‘Poor’ Garrincha almost a forgotten legend here
RIO DE JANEIRO: Like the man, the city of his birth and death seems to exist on the rim of Brazil’s consciousness. Pau Grande is over an hour’s drive from Rio de Janeiro and that’s seriously far, says Marina a receptionist in our hotel who agreed to be our translator for the trip to Garrincha’s home.
The road to the town of one of football’s greatest players and a member of Brazil’s World Cup winning squads of 1958 and 1962 narrows as we get farther from Rio.
Fringed by mountains with wisps of cloud on top, Pau Grande looks like the one-street towns of Hollywood Westerns. Seeking directions, we stop at a singlestorey building because it has “E M Mane Garrincha” written on top and has “Runa Ao Hexa” slung from the ledge on the roof. Translated it means, “we are on our way to the sixth (World Cup title).” Turns out it is one of the two municipal schools in the place named after the “Little Bird.”
“Garrincha was poor, had problems with drink and women. Maybe that’s why people don’t remember much about him even though he was such a legendary footballer,” said Lydia Borges, a director at the school. School children have in their own way tried to preserve his legend. One wall has a painting of Garrincha in a Brazil shirt and a brown pair of legs in cleats turned slightly inwards.
Down the road, a bust immortalises the “devil with twisted legs.” It was inaugurated in 1992, nearly nine years after Garrincha died aged 49. Next to it, a poster of Garrincha hangs from a lamp post with “Rumo Ao Heza” written below. That’s about the only connection visible between him and the 2014 World Cup in this place.
“If I took money from the visitors who have come during the World Cup, I would have become rich. After the World Cup, the tourists will go and the police (enhanced security) too. We will return to our old ways or maybe get worse,” says Alexandra do Santos one of Garrincha’s granddaughters.
“Imagine how Pau Grande would have been transformed if Brazil had decided to remember Garrincha with a museum here. But in this country no one remembers the poor; nobody wants to talk about them as well. And when Garrincha died, he had no money so that was another reason not to remember him,” says Santos, 41, who lives in her grandfather’s house with her three sons. It is a cosy one-storey building painted in the yellow of the Brazil football team.
Next to the house, Santos runs a Garrincha-themed restaurant with eight covers set up by a television programme after she won a contest. Santos says she plans to revive the legend of Garrincha and is talking to a lawyer about image rights adding she has no idea how long that could take. “From authors to television channels, everybody has made money off Garrincha except his family,” she said about the man whose death “orphaned football”, according to the writer Paulo Emilio.
Some distance from Pau Grande, the cemetery where Garrincha is buried has two graves. One is spartan, recently whitewashed. The grander other slightly uphill was apparently a former Mayor’s idea. The caretaker insists that it was in the one more austere that Garrincha lay though like with the number of children he fathered or the affairs he had, you could never be sure.