A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  I wasn’t immune to this enchantment. I was still obliged to go to church at the time and felt its pull. Church in the end, for me, had always been an extension of family; it was the community I most intimately knew, and I wanted to be part of it. All around, people of my own age were singing and swaying in a kind of frenzy. And I would join in up to a point. I would try to go beyond that point. But then something blocked me. I couldn’t do it. Not only would I suddenly find myself outside the spell, but I would be in a sweat of resistance against it. I would be quite desperate to be out of that room, that church, that prayer meeting, and what’s more I would be willing the collective spell to fail, willing for people to realise how ridiculous they were being. Charismatic religion is ridiculous, I thought, its demand for total submission is obscene. How can I be asked to believe that this babble is really speaking in other languages, how can I ever accept the idea that the greengrocer’s wife has really been given the gift of prophecy? How can I give myself wholeheartedly to folly? Rather than offering a welcome release from the experience of separateness – the pleasure, for example, of singing a descant over the solemn voices of tenor and bass, perhaps with the occasional smile flashing back and forth across the stalls, boy with man – these frenetic encounters actually increased my sense of being alone. I could not and would not believe in this silliness. I was like a Milan supporter who finds himself by accident in the Curva Sud, asked to join in some improbable song claiming Hellas is about to win the Champions’ League. He opens his mouth, but he can’t do it. It’s crazy. And he knows he has been caught out. They’ve seen he isn’t singing. They’ve spotted his scarf! Dio boia, Milanista di merda! Be sure your sins will find you out. Now they are going to tear him to pieces, or make him a convert.

  Obliged to read the Bible daily, I discovered that my problem was intellectual pride. But I didn’t seem able to do anything about it. Oppressed, I eventually managed to pull away from the church, though in my case this inevitably involved distancing oneself from family too; all kinds of emotions became mixed up. And for years afterwards I overreacted by refusing to join in any group singing. I taught at a summer camp in the USA and could not join in round the camp fire. Hitch-hiking companions sat cross-legged on the beach in Spain singing Bob Dylan. I could not join in. Religious music in particular was impossible for me. ‘Jerusalem’ sung at some official gathering was at once too beautiful and quite impossible. I opened my mouth, but then was overwhelmed by ungovernable emotion. I could not sing at friends’ weddings, nor, when alas they began, at friends’ funerals. I love singing and frequently, cheerfully, sing on my own, too frequently and too cheerfully for those who live with me. But from age fifteen on I had lost the ability to lose myself in the spell of group song. For me every meeting was revivalist, and hence impossible.

  What a pleasure then, at the Bentegodi, to rediscover the crowd and its choral pandemonium. I could even, after a while, raise my hands at the appropriate moments. Like the church, the curva embraces all comers. In particular, I love the ragged end to almost all the songs and chants; you launch with great gusto into something inanely repetitive – nella pioggia e sotto il sole, nello stadio ci saròòòò! (‘in rain or shine, I’ll be there’ – the tune is ‘La Marseillaise’). You sing it once, you sing it twice, then all of a sudden it breaks off, there is no predetermined end, you can never know when it is going to stop, so that someone will be left with his arms in the air when all the others have lowered theirs, somebody’s voice will be heard loud on its own when all the others have sunk away. That person looks round, amazed, faintly embarrassed. I remember in particular a man in his forties on the station platform when we arrived in Vicenza. Bundling out of the train, the fans were yelling Vicenza Vicenza vaffanculo! and so taken was he with the excitement of yelling fuck off into the faces of people he didn’t know, that he went on a good thirty seconds after all the others had stopped. His voice at last trailed away. His face was a picture of embarrassment. Then he burst out laughing. In the football crowd one moves constantly in and out of the spell, in and out of the group, in and out of the law. Singing together you are all-powerful, singing alone you are a fool. People are aware of this. And however stupid they may be, at least the songs are not addressed to God. They are not that stupid. Then, once in the stadium, they have a definite purpose: to incite the team, to raise these mercenaries’ adrenaline levels. Dark-eyed, sharp-nosed, chinless and turkey-necked, Captain Leo Colucci says: ‘For us the fans are like the motor in a car, without them we wouldn’t get any mileage. It’s they who give us the drive when things get tough, and if it wasn’t for them I don’t know how we could manage.’

