Good luck in Europe, Matheus

Last Sunday, moving at the cautious pace imposed on me by being thirty-three years old, the demands from readers for the continuation of Magical Crimes, and the exhaustion of preparing eighteen meals for the family for the week, I sat down in front of the TV to drink a modest two Spaten beers and witness Cruzeiro's defeat.

Gabi, also known as Gabigol and, more rarely, to the dismay of his own birth certificate, Gabriel Barbosa, elbowed an opponent in the face and was sent off after the referee reviewed the VAR. The coach of the other team, Cuca, said in an interview that the incident was not decisive for Cruzeiro's defeat; these are postmodern times, I guess, and thinking twice before denying any obvious truth is just a waste of time.

After the match, our number 10 announced his desire to leave the club. Nothing against Cruzeiro; he wants to raise his child in Europe. "It's not you, it's me."

Despite the letdown, I wish Matheus Pereira a timely transfer in the coming weeks, to a place where he can rediscover the football he has long forgotten. But...

But, of course, if you're even minimally attentive to the news, you might be thinking about something specific.

I'm thinking about it too, but the fact is that Matheus Pereira's child will have enough money not to suffer the hardships imposed by European xenophobia, less timid each year, on those trying to alleviate the woes left as a legacy by their own colonization, the Europeans, on the periphery of capitalism. And this is good news for the family.

However, if the economic contradictions of the system intensify (as sure as the sun will rise in the east), I hope for the return of our number ten to the best possible place for any Brazilian: Brazil. Here, we still have to deal with Bolsonarism, it's true, but no amount of money will make the followers of the Swiss People's Party, France's National Front, Fidesz, or Germany's Alternative for Germany, the same one Elon Musk supports, see humanity in people like us.

But this reasoning requires some assumptions. And I have no idea if Matheus Pereira has them. I mean: are there no Brazilian immigrants who support Donald Trump, discovering, surprised, that they are irredeemably Latino, despite the color of their skin?

As I said: this reasoning requires some assumptions. Without them, you are just someone very confused, for whom the world does not seem to make sense, discontented with "all this that is out there."

It was thinking about these things that I realized the Sunday of defeat had ended. I still tried to review a bit more of Magical Crimes Part 2, a book already completed with its 300 A4 pages and 87,000 words, but everything is always bad when Cruzeiro loses. I closed the file, unable to progress, and went to sleep with the certainty that two Spatens don't harm anyone.

Foto: Gustavo Aleixo/Cruzeiro