BarcelonaIt doesn’t fail. Whether at the door of a stadium in Austria, in a lost nightclub in Cape Town or elsewhere check-in from a hotel in Lima. Every time a stranger who is a football fanatic sees my ID, he automatically completes: “Thiago Arantes… Do Nascimento!” No, even if my father told me there was a missing branch of the family tree that would lead us to Três Corações, I stopped believing we were family years ago.
But maybe, well, we are. Pelé is (and here I will never write the verb in the past tense) family for all Brazilians. Pelé, the footballer who can stop a war in Africa, also makes us win our little wars every day, everywhere. Even literally. Whenever a Brazilian journalist travels to cover a conflict, it’s wise to pack a few Brazil national team shirts. “In case something happens to us at some border control, or we have problems with an unknown language… When you teach thehopscotchthings get fixed”, a colleague once explained to me.
The existence of Pelé draws, since that already distant 1958, the map of Brazil on the globe. It is because of him that the world faced a then unknown country. So that Brazil could teach the samba, the bossa nova or Carnival, first there had to be a team of soccer players dressed in yellow and a boy who was crowned king at 17 years old.
You can talk about Pelé’s greatness without even mentioning the goals he scored, the World Cups he won or the plays he created that still seem revolutionary to this day. Because of Pelé, a mystique was born around the number 10. Not only at Santos or in Brazil. If you see a team of fry kicking the ball anywhere in the world, look out for the 10, because it’s quite possibly the best of them all.
But let’s go back to Brazil. A country too cruel to its heroes, where people spent the last few years questioning whether Pelé should have been more involved in political or social issues, instead of accepting that he did more than anyone else for the image of the Brazil around the world. The Brazil we know would not exist without Pelé. But the Brazil we will know without him will not change with his absence. Pele is eternal, Pele will last. Every time a boy kicks a ball in Salvador, in Rio or Natal, every time the national team in that yellow shirt sets foot on a football field, be it in Qatar, Maracanã or New York.
His presence will be felt in our day-to-day life, either to set an almost unmatched bar (“This Hamilton is the Pelé of Formula 1, right?”) or to enter the melee with any Argentinian friend with the conversation he likes the most even though it always ends the same: Pele has as many World Cups as everyone else brothers and sisters together Pelé, after all, will continue to be there even in the most trivial things, like when someone looks at a DNI with Arantes and the boss ends the sentence with a “do Nascimento”.