The Mystery of São Paulo

In the Parc de Montjuic atop a hill overlooking the magnificent Catalan City of Barcelona, there sits a delightful building which is the home of the Joan Miró Museum. There is a terrace on the rooftop of this building which, on a bright day, offers a beautiful vista stretching from Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Basilica to the west and the Mediterranean to the east. It was here that Alfredo Cipriano had hastily arranged to meet Fernando Alonso this week while the latter was en route from the penultimate F1 race of 2012 to the last one in Brazil. Upon meeting one another the two men embraced silently. Cipriano then stepped back and took a long hard look at his friend. His hair was slicked back in the manner beloved of southern Italian gentlemen of a criminal persuasion. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips dry.

“You need not say anything to me, Fernando,” Cipriano said at length, “I understand everything. Now, come with me and let me show you some of the beautiful things contained in this marvellous place.” As they walked down the stairs, Alonso noticed that the big man’s shoulders were unusually drooping and he seemed to hang his great head. Cipriano’s demeanour was one of a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Presently, they stood before a bright canvas painted by Miró in 1940 and entitled The Escape Ladder.

Cipriano spread his arms wide and began to explain. "Europe was in political turmoil in 1940. Worse still, the world was at war. But Miró found a way of escaping from the prevailing political climate and the war by the use of his art. He produced paintings which were alive with birds and stars and strange creatures. They evoked a sense of freedom and energy and transported you to a beautiful fantasy world. Unlike his other Surrealist friends like Salvador Dali, who frightened you, or René  Magritte who befuddled you, Miró charmed you. I have always loved his work. More so because I had the privilege of knowing Miró personally during the sunset of his alluring life and I was sufficiently advantaged to have been present here when this elegant museum was opened in 1975.

“Whatever happens on Sunday, don’t lose heart. The enlightened forces are behind you. Their effectiveness may have been dulled this year because of an error I made in concentrating a little too much on your English schoolboy friend but the secrets I learned from my travels in the Levant many years ago are still with me. One of them was to seek solace from images such as the splendid one before us.”

“Relax, Alfredo,” Alonso said with a smile, “we never give up. And don’t forget, whatever else it may not be, Ferrari is still an Italian team.”

Meanwhile, in Heppenheim, a small German town an hour’s drive away from Frankfurt, a frowsy, middle-aged German lady was dusting a teenage boy’s bedroom for the fourteenth time that day. The teenager who had once occupied the room had long since left to live on his own, but she still kept his room as if in expectation of his imminent return. As she dusted the posters the boy had on his wall, her hand trembled when it came to the poster of Michael Schumacher as Ferrari world champion. She stepped back slightly and shut her eyes reverently. 

Then something occurred which startled her. She remembered the other task she had performed earlier and let out a out a little shriek. As quickly as she could, she scuttled out of the bedroom and raced down the stairs to the kitchen. It was too late. Thick smoke was billowing out of the oven. “Scheisse!” she screamed. When she extracted the smoking baking tray, she found to her horror that the cake she had lovingly prepared that morning was burned to a cinder. “Das kann nicht wahr sein (I don’t believe it)!“ she screamed.

Shortly afterwards, her portly husband, Norbert, came rushing in. “Was ist los (what’s going on)?“ he demanded. Through clenched teeth she explained that the Himbeer Streuselkuchen (raspberry crumble cake), Sebastian’s favourite, whih she had been preparing in readiness for his visit that afternoon was ruined. Norbert Vettel looked again at his wife. She was a bundle of nerves. Her eyes were vacant, her hair unkempt and she looked extraordinarily pale.

“I think you should sit down for a little while, Heike.“

“Why are you telling me to sit down? Sit down yourself!“

“Come now, darling, I’ll make some tea for us and we can relax a little.“

“I don’t want tea. Leave me alone!“

The cauldron-like atmosphere of the Vettel family home was not typical. But then how many mothers had been on the brink of seeing their son becoming only the third man in history to win 3 Formula One world championships in a row? On Sunday evening in Sao Paulo, Sebastian Vettel could join the ranks of Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher in the history books. If he failed to win the title this year, that particular record would never be one he could claim. With his thirteen point lead over Fernando Alonso, the odds were weighted heavily in his favour. And yet...

Sao Paulo was a worrying place. It was difficult for Heike or Norbert Vettel to imagine a place less sanitised than Heppenheim. In place of clean, well lit orderly streets on which not the slightest scrap of rubbish was to be found, there were vast, teeming slums in the shadow of forbidding skyscrapers. Instead of tidy German people who smiled and wished one a good day when they chanced upon you at the baker’s, Sao Paulo had huge gangs of knife-wielding teenagers with scars on their faces, bandanas on their heads and gaps in their jaws where teeth had once belonged. Voodoo hung in the air. If Sebastian’s parents had been asked to select a place in which they imagined their beloved precious young son making history, Sao Paulo was not it.

Notwithstanding everything, a 3rd consecutive world championship was a 3rd consecutive world championship whether won in Sao Paulo, Hockenheim or Timbuktoo. The weight of thinking about this was proving so intense, so harrowing, so gut wrenching, that Mrs Vettel could not function any more as a normal human being.

History awaits us on Sunday night. Every driver would love to win three consecutive championships. Perhaps more important than that is the overwhelming significance of the Ferrari name to Formula One. It is an often forgotten fact that every driver would give almost anything to be a Ferrari world champion. To have won the world championship in Ferrari scarlet is a far more important achievement than any statistic in a world record book. That also is at stake in Sao Paulo.

There is a big weekend ahead...

Enjoy Brazil!

Gitau

22 November 2012