Epistle to Maradona

Diego, sometimes when I’m kicking a ball around this garden, trying to decide on my story, something like a wind flips my mind to pages I can’t acknowledge; and then when I’m not looking, distracted (perhaps a rose needs pruning), a rogue bull rushes from the bushes, a hard head aimed into the bottom of my spine.

But not today: I’m imagining wild azaleas and hydrangeas and a boatman rowing cows across the Parana delta.  This is your father, who you say left this life on a river to go to Buenos Aires, to break and pound cattle bones from four in the morning ‘til three in the afternoon – so you’d have food and schooling and trainers.

Now you are rich you take him back to the flood-plain every summer to cook the tastiest asado and remember the secrets of the river. This is how you can open your autobiography: “It’s good to look back, when you feel well, when in spite of your mistakes you have nothing to regret!” And oh, you are so famous, you may as well promise to reveal everything.

But what about cheating?  I don’t mean that blatant hand-ball because I love your risk and bravado, no, I mean the hidden responsibilities.  Can you hear a boy calling from the sidelines, Diego? He wants to know where his father is.

Are you back at the Vatican?  Let me turn to that brazen chapter, you’re taunting the Pope: “Sell the gold ceiling and do something for the children, Amigo!  You’ve nothing else going for you – you were only ever a goal-keeper!” Or are you at the Iglesia Maradoniana, listening to the faithful remembering your miracles of La Boca, Napoli and Barcelona?

Oh, Diego Armando Maradona, if I could drag that bull up onto your altar, would you slaughter it skilfully, sprinkle me with its blood live on television, tell me cheerfully I’m forgiven?  But then you collapse back at a hacienda, a soon-to-be-redacted chapter of mafia anger, cocaine dependency and obesity.

If I went to your father, I imagine he’d place his shoulder into its flank, ease it onto a platform, tap its rump with a stick, close a gate, row it across a river knowing it’s the last time he’ll do this for anyone: he’s going to Buenos Aires, leaving his secrets and azaleas, his triumphs and failures, for the sake of his son.

My boy’s just found the latch on the French-window and he’s coming into the garden!  Diego, I don’t know if I’ll tell him about the bull – he may laugh, it will seem so unreal to him.  A breeze flips the pages.  Diego let’s take our sons down to the end of this garden, lift them up on our shoulders so they see beyond the roses to the flood-plain. Look! There’s an old boatman rowing back across the delta, remembering the stories he told his children of loyal coypu, grinning pampas cats, playful capybara.

He knows that he has done to some others as some others did to him, that he will wake in the night with an ache in his spine; but that come the morning he will rise with the quiet, hard-earned courage of a jaguar: arch his back, stretch his lean limbs and then, for the sake of the whole congregation, search for food, friendship and those secrets of the river.

2010.