by Tim Parks
In the Italian national consciousness, so far as such a thing exists, the north-east of Italy, and Verona in particular, is stigmatised as irretrievably racist. It is also considered bigoted, workaholic, uncultured, crude and gross. So while British or German tourists explore the piazze and palazzi of the Veneto, in a daze of admiration, imagining themselves, at last, in one of the few places in the world that has managed to preserve the centuries-old elegance of an impeccable Renaissance humanism, the rest of the country has written off this part of the peninsula as a national disgrace, a pocket of the most loathsome and backward right-wing dogmatism.
The historical reasons for this assessment are many, from the area’s long relationship with the Austro-Hungarian empire, to its vigorous support for the die-hard Fascist government in Salò and, more recently, the formation of the separatist and xenophobic Lega Nord. But it’s also true that the criticism has much to do with the traditional Italian rivalry between cities and regions. If you can find a stick to beat a neighbour with, use it. And what bigger stick can there be to beat someone with in these pious times than the accusation of bigotry and racist intolerance? Wield it with glee.
In any event, one never senses, travelling the rest of Italy, any desire that Verona should be anything but bigoted, nor anywhere but in the dock, and the easy target for complacent criticism. ‘When Rome asks us for something special on the region,’ an executive of national public radio in Venice once told me, ‘they only want news that reinforces that stereotype. For example, they sent us out on ferragosto (August bank-holiday) and we were supposed to interview Veronese who were working through the holiday or, even better, making their immigrant labourers work. We couldn’t find anybody. Or we’re supposed to run a survey on racism; we have to interview a Moroccan who’s been beaten up. And we just can’t find one.’
Well, thank God for that. But the fact is that recently someone has been making a great deal of fuss about being beaten up in Verona, yes, right in the centre of ancient and beautiful Verona. And this is what the bespectacled man standing in the aisle of the bus at three in the morning, as the Brigate Gialloblù head south towards the Adriatic, wants the drunken boys to talk about: the case of the Jewish South American religious-instruction teacher Luìs Ignacio Marsiglia.
The bus is travelling on the night of Friday 29 September. Some eleven days before, on the evening of the 18th, Luìs Marsiglia, forty-three years old, balding and thickly bearded, walked into Casualty at the city’s main hospital and declared that he had been attacked by three young men wearing motorcycle helmets who banged his head against the wall shouting, ‘Dirty Jew get out of here’, and ‘Long live Haider.’ They beat him about the legs with sticks, performed a sort of ritual laceration of his forearms, with some ugly sharp instrument, then would doubtless have gone on to kill him, if they hadn’t feared they were about to be discovered and run off.
The case hit the national headlines. Rightly so. Everybody was deeply shocked, most of all the Veronese. Neighbours ran to Marsiglia’s apartment with consolatory gifts of olive oil and Parma ham and bottles of Valpolicella. The declarations of solidarity were endless and genuine. Verona is actually a very ordinary place.
But then a typically Italian dynamic sets in. The national press sent its reporters north and began to present Verona as hopelessly Fascist and racist. The minister for internal affairs made an announcement in parliament stating that the attack was clearly the work of dangerous neo-Nazi elements, many of them close to the infamous Brigate Gialloblù. ‘I ragazzi gialloblù, Dio boia,’ shouts the bespectacled man standing right beside me in the aisle of the bus. ‘Have we ever hit a Jew? Would we recognise a Jew if we saw one?’ Actually he looks rather Jewish himself.
The case was then raised by left-wing Italian members in the European Parliament with the suggestion that moves be made against the Lega Nord. The big national papers, who mostly support the centre-left government, began to suggest that there was some kind of complicity between Verona’s eternally centre-right local authorities and this sort of xenophobic violence. The mayor had done nothing to stop it, they said. ‘The right will lead us back to fascism and beatings in the street.’ Here it has to be said that 2001 will be an election year and all opinion polls are suggesting that the incumbent government is going to lose. So this story of Nazis beating Jews in the bigoted right-wing Veneto is clearly worth exploiting. The police began their interviews.
