by Tim Parks
Certainly Emiliano Salvetti is gloomy. I find his strange and haggard face beside me on the plane back to Verona, the last leg of the trip. Salvetti is the quietest of all the players and, on the pitch, one of the most curious, capable of inspired runs, brilliant through balls, but also of entire games of listless non-engagement. Studying him as he stares blankly at the seat in front, it seems impossible that this man is only twenty-seven. His skin is sallow, his hairline has drastically receded above each temple leaving a fuzzy central brush high on the top of his head. His nose and chin are both long and pointed, his mouth small and still. Above all he has huge, softly sad, doggy eyes.
‘You didn’t play badly,’ I finally suggest.
He raises an eyebrow.
‘It was a brilliant shot you got in at two–one.’
He shakes his head. With a little more prompting, he tells me about last year when he was doing his military service at the same time as playing for the club. As Oddo is doing now. After the game on Sunday, he would drive down to Bologna with his girlfriend, then get the plane to Rome and be in the barracks there by ten p.m. Only once in the whole year did he hold a gun. And only once on that occasion was he allowed to pull the trigger. Every other week he cleaned the kitchens or the toilets. That was his military service. Otherwise it was just training to keep fit for the weekend.
‘So you’re forced to do your service, to show the law is equal for all. But then you don’t really do it, you just waste your time?’
‘I suppose so,’ he says. ‘I never really thought about it.’
I think of the way Pietro, who sits beside me at the Bentegodi, hates it when Salvetti plays. ‘Wake up, wake up,’ he shouts at him. ‘Move your arse. Do something!’ Maybe the trouble with getting to know the players is that you can’t so easily shriek insults at them any more. Will I ever be able to yell at Cassetti, after seeing the poor kid emerge from the changing rooms in a state of such dejection?
‘Princess in Goethe,’ comes a voice from the seat in front. ‘Can you help?’
Melis, Piovanelli and Oddo are doing crosswords again.
‘Sorry.’ Melis turns back disappointed. What on earth is the point of bringing a writer on a trip if he can’t even help with the crossword?
Then suddenly it’s over. The plane’s landing. No sooner have the doors opened than Agnolin hurries off. He barely touches my hand, doesn’t look me in the eye. The players have a bus waiting, I take a cab to the train station where my car is parked. Then lying in bed I try to sum up the weekend. And, yes, I have to admit it, I’m disappointed. When I went to Bari, I expected nothing but a dull bus ride in the company of yobs, at best a hard-fought game, maybe a result, then the ride back. Instead I came home with something I didn’t expect: a rhythm that drummed in my ears for days, a strange and exhilarating cocktail of theatrical transgression and studied irony, an intense sense of community always ready to defend itself with self-parody.
Instead from Lecce I bring back only the massacre of my illusions. There is nothing special about these people except what they can do on the pitch. And this time they did nothing on the pitch. Then, damn it, I can’t sleep. Why? Because I’m feeling sorry for them. It’s ridiculous, I suddenly realise. Tim, you’re feeling sorry for a group of kids who earn more in a year than you do in ten. Not only do we lose the game, but they’re robbing me of my sleep too! They should be sorry for me, for Christ’s sake, not me for them.
Careful not to disturb my wife, I slip downstairs to the taverna where we keep the computer. What are the fans saying? I open The Wall.
‘The club is considering whether to take the team away in retreat to overcome this difficult moment,’ writes someone who calls himself McDan. ‘Good idea. I would suggest the new multi-functional sports facility of Dachau.’
‘A deaf mute in charge of a herd of human vegetables,’ comments Il Bandito.
‘Electrocardiogram of Hellas: flat,’ writes Pam. ‘Bile of fans: record for world production. Diavolo porco, if you don’t want your cars smashed, let’s see some balls!!!’
‘PIG WHORES LUTBASTARD.’
‘For sale, section of the Curva Sud of the Bentegodi Stadium, Verona. Seats upholstered with human skin …’
After about ten minutes I’m laughing my head off. Good. Having re-established the proper distance between myself and the boys in yellow-blue, I at last went to bed with a smile and slept deep and sound.
‘Just calling to thank you,’ I told Guette the following afternoon for getting me on the trip. Naturally he was depressed about the result. ‘By the way,’ I ask, ‘what exactly is Agnolin a professor of?’
‘Agnolin? He was a referee of course.’
‘Yes, but everybody calls him “professor”.’
‘Oh right,’ Saverio Guette says. He pauses. He’s trying to remember. ‘Of ginnastica. That’s right. Gym. He was a gym teacher.’
Magic
Go magical Hellas!
Paruca
‘DAGLIELA!’ SHOUTS THE girl behind me. ‘Pass it to him.’ She’s on her feet screaming. ‘Dagliela BENE!’
On the pitch Martino Melis lifts his head. But he can’t hear her. She’s only one voice. Thousands of others are chanting: ‘Su Verona, su Verona, dai, dai!’ Melis is dithering again.
‘Ma dagliela!’ she weeps. ‘Dagliela bene!’ Give it to him right!
Too late Melis sees the opening and passes. The ball runs long. The girl collapses in disappointment. A moment later she begins again: ‘Pull him down! Pull the bastard down, Dio povero!’ She’s suffering. Mazzola can’t hear. ‘O mongolo,’ comes the familiar call from a few rows further back. ‘O fenomeno, go back to Cloud-cuckoo-land!’
On The Wall, as Sunday’s game approaches, the exhortations flow thick and fast:
‘ODDO, YOU MISERABLE MERCENARY, LET’S SEE SOME BALLS TODAY.’
‘PEROTTI, MERDA! ENOUGH DRAWS AND DEFEATS. SEND ‘EM OUT TO WIN, DIO BOIA, AND DON’T PLAY CASSETTI. HE’S A CRIPPLE.’
Why do people write messages to those they know are not going to read them? Why do people shout at players who they know can’t hear?
‘Shoot, shoot, shoot, porca miseria!’