Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  Friedenreich was the son of a second-generation German-Brazilian father and an Afro-Brazilian mother, a dual inheritance that allowed him, as a child, to play in the free-form street football of the city as well as benefit from training and facilities at the elite SC Germânia where his father was a member. As an adult he played mainly for the elite side CA Paulistano and was, without question, the highest scoring striker of his day and the darling of the press, who nicknamed him El Tigre (‘The Tiger’) in Uruguay and ‘Golden Foot’ in Brazil. The fact that a visibly mulatto player could turn out for São Paulo’s leading side demonstrates that Brazil’s racial divisions were not insurmountable and that talent and social class could trump, on occasion, skin tone.

  Not everyone was treated so well though. Carlos Alberto was the mulatto son of a Rio photographer who, in 1916, was playing for América’s second team. He was called up to play in the first team of Fluminense and, of course, took his opportunity. Mário Filho recounted the story a decade or so later as a kind of morality tale. He described the player arriving late for the line-up with his teammates in front of the crowd, delayed in the dressing room because he was applying rice powder to his face in an effort to lighten it. When he turned out for Fluminense against his old club América the crowd chanted ‘Pó de arroz’ (white powder) at him, a name that Fluminense fans have since adopted themselves.

  Argentinian fans and writers were no less strident in their racism. Their press described the Brazilian team at the 1916 South American Championship (later called the Copa América) as ‘monkeys’. More of this was a prospect so acutely embarrassing to the Brazilian football authorities that they sent an all-white team to Buenos Aires for the following year’s tournament. Lima Barreto, caustic as ever, wrote, ‘The Holy College of Football has met to decide whether they could send to Buenos Aires champions that had in the veins a little black blood . . . Our vengeance is that the Argentinians don’t distinguish the colours in us. For them, we’re all monkeys.’27

  Thus by 1919, when Brazil hosted its first South American Championship, football had become an arena in which Brazilians had begun to decide what the nation actually was. The tournament was testament to the depth of Rio’s football mania as well as the national symbolism of the sport, with almost 200,000 people attending the seven games played at Estádio das Laranjeiras. For the final between Brazil and Uruguay an unbelievable 25,000 spectators crowded into a stadium built for barely 18,000, another 5,000 clung to the hills and trees that surrounded the ground, and more were left outside. Many thousands of people gathered in Rio’s squares and on some of its broadest avenues where loudspeakers had been set up to relay news of the game. Banks and government offices closed early, by presidential order. It took four periods of extra time to break the nil–nil deadlock. Then Arthur Friedenreich scored the winning goal, and the crowd broke into wave after wave of ‘Viva o Brasil!’ President Epitácio Pessoa, present for the occasion, said of the team, ‘I salute you in the name of the nation.’

  It was a Brazilian triumph made by a footballer of European and African ancestry, and it was celebrated most memorably by the great black flautist, saxophonist and composer, Pixinguinha. His song, ‘Um Zero’ (‘One Nil’), and indeed all the music composed and played by his great band of the time, Os Oito Batutas (‘The Eight Amazing Players’), was a complex and original mix of Afro-Brazilian rhythms, American jazz influences, and European waltzes and polkas. This kind of hybrid was surely the future of the Brazilian nation and Brazilian football too, but it would take another decade of struggle and the collapse of the Old Republic to begin to make it a reality.

  2

  Modern Times? Football and the Death of the Old Republic, 1922–1932

  ‘A formidable array of vividly beautiful girls’ – Fluminense vs Paulistano, Estādio das Laranjeiras, 1920.

  The noise of an engine celebrated the victory.

  The field was emptying like a water tank.

  Miquelina wilted inside her sadness.

