A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  I didn’t understand. There were about a thousand of us, all with our scarves and hats, though some had switched blue-and-yellow for viola. As always at away games we were standing. We were packed together for warmth, all stamping our feet on each other’s toes while the icy air round our heads steamed and smoked. We were shivering. We couldn’t see properly. We were losing two–nil. What did the man mean, on the count of three we score?

  ‘One.’ Everybody fell silent. ‘Two.’ They opened their mouths grinning. ‘Three.’

  ‘GOL!!!’

  The whole throng all around me went quite mad, shrieking, embracing. ‘Rete! Golf’ On the pitch a couple of players looked up from whatever mundane administration they were involved in. What was going on? ‘Gol! Forza Verona alè!’ Across the stadium, when the Fiorentina supporters finally understood, they joined in the cheering. There was a loud crackle of applause. Five minutes later the megaphone said: ‘Now we hit the post. One, two, three. Ooooh! No!’

  ‘And now, butei, we equalise.’

  ‘Gol! Gol! Gol!

  In the end, or in cloud-cuckoo-land, Verona won the game three–two, an illusion within the general illusion that is football. Congratulating themselves, the brigate sang ‘Buon natale, buon natale, buon natale gialloblù’ – Happy Christmas blue-yellows – to the tune of ‘Clementine,’ as if the game were already over. It might as well have been. For myself I was shocked by such unwarranted good spirits and didn’t recover my equilibrium until I heard someone saying, ‘What a cripple Cassetti is! Che natale di merda per lui.’ A shit of a Christmas for him. Yes, Cassetti will have an awful Christmas, I thought, and likewise Filippini who gave away the penalty. They deserve it.

  Then driving home, the world stopped. Isn’t this what the ancients always feared at the winter solstice? Descending from the frozen Apennines, we found the Po valley under the thickest fog and crept back the last eighty miles at a snail’s pace. Verona was icily still, the temperature well below zero. No football for two weeks. Nothing to do but detoxify oneself with rich food, strong wine and sloth.

  I honestly dread the days between Christmas and New Year. There is no rhythm to them. Initially excited about their presents, the children grow restless. You have to drag them away from their computer games. Or play computer games with them. Having discovered that in ‘Superstar Soccer’ Sweden play in more or less the same colours as Verona, Michele and I take on all the best teams in the world – Germany, Brazil, France – pretending we are Hellas Verona. Needless to say, we win. ‘The right to lose is one thing,’ somebody writes on The Wall, ‘but the right to relegation is quite another.’ Hellas Verona are fifth from bottom.

  When the papers re-appear on the 28th, I am cheered by a tidal wave of kitsch. In a nearby village, at midnight mass, a priest read out all the SMS messages he had received on his telefonino, then invited the whole congregation to get their telefonini to trill together at midnight exactly. Perhaps the brigate should do this when we score a goal. Meantime there are articles on the so-called charity calendars that so many sports teams produce. This year all the athletes are getting themselves photographed naked. ‘They may be bottom of the league,’ – this about a girl’s volleyball team – ‘but they’re the top men’s choice when it comes to a calendar.’ The money goes to the needy somewhere or other. It always does. The mixture of charity and prurience, it seems, is unbeatable. If Playboy and Hustler said that half the cover price went to Save the Children, they would double their sales. An incredibly long article discusses the case of the San Martino Buon Albergo team who planned such a calendar but then found that some players refused to get their kit off. ‘Behind the ball the centre-forward has his pants on,’ the journalist complains.

  Oh but this is a hopeless week. No work, no peace to read with the kids in the house, no football, the roads too choked to drive anywhere. Why don’t the Italians have Boxing Day matches like the English? The English never stop playing football.

  As the frustration mounts you begin to hear fireworks going off at all times of the day and night. Italy is preparing for New Year’s Eve, an explosion of pent-up, pyrotechnic energy released into the nothingness of the winter night. This year stops now, everybody is screaming. We’re fed up; let another one begin. Turn solstice turn! Isn’t it enough that we invented that story with God coming into the world? Isn’t it enough that we’ve suspended the football season? Let this dead time end. All over Italy, but above all in Naples, the police are confiscating home-made fireworks. A child has lost his hand.

