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Once upon a time there was a house with three cosmopolitan, cultured and polyglot girls, who were also warm, extroverted and creative. Growing up between Portugal, Cyprus and Cape Verde, they became fertile in imagination, generous in joy and good will, eager for knowledge and adventures. Amid so much self-confidence and excitement, the parents limited themselves to rule as they could. They controlled the order in which each of the girls spoke, fed them with food made in a hurry, confused them with brain and motion teasers. Conversations about racism were avoided and, on the worse days, they’d put the girls to sleep in tents. What do you call that?

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Cloé and Noa Soares

Born in Nikosia, Cyprus

8 and 4 years old

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If there was any initial shyness, it did not last more than a minute. Before long, three girls were jumping around a square table, commenting on the stories of the adults, asking for drawings, showing off the family pet rabbit and displaying their scrapbooks, while the smallest of them tested her lungs by screaming “Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!" without redundancy itches, until we finally got to appreciate the doll she craddled on the couch. Noa is the youngest and also wants us to notice her princess outfit; Cloé is the middle sister, more reserved, and has the reputation of an athlete who wins every cross country race; Isis is the oldest, has an artist's vein and the immodesty to warn that she is "very smart". She’s the only one who is a native of Portugal, but, as the younger sisters were born in Cyprus, they all studied until mid-2018 at a Cypriot private school where the official languages ​​were Greek and English. Firing words in several languages, they overlap each other’s speeches to share memories about their first days in a school where no-one spoke Portuguese and where the language most often heard was Russian. Cosmopolitans, the girls got used to intercultural dialogues, world maps, luggage, flights and passports. In Santa Maria da Feira they already feel at home, but, after a few seconds of hesitation, they still confess that Cyprus had another charisma. “We had a pool there”, “we strolled more”, “the beach was right next to the house”, “it felt like a vacation” and other things, which the Mediterranean climate will have helped to sublimate.

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Ísis, Cloé and Noa lived on that island because their father is a professional football player and, after a first contract with AC Omonia, he later wore the AEL Limassol jersey. Born in Portugal 36 years ago, his name is Marco Soares, he is the son of Cape Verdean parents who met in Setúbal – he a “badio” coming from Santiago and she a “sampadjuda” from Sal Island – and he grew up listening and dancing the funaná and quizomba, eating cachupa and, inevitably, falling in love with the replica of Cape Verde that Vale da Amoreira, in Setúbal, came to be. "I was raised in a social neighborhood composed solely of returnees and, since I was a child, I have always felt this bond to the land of my parents", he says. And that will explain why, later, in his sports career, the appeal of Africa spoke louder.

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Marco started playing ball at the age of six in the “Pélézinhos de Setúbal” club and, since then, he has dribbled on pitches of Desportivo de Portugal, Sporting, Barreirense, União de Leiria and Olhanense, before heading to CS Pandurii in Romania and to Omonia in Cyprus. Then he went on to the Angolan “First of August”, the military club where players were forced to practice inside the base, were forbidden to use tops without sleeves and sometimes were only allowed to enter through the back door – minor constraints, though, considering that, in previous championships, whoever received a red card when playing for the club was subjected to a kind of imprisonment and was prevented from going off the base. After that, AEL Limassol was a seaside resort, Feirense a paradise and Arouca a quiet haven. Among these different stopovers, a persistent destination was the Cape Verde National Team – of which Marco has been a member for 15 years and captain for eight – and that happened due to a sense of duty better explained by the heart than by reason or birth certificate. “Since I was not born in Cape Verde, it was in Vale da Amoreira that I fell in love with that country. It was my parents' stories, the songs at home, a bond that has always been present since I was a child”, he says. The physical distance was, therefore, nothing more than a detail, and that’s why the connection that the footballer always felt in his soul explains that, even though he was invited to Portugal's U20 National Team, he ended up choosing the African country where his parents were born. “A lot of people ask me why I chose Cape Verde, but there are things that we just feel. I have no other explanation. I felt that I had to represent Cape Verde and I am not at all sorry: I am the captain of an entire team and that is something of a pride for me. I gained a great love for that land. On the day when we first qualified for the African Cup, there were more people on the streets than when the country achieved independence and that marks us for life. It creates an emotional connection in us that does not disappear”.

 

Now, almost every year, the family travels to that archipelago, where the girls transform themselves to embody the spirit of Africa. They walk barefoot through the streets, let their hair loose, try to learn Creole, chat with everyone... They have a more spontaneous behavior and that is, after all, what the family is looking for there. “A Cape Verdean from Europe is different from one who is actually in Cape Verde. There is so much purity there… It is quite moving the simplicity of the people, the naturalness of things”, insists Marco. This freedom and its small pleasures are, moreover, what Marco values ​​most since he broke his tibia at the age of 25, which destroyed his dreams of being hired to play in the United Kingdom and forced him to undergo three surgeries in 14 months of recovery. “This injury helped me to grow a lot”, he confesses. “It forced me to mature, to learn what really matters in life, to see who is really by our side and genuinely cares about us”.

