A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  On the evening before the policeman’s vision, the Lega Nord had arranged a ‘Stop Islam’ assembly in the centre of Verona. Walking with my wife to a favourite bar, we were surprised to see cars being towed from the square behind the duomo. The demagogical Michele Santoro, an offensively pious presenter of heated TV debates, had hurriedly set up a stage to coincide with the meeting so that Verona could be presented to the nation at its racist best. Showing unusual wisdom, the Lega cancelled the meeting. The stage with all its lights was thus useless and a man was left holding a microphone with no scandal to report. The residents are furious because they were given only a few hours to clear their cars.

  The television muckrakers were luckier in Rovato, forty miles west of Verona, where the local mayor has forbidden all non-believers from coming within fifteen metres of any consecrated building on a Sunday. This probably means he doesn’t want groups of blacks selling their cigarette lighters by the church doors as the good white folk walk in and out of mass. All right-thinking people are outraged. The north is insufferable. ‘All cat-eaters [Vicenza supporters] and hunchbacks [Juventus supporters] and terroni [more or less everybody south of the river Po] should be forbidden from coming within fifteen metres of the sacred Bentegodi,’ writes a fan to The Wall. ‘Any day of the week.’

  Over the same uneventful weekend the Vatican invites pharmacists nationwide not to dispense the day-after pill and not to stock it. The government has just included the abortion pill in its list of medicines that physicians can prescribe. The magazine Panorama shows two ladies coming out of mass. ‘What do you think of the day-after pill?’ one asks. ‘Day after what?’ the other replies. After losing three–nil at Bergamo perhaps. An article in the Arena speaks of depression and absenteeism on the morning after a lost game. But enough joking and muddling things up. ‘The foetus is a human being at the moment of conception,’ thunders a cardinal in a radio interview. ‘And that is that.’

  But is the foetus also and immediately Veronese? And if Veronese by conception, immaculate or otherwise, how could such a child, yellow-blue in the womb, ever support any team but Hellas? Alas, they can, they do. When Inter or Juventus or Milan come to the Bentegodi, the Brigate Gialloblù face a serious threat to their identity: the local turncoat who, like the impressionable referee, supports the big teams.

  ‘Abortions!’ shrieks a boy crawling up the fence at the edge of the curva. The object of his disgust is a knot of Veronese in the east stand wearing Inter Milan’s blue-and-black scarves. ‘We have your addresses! It would have been better if you’d never been born!’ In my book, the only thing that really happened on Sunday November the fifth was Hellas Verona’s home game with Inter. And this game I have to talk about. It outdid any appearance of Our Lady for excitement and surprise, any announcement of the Lega Nord or the Vatican for controversy, it was a dream, a nightmare that really happened.

  Pietro, who keeps my place in the curva, once put it to me, in some half-time discussion or other, that football is essentially eleven guys trying to make something happen, and at the same time trying to stop the wrong thing happening. In some games, however generously the players give themselves, it doesn’t come off. The fans will be left unsatisfied, hands thrust in their pockets, idly kicking the steps as they leave. Nothing happened. It’s not just a question of scoring, of winning or losing, though a goal is an excellent spark for a conflagration and a victory is always better than a loss. No, it’s the creation of a sense of urgency, of total engagement, a feeling of having been at an event where something major occurred, something collectively felt, something of which you can say: I was there.

  When this does come off, it’s as though team and crowd had fused together, leaving the fans with the sense that they have played a vital part in the game, the way long ago worshippers in other temples believed their sacrifices had kept the sun in the sky, or allowed a god to rise again. At the end of such a game, the players are drawn to the stand where the most energy is coming from, the core of their curva. They strip off their shirts, and sometimes shorts, and hurl them into the crowd. It’s a token of the mixing that has taken place. For this brief space of time we have been a community. The match with Inter on Sunday 5 November was the one that fused this heterogeneous group of new arrivals – Mutu, Gilardino, Bonazzoli, Oddo, Cvitanovic, Camoranesi, Mazzola – with il popolo dell’Hellas. It was also the first match where we understood that we had a new genius in the team: Mauro Camoranesi. ‘Bentegodi Discovers the Gaucho’ will be tomorrow’s headline.

