by Tim Parks
Emerging from the stairway I see to my surprise that the small stadium is packed. Perhaps fifty busloads of fans have come across on the ferry from Reggio Calabria, plus there are all the local Catania enthusiasts who never get a chance to watch top-level soccer. Ranged around the terraces of a very pretty little ground they stand watching the barbarians wave their blue and yellow flags and insult them. ‘Non si capisce!’ Then, rising to the challenge, Calabrians and Sicilians came back with one voice, urgent and derisive: ‘Merde siete e merde resterete.’ It’s the staple chant of all football grounds: ‘Shit you are and shit you’ll stay.’ So despite the attack on their way of speaking, not only have they understood the Veronese, but they are making themselves understood. Perfectly. Overwhelmingly. Immediately, I felt justified in saying that this was one nation. Even if everybody has a different way of speaking it, the need to insult, not to mention the need to talk about football, has established a lingua franca.
Nervous, Daniela insists on standing to one side, beside a policeman. All the boys are there. Fondo, Il morto, Forza, Cain, the pleasant young man with the short phocomelic arms. They notice me, give a nod of acknowledgment. It was presumptuous on my part to imagine they would give a damn about my presence, about my writing books.
‘How was the trip?’ I ask one of the youngsters. He grimaces. ‘A nightmare.’ Although they’re working hard at their chants, none of the group seem high or wild. The drink must have worn off before they got here. Daniela smiles. ‘They’re rather charming,’ she says.
Reggina play in claret and white. Verona have changed their standard dark blue for white and yellow. The sun is full in our faces. ‘Is this the Red Sea or what,’ the man beside me laughs as the referee starts the game. ‘I’m scorching.’ And he starts to take his sweater off. Before he has got it over his head, Verona have scored. ‘You didn’t miss anything,’ I console the man. ‘None of us saw it.’
They have put us in a corner and the goal was at the far end. Only later on video would I understand the dynamic of the thing. A lucky rebound and a perfect long shot. My son is under instructions to video all the goals this season.
So now, once again, we face ninety weary minutes of watching Hellas Verona trying to ‘administer the one-goal lead’. And once again it is unutterably painful. Reggina attack endlessly. Their fans are going crazy. At half-time we are showered with small metal objects, screws, nails. One hits the phocomelic boy on his shaven head. He’s bleeding. The police shrug their shoulders. Daniela is appalled and starts to show solidarity with the brigate. Ten minutes from the final whistle, with Ferron beaten, alone on the edge of the six-yard box, their centre-forward shoots wide. Five minutes later the same man hits the underside of the bar. ‘If ever a result was robbed,’ laughs the man beside me, now bare-chested, ‘this was it.’
But the game isn’t over. With thirty seconds to go to the end of injury time, Reggina’s goalkeeper, the towering Taibi, runs all the way to Verona’s goal in the hope of gathering a free kick from the centre circle. Everybody is in Verona’s area. The defence lose their nerve. Oddo heads a ball that is going safely out back into play and after a ferocious scramble somebody sticks it in the net. All the players run off the pitch to celebrate under their fans. None of them is shown a yellow card. The referee whistles the end. One–all.
Daniela is surprised at the calm reaction of the Verona fans. ‘They sensed it was coming,’ I explain. ‘They knew a win would be robbery.’ And I added, ‘In the end, they accept il verdetto del campo.’ But what the boys weren’t going to accept was that the police should throw them out on the street at once and unprotected. Cain is furious. ‘You can’t let us out now!’ The police are trying to move people to the gates. ‘They’ll fill us with bruises,’ he protests, using a Veronese expression. ‘They’ll swell us up like canoes.’ The police relent. Meantime, Daniela and I manage to slip out, me hiding my blue-and-yellow scarf, feeling protected by the young woman’s totally southern look. But all the way back to the car she is repeating those two very Veronese expressions, ‘They’ll fill us with bruises. They’ll swell us up like canoes.’ She savours the strange accent, trying to get it right. And over dinner that evening with her husband and various friends she insistently and improbably praises the Brigate Gialloblù. She sings a couple of chants for the company: Non si capisce ma come cazzo parlate. In Italia Hellas, in Europa Hellas. I sense she has been seduced by their mad energy.
