A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  It’s a constant scramble to compete in a bigger and bigger league, to impose local pride on a larger and larger, ever more mixed-up world. And each time a new horizon is opened, a few old names will disappear. Where now Audace with their red-and-black shirts? And Edera? Where is the once formidable Pro-Vercelli?

  But Hellas Verona are still there, just, despite, in 1941, a brief descent into the ‘inferno’, as the official history of the club would have it, of Serie C. In 1946, the writer tells us, they earned themselves a place in purgatorio, Serie B, but then would have to do eleven years’ penitence before winning their first promotion into Serie A, paradiso, 1957. After which what remained but the goal of that new heaven and new earth, Europe? In 1983 the club finally won the right to participate in the European Fairs Cup, and on an extraordinary autumn evening Hellas Verona extended their Yellow-Blue reign across the Adriatic, beating the mighty Red Star Belgrade in their home stadium. ‘You’re all filthy Slavs, as far as I can see,’ writes a Turin-based Juventus supporter, invading the hyperspace of www.Hellasverona.it.

  Yet, however far afield the Yellow-Blues may travel, stretched and overstretched, however many Brazilians and Germans and Danes and Slavs may play or have played in their team, in the end it always comes back to this, this old old game with the magnagati, our cuginastri (nasty cousins), this re-enactment of the first mixing of all, when Verona went to Vicenza. This is the game that generates the most heat, the one no one wants to lose, the one that will attract the most away-game supporters. No distinction is more urgent or more arduous than that between ourselves and those who most resemble us, the guys down the road. And how much more difficult the distinction becomes when Verona is now owned by the Vicenza-born Pastorello and Vicenza by an anonymous consortium of British investors. It’s one of those puzzling moments when you must ‘aggrapparsi ai colori presi dallo stemma della città’: cling to the colours taken from the city’s coat of arms. ‘VERONA, CITY AND STATE!’ one banner says. On The Wall someone writes: ‘Since 1200, whenever the Scaligeri go to Vicenza, the ground trembles.’

  The scene as we leave town might be an expensive cinema reconstruction of some moment in 1916 when the Alpini and Bersaglieri were cheered off to war. The railways have laid on a special cut-price train made up of ancient but rather charming carriages, a good twenty of them. The big windows pull right down. The boys are hanging out in the damp air with their scarves and banners and flags, shouting and waving. ‘Cheer up!’ a voice shrieks at me. ‘Dio boia!’ A huge man comes stumbling into the compartment. ‘It’s our party!’ He’s high. He has a bottle of limoncello in his hand. ‘Alé Verona!’ He waves his hat out of the window. Then turns to my worried face, disgusted. ‘Facciamo festa!’ he orders. ‘Party time! Look out of the window! Cheer up.’ He grabs me from behind and pushes my head outside. ‘Isn’t it fantastic! Isn’t our party beautiful!’

  He’s right. The train is grinding out of Verona Porta Nuova in a tight left-hand curve which takes it over the big circular road where the black prostitutes hang out, then across the Adige, still spectacularly swollen with this autumn’s constant rain. It has rained ever since that evening we gathered outside the Zanzibar for the away game at Bari. For a moment I have the wonderful vision northwards that seduces every arriving tourist: the red-and-white brick embankment of the fast brown river, the stone bridges, the bristle of towers, palazzi and campanili, the ancient fortifications zigzagging up the steep cypress hills to Castel San Pietro on the right with its picture-book battlements, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes far away to the left, and behind, just visible beneath a grey sky, the already snow-capped Alps. Gazing out at the scene beside this man waving a bottle beside me, I’m struck by the fact that I have spent twenty years here, my whole adult life really. All the taxes I have paid I have paid here, Dio can. A fortune! I have brought up my kids here. I too have a right, I tell myself, to this civic pride. I too can party.

  ‘Sing!’ the new arrival orders me. He starts into a song to the tune of Verdi’s ‘Va’ pensiero’. ‘Bang on the window!’ he orders. ‘Veronese!’ And we bang time on the window. ‘Gran figlio di troia sei tu, sei gialloblù, sei gialloblù.’ Veronese, great son of a bitch you are. You’re Yellow-Blue, Yellow-Blue.

