ZIDANE'S MELANCHOLY

by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Zidane watched the Berlin sky, not thinking of anything, a white sky flecked with grey clouds lined with blue, one of those windy skies, immense and changing, of the Flemish painters, Zidane watched the Berlin sky over the Olympic stadium on the evening of the 9th of July 2006, and felt with poignant intensity the sensation of being there, simply there, in Berlin's Olympic stadium, at this precise moment in time, on the evening of the football World Cup final. No doubt it was a matter only of form and melancholy on the evening of this final. In the first instance, pure form: the penalty converted in the seventh minute, an indolent Panenka1 that hit the crossbar, passed over the line and re-exited the goal, a billiard-ball trajectory that flirted with Geoff Hurst's fabled shot at Wembley in 1966.2 But this was still only a quotation, an inadvertent homage to a legendary World Cup moment. Zidane's true act on the evening of this final - a sudden gesture like an overflow of black bile into the solitary night - will occur only later and make one forget the rest, the end of the match and the extra time, the shots at the goal and the winner, a decisive, brutal, prosaic, novelistic act: a perfect moment of ambiguity under the Berlin sky, a few dizzying seconds of ambivalence, where beauty and blackness, violence and passion, come into contact and provoke the short-circuit of a wholly unscripted act. Zidane's head-butt had the suddenness and suppleness of the calligrapher's stroke. If it took only a few seconds to accomplish, it could occur only at the end of a slow process of maturation, a genesis long, invisible and secret. Zidane's act knows not the aesthetic categories of the beautiful or the sublime, it stands beyond the moral categories of good and evil, its value, its strength and its substance owing only to their irreducible congruence with the precise moment in time at which it occurred. Two vast subterranean currents must have carried it from afar. The first, from the depths, wide, silent, powerful, inexorable, deriving as much from pure melancholy as from the painful perception of the passing of time, is linked to the sadness of the ordained end, the bitterness of the player who is contesting the last match of his career and cannot resolve to finish. Zidane could never resolve to finish, he is familiar with false exits (against Greece) or missed exits (against South Korea).3 It has always been impossible for him to bring his career to a close, even, least of all, beautifully, for to end beautifully is nonetheless to end, to seal the legend: to raise the World Cup is to accept one's death, whereas missing the exit leaves prospects open, unknown and living. The other current bearing his gesture, both parallel and contradictory, fed by an excess of black bile and saturnine influences, is the wish to be done with it at the quickest, the wish, irrepressible, to leave the pitch abruptly and return to the locker rooms (I left abruptly, without telling anybody),4 for weariness is dire, sudden, incommensurable, tiredness, exhaustion, a bad shoulder, Zidane is unable to score, he can no longer bear his team-mates, his opponents, he can no longer bear the world or himself. Zidane's melancholy is my melancholy, I know it, I have nourished it and I feel it. The world becomes opaque, limbs are heavy, and the hours seem leaden, longer, slower, and interminable. He feels broken and he becomes vulnerable. Something in us turns against us 6 - and, in the

intoxication of fatigue and nervous tension, Zidane can only complete the act of violence that delivers, or of flight that relieves, unable otherwise to defuse the nervous tension that weighs on him (and it is the final flight from the finished work).7 Since the beginning of extra time Zidane, unconsciously, has not ceased to express his weariness with his captain's armband which does not stop slipping, his armband which comes undone and which he keeps readjusting clumsily on his arm. Zidane thus signals, despite himself, that he wants to leave the pitch and return to the locker rooms. He no longer has the means, or the strength, the energy, the will, to pull off a last stunt, a final stroke of pure form; the header, for all its beauty, pushed away by Buffon a few moments earlier, will definitively open his eyes to his irreparable impotence. Form, at present, resists him - and this is unacceptable for an artist, we know the intimate ties that link art to melancholy. Unable to score a goal, he will score minds. The night has fallen now on Berlin, the light's intensity has lessened, and Zidane has suddenly felt the sky physically darken over his shoulders, leaving in the firmament only flayed streaks of twilight clouds, black and crimson. Water mixed with night is an old remorse that will not sleep.8 No one in the stadium understood what had happened. From my spot in the stands of the Olympic stadium I saw the match resume, the Italians returning to the attack and the action moving away towards the opposite goal. An Italian player remained on the ground, the act had taken place. Zidane had been overtaken by the hostile gods of melancholy. The referee stopped the game, and people started to run every which way on the grass, towards the prostrate player and in the direction of the assistant referee, whom some of the Italian players were surrounding, my gaze went from left to right, then, through my binoculars, I instinctively singled out Zidane, the gaze always finds Zidane, the silhouette of Zidane in his white shirt standing in the night at the centre of the pitch, his face in extreme close-up in the sights of my binoculars, and Buffon, the Italian goalkeeper, who appears and starts to speak to him and rub his head, massaging his scalp and the back of his neck in a surprising gesture, caressing, enveloping, in a gesture that anoints, as one would a child, a newborn, to comfort it, to calm it. I did not understand what was happening, no one in the stadium understood what was happening, the referee headed towards the small group of players where Zidane stood and pulled out a black card from his pocket, which he raised towards the Berlin sky, and I understood at once that it was addressed to Zidane, the black card of melancholy. Zidane's act, invisible, incomprehensible, is all the more spectacular for not having taken place. It simply did not take place, if one limits oneself to the live observation of events in the stadium, and to the legitimate faith we can have in our senses, no one saw anything, neither the spectators nor the referees. Not only did Zidane's act not take place, but, were it to have taken place, were Zidane to have had the mad intention, the desire or fantasy, to head-butt one of his opponents, Zidane's head would never have reached his opponent, for each time Zidane's head would have covered half the distance separating it from the opponent's chest, there would still have been another half to cover, and then another half, and then still another half, and so on eternally, such that Zidane's

head, progressing continually towards its target but never reaching it, as in an immense slow motion sequence infinitely looped, could not, never, for it is physically and mathematically impossible (it is Zidane's paradox, if not Zeno's), come into contact with the opponent's chest - never; only the fleeting impulse that crossed Zidane's mind was visible to the eyes of viewers around the world.

-Translated by Thangam Ravindranathan and Timothy Bewes1. Antonin Panenka, taking the last penalty for the Czech team in a penalty shoot-out during the final of the 1976 European Championship, fooled the German goalkeeper into diving for a save, before chipping the ball into the centre of the net. 2. Hurst scored his second goal of the 1966 World Cup final from inside the penalty box in extra time, striking the ball upwards with his right foot. The ball hit the crossbar and bounced down, and was only awarded when the linesman confirmed that the ball had crossed die line. 3. Zidane retired from international football after France lost to Greece in the quarter finals of the 2004 European Championship, but announced his comeback a year later. In 2006 he received a yellow card during France's group stage match against South Korea, and so missed France's next game against Togo, a match that, had it been lost, would have seen France eliminated from the tournament. 4. Jean-Philippe Toussaint, The Bathroom, Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis (trans), New York, E.E Dutton, 1990, p37. 5. Ibid., p42 (translation modified - TN). 6. Jean Starobinski, 'L'Encre de la melancolie', Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 11.1, 123 (March 1963): 411 (our translation -TN). 7. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, Penguin Freud Library Vol. 14: Art and Literature, James Strachey (trans), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990, p155 (translation modified TN). 8. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Edith R. Farrell (trans), Dallas, Texas, Pegasus Foundation, 1983, p102.