Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  Prophetic dreams also had their place at Botafogo. One night in 1945 the sports journalist Geraldo Romualdo da Silva had a premonition. He dreamt Botafogo would tie the match due to take place the following day. In order not to contaminate the atmosphere with bad luck, he stayed away from the team hotel on the day of the game. The result was worse than predicted. Botafogo lost. From then on it was crucial that the pressman never have another similar dream. Botafogo directors made sure that on Friday nights he had the best table at the Urea casino. When that was over men were sent to chat with him until it was time for work. For the length of the championship, he never slept on weekends.

  Carlito and Biriba helped earn Botafogo the fame of Brazil's most superstitious club. It is a reputation it still carries today, and one that has no chance of disappearing if bizarrely coincidental events continue to occur, like the match of 29 April 2001. On that day Vasco beat Botafogo 7-0. Nothing strange so far, except that seven is a traditionally mystical number and seven goals is a traditionally humiliating score-line. Newspapers pointed out that the previous time Botafogo let in seven goals was on 29 April 1994 – exactly seven years before. On both occasions the seventh goal was scored by the player in the number seven shirt. If that isn't spooky enough, both happened on the twenty-ninth, and what is nine minus two? The daily O Dia's headline two days later had an explanation: 'Uranus is to blame.' De, the coach, was more preacher-like: 'Seven is God's number, because he created the world in seven days. It's in the Bible. If he's putting me through this it's because he will compensate me in the future. Today's humiliated will be exalted tomorrow.' Gosh.

  Another prime number that should have its own entry in the encyclopaedia of Brazilian football is 13. Ever since Mário Zagallo married on 13 June, the day of St Anthony of Padua, it has been his lucky number. Zagallo is the most decorated World Cup footballer of all time. Talent, surely? He attributes his success to St Anthony. He won his first World Cup, as a player, in 1958, and his fourth, as assistant coach, in 1994. The sum of 5+8, and 9+4 is 13. (Let's forget medals as a player in 1962 and coach in 1970). He always wears an item of clothing with the number 13, he lives on the thirteenth floor and his cars have plates ending in 13. (Let's also forget that in 1999 he was sacked by Portuguesa after 13 games). In 2001 he coached Flamengo to the Rio state championship title. After the final's second leg at the Maracanã, press and fans invaded the pitch to surround the sixty-nine-year-old veteran. Zagallo took a figurine of St Anthony out of his pocket and held it in front of them. The final scoreline was 1-3.

  To rational Europeans, Brazilian superstitions are hard to swallow. They need to be taken in their context. Brazilian oral culture is so rich in old wives' tales that faith in a number is quite a considered decision. A cherished folk ritual is the simpatia, or 'affinity'. In most newspaper kiosks there are several magazines full of simpatias, mostly collected from readers. In a thirty-six-page booklet I bought in São Paulo, I noted the following simple recipe:

  How to marry a rich man

  Take two onions, three cloves of garlic, and two sprigs of parsley. Put on a white plate. Squash the ingredients until you have a paste and add a pinch of salt. Write the name of a man you want to marry on a piece of white paper. Put the paper on the well-seasoned paste. Leave the plate in the open air over night. Throw everything in the bin.

  Another booklet had more male-oriented advice:

  Success in betting on sporting events

  Buy a rabbit paw. Put it in your pillowcase for seven nights. Afterwards, take it to a forest with a green pen and a piece of white paper. Write your name and address on the paper and roll the paw in it. Bury everything in front of a big tree that is in blossom. Then ask the forest spirits to help your luck grow like the tree. Say thank you and leave without looking back. Bet as you usually do, but don't exaggerate.

  Another common custom is to pray to a Catholic saint asking for some help, making a vow that if the request is granted then you will perform a specified task as thanks. It is called 'paying for promises', a religious version of buying something on a credit card. You make the promise, and if the saint obliges, you pay for it later – usually by making a pilgrimage to a holy site. Frequently you leave a gift, an 'ex-voto', that in some way represents what the promise achieved. If you prayed for a car, for example, you would most likely bring a model car or a picture of yourself in front of it. This practice is not unique to Brazil, but Brazil seems to have embraced the concept with medieval fervour. It forms the basis for one of Brazil's most successful films, O Pagador de Promessas, The Given Word, which won the 1962 Palme D'Or at Cannes. The film told the story of a rural worker who expresses his gratitude for the miraculous recovery of his donkey by walking to Salvador burdened-like Jesus – with a wooden cross on his shoulder.

