Bars are the football mood truth machine. And I’ve been running it at full speed for a week. In the bar of the fish market with breakfast, in the one in the old market square with the midday beer, in the one on the balcony of the port with the afternoon beer or in the beach bar with a glass of ice and something after midnight. And the result that the device has provided, used with all kinds of parishioners, has always been the same until now: people believe that Barça has a good team. The desire to sit in front of the television has returned, to ask the local rock to organize buses to attend the field and, most importantly, to delay dinner time if it coincides with the game. Let’s see if we are lucky and make it last. We entrust ourselves to Xavi and his field hands.
But these first lines of the season do not want to be about football, but about a man. Sometimes it happens that the most fragile is the most solid. That the most brittle is the most resistant. That the most vulnerable is the strongest. Do not see in these paradoxes an abhorrent juggling word game. They are, yes, a literary shipwreck because they don’t even come close to what they would like to mean: the true miracle of the human. Because that is what Juan Carlos Unzué’s public life has become since he was diagnosed with ALS and decided to turn to activism to publicize the disease and raise funds for his research.
One thinks, from the arrogance of their well-being, that it is the unhealthy who needs our embrace. That we are the healthy ones who comfort and comfort the one who suffers from an illness. Unzué has been teaching for some time, even if it is unintentionally the opposite. It is the sick who heals and helps the healthy. It is from a wheelchair that one reaches the stature of a giant who can embrace the entire universe without even being able to raise his arms or move his legs to deliver it to those who can do it but are unable to dare to go that far. It is from the cruel condemnation of an illness like his that every gesture and every word of hope that Unzué gives and warns of how wonderful life is and how much it is worth living, whatever the circumstances.
We are not the ones who help Unzué and the other patients by going to a charity match. It is he, in fact, who throws a cloak over us, illuminating what is truly substantive in what is human. That is why the first lines of the season are to thank him. Because no matter how many donations we make, we will never reach the price that the ticket should have to attend the life lesson that this man is giving us. Thank you Juan Carlos.