  Antônio de Alcântara Machado, 1927

  I

  Just a decade earlier Brazil’s poets had been composing hymns to the eugenic power of football, casting players as the new Hellenic gods of the South. By 1927, when Antônio Machado published his short story/prose poem, ‘Corinthians (2) vs Palestra (1)’, it was being described with the metaphors of the machine age – of engines and water tanks, the game of an industrial city told in oblique fragments rather than orotund epics. Modernity, in the form of industrializing cities and its cultural correlative, Modernism, had arrived and was reshaping Brazilian football. Virginia Woolf, in her 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ , expressed the thought that ‘In or about December 1910, human character changed.’ D. H. Lawrence dated the end of the pre-modern era slightly later, writing, ‘It was in 1915 the old world ended.’ Ezra Pound, high priest of Atlantic Modernism, had insisted that modernity had arrived in 1922 or Year One of the new era as he referred to it, before opting for Mussolini’s new Fascist calendar. Given its decidedly pre-modern plantation economy and peripheral geography, Brazil might have been expected to lag some way behind this. However, in its most advanced zones – Rio de Janeiro and increasingly São Paulo – Brazil showed a remarkable technological and cultural precocity.1

  Cinematic techniques and equipment had arrived from France at the turn of the century, just a few years after the Lumière brothers’ first experiments. The take-up and spread of radio broadcasting were in advance of many European states. In 1922 São Paulo could claim an important place in an emerging global avant-garde when the Modern Art Week was staged at the city’s Municipal Theatre. It was the single most important event in Brazil’s literary and artistic world in the century since independence; it was also just the first of a whole series of events that year which announced the modernization of Brazilian society and demonstrated the limits of the political and cultural structures of the Old Republic.

  Modern Art Week had been conceived, at least in part, as a deliberate riposte to the Independence Centenary International Exposition to be held in Rio from September 1922. This government-initiated city spectacular, part fair, part cultural festival, part urban-development programme, would attempt to cast Brazil in a nostalgic, exclusively European light. The artistic radicals of São Paulo wanted to offer something very different. But before Brazil could make the comparison it would endure another six months of change and upheaval. In April the old order seemed secure when the candidate favoured by the previous incumbent and the dominant coffee interests, Artur da Silva Bernardes, easily defeated his republican opponent, Nilo Peçanha, in the presidential election. However, the opposition put the victory down to electoral manipulation, further discrediting federal politics and the presidency. Bernardes, despite his electoral majority, would be forced to rule much of the next four years with the help of the army, imposing martial law in Rio, and establishing Amazonian internment camps for his opponents. Less than 5 per cent of the adult population had actually turned out to vote in the election and neither candidate had sought to represent or engage with the interest of Brazil’s new urban masses.

  In 1922 there were three separate attempts to do precisely that. First, the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) was founded in Niterói, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, and, despite its small size and periods of illegality, it would be an important force in destabilizing the Republic. Second, the Brazilian Catholic Church, long accustomed to ministering to the needs of the rich alone, began its flirtation with more radical theology and attempted to establish a physical and spiritual presence in industrial Brazil with the formation of Catholic workers’ social clubs and social programmes. Finally, in July, the simmering discontent inside the junior ranks of the army, where a whole variety of ultra-nationalist and hyper-modernizing aspirations for Brazil had been taking hold, boiled over into open rebellion. Troops in the fortress of Copacabana in Rio briefly raised the standard of a modernizing revolt before being gunned down in the street. There was more of this
to come.

  Nineteen twenty-two was a high-water mark for global Modernism, when bath Ulysses and The Waste Land were published. São Paulo Modern Art Week, held in mid-February that year at the city’s Municipal Theatre, was part of this global movement, but offered its own distinctive take on Modernism and challenged its Eurocentrism. Its principal organizers were the painter Emiliano di Cavalcanti and mulatto polymath Mário de Andrade, but they were closely connected to a wide circle of São Paulo-based artists, musicians, sculptors and poets who would form the core of the country’s intellectual elite over the next couple of decades. Key members of this circle had made the journey to Europe and brought some part of the Modernist movement back with them: Oswald de Andrade imbibed the wild manifestos and machine freakery of Italian Futurism, while the painter Anita Malfatti introduced Brazil to the techniques and styles of German Expressionism and then of Cubism. To this kind of avant-garde cosmopolitanism Andrade, di Calvacanti and others brought often radical forms of nationalism and a deep concern with finding Brazilian rather than European sources of artistic inspiration. Andrade had already begun his lifelong compilation of Brazil’s indigenous folklore and music; composer Heitor Villa-Lobos would try to incorporate this into modern classical music; poet Menotti del Picchia called polemically for the ‘Brazilianization of Brazil’, and most acknowledged the enormous but often hidden African contribution to Brazilian culture. The week consisted of readings, exhibitions, lectures and concerts. Many of the more conservative members of the audience were shocked, some booed, and others stormed out. The old guard in Rio were so appalled that Graça Aranha, the only member of the Brazilian Academy to attend, was shunned by his conservative colleagues.

