Messi by Guillem Balagué Read Free Book Online Page A

neighbourhood, where I was born.’
    The Messis lived for decades in a small house on the Calle Lavalleja, located in a suburb some four kilometres south-east of the centreof Rosario, known by some as La Bajada or Las Heras. To others it remains nameless; it is just home. It is a typical low-rise community where front doors are left ajar. Cumbia music, chatter and laughter emanate from within. Kids play in the streets. Traffic is rare. Time seems to stand still in Bajada. In this sleepy working-class area, at number 525 on the narrow Calle Estado de Israel, is the house Jorge Messi built with his own hands.
    His father, Eusebio, was a builder by profession and Jorge quickly learned to do everything. The two Messis used the weekends to lay brick upon brick on a 300-square-metre plot of land bought by the family. It was at that time single-storey, a similar size to all the other houses in the street, with a backyard to play in. One wall faced the house of Cintia Arellano, who was the same age as Leo and his best friend. Today the road surface has been improved, as has the street lighting and the drains. The house has a second floor, a fence (the only one in the street) and a security camera, but almost always remains closed.
    This is where Jorge Messi, Celia Cuccittini and their four children lived in the early years. It was, remembers Leo in Corriere della Sera , ‘Small. A kitchen, living room, two bedrooms. In one bedroom my mum and dad slept and in the other me and my brothers.’
    This, then, was Leo’s street, just 200 metres from an uneven piece of fenced-off land covered with rough, wild grass where football was played; next to it, the kiosk where Matías worked when Leo was already in Barcelona, is still there, right next to the house where Matías lived and that he later gave to a relative. Go to the top of the street and there you will see Grandoli. Grandmother Celia lived around here and a little further up were the cousins. And close by are the paternal grandparents, Rosa María and Eusebio Messi Baro, who, at 86, and years after retiring, still gets up every morning to open the humble bakery he installed in a room in the house that they have lived in for the past 50 years.
    Everything starts and finishes in that neighbourhood. The family unit is the fertile ground on which the Messis and the Cuccittinis were raised. Leo is devoted to his parents, his brother, his cousins, his uncles. To his mother, above all to his mother: he has a tattoo of her face on his back. ‘He did it without saying anything to anyone. He came around one day and showed us. We almost fainted withthe shock. We didn’t have a clue that he was going to do this. But it’s his body and there’s nothing we can say to him,’ his father said in Sique Rodríguez’s book Educados para ganar (‘Educated to Win’) in which the parents of the best-known graduates from FC Barcelona’s La Masía give their side of the story.
    From here also come Leo’s best friends whom he still sees whenever time permits. For Messi, Rosario, La Bajada, or whatever you want to call it, represents his childhood, ‘a man’s true homeland’ as the poet Rilke would say. The place where he wants to return (where he returns constantly), the place he has never left; the place he has recreated for himself in Barcelona to make everything easier.
    That’s why he returns home to his family whenever he can. It is to Rosario that he escapes when there is a sufficiently long break at any time in the summer, or at Christmas. You don’t see him in the neighbourhood so much now, not since he bought a larger property on the outskirts of the city, but at other times he has been seen cycling there. Sometimes he travels around neighbouring regions, as in the summer of 2013 when he was seen in a supermarket pushing a trolleyful of muffins, wine and breadsticks; he was spending the day in Gualeguaychú, in the south-east of Entre Rios, a sleepy town where, despite the cap he was