I think of the tiger, a twilight shadow spreading the Library

One of the obsessive themes of Borges' life and literature is the tiger. The other tiger. The gold of the tigers. Blue tigers. In 1960, Borges published the book The Maker. That year, D. A. Maradona was born: in the despised streets of the suburbs where simple little houses are weighed down by the immortal distances. He grew up in the myths of violence and the knife.
Among the "short stories" in the first part of The Maker, the greatest impression was left on me by the "observation" "Dreamtigers". As a boy Borges stood with the peace ("without interruption") of an angel, mesmerized, in the zoo, in front of a single cage. The royal tiger. "Childhood passes, the tigers fade... but they are still in my dreams. On that submerged or forbidden level, they still rule... And then I think that this is a dream... even now when I am boundlessly powerful, why not make a tiger."
In The Maker is also the poem "The Other Tiger":

"...the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols?
A string of labored tropes that have no life
(...)
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse."
Interpreting these lines, Borges says that the poem is about the powerlessness of art, "about art as the transmission of reality or life".
"Burgin: You keep trying to catch the tiger?
Borges: Yes, because the tiger will always be?
Burgin: Beyond art?
Borges: Yes, beyond art. You see, that is a kind of hopeless poem."

Borges died so that in his dream he could hunt down the real tiger. The royal tiger. He made his life a sacrifice, his word, his way, so that he could touch "the bony frame under the splendid, quivering cover of skin". Diego Armando Maradona. And for Borges to ensconce him on the throne. In the mythology of the Aztecs, in Buńuel's Mexico. "I release him slowly into epic space/And still the verse is for him not done." Borges found the real tiger in another art ("In the year 1912... the astrological rapture of the Centennial had a burial mark and also kilometers of blue material for its banner... the angel of the air and fire on which the street organs played the Tango of independence. Already then, physical exercise became more interesting than death: boys quit copying the art of the knife fight and went to play football, which the carelessness of local pronunciation christened as some kind of fuba.")

Artaud's theater at the "Aztec" Stadium, or
Metaphysics has to be injected into souls through the skin

The world for the European is indeed a cosmos
in which everyone intimately becomes identical
with the task he is to do, for the Argentine
the world is chaos...
J. L. Borges

Antonin Artaud, the Theater of Cruelty, headed for Mexico in 1936. Searching for the "living basis of culture, for the world in a constant state of excitement". Artaud arrived in Ciudad Mexico in 1986. A long journey. Exactly half a century. The month was June and full was the Moon. Games were played at noon and midnight. In the capital city of Mexico, Artaud held the lecture "The theater and the gods". He is an opponent of restraints and pressures. Artaud is a champion of civilization "which will be the flourishing, passion and possibility of overcoming". The first performance of the Theater of Cruelty will bear the title "The Conquering of Mexico".
Diego Armando Maradona, a tiger who had come to know the European cultural tradition (in Spain, England and Italy), shattered European arrogance into a thousand pieces. Maradona was greatest when his team, Argentina, arrived in the Great Theater, the theater of cruelty - Aztec Stadium.


God's observation or
The King's death is eternal like the skin

Sunday, June 22. Aztec Stadium. Argentina-England 2:1. Goals: Maradona 51st min. and 54th min.; Lineker 80th min. This battle lasted for 1 minute (the 54th). For an eternity. Aztec Stadium became el gran teatro del mundo. A cruel spectacle. A magnificent circus. Maradona glowing with the fire of a demon ("a sparkling flame and eternal archetype of Evil") penetrating England's team with the prance of a tiger (like "a symbol of gruesome elegance"), "shining in swords and in passion", like God, fading into nostalgia, into immortality. The England defenses opened up "like death and like a dream". Each of Maradona's goals had the heart of death and the heart of a dream. "General Quiroga in his chariot, heading toward the goal as if toward death". Maradona weaves through the eleven "terrors" (Shilton, Stevens, Sansom, Hoddle, Butcher, Steven, Hodge, Reid, Fenwick, Lineker, Beardsley) and with the "restless courage of the tiger", terrible and magnificent, makes the second, decisive goal on his own. Sixty meters in which each step had the perfection of a verse, Maradona conquered them, and kept his strength for the stab of the toreador. The royal tiger, "with mysterious and even strides, measures space and time".
In the late poem "To My Father", Borges has the following line: "You died blind, with a gentle smile". On June 22 at Aztec Stadium, Borges heard God's observation, his step, the power of the tiger and touched the splendid quivering skin with his own fingers.

Courage was the practice of his sword

Wednesday, June 25, Aztec Stadium. Argentina-Belgium 2:0. Goals: Maradona 51st min. and 64th min.
The second goal again in the stride of the tiger. "And I repeated the ancient roads/Just as one gets back a forgotten verse." With the first goal Maradona showed the agility and cleverness of his great forerunner Alfredo di Stefano. The second goal showed the impudence and charm of Omar Sivori. Both of them Argentines. The comparison perhaps does not hold water, but I could resist the temptation to list them. Alfredo di Stefano, Omar Sivori, Mario Kempes, Diego Armando Maradona.