  While these artists drew upon the new repertoire of techniques developed by European Modernism, they were self-consciously attempting to deploy them in a Brazilian context for their own ends. Two themes stand out. First, that the proper subject of Brazilian art must, henceforth, include the life and language of the city and every strand of society within it. Second, the idea of Brazil as a cannibal culture developed by Oswald de Andrade. In more of a rhetorical flourish than a coherent anthropological theory, Oswald argued that Brazilian culture was the product of absorption and digestion, eating and then transforming the flesh of European, African and indigenous cultures. If football was not, initially, an obvious candidate for the Modernist epitome of Brazilian culture – too foreign in their eyes in 1922 – it was the perfect subject matter for their writings. Authentic Brazilian art would need to get out of the drawing room and on to the street and reflect something of the real life of the urban popular classes. It would certainly include the vernacular vocabulary of its cities and the peculiar cadence and fragments of reported speech. Both of these promises were delivered in the poetic work of Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade – they were not related – where football is an unremarkable feature of the urban landscape. In his long poem Paulicéia Desvairada (‘Hallucinated City’), Mário de Andrade spliced together tiny slices of a match day in the city, flashes of the action on and off the pitch and snatches of football conversation, before wondering whether it amounts to anything at all:

  Who’s playing today? Paulistano

  Of Jardín América, the garden of roses and kicks!

  Friedenreich scored a goal! Corner!

  That referee!

  Do I like Bianco? I love him.

  How about Barto . . .

  How about my marvellous namesake!

  Futility, civilization . . .2

  In his novel Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar, Oswald de Andrade made football an element of an urban dreamscape where trams are goals, the air is filled with football chants, and football matches take on the air of the dance hall.

  Streetcar goals

  Aleguais!

  Sleepwalkers of championship matches

  And dust.

  With afternoon entertainment

  Tennis girls unwrapped

  At Paulistano

  Paso Doble3

  In time both Mário and Oswald de Andrade would shed their scepticism about football – indeed, both would recognize that the development of the game precisely fitted their prescription of a cannibalized culture in which Brazil would absorb, digest and remake European and African cultures. Mário would celebrate the game as both carnival and dance; Oswald, in his later writings, cast the game as a form of Modernist religion. Menotti del Picchia went so far as to write the script for Brazil’s first fictional football movie, Campeão de Futebol, released in 1931 and starring Arthur Friedenreich and other players of the day. It was, needless to say, not Modernist verse but a simple-minded popular comedy reflecting the author’s steady move towards the super-populist right wing of Brazilian political and cultural life. Perhaps the most significant literary work to engage with football was the short story/poem ‘Corinthians (2) vs Palestra (1)’ by Antônio de Alcântara Machado, who though not present at Modern Art Week was part of the same circle. Where de Andrade’s novel had offered soundbites, Machado wrote the whole match report, capturing the action at Palestra’s home ground, Parque Antárctica, and the complex social and emotional processes going on around it.

  The ball landed on the far left.

  The stand stood up.

  She held her breath. Sighed: Aaaah!

  Miquelina dug her nails into Iolanda’s fat arm.

  Around the green rectangle twenty thousand people craved.

  Greedy eyes. Electric nerves.

  In black. White. Blue. Red.

  Football loathing in Parque Antárctica.4

  In just a decade, in the imagination of its devotees, football’s shape had shifted from Coelho Neto’s carnival of fresh air into a kind of collective nervous breakdown.

