Seu Silva | EddieSilva.com
Childhood in the 70s and 80s: horses, rooftops, Corinthians, a disallowed goal, and an empty carnival playing Crimson and Clover.
Sometimes I wonder how I survived the 70s and 80s.
I do not say that as a pretty sentence.
I say it as someone who looks back and realizes that childhood, in those days, was a kind of unfenced territory. We left the house, walked into empty lots, climbed onto roofs, invented parachutes, pulled a horse's tail, crossed streets, disappeared for hours, came back dirty, hurt, hungry, and nobody called it trauma.
They called it being a child.
Today, some of the things I did back then would be enough to put my parents in solitary confinement and send me to intensive psychological treatment.
The problem is that my parents did not even know.
They had no idea what kind of troubled mind the second son of the family was carrying inside that small, skinny, restless body, far too curious to survive safely.
My first memory is not a party.
It is not a birthday.
It is not a toy.
It is a horseshoe.
I must have been four years old.
I know that because I checked later. By five, I was already living in another house. So that memory belongs to that strange, almost impossible age when a child barely understands the world but already finds ways to almost leave it.
In front of my house there was an empty lot.
And in that lot there were two horses grazing.
I do not know what went through my head. Maybe nothing. A four-year-old child does not think about consequences. A child thinks about movement. Texture. Curiosity. Testing whether the world answers when you touch it.
I walked up to one of the horses.
And I pulled its tail.
The horse answered.
Not with anger.
Like a horse.
It kicked.
To this day, I can still see the horseshoe.
Clear.
Large.
Fast.
Passing in front of my face like a sentence that missed its address by only a few inches.
I keep thinking: what if I had been twelve inches farther forward?
Twelve inches.
Too small a distance to separate mischief from tragedy. Too small a distance to separate a funny memory from a story no one would tell with a smile.
My parents never knew.
Nobody knew.
It became one of those unwitnessed memories that stay hidden for a lifetime, waiting to appear every time I see a horse grazing.
I do not see only the horse.
I see the horseshoe.
I see the boy.
I see the almost.
In that same house, there was a plum tree.
Its branches reached above the roof.
To a child like me, that was not a tree.
It was a ladder.
It was an invitation.
It was irresponsibility with ripe fruit.
I have two memories of that plum tree.
In the first, I am lying on the roof of the house eating ripe plums with no effort at all. The whole world seemed to have been designed to serve me fruit at mouth level. The roof was warm. The plums were sweet. I must have been dirty, happy, and completely out of where I was supposed to be.
In the second memory, I am holding an open umbrella.
On the roof.
Ready to fly.
I had seen, or imagined, or decided on my own, that an open umbrella would work like a parachute. Children do not know physics. They know cartoons, false courage, and knees ready to be scraped.
I jumped.
The umbrella did not negotiate with gravity.
The fall was quick.
The glamour, nonexistent.
My knee split open.
And my biggest problem was not the pain.
It was hiding the wound from my mother.
Because in those days the fall was only half the accident. The other half was explaining how you had ended up on the roof with an open umbrella and a criminal idea in your head.
I do not remember how I climbed up.
But I remember the plums.
I remember the roof.
I remember the fall.
I remember the knee.
Memory is a strange thing.
It does not keep everything.
It chooses.
And in my case, it seems to have chosen mostly the evidence against me.
I do not remember much of the good things I did, if I did any. I clearly remember the wrong things. The near tragedies. The small acts of madness. The plans that should never have survived the first idea.
From the age of six, though, memory opens the doors.
The first bicycle.
The first friends in the new house.
The first day of school.
That first year of school deserves an article of its own.
I began first grade already knowing how to read.
Said like that, it sounds beautiful.
You could almost imagine the mayor coming to the school to congratulate me.
But the truth had fewer medals and more leather belt.
There was a belt hanging on the wall at home.
And that belt had a very clear pedagogical mission if I did not release the entire alphabet.
I learned to read early.
I do not know if it was talent.
Or survival.
But that is for another article.
Because the 70s were not only backyards, roofs, and horses.
They were also football.
And football, for a Brazilian boy, was not entertainment.
It was spiritual formation.
In 1976, I rooted and cried for Corinthians.
After the invasion of Rio de Janeiro came the loss to Internacional.
I confess that defeat did not destroy me. Maybe because I still did not understand the size of the drought. Maybe because children suffer differently. They suffer now, but they still believe in their fathers when their fathers seem to believe for everyone.
I trusted my father.
And it was worth the wait.
In 1977, at ten years old, I saw the drought end.
Corinthians became champion against Ponte Preta.
Only years later did I understand my father's joy. At that moment, I did not fully grasp what so many years without a title meant. I saw the match, the celebration, my father, and something inside me understood without knowing how to explain it.
I think that was when I understood what it meant to be Corinthians.
It was not about winning.
It was about waiting.
It was about suffering with witnesses.
It was about believing after logic had already left the room.
It was about looking at my father's face and realizing that a title could give a man back something time had owed him.
But in 1978 came another lesson.
The first great frustration of my life.
Brazil and Sweden.
World Cup.
The corner kick.
Nelinho takes it.
Zico rises.
Heads it.
Goal.
And then the referee says no.
The game was over.
Even today, at fifty-eight and change, I still cannot understand it.
If the match was over, why let the corner be taken?
That question still lives inside me with the clean indignation of an eleven-year-old child.
From the corner kick to the ball crossing the line, it was not even four seconds.
Four seconds.
Almost nothing for a clock.
Too much time for an injustice.
I watched that match alone.
My family had gone to watch it at friends of my father's. I do not remember why, but I remember staying home. An eleven-year-old child in front of the television, learning that not every goal that goes in counts.
That was a calling card.
Reality entered without asking permission.
Raw.
Naked.
Without explaining the rules.
When the match ended, I left the house to go where my family was. The neighborhood had one of those traveling carnivals that appeared like circuses, stayed for a few days, filled the street with light, music, and dust, then disappeared as if they had never promised joy.
That day, the carnival was open.
But empty.
That stayed with me.
An empty carnival after a disallowed goal.
The lights maybe still on.
The rides still.
The worn ground.
And from the damaged loudspeakers came an old foreign song, beautiful in a sad way:
"Crimson and Clover," by Tommy James and the Shondells.
I did not know English.
I did not need to.
Some songs arrive before translation.
It was 1978.
I was eleven years old.
A goal had been taken from me.
The carnival was empty.
And that song played as if someone had chosen the exact soundtrack for a child to begin distrusting the world.
Three years later, my father would die of a massive heart attack.
Forty-six years old.
It was 1981.
Then the world did not disallow a goal.
It disallowed a presence.
And there was no referee to complain to.
No corner kick to take again.
No question that could solve anything.
Only absence.
In 1982, I would cry again.
The same way I cried for my father's death.
But that is another story.
Some memories we tell.
Others wait for the right age to hurt properly.