What it means to be Portuguese in Ronaldo’s country

“Football is an opera injected straight into the vein.” – Carlos do Carmo, fado singer

Lisboetas saddle up to get a better view of the big screen.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Lisbon

THE airport in his hometown has been named after him. The president himself has dubbed him a “Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry”. Astronomers use his initials and shirt number to refer to a galaxy some 12.9-billion light years from earth.

And yet, the locals aren’t so sure about Cristiano Ronaldo.

A friend from Porto, who know lives in Lisbon, tells the story of watching a game in a bar in Madeira when Ronaldo — a son of Funchal, the capital of Madeira — scored for Portugal.

My friend catapulted upright in joy, which erupted from him in whoops and applause. But after a second or three he got the feeling that all was not as it should be, and it wasn’t: around him his fellow Portuguese, to a man and woman from the same Funchal where Ronaldo was born and raised before going to bigger, brighter places, sat almost as stoic as if CR7 had put the ball into his own net.

“They’re unhappy with him for not helping them more after the 2008 financial crisis,” my friend explained. “He did help them, but they say it wasn’t enough; he didn’t give every person on Madeira a lot of money.”

Ronaldo, who grew up poor as the fourth child of a gardener and a cook, is among the richest sport stars in the world with an estimated net worth of R5.24-billion.

He has made something of a second career out of giving away significant chunks of his fortune, and in August 2015 he was named “the most charitable athlete in the world” by the website athletesgonegood.com. 

Ronaldo can, of course, afford it and more. But his sense of duty extends further than throwing money at problems: in 2016 his video message to children in Syria was that they were “the true heroes” and “don’t lose hope”.

That, it seems, isn’t good enough for some people in Madeira, where — according to me friend — “they say, ‘Does he think he’s better than us just because he’s rich and famous?’”.

That view isn’t overtly noticeable in Lisbon, where Ronald’s likeness and jersey are ubiquitous. In one tiny shop, not a lot bigger than a phone booth, Superman looms large: for sale are his Portugal shirt and his home as well as his away Real Madrid jerseys along with two versions of Ronaldo pennants.

The Portuguese see themselves as a small nation peering out at a world of giants, and Ronaldo as their prime ambassador to that world. So they are resigned to him going off to make his fortune and build his legend with clubs like Real Madrid. But that doesn’t mean they have to like him.   

Portugal’s complicated relationship with their best ever player — Eusébio doesn’t count since he was Mozambican and didn’t move to Lisbon to play for Benfica until he was 18 — is among the most intriguing aspects for a South African who is in the capital during the World Cup.

You might think that relationship was uncomplicated forever on Friday, when Ronaldo delivered a shimmering performance to score all his team’s goals in a 3-3 thriller against Spain, the ancient enemy itself, in the teams’ World Cup opener in Sochi.

At a fan park in the Praça do Comércio, just metres from the Rio Tejo, the crowd swelled to several thousand in the hours before the game.

Scores of them improved their chances of a good view of the giant screen by clambering onto the statue of King José I on his horse, crushing snakes in his path, that towers over the square.

A public address announcer introducing Portugal’s team as the minutes to kick-off dwindled to single figures had three words when it came to Ronaldo: “Cristiano! Cristiano! Cristiano!” 

A fourth-minute penalty, banged hard, a weak 44-minute shot that somehow eluded David de Gea in Spain’s goal, and a vicious, hooking free kick from what would have been too close to goal for mere mortal players to level matters with two minutes on the clock fulfilled the announcer’s oblique prophesy. And more.

Every goal was cheered as if Ronaldo had singlehandedly won the 11th war between the countries. That’s right: they’ve fought 10 in the past.

But, if anything, Portugal’s relationship with their golden child is suddenly more complex than ever. Now they have to like the preening, rich, famous, charitable, brilliant bastard, whether they really like him or not.

And that in the throes of a World Cup in which Portugal hope to go at least as far as the third place they earned in 1966, when Eusébio scored nine goals in six games. Not that that hope is expressed above a whisper, if at all.

Nobody brags in this country (about anything, much less beating the world’s best at the world’s own game), nobody seems nervous (why would you be when you’re expecting your dream to be dashed), and nobody is under any illusion that the World Cup isn’t a trophy too far (“Yes, we won Euro in 2016, but this is much bigger,” is a commonly heard view).

