Preserved by the family, Edson kept the faith knowing that Pelé is immortal

Pelé watched the debut of the Brazilian team in the Qatar Cup, on November 24, against Serbia, on a TV in the Albert Einstein Hospital room, in São Paulo, where he spent the last days of his life.

To cheer him up, some people were allowed to watch the match alongside him. The family’s only request was that no photos were taken. The image of the King of Football swollen by the treatment against cancer, already in the terminal phase, could be frightening. Those who were with the former player, who died this Thursday (29), aged 82, were worried and left fearing the worst. The patient alternated moments of lucidity with others of uttering disjointed sentences.

The last years of the life of the three-time world champion for the national team and twice for Santos, the greatest scorer in the history of football, consisted of comings and goings to the hospital, requests to go to his mansion in Guarujá when he should have been in his apartment in the central area of ​​São Paulo , and rumors about his death.

Every time he went to Einstein’s for chemotherapy sessions, word spread that he had died. At the request of advisors who looked after his image, he recorded videos denying them.

According to people close to the family, as much as possible, Pelé nurtured the hope that he could travel to Qatar to watch the World Cup. The doctors, even though they knew it wouldn’t be possible, put off breaking the news to him as a way of keeping him in good spirits.

Going to the World Cup was a matter of honor for him, as was maintaining at least part of the agenda of the most requested poster boy in world football. Already with mobility problems and cancer, Pelé had been prevented from going to Russia in 2018. he never conformed. It was the first tournament he had not been to since 1954, when he was 14 years old.

In the following year, in 1958, he was champion for the first time with the Brazilian national team. He played in the 1962, 1966 and 1970. From then on he was ever present as a poster boy, TV commentator or both.

He heard the promise that he should preserve himself for 2022. He began to tell everyone the joke that he “had warned Tite” that the competition in Qatar would be the last, after that “it wouldn’t do any more” to summon him.

Visits to Einstein irritated him. That’s why he asked his former assistant, Pepito Fornos, to buy berets that he could use on trips. Pele, under normal circumstances, he didn’t mind being recognized. He always amazed his ability to pay attention to fans, asking their name, writing a dedication when signing an autograph.

In the opinion of friends, he just didn’t like to be recognized at all times when arriving and leaving Einstein because it wasn’t his image. Edson Arantes do Nascimento couldn’t accept being Pelé anymore. More or less like his colleague/enemy (and these two conditions alternated several times over the years) Diego Armando Maradona, who wanted to be forever the number 10 of the Argentine national team for the 1986 World Cup, the Brazilian got used to the image of invincibility.

His moments of greatest irritation were on days when he wanted to walk alone and couldn’t anymore. He was revolted by the physiotherapy sessions which, he felt, were going nowhere. According to an acquaintance who spoke with him a week before his last hospitalization, there was a complaint that his thighs, so thick when he was a player, were too thin.

In his last interview with Sheet, in December 2018, he made this same complaint. But optimistically, he said the treatment would work.

In the final weeks, his daughter Kely, the most publicly present in the final stretch of her father’s life, posted images of herself with Pelé, but they only showed her hands or part of her head. In moments of conscience, according to these same people, she always kept the faith that, at the end of it all, there would be a way out. As if he knew that Edson was like everyone else, but Pelé is immortal.