  Didi, inventor of the dry leaf free kick, so called because it fell in unpredictable directions, paid a very public promise. In 1957 he promised Our Lord of Bonfim that if Botafogo won the Rio state championship he would walk in his match clothes from the Maracanã to Botafogo's club house. About 5,000 fans accompanied him on the five-mile journey. 'When I arrived I was without my boots, socks, shirt and shorts,' he said. 'I ended up in just my Y-fronts, Botafogo fans took everything from me on the way.' The following year Didi was voted best player in Brazil's victorious 1958 World Cup side. He did not walk back from Stockholm.

  In October 2000 I travel to Juazeiro do Norte, a religious town in the northeastern interior. The blisteringly hot, rugged surroundings are Biblical enough even without the 350,000 pilgrims who are there too. The narrow streets are crammed with stalls selling religious trinkets and many people are in black cassocks. Almost everyone is wearing a cheap straw hat.

  Juazeiro is a pilgrimage site because it was the home of Padre Cicero,* the local priest until he died in 1934. He allegedly performed a miracle, in 1899, when during communion a lay nun's mouth filled with the blood of Christ. On a hill overlooking the town is a 25m-high statue of the cleric, his staff in his left hand, his hat in his right and a strongly pious expression on his face. Brazilians claim it is the third-largest statue of a person in the world, after the Christ in Rio de Janeiro and the Statue of Liberty in New York.

  The cult of worship has turned Padre Cicero's former house into a shrine. Inside, crowds of pilgrims head past his original clothes, chinaware, confessional and lectern to his small wooden bed, touching the mattress to soak up its Divine power. They press any possession – hats, bags, even glasses – against the bed to charge it up with spiritual energy.

  The bed is also where pilgrims place ex-votos. Each gift is payment for a miracle that Padre Cicero is believed to have granted. I see flowers, dolls, wooden heads, photographs and cassocks. So many objects are deposited that a man sits by the bed stuffing them into a plastic bag almost as soon as they touch the mattress. The ex-votos are then displayed in the Room of Miracles. To enter it is a wonderfully uplifting experience. The walls are covered in photographs of people. All the eyes that stare at you represent a happy story, a personal triumph of faith. There are stacks of shelves full of domestic utensils, model animals and clothes. Hanging in the middle something catches my eye: a St Etienne away shirt.

  I approach the silver garment. 'Thank you, Padre Cicero, for the blessings and graces I received,' says a scribbled note sellotaped to the chest. It is signed by the footballer Aloisio, who played for Flamengo and Goiás before transferring to St Etienne in 1999. (He later moved to Paris St Germain.) Adjacent to the note is a picture of the midfielder; he has a shaved head, an earring in his left ear and a toothy smirk.

  Aloisio is from a small town in Alagoas, a northeastern state whose economy is based on huge, unmechanised sugar estates that have changed very little in a hundred years. I was determined to discover the footballer's story. A few weeks later I track down his mother, Maria da Silva. She tells me why she had taken the shirt three hundred miles to Juazeiro in a truck. 'It was to thank Padre Cicero for fixing it for my son to play in Europe.'r />
  Maybe Padre Cicero has a dark sense of humour. Shortly after Mrs da Silva made her pilgrimage, disaster struck. Aloisio ruptured his left-knee ligaments. He would not play for at least a year. Mrs da Silva did not lose faith. Quite the opposite. She ordered a sculptor in Atalaia, her home town, to carve a wooden leg, symbolising the recuperating limb, and returned to Juazeiro. It is not uncommon to take wooden body parts to religious shrines. A church at Caninde, two hundred miles from Juazeiro, receives about 30,000 a year – which pilgrims heap in a giant pile. Most limbs are hand made. But Mrs da Silva was the mother of a famous footballer. No expense was spared. This time she drove to Juazeiro in the car that her son bought with his European earnings. St Etienne had a more practical solution: Aloisio received the best medical attention money could buy.