  ‘Will they manage?’ I ask Pietro, arriving for the game with Milan. This is 17 December. Leo Colucci is still out. Camoranesi’s injury gets more serious every time I read about it. His knee is bust. Now Mutu too is injured it seems. My son as ever is tiresomely pessimistic. ‘Be a great game,’ Pietro says. He rubs his hands. ‘Great game, always a great game when Milan come to the Bentegodi.’

  How reassuring this man is. How wonderfully cheerful with his big-jawed smile and his bright eyes. And today he has tradition on his side too. Verona have an uncanny tradition of beating AC Milan at the Bentegodi. Twice the big club actually lost the championship here on one of the last games of the season. In 1973 Hellas beat Rivera’s team five–three, this after Milan had just won the Cup Winners’ Cup. As a result Juventus took the championship. In 1990, with Verona doomed to relegation, Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan, with Van Basten and Gullit in attack and Rijkaard midfield, went down two-one. This time Napoli popped up to take first place. And even in 1997, the most miserable year I’ve held a season ticket, Verona still managed to beat Baggio’s Milan three-one, almost the only important victory of the season.

  Why does history repeat itself like this? Why hasn’t the great AC Milan, a team built with the resources of Silvio Berlusconi’s vast media empire, scored a victory at the Bentegodi in a decade? Is it that an initial fluke is then followed by a subversive, self-fulfilling desire for the jinx, a sort of infantile thirst for the supernatural at any cost? ‘If we keep losing against those second-raters that means there must be something more to the universe than blind mechanics.’ Is that it? So that even the new star player from Brazil perhaps, or from Spain, someone who has never played at the Bentegodi before or even heard of it, nevertheless, by some curious mental contamination, expects things to go badly when he steps out on the pitch beneath the Curva Sud. Today Milan are headed by the man who last year was Serie A’s top goal-scorer, the Ukrainian Andrij Shevchenko. The rossoneri (red-and-blacks) as they’re called have just won three games in a row. Verona must play what jinx value they have for all it’s worth.

  They do. ‘Milanisti!’ the PA system booms out. ‘Welcome to the fatal Verona.’ The curva goes wild. In fact the thing I remember most now of this game is the fantastic scene that followed that announcement, the enchantment of the curva in full voice. To the tune of ‘Guide me O thou great Jehovah’, a tune I first heard no doubt in the pews or choir stalls of my father’s church in Manchester or in Blackpool, the butei sang: ‘Quanti scudetti avete voi?’ (how many championships do you have?). And then came the refrain, sotto voce but growing louder as the music shifts up the scale: ‘Due di meno, due di meno.’ Two less, two less.

  Why do I find it so moving? Why is it so easy for me to join in? And as a line of red smoke-bombs is lit around the edge of the terraces, every single man and woman, boy and girl in the Curva Sud hurls a roll of (generously provided) white ticker-tape down into the bowl beneath us, so that for a few moments the whole area seems to have been caught in a blizzard framed in burning red. The spell is cast. A magic circle has been drawn. The players are in the middle of it. Waving to us, they do not realise they have been enchanted. The whistle blows. In less than three minutes, Bonazzoli has scored.

  ‘Too soon!’ Everybody said it at once. ‘Too soon!’ Why do we score so early? Three minutes later, entirely alone i
n front of the goal, our young Cassetti, fresh from Serie C, tall, stooped, long-haired and timid, rose to a perfect cross from Martino Melis on the left and headed it down hard. The goalkeeper froze, beaten. The ball struck the ground in the six-yard box and bounced over the bar. Oh. The spell had already broken.

  ‘That’s it.’ Everybody shook their heads. That was the moment to take control of the game, to sew it up. There won’t be another. Sure enough Milan equalised after about twenty minutes. But we were already resigned. And fifteen minutes into the second half, with the Verona defence split apart, the great Shevchenko was running on to a low cross that came skidding and bouncing along the top of the six-yard box.

