Outside, in the afternoon heat, more banners had been hung on the railings of the perimeter fence: ‘Senna obrigado’, ‘Adeus Senna’, ‘Senna tricampeão’, ‘Senna o melhor’. A few of them bore no name, but simply a single word: saudade. ‘It’s the most beautiful word in the Portuguese language,’ my friend Ana Cecília said as we bought a couple of bottles of mineral water from a vendor by the palace fence. ‘And it’s one of those for which there’s no direct translation. It means the sense of loss and sadness you feel when the person you love isn’t there any more. No other language has this word.’
All through the night they passed in and out of the Monumental Hall. An hour after dawn, 300 kilometres down the Atlantic coast, in the city of Curitiba, a sixteen-year-old student switched off the early morning television news coverage of the obsequies and shot herself with a .22 calibre revolver. ‘I’m killing myself because I don’t want to suffer any more,’ Zuleika da Costa Rosa wrote in a last note to her parents and her ex-boyfriend. ‘I’m going to meet Ayrton Senna. With love to you and to Fabrício. Goodbye, mother and father.’
By ten o’clock, when the howitzers of the 2nd Artillery Brigade fired a twenty-one-gun salute over Ibirapuera Park, more than 200,000 people had paid their last respects in person. Now rose petals were strewn over the coffin and its enveloping flag as cadets of the Barro Branco military academy hoisted it off the catafalque and on to their shoulders, carrying it out of the hall and down the path between the floral tributes to the waiting fire-engine.
This second and final motorcade, along fifteen kilometres of city and suburban streets to the Morumbi cemetery, was itself watched and accompanied by something like a quarter of a million people. More banners and placards were out, broadcasting the now familiar litany: ‘Ayrton Senna para sempre’, ‘Adeus’, ‘Valeu’, ‘Obrigado’. And this, in translation: ‘You were worth more than 90 per cent of our politicians.’ Outside the Beethoven Academy of Music on the Avenida Reboucas, a pianist performed the music customarily used by TV Globo, the Brazilian network, to celebrate Senna’s victories. Ana Cecília, who was not particularly a fan of motor racing, cried when she heard its evocation of his years of glory, and of what his success had meant to her country.
Around Brazil, tens of millions more watched on television as the seven planes of the Esquadrilha de Fumaça – the Brazilian air force aerobatic display team – laid smoke trails in diamond formation as the cortege crawled up the incline to Morumbi, an enclave of affluence set high above the city. The last kilometre of steeply winding road looked like the Alpe d’Huez on Tour de France day, lined with people applauding and holding out messages as the parade went by. The difference was that many of these people were weeping, even as their hands applauded the passage of their champion. ‘This manifestation says everything,’ the state governor paused to announce, ‘about the high level of affection and respect the people have for their hero.’ I hadn’t seen anything like it since the funeral of Bob Marley in 1981, when a similar motorcade chased from one side of Jamaica to another, tracked by helicopters and watched by thousands of ordinary people as their hero – who had been one of them, the same flesh and dreams – made his last passage through their towns and villages.
But Senna’s final resting place was very different from Marley’s tiny brick mausoleum on a hill in a remote rural hamlet, his birthplace. We waited for Senna behind guarded walls and overlooked by luxury high-rise apartment blocks in the Cemitério de Morumbi, a round park as big as a dozen football pitches. No headstones on these graves: the flat expanse of bright green was broken only by small engraved plaques laid into the grass, their wide dispersal the clearest possible evidence of the wealth buried here, an eloquent expression of privilege in a teeming city where hundreds of thousands are wedged together to live and die in improvised shanties.
We watched the official mourners arrive, the little Fs and As affixed to their dark suits and black silk mourning frocks. They came in limousines, in mini-coaches and in helicopters which shuttled to and fro, landing on an improvised pad behind a small copse, their security assured by members of the Grupo de Ações Táticas Especiais, the Brazilian special forces unit, in matt grey combat uniforms and black baseball caps, holsters slung low and strapped down on their hips. We stood and made notes while small groups of relatives and friends walked slowly up a rope-lined pathway of pale green carpeting to the middle of the circular central lawn, where brighter green tarpaulins lay around the freshly dug grave and a small white canopy cast shade over the spot where the ceremony was about to take place.
