Como torcer

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On Saturday, I got my stripes.

“Perder faz parte,” my football godfather said with a worried look as we bid each other goodbye before the Botafogo-Fluminense game. “Losing’s part of it.” Pump-up talk: you’re doing it wrong. But I was prepared for wailing and gnashing of teeth – perhaps readier to grovel than to exult. As Nelson Rodrigues famously put it: “The Botafogo fan buys his ticket like someone obtaining the sacred, inalienable right to suffer”.

Consider my ticket purchased.

I went with a group of five gringos – two Flamenguistas (one halfhearted, one rabid), one undecided, and two baby Botafoguenses out for our first game. I had probably seen a total of 5 football games in my life, none of them in a stadium. This was a big day. We took a picture together before heading off. “Don’t look so serious,” said our photographer friend. I hadn’t been trying to.

As soon as I went out on the street in my black-and-white, I knew that something was different. America has been at war since I was in elementary school, but I’ve never felt so clearly the presence of comrades and enemies. Our national security policy is obsessed with identifying terrorists, with locating the enemy. On the train to Engenhão, it was remarkably easy; people wore their loyalties on their sleeves (their black-and-white or tricolor sleeves, that is). I do not plan on joining the army, but I have now had the sensation of being in uniform.

We got off the train at Engenhão – incredibly early, as predicted by more seasoned torcedores – and joined the steady stream heading for the massive gates. Being a lone alvinegro is something; being in a mass of them is quite another. As we arrived at the stadium, time started to elongate.

To get to the upper section we walk up a massive spiraling track, the concrete glowing gently in the dusk light. From the top you feel nestled in the mountains, and the view reminds me of looking out from temples in the Yucatan. I see the tricolor masses on the other side of the field and want to know what we look like. Over to our left, an impossibly large banner unfurls itself over the bleachers. Flags are parading through the seats. I’m too far away to see the people wielding them, which makes the sight even odder. The torcida looks like it’s taken on a life of its own, as if the flags and banners sprouted organically once given a critical mass of alvinegro pride.

The game starts without me realizing it. Shouldn’t there be some cannon blast, shouldn’t someone sing the national anthem? No, they’re already running around down there. Almost immediately, a tricolor player flops to the grass in agony so theatrical you can sense it from the nosebleeds. This is despicable, I know, but that doesn’t stop me from being highly disconcerted by the chorus of “VEADO”s that rains down on him. To hear my compatriots, you’d think that Fluminense was the first float in this year’s gay pride parade.

The Fluminense fans are clearly outnumbered, and I don’t know how to feel about that. On one hand, they clearly haven’t filled up the cheap seats because they’re a bunch of snobs; on the other hand, I’ve never felt comfortable reveling in the majority. A bateria is rattling away somewhere up in the stands, simultaneously egging on the fans and giving them a rhythm to settle into. Does Flu have drums? I scribble absentmindedly. Probably not, because they suck.

The players seem small and unreal, little creatures with fluorescent feet. The ball is ethereal and never lands where I think it will. It’s like looking at a drop of water under a microscope, or trying to tag an electron – at the subatomic level nothing behaves like we expect it to.

The bleachers have one crucial difference from American stands. The seats are normal, little blue ones made out of molded plastic, but they have a series of short railings running the length of the rows. At first the railing seems strange. As the game goes on I realize that it serves exactly the same purpose as the safety bar in a roller coaster. It keeps the torcedores in their place, gives them something to grasp when they’re on the edge. Like ballerinas, knuckles white on the barre. I grab the railing.

The referee is a filho da puta, when not something worse. I don’t think I’ve ever heard children yelling with such rage. A small family is sitting in the row in front of us – father, mother, and a daughter who can’t be older than 3 in an adorably tiny Botafogo jersey. The father goes from saying Botafogo chants sotto voce with his little girl to bellowing obscenities with remarkable ease. Looking at the people around us is surreal. I keep hearing bellows of rage or roars of encouragement and turning to see a kindly-looking grandfather, or a disconcertingly small boy, or a slight woman in a Túlio Maravilha shirt. The play of emotions across their faces is lightning-fast and as intense as anything I’ve ever seen.

And the yelling isn’t all angry. “BOA!” someone says in tones of mixed frustration, excitement, and tension – exactly how the Botafogo rowing instructors sounded when I was starting out on the Lagoa, as a matter of fact. “Isso.” “That’s it.” I almost feel as though the fans are in an abusive relationship with the players; there’s violence and affirmation, verbal abuse and then applause. They can’t quit each other.

