Quinta Borges

For many years, Jorge Luis Borges, the brilliant Argentine writer whose blindness did not keep him away from literature, quite the opposite: he made it a matter of the soul, and worked standing in front of a windowless wall.

They had no need of them, their motionless eyes, which had only dim visions, among which (he once confessed to me) were the stained-glass windows of the Palace Hotel in Madrid. I took him there one day, because he asked me about this destination, and then he explained to me that there he could see, in his fixed gaze, only the color yellow. There he was, speaking in front of the hotel dome. And there, in his study room, in a library in Buenos Aires, there are still his memories, his work tools, and that wall that he looked at while doing his work as a cultural official, and from time to time he wrote the poems that made him a genius.

Suddenly, when last night the referee sent Xavi Hernandez off the field, forced, for example, to remain in the dark in the dressing room, without being able to address his players, or see them, I was reminded of the tale of the brilliant blind man. From Argentina, a man so clear, so intelligent to see what was inside, who went down in history because of what he saw through poetry and his stories that seemed to be written on the edge of inspiration and delight.

So, there, locked up and without games, in the dark basement of the punishers, Xavi would see out of nowhere that his team, more poetic than ever, more inspired than the entire season, defeated the daring eleven (several times) of Simeon.

I tried to understand how a former footballer could imagine a midfield that looked like a bubble of success in the difficult areas, in which the game developed. Sure, he had someone to explain the changes or doubts to, but through the radio (SER, my station, and Flacoy, the broadcaster, I must say), I came to know something that interested me even more: it was him and expelled coaches were forbidden to have in this place of punishment No information about what happens in their absence.

Barcelona played, outside the field of vision of this blind coach who resembles Borges in his work station, looking at a wall that would not tell him anything, one of the great matches of his last era. The statistics also show that Barcelona did not have that many boys from the youth team on the field.

Both, veteran and young, were accompanied, in their team and in turn, by players who were in one and the other rivals, so that neither Griezmann nor Memphis nor Joao Felix, for example, should have had any interest in manufacturing the nostalgia that frightens them. Quite the opposite.

Well, without a coach to see them or teach them, in the case of Barcelona, ​​these players who were born not so long ago, and many other veteran players, made Xavi himself forget for a while and others from his fifth year, that they could be called “Kenta Messi”, and they They formed their own “Quinta”, which, if I may, I will now call it, in honor of that blind wall over which the coach fought for almost all members of the party, the “Quinta de Borges.” And if it's possible, I'd love it if they came out one day to trade with Lalif in their hands.

Borges brings luck. I swear