River Plate and the Depth of My Sorrow
Between Wednesday, June 22, and Sunday, June 26, 2011, River Plate, the team I’ve been a fan of my entire life, was relegated to the second division of Argentina’s soccer league. The depth of my sadness during those days took me by surprise. Soccer has always been an important part of my life, and some of my first childhood memories are tied to River—my father taking me to the stadium, the lights, the greenest grass I had ever seen, the red and white waving flags, the whole place shaking when our team came out to the field. The news of River’s demotion—the winningest team in Argentina’s league history, and ninth in the historical rating of the International Federation of Soccer History & Statistics—startled fans throughout the world, and the incessant front page news about everything around it proved that interest extended well beyond the strict realm of sports. Even though it occurred to me that it might be interesting to tease out the significance of the signifiers around River’s decline (the national resonance of management’s corrupt practices, the crisis of cultural institutions at the core of popular imaginaries, the end of soccer as a tale of heroism unthinkable in other social spheres), but during those days when River could not beat Belgrano de Córdoba, this intellectual agenda seemed like a grandiloquent, pompous and trivial exercise compared to the narcissistic intensity of my sorrow.
The fact was I was very sad. Too sad. Suspiciously sad for someone passionate about soccer, but nevertheless cerebral and rational (most of the time). An episode involving sports—no matter how traumatic—should not set off such deep sadness, I kept telling myself. But in this slightly demented interior dialogue, I could make no argument that could dissipate my sadness. And when I no longer wanted to—or no longer could—keep wallowing in the complacent mud of this excessive melancholy, I sat down and wrote a number of ideas, hypotheses, reasons to explain what I felt during those days’ declines, defeats and demotions.
I’ve lived in the United States for more than ten years, and since the birth of my two sons (Valentín and Bruno, both of them huge fans of River like myself and my father), I have developed a decidedly schizophrenic relationship with the identity-forming rituals of progressive Argentinity and, most of all, with the practices and modalities of my own childhood in Buenos Aires, that my memory distorts over the double gaps of time and diasporic space. I pay close attention to what goes on in Argentina, I refer to current-day affairs of Argentine politics and cultural life with sharp cosmopolitan irony, but at the same time, I exhaust myself with vain attempts to reproduce for my sons a series of everyday routines and modalities (food, music, sports, movies, jokes and word games, overwhelmingly intimate physical closeness) that I imagine they would have if they were growing up in Buenos Aires.
To me, soccer is one of the most effective ways of bridging my family’s diasporic gap, but this is not specific to my relationship with my sons; the socio-affective significance of soccer is a proven global fact. Throughout the world, like very few other cultural phenomena, soccer is one of the names of the sentimental mediations that make up our (masculine for the most part) subjective identities, and the relations we form with our fathers, our sons, our friends. It’s not just soccer; there’s also politics, music, school, yes, but soccer is particularly effective as a way off invoking the sentimental universe of Buenos Aires that I would like to preserve here in the United States.
Soccer is not just soccer. Soccer is the emotional world that contains it and determines the weight of its social and subjective significance. So, for me, soccer is the name of vertical and horizontal forms of affect: in 1975 my father took me to the stadium for the first time to watch River win a championship after 18 years of defeat; and I was four when my dad took a picture of me in Hacoaj, with my first River jersey and soccer ball, posing as a professional player (I’ve taken similar pictures of my two boys in both Cambridge and Buenos Aires); beyond the hand of God and the most beautiful moves in the history of the game, my memory of Maradona’s goal against England in the 1986 World Cup is marked by the way my grandfather Juan and I celebrated and embraced for an eternity; the endurance and power of the liturgies of friendship depends, at least partially, on the convoluted shapes of love inscribed in the ways my Boca Juniors friends and I tease each other like kids. And as a mechanism of identitification, River gave me an excuse to avoid participating in the disagreeable chauvinistic side of Argentines’ love of the national team (I’m a River fan, not of Argentina: I never cheered for a goal of a Boca player in la selección—Maradona doesn’t count, of course: he is universal patrimony).
That’s why the sadness I experienced in late June 2011 had very little to do with the demotion of River to the second division. Its strict sports meaning gets lost, indeed dissolved, in its overflowing socio-affective significance. If “River” is the way in which I work through my relationship to Buenos Aires and its cultural universe, then what was in play between Wednesday, June 22 and Sunday, June 26 was not the horror of having to play in the second division with teams like Defensa y Justicia, Patronato, Atlanta and Deportivo Merlo, but the literal degradation of one of the signifiers of that name my sentimental life. The exasperated and impatient response of those who don’t hear any emotional echoes in the deafening noises of soccer (my wife, for example) bothers me precisely because I am perfectly capable of seeing how ridiculous my over-investment in soccer is (so masculine, so Argentine, so idiotic). Thinking it through, perhaps it is this reproaching gaze (which is my own, most certainly) that leads me to intellectualize those days of River-Belgrano, and thus redeem my sorrow from its sports specificity and its apparent triviality.
The soccer fan in me tells me that I am unbearably pretentious in writing this essay. This inner voice tells me that the sadness of those days in June was (and is still) strictly sports-related because it was (and is) unimaginable that River has fallen so low, betraying its history, its colors, its stadium—and my own fresh memory of having felt, not so long ago, unbeatable, the best. But I have a twofold existence: the other part of me, the one that writes these lines midway between mourning and melancholy, shares space with the suffering sports fan. But if my sorrow can be explained through the evidence of affective relations and degraded childhood memories, the strictly sporting hypothesis carries some weight as well. Otherwise, I would stop caring about wins and losses, scores and rankings, rosters and injuries, for the year River will spend in the second division, and I would throw myself wholeheartedly to the process of mourning. But that’s not the case. I insist on the tortuous ceremony of watching River every Saturday over the Internet. Valentín and Bruno sit down and watch with me, they sing soccer songs they understand partially, we hug each other with every goal and at every step of the ritual that perhaps redeems the socio-affective charge that River’s demotion and my own diasporic status have degraded. And perhaps, through magical thinking, wishing Cavenaghi scores again, the three of us can will River into becoming champions once again.
Mariano Siskind is an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
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