It was November 23 of last year, I know because I have the phone photo in front of me. At the end of the event at the Ramón Llull bookstore (awarded as the best in Spain in 2022), Rafa Rodríguez, editor of Verlanga magazine, and Almudena Amador and Paco Benedito, owners of the bookstore, went to dinner. Around midnight we left. The three of them accompanied me to the hotel when I stepped away for a moment when I saw graffiti and a message. When you go to many places for a short time, it is usually the one you jump on the street. I went to that wall and took the photo, and when I got to my room I looked for the phrase (‘No ser res si no s’es poble’), the poem to which I discovered it belonged, the author of the poem and his life and circumstances.
I remember that at the door of the hotel I told my companions that I was dead of sleep, but I became obsessed with the poem and with Vicent Andrés Estellés, its author, a long time in bed with my cell phone. “All that is valuable is the conscience / of not being res if you are not poble. / I you, greument, have escollit. / After your strict silence, / you walk decisively”, he ends. And it begins, imposing: “You will assume the sight of a town, / and it will be the sight of your town, / and you will be, forever, town, / and you will leave, and you will wait, / and you will always live among the pols, / et a post-war will follow.” And it continues, I translate into Spanish: “And you will be hungry and you will be thirsty, / you will not be able to write the poems / and you will be silent all night / while your people sleep, / and you alone will be awake, / and you will be awake for everyone.”
They are hypnotic verses, of that poetry that makes the country. After the years dedicated to Berlanga and Sorolla, it was intended that there would be an Estellés Year, but Les Corts voted no (this is another story, or not: it is the same old story). It was not clear to me that the suspension of the football day was necessary until Saturday; that is, until it started. In fact, on Friday in El Larguero I expressed doubts: on the one hand I saw it as natural, almost essential that it not be played: what a shame!; On the other hand, isn’t football a spectacle of recreation, of dispersion, of entertainment, that perhaps would alleviate for 90 minutes the worry of people outside of Valencia (this, unfortunately, is not for relief)? Only by seeing the ball rolling, the teams in uniform and the public in the stadiums, does one realize where and when the voice of a people has to be, and that one is nothing if one is not a people, and that it is unbearable the idea that there are such important shows that continue while it is unknown how many lifeless bodies are left to be found in your country.
No, football is not just anything. If it is the people’s sport, football stops when your people are left homeless and jobless, they don’t have to eat and drink, and they look for corpses. Today’s day was enough for even those of us who initially doubted; At this time of Sunday it is not that the result matters or not: it is that the images of the matches happen like the things that appear to us in the present, but we believe them to be the past, like beforepure archive, and Spanish football, in addition to being our greatest entertainment spectacle, has, as such, an enormous responsibility.
