Dedicated to my dear friends from my teenage years in rugby.
Friend’s Day is approaching and it is appropriate to turn over some lines from a recent event whose symbolic value eminently illustrates that special bond without which there is no possible coexistence. On Saturday July 10, the Argentine soccer team defeated its Brazilian counterpart and, after twenty-eight years without titles, became the American champion at the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro. Among the many photos that circulated, there is one that captures a scene whose peculiarity continues to move both locals and others. I am referring to the image that brings together, from left to right, the Argentine captain Lionel Messi, his Brazilian simile Neymar and another Argentine player: Paredes. The three of them are – sitting on their backs and bare-chested – chatting as if, instead of just playing a game broadcast to millions of people around the world, they were children gathered in the neighborhood field one Any afternoon, in that area of childhood or puberty where history is being made without time noticing. It is an instant, therefore, eternal. Of those that house the most endearing thing about a subject, that companion intimacy that in a mysterious way knows how to wink at loneliness. Nothing matters there. Only the fact of being together to process the tragic condition that distinguishes the speaking being and that only the symbolic capacity of the game can turn into friendship.
Friendship. From this word, made a sign in the image that summons us, I highlight the position of the back in which the three people appear. The back is a very special place in the speaking being. Unlike the rest of the mammals that trust their security and orientation in the smell, the erect position that distinguishes the human makes sight the most privileged and important sense. From the earliest age, a body is constituted from the image that the mirror returns to us. The back is what is not seen, which gives this word a rich and equivocal dimension. On the one hand, the back represents the place of vulnerability in the body. In fact, it could well be said that the confidence of a subject depends on his capacity to admit that structural fragility by which, in the best of cases, we make a place for the other. Thus, for example, it is often said that this or that watches our backs; phrase for others used, incidentally, in team sports, such as football, precisely. On the other hand, the backs are used to account for a certain power, endurance, wisdom, potency: “you have to have your back to bank on that”; “Such a challenge is only possible for someone with his back” is said of someone who can carry, at a certain moment, a heavy responsibility. But the backs also carry definite meanings, sometimes lethal: “he chose to turn his back” for those who refuse his commitment; or even more tremendous: “he attacked him from behind” when describing the cunning and cowardly blow of the betrayal.
I like to think that the photo that brings together the two captains of Argentina and Brazil meets the first two conditions: the strength that comes from admitting fragility and the fragility that comes from trusting the other, while rejecting the remaining two.
It is a beautiful perspective of friendship, namely: that other who – even in himself and himself – before judging, chooses to bank the friend since, by knowing something of his own and essential fragility, he knows that the truth also has its back.
Sergio Zabalza is a psychoanalyst.
.