But many of us who live in Verona were not so much shocked as amazed. Nobody denies that there is a certain level of resentment towards immigrants here. My wife rings up a few people who have advertised rooms in the papers and asks them if they have a place for an American friend who is visiting the city for a month. ‘Is he black or white?’ they ask. The ragazzi gialloblù themselves never forget to make their monkey grunts when a black from an opposing team touches the ball at Bentegodi. One says opposing team because Verona have never had a black player. Or rather, they once signed such a player, but he only played twenty minutes all season and that was in an away game.
Anyway, we know all this. It’s unpleasant. But the idea that a man somatically indistinguishable from your average Italian should be beaten up because Jewish, and in the centre of town, an affluent pedestrian haven for culture-tourists and well-dressed locals strutting up and down for their evening passeggiata, this is unthinkable. There must be something more to it.
There is. As well as talking about the way he was attacked, Marsiglia informs the police that for some days now he has been receiving offensive and threatening mail. A large photograph in every Italian paper shows the teacher, gloomy but determined, holding a large sheet of paper on which, in a collage of letters cut from a variety of newspapers, somebody has written:
Marsiglia ebreo di Merda
Long Live Christ the King.
But the paper also says something else.
Finally out of the Maffei.
The Maffei? It is here that the story starts to get complicated and to intersect in all kinds of ways with so many areas of Italian public life, and, very strangely, with the Brigate Gialloblù.
The Maffei is a Liceo classico: a school for fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds where Latin and Greek are among the main subjects. What’s more it is the elite state school for the would-be best-educated of Verona’s middle classes.
‘How can they say that he was beaten up to have him chucked out of the Maffei,’ the squat bespectacled figure in the aisle is protesting. He has a pleasantly piggy, if permanently sweaty face. His name it turns out is Albe, short for albergo (hotel). This is not because he works in a hotel but because, as I discovered, he comes from San Martino Buon Albergo, which is to say St Martin Good Hotel.
‘As if we would wear crash helmets to beat someone up,’ Albe goes on. ‘A likely story. Who has ever seen the brigate in crash helmets? They would get in your way. As if he would have been able to walk to hospital if we’d beaten him up!’
‘Haaaayllas, Haaaayllas, Haaayllas!’ the boys begin to chant. They’re well away. They don’t give a toss. But I’m fascinated.
Day by day the papers have been producing more and more facts surrounding the case. Born in Uruguay to Italian parents, Marsiglia, a practising Catholic, studied theology in Montevideo and continued his studies in Verona, where some yean ago he applied for a position as a teacher of religious instruction.
But there was a problem. Marsiglia wasn’t able to present his degree certificate. The crucial piece of paper had been lost, it seemed, in a fire at Montevideo university. But he promised to acquire some kind of copy within the year, and one morning in the office of the appropriate Monsignor he broke down in tears saying he desperately needed the work to support himself and his sick wife. A position was vacant at the elite Maffei and Marsiglia got it.
So the man from Uruguay penetrated the exclusive classrooms of the Maffei, where Verona’s brightest and best soon learned that although he was of the Catholic faith and selected by the Curia, he was of the Jewish ra
ce and not at all interested in teaching the tenets of religious faith. He liked, instead, to talk about the Holocaust and how it should never be allowed to happen again. Fair enough. Many students took to him. He was popular. Politically engaged youngsters visited his apartment at the weekends. But others were not so happy. Some parents wrote to protest that the teacher’s classes were more about politics than religious instruction.
The headmaster had words with Marsiglia. He wanted to understand what was going on. The Curia asked if he could please find a copy of his degree certificate. Mid-September, just before the new school year, when he was still unable to produce the copy, they told him that as part of a general policy of moving teachers from school to school he would not be at the Maffei the next year but would be given work in other schools.
Though his salary would be unaffected, Marsiglia encouraged the students of the Maffei to protest on his behalf. Then came the assault, the three Nazis in their motorcycle helmets with their boots and sticks. The teacher was afraid for his life, he announced to excited journalists, but absolutely determined to stay. Eagerly, the national papers now attacked the bigoted well-to-do Veronese who could not bear an enlightened teacher. There must be a connection, they decided, between these conservative Catholic parents and the neo-Nazi attackers who were close to … the unspeakable Brigate Gialloblù.
