Chronicles of a family disaster

I told my colleague Paniagua at noon that we would party at night three to one. At the beginning of the match, when Pedri put on his gloves against the cold of Montjuic, I told those next to me that Pedri is more than just a club, and that we owe him some of these three goals I want to guess with Paniagua.

When the score was 0-1, I kept believing in Pedri and a few others, because Barcelona fans only give up when the team leads 1-2 and loses, a few minutes before the end. With such overwhelming joy as we play football on the local spectators’ benches, I had watched Lewandowski’s sensational equalizer and hoped, as always, that Pedri would end up saving us from misfortune.

Albert Camus has a memorable line in his best book, The Stranger, when this hideous character admits that he has already knocked on the door of misery. In a satanic moment in the match, when Barça submitted to the law of its contempt for defense as God commanded, I watched the third goal enter Barça’s net as if it had been sent by a crazy relative who was pulling the strings of disaster. From the balcony of Girona, where the magician who makes the team in those colors now lives, I bring out Xavi and all the relatives of this family disaster that we gather in order to shame or mock the times in which we live.

It was a family disaster. At home they left me alone in front of the screen, and finally, about 15 minutes before the end of the match and seeing the team sold out of their respect and into their ranks, captive and disarmed by a fearless army, I went and typed on a computer that witnessed, in another time, the speed with which She takes the pen to Farha to explain how Pedri, or Messi, saved us from nothing that has now become my grammatical structure and also my shame or sadness.

Barcelona are already weak from top to bottom, we are as disappointed as we were in school when plays that seemed to be the imagination of Funchu or Kubala, who were role models for us in an uncertain time, did not seem to go to the right place. Many years have passed, we are older, and we have less excitement because we are now sad to chronicle a family disaster.

And now? Now, let us swim on the beach and feel the salt water and the tears that go with this defeat that seems to have been conjured up a week or two ago, when Xavi, we think, had guessed the clue. The key was an illusion, just as this typewriter was waiting impatiently for these fingers to sound a love song to the shoes of those who only did two yesterday and were of no use. Illusions are also lost.