I’ll tell you about the “political” Maradona
Diego Maradona, an inimitable champion on the football fields and a fragile and reckless man in life, died; but also a citizen who has always vigorously claimed the rights of the weakest. The memory signed by Livio Zanotti, former correspondent from Latin America
He had a judgment on everything and for everyone, not necessarily shared but always consistent. And he didn't just express it, he flaunted it. It's not often that ordinary people do the same, and neither do many professional politicians. To say he was cultured may seem like a post-mortem indulgence, an excessive tribute to his fame. And yet what Diego Maradona had not learned in his short school curriculum, he had then snatched away from the insatiable curiosity with which he observed the world while he did everything to devour it and be devoured by it, from the words of the people who managed to keep it in order to a few moments the frenetic anxiety with which he chased life, even more than the ball on the football fields. Thus he had an idea of the existing.
Maradona really believed that he was "the hand of Dios" (who had fraudulently defeated England and therefore had brought divine justice to earth for an Argentine), without however losing sight of reality, the naked and raw one of every day in medium to which he was born and raised.
That noisy, sometimes (but rarely) coarse man had an inner life. He could be silent for hours, during which time it was possible to see him vibrate – perhaps painfully – within himself.
I have been a direct witness of this many years ago. When, after once again risking his life for his toxic excesses, he went to detox in a specialized center in Cuba. We flew side by side by plane from Buenos Aire sa Campeche, Mexico, where he took a connecting flight to the Habana.
Guillermo Coppola accompanied him, for decades he was personal-trainer , secretary, confidant of the Pibe de Oro , until he was finally convinced that very prosaically he was more concerned with gold than with the Pibe, from a certain moment onwards overwhelmed from frankincense, myrrh, cocaine and courtesans of tumultuous loves. "Every now and then I dream of what I could have done more and more en la cancha , if drugs hadn't cut my legs", he said aloud to himself in the presence of Serbian director Emir Kusturitza, while directing it in a biographical film . Nonetheless, that trip was an interlude of quiet, also because it was carried out mainly in the night. "Ah, you are a hincha of Rome, then of Naples, you don't know anything about the Neapolitans, maybe you even dislike them …". In Naples, not only to his football team, Maradona had remained fond of.
“ After the Bombonera (the Boca Jr. stadium in Buenos Aires, ed ), the San Paolo is the cancha where I found myself best, do you know it?”. Without waiting for an answer, Diego covered his ears with earphones and the music of Cuban son he began to listen to made him rise rhythmically from his chair, squirm on himself, bend over as he raised his arms. Coppola, who was sitting behind us but had been absent for some necessity, reappeared to apologize and suggest that I go and sit somewhere else among the numerous remaining free ones. He introduces himself and I do the same: "Does Diego know that you are a journalist?". There hadn't been time. "Better this way, he is unpredictable with journalists …". Coppola smiles suggestively… Maradona had a character of strong instinct and variable mood, particularly in periods when he was committed to getting rid of drugs.
After a few brief conversations with his trainer and with the crew who peeped out curiously to glimpse the sleeping champion, I nevertheless sat next to him for the night. All of a sudden he took off the audifoni letting them fall on my lap, he reclined the back and sank into stillness. Awakened only a few hours later by the rumors of the on-board loudspeakers, through which the captain announced the start of the descent to the Campeche airport. “Are you coming to Cuba?”, He says to me as a good morning. "I'm going to Mexico City, there are elections …". It is as if I had turned on a radio…. Maradona shakes his legs, spreads his arms yawning, shakes himself and begins to have his say on Mexican politics …
The Partido Revolucionario Institucional , el PRI , as Maradona says, who doesn't like it even one bit. " Traidores ", summarizes in a moment of the rally that staged everything for me, since there is no one else in the cabin, except Coppola, who however does not seem interested at all and is actually phoning to warn of their imminent arrival. Traitors to the popular cause, he means Diego, who not by chance calls his host Fidel Castro a teacher, without however preventing himself from taking some precautionary distance from him too ("Not everything is resolved in Cuba, and that is expected: it takes time" ). The party that never belonged to Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, but not even to Madero and Carranza: "All murdered by treason," Diego reminds me.
I saw him again last March on TV, at the Gimnasia & Esgrima stadium , the La Plata team that plays in the first division of the Argentine soccer championship and he coached until a few weeks ago. I think they were celebrating his sixtieth anniversary, he was walking around the field with difficulty, enormously weighted, his face swollen, tucked into a suit that made him look like an astronaut, supported with difficulty by the president of the club. It was a painful image, although it did not suggest how close its end was. I thought back to that trip of ours: last night you vibrated with the music, as if you were dancing, I told him. “No, no, I didn't dance, it's just that music makes me think, think seriously, I say: do you understand?”.
Livio Zanotti
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/politico-maradona/ on Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:46:02 +0000.