Later, shortly after one o’clock, I turned on the television in my hotel room and discovered a programme where an astrologer analyses the chances of each Serie A team on the basis of their collective birth charts. ‘Reggina have too many Aquarians,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘and this is a bad moment for Aquarians, but it will get better after Christmas.’
Trying to sleep, it comes to me that there was a wonderful symmetry about the game; it held the opposites of north and south in perfect balance: a goal at the very beginning, a goal at the very end. Though one thing that is definitely different about the south is how late the street life goes on. At two-thirty, when I last looked out, the traffic was still jammed on the street outside. Open car windows offered a selection of the music I usually hear tinkling on my son’s Discman. The south drags things out, I thought. They walk slowly, they speak slowly, they dine in the early hours and they leave scoring till dangerously late. The brigate, meanwhile, would be between Naples and Rome. I slept with earplugs and a pillow over my head.
Incanto
Sunday we’ll climb once again the mythical steps of the Curva Sud! Remember, we must be the 13th, 14th, and 15th man on the field. Sing, butei, sing! Let’s hear the curva’s cannons! Ever and only Hellas Verona!
Paruca [email protected]
IN CANTO. IN song. Incanto. Enchantment. To enter into song is to enter into a spell, the thrall of the music. Individuality and discrimination suspended, you throw your weight behind the yoke of the rhythm, bound together like beasts of burden for the extension of the song. Shortly after the game with Brescia, I received the following e-mail:
Dear Mr Parks,
My mother – a highly respected professional woman – just called me on the phone, shouting, ‘Eugenio, get on the net, find La Stampa’s site and check out the article by a certain Parks on Juventus-Verona. He’s a nutcase like you!!!’
And in fact I must admit that after reading that article, I told myself, ‘See, you’re not as strange as friends and relatives have always painted you.’
But I should give you the facts.
My name then is Eugenio, I’m thirty, and I’m a journalist for CNN. I work in Atlanta, Georgia, at the network’s head office. But first and foremost I’m a BRIGATISTA GIALLOBLÙ, I’ve been sick with ‘Hellas fever’ ever since I was a kid. And, what makes matters more complicated, like you I’m not even Veronese, I’m not even from the Veneto, and I don’t have any relatives from round there. I’m from Asti, Piedmont, and my family is from Tuscany. One day, when I was small, they took me to see Juventus-Verona in Turin. I don’t remember anything about the game. I spent the whole time watching the brigate in their curva, they sent shivers up my spine. That night I decided that one day I would become one of them.
And so I did. For years, first by train, then car, I followed the Brigades all over Italy and finally became one of them, as I had always dreamed I would ever since I was a kid. How many times, in Pisa or Cremona, Como or Perugia, I’d be there in the middle of the gang and suddenly find myself wondering, ‘What the hell are you doing here, Eugenio?’ And how many times my friends and family would ask, with horror in their voices, ‘Verona? Why Verona? How on earth can you support Verona?’ As if a fan needed any justification! As if anyone not supporting Juventus or Milan were some kind of pervert or subversive. They gazed at me with a mixture of pity and amusement as if to say, ‘That’s Eugenio. A born joker. He likes to provoke.’
To provoke! I want to know what’s provocative about singing till your voice cracks in the oppressive heat of a
Terni June, or the freezing cold of an Udine November, trying to understand – just to give you an example – what kind of awful family tragedy must have plagued Graziano Battistini [an ex-keeper] every time he took a goal kick. He never got one right, not one.
The crunch came last year when, at the end of a long training course, I was taken on by CNN and given the job in Atlanta. Despite having worked towards this for yean, I immediately thought: And Verona? And the stadium? And the games against Milan? And insulting the southerners?
In the end I took the job out of a sense of respect for my mother’s mental health, and she consoled me saying, ‘Not to worry, you can see the games via satellite.’ Well thanks a lot, as if it were the same thing. In the Curva Sud I used to shout, ‘No to TV football.’
But between nothing and the satellite, I settled for the satellite. In fact I have two satellites here on the balcony, one for Rai International and the other for Fox World Sport. Sometimes they show a Hellas game.