  What can the Parks family do to add their weight to the general effort to shift the earth a little on its axis? On New Year’s Eve we drive up to the mountains to walk in the snow; anything to get the circulation going. Not to the skiing areas – that would be impossible – but the depopulated desolation of upper Lessinia: San Rocco, Rovereto, Velo Veronese. On all the road signs out of town, a yellow sticker proclaiming ‘Republica Veneta’ is evident. This is serious Lega country. Everywhere there’s the poster that announces in dialect: ‘DIME CAN MA NO TALIAN!’ – Call me a dog, but not an Italian.

  We park the car above Velo at 3,000 feet and walk up towards the high plateau: my wife, myself, Michele, Stefi, Lucia. Michele, gloomy as ever, disappears ahead. He wants to walk on his own. The girls roll in the snow, two feet deep here. But an hour later, as we climb up higher and higher, the wind takes you by surprise. It’s quite bitter. Rita turns back with Lucia, while I must press on with Stefi to find where on earth Michele has got to. Going over the top of the ridge on to the plateau, we’re suddenly in Scott-of-the-Arctic conditions. The wind whips hard flakes of ice across an expanse that is hugely white, with the range of Monte Baldo to our left, the tall peak of Carega to our right. But where is my son, my firstborn?

  Bent to the wind we stagger on, and find him at last where the path, marked by poles in the deep snow, passes a little hollow that the farmers use in summer as a watering hole for their cattle. Now the water is frozen solid into a tiny round lake. On his knees Michele is scraping letters on the ice with a stone. In the huge nothingness of the landscape, beneath a white and empty sky, on the last day of the year 2000, he has etched ‘HELLAS VERONA, VINCI PER NOI’. And immediately beneath this: ‘JUVE MERDA!’

  Lecce

  Italy, land of a hundred cities, that unites love of my home town with love of my country and love of Europe. There is more that unites us than divides us.

  President Ciampi, New Year’s address

  Italian unity = Roma merda, Inter merda, Milan merda, Napoli merda, Vicenza merda, Lecce merda. Need I go on?

