One more dribble, one more. Not the last one though because for Maradona it is never the last game, but "only and always the penultimate", because certain infinite children (as Emanuela Audisio defined them in a beautiful book, on the cover of which stood out a very young Maradona, with a still flat stomach, a basket of curly hair and a ball on his head, a smile a little further down), never stop to play, to run and get dirty.
For people like him, the passing of time is just a sad irony, a joke that's not funny because you don't fully understand it. She always looks forward and never back, to an endless future. A fire that burns too much doesn't have time to stop and reckon, and certain pasts are just cruel inconveniences that sometimes recur.
Today Maradona is the baggy and sullen remnant of a hero, and loose curls have given way to a more rigid hairstyle, made static by gel. There is no trace of a smile further down. The playing field is an interview by SkyTg24, in Dubai, in the villa given to him by an emir. From there Diego talks about Italy and Naples and the taxman, another dribble, one of the many games he hasn't stopped playing yet.
Because the fact is this: Maradona owes the Italian state 40 million euros. It is a story more than twenty years old, a past that presents a heavy bill, one of the many legacies and ruins left by the Pibe de Oro behind it, along its wake, in the roaring 80s of Naples and Naples. He, Careca and Alemao, the three foreign champions who, between strokes of genius and pennies, made an entire city dream, had created shell companies abroad to exploit their image. When the taxman began to mark them, Alemao and Careca agreed, while he, Diego tore up the notification like any of his opponents, one who would never have had the courage to make up for it.
Only that Since then, Equitalia has branded him as tight as if he were Claudio Gentile, at the cost of ripping the shirt (or the earrings, or the Rolex, out of the metaphor) off him, like one of those old-fashioned defenders who draws a line on the grass with his studs, two parallel furrows like the cut of a razor, and tells you to steer clear, away from the area. Over there I have no legs to chase you, but if you cross the line it's your problem.
"Siempre la same historia con l'Italia", a penalty area crowded with mastiffs that you enter at your own risk, a marking from which you can't escape even if you're a champion. “I lost twenty years of love” says Diego, and then Pibe invokes clemency, not an amnesty, but a clarification, "to find a final peace with the tax authorities and with all of Italy", an agreement that allows him to return to Naples. Then he closes with a classic stroke of his, a touch below the left foot dusted with populism and sweetness: “I would like a more humane taxman for all citizens".
Despite the heartfelt defenses of Bagni and Mauro (a former parliamentarian, just to remind us), it seems unlikely that Maradona can obtain privileged treatment, in these strange times in which for most citizens (let's say the honest ones) the tax collector risks becoming, instead of the mournful bogeyman he historically represents, a popular hero, as is happening in Befera.
Maybe this dribbling won't succeed, and maybe rightly so. But that's okay, there's always another run-up, another rush and another game. It's never the last. You fall and get back up, Maradona has always done it. Infinite children carry the world on their shoulders and then, at the exact moment they can no longer support it, they drop it. They pass, live and burn. Someone else will take care of it, then, to collect ashes and shards.