  It’s fun banging on the window as the train fizzes with excitement. Then, tall, unshaven, blond, drunk and coked to the eyeballs, the new arrival bounces out as suddenly as he bounced in. Without him to order me about, I collapse on my seat. The old man opposite tells me about the Neapolitans with their guns and knives and then the boy in the far corner proudly announces that he was knifed in Rome. He tells his story. He took the Eurostar, and was walking drunk through the city singing at the top of his voice when all at once someone stabbed him from behind. ‘In the butt. Police took me to hospital. Thirteen stitches.’ Deep down you can see he’s delighted. ‘A game of two groups of young men,’ I reflect, ‘unarmed, for honour.’ When I ask him whether it was worth missing the game for, he tells me, yes.

  At Vicenza station, the American and Japanese tourists, fresh from their visits to Palladio’s masterpieces, to Giotto’s frescos of the damned, look on with wonder as these damned boys march out of the station chanting blasphemies. Everybody is promisingly aggrieved. Everybody pulls their hats over their faces as we pass the policeman with the video camera at the top of the stairs. There’s an old guy covered with medals, a fat woman in her sixties dressed in yellow-blue rags from top to toe. Gathering in the street, we give Vicenza notice of our arrival with a rousing performance of Chi noi siamo.

  Then things turn sour. The walk is too long. There’s too much stopping and starting. The police are overstretched. They are trying to keep our crocodile compact and to fight off attacks from stone-throwing Vicentini who rush up quite suddenly from desolate side-streets, hurling a few pebbles at us, nothing serious, and dash away again. A policeman bangs his truncheon on the back of the van that’s supposed to be leading us. ‘Move, asshole!’ He’s dented his own van! The boys jeer. We shuffle on.

  A cloud of ambiguity hangs over these scenes. You can never know quite what’s happened or why. How is it that some boys are suddenly fighting the police on an island of flowering shrubs in the middle of the road? Plastic flagpoles are being used as swords. Some of the kids are mad. Others are smugly urging them on, but keeping out of trouble. ‘Why does nothing ever really happen? What’s wrong with these kids? Go on, do it!’ When the police lay into someone, the boys are indignant. We haven’t done anything! Thugs, Fascists. When a stone hits a helmet there are cheers.

  Suddenly the whole crowd shifts violently. I’m almost knocked over. Where there was a solid mass, there is nobody. On the ground before me a boy is being beaten. A stout moustached policeman looks me in the eyes, his truncheon raised. I’m lucky, it doesn’t come down. A firework sizzles over our heads. A few yards away the police are beating two youths on the ground. Their truncheons come down again and again, fast and rhythmical, as if this were some kind of wearisome manual labour. Other people light cigarettes, leaning against a fence, bored.

  Finally we reach the stadium just twenty minutes before the game to find only one small gate open. It’s narrower than a regular door in an ordinary house. Strait is the gate and narrow the way. And they’re trying to check all the tickets, one by one! This is crazy. We’ll never get in. The game will kick off without us. Half the crowd haven’t got tickets. The police are trying to turn them away. The crowd behind won’t make room. Behind the narrow gate, a policeman is standing on a box or raised platform of some kind so that he can loom out waving his truncheon. Other police hang around the fringes uncertain what to do. One or two of them are selling tickets. How can this be?

  ‘Issa!’ the crowd began to shout. ‘Issa!’ Heave, heave! Those at the door are being crushed, forced through the gate. A group of police are trying to hold a barrier. It’s ridiculous. And how strange, at the edge of the crowd some fans are calmly chatting to the policemen, while others stand only inches
away shrieking the most obscene insults right into their plastic visors.

  ‘We were at Brescia yesterday,’ a policeman tells me. For the Saturday game with Atalanta. ‘There was lots of trouble. Much worse than this.’ Only now do I realise that these men are part of a specially trained force. They’re not locals at all. Perhaps they actually volunteered for this. Perhaps they look forward to a little trouble.

