Ruben Verdu welcomes you to…
Sometimes one seems to prepare the unconscious just to cope with certain environmental actions. I mean actions in the most theatrical sense, with a clear intent of being acts that back-ground a semiotic passion, interactive in very perverse ways, and in a play that signals the complicity of every element with that which flows, ultimately, from the very presence of the living thing. Sometimes one has to just take action.
One has sometimes also to belong succinctly to a fictional genre, subject to a constant state of excess, doubled, and repeated by the reflection of an imaginary real that succeeds in showing things go into further enhancement.
From the folds of this imaginary, we witness the outcome of an autistic field purely dedicated to deploy its copies and to undertake again, disciplined, every one of its traditions, every one of its laws, every one of its rules.
Futbol
After the last outlines of town disappeared behind the turns of the dirt road outside Creel, I found at last a place that dealt in unison with things, and the heat of summer. On that day, Benito was drunk. I didn't know his name then, but compelled by the unanimous impositions of the scene, he felt eager to tell me something about him that went, of course, beyond himself. I asked him about the drink. He mumbled that I could join him in trying to finish whatever booze had been left over from the game.
—The game...what game?
—Futból.
To think of soccer, there, was not easy. Every step was either a climb or a descend. After taking a look at his feet, barely protected by the shadow of sandals, I added with an air of intrigue...
—you guys kick ball here?
He went drunk on me again, said nothing, and started stumbling towards the thick of the woods. I followed him. He did not get very far, however, and reached for the ground where he found something he knew he could find there. He showed me what he was already holding in one of his hands; six inches of solid wood, carved kind of round, that accompanied the length of his reply.
—We kick ball.
It was clear from his comfortable explanations that for me there will be no recourse to imagination in trying to keep up with his account, and that, from now on, I was going to be at the mercy of his story. He began to explain how to ferment corn sprouts for the beer because intoxication was so much part of the game, because endurance had to be challenged, had to be raised to another level.
—Everyone has to drink.
Competition prevails if all participants submit to this tabula rasa, and they do. Everyone, whole families, are committed to further extend the contagious effects of this rule.
—...and then, he said, we kick ball.
From what he told me, this is futból. Two teams of men from different communities take turns at kicking the ball. The drinking continues wherever they go, and with it the simplicity of futból. The need for simplicity underscores the, otherwise, gigantic dimensions of the game. Potentially, the field of the game can encompass the entire world. They move about with no clear demarcations, following the ball everywhere it lands, further and further from where they originally started. This drifting has no competitive value of its own, but in combination with drinking, one can begin to understand the obvious challenge, and the necessity for an uncomplicated set of rules.
At the end of the game, there is no more will to kick the ball. Everyone has fallen victim of exhaustion. By then, two or three days have already been spent playing. A few, bored and older, are busy talking and finishing whatever has been left to drink.