So there’s a condominium in Atlanta in the southern United States where every Sunday morning at nine a.m. people ask, ‘Who is that asshole rolling around on the floor screaming in three languages?’ and ‘Who the hell is this Bonazzoli he likes so much, or that Cvitanovic who doesn’t press enough? And what does press enough mean anyway?’
Now my friends and work-mates here look at me with that same mixture of horror and amusement I used to get in Italy, and every now and then one of them stupidly says, ‘Not to worry, you’ve got a good job, haven’t you?’
I know I’ve got a good job. But already I’m organising my holidays around the Serie A calendar. At least I can make it to the last game of the season. I absolutely can’t miss that.
This e-mail is signed: ‘Eugenio, for ever gialloblù, and reading it I can’t help feeling what a dangerous thing it is to be taken to a football game as a little kid and to enter into the song of a group like the Brigate Gialloblù. They may not be sirens, but their enchantment certainly seems able to hold people in its grasp. Daniela felt its power. And she was from Catania and had never watched a game of football in her life. Mirko from Trento is still climbing on the train every Sunday. We exchange phone-calls from time to time. He says he would sacrifice any job or girlfriend that did not allow him to join in the chant. There are a group of Germans who drive down from Munich once a month, two or three rather melancholy guys from Rome who regularly make it to away games south of Bologna, an English couple who fly over from London when they can. The core of the brigate accept these strays with a mix of pity and incomprehension. These people have been enslaved by the song, by the rhythm it gives to their lives, and this without even knowing Verona the town, or speaking its dialect, or sharing its blind civic pride. These people will never sign a message Verona città e stato, or ho Scaligero. They can never feel the same sense of ownership, the way the fan born in the shadow of the Bentegodi feels he owns the team far more than Pastorello. But if they shout loud enough and raise their arms when the chant leader tells them to, they are welcome. ‘It sings in my ears for hours afterwards,’ Mirko assures me, ‘for days. I know it’s stupid, but I can hear them while I work. Per sempre gialloblù.’
I too had a powerful experience of entering into song as a child, of succumbing to the enchantment of the group. But this song was different and even more dangerously coercive than that of the brigate. Eventually it had to be rejected. And when in adult life I discovered the football chant, the spell of the crowd and the stadium, it was as a pleasant surrogate for an intoxication that had been too mad and possessive.
From as early as I can remember, I was a treble in the choir at St Mark’s Church, Layton. The choir was perhaps forty-strong. There were more than twenty boys, too many for the stalls, so that stiff wooden chairs were added on the stone floor towards the Lord’s Table. As you grew older you graduated from these chain where you sat with the hymn and prayer-book in the lap of your cassock, to the stalls where you could hide your hands under the music ledge and make pellets from the peelings of old book bindings to flick at those opposite. Then we stood in the gloomy cold to sing Bach or Handel, or just the descant to a Christmas carol, as the choirmaster strutted up and down between two lines of white surplices, overenunciating in a would-be castrato and pouncing on anyone, often myself, who was however slightly flat. Once a month after Sunday Service probationers got a sixpence, the next grade up, with the surplices, whose name I have forgotten, got a shilling, and the choristers with the blue and red ribbons round their necks got half a crown.
This was a beautiful way to be in song, though you could only let yourself go and feel the elation of the music when the choirmaster turned his back to sit at the organ. Otherwise we were too frightened of hitting a wrong note. But even this had its attractive side; it made for solidarity, complicity and giggles. We giggled at weddings and we giggled at funerals. We were disinterested spectators at life’s great events, more ball-boys really than fans, contributing our unbroken voices (le voci bianche, the Italians beautifully call them, white voices), but never participating the way you do when the chant leader shouts, ‘Now!’ and everyone hurls the scraps of paper they’ve prepared into the air and claps their hands and begins: ‘Alè Verona alè!’
There were no girls in the choir. The choirmaster refused to accept them. Their voices weren’t pure, he said. And girls didn’t play football either. Or at least I’d never heard of such a thing. I was sweeper in the school team at the time, an enthusiastic player in a family where no one had ever kicked a ball in their lives. Every now and then some sidesman, or perhaps it was the father of a school friend, would take me to Bloomfield Road and even Old Trafford. I was not captivated by the fans’ voices. I remember only the geometry of the big stadium, the intense green of the pitch and, still in my mind’s eye, the wonderful tangerine shirts that Blackpool played in.
