Paolo Guerrero: the day when Trujillo was an unforgettable city that marked him in his childhood | CHRONICLE

His face, elongated by nature and sullen by the impertinence of the moment, changed. Her eyes and mouth stretched back and her nose stretched forward. The youngest Peruvian soccer player sold abroad smiled.

The first photos you just saw, of all the ones you received, were taken in Trujillo when you were a child.

In one of them, he appears when he was two years old, at his godparents’ house, in the Las Quintanas urbanization and, in another, in the Buenos Aires stadium, in the Víctor Larco district, when he was around 10. They show him the photos of the Bayern Munich forward was a shock, it had charm and disappointment.

On Thursday, June 2, 2005, at the Jorge Chávez airport, when the team was getting ready to travel to Colombia to receive the five coffee-scented lashes, I approached him and explained that I wanted to show him the images that his godparents in Trujillo provided me. , Juan Wong León and Coty Trelles de Wong.

He was glad. “Now, come out,” she said.

The agreement was to talk at the hotel.

We arrived in Barranquilla on Thursday night. Guerrero never left his room, except to try a bite to eat. On Friday morning he was not seen either. In the afternoon, the team trained. After the practices I waited for him to attend to the other journalists and I approached him.

He remembered the engagement, but told me he didn’t have time. I insisted. “At night I’m going to go out for a little while. I’ll see you there”, he answered me and I felt like the salesman, who hears from the client’s mouth: “I’ll call you”.

So, we had to think of another plan.

From the place where Peru trained to the hotel it is 15 minutes by car. Our taxi passed the bus that was taking the players and we arrived at the concentration first.

Paolo was one of the last to get off. When he crossed the door that separates the hall from the street, I extended my hand to him with the photographs. “These are”.

Guerrero smiled when he saw himself in the photos, but he killed the illusion when I asked him what he remembers about Trujillo.

“Nothing,” he replied.

Hurt to the soul, I took away the photos and looked for the one of the Buenos Aires stadium.

“Your godparents say that this photograph was taken after a game that your team won with a goal from you,” I told him like someone speaking to a forgetful person.

He took the photos from me. “Of course, of course. If I remember”. She sighed. She looked at them, stilled her eyes and tried to piece together the broken glass of her memory. “I scored the goal.” She smiled. Photography is an art that refuses to acknowledge the past of time and forces us to relive it through the act of contemplation.

In the image he is ten years old. She is wearing the t-shirt Lima Alliancethe club where he formed and left for Bayern Munich, in a transaction clouded by management claims.

That day the cast of the intimates played with a local team. His godparents Juan and Coty hug him. He wears faded black shorts, the brand on his shirt is Calvo, and his haircut is collegiate, abysmally different from the one he wears at the Barranquilla hotel, which has earned him the adjective of metrosexual.

At that age, what were your dreams as a soccer player? I asked him. “Play abroad in a big team”.

If Waldir Sáenz or Mario ‘Machito’ Gómez had been asked the same thing when they were twelve years old, they would have answered at most: play for their club’s first team, then see if they can go abroad. Paolo is different, which is why his response was strange, and oddities always raise more questions. “Didn’t you want to play on the main Alliance team?” “Yes, but my goal was to go abroad.”

That’s why he went to the Bavarian team before turning 18. “Why don’t other players think the same?” “I only answer for myself.”

The visual impacts of the photographs shake our interior and are followed by a deep analysis of our being. If Guerrero wasn’t at Bayern, would he have answered me the same?

My colleague and photojournalist Freddy Padilla asked him to show him the photo and look at it to capture it with his digital camera. Guerrero refused and searched in his hands for another photograph. “With this one,” he said and looked at the photojournalist. Click. Paolo does not want to be portrayed with the Alianza Lima shirt.

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In the chosen photograph, Paolo is 12 years old and is at his godparents’ house. He wears a long-sleeved striped polo and blue overalls. He smiles with stretched lips. His mother –sister of the missing José ‘Caíco’ Gonzales– also smiles.

Her godmother Coty wears a light blue dress from the time and takes her by the shoulders. In those years, she was still not the happiest godmother in Trujillo.

Paolo stopped at a photo from his freshman party. His godparents and their son surround him. The striker was disguised in a white navy uniform and a king’s crown, nothing like the pants torn to the hips, the rainbow-colored polo shirts and the upside-down caps that he wears 20 years later every time he arrives. A lime.

The athlete’s relationship with his Trujillo godparents is intense. Juan Wong will not be Vito Corleone, but with his wife he always takes time to be close to his godson.

“Good. My godparents, good. “I get along excellently with them,” said Paolo in the most luxurious hotel in Barranquilla, that city distinguished by a song like “Golden Door” and which is, in part, Macondo Real by Gabriel García Márquez.

In the chosen photograph, Paolo is 12 years old and is at his godparents’ house. He wears a long-sleeved striped polo and blue overalls. He smiles with stretched lips. His mother – sister of the missing José ‘Caíco’ Gonzales – also smiles

The godparents have not missed any of Guerrero’s games with the national team in Lima. They shouted closely the goal that by dint of drive and pride scored against Chile.

They were excited by the early goal against Ecuador and were disappointed with the canceled goal against Uruguay.

Paolo receives so much love from his godparents that he thought he would give them something back with a visit in the next few days. “Suddenly I’m going to Trujillo,” he promised.

Warrior and the memory of a love

Photography evokes a past time that we long for. Roland Barthes points out, in his book The camera lucidathat when we look at a photo we necessarily become aware that the objects and beings represented by it were and existed (in the same form, as we see them) in a moment of temporal flow, and covered a space similar to that occupied by our own body. .

This often produces in us the desire to imagine or create the vital development of those beings, of what they were before or after having been transformed into an image.

Among the photos that I showed Paolo Guerrero there are two where he appears with Larissa, a young German woman who arrived with him at the beginning of the year in Lima and who all of Peru knew as his girlfriend, thanks to the exposure she had in the media. .

In one of the images, Paolo is hugging Larissa, on the Agua Dulce beach in Chorrillos, in Lima. Her godmother and her niece flank them.

The forward looked at the photo carefully. He brought his hand to his nose and lowered it to his mouth. He grabbed his wet hair. Are you still with her? He shook his head from side to side, still looking at the German woman’s image of him. “Not anymore,” he replied without letting go of his hair.

*The original version of this text was published in June 2005 in the newspaper La Industria de Trujillo. Then, in 2007, it appeared in the book Devuélveme tu historia.