In a film at a museum in the most Lisboa of Lisbon’s neighbourhoods, Alfama, that seeks to preserves the legacy of fado, the peculiarly Portuguese bluesy folk music, a maestro of the art, singer Carlos do Carmo, says: “Football? Football is an opera injected straight into the vein.”

That sounds like a compliment to the game, but Do Carmo smirks as he says it and motions like a heroin addict shooting up.

It’s gloomy but it’s real. It’s what the people here call saudade, a quality that Portuguese intellectual Aubrey Bell described in his 1912 book “In Portugal” as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present”. Saudade, he wrote, is “not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness”.

The closest this reporter has come to understanding it hangs in a shop window in downtown Lisbon, where a Portugal jersey will set you back €84.90. A Spain version? €89.50. That’s €4.6 in degrees of separation, or about R71.

It doesn’t sound like much if you don’t consider the who, what and where of it all. That, in prosaic terms, is what it means to be Portuguese: proud but not smug; hopeful but not expectant; in love with Ronaldo but also a little in hate with him.

Saudade. Feel it; it is here.

Portugal begrudges Spain every damned thing – even superiority

“Ronaldo is … Ronaldo is Ronaldo.” – Elsa Rodrigues, Portugal and Benfica supporter

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Lisbon

THEY’VE been at each others’ throats in 10 armed conflicts spread over 424 years; three of them across the Atlantic in South America and one that never caught fire: the “Fantastic War”, so called because it involved no major battles.

Happily, Spain and Portugal haven’t tried to kill each other on an industrial scale for the past 210 years. But whatever else the Iberian neighbours do in their World Cup opener in Sochi on Friday, they won’t be borrowing cups of sugar.

Asked, foolishly, if Spain was Portugal’s big brother, Elsa Rodrigues, a forty-something Lisboeta in mom jeans and no-nonsense hair, flashed the kind of withering eye she might level at a fishmonger trying to overcharge her for bacalhau.

“Spain is big but they are not a brother,” she said, and left her words to twist in the wicked little wind that bounced off the black-and-white mosaic paving stones as it swept up the hill from the Rio Tejo.

Would Friday’s game be Portugal’s most difficult of the opening round? Another stupid question, it seems.

“If we think Spain are the most difficult to beat, it’s no good,” she said. “All three are very tough.”

The Portuguese begrudge granting Spain a damned thing. Not even superiority.

Portugal are ranked fourth and Spain 10th. Iran and Morocco, the other teams in Group B, are 37th and 41st.

If Spain aren’t Portugal’s highest hurdle then there is no cult of Cristiano Ronaldo in Lisbon.

And there isn’t. At least not at Benfica’s official shop, where you can — for the equivalent of R14 000 — buy a replica of the inaugural European Golden Boot that Eusebio won in 1968.

Some R17 000 will get you No. 74 in a limited edition of 100 SJ Dupont pens, along with matching cufflinks.

Everything is Benfica branded: golf tees, Monopoly sets, jars of honey, padlocks, bottles of wine, port and ginja — the cherry liqueur Lisboetas swear offers medicinal benefits. As long as you stick to the recommended dose: seven shots for women, 14 for men. Daily.

About the only floggable commodity that can’t be seen in the double-storey shop is anything relating to Ronaldo.

Of course not. He cut his professional teeth playing for Sporting Lisbon, Benfica’s bitter rivals.

That he now plays for the most Spanish club of all, Real Madrid, only adds to the brotherly unlove. 

Rui Almeida, a salesman in the shop, looks at me hard from below a tilted forehead and arched eyebrows when the player who shall not be named here is indeed named.

Almeida is a strong-shouldered young man. For a moment the smell of latent violence itself is Benfica branded. But his focus softens, or maybe it shifts to the bigger picture.

“We cannot disapprove of him,” Almeida says. “He came up through Sporting but he takes Portugal to the world. That makes us feel good, so we need to be proud of him.”

Ronaldo is an important part of Almeida’s reasoning why “the Spanish need to look up to us, not us look up to them — they have the best league in the world but we have the best player in the world”.

Almeida has yet to see Ronaldo play live. I tell him I have: in a warm-up against Mozambique at the Wanderers before the 2010 World Cup.