  Dany-for-Hell@s.it

  BY THE AGE of ten their skills are evident. Their mothers are shrieking on the sidelines. Talent scouts are offering advice. By the age of fifteen they are in a football college. They survive one selection after another. They see other boys leave, hanging their heads. Sensing they are destined for glory, they go to bed early, dreaming of the turf at San Siro, at the Olimpico. On the telephone Mamma and Papà urge them on. Their few old friends urge them on. They don’t drink and they don’t smoke. Their diet is controlled. The training is exhausting. By seventeen or eighteen they are playing in Serie C, or sitting on the bench in Serie B. Solemn men in heavy coats gamble on their future. They are bought and sold. A billion lire this year, five billion next. They are shunted up and down the length of the bel paese, Treviso, Taranto, Palermo, Turin. They know no one outside the world of football now. They hardly know what to say to a person who is not a player or a manager or a journalist. Or at least a fan. Is there anybody who is not a football fan? They are simultaneously proud of what they have achieved and afraid of seeming stupid. They haven’t studied. They haven’t had time for a social life. Always supervised, they haven’t had time to develop a character. Before each game their bags are prepared for them, three shirts with name and number stitched on the back, three undershirts, three pairs of shorts, three pain of socks, three pairs of shoes, the club tracksuit, the spare all-white k
it just in case. Their travel is booked for them, their meals are prepared for them, their days are planned out for them. Five days a week they train, one day, if they are lucky, they play, and one day they are free to read the papers about how they played. Before and after each training session they are weighed. They are told their optimum weight and must maintain it. They mustn’t have sex before a game. They are fined if they are late for training. They are fined if their telefonino rings when the coach is speaking. They are fined if they don’t wear the club uniform when travelling with the team. Yearning to be picked for the game, what can they do but agree with everything the coach says? What can they do but try to carry out his every wish? Picked, they are proud and relieved; left out, they suffer all kinds of anguish. Dreading injury, they become hypersensitive and hypochondriac. They have a twitch in the calf, a tingle in the wrist, a swelling in the neck. What is it? The team doctor examines them, the team masseur revives them. Surgeons of international renown perform the most routine orthopaedic operations. Yearning to be adored, they are afraid people want their company only because they are famous. They watch pornography in anonymous hotels. When they win they are worshipped. Standing arms raised beneath the curva, they are drenched in glory, their faces resplendent. Their clothes have become sacred objects. People seek to touch them in crowds. When they lose they are spat on. The whistles are deafening. They make for the tunnel with head down. Lonely, they marry young. An old girlfriend perhaps. Perhaps a young model, lost and vain as themselves. Or in the claustrophobic autism that reigns in this world, they turn to team-mates for sex. It’s a men’s world and the men are young and attractive. Waking with a headache in the middle of the night, they have to call the team doctor before they can take anything. There are dope tests. They cannot put drops in a stuffy nose. They cannot inhale Vicks. They cannot think about anything but the game. The next game is crucial. The next game is always crucial. The night before the game they are too tense to sleep. The night after the game they are too excited, too furious. The whole body is inflamed. The muscles are swollen, the joints are stiff. They cannot sleep. With amazement they read about players in other countries who drink heavily and smoke and smash up restaurants and aeroplanes. How can this be? What would the Gazzetta say? Italy is a Catholic country. They read that English players check the horse-racing results at half-time. They do not believe it. It can’t be so. Like Spartan soldiers, they are truly themselves only on the field of battle. Only when they run out through the players’ tunnel into the big green stadium can they unleash all their pent-up emotion. Only here can they show their genius. Only before a huge crowd can they at last behave appallingly. They clutch their opponent’s shirt. They crash into his legs before he reaches a scoring position. The crowd applaud. Pull him down! They constantly pretend that they themselves have been fouled. They fall over when they haven’t been touched. They deny the most evident truths, insisting they didn’t touch a ball when everybody has seen that they did; claiming a ball didn’t go out when everybody has seen that it has. Winning, they toss the ball away to waste time. They clutch it and refuse to hand it over. Fouled, they writhe in pain when they feel no pain at all. Substituted, they cross the turf as slowly as possible, despite the whistles of the opposing crowd. They are simultaneously infantile and mature, petulant and courageous. When they score they lose all sense of control. They tear off their shirts, they go wild. When their opponents score they collapse on the ground in dismay. They protest vigorously. They kick the goalposts. After the game they phone their mothers. Interviewed by the television, they are cautious and conformist: we did our best, our compliments to the other side, we must work hard to improve, we must be humble. Next day they check their marks in all the papers. They check their hypothetical value in the fantasy transfer market. Will I still be here next year? Will I be playing, will I be on the bench? Immensely privileged, they are hopelessly deprived. They have no ordinary life. Above all, they are paid huge salaries. And right now I am waiting to meet them, or some of them, in the foyer to the Marco Polo airport, Venezia.

  It is 5 January, three p.m., and I am sitting in the departure lounge of Venice airport waiting to meet the Hellas Verona team. I am going to fly with players and coach first to Rome, then Brindisi, way down on the heel of the Italian boot. Then a car to Lecce where I will stay with them in the hotel on Friday and Saturday nights. On Sunday I will watch the game with the owner, Giambattista Pastorello, and the sports director, Rino Foschi. I am beside myself with excitement. When I saw Her Majesty the Queen, it occurs to me, a couple of months back now, I was completely offhand. It meant nothing to me. The only thing I was curious about was how far Her Majesty did or did not resemble my mother. Now I am like a little boy on his birthday, or at an important exam. Why?

  I first contacted the club back in October. I expected, to be honest, the kind of self-satisfied obtuseness I grew used to in my twenties and early thirties when working as a translator for the Veronese business world. Gruff, hard-working men would quiz you as to why your translation was slightly longer or shorter than their original. Many of them couldn’t distinguish between Italian and dialect. ‘Why don’t you use the same number of words?’ they asked.

  But Saverio Guette, Hellas Verona’s marketing man, turned out to be quite a different figure. The first thing that took me aback was when he courteously returned my phone-call. ‘By all means let us fix an appointment, Signor Parks.’ So a few days later I discovered Palazzo Pancaldo, the new office block to the west of the city where the club has just moved. Stepping out of the lift and into a hushed, blue-upholstered reception on the fifth floor, the feeling was more like corporate America than the provincial improvisation I’d expected. The floor is an imitation grey-blue marble. There are the flags of Europe and the United Nations.

