Kitty Maradona: 'It hurts my soul that he's no longer with us'

Nearly six years have passed since 25 November 2020, and for Rita Mabel Maradona — Kitty, one of Diego Armando Maradona's older sisters — the void has not closed. "I cannot say why my brother died, there is a trial under way against the doctors who were treating him. The only thing I think about is that justice is done," she said.

"It hurts my soul that he's no longer with us. Nearly six years have passed now and even today I cannot fully come to terms with the fact that he's gone."

Diego only formalised that gift in 2019, a year before he left them: "Maybe he had a premonition," Kitty says. At their last Christmas together he gave each of them a bunch of flowers, the deed of ownership and the trademark, with a line that now sounds like a will: "That way, when I die, you can be at ease."

Kitty does not hide the hardest moments. Her brother's arrest at 32, over half a kilo of cocaine found in his flat on Calle Franklin, in Caballito, came as a sudden shock: "Before that we had never suspected anything like it." On his illness, she chooses not to go back there: "I'd rather not think about it. Life alongside him was beautiful, and when he was unwell we were still by his side."

On the bond with Napoli, Kitty describes an affection they had not even felt in Argentina: she and her sisters, when Diego played in Napoli's blue shirt, could not leave the house without being surrounded by people — in the street, at dinner, always. They returned to the city after their brother's death and found themselves, in her words, "in a wonderful madness": recognised, kissed on the hand, in a love that for her will never end.

The trial remains open, and so does the demand for justice that Kitty repeats like a fixed thought. Nearly six years on from 25 November 2020, the wound for Diego's family is still the same as it was then, and in Napoli as in Argentina, it has not healed.