For the black man who lives inside Pelé

I didn’t see you play. By the time I was able to understand what football was, you were already heading towards the end of a career so brilliant that your name was synonymous with quality in everything. It was common to hear someone refer to a talent, a person of reference in their area of ​​expertise: “so-and-so is a Pelé at what he does”. As a black girl, daughter of a black father the same age, I grew up with the pride he felt in seeing you in the high regard of the world – which had the custom (and still has) to place dark black men in subalternity, even if they were ” Pelés” in what they did.

In Brazil, you were the first great black international pop star. No Brazilian artist or athlete had reached the world with equal fame until then. A time when all boys wanted the same skill, the same opportunity, the same fame, the same money, the same prestige…

We live in a difficult world and country. A world that creates exceptions to convince the majority of the illusion that one day they could become the rule. Everyone wanted to wear the number 10 shirt and raise that clenched fist in the air after a goal.

I think you always knew that and, for decades, on the field, you did your best (and the impossible) to keep this dream and this desire alive and warm in the eyes of the huge Brazilian fans, even those who, like me, don’t remember watching you play.

What perhaps wasn’t so clear and evident for you is that the fascination aroused by your performance within those four lines of the field had very deep roots, because your body, mine, my father’s, my mother’s, that of black people like us, has always been treated as devoid of humanity and, consequently, of intelligence in those molds of the head separated from the strength of the arms, abdomen, buttocks, calves, feet. An existence centered on thought as a sign of existence.

We do not fit into this pattern for a simple reason: where our ancestors came from, existence and intelligence are in each cell, in each movement, in each dribble that the chest throws to one side, but the legs pull to another, in the absolute domination of that sphere on the instep, in each quick dash towards the goal. In the head that anticipates and, for that very reason, is capable of imagining exactly where yours and the other’s body are going, but, above all, how far we manage to resist the attack. If we didn’t have this intelligence to anticipate movements and calculation, Pelé, there wouldn’t be you, me, my father, my mother and black people like us, because the world, for us, has always been pure attack. This is, after all, the magic. The dense identification we have. Our ancestral link.

I, as the daughter of a black father the same age, felt deeply affected by your stories of cracked, denied, crumbling paternity, with a daughter almost the same age as I was. Stories that were never mine with my father, but could be those of many men (black or not) that I met, that I know. The same love that I received, I wanted for that daughter of hers.

It took a long time for me to understand our disgrace as a society built to burden us women with all the burdens of maintaining family affections and raising children. Since this is a sincere conversation, even if I can’t hear your answers, I can tell you that I can explain, but not justify. However, I don’t know what it’s like to have been you either. I can only regret what was lost, hoping that there is some space for the recovery of affection, even if on another plane.

After so many decades in the world’s spotlight, I know it’s hard to remember that before Pelé there was Edson Arantes do Nascimento, who carries within himself these things said here and so many more. There was a boy somewhere… It is difficult to separate what was his and what was the construction of the imaginary eager to make idols and executioners, as if there was nothing between one and the other or if one and the other did not coexist within each one. of us.

And what’s left now?

The desire to run with the speed of an agile, intelligent, brilliant, fast, accurate body remains.

The urge remains to punch the air with a clenched fist, in a leap upwards that remains frozen there, in the air, in space made of invisible matter essential to life.