A clinical study published years ago on addictions analyzed three laboratory mice locked in a type of circuit known as the Skinner box. At the end of the route, they found a dose of cocaine and an electric shock that was activated when the animal consumed it. The pleasure was beyond doubt. Not so much survival. The first rodent lost its desire to return when it felt the electrical tickling. The second relapsed and received another shock, but was dissuaded from a third attempt by an idea as abstract and counternatural as moderation. The last one, the one of interest for the study, came back again and again until the shock fried his brain. We are all that third mouse at some point in our lives. Others, like Adriano Leite, are from the moment they get up until they go to bed.
The Emperor, the striker who had everything to rule the world of football, has returned to the favela, whatever the cost. There he plans to die and, above all, live. He told it in a heartbreaking letter published in The Players Tribune written with the rhythm of a sonnet or magnetic hip-hop lyrics in 4/4 time. In first person, like those Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. “Do you know what it is to be a promise? / I know / Even a broken promise / The biggest waste in football.” You understand Adriano better than in any interview or report. “I’m not a criminal, but of course I could have been / I don’t go to clubs. / I always go to the same place, Naná’s kiosk, if you want to meet me, come by. / I drink every day, yes, and the days I don’t drink often too.”
The broken life, the one he surely didn’t want to have when it was his turn to take over from Ronaldo Nazario at San Siro. “I have lived in Barra da Tijuca for many years. But my navel is buried in the favela / Vila Cruzeiro. Complexo da Penha / Get on too. We go on a motorcycle. That’s how I feel. Come on, friend. It’s dawn. Soon traffic will be paralyzed. You didn’t know that, did you? From here to Penha on the Yellow Line is fast. But only if it is at that moment. Come on? That’s how it is. Right at the entrance of the community. The field of Order and Progress. Shit, I’ve played more football here than at San Siro.”
At San Siro, of course, he played little. 77 games in two periods, between 2001 and 2009. 74 goals, seven titles. He arrived at the age of 19 and in the first Champions League match he took a ball that Seedorf gave him, planted it in front of one of the Bernabéu areas, and turned Casillas’ goal into a violent wall. That day he became Emperor, an unstoppable beast of 87 kilos and 1.89. Then his father died, at only 44 years old, of a heart attack. And expectations, and life itself, overwhelmed him. He locked himself in his house in Milan, thought about his favela and downed a bottle of vodka with his gaze fixed lost on the wall. And then another. “Christmas came and I was alone in my apartment. It was incredibly cold. “I felt that depression that comes in the cold and gray months of northern Italy.” And as soon as he had a vacation, he would go to Rio, and as soon as he stepped foot off the plane, he would go straight to Vila Cruzeiro. “I was ringing the doorbell at the house of Cachaça, my great friend, who is no longer with us, and Hermes, another friend from childhood. I knocked on the window and told him: ‘wake up, come on’. They found us days later.”
Taking someone like Adriano out of a place like Vila Cruzeiro, a kind of Skinner box, can turn into a cruel cold extraction. He returned, as mice returned to the origin of personal pleasure, ignoring, or rather dramatically assuming, the consequences that his return would have. If it went badly for him, imagine all the kids who arrive every year from Africa, turned into “waste” and who can’t even put on their boots in the locker room of a big club.
