Ian McDonald - Brasyl

Game one, we crush Sweden seven-one. Game two, Spain, six-one. Nothing — nothing — can stop Brazil. This will be one of the greatest Seleçãos in history. The only thing that stands between us and glory is tiny Uruguay. Rio expects, the nation expects, the world expects we will raise the Jules Rimet in the most beautiful stadium in the world in the most beautiful city in the world. O Mundo even prints pictures of the team in the early editions with the headline: These Are the World Champions!

On July sixteenth one-tenth of Rio is inside that oval. A tenth of the entire city, yes. The rest of the nation is listening on the radio: everyone remembers exactly where they were when the referee blew for kickoff. The first half is goalless. But in the twenty-eighth minute something very strange happens: Uruguay’s captain, Obdulio Varela, hits Bigode, and it’s like macumba. Everyone knows the energy in the stadium has changed; you could even feel it through the radio. The axé was no longer with Brazil. But then one minute into the second half, Friaça sees the angle… shoots. Gooool do Brasil! One-nil, one-nil, one-nil, one-nil. Everyone is dancing and singing in the house and every other house and all the way down the street onto the Copa. Then in the sixty-eighth minute, Gigghia for Uruguay picks up that macumba and runs with the ball. He’s past Bigode on the right wing, crosses. Schiaffino’s on the end of it and puts it past Barbosa. God himself could not have stopped that shot.

But we can still win. We’ve come back from worse than this. We’re Brazil. Then, at 4:33, all the clocks stop. Once again Gigghia beats Bigode. He’s into the box. But this time he doesn’t cross. He’s close on the post, but he takes the shot. Barbosa doesn’t think anyone could get in from that angle. He moves too slow, too late. The ball’s in the back of the net. Goal to Uruguay , says Luis Mendes on the radio, and then, as if he can’t believe what he said, he says it again: Goal to Uruguay . And again, six times he says it. It’s true. Uruguay two, Brazil one. There’s not a sound in the stadium, not a sound in our house or on the street, not in the whole of Pavão, not in the whole of Rio. Gigghia always said, only three people ever silenced the Maracana with one movement: Frank Sinatra, the pope, and him.

Then the final whistle went and Uruguay lifted the World Cup, and still there wasn’t a sound. My father couldn’t work for a week. A man up the hill threw himself in front of a bus; he couldn’t stand it. Rio froze over. The whole nation went into shock. We’ve never recovered from it. Maybe we expected too much; maybe the politicians talked it up until it wasn’t just a game of soccer, it was Brazil itself. People who were there in the Maracanã, do you know what they call themselves? “Survivors.” That’s right. But the real pain wasn’t that we lost the World Cup; it was the realization that maybe we weren’t as great as we believed we were. Even up in our shack on the Morro de Pavão, listening on a radio wired into the streetlight with an oil drum for an amplifier, we still thought we were part of a great future. Maybe now we weren’t the nation of the future, that everyone admired and envied, maybe we were just another South American banana republic strutting around all puffed out like a gamecock in gold braid and plumes that nobody really took seriously. The Frenchman de Gaulle once said, “Brazil is not a serious country”: after the Fateful Final, we believed him.

Of course we looked for scapegoats. We always do. Barbosa, he was the hated one. He was our last line of defense, the nation was depending on him, he let Brazil down, and Brazil was never going to let him forget it. He only played again once for the Seleção; then he gave up the game, gave up all his friends from the game, dropped out of society, and eventually disappeared completely. Brazil has given him fifty years of hell; you don’t even get that for murder.

“So it’s a trial format,” Marcelina Hoffman said. This Blue Sky Friday the pitching session took place in Adriano’s conference room, a glass cube with the titles of Canal Quatro’s biggest and noisiest hits etched into an equatorial strip. There were a couple of Marcelina’s among them. Toys and fresh new puzzles were strewn deliberately around the floor to encourage creativity. Last week it was Brain Gym for the PSP; this week, books of paper marked and precreased for Rude Origami. The Sauna, as its nickname around Rua Muniz Barreto implied, was notorious for its atrocious air-conditioning, but the sweat Marcelina felt beading down her sides was not greenhouse heat. Roda sweat: this glass room was as much a martial arts arena as any capoeira roda. It would take all her jeito, all her malicia, to dance down her enemies. Aid me, Nossa Senhora da Valiosa Producão.

“We track him down, haul him in, and put him on trial before the people of Brazil. We present evidence, for and against — he gets a fair trial. As fair as we want it to be. Maybe get a real judge to preside. Or Pelé. Then the viewers decide whether to forgive him or not.”

Glass tables in a glass room; arranged in a quadrilateral. Community-facilitating and democratic, except that Adriano and the Black Plumed Bird, so very very Audrey Hepburn today, sat on the side of the quadra farthest from the sun. Lisandra and her pitch team were to Marcelina’s right; the iiber-bosses on her left. Keep your enemies in your peripheral vision but never be seen looking; that is foolishness. Directly across the square from her was Arlindo Pernambucano from Entertainment; too too old to be creaming and shrieking over celebrity mags and general girliness but who, nonetheless, had a phenomenal hit-rate. But he was out of this jogo. It was Lisandra and Marcelina in the roda.

“What happens if he’s guilty?” Adriano asked. “We make him apologize on live TV.”

Adriano winced. But that’s all right; that’s the cringe-TV wince, the carrcrash/guilty-pleasure wince. Embarrassment TV. He was liking it.

“And is he still alive?”

“I ran a check through public records,” said Celso, Marcelina’s boy researcher and newest member of her alt dot family. He was intimidatingly sharp, nakedly ambitious, was always at his desk before Marcelina arrived and there after she left. She had no doubt that someday he would reach for Marcelina’s crown but not this day; not when the joy — the old heat of the idea that burned out of nowhere perfect and complete as if it had Made in Heaven stamped on the base, the joy she thought she had lost forever and might now only glimpse in Botafogo sunrises and the glow and laughter of the streets of Copa from her roof garden — glowed in her ovaries. I’m back, she thought.

“We could make the search for him part of the program,” Adriano said. He’s making suggestions , Marcelina observed. He’s taking ownership of it. She might get this. She might get this.

“He must be a very old man by now,” the Black Plumed Bird said. “Eighty-five,” said Celso at once.

“It’s an interesting idea, but is it Canal Quatro to hold an old man up to ridicule and humiliation? Is this just pelourinho by television?”

Yes , Marcelina wanted to scream. Nothing is more Canal Quatro than the whipping post, the pillory, the branding iron. It’s what we love most, the suffering of others, the freak show. Give us torment and madness, give us public dissections and disgust, give us girls taking their clothes off. We are a prurient, beastly species. They knew it in the eighteenth century; they knew the joy of public disgrace. If there were public executions, Canal Quatro would run them prime time and rule the ratings.

“It’s a chance for us to get closure on something that still festers, fifty years on. We’ve won since, but not when it really mattered, on our own soil, in our own stadium, in front of our own people.”