  An evening kick-off helped. For the first time, and quite probably the last, Verona have the star Sunday night spot. People who have mainstream pay TV will be watching on their screens. Or rather Inter have the spot. We are their chosen victims. They’ve made a rocky start to the season, they need a couple of easy victories. In the wonderful atmosphere of the tall floodlights, the brilliantly lit pitch and the luminous glow of faces in the dark all around, the stadium is packed and alive with tension. Packed because, despite the television coverage, Inter bring along a lot of supporters; tense because half of those Inter supporters come from Verona. How can the native-born Veronese do it? How can they live in this small proud town and support, for convenience sake, so as to be sure of winning, or at least of never going down to Serie B, one of the big rich teams? What is this phenomenon?

  The funny thing is that I, an immigrant, share the indignance of the Hellas fans. I cannot feel the intensity of the ancient provincial rivalries, the local hatred of Bergamo and Brescia and Vicenza. Apart from the different dialects, I can’t distinguish the inhabitants of these towns. But perhaps because it took so long for me to settle in Verona, so long to feel that this town would be my town, this team, for better or worse, my team, it seems outrageous to me that so many of its citizens should not only not give their support – that’s fair enough – but actually come along to cheer the privileged unto whom everything has been given, the men with Pirelli on their shirts. Perhaps the kind of emotions I relish in football have to do with the pathos that you did not choose which team to support, in the way you cannot choose the personality of your children, and yet you go on supporting them even when they play awfully. ‘Bastardi,’ my son yells when an Inter banner is raised. At once, magically, these are the same bastardi who arranged that first afternoon kick-off against Bari.

  No doubt there is a certain sickness in my being attracted to this passion. Do I actually want to feel that the team I support can only win rarely, that victories will always be snatched in the teeth of fate, and that losses will be the order of the day, this so as to give a monumental importance to the occasional success? When I first came to Verona, twenty-five years old, I scuttled the streets of the centre, nervously clutching a battered briefcase and umbrella, earning a living teaching English to the well-to-do of the expensive centro storico. I cannot deny having felt a little excluded: linguistically, economically, culturally. These families were so settled, so well-heeled, so serenely complacent. ‘I’ll have to miss next week’s lesson, Daddy’s taking me to Cortina.’ ‘For my summer holiday’ – I would be watching a pen slowly scribble – ‘we first spend two weeks scubing in the Seishelles, then mummy tooked me to Japon.’

  Without family money, or a steady job, or a book published, I felt insecure and a little frustrated. This was inevitable. When such people actually paid late, I was furious. I wrote a book, Cara Massimina, in which a language teacher, Morris Duckworth, becomes a serial killer. I can’t remember ever enjoying writing so much. It was hard for me to get on with the heavily made-up, bejewelled and befurred Veronese. No doubt the failing was as much mine as theirs.

  But in the stadium it was different. It is not that the people of the curva are like me. Our backgrounds are a thousand miles and many light-yean apart. It’s just that, if only because Verona can never be a big team, this is necessarily a population of underdogs. And there must have come a moment when, unwittingly, I linked my own battles to theirs, my own experience of, as I saw i
t, shovelling shit to Hellas Verona’s endless fight against the flood-tide of big money. In that sense, I could feel part of their community. Had Morris Duckworth come to the Bentegodi, he would never have lifted a paperweight in anger. It would have been enough to yell Inter Inter vaffanculo!

  The occasional visitors to the stadium, on the other hand, those well-dressed folks who buy expensive seats because they are fitful fans of wealthy teams, these people I tend to associate with all the well-fed obtusity I imagined I was up against in the early days here. I’m perfectly aware that my division of town and stadium like this is entirely unverifiable and almost certainly false. In all probability the people I have liked and hated outside the stadium are equally divided between the two sides; or more likely just not here at all. They don’t give a toss about football. They find it infantile and ridiculous. But precisely the mystery of following a team is the investment of emotion where there is really no reason to invest it. Home games against Inter, Milan and Juventus are the high points of the season for me. And it’s not the opposing team we have to beat, it’s those complacent Veronese fifth columnists, those people who went to the Seychelles and Japan and asked if I had a proper hanger for their fur coats and always always paid me late.