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At the time of his convalescence, Cheila Soares, the girls' mother, was already with Marco. Born in Portugal with Angolan and Guinea genes, she met the athlete at Barreiro when she was still a teenager, having just returned from 10 years living in Munich and London, where she attended school while her mother worked. The couple’s dating has always been – still is – particularly empathetic and harmonious, serene and tender. It seems to have the sweetness of the cakes that Cheila creates in a flash, while the girls tell of their adventures and Marco validates the veracity of those stories. Suddenly, the room is invaded by the aroma of coconut and on the table a creation decorated by strawberries appears, with the refinement developed at the pastry course that took Cheila to do an internship at the Yeatman hotel, in Vila Nova de Gaia. Perhaps these culinary skills are an accomplishment of fate... Because one of the chef's surnames is “Fogaça” and, in Santa Maria da Feira, whose culinary ex-libris is a homonymous sweet bread, this seems like the work of destiny. When Marco played at Leiria, one of his teammates supplied him with the fogaças that are reputed to be an amulet against the black plague; now, those sweet breads are bought on the spot, in person, and seem to prove that Feira is where the family should be. “We were so well-received and the people were always so friendly that I loved coming here. There is no problem if I have to live here forever”, says the cake designer, after so many years going from port to port, at the rhythm of her husband's championships.

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Marco’s and Cheila's life is marked by many displays of consideration, dictated mainly by football, but it also has moments of racial discrimination, when it is not the ball ruling. In the list of the first, it is he who gives some examples of moments when affection is enlivened by sports performance, as if that were all that matters. “In Cyprus, the fans are more passionate, much more than the Portuguese”, he recalls. “Everything is very good when it goes well and everything turns very grim when it goes badly. If we win the game, they are euphoric and will block the traffic just so that the players can stop and party on the street, but, if we lose, we arrive at the hotel and 200 people with their faces covered may be there waiting for us with threats”. As to Portugal and Angola, the main difference is this: “Here, football is more evolved at the tactical level and more organized, but in Angola the championship is very pleasant, with good teams and a lot of entertainment on the stands, because the fans are very enthusiastic”.

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Always calm and tranquil, Marco knows that “racism is everywhere,” but he tries to put it in perspective. “If I care about it and let myself be affected, the more will the people who cause the disorder feel stimulated. Of course not everyone has the same psychological ability to withstand the insult, but I always try to ignore it. I find it more difficult to disregard when I see those attitudes on the field, by players from the opposing team, who even have colored colleagues in their team, but who start attacking us there, during the game, just to destabilize us”.

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Cheila, on her part, is particularly irritated by the excess of familiarity, by the invasion of her daughters' personal space. “I feel that it is an excessive curiosity. Why are they always touching the girls' hair?”. There is a friend of Cloé, with blond and straight strands, who cannot resist touching her dark, bulky locks and tight curls, but that is because of the contrast, of the genuine affection of a girl who admires the physical features of the other. "But that tendency to always be touching the other person's body, without respect for their personal space... It is abusive and unnerves me", says Cheila. Cloé and Noa do not follow the conversation with great attention, but take the opportunity to send their mother a message: “It irritates us more to be wearing matching clothes”.

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Cheila and Marco fear the sharpness of their daughters' comments. The girls have perfect diction, are very attentive and curious, particularly educated for their age and that is exactly the problem. “As they have lived in other countries and traveled a lot, they talk about Big Ben as if it were the traffic-light next door! They find it strange if a child says she has never been on a plane, they are amazed if a colleague does not know what sushi is... We don't want them to make anyone feel bad. The other kids didn't miss out on these opportunities – the girls are the ones whose life experience is very different from what is normal at this age”, explains the father, who, one day, after ending his football career, would like to be a kindergarten educator. "He really has a gift for that," Cheila confirms.

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The girls immediately reinforce the idea. While Cloé pours the coffees and sweetens them with the perfect dose of sugar, Isis praises her father's qualities: “He is very good at making puzzles, but what he does really, really well is huts inside the house. Sometimes we spend an entire afternoon inside the tent and it's really cool”. Cheila certifies that these are authentic penthouses, balanced between chairs and other furniture, with roofs made of blankets and bedsheets. “When it is sunny, we go to the balcony to play monkey, do sack races, throw spinning tops and yo-yos, jump on ropes and occupy ourselves with other old games that children no longer play”, states Marco. When the weather is bad, the tent is set up in the living-room or a mattress is spread out between the sofas, and that is where the five of them sleep – plus frisky Noa’s doll. “Much of our time is spent together, just us”, assert Marco and Cheila. This was already the case before the pandemic, when they weren’t required to do so by government orders for lockdown. Whether they have always done it because of genetics, love or mere coincidence of agendas, it doesn't matter. They have always taken their happiness out of small things and still feel that 5 is the perfect number – the right measure, the perfect balance, the full completeness. ■

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