  This is the only clear picture I have of the whole game, though the action was at the far end and my eyesight isn’t perfect. Wrong-footed, Ferron had already gone down. He was beaten. Already Massimo, behind me, is yelling, ‘Mongolo!’ It was so obvious that the Ukrainian was going to score. In a moment the great bank of red-and-black scarves and banners behind him will erupt, and likewise the fifth columnists hidden in the more expensive seats to our right. Yes, they will jump to their feet and then sit quickly down again when the curva around me roars out for their blood. The ball keeps coming. Shevchenko keeps running. It is like the one time I was involved in a serious car accident. From the back seat I saw the impact coming a surreal split second before it did. And that fraction of a second was silent and infinitely long. The Curva Sud is silent. Even the cry of mongolo has died away. The stadium holds its breath. Ferron looks up from the ground. The white ball and the blond man are about to meet.

  Now!

  And somehow Shevchenko contrives to miss it. This star player, fabulously rich, fabulously talented, contrives to screw up this most open of open goals. For some reason his foot doesn’t connect with the ball. It seemed he was already tapping it in. But somehow the ball continues in the same direction. The Verona fans stood and hugged. It was as if we’d scored. It was a miracle. It was proof that Verona is indeed fated when it comes to AC Milan. And in fact the draw was played out now with only four or five more scares. We knew the ball wouldn’t go in. At the end I returned home exhausted and hoarse, complaining as ever in the car to my son about the referee’s leniency with the yellow cards when it came to the big teams. Giuseppe Colucci had been stretchered off after an unpunished foul. Another key player gone. ‘Bastardi!’ Michele agreed. But back home, watching the evening’s round-up, we saw that if any team had been favoured it was Verona. Our goal was outrageously offside. Once away from the incanto of the crowd, it was clear we’d been a very lucky team that afternoon. ‘I accept il verdetto del campo,’ I announced. All the same, with Vicenza winning at Parma and Napoli beating Reggina six–two, we are now only two points clear of the relegation zone.

  Calendario

  Forza Verona, how can I go a Sunday without you?

  Ricky@semprehellas

  THE AMBITION OF every enchantment is to extend itself everywhere and ad infinitum. Only when it fills your whole mind, always, only when you think from inside the spell and never see it from without, never even realise you are bewitched, only then does it hold you completely in its thrall.

  Open any Italian diary, even the desktop business diary that I use, and it will give at least one saint for every day of the year. Today, for example, the twelfth of January, is San Modesto, not a popular name these days, and certainly not a nickname you would want to give to a footballer. Who knows now what San Modesto did? No one. But once that name would have meant a story; once every day had a story and every story contributed to the overarching enchantment, the spell Christendom then lived in. The Aztecs did the same. Every day was dedicated to a god and every god had a festival. What was polytheism for but to fill the world up, top time to the brim, a deity a day? There was always something to celebrate, never a moment for reflecting, as the hunchbacked Leopardi so often did, on life’s nothingness.

  So on 11 November, the day before we played Vicenza away, amid all the insults flying back and forth on The Wall, someone remembers to write: ‘Auguri per il tuo onomastico Martino Melis!’ Best wishes for your saint’s day! For a moment the Christian calendar and the football calendar embrace. Born in Hungary in the fourth century, Saint Martin was pressed into the Roman army at the age of ten. Sixteen hundred years later, aged fourteen, Martino Melis left his home in a small village of Sardinia to go to a football college on the mainland. Saint Martin asked to be allowed to leave the Roman army because he was a Christian. He was Christ’s soldier and could not fight a secular war. Martino Melis is also a practising Christian, though fortunately his beliefs don’t prevent him from joining the weekly fray. When charged with cowardice, Saint Martin is said to have offered to stand in front of the Roman battle line armed only with a crucifix. The dark and dapper Martino Melis, whose face now appears on the local paper’s full page ad for Pocket Coffee, always touches the crucifix hailed above the changing room door before entering the battle ground of the Bentegodi. Or so the team masseur told me. But sitting, as I and my son do, directly above the corner flag, we often see from close up how, having completed a run down the left wing, Melis faces his defender. It’s the moment when he must dribble or cross. But he seems to freeze. We can see his thick jet-black hair, his fussily trimmed beard. He shifts his weight from side to side, hesitating. The seconds are ticking by. The area is filling with defenders. ‘Punta l’uomo, Martino!’ the crowd shrieks, ‘Pass your man!’ and beside me Pietro sighs. ‘He hasn’t got the courage. Since his injury he won’t take on his man. He’s scared of the foul.’ Saint Martin, it seems, was the first example of a Christian becoming a saint without undergoing martyrdom. Martino Melis, perhaps, is eager to emulate that achievement.