  II

  The final of the South American Football Championship in 1919 had been interpreted as a victory for the whole nation. Yet despite the presence of the mulatto striker Arthur Friedenreich and his winning goal in the final, Brazil’s football and political elites remained resistant to embracing the notion of an ethnically mixed nation. In 1920 King Albert of Belgium made a state visit to Brazil and among the many formal occasions held in his honour the most significant was the parade of sports clubs at the Estádio das Laranjeiras. Unlike the 1919 national team, this was the nation – but without either São Paulo or any of the rest of the country. The parade was headed by delegations from the overwhelmingly white clubs of the city – Fluminense, Flamengo, Botafogo and América – while the smaller, more working-class and even mixed-race clubs of the suburbs were given a much lower profile. In the photographic record of the day the football and rowing teams of the leading clubs line up in club colours in front of the King and much of the Brazilian cabinet, oars held to attention: an all-white, all-male nation bursting with European vitality. The following year, on the eve of the 1921 Copa América due to be held in Buenos Aires, Brazil’s President Epitácio Pessoa decreed that the national team would not field a black player in the tournament lest the nation be embarrassed by its African and mulatto elements.

  It was a similar impulse, to display to the world the improving health of Brazil’s racial stock and to raise the profile of the nation in the world, which animated the plans for the 1922 Independence Centenary International Exposition. In a remarkable anticipation of the political coalitions and interests that have informed Brazil’s twenty-first-century hosting of sporting mega-events, the exhibition was closely linked to grandiose plans for the transformation of the urban environment. When the exhibition was first announced in 1917 the New York Times reported that the organizers intended to make ‘satisfactory plans for the material and aesthetic transformation of the city of Rio de Janeiro with a special view to the probabilities of its development’.5

  Rio had already undergone a major period of change in the early years of the century initiated by the activist mayor Pereira Passos. In an attempt to rid the city of the threat of contagious diseases and to build a capital that matched
the elite’s ambitions, Rio was reshaped. Tunnels were dug through the mountains opening up the hitherto inaccessible beaches of Copacabana and beyond; coastal parades were decorated with the city’s signature black-and-white mosaic pavements; in the old centre, large areas of lower-class housing and narrow eighteenth-century lanes were swept aside, Haussmann-like, to create public squares and grand boulevards adorned with magnificent municipal buildings. The plans for the 1922 exhibition, which was to be located in the south-east corner of the central area, were not dissimilar. The Morro do Castelo, a hill close to the shoreline, was levelled and with it a long-established favela of self-built housing was removed – just one of a number of forced relocations at the time of a kind that has since become the hallmark of such mega-events. Suitably cleansed, Rio would appear to the world as a modern European capital, a safe and healthy destination for investors and tourists rather than a dangerous and disease-ridden tropical port.

  For the first time in Brazil’s history we have cinematic evidence of this transformation and of the place of football within it. The country’s early embrace of the cinema meant that many short films had been made in the first twenty years of the new century, including footage of over a dozen football matches. In 1922 Brazilian cinema made the leap to longer and more structured documentaries. Among the leading figures in this process was the cinematographer Silvino Santos who was commissioned by government agencies to make films about his home city of Manaus in Amazonas and about the centenary exhibition. His Rio movie was called Terra Encantada (‘Enchanted Land’). It was both ambitious and innovative. Unlike the one- or two-reel shorts of the past, it was put on general release in Brazil at two hours long. Urban scenes were shot from a moving vehicle, use was made of fade-ins and fade-outs, and the camera seemed to search out the relentless motion of the new city. Only thirteen minutes of the original film have survived, but even in this reduced version football appears as a natural component of the urban canvas. Alongside bustling boulevards, fashionable cafés, long white beaches and decorative architecture, Santos included a game at Estádio das Laranjeiras. We see the gentlemen of Fluminense raising their flag to a large and seemingly vocal crowd. The written titles announce: ‘Fluminense Football Club is in Rio, a prodigious human endeavour’.6