“And after goodbye ... again, Cristiano”

Nthe night of April 24, 1974, at 10:55 p.m., the Associate Emitters of Lisbon put on the air a love song. “And after the farewell”, José Niza and José Calvary, in the voice of Paulo de Carvalho, spoke of the end of a relationship. That night served something else: it was the first password for the troops to advance. A song about a loss was forever linked to a beginning. A kind of “lesson about goodbyes”: goodbye only makes sense with what is done after it.

Cristiano Ronaldo announced on November 5 that he left the National Selection. At the age of 41, with 234 games and 146 goals, world record of internationalizations and goals by selections, he chose to do so in a video on social networks, on the eve of Jorge Jesus publicizing the call. In August I wrote here that we were all rehearsing a farewell. In October, after Copenhagen, this was a farewell that no one rehearsed. Rehearsal's over.

The end wasn't the party you imagined. The bank in Norway, on leaving the internship in Copenhagen and the eight-page press release, joined a 30-day suspension applied by the Federation Discipline Council. Anyone looking for a culprit – the captain or the selector – on the benches and in social media comments, as we do every time we lose something. The last game was September 24 against Wales, without anyone knowing it was the last. Bruno Fernandes had asked that if it was to go out, it would be a party day. It wasn't.

I don't know him from the office and it's not my place to read his soul. But Psychoanalysis has things to say about what happens to people who lose a place. Freud, in “Fight and Melancholy” (1917), to which I referred in August, recalls that mourning is not only done by the loss of a loved one, but also by the loss of an abstraction that occupied this place: the homeland, freedom, an ideal. The 7-shirt was, for 23 years, one of those places. For him and for us. Many people today will feel a sadness that, seen from outside, may seem disproportionate. But with it is also a piece of our own history: the place where we were that night of 2016, the people we embraced. We cry the player and cry the time we live with him.

Grief implies work. You need time and you need shape. Farewell rituals exist to give meaning and support to a loss that, without them, hurts raw. Here, the act came before the word: first the exit, then the explanations. The farewell video seems to be the attempt to end the symbolic form that the lawn denied him. It's a thank-you text that names those that never appear in the photographs, which admits flaws. In a man whose public image was built on the refusal of failure, acknowledging that he also failed says something.

There is still one sentence that deserves attention. He says he spent his life working to be the best in the world and that today he realizes that the greatest victory was that he deserved to represent the country. It's a subtle displacement. Being the best depends on winning others; deserving a place depends on belonging to something greater than us. If this phrase is more than rhetoric, it points to the path that awaits it.

What are these challenges? The first is that this goodbye is partial. You keep playing Al Nassr, and the final end of your career is yet to come. This was the first of two goodbyes, and the second will be more difficult, because it takes with it the athlete body itself. At 41, the body no longer responds as it responded at 25. The risk is that the club becomes the stage where you try to prove what the Selection no longer lets you prove, and that the pursuit of numbers replaces the work of thinking the end. Freud, in “Remember, repeat and elaborate” (1914), showed that what cannot be elaborated tends to return in the form of repetition, in act. It is worth remembering that Manchester United's departure in 2022 also broke with the coach. It remains to be seen whether this end will be drawn up or repeated again..

The second challenge is to find life beyond income. Winnicott, who helped me think of disenchantment in October, also wrote that it is in playing that the child and the adult can be creative. Living creatively is what makes you feel that life is worth living. In a excerpt that Netflix put around, you hear his wife say: “Cris, you have everything.” What a difficult phrase to hear, for those who have spent their lives wanting more! For Psychoanalysis, desire is not exhausted in what is achieved, and the challenge of those who have already won almost everything is to find out what is still lacking, without going to look for it in a marker. The message ends with a boy in Madeira chasing after a ball. That boy played. The man's challenge will be to find a field, inside or outside football, where he can play again without having to prove anything to anyone.

The third challenge is ours. Piera Aulagnier called a narcissistic contract to the bond that unites each subject to the set to which he belongs: the group invests him and reserves him a place, and he resumes as his statements that founded the group, ensuring his continuity. Kaës extended the idea to groups and institutions. For 23 years, Ronaldo carried much of that investment. Now he returns his shirt and says that a country that continues to create new heroes never ceases to believe in itself. Bion described the groups that function as if they were gathered to be supported by a leader on whom everything depends. A selection, and a country, that lived for two decades supported by one man now have to learn to think without him. Without quickly replacing him with another savior.

No one knew in 1974 what was coming after goodbye. There was something new that had to be built. Ronaldo's the same. After good-bye there's a foul for him and us. I wrote here, by the way of Kyrgios, that lack hurts but opens the way to desire, while the void only asks to be filled. Whatever everyone does with this fault, think about it or cover it, it will tell more about the future than all the records together.