‘Us, Dio boia! Next it’ll turn out we run the Mafia.’
The police seized papers from the houses of a number of affluent Veronese families. Marsiglia was given a twenty-four-hour police escort. Members of left-wing student movements slept outside his flat to defend him against potential attack. Two largescale marches protesting against racism were organised in Piazza Bra, Verona’s huge central square. Twenty youngsters were taken to hospital after a right-wing group tried to join the march, apparently in a gesture of solidarity. They weren’t welcome. Each side blamed the other. Marsiglia wrote a letter to the Manifesto, the paper of the far left, announcing: ‘Verona is falling into the dark night of the Italian Republic. You must reawaken people’s consciences. The church is even worse than my aggressors.’
‘This bastard Jew’, Albe is saying, in the dark coach at three-thirty in the morning, a bottle of limoncello in his hand, ‘is covering our city with shit.’ Limoncello is a powerful and fearfully sweet liqueur. ‘He’s pissing on us, Dio boia.’
The kids are still chanting ‘Alè Verona, alè!’ and sucking on their beer cans between songs. They ask Albe if he can sing the song about the Juventus supporters killed at Heysel. They want to learn it. Albe, it turns out, is one of those who have a talent for inventing songs. But right now he’s not interested. ‘Covering our city with shit!’ he insists. The familiar tone of outrage is welling. ‘Have you read the papers? The whole fucking country is calling us racists. Filthy southerners.’ (Limoncello, by the way, is very much a Neapolitan drink.) ‘If we wanted to beat people up we could have killed half a dozen black whores before even getting on the bus.’
Albe is right. Actually, he has a rather merry face, a glint in his eyes, the tone of someone who might be joking. He knows it’s ridiculous to complain about racism and then talk about filthy southerners. He’s not stupid. And it’s true that the area between the station and the stadium is thickly patrolled by black prostitutes. If there were violent gangs roaming around they would have no end of soft targets. The Brigate Gialloblù, on the other hand, have shown no interest at all in attacking anybody. All they have done is sing things about guerrilla warfare and urban combat (‘Come ogni fine settimana, guerriglia urbana, guerriglia urbana every weekend, urban terrorism), and now they want to sing about the Juve fans who died at Heysel. ‘There were thirty thousand when they left, thirty-three didn’t come back … Blood on the terraces … Honour to Liverpool … Champions of Heysel. Juve di merda.’
When the singing has died down, I ask Albe: ‘But do you really believe Marsiglia was beaten up?’
Like everybody else when I speak to them, Albe looks at me as if I were from another planet, only with more suspicion.
‘What do you mean?’ He takes a swig of limoncello.
‘Well, he had a few scratches on his arms and some bruising on his knees. He says he threw the tracksuit top with the blood on it in a waste-bin, but it hasn’t been found. He said he was attacked right near his house, but then walked almost a kilometre to call an ambulance from a public call-box. The guy just didn’t want to be fired from school,’ I protest. ‘He set it up.’
Actually, I’m not quite sure I believe this version, but that’s certainly one possibility I’d be looking at if I were the police. I remember reading in a detective story that people who want to fake an assault on themselves almost always hack at their forearms. Apparently it’s one of the few forms of self-wounding that most of us can contemplate. Marsiglia’s wounds were on his forearms.
‘Who are you?’ Albe asks.
I explain that I’m an English fan of Verona. Strictly a home-game fan. This trip is just an aberration. ‘The season has started so late and I need to see some football.’
‘If you’re working for Papalia,’ he tells me, ‘I promise you we’ll kill you. We’ll chop you in bits.’
Now I’ve heard the name Papalia, in fact I’ve heard it a great deal, but just for the moment, I can’t place the name.
‘Per carità!’ I laugh. One of the things about the ragazzi gialloblù, I’m telling myself, unlike supporters of, say, Juventus or Manchester United, is that it would be unimaginable for someone from outside Verona to infiltrate them. Their community is so genuinely tight-knit, so radically local and such a well-defined linguistic island, that the idea of masquerading as one of them is unthinkable. You can’t even be suspected.
