The walk to the ground is where the day starts, and it starts earlier than the kickoff suggests. You feel the Re-Pa in your legs before you hear it. From the Marco neighbourhood the streets fill in the same order every time: first the food carts taking their positions, then the sellers with their flags over their shoulders, then the families coming out of side streets already singing, already half an hour into an argument.
My father supports Paysandu. My mother’s side is Remo from birth to the bone. I have asked her twice whether she knew this when she married him and twice she has said, with a straight face, that he seemed like a fixable man. Forty years on he is still a bicolor and they are still married. This is the normal condition of a household in this city. The Re-Pa runs through the middle of families like the Guamá runs through the middle of Belém.
14 June 1914
The first game was on 14 June 1914, and Remo won it 2-1. I mention the score because my family mentions the score. More than a hundred years of meetings later, and the result of the very first one still gets quoted in kitchens as though it settled something.
And it settled nothing, because the two clubs have met more than seven hundred times since. That number is the thing that gets quoted abroad, and it deserves the attention. Most rivalries anywhere in the world count their derbies in the dozens. Ours has run past seven hundred and sixty meetings, which makes the Re-Pa the most-played derby in world football. There are fixtures in Brazil’s national calendar that have been played fewer times in their entire history than we have played each other since the pandemic years.
The sheer repetition is part of the texture. Twice a year at a minimum, more when the state championship and the national divisions line up, plus the friendlies and the commemorations. By the time you are twelve you have seen thirty Re-Pas and you have opinions about players you never watched, inherited from your father, who inherited them from his.
the noise comes first
I should describe the noise, because that is what people ask about.
At Baenão the sound arrives before the teams do. The drums set up in the terraces an hour early and the stand starts to breathe as one thing. When the players come out of the tunnel the volume goes past talking. You stop hearing individual voices around the tenth minute and the whole ground becomes one voice with a rhythm, and the rhythm is the drum, and the drum is the pulse of the neighbourhood around the stadium.
People who have only watched European derbies on television imagine the noise arriving in waves, chants starting and stopping. The Re-Pa is more like weather. It is constant and it changes pressure. There is a specific sound the crowd makes when a player turns toward goal, half a breath, thousands of people inhaling together, and then either the roof comes off or forty thousand people groan in the same note and the pressure drops.
At Mangueirão the sound goes up into the open bowl and comes back to you a half second late. At Baenão it has nowhere to go and lands on the pitch. This is one reason the older supporters prefer the little ground, and it is a reason you can feel in your chest.
what the day is actually like
Matchday in this city is an all-day event that happens to have a football match inside it.
The morning is for the family lunches, where the two colours sit at the same table. The afternoon is for the walk and the food and the meeting up. There is a moment, maybe an hour before kickoff, when the area around the ground becomes a single conversation and you can ask a stranger about the 1993 side and get a fifteen-minute answer with hand gestures.
Children get their faces painted in one club’s colours by a parent and then a grandparent quietly adds something in the other club’s colours, and nobody in the family thinks this is strange. Half-and-half scarves exist here, though the ultras hate them. I have an uncle who owns one and keeps it hidden in a drawer like a confession.
In the week before the game the two colours take over the city. Shopfronts in the Marco go one way or the other depending on the owner, and the buses carry the argument from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. There is a specific kind of quiet here on the morning of a Re-Pa, the kind that hangs around before a storm. By midday the drums have started somewhere and the whole thing is moving.
The match itself is the middle of the day, not the whole of it. After the final whistle the arguments start properly, in the bars and on the corners and over the phone with relatives in Manaus and São Paulo. A Re-Pa ends when everyone runs out of things to say, which is usually around Tuesday.
2016
In 2016 the state government declared the Re-Pa part of the intangible cultural heritage of Pará. I went to see the paperwork because I did not quite believe it. There it was, an official document listing our derby alongside festivals and crafts and religious processions as part of the culture of the state.
It is the single most correct bureaucratic decision I have ever watched a government make. The Re-Pa belongs in the heritage register for the same reason the Círio belongs there. It organises the year. It tells you where you were and who you were with. My grandfather’s first Re-Pa, my first Re-Pa, my nephew’s first Re-Pa, all measured against the same fixture, all with the same walk to the ground.
Official recognition changes nothing about the noise and everything about the argument. Now when my father says the bicolors are the soul of the state, my mother can point at a government document. She does, too. Every time.
why it feels like this
Rivalries elsewhere are often about geography or class or a single final that went wrong. Ours has all of that and something else, which is time. Seven hundred and sixty-odd meetings is enough time for the fixture to become a family member in its own right. It has a birthday, 14 June 1914. It has moods. It has an official heritage listing. It has a memory longer than anyone alive.
My first Re-Pa was at Baenão in the early nineties, and I remember it as sound and knees. My father’s hand on my shoulder, the terrace shaking under us, and a man behind us singing the same word over and over for ninety minutes. I have been to hundreds of games since. Nothing has come close to that ground on the day these two play each other.
So when people outside Pará ask me what the Re-Pa is like, I have stopped trying to explain it with the numbers. The numbers are the easy part. What I tell them now is this. Come down here in the week of the game, walk with us from the Marco, buy something from the vendors who have been setting up in the same spots for thirty years, and sit in the ground where the noise has nowhere to escape to. Then call your father afterwards and argue about it.
That is the Re-Pa. Everything else is a fixture list.
