The biggest amateur football tournament in the world: for six months, 700 teams play one another all over the city.Brazil lives to the rhythm of the round ball, and Amazonia to the rhythm of those who come to seek their fortune there. From Manaus, gateway to the forest, to the coast of Maranhão, three stories of conquest: beauty queens in the service of football teams, a bank on board a boat on the Amazon to win customers even in Indigenous villages, and a journey of nearly a thousand kilometres through the Wild West, from the iron mine to the ocean, in the footsteps of the pioneers who came to take the land for themselves.
In Manaus, football has no monopoly on curves. The Peladao is also a beauty contest: each team has its queen, and a queen who gets through the qualifying rounds can bring her beaten team back into the competition. Here the queen is picked in the changing room: Erika. One day, her brother asked her to defend his team’s colours; she would like to win first prize, a car, “that’s always good”. Arnaldo Santos, the organiser, is refereeing that day, on the banks of the river, the match of the future champions. For him the ball was “like my mother’s breast”; and since there is no celebration without the consent of women, at the heart of Amazonian traditions since time immemorial, they were brought into the competition. The bow and arrows were simply traded for a ball and football boots. It is quarter-final weekend. While the team plays, Erika parades live on the local channel; at the neighbourhood school, the only place where the television gets a signal, Marilu, the club president, sees her knocked out on a fault of style. The team, for its part, wins 1–0 and goes through to the semi-final, without its queen.
The Peladao was born of the idea of bringing families together in the streets and getting them to play against one another.
“No one has beaten us yet,” the coach insists: the opposing team will just have to get down on its knees and beg forgiveness.On the Amazon, the shipowners, often white, have for centuries handed down the art of trading with Indigenous villages. One of them has taken a bank on board: deep in the forest, bankers still have customers to win. The captain has never seen the sea; on the water, he earns a better living than with the minimum wage on land, and if the bank boat attracts pirates, money has at least turned the paddle into an engine. The commander, for his part, sees himself as an heir: his forebears traded goods from outside for the gold, the rubber and the spices of the forest; he also delivers the superfluous, instant coffee, disposable nappies, mobile phones. After twelve hours of unloading, in a village that looks like paradise, Lucia, a shopkeeper, hesitates between barter and the bank card. Among the Ticuna, her people, girls dye their hair like the white people on television. She knows that her crisps make the children fat and her sweets rot their teeth, but she also believes she is doing her community a service. Then she begins to cry.
People there talk of those who have made it: a white man is said to have made a fortune selling bananas to Indigenous people.
The voyage lasts about ten days, from one Indigenous community to the next: unloading, loading, selling, buying.Christophe Cousin begins his journey in the rain, at the Carajas mine, the largest iron mine in the world: howling monsters load nearly a hundred million tonnes of iron a year there. Antonio Dutra, thirty-five, drops him at the station at the wheel of the biggest truck in the world. The train that carries the ore to the sea is three kilometres long; its sole driver writes poems, one of them for a Brazil nut tree that men left standing alone when they cleared the forest, and that lightning finally split. A stop at Serra Pelada, where tens of thousands of gold prospectors rushed in the 1980s. Chico, fifty-nine, still digs beneath his kitchen, at the end of a steel cable, ninety metres down. In 1981, he found 400 kilos of gold in a fortnight; a witch foretold that he would make his fortune around fifty. Further on, at Eldorado dos Carajas, the forest has given way to ranches: 25,000 hectares, 20,000 head of cattle, and a boss who lashes out at the landless. Those he finally meets are descended from slaves who fled the plantations, and refuse to give up their land to a satellite launch base project. At the end of the line, São Luís and its port, where iron meets the sea.
One storey for the wheels, another for the radiator; at night, its drivers sometimes come face to face with a deer or a tapir.
334 wagons of 110 tonnes each: “the longest and heaviest train ever invented”.
In the days of the rush, six hundred men worked for him: “We were a real brotherhood.” Today, he says, the people of Serra Pelada are less respected than dogs.
Replanting the felled trees would mean, according to the ranch boss, getting rid of cattle: “It makes no sense.”“A speck of gold dust, a little flake you offer to the mine, and you’ll find a big nugget. That’s the gold prospector’s legend, but it’s the truth.”Chico, gold prospector at Serra Pelada