The longing of Eros is cruelty, or how the tiger
became a magical director

Sunday, June 29. Final: Argentina-W. Germany 3:2. Corners 9:5 for Argentina. Goals: Brown 22nd min., Valdano 55th min., Burru- chaga 83rd min. for Argentina, and Rumme- nigge 73rd min. and Voeller 81st min. for West Germany. Aztec Stadium in Ciudad Mexico. Attendance: 114, 590. Field conditions: damp; weather: pleasant for play. Referees Arppi Filho (Brazil), assistants Eric Fredriksson (Sweden) and Verin Ulloa (Costa Rica). Yellow cards: Maradona, Olarticoechea, Enrique, Pumpido (for Argentina), and Matthaus (for Germany).
Argentina: Pumpido, Cuciuffo, Brown, Ruggeri, Olarticoechea, Giusti, Batista, Burruchaga (Trobbiani, 89th), Enrique, Maradona, Valdano.
West Germany: Schumacher, Brehme, Foerster, Jakobs, Briegel, Eder, Matthaus, Berthold, Magath (Hoeness 61st), Allofs (Voeller 46th), Rummenigge.
The final match was the "theater of turnabouts", of the power, courage, eros, and attack of the tiger in a master who dedicated himself to "the construction of dramatic space". Certain parts of this game were as if they were made according to the instructions of a certain great Polish film director. Everything took place in the name of space (and light) which produced a lead actor in relation to the "combination of actors' bodies".
The blue tiger inspired (or hid) the energy of the goal makers, and patiently waited as the eternal hunter should. He disguised himself as a magical director who knows the secrets of "filling and animating space". Into that space, as beautiful as the sea, Maradona forced Valdano (second goal) and Burruchaga (winning goal). He lent them his speed and bravery, the prance of the tiger, he gave them fame.
Those two images from the final performance, which were flawlessly directed by Maradona, were not just the work of "satisfying the senses", but rather the work of "the most profound and hidden spiritual satisfaction". For the few. In the world, there are thirteen of us. We know that the bare stage is not used only in its traditional dimensions, but also in "its lower depths". That "assault, the change of images" he brought to the hearing of the players, "to the creation of true physical language". That language "takes us into the netherworld" ("And at the bottom of our dreams are dreams").
Jorge Luis Borges made a sacrifice of his life (Library, Dream) to the "real tiger, whose blood runs hot". For the Argentine triumph, for the gold of the tigers:

"With the years have left me
the other magnificent colors
And now all I have left
Are dim light, tangled shadows
And the gold of the beginning
About twilight, about tigers, about flashes
Of myth and the epics
Of a gold even more precious."

Maradona, Diego Armando, led Argentine history into the streets. And Argentine mythology into the town squares. Myriad like the seas.
The taste of the real and the improbable; terror and fame. He made it so that Argentina is no longer "a country without memory".
Just like Borges, Maradona claims: "The years I spent in Europe, they are unreal/I was always (and will always be) in Buenos Aires".


For the end, Dawn or "who knows how tomorrow
the grave may be unlocked"

In better shape, I would offer a narration of the meaning of the number 10 to the geometry of Tlön. "That geometry knows not of parallels, and it postulates that a man stretching changes the forms surrounding him. The basis of their mathematics is the concept of infinite numbers."
In this is the secret of Diego Maradona's dribbling.
In better shape, I would try to show how Maradona is like God. He reminds one of a sphere. As solid as a building. Cicerone him-self claimed that the shape of the sphere is perfect and that it is suitable for divinity. Maradona is like the Ball. "A frightening sphere whose center is everywhere and surface is nowhere."
The Encyclopedia of Errors, that is my biography. The first and final. I captured the football tiger, the energy of the tiger. I am alone in my own zoo. "Watching me" (grown old), a blind man shuts me up. An editor at KN (Literary News). The last in a series of mistakes: this text.
While we at the offices of KN were putting this edition together, I had the feeling, from the contributions that had arrived, that this issue of KN would have a "nice" political hue. Therefore, we should bring things into balance. I should speak up about football. However, even this football story is related to an interesting "political fact". In the past thirty years, every year when the World Cup was played, the Argentine government unfailingly fell. Either by putsch or by more gentle means. There are two exceptions. Cesar Luis Menotti and Mario Kempes saved the government in 1978. And this year, it was Diego Armando Maradona. Football is above the military juntas (1978), and above the renewal of democracy (1986).
If only we had taken the title as the World Champions in football, there would have been no Memorandum.
This text I bring to a close at dawn.

Dawn
"I search for my house
Amazed and frozen by the white light
While a bird stops the silence,
and the spent night
Remains in the eyes of the blind."

When the rebel students broke into his lecture at the University of Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges did not want to stop. They say he was talking about Blake. I say it was about the Tiger.
Postscript: Just before the "Književne novine (KN)" "came out", in the "press" it was reported that Diego Maradona had received the "Golden Quill" in Monaco.

Translated by Randall A. Major