The curse of Ronaldo, Zidane and the Cat

“Mom! Have you seen o Gordo!?”

We were 15 minutes away from the 1998 World Cup final between Brazil and France and my brother and I couldn't find the cat anywhere. “He must have gone out, cats are like that!”

O Gordo may have gone outside, especially with all the visitors here to watch the game, invading his kingdom. But the problem was that o Gordo couldn't go out.

Since the quarter finals against Denmark, I had discovered that he was a fundamental part of a complex ritual that was necessary for Brazil's wins: it was imperative that, before the game, my brother and I played five matches on our video game, reproducing that day's game. If it was Brazil-Chile, we had to defeat Chile in the video game, so real-life Brazil could win. In our last “premonitory” game before the Round of 16, we beat Chile 4-1, the same result Brazil got at the Parc des Princes.

During the actual game, it was necessary that my mom was at my left, my brother to my right and, extended over our legs, the national flag. But the most important thing was to have, between our legs and the flag, o Gordo, with his head barely showing.

Where does superstition come from? Nobody is born superstitious. I'd even say nobody teaches you to be superstitious. My parents were always skeptical. If my old man had been there during that final with us, he would have ridiculed us.

I think superstition comes from an egocentric principle of believing that the world turns around us and that we can influence everything that happens, or maybe from the need to feel part of things over which we have no control. That is why we invent these absurd relationships between ourselves and these events.

But it happened during the quarterfinals. When Denmark's Jørgensen scored first, o Gordo showed up in the living room, oblivious to our nerves, and slowly settled between us. Then Brazil woke up. We scored twice. With our euphoria, the cat got upset and left. Roberto Carlos invented a bicycle kick in the penalty area, and the ball was left to Laudrup. 2-2. The spell was born.

Fear took a hold of us, 15 minutes before the start, when we learned Ronaldo wasn’t in the starting line up and that the cat was missing.

But I said to myself, we’re Brazil. France, poor thing, hadn't even qualified in ’94. Who was Zidane? We had beaten the Netherlands of Kluivert, Bergkamp, Cocu and the De Boer brothers.

When the team came onto the field, Ronaldo was in the starting line-up and we were calmer, sure that o Gordo would show up any minute. But everybody knows how this story goes: France destroyed Brazil, 3-0, Zidane scoring twice. If my mom hadn’t broken the spell even more, sitting away from us, so my grandmother could see, maybe Petit would not have scored that final goal and the tragedy would have been smaller.

It was night when we heard the meowing. We followed the sound to my mom's bedroom. It was impossible that he was there; we had looked all over the place for him. But he was caught in the drawer below the bed. Somebody had closed it without realizing that he was sleeping under the covers.

*As told to Africasacountry. Tom graduated from São Paulo University. He is a director, an editor and a screenwriter. He likes to write but he likes football even more.