Albe seems to appreciate this. He smiles. ‘We’re doing our own research,’ he says. ‘We’ll find out who did it.’
‘You?’
‘If it’s who they say it was, we’ll know sooner than they will.’
‘In the Maffei there’s a bomba,’ Fondo starts to chant. ‘The Jew is a bomba. At Heysel there was a bomba.’
His sunglasses have lost one of their lenses. Exposed in the coach nightlight, the one dark-rimmed eye is fearfully red. ‘Dio boia una bomba, dio boia dio can una bomba, dio boia dio can dio boia dio can dio boia dio can dio boia dio can.’ It goes on and on and on. ‘Dio boia dio can dio boia dio can.’ Some of the kids are giggling uncontrollably. Suddenly, the bus swings into a service station.
One of my concerns before the trip was that I would wake up in the middle of the night, needing a pee, as I invariably do, and that I wouldn’t be able to go. The whole coach would be asleep and the teens and twenties with their wonderfully elastic bladders would sleep the night through while I sat there in my miserable mid-forties with my legs pressed together.
How ingenuous! No sooner were we on the autostrada than we were stopping for a pee. ‘Autista di merda, I’ve got to piss! Stop this fucking bus. I’m going to piss on the floor, cornuto autista di merda, if you don’t stop this bus.’
Never have I crossed the Po valley so slowly. Never have I had a chance to see how absolutely identical are the many so-called autogrill, the service stations, down the Adriatic coast. The coach stops yet again. The boys stumble through the bottles and cans now littering the floor. Most of them get no further than the first oleander. They pee. Some of them are peeing under the coach. I get out myself but only for fresh air, I’ve hardly drunk anything. A sirocco is blowing, warm, damp and unpleasant. To one side are the steep hills, the olives, the vines, to the other the rocks, then the sea. ‘Back in the coach, Dio boia! Autista di merda, we’ll never get to Bari.’ On board again, the air is stale, the floor sticky. Somebody kicks a few bottles and other assorted trash out on to the tarmac and we’re off.
The night drags on. Towards five the talking has finally ended, but as the bus brakes or changes lanes the cans shift uneasily up and down the aisle. It’s a constant slow clatter. Amazingly, the boy opposite me, who has drunk
little, said less, but eaten a considerable number of sandwiches from the seemingly unlimited supply in his backpack, is fast asleep with his head directly against the hard windowpane. How can he do that?
Somewhere in the coach a phone rings. Fish, on the nightshift, has to be kept informed. We’re beyond Ancona. I can see the faintly luminous expanse of the Adriatic to my left. Somebody else is whispering to his girlfriend. Since I didn’t hear his phone ring, I figure he must have called her. It’s funny to think what my wife would say if I called her at five in the morning.
Unable to sleep, I try to focus on the racist question. The boys indulge in racist chants, they define their group by its exclusion of all outsiders, it’s a declared if sometimes pantomime hatred of all surrounding cities, teams and regions. ‘Vicentino infame, per te ci sono le lame,’ someone writes when a Vicenza fan dares to send a message to the Hellas Wall. ‘Vicentino disgrace, for you the mace.’ This might just be fun, I reflect, but then someone else wrote: ‘If Pastorello buys a black, we’ll kill him. I’ll shred my season ticket. We’ll have nothing to do with negroes. Hellas contro tutti!’ Somebody’s been reading Mein Kampf.
And yet they’re furious when the press accuses them of a racist attack, of actually doing something. At once they are convinced that such accusations are part of an agenda to smear themselves and their city. And it might even affect the team’s results! If Verona becomes a national pariah (but Verona is already a national pariah!) referees will do anything to make sure they don’t get very far. Already Verona’s goals are shown less on TV sports programmes than those of any other team. Even the local newspaper has pointed out the fact. ‘Did you see’, somebody writes to The Wall, ‘they showed everybody’s goals but ours.’ Bastardi! When the brigate get really angry, I conclude, it’s with the journalists and politicians. Blacks, Jews and even the odd Vicenza fan are quite forgotten.