Eventually there would be 500 or so in attendance. At the centre, the close-knit family: father, mother, sister, brother. The lovers: Adriane Galisteu, arriving with a friend, Birgit Sauer, wife of the former head of Volkswagen Brazil; and her predecessor, Xuxa Meneghel, the popular singer and television presenter, ensconced in the family group. The friends: the boxer Adilson Maguila Rodrigues, the artists Francisco Cuoco and Alberto Riccelli. On the periphery, the Italian ambassador and the president of the Italian automobile federation, patiently answering reporters’ questions about whether Senna had been killed because Imola was unsafe. The Formula One bosses: Ken Tyrrell, the doyen; Peter Collins of Lotus, the team with which Senna had won his first grand prix; Frank Williams, in whose car he had died, sensitive to the feelings of the Brazilian fans and arriving in a van with the curtains drawn; and Ron Dennis of McLaren, making his entrance surrounded by the cast of Reservoir Dogs, silent and compactly built men in black suits and Ray-Bans.
A distant humming in the skies announced the approach of the procession. As half a dozen TV network helicopters appeared over the horizon, the 2nd Guards Battalion of the Southeastern Military Command straightened their green uniforms and shouldered their rifles, forming ranks just inside the cemetery gates.
Nearby, in the same shaded area, the pallbearers assembled: Gerhard Berger, outwardly calm but occasionally turning aside to recover his composure; Alain Prost and Michele Alboreto, veterans of many battles with the dead man; the former triple champion Jackie Stewart, representing not just his own era but all those that had gone before; Damon Hill, Senna’s last team mate, behind dark glasses, like all of the Fittipaldi clan – Emerson, Wilson and Christian; fellow Brazilians Rubens Barrichello, Maurizio Sandro Sala, Roberto Moreno and Raul Boesel; Pedro Lamy, a young Portuguese driver befriended by Senna when he came into Formula One as a novice with the Lotus team; Derek Warwick, whom Senna had once notoriously vetoed as his team mate; Johnny Herbert, the Lotus driver; Thierry Boutsen, of Belgium, a quiet man and a close friend who, with his wife, had often stayed with Senna and Adriane at the villa on the Algarve; and Hans-Joachim Stuck, the tall German whose father had raced before the war, in the golden age.
Prost, the reigning world champion, was the magnet for the TV cameras and radio microphones, and he obliged the newsmen’s requests to talk about Senna’s accident. ‘I was shocked,’ he said. ‘He was the kind of guy you really think it won’t happen to. He was the master of his job. For sure, something happened with the car. Motor racing is always dangerous, but we must minimize the risks wherever possible. I think it’s time for changing a lot of things. It’s not a question of rules. It’s a question of philosophy, of whether you have respect for the drivers.’
He talked a bit about how, after five years of conflict, he and Senna had become reconciled in the Brazilian’s final days, their growing warmth towards each other culminating in an embrace at Imola on the eve of the crash. Nobody wanted to doubt Prost’s sincerity, but it seemed a bit pat, somehow, a bit too scripted for comfort. After all, these two men had developed a rivalry that went beyond the fight for a mere race or even a championship, deep into complex questions of integrity and manhood, dragging us along with them, making us take sides and argue cases.
But what the journalists really wanted to know was whether, in the cold-blooded way of the Formula One world, Prost planned to annul his recent retirement and step back into the car from which S
enna had ousted him with such public rancour only a few months earlier. ‘Out of respect for him,’ Prost declared, ‘I would never, never, never take the seat in his car.’
If you stood back and watched this little tableau vivant, this gaggle of reporters and cameramen engulfing a small curly-haired figure, suddenly it looked like all those Fridays and Saturdays in paddocks and pit lanes around the world, when men and women with notebooks and cameras would cluster around Prost and Senna at the end of a practice session. The two drivers would be perhaps twenty yards apart, each telling the story of the day from his own point of view and in his own characteristic style, but each really talking as much about the other as about himself – even though, in Senna’s case, the rivalry ran so deep that he could not bring himself to utter his adversary’s name.