  Speaking of lateness, Mick and I arrived late because of the cemetery situation. Everybody eternally does the same thing at the same time in Italy – for that is what community means – and the weekends before and after the Day of the Dead bring with them an orgy of visits to lost loved ones. The circular road was blocked. Indians were selling bunches of chrysanthemums, the flowers the dead love. At the traffic lights the gypsy women were begging with their babies in their arms. It’s curious how each immigrant group seems to know its niche. Two hooded figures sit over the great gate that leads into the cimitero monumentale. Between them, carved huge in stone, is the WORD RESURECTURIS. Atalanta, I thought, ‘risorgeremo’, and hoped Pietro would manage to hold on to our seats, hoped the boys would have recovered their morale. In the paper, our coach, Attilio Perotti, had referred to that game as ‘bringing to light a puzzling technical and psychological involution of a hitherto positive trend’. I hoped that, since anybody who can say such a thing clearly has a considerable education, Perotti would have figured the problem out.

  The game had everything, fireworks at the start, fireworks throughout. As the players came on to the field, a line of glowing red smoke-bombs were lit all around the parapet of the curva, sending a cloud of pink into the icy, floodlit night. It was the first time the short, stocky Argentinian, Camoranesi, had been on the pitch from the beginning. It was the first time the man who had been our goalkeeper last year had returned for a competitive game. The young Frenchman Sebastian Frey has been the best loved player I have seen in my years in Verona. Enviably handsome, huge, blond, always jolly, darling of the girls, he walks over now and waves through clouds of pink smoke to his old home crowd. There is a huge chant – ‘Fre-ey Fre-ey Fre-ey!’ It’s intriguing how some players immediately attract everyone’s affection, while others will remain for ever anonymous. Frey’s personality transmits itself effortlessly across the athletics track and up into the packed stands. The moment he is there, bouncing off a post to get the feel of the place, you feel you know him. He raises a big gloved hand. ‘Fre-ey, Fre-ey!’ Fifteen minutes later, when Verona put the first goal past him, after the huge uproar that attends any goal, there were still those, mainly women I suspect, ready to remind him of their affection, still cries of Fre-ey! It must be a strange buzz girls get from following football. The few times I’ve watched the women’s game, I just felt confused.

  This goal was the work of Camoranesi, another of Pastorello’s happy discoveries, another personality immediately available to all, there to be savoured in the bright night. Small, barrel-chested, a helmet of Indios black hair, this boy is a collision of fury and talent. He loses his temper. He shouts. You can see he’s going to be sent off before the season is out. Sometimes he’s so determined to be clever he loses the ball too, he shuffles his legs this way and that so fast that he mesmerises himself, he can’t remember what he was supposed to be doing, the way sometimes a sentence, an idea, can become so overintricate, so self-regarding in its twists and turns, it collapses in on its own conceit and already the reader is looking elsewhere. Camoranesi is left in a rage, wondering what has happened. But when intensity and cleverness combine, this boy is unbeatable.

  Mutu lifts his head in midfield, picks up the little Argentinian making a run on the right and delivers the perfect through ball at exactly the speed and the angle that will cheat the defence. Camoranesi gathers it, passes his man, and suddenly there he is, running into the area, just a couple of yards from the touch-line. ‘Crossa!’ people are shrieking, imperative of that old Italian verb crossare. Cross! He doesn’t. He’s heading straight for goal. Blocking his way now is the monstrous Colombian, the wardrobe-like Cordoba. With enchanting deceit, something that fools the spectators even more than the defender, Camoranesi looks up, seems to be about to cross but in fact takes on his man. Cordoba is so surprised, he trips over himself and is left on his butt.