The truth is that my thoughts, or prejudices, about football crowds had already been formed on what must have been a Saturday evening in early infancy. Unusually, we were to be treated to fish and chips. We were about to set out for the shop. Perhaps this is an apocryphal memory, but none the less intense for that. Hearing on the radio that Blackpool had lost at home, my father, who as a clergyman knew what he knew, remarked that the chip shop would be full of women and their children who didn’t want to go home. They would be afraid of being beaten up, he said. Then I realised that football crowds were ignorant and working-class and got drunk and swore and that we in St Mark’s choir, singing ‘Adam lay y bounden’, were infinitely superior. I later discovered that my father, who couldn’t have cared less, always checked the football results to know what humour his congregation would be in on the Sunday morning.
Another thing that was superior in those days was Northern football. So much so that no sooner had the family moved down to London than I was made captain of my new class team. It was the last year at primary school. I was ten. To prove myself worthy of this honour, I played furiously, shouting encouragement to my team-mates throughout, so that if there had been a choir I most likely wouldn’t have been able to sing in it. But Christ Church North Finchley lacked this glory, as the dull London suburb lacked brass bands and Whitsuntide processions and May Queens and wild Bonfire Nights and all the ways that the North had learned to express its identity in a collision of raw energy and muddled heraldry, whether Christian or pagan. Now instead our family was immersed in the stagnant lily pond of the Southern middle classes, a gloomy world of quiet and cautious repression. When my old Blackpool schoolmates came south on a school journey and I went to meet them at their hostel, everybody expressed amazement at the change in my voice. How quiet you are, they said, how soft-spoken. I was doing all my shouting on the field.
My mother, a Londoner, expressed great satisfaction at having escaped at last from the barbaric North. She felt at home here. She liked the propriety, the better taste, the more closely drawn curtains. She would have been happy, it has often occurred to me, with the stiff decorum of the well-to-
do Veronese. Yet whenever some inconvenient wild beast is slain, or monstrous emotion suppressed, you can be sure it will turn up again elsewhere in some other guise. In the end the defining characteristic of the monster is the number of heads he has. And the moment, shortly after one head is cut off, when another appears, the moment when it first snorts its fierce fire and gnashes its sharp teeth, that moment is often far more frightening than the ugliness you were used to. Monsters should be bridled not slain. This is what football violence is all about. So, when the choir-less Christ Church in polite North Finchley did begin to sing, the experience, at least for a thirteen-year-old, was terrifying.
In 1968, with revealing simultaneity, exactly as the too-well-behaved children of the diligent professional classes finally exploded in a clash of guitars and naïve political revolt, so my father’s congregation was swept off its stolid feet by the charismatic movement. People were baptised in the spirit, spoke in tongues, were granted prophecies and Words of Wisdom and even performed exorcisms. My father, my mother, the handsome curate, the intellectual curate, the sidesman, the youth club leaders: they were all swept away by a wild and terrible enthusiasm. Only the ancient verger who had first taken me to White Hart Lane and who, I later realised, laid his hand on my knee too often, seemed immune. And now in church, instead of the stilted rehearsal of ‘Love Divine’ or ‘The Church’s One Foundation’, these hitherto wooden suburbanites entered wholeheartedly into the enchantment of song; of awful songs with trite Billy Graham words and hurdy-gurdy melodies. And where before people had kept their eyes down on their hymn books, or stolen concerned glances at their watches, now they raised their joyful faces to the chancel steps and even the roof, as if struck by the bright light that hit Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. Certainly a general blindness seemed to afflict them. Eyes shining with tears, they began to lift their arms as they sang, their hymn books tossing in the air, swaying in ecstasy. Sometimes the sound, as we reached the sixth verse or the seventh, was more of chanting than of song, the way in the Bentegodi something that starts out with some old and famous tune – ‘La Marseillaise’ perhaps – suddenly resolves itself into an insistent cry of Hellas Hellas!