Now, in this grassy paddock, there was just the one cluster. ‘We were enemies at one stage,’ Prost was saying, ‘but very close at the same time because we were fighting against each other, and the longer it went on the closer we became. For ten years it was Prost and Senna. Now it’s just Prost. Half of my career has gone today.’
Among the drivers who had played significant roles in Senna’s career, there were three notable absentees, two of them former world champions and the third a champion to come. The first, Nigel Mansell, who beat Senna to the title in 1992, was busy with his new career in America, preparing for his second attempt on the Indy 500 at the end of May. A couple of weeks after the funeral, sitting in his team’s caravan at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Mansell would talk quietly and with obvious feeling about Senna’s death. The Englishman tries hard to be a good public relations man, but seldom on behalf of others, and to say he lacks a certain smoothness of tongue would be an understatement; which is perhaps why his regret seemed convincing.
The other missing champion, Nelson Piquet, had won three world titles, just like Senna. But he had been comprehensively replaced in Brazilian hearts by the younger man several years earlier, and had taken it badly. Now, perhaps to his credit, he refused to dissemble, unable to pretend that he had not publicly insulted Senna by referring to him as ‘the São Paulo taxi driver’, and much worse. Nevertheless his remarks seemed pointless, reflecting more on his own lack of mature judgement than on Senna’s character. ‘I’ve never liked going to funerals,’ Piquet said. ‘Besides, I didn’t want to act like Prost did, pretending he was Senna’s friend when they had actually spent all their lives fighting with each other.’
A lesser-known Brazilian grand prix driver, Chico Serra, shared his feelings. ‘I didn’t turn up for the funeral because I didn’t want to get upset,’ Serra said. ‘There was too much pretence, which made me sick. Some people came a long way just to use the situation for their own good. These people never helped him, and they wanted to make us believe that they were great friends who were suffering so much. Going to the funeral was more beneficial to them than winning at Indianapolis.’ Serra’s bitter words were lent an extra resonance by the knowledge that it was he, twelve years earlier, who had set the young Ayrton Senna’s car-racing career in motion by taking him to England and arranging his first drive. Serra himself fiddled around at the back of the Formula One field for two or three seasons in the early eighties, watching his protégé catch him up and then overtake.
The third absentee was Michael Schumacher, the man who had been expected to replace Senna as the presiding genius of Formula One, the greatest talent of his generation, the standard-setter. Most people expected it to take another season or two, and perhaps even Senna’s retirement, for the succession to be confirmed. But Schumacher had unexpectedly beaten Senna in the first two races of the 1994 season, and his car had been only a few yards behind when Senna left the track at Imola and died. Now he preferred to concentrate on his preparations for the next race, at Monaco.
Other people, not among Senna’s former rivals on the track, were missing from the ceremonies, in particular two English administrators of Formula One: Max Mosley, president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, and therefore ultimately responsible for circuit safety standards; and Bernie Ecclestone, boss of the Formula One Constructors’ Association, thought to be implicated in the confusion over delaying the announcement of Senna’s death in order to get the San Marino Grand Prix restarted. Ecclestone’s role was the subject of intense and bitter speculation among ordinary Brazilians, whose powerful feeling was that if Senna had indeed died instantly, the race should have been cancelled out of respect and common humanity. Ecclestone had been sighted in a São Paulo hotel that morning but stayed away, having been informed by Leonardo Senna da Silva that his presence would be ‘inconvenient’. For his part, Ecclestone issued a communiqué announcing that he would be meeting the state governor that afternoon to discuss the accident.
But now the drivers, their faces bleak beyond words, set the coffin moving on its metal trolley. After fifty yards they stopped, opposite the guardsmen, who pointed their automatic weapons at the ground and, on a shouted order, fired three volleys in salute. Between each fusillade, the tinkling of empty brass shells on the asphalt could be heard over the background throb of the rotor blades circling high above. Then, surrounded by a hideous scrimmage of photographers, the drivers guided Senna down the drive to the lawn, where the casket was taken over by a dozen police cadets, who carried it up the pathway to the grave as the drivers joined the group around the grave. A hundred yards away, by the cemetery gates, a couple of boys were on their hands and knees among the ranks of guardsmen, collecting the spent shells from the salute.