Ronaldo mostly went through the motions, but for a few seconds he tore upfield exponentially faster, beating opponents left, right and centre, tilting like a spinning top as he went, razzling, frazzling, dazzling, a glittering jewel on the hoof. He didn’t bother taking a shot at goal, but the shock of what he could do at will is forever lodged in the memory.

Suddenly it’s Almeida who’s doing the interviewing: “It came from nowhere? You think, this guy, he’s not human?”

Rodrigues, too, is conflicted over Ronaldo: “I’d prefer that he plays for Benfica; that’s my team. But in Portugal we know he is too big for our clubs.”

Does she like Ronaldo as a player? She shrugs the shrug of the choiceless: “He is Portuguese, so I like him.

“Ronaldo is …” she pauses to try and match what she’s thinking in Portuguese to what she can say in English. She gives up not because she can’t find the word but because it doesn’t exist.

“Ronaldo is Ronaldo.”

Accidental tourist: Pastéis will never be the same

A pastél rested in my hand, heavy with promise. Perky pastry covered like lingerie what lay within, waiting.

Sunday Times Lifestyle

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

The queue to No. 84 Rua de Belém loomed as long as the ooze of a Lisbon summer’s day into evening and was as thick as custard with tourists and locals alike.

All squinted and sweated in the 30-whatever-degree heat. None complained, not with our minds’ eyes on this particular prize.

You could call Fábrica Pastéis de Belém — which is at No. 84 — a bakery. You could call the pastéis de nata they’ve been making, in ever increasing numbers but of utterly consistent quality since 1837, custard tarts.

You could also be stupid. Or, at best, tongue deaf.

Religious orders fell on hard times after the Liberal Revolution of 1820, and to raise funds pastéis de nata were baked by monks in the nearby Mosteiro dos Jerónimos and sold at a handily close sugar refinery. The monks were French, and thus knew only too well the wonder that was the custard tart. The Portuguese version was set apart by the addition of egg yolks that were left over after the whites had been used to starch nuns’ habits and the like.

In 1834 the mosteiro was shuttered and the inmates driven out. Happily, the secret recipe survived because those mercenary monks sold it to the sugar refinery, who established the fábrica, and the fruits of all that history awaited us at the end of this damn queue.

It moved quickly in random squirts, and 12 minutes after we joined the line we had, in our hot little hands, a box in which nestled four of the gooey gorgeousnesses.

Others scoffed theirs in the unspeakable squalor of a neighbouring Starbucks. We, of course, did not. Instead, we walked purposefully to the Jardim Vasco da Gama and settled under an olive tree.

With a sprinkling of cinnamon and a dusting of icing sugar, we were good to go. Which was when a blasphemous blip hit at least one of us: would they live up to the hype?

A pastél rested in my hand, heavy with promise. Perky pastry covered like lingerie what lay within, waiting. Partly covered, that is. From the centre peeped a circle, concave like a sacral dimple, of yellow freckled with black.

The whole quivered in anticipation. Or was that my hand? Either way, there was no slip twixt pastél and lip. And teeth … And tongue … And mouth …

And?

Comes a point in these things when you want to leave the rest of the thinking to Lester Bangs or Hunter S. Thompson or Rian Malan and soak up, wordlessly, the bliss of it all. But Bangs and Thompson are dead, and if Malan is alive he has far more existentially important stuff to agonise over than the quality of a pastél de nata. Even if the pastél de nata concerned is the original and the finest yet baked on God’s earth. Sorry, Mr Malan — the finest yet baked on this cursed, crisis-crippled excuse for a planet that doesn’t deserve the benevolent attentions of any self-respecting god. My traitor’s tart, indeed.

Yes, it was that good. Good enough to make you want to sue other bakeries on Fábrica Pastéis de Belém’s behalf for passing their stodgy, sickly sweet offerings off as something that deserve to be called pastéis de nata.

A cloud perfectly balanced between sweetness, richness and molten irresistibility filled my mouth. It was like eating satisfaction itself.

Thing is, there are at best two decent bites to be had from a pastél. Too soon, it was over.

Thoughts of re-joining the queue were quelled by the fact that we had to get the metro back to Alfama in the city centre for an already booked and paid for fado show.

We walked to the station with the angelic alchemy of egg yolks, sugar and milk still aswirl in our senses. Nothing could ever be the same.