  But if there are analogies between football and religion, hero worship and saints’ days, there are huge differences too. And one is that while Christianity does, or did, really fill every day of the year, football on the contrary, however hard it tries, hasn’t yet extended its calendar over the whole year. Not quite. It’s true that when there’s not the league there’s often the cup; Verona, alas, was knocked out of the Italian cup in September in a manner so distressing I chose not to mention it. It’s true too that when there’s neither the league nor the cup there are the European cups which are now carefully dosed out to occupy Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with the result that there are many weeks in October and November which actually offer an important match every single day: that is, to recapitulate: the two anticipi for Serie A on the Saturday, afternoon and evening; the main fixture programme of Serie A and Serie B on the Sunday afternoon with a big match delayed to the evening, the posticipo of Serie B on the Monday, half of the Champions’ League on the Tuesday, the second half on the Wednesday, the UEFA cup on Thursday, and the anticipo of Serie B on the Friday. There! The whole week has been filled. Quite an achievement when you think that the number of saints’ days people actually remember are now as sparse as the vandalised seats in the Curva Sud.

  Such blanket coverage is the result of very serious planning. Talented administrators are hard at work to make sure that we are never without football, as once the bishops no doubt worked hard to spread the saints across twelve months and fifty-two empty weeks. In alternate years we will even get the European Cup or the World Cup to fill the summer. So another arid, empty space blossoms with colour and heraldry.

  And yet it stops. Try as they might, they can’t quite fill the whole year. Or perhaps they could. They could, but there’s something that prevents them from doing so: a modesty, a pudore, a residual sense of realism and measure, a fear of hubris, perhaps, the kind of common sense no religion can countenance. Perhaps this is part of the modernity of football: that unlike the other transporting experiences whose function it unwittingly seeks to replace, giving shape and direction to our lives, football is nevertheless something we all stand outside of from time to time. Then, like the man who hears his voice after all the others have already stopped chanting, we
feel vaguely embarrassed and say: it’s only a game. Ridiculous words! There are other more important things, we say. Absurd! At which, we sense a sudden emptiness. It’s the emptiness of the temple robbed of its gods. The world has stopped. In Italy, which unlike England still imagines itself a Christian country, one of those stoppage times is Christmas.

  On Monday 18 December, Saint Graziano’s day, I lay on my narrow bed in my Milan hotel and, eating (despite the mad cow craziness) a burger bought from the McDonald’s in Piazza Duomo a hundred yards away, I tried to watch from beginning to end the TV football programme called ‘Il Processo di Biscardi’ (Biscardi’s Trial). To my surprise, I saw that sitting beside the asinine Biscardi, a belligerent loud-mouthed fellow, all extravagant tie and unwarranted self-importance, was a cappuccino monk. Theatrically bearded and bespectacled, this holy man smiled with bland complacence. His name, so it seemed, was Padre Antonio, and ‘he is here’, the presenter Biscardi announced, ‘to bless us all before our Christmas break.’

  Break? Christmas? Fighting hard, I tugged a wallet from a tight pocket, pulled out my Hellas calendar and discovered that there was indeed a hiatus in the otherwise seamless calendar: from 23 December (away to Florence) until 7 January (away to Lecce) the fans were to be left entirely to their own devices. So Sunday by Sunday the football calendar superimposes itself on the religious calendar, with optional ceremonies during the week ‘for several occasions’ as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. But then, come Christmas, the old calendar surfaces, the Christ dinosaur raises his thorny head, and we are obliged to savour together the aftertaste of His lost enchantment. Yes, for a full two weeks we will be quite defenceless against everything else that is encroaching on our mental space: the massacres in Palestine, a fresh crop of deaths on the road, the endless and incomprehensible election campaign, BSE, global warming, and even the bomb that this very night someone is placing behind the gargoyles of the Milan duomo exactly opposite those golden arches where ten minutes ago I paid for my burger. But for the moment let’s concentrate on Biscardi.