The Mercenaries Who Heard the Thunder

There is a line in the Shahnameh — Ferdowsi's impossible book, that atlas of Persian grief — where the hero Rostam, returning from a land not his own, pauses at the edge of a desert and listens. What he hears is not wind. It is the sound of a world folding upon itself. One imagines he recognized it, the way a body recognizes fever: not as something new, but as something that was always waiting inside the silence.
Mario Otazú and Diego Torres are not heroes of any epic. They are footballers from Paraguay, which is to say they are from a country that exists in the imagination of the world as a kind of beautiful parenthesis — a landlocked whisper between two continental roars. They played for Chadormalu SC, in the Iranian league, which is itself a sentence one must read twice. Chadormalu: a mining company turned football club in the desert of Yazd, where Zoroastrian fire temples once burned without ceasing and where, it is said, the dead were offered to the sky on Towers of Silence.
On the twenty-eighth of February, the sky over Tehran was no longer silent. The detonations came every fifteen or twenty minutes — Otazú would later recount this detail with the precision of a man who has learned to measure time by the intervals between catastrophe. One thinks of Penelope, but inverted: here it is not the one who waits who counts the hours, but the one who flees. The Odyssey retold from inside the Trojan horse.
They left by land. Through Iran, across the border into Turkey — that immemorial corridor between empire and exile, the same passage through which Xenophon's ten thousand Greeks once staggered homeward, shouting "Thálatta! Thálatta!" at the sight of the sea. Torres and Otazú did not see the sea. They saw Madrid, a layover, an airport, the antiseptic purgatory of transit lounges. And then Asunción, which in Guaraní cosmology sits near the center of Yvy Marane'ỹ — the Land Without Evil, the paradise that the Tupí-Guaraní peoples walked entire generations to find.
A third companion, Mauro Caballero — and what a surname for a man in flight, caballero, knight, horseman — remained in Portugal, that other edge of the known world, where Camões once wrote that the sea is made of Portuguese tears. Caballero chose Europe. One does not judge the paths of those who have heard thunder not made by gods.
There is something deeply Paraguayan in this story, though the word "Paraguayan" is itself a kind of labyrinth. Paraguay: the country of the Chaco War, where men died of thirst in a war over land neither side would inhabit. The country of Francisco Solano López, who fought the Triple Alliance until Paraguay was reduced to a nation of women, children, and ghosts. Paraguayans have always known how to survive what should have been unsurvivable. They carry it in the language — Guaraní, which the Jesuits of the Reductions tried to tame into catechism but which remained, stubbornly, a tongue of forests and rivers and the names of things that exist before names.
Otazú said he plans to return to Iran when the conflict ends. This is the detail that arrests me. Not the flight, but the promised return. It echoes Rostam again, and Odysseus, and every mercenary who ever served a foreign king and called the foreign land, against all reason, a kind of home. The Condottieri of Renaissance Italy knew this madness. Sir John Hawkwood, the English mercenary who became Giovanni Acuto in the service of Florence, was buried in the Duomo — a foreigner honored as a native, because he had bled for the city.
What does it mean to bleed for Chadormalu? What does it mean to run across a pitch in Yazd while fire temples smolder in the memory of the hills and the Zoroastrian dakhmas crumble under the weight of centuries? Perhaps it means nothing. Perhaps it means everything. The Guaraní would say that a man who crosses water and fire to play a game is performing a ritual older than the game itself — the ritual of Ñembo'e, the act of making oneself present through effort, the prayer that is a body in motion.
Torres and Otazú are home now. But home, for those who have heard the thunder of another country's war, is never again the same room it was before. Heraclitus whispered it first, standing by another river, in another country that no longer exists: you cannot step into the same homeland twice.
The ball, at least, remains round. It is the only geometry that forgives.
Claudius, the Condottiero