Our second World Cup dispatch comes from our girl in Rio, Niti Parthasarathy. She took time away from lounging on the beaches and clubbing with favela warlords to watch the U.S. play Ghana at her favorite cafe.
Dear [The ##],
It was a hot, golden afternoon with a regular breeze, and there was not a single cloud in the sky. Whenever I am away from Rio de Janeiro, I miss days like this, when the sun is like a fire and the water glows green and the breeze shakes leaves down onto my hair.
I arrived at Cafecito and sat down at a table near the television. The sounds of the game mixed with the sounds of the neighborhood: the Santa Teresa streetcar creaking uphill, street musicians wandering with their ukeleles and their songs, children running and shrieking, the television echoing from the houses and bars across the street, cars screeching to a halt and horns honking amid angry protestations, babies wailing furiously, other people cheering, many conversations in Portuguese and also in Spanish because the owner of Cafecito is Chilean.
You have to climb a flight to stairs to reach Cafecito, which is on the second story; though it has no roof, it is protected from the sun by the boughs and branches of large trees, which hang over and supply shade. The floor is made of rocks and log planks, the tables and chairs are also built from wood, and there are tropical plants in every corner. I feel like I am in a treehouse.
Because it is so picturesque, many tourists stop and eat and take photographs at Cafecito. Some British kid tried to tell me I should call the sport football. I told him we’d stop calling it soccer when they stopped using the metric system.
I like America being the underdog in at least one thing, since we dominate at everything else. We are not woefully ignorant about soccer; we are willfully ignorant. And we shouldn’t think of our loss as devastating and heartbreaking and dream-crushing. No, this is just America being charitable towards the rest of the world, allowing them for once to understand what global domination feels like, even if it is just in sport and not in important things like diplomacy or warfare.
I am bitter and upset. How can people be soccer fans every year and all year round? I think it will take me four years just to recover from the emotional turmoil of the past few weeks. And yet, most of the rest of the world suffers like this all the time. I really pity them. Or maybe I envy them. I’m in Brasil, after all, where everyone is mad for this sport, and their passion is infectious.
Years ago, on my very first trip to Brasil, I visited the Mineirão stadium in Belo Horizonte with my friend Kathyuscia. “Ronaldo was discovered here!” she exclaimed. The stadium was empty, but I could picture it full of people jostling, heckling, fighting each other. Kathy had mentioned casually that her university classes, like all schools and offices, were cancelled during Brasil’s matches, and it fascinated me at the time, the idea of an entire country relieved of their official duties just because of futbol. But now, after so much time spent here, it seems perfectly normal to me that Brasil stops during the World Cup, that banks are on holiday, that the metro is unstaffed, that the centro is like a ghost town.
A perfect description: I remember Kathyuscia saying to me, “whenever they play here, the whole place is jumping jumping! And all the lights are bright, and everyone is always shouting.” I also remember that the man on duty at the Mineirão told us that people from FIFA were there that day, which is more exciting in retrospect than it was at the time.
I’m leaving Cafecito now, and the sunlight is waning in Rio, and the evening breeze blows comfortingly. I like this hour best of all hours, when the streetlights are turned on and windows begin glittering with lamplight. The city is violet and golden. The air smells like dinner, and everything is overlain in shadow.
VAMOS BRASIL.
Niti
