“That is why, my Colombian friends, I understand perfectly and I sympathize body and soul with the long-suffering supporters of the DIM. Let’s enjoy the bliss while it lasts. Happiness is lightning. And let’s not look for many explanations, because knowledge can break the spell. Thus ends the prologue written by Roberto Fontanarrosa to open the second edition of King of hearts, El Medellín, a chronic passion. A book with 25 love letters from nostalgic and angry fans that was printed for the first time in November 2004 with ten less texts.
Fontanarrosa, who does not need a prologue, was —and surely still is now that he shares a kingdom with Pelé— a fan of Rosario Central. A team, like the DIM, and like almost all of them, used to defeat. That is why he understands the long-suffering and unfortunate fans of the Powerful who wrote this book to win points in the race for the dignity of defeat that Borges, who hated soccer, spoke of.
It was Jorge Giraldo, a philosopher from Antioquia, a university professor and a sick fan of the Medallo, who had the idea of bringing together academics and characters from the paisa literary circle (rational people, like Fontanarrosa) at the beginning of the century to write an anecdotal, reflective or philosophical text. about the most irrational of his passions. But despite the fact that he obtained the prologue and fifteen texts with sales signatures such as Héctor Abad Faciolince, Juan José Hoyos or Darío Jaramillo Agudelo, he did not find a publisher that would buy it. So, with the help of a couple of red friends, he self-published it and published a thousand copies that were released at the end of that glorious 2004 at Atanasio, in a match that could not end in any other way than with a 2-0 defeat at the hands of from Cali.
an obsession
The book was sold like a bible is sold to a fan and sold out in a few months. However, 18 years had to pass, two finals won and six lost, so that thanks to the obsession of Gonzalo Medina Pérez, another academic, writer and sick person, a new edition was published, corrected and enlarged, as the old said. The old men who wrote these letters when the DIM was already adjusting four decades without raising a glass. The old people who made the fear of dying without seeing their champion team a reason to prolong their existence. The old men who saw how the two stars on the shield froze and stopped shining.
This new delivery of 25 texts was ordered, in general terms, as kickers are ordered in a penalty shootout: from more to less. It begins with “Tests of love: distant memories of a DIM match”, a chronicle without points by former guerrilla and political analyst León Valencia, and ends with “Our Powerful Soccer”, a family history of professor Sonia López Franco, the only woman who wrote in this red and blue anthology. In the middle, there are letters signed by Sergio Fajardo, Darío Ruiz Gómez, Reinaldo Spitaletta and Carlos Mario Aguirre, the actor and director of Águila Descalza, the only fan of the other team in the city who slipped in with the excuse that one of the The great frustrations of his life had been not being a fan of DIM. “I was born, I don’t know why, a strange curse, a fan of another team, inhabiting an opposing entity, a foreign body in my own body, I was from the other team, like a deviant, like an invert,” he says.
childhood recovery
The recipient of the texts is only one: Deportivo Independiente Medellín and whatever that means. The themes, approaches and protagonists are various but not many, and they confirm that Marías’ definition of football is perhaps one of the most precise: “the weekly recovery of childhood”. The book is littered with childhood memories and superheroes. Of stories of the first match in the stadium, of the first goal, of the first idol. There are anecdotes, such as the DIM match against Botafogo by Didi and Garrincha in the middle of the last century, and characters that are repeated insistently: El Charro Moreno, El Caimán Sánchez, Corbata, Malásquez and Ramaccioti appear as the heroes of the feats of a very distant childhood world, when the DIM fans were the darlings of the triumph and had not been expelled from paradise. When the team had not become the metaphor of Sisyphus. When they were the majority in the neighborhoods, in the factories and in the schools. When it was the others who suffered from insomnia on Sundays, devising an excuse not to get out of bed on Mondays and thus avoid the mockery of God’s favorites.
There are also stories of the common house, the Athanasius. And from his stands, which before had more beautiful names than now, especially Korea, which is now called North and Sun, East. Gonzalo Medina says that in Korea were the workers, the unemployed, street vendors, students, shoe shiners, bus drivers, street sweepers, waiters, orderlies, messengers and shirtless people. The Korean account is that in Medellín the saying became popular that when DIM played, houses could be left with their doors open because all the thieves and whores were in the stadium. “Corea had the flavor of a shirtless people, the same one that made the neighborhood a space for collective self-affirmation,” recalls Medina.
Of those feats and almost unforgettable feats like when in 93, after 36 years without celebrating, we were champions for only five minutes. His stories are also remembered with nostalgia. The radio stories of Jaime Tobón de la Roche or Wbeimar Muñoz, who enchanted so many innocent and suffering children, at least on Sundays, with their extravagant phrases and exaggerated analogies, are quoted a couple of times. But above them, and anyone who has tried to preach about the emotions of the faithful of the Powerful, appears the figure of José Yepes Lema who, under the pseudonym Malevo, published for years in different local and national newspapers the purest feelings and more red from thousands of fans who, like Abad, resigned themselves to the fact that the DIM champion was a contradiction in terms, like saying “hot ice”. “Malevo sculpted the sickly masochistic feeling of men and women who grew old waiting, with the illusion of the spinster who never stops praying to San Antonio, the joyful possibility of touching the sky reaching the third star,” wrote Jorge Mejía Martínez . It was Malevo who wrote the last words that the Medellín fans will say before the final whistle: Oh Medellín, you are going to murder us!