  ‘Why don’t they just let us in. Is there space?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Sure there’s space. Plenty of it. If it was up to me, I’d just let you through. Mad, isn’t it?’ He seems resigned, unimpressed. For reasons I can’t imagine a tear-gas canister is fired. People lift their scarves to their faces. But no one wants to lose his place in the crush. We hang on, gasping. Then I’m just two yards from that narrow door, hand over my mouth, when I become aware of the fence. There’s a low railing to force people into line against the wall. It’s between ourselves and the door. How could we have known? Thousands of people are forcing themselves against this railing. It’s jammed against my thigh. Issa. Issa. Afraid I’ll be crushed, I lift my knee, get a foot on the top bar and push. The force of the crowd behind sends me shooting up, and suddenly I’m crawling over heads and shoulders right through the door and into the dark of the entrance. Others are following. As I drop down I can’t help bursting out laughing.

  In the stadium the ambiguity persists. ‘Salutiamo i nostri cugini’ says one banner at the Vicenza end. And beside it two smaller ones: ‘VERONA MERDA’, ‘HELLAS A.I.D.S.’ Meantime the butei are hanging up a banner at the back of our paddock. ‘VAFFANCULO MANGIAMIAO’. Fuck off miaow eaters. They start to sing: ‘Vicentino maledetto, hai mangiato il mio micetto.’ Damned Vicentino ate my cat.

  As if to give the lie to this, a man dressed in a huge red and white cat outfit (Vicenza colours) appears from the players’ tunnel and goes round the pitch to general cheers and mirth. He waves his paws and waggles his whiskers. When the teams come out, each Vicenza supporter holds up a huge red card, perhaps half a metre square, so that their whole curva is a solid block of red. What an effort to orchestrate this! The brigate clap slowly.

  The game is the most violent of the season so far. The Gazzetta will describe it as very ‘English’: the muddy field, the brutal, low-quality football under a ‘London smoke’ of a sky. Verona play better and get nowhere. At the beginning of the second half, against the run of play, Vicenza score. Only sixty seconds of gloom before our equaliser. The Vicenza fans are furious because they’re convinced that Bonazzoli, our centre-forward, pushed the defender out of the way. Looking at the video later, I suspect they’re right. Dodging police, a fan rushes on to the field and makes straight for the referee. From under his coat he produces the huge red card used for the show earlier on. He points the referee to the dressing room. Off! There are general cheers at this show of wit as the police drag him away.

  Surely now we are going to win. We are the better team. We have equalised. But their centre-forward, Luca Toni, keeps falling over. He wins a free kick outside the box. They score again. Two–one. And now there’s real despair. We’ll never equalise twice. To make matters worse, the Vicenza supporters to our right are throwing coins at us. I turn my back to them. Suddenly a big red firework comes spinning and fizzing through the air and down into our paddock. A man picks it up and hurls it back. But then it comes back to us again, turning over and over in the air. Yet again it’s thrown back. Each time it passes the fence a great shout goes up. This time it lands right on someone’s head and there’s a shriek. Applause from the crowd. The police have got the thing, and it’s eyes back to the pitch.

  ‘Shit,’ the man next to me is muttering. ‘Shit shit shit.’ For the whole game I have had to listen to his monotone litany. Perhaps my own age, grim, tense, unhappy, this sharp-faced man grumbles on and on under his breath. The referee is biased. The stadium is shit. The pitch is a bog. The police are thugs. The Vicentini are subhuman. He joins in none of the songs. He never cheers. He never claps. He seems locked into some terrible gloom. To his other side, an over-made-up woman in a rather smart jacket holds his arm tight and smiles, but she knows it’s pointless to interrupt. ‘Merda, merda, merda,’ he’s saying. There’s a curious pathos, a compassion, in the way she accepts his misery. She lays her dyed hair on his shoulder. It occurs to me that perhaps a man like this should not be supporting a team like Hellas Verona. Perhaps it would be forgivable for a real depressive to support Milan or Juventus. Have psychologists latched on to this kind of thing?

  Then miraculously, from a corner, Camoranesi pays us back for his recent adoption. Unbelievably this small boy, just a metre seventy-four the official website tells me, jumps higher than all the huge defenders and puts the ball in. For just a moment my neighbour is a volcano of happiness. He’s yelling. ‘Rete!’ Goal. He embraces everyone, the people behind, the people in front, myself, his wife. Then she resumes her position as his face sets in intense anxiety again. ‘Merda.’

