru vs Argentina in literature: From Osvaldo Bayer to Julio Ramón Ribeyro

“Soccer is the only religion that does not have atheists“, He said. And later, rehearsing a shot that was aimed directly at the portico defended by Rudyard Kipling and JL Borges, declared enemies of football: “How is soccer like God? In the devotion that many believers have for him and in the distrust that many intellectuals have him”. And then he decided to turn his old Olivetti into a symphony of the senses: “His majesty football” (1968) and “Football in the sun and shadow” (1995) are books loaded with a lightning and exquisite prose, accurate and lethal as a free throw that describes a parabola in the air and is nailed in the angle. That was Eduardo Galeano (1940 – 2015), messenger, cartoonist, laborer in an insecticide factory, stenographer, bank teller, diagrammer, editor, pilgrim from America and exquisite soccer player… in his dreams.

Galeano was not Argentine. But the epic of his pen was the nuclear center that generated a frankly cataclysmic outbreak in prose and verse: short story writers, versifiers, essayists, sociologists and writers of all stripes and with unequal fortune dedicated themselves to typing on that mixture of popular epic and controlled savagery. that subjugates the inhabitants of the Río de la Plata. In his books is everything: the stadium, the fan, the fan, the player, the goalkeeper, the goal, the idol, the business, the coach, the referee, the soccer doctors, the hidden forces, the world championships, the owners of the ball, leg traffic. For an army of epigones to take care of their variables: from fanaticism to unreason, from millionaire trafficking to organized crime, through speculators, bad tactics and the so-called ‘football philosophy’, a behavioral phenomenon that can only be explained in a country like Argentina, justly called ‘Freudland’ for having the highest number of psychiatrists per capita in the world.

Was Argentina 78 a smokescreen to cover up Videla’s crimes? Was it a momentary endorsement of the dictatorship? Did the exiles celebrate? Was the exhaust pipe to oppression? How were the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo treated during the twenty-five days that the Cup lasted? Was it forbidden to criticize Menotti? Why did they only repatriate Kempes? Why didn’t the Dutch go to the award ceremony? And the million dollar question: Was the match with Peru arranged? These are some of the immense questions that Bauso Matías tries to answer in “78. Oral history of the World Cup ”(2018), the reconstruction of the as endearing as bittersweet contest for our bicolor.

Set a year before, “The red game: The greatest feat of Argentine football in the midst of the bloodiest dictatorship”(2018) by Claudio Gómez attempts a gateway to a certain climate of heroism that was living under the brutal repression of those years. But if it is about archeologizing the history of Argentine football, in “Héroes de Tiento. History of Argentine Soccer 1920-1930 ″ Carlos Aira ties 125 stories of loves, hatred, defeats, trips, leaders, passions, ambitions, journalists, businessmen, tango players with the structural embryo of an identity that overflows the green ring to structure a certain identity from La Plata .

That, according to the journalist Diego Ariel Estevez was born on June 20, 1867 when a group of enthusiastic ‘sportmen’ organized a pichanguita in Palermo and a certain Alexander Watson Hutton ended up formalizing it in 1893. He documents it in his book “140 years of Argentine football” (2010). Ideal complement to the brilliant chronicle that the no less endearing Osvaldo Jorge Bayer (1927 – 2018) will build in “Argentine Football. Passion and glory of our most popular sport ”(2016), great treatise on magicians, volatineros, jugglers, poor circus clowns, theater for grown-up children, too many noises, many scares, campaign masses and lonely tears on the emerald green of his prose.

The Danish referee stopping a match to look for his false teeth. The striker who scores all four goals in a match that ends 2 to 2. Another who scores seven goals in a match that his team loses 8 to 7. A seagull and a dog score valid goals. A team loses by putting a one-armed goalkeeper. Another team that arrives drunk after a partner’s marriage. A federation suspends a player who was dead a week ago. Anyway, tremendous editorial success of the journalist Luciano Wernicke (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1969), who writes in Spanish and is translated into English, French, Italian, Russian, Hindi, Hungarian, Finnish, Czech, Indonesian, Malay, Portuguese, German, Estonian, and Arabic, Bulgarian, Placo, Greek, Ukrainian, Kyrgyz, Turkish, Dutch, Korean, Chinese, and Slovak.

With which he demonstrated that soccer can as much as the literary fiction of the ranked Samanta Schweblin, translated into twenty-five languages. Or Eduardo Sacheri, more than twenty. And when it comes to figures, Daniel Dionisi tries a parallel between Argentine identity and goals in “50 impacts of Argentine football” (2016): Racing, Independiente, River, Boca and, of course, El Diez. The bibliography, later, will opt for events of lesser incidence, such as the cup that the modest team from La Boca found on November 28, 2000 at 7 in the morning at the National Stadium in Tokyo when they beat Real Madrid ( “Mouth of the world” – Martín Souto, 2020). And the like.

But between the ‘fantastic realism’ of the journalist Pedro Saborido (“A football story”, 2017) and the trail of books that investigate the times that Maradona blew his nose, recite the prose of an unusual author: Jorge Valdano (Santa Fe , 1955). Not only is he the author of the goal that gave Argentina the last World Cup – ”after the goal I thought: is it true, is it a lie? Is it the real world or is it again the dream of a lifetime that I’m scoring a goal in the World Cup final? It is the fear that your mother will wake you up ”- Valdano is also a notable prose writer:“ Soccer dreams ”,“ Soccer stories ”,“ Soccer stories II ”,“ Valdano’s notebooks ”,“ Stage fright and other herbs ”,“ Soccer: the infinite game ”. A man capable of transmitting to the readers of the paper the fascination that the heroes feel on the field.

“Agile, fine, winged, electric, sudden, delicate, sudden: that’s how I saw you play in the Olympic afternoon ”. A nice guy from Huancaíno, bohemian and globetrotter, was in Montevideo seeing that needle of colors and bronze with electric tremor called Gradín. Then he had no choice but to keep writing: “Arrow, viper, bell, banner! / Gradín, blue and green bullet! Gradin, balloon that goes! / billiard player of that sudden and vibrant carom / that breaks in the heads and lines up further … / and flying disco, / you pass one … / two … / three … four … / seven players …”.

Paradoxically, the best verses that a Peruvian poet has lavished were not on Lolo Fernández or Teófilo Cubillas. They went to a footballer born in Lesotho (1897), who grew up in Palermo in Montevideo and died in the most absolute destitution, but who shines in the verses of the bard Juan Parra del Riego (1894 – 1925): “Throbbing and jubilant / like the cry that is suddenly thrown at an aviator / all so clear and nervous, / I sing to you, oh wonderful player! / that today you have made my chest like a tremulous drum”. And because of that “dynamic polyrhythmic to Gradín, soccer player”, the bard admired by the famous Uruguayan poets Delmira Agustini and Juana de Ibarbourou is considered Uruguayan: a street in the Parque Rodó neighborhood bears his name and has a bust.

Our best prose – that of Ribeyro, of course — he would be in charge of perpetuating the movement of our stars, like Lolo Fernández, ‘the Peruvian gunboat’, in stories of marginal beings that mark the paradoxical charm that going to the colossus of José Díaz means. Here is the thunderous ‘Atiguibas’, that “drunken sambo with curly hair, coarse nose, and purplish complexion marked by craters and bumps like a well-handled bunch of burgundy grapesWhich ends up ripping off the narrator. And it immortalizes that mixture of popular epic and controlled savagery that everyone calls soccer and until now nobody can convincingly explain.

Because, as in literature and football, what remains is that irremediable melancholy that we feel after love (and the final whistle).