  These are the situations where time stops, the moments when you feel, far more in the stadium than ever on television, the fatal uniqueness of action and opportunity. A metre in from the touch-line Camoranesi is running at the goal. This is the vision the mind will pluck from the game like a fruit from the tree. Even years hence, however distorted, it will still be there to be gloated over. In this football is not unlike sex, which also offers its unforgettable snapshots.

  But far more is at stake here! Camoranesi has to get it right now. The curva are suddenly silent. He’s almost at the six-yard box. Other defenders are closing in. Frey is advancing, the miraculous Frey, voted the best goalkeeper in Italy last season, a kid who’s gone from nothing to holding a regular place in one of the richest teams in the world. You’ve got to do it now, Camoranesi. There will be no replay. At its most intense, life is always this, everything at stake, now.

  The young man doesn’t hesitate. He runs directly at the keeper, fakes a shot and instead passes soft and straight across the six-yard box. The defenders throw themselves at that ball. But Bonazzoli, huge, long-haired, arrives first. Bought, or rather borrowed, for his ability to head the ball, his powerful bulk and speed, all he has to do is tap a perfect pass into an open goal.

  No need to describe the crowd’s response. The Inter fans are silent, especially the Veronese. There can be no one sadder than the turncoat who’s made the wrong choice. When a team is a destiny, you accept anything, but when you actually chose the bastards, then hell, they’d better win for you.

  The following morning the Gazzetta gives a full page to the game, as it must for one of the big teams. Of the referee it says: ‘Rodomonti: good for the last hour, uncertain in the first thirty minutes when he fails to give a yellow card to Blanc (2’), Gresko (11’) and above all Cordoba (30’) who all deserved it. Applies the rules with Italiano.’

  The whole game is there in this cryptic assessment. Blanc, Gresko and Cordoba are all Inter players. In the end Gresko was given a card, likewise Inter players Di Biagio, Ferrari and Farinos. It was a wild game. The Gazzetta counted, I note, sitting in the bar the following morning over a cappuccino and brioche, still in a state of some excitement, twenty fouls by Inter and only eight by Verona. And those in the notebook were the few conceded by the referee.

  But it was the Verona player Italiano who was sent off. ‘Applies the rules with Italiano.’ How eloquent. Against Atalanta, as I said, the refereeing was really pretty fair, so fair I hardly noticed it. Here it is scandalous. And surprise, surprise, it is the same referee, Rodomonti. The more I think about football, the more I am convinced that injustice is an essential part of it. The fan thirsts for injustice. The Verona fan, or indeed the fan of any small team, is lucky. He gets it.

  It happened like this. With Verona all over them, the Inter defence turn nasty. The referee, worried Verona may score
again, does nothing to stop the growing brutality. There are fouls from behind of the kind we were told would lead to a sending off in the World Cup. The referee gives the foul but not the yellow card.

  Then Inter equalise on their first serious attack of the game. A cross headed away falls to Recoba, the defence charge at him. He passes to Farinos left quite alone and the Spaniard scores. Delighted, the handsome young man runs to salute his supporters. He has scored at the right end, under the Curva Nord, but Verona’s stadium has an athletics track round the pitch, so you have to run off the grass for a moment to get near the fans. Instinctively, Rodomonti sees how he can now appear to be fair. To make up for his amazing lack of severity so far, he quite unnecessarily shows Farinos a yellow card for ‘festeggiamenti eccessivi’.

  That was the twenty-sixth minute. The ball hit the net. Farinos waved to the crowd. All over the stadium Inter fans betrayed themselves leaping to their feet, waving their scarves. The Curva Sud howled. They really do hate these Veronese Interisti. Thank God for fences. Four minutes later, Camoranesi again slips past Cordoba. This time the big defender is merciless, he slays the boy, sweeps away his legs. The referee does nothing. Ten minutes after that, with Verona now attacking again, Inter make a break on the right and Italiano brings someone down, I think Recoba. The yellow card is immediate. The scene has been set for the most unusual drama.