Okay, so I have to be honest. To me, this looks like one of those pictures that you see on the covers of those volunteer-to-help-the-children leaflets. Look at me, being adorably mobbed by half a dozen pint-sized Argentine devils. I am helping out. I am playing with the children. Aren´t they just SO precious?
But this, my friends, is an Argentine soccer game. All of those people that you see in the background, plus about 20 more that you do not see (they are probably beehiving to one corner), are frantically attempting to (not) murder each other for the sake of the most important game in the history of all humanity: el fútbol.
There are at least 30 people in the scene by this point, but it did not begin this way. Oh, no. Our story began, ladies and gentlemen, with nine US citizens, an empty patch of scratchy grass on the side of the road, and one magical object made of wonder, light and sprinkles-- which hereafter I refer to as the "Soccer Ball".
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So we begin, my friends and I, our informal game. We use our backpacks to mark goalposts, we kick things around, argue a little, try to avoid the trees and power lines, then number off. Immediately we have to re-arrange because some of us have genuinely never put a foot to a ball in our lives. We´re oddly-numbered. We really don´t care. We begin.
I spend most of the first ten minutes trying to remember which blonde faces are on my team, so it is some time before I realize that we have spectators. A man and a woman are stopped in the sidewalk intently watching our rather lawless game. The man steps forward, reflexively, to join. We accept, grinning, I mean, now our teams are even. The woman finds a tree and settles down to watch. The dude is good. Our game moves a little faster.
Fifteen minutes later, three teenage boys are frozen in place. They join us immediately. Now numbers on the teams don´t really matter--all that really matters is that everybody has an even number of Argentines. The game starts to fly. We race, tumble, scream, drop kick balls into power lines and forget all boundries. There are barely any rules because nobody wants to stop the game long enough to figure them out.
Overshot balls go hurtling towards the street and we go barreling after them. Whoever gets there first smacks the ball in whichever direction he or she damn well pleases. We play until our sides burn and we keep playing long past the time that our legs have begun to tremble.
When our Argentine friends have to leave, I feel confused as if something has interrupted the turning of the earth. I feel as if I had been drugged and now I am slowly settling back to the normal world.
We slow down. Shake ourselves off. Prepare to begin another game.
Before we can start, the local P.E. teacher (who went to Patagonia with our group and knows us) shows up on the field with about 20 kids between the ages of 7 and 16. Who knows what they were originally planning to do, but they see our soccer ball and our professionally constructed backpack goalposts, and suddenly it doesn´t matter.
Will we scrimage?Which leads me, finally, to my picture.
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I went to a Boca Junior game in Buenos Aires this weekend. While spending two hours jumping up and down and screaming myself hoarse in an endless sea of blue and gold fans, I watched as dozens of people hurled rolls of toilet paper onto the opposing team´s goalie from hundreds of feet up in the stadium. We had no seats, no organization. We cried chants that we could barely understand from rows and rows of concrete benches.
I tried to go shopping in my newly bought jersey. The theme was not what I was going to buy, or how to impress me so that I would buy wares. It was whether or not they liked my team or not.
They can´t help themselves, these Argentines. It´s really not their fault. They see a Soccer Ball and are mystically drawn to it like my brothers to frozen Costco taquitos. It calls to them, work, school, relationships be damned. As they say here, born with a ball.
This is the Mendoza Mall children´s play area.
