Contrary to what great scholars such as John Rambo, Jason Bourne or Jack Reacher claimed, the past does not always return: sometimes it simply creeps in. And that’s how Leo Messi returned to the Camp Nou: without warning, without anthems, without children wearing his shirt, without managers bringing gifts with which to entertain the idol’s family… Just a stroke of instinct drawn in the night, like those old cats who never forget where the manger is. All he needed were flashlights, expensive clothing and the complicity of a handful of workers who still wonder today whether the visit was real or whether the new stadium is already old enough to admit the presence of ghosts.
The Blaugrana public needed a little wink, a simple gesture to certify that the feeling is mutual: Messi left Barça almost by mistake and no one wanted him to leave. But the world of football is complicated. One day you find yourself hugging a 10 mannequin as a graphic promise of eternal love and the next day you sign his agreement, a dizzying degradation of expectations that Laporta will have nailed to his foot for as long as he breathes. It must not be a tasteful dish for him to know that he is the institutional villain of a story that could not have a happy ending. Nor for the hero, who left the house without being able to say goodbye because he risked being killed by the roof.
“I hope I can come back one day,” he declared a few hours later, the same conviction with which my father used to say “I hope we win the EuroMillion” as he reviewed the statistics. It’s not a big deal compared to the unlikely hope of having him back in December, of seeing him compete for all the titles once again, but that’s enough for now. Haste is not a good advisor and nostalgia always reserves some final blow for those who persist in caressing it too much. Ultimately, everyone wants Messi to return, but without a salary. Because it escapes no one that it’s time to pay the mortgage, to take care of all the economic nonsense that not even the goose that laid the golden eggs could avoid: you don’t go out crying and come back smiling, just like that. The only thing missing is that, after everything that has happened, someone tries to involve him in the spill.
From the club they promise the greatest of tributes when the work is finished and Messi is in favor of the return, not the intrusion. A big party in which everyone participates in the return, not so much in the surprise of finding him inside. The eldest deserves to go back to running around his garden without the presence of scaffolding, with all the spotlights on him, without reproaches or uncomfortable silences. There was something terrible in the photo shared on social media: it was the first time we saw Messi at the stadium without a soccer ball to complete the scene, like those parents without children who stop in front of the windows of Zara Kids.
Bad times for poetry in which the only one who still seems to feel something is the boy who enters the house on tiptoe. After all, it’s as if Messi hadn’t returned to Camp Nou: he just went to check that it still exists. The rest came from our memory, from the desire to always repeat the same story, from that pleasant shower that replaces the real bath.