  I tried to explain to Guette the kind of book I was planning to write and the sort of help I was hoping the club might give me. He nodded. My opening remark on the special mix of quasi-religious emotion and wittily distancing irony was taken as common knowledge. ‘You should be reading Philipe Ariè and Mikhael Bachtin,’ was his immediate advice. ‘Bachtin’s book on laughter and the spirit of carnival.’ I wrote down a tide. ‘The two clubs whose fans most embody this combination in Italy’, he told me, ‘are Verona and Inter.’

  He answered the phone frequently as he spoke, but politely tried to show how eager he was to get back to me. ‘The general transfer of the public libido to football has gone hand in hand with its availability to a wider public through pay TV,’ he remarked between finishing one call and starting another. ‘The point being of course that football can both generate and manage sharply contrasting emotions.’ He offered me two hefty university theses to read on finance and marketing in Italian football. ‘They will help you understand the nitty-gritty.’

  I wondered if he was trying to impress. Apparently he tutors at a private university. ‘Football merchandising has never really caught on here. People find it difficult to associate fashion and football.’ His Italian was clipped and elegant. ‘Poems about football? Yes, Leopardi of course. “Al vincitore”. And then Umberto Saba, you know?’ I didn’t. He began to quote:

  ‘Il portiere caduto alla difesa

  ultima vana, contro terra cela

  la faccia …’

  Fallen in a last vain defence

  The keeper hides his face

  Against the ground …

  ‘A little sad, though,’ Guette laughed, ‘don’t you think, for a poem called “Goal”? Please don’t write a sad book about football. It’s a joyous thing.’

  Humbled, I was already wishing I could spend hours and hours with this man, not just to pump him for everything he knew, but for the unexpected pleasure of his company, at once fussy and accommodating. ‘I was hoping, perhaps,’ I tried cautiously, ‘just vaguely hoping, you know, that perhaps, maybe, the club might, well, help me out with maybe just one of the distant away games, perhaps just once I could travel with the team.’

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bsp; ‘That will be our pleasure,’ Guette smiled.

  I was introduced to his assistant, Massimiliano, a tall, absurdly handsome, absurdly polite boy. For a moment I imagined myself with a priest and his eager acolyte. ‘I went to Bari on the bus with the brigate,’ I said to try them out. Guette laughed. ‘Our fans are marvellous,’ he said. ‘If only they would stop their racist chants.’ With a clear reference to their opposition to his boss, Pastorello, and the choruses of ‘Pastorello vaffanculo’ that characterised the last games of the previous season, he said, ‘As you can see, we make no attempt to influence them, or to buy off their leaders with free tickets as some clubs do. They are entirely at liberty to think what they like.’ I would never have imagined, before he said this, that clubs tried to sweeten their fans with free tickets.

  Then very briefly I was introduced to Pastorello himself. Again there was a strangely American feeling to it all. A tall, slim, bearded man rose from behind a battleship of a desk with huge glass windows behind. He shook hands, smiled warmly. He was tanned, elegant, endearingly vain. With some difficulty I tried to match this image of urbanity with all the negative things I’d heard and read of Pastorello: his interminable meanness, his aloofness, his coldness, his supposed disdain for the fans. ‘I saw El Pastor jogging in a Hellas tracksuit,’ a voice writes on The Wall. ‘Shame on him. He has no right to wear blue-and-yellow. If I catch him alone, I’ll give him a good hiding.’

  ‘How interesting,’ Pastorello was saying. ‘Yes, it will be an honour to have you write about us. By all means come on one of the away games.’

  But to have opened one, or even two doors is not to have opened them all. Not in a football club. The curious nature of the football club is the way the owner delegates, or should delegate, enormous powers to those who work for him: first to the sports director, as the Italians call him, the man who plans which players to buy and sell; and then above all to the coach, who must carry the can when things go wrong and in return has complete control over who goes on the pitch. This breakdown of authority is designed to overcome, or at least paper over, the essential contradictions at the heart of football: that the sporting result is very often in stark contrast to the financial result; that it is a team sport in an era that thinks only in terms of individuals.