  Two–all. Both teams are possible relegation victims. Both teams are determined to get those three points. As the floodlights come up, the last fifteen minutes are savage. Martin Laursen, in particular, seems finally to have met his match in the giant Toni, a mountain of a boy who either pushes him out of the way or falls over at once to win a foul. There are more dangerous free kicks. The usually calm Danish boy is getting wild. He’s forgotten all the noble words he spoke when interviewed after the Pope’s game. We need these points! Even more importantly, we mustn’t let Vicenza have them. He slides across the filthy pitch with studs up. It’s dangerous. But he just can’t hold his man. Toni is strong, he’s talented. He defends the ball with great cunning. Laursen is tiring. Finally he hacks the striker down from behind and is justly sent off. A glimpse of his distraught face suggests he’s lucky not to be armed. And luckily there was only a minute left. Two–all it is. An away point is money in the bank.

  Al Vincitore

  Hellas is a feeling, a faith, not a cheque to stick in your pocket, Pastorello.

  Zio Preben (Elkjaer)

  HOW CONSISTENT IS character? Coming back from Vicenza I observed a strange scene. Slumped at last in a train compartment, I was listening to the man and wife opposite me assuring their families on separate mobile phones that they had not been involved in any of the violence that was apparently being shown on television. A boy came rushing across the compartment and slammed down the window. He was slim, handsome, perhaps seventeen, with blond hair expensively cut round a centre parting and a fine chiselled face. Leaning out of the window, be began to shout at the line of policemen only a yard or two away. ‘Shits! Thugs! Worms! Turds! Communists! Go fuck yourselves!’

  If a young man were to do this on any ordinary day in any ordinary street of northern Italy, the abused policemen would arrest him at once. Instead, within the framework football provides, the men in uniform gazed back impassive, their padded jackets full of weapons. ‘Fascists! Slavs! Kurds! Bastards! Terroni!’

  Then the boy realised his mobile was ringing. He pulled it out of his jacket pocket. ‘No, Mamma, we’re still in the station at Vicenza.’ How sweet his voice was now, how empty of tension or anger! ‘No, we didn’t have much homework this weekend. I’ve already finished.’

  But as he was speaking, the carriage began to pull out of the station. ‘Momento, Mamma.’ Putting his hand over the microphone, he leaned out of the window again. ‘Vaffanculo stronzi di merda vergogna di tutta l’Italia.’ His face was livid with rage. The policemen were motionless, inscrutable. The other people in the carriage barely noticed. ‘Sorry, Mamma,’ the boy goes back to his phone, ‘the butei are making a bit of a racket.’ He laughs. ‘Anyhow, we’re just leaving the station now, so if you put on the pasta round, what, six-thirty I should be back when it’s cooked. Ciao, Mamma.’

  In the late 1920s, observing the behaviour patterns of the Iatmul Indians of New Guinea, the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson invented the word schismogenesis. He was trying t
o define the process by which the individual assumes a personal identity in a larger social dynamic. In the case of the Iatmul he noticed that whenever one of the men began to show off, which was often, the other men would immediately compete with him. Meantime, the more the men became exhibitionist and boastful, the more the women in response grew quiet, admiring and contemplative.

  The pattern was endlessly repeated. Bateson, who knew nobody ever reached a conclusion without jumping to it, quickly decided that any behavioural gesture would provoke either competitive or complementary reactions on the part of others and that this would generate a schismatic process, with one person assuming one role, one another, but always in relation to each other. It was no time at all then before the anthropologist was talking about schismogenesis in marriages and families, in the workplace, in politics, in the arms race.

  But Bateson did not call his book on the Iatmul Schismogenesis. The more he watched those men showing off, those women admiring, the more he realised that this business of action and reaction, whether competitive or complementary, was not a process that could go on unchecked. Otherwise it would surely lead to wild behavioural extremes, perhaps to conflict, perhaps to a crippling sterility. For, if behaviour was for ever thus conditioned, an individual’s range of experience would inevitably be lamentably narrow. The Iatmul men were interminably exhibitionist and competitive, the Iatmul women contemplative to the point of catatonia.