  Juazeiro attracts about two million pilgrims a year. Hundreds of thousands of devotees arrive every October in Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon, for the Cirio de Nazare, a religious festival in which participants scrum to touch a 1,200ft rope. At Easter, the world's largest Passion Play takes place in the world's largest outdoor theatre at New Jerusalem in Pernambuco. Padre Marcelo Rossi, a young priest who incorporates aerobics routines into Mass, plays venues bigger than stadiums. These grandiose celebrations are social as well as spiritual – they let Brazil express its identity as a country of deep-rooted faith.

  The Patroness of Brazil is Our Lady of Aparecida, which means 'the appeared one', in reference to a terracotta statuette of the Virgin Mary that was found in a fisherman's net in 1717. As soon as it was retrieved, the barren River Paraíba suddenly filled with fish, the first of many miracles attributed to the figurine. Our Lady appeared conveniently halfway between Rio and São Paulo and the motorway that now links Brazil's two largest cities passes within metres of the National Shrine. It is a giant red-brick basilica whose white cupola gives it the look of a nuclear power station. As befits its status as the holiest Catholic site in Brazil, the complex makes no economies of scale. Each weekend 100,000 drop by.

  Brazilians consider Our Lady of Aparecida their queen. Since the eighteenth century She has been dressed in a velvet blue mantle. You could say She is wearing Brazil's away strip. In Stockholm for the 1958 World Cup, panic struck the national side when they were told they were not able to wear their lucky yellow shirts for the final. The mood only changed when Paulo Machado de Carvalho, head of the delegation, entered the changing room. He shouted exultantly: 'Blue is the colour of Our Lady! The heavens are sending us a message!' The blue of the away shirts, which had been a problem in the superstitious players' minds, was turned into a talisman.

  Our Lady of Aparecida is the Mother of all promisees. I choose to visit Her on the Saturday following the victories of Corinthians and Flamengo in the 2001 São Paulo and Rio championships. Both were unexpected triumphs. I reasoned that if any Corinthians or Flamengo fans had made Her promises relating to that match then it was as good a moment as any for them to pay up. I park my car in Section C of Gospels, by the Pilgrim Support Centre shopping mall, and follow signs to the National Shrine.

  Like Father Cicero's house, Our Lady of Aparecida has a Room of Miracles to display ex-votos. The chamber is the size of a village hall. It feels like a museum. Glass cabinets are full of model buses, tractors, ships, boats, planes and cows. They are made out of wood, metal and plastic. Some are professionally done, others are primitively home-made. There are guitars, drums, brass instruments, bicycles, crash helmets, precious stones, crockery, sewing machines and irons. A singed Bible has an explanatory note: 'the only thing that survived a fire'. There are boxes for orthopaedic instruments and hospital equipment – discarded after Our Lady's miraculous cures. Crutches are stacked on a shelf. A box is full of clumps of hair. A common promise is to grow your hair for several years and then cut it in the Room of Miracles.

  Thousands of photos cover the walls, the ceiling and upright beams, each image representing a miracle that Our Lady is understood to have granted. One wall looks more like a sports bar than a church basement. It is covered in pictures of hundreds of football teams. I see posters of well-known sides, including the 1994 World Cup champions, Corinthians, Palmeiras and Botafogo and also snaps of local teams and anonymous players. Next to the wall is a cabinet of sports trophies that would make any athlete proud. A glass locker of football shirts is so full that it looks like the window display of a sports clothing shop. I count about seventy shirts pinned up and a similar number folded in piles.

  Ex-votos reflect personal worries and anxieties. Entering the Room of Miracles is like entering the mind of contemporary Brazil. A brief look around and you can judge the main areas of national concern: health, family, job – and football.

  I read a book of pilgrims' depositions. A picture of a guilty-looking little girl catches my eye, who, I read, swallowed three keys. 'In despair, her family made many prayers to Our Lady of Aparecida that nothing serious would occur. After seven days of suffering, Karla discharged the keys. In December 2000 her grandparents came to the National Shrine to register the fact and pay thanks for Her kindness.' Karla, who looks about two, is pictured waving the keys in her hand.