In the front row by the open grave were the dead man’s immediate family: his mother, father, sister, brother, nephew and nieces. Behind them were the seats reserved for Adriane Galisteu and her most famous predecessor in Senna’s affections, Xuxa Meneghel. But even now there were signs of tension, small ripples betraying darker undercurrents of feeling. When Adriane took her place in the second row, Xuxa rose quickly and moved elsewhere.
The ceremony lasted half an hour under a bright midday sun, and only two voices were heard: those of Pastor Lali and Senna’s beloved sister Viviane, who clutched the helmet that had rested on the coffin during the lying in state as she gave a final address over the grave, speaking both of her brother and their country.
‘Brazil is going through a very bad time,’ she told the standing congregation. ‘No one feels like helping anyone any more. People just live for themselves. My brother had a mission, and our family is in deep emotion today because we didn’t realize it had made him so greatly loved. I saw how the ordinary people showed their feelings. Some of them were shoeless; others were dressed in silk. He united them, even through his death.’ The noise from the steel blades of the helicopters chopped at her words, but she continued, and even those with no command of Portuguese could follow the gestures. ‘I think that my brother is not down there,’ she said, pointing to the earth, ‘but up in the heavens.’ And as she spoke, two planes from the aerobatic team traced a big heart and a giant S in white smoke on the bright blue canvas high above the cemetery.
Finally Viviane threw up her right arm, in imitation of her brother’s victory salute. ‘Valeu Senna,’ she cried. And her listeners responded: ‘Valeu Senna.’ Farewell.
The mourners remained by the graveside for long minutes, talking in small huddles that blended and dispersed and regrouped. Gradually they began to move, saying their farewells, walking slowly across the grass and down the pathways, back to the helicopters and limousines. Adriane Galisteu made to enter one of the family cars but was told there was no seat for her and left with her friend Birgit, destiny uncertain. (Later, by her own account, during a final visit to Senna’s São Paulo apartment, she was to ask his mother only for his toothbrush and the pyjamas he wore on their last night together.) In contrast, Xuxa walked away from the grave shoulder to shoulder with Viviane, riding out in the family limousine, clearly endorsed as the official widow.
And as the helicopters rose and the limousines sighed away,
a van drove across the grass up to the graveside. Two men in overalls climbed out and began to unload its contents, the flowers from the hall back in Ibirapuera Park. As they started to heap them around the grave, Ana Cecília and I walked across the grass to have a look. New among them was a fresh wreath with a card handwritten in capital letters: ‘Dear Ayrton, Rest well. You deserve it. You’re still the hero and will remain so for many of us. We will always remember you. Love, Tina Turner.’
By half-past one, the mourners had left the Cemitério de Morumbi. The workmen were now arranging the flowers more carefully around the grave, making sure piles of blooms did not obscure a small bronze plaque laid into the freshly pressed turf. It read: ‘Ayrton Senna da Silva 21.3.1960–1.5.94. Nada pode me separar do amor de Deus.’ Nothing can separate me from the love of God.
Almost twenty-four hours earlier, a small boy had passed in front of the coffin in the hall of the July 9 Palace and, barely breaking his stride in the moving column, let fall a single leaf of exercise-book paper bearing a simple crayon drawing of a racing car. Many of us had once been that boy. For a few hours, at least, some of us were again. And that, perhaps, was the biggest surprise and the most profound truth to be found in the death of Ayrton Senna. Those simple dreams, that unbought affection: maybe they justify it all.
Chapter Two
On a grey spring morning in the English Midlands the sleek little car smashed against the wall, its powder-blue bodywork exploding on impact, flying through the air in a shambles of torn fibreglass. A few seconds later the driver got out and limped to the pits. For an eleven-year-old boy, staring at the driver from behind a barrier a hundred yards away, it was a first glimpse of motor racing.
The Death of Ayrton Senna Page 2
