Recovering childhood through football

BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE

Javier Marías, a writer whose recent death – at seventy years of age – has shocked thousands of readers, defined football as “the weekly recovery of childhood”. Many of us dream as children of sharing a goal with our heroes. We have witnessed great plays on the court, moments that we treasure all our lives. Then, growing up, it seems to us that the ball rolled better before our eyes when we were eleven than today at thirty. Capturing those moments is a virtue of literature.

In Al estilo Jalisco, Juan Pablo Villalobos explores the obsession with recovering that past that, being ungraspable, can only be achieved from daydreaming or madness. In a humorous key, the Jalisco author presents a story whose protagonist is, like Villalobos, a self-exile who landed in Brazil fishing for the memories of that selection led by Pelé that he fell in love with in the 1970 World Cup.

Villalobos, born in 1973, imagines himself in that Jalisco Stadium where he received the Brazilian stars and is dedicated to recreating the sparks of the genius of the verdeamarelha in the first part of the story; with so many elements belonging to reality, the reader seems to find himself in front of a wonderful chronicle, something not alien to the author’s bibliography. However, in the second part, the comic protagonist blurs by his own hand attending to the economic needs of adulthood, thus demonstrating the theory of Javier Marías: the happiness that produces the memory of childhood lasts ninety minutes.

Going down to reality means, both for us and for the protagonist, facing what makes you uncomfortable. We are not who we wanted as children. To change our adult world, we are forced into a parody of children’s play. “There is nothing more serious than a child playing,” says soccer writer Juan Villoro. Jalisco style is the strange and unserious game of the adult who longs for his best years. There is, implicitly, a very fair celebration of what we call in Mexico “echar la cascarita” (to play a street soccer game) with friends, which only requires a spherical object.

The work has fun with memory. It is recognized, through the criminal turn of the protagonist, the impossibility of the exercise: we will not return to the past, but we can spend a nice moment remembering the days when we thought less and acted more.

Juan Pablo Villalobos, as a football lover, wonders what he would have done if he had been present in 1970 and we, readers, enjoy in the second part of the story that conjunction of the town of Lagos de Moreno, childhood site for Villalobos himself, with the mischievous essence of the Mexican.

We are then, facing a short novel, which amuses the same that reflects on the antics of childhood or informs in great detail, to bring the youngest footballers closer to that consecrating World Cup for Pelé as a player and for Mexico as a sanctuary of the ball, because in this same territory, sixteen years later, Maradona would score the two most famous goals in history.

Published in Portuguese in 2014, when Brazil hosted the World Cup and Villalobos lived in Rio, Al estilo Jalisco can regain importance in four-year cycles for those who like to say “the football I watched is better than today’s.” To test the hypothesis, we must consider the Spanish translation in 2018, the year in which, according to Pollo Blanco, the publisher in charge of the Mexican publication, “Miguel Layún stepped on Neymar’s ankle in the knockout stages of the FIFA World Cup in Russia”.

Pollo Blanco and Villalobos celebrate the Mexican defeat, they are glad that at least the opponents did not leave immaculate. Contrary to the famous song, Al estilo Jalisco does not want to find oblivion but a memory.

Orígenes Romero Porras

Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Guadalajara. Former Paralympic athlete (2006-2017). Interested in the relationship between art and history. Literary analyst.