It’s amazing how the fans are like a single body. A missed goal hits everyone in the stomach – “Uuf!” – yanking the men’s arms up and clenching their fists. Why would you ever watch a game alone? Maybe the Botafogo torcida is held together by a sort of molecular weak force, or linked at some quantum level like those particles that spin in tandem even if one of them is on Mars and the other is in Australia. The pain of a missed goal travels faster than the speed of light.

We get to the end of the first half – already? – with no score yet, and the crowds lumber off to get pastries and sugary sodas. Unlike the recreational eating that characterizes U.S. sports-watching, Brazilians don’t seem to be eating during the game itself. Here, you get the sense that the fans need to eat. They’ve put so much of themselves into the players on the field that they’re spent; they need a Guaraná to make it through the next hour, dammit. They’ve earned it.

As fascinating as the (other) fans are, I’m still feeling a little lost. Why are we booing? I say as quietly as possible to the other Botafoguense novice, once the game starts up again. He shrugs. “Just imitate!”

I know I’m out of place, and self-diagnose: I’m not angry enough. Sure, I leap up when we get close to the goal and throw myself back down when the players trip over their own feet, but not with the same vitriol; when Flu has the ball, there’s a massive collective rumble of dissatisfaction, but I can tell that I don’t feel it. Part of it is that I can’t make myself get my hopes up. For the people around me, it seems like every pass could be a goal for the ages. When it isn’t, the suffering is that much greater. For the older guy behind me, Garrincha dies again every 30 seconds. Meanwhile, I look uneasily from side to side and try not to get any contact shocks.

All that changes when Fluminense makes the first goal. This is the worst thing that has happened to me in Rio. Suddenly the ball is slopping into the net on a soft kick, almost as if it didn’t know what it was doing there. The scoreboard confirms that the universe has gone awry. A deathly silence descends on the western half of the stadium as Little Italy erupts in jubilation. Confetti rains down. The playing field is sickly with glitter. I set my jaw and clutch the damned railing. Perder faz parte.

Time suddenly collapses. I could go look up the timeline of the game, but all I can tell you now is that that suddenly – immediately, it seems –, the ball has recognized its mistake and rockets, arrependida, into the correct goal. I’m in a group hug with the Flamenguista, the undecided, and my alvinegro compatriot, and the railing is insufficient, because what the torcedores really need is a trampoline. The west side of the stadium is crackling, and silver rains down. And I know one thing. We had better not tie. This is my first game, goddammit.

Everything takes on deadly importance. The father in front of us has his head bowed in a desperate reverence that, if not prayer, should be reclassified as such. My notebook is neglected under my seat, which is why all the picturesque details I’ve been sprinkling this relato with are disappearing bit by bit. I alternately spring up and down, tear nervously away at all the callouses I’ve gotten rowing at Botafogo (oh, the irony), and clutch the bar like a prospective Tempur-Pedic customer wanting to assess the material’s pliability. Suddenly the father starts unknotting the Botafogo flag he’s tied to the railing. I am about to have him hanged as a traitor when I see that he’s wrapping it around his wife and daughter’s shoulders. We need all the comfort we can get.

I would compare the next ten minutes to the night I spent watching the 2008 election results come in, but back then I’d gone an entire sleepless weekend and was practically having an out-of-body experience. It was more like election night 2000, watching blue and red advance over the map without really understanding why or how but knowing that this was really really important. And we all know how that turned out.

Then we score again. We are bathed in gold. The tricolor beast writhes in agony, St. George’s spear in its side. Half an hour to go.

The time that followed passes approximately as slowly as the day that my college decision letters came in. The family might as well be clutching rosary beads. A white bird is fluttering around in the Engenhão rafters, but the moment I get distracted by it Fluminense is going to score again. Temples are clutched. I can’t look down to check the time.

And then the game ends like it starts –without me noticing. No ceremony? All of a sudden the groups on the field are dissolving. The family in front of us is hugging, all wrapped in the black and white. All the strings have been cut, and it feels, to be honest, a little anticlimactic. Then I put a hand to my head and feel the laurels. We’ve won.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

É escritora, tradutora, brasilianista e diretora de pesquisa na Rádio Novelo