  When pilgrims enter the Room of Miracles to pay their promises they may register them at a desk run by Sister Maria do Carmo Rosa. I approach and ask if any football-related ex-votos have arrived recently. Gislaine de Oliveira, one of Sister Maria's young staff, smiles. My reasoning is correct. She tells me that yesterday the uncle of Kleber, the Corinthians left back, had brought in his team shirt. 'He said he came to thank Our Lady for the title,' she says. 'Kleber couldn't come personally because he is grounded in preparation for [the semi-finals of the Brazilian Cup].'

  The girls who work behind the desk are used to seeing famous players. In fact, coming to Our Lady is almost a standard ritual for the winning of any title in any sport. I am allowed to open the sports locker. I find a Flamengo shirt signed by Romario and a Brazil shirt signed by all the members of the 1999 Copa America. There are also the yellow running shoes of Sanderlei Parrela, who was fourth in the 400m at the Sydney Olympics, and Ayrton Senna's driving gloves. I doubt there is a more diverse collection of sporting memorabilia in Brazil.

  Most gifts, however, are brought by fans. It is striking to think that someone prays with the same intensity for their team to win as they do to be cured from a brain tumour. When I arrive, at 11am, I have just missed a man in his late thirties who registered a pair of black Umbro football boots covered in mud.

  Sister Maria takes out a plastic bag in which she has put the football shirts that arrived in the last fortnight. She lays seven out on the desk. Two are Corinthians, one is Corinthians' fan group Hawks of the Faithful, one is from Ponte Preta, an unfancied São Paulo team having their best spell in years, and one is from São Paulo FC. One is from an orange amateur team that has about twenty names signed on it and the last is an anonymous purple goalkeeper shirt. 'They just keep on coming,' she says.

  After hours of waiting I feel I should have made a promise to Our Lady myself. I want to see someone arriving with a gift related to football. Hundreds of people are arriving, but all for different reasons. I see a man come with his niece's hair, a man who gave up smoking handing over a packet of cigarettes, a man giving a guitar and a woman with so many wax limbs she could almost make a person. 'The leg is for my sister-in-law, the foot for my brother-in-law, the lungs for my cousin, the head for another cousin and the heart for my husband,' says Nilza Bombonatti Danelon. 'I take advantage of coming once and I do them all together.'

  Then a scruffy child arrives and puts his white baseball cap on the desk in front of the women. The cap has the emblem of the football club Coritiba. He is fourteen-year-old Leanderson da Silva. A week before he was living on the streets of Curitiba, a state capital south of São Paulo. He was given lodging by an educational foundation, who are on a group trip to Aparecida. They asked him if he wanted to give something to Our Lady to ask for her help.

  'I'm giving my cap so I
can play football better,' he says.

  Padre Antonio Carlos Barreiro, casually dressed in slacks and a white striped T-shirt, speaks to me before dashing to take the 4pm Mass. We are sitting on the sofa of the priests' lounge. Padre Barreiro is responsible for the Room of Miracles and seems as interested in my knowledge as I am in his. 'The reality is that there is very little research about the gifts,' he begins. 'Although the Room of Miracles is the second most visited place in the Shrine after the altar, and visits are increasing. We are about to enlarge it.'

  He says that the majority of the pilgrims are poor and feel abandoned by society. The large number of gifts relating to the body shows the failing of public health services. 'We are now noticing a lot of houses. This shows that in Brazil it is a great challenge to buy your own house. When people finally have their own house they bring a model of it or a photo here. The gifts paint an anthropological portrait of Brazil.'

  Padre Barreiro estimates that about twenty football shirts are brought each month. 'We notice it more when teams get promoted or they win a championship. A large proportion believe that their praying helped the team win.' Most shirts come from Corinthians fans because, he says, they have the strongest support among the poorer classes.

  He adds that entire teams sometimes arrive. 'Always small teams. I guess they are passing on the motorway and stop off. They ask to be blessed.'

  Near the Room of Miracles is the National Shrine's bric-a-brac bazaar, where they resell many of the ex-votos. You can buy toys, clothes and sewing machines. Donated wax limbs are also melted down, remoulded and resold. (The bazaar has buttocks and shoulders at 80p each. Throats, intestines, bladders and ovaries are slightly cheaper.) The volume of gifts is so great that the National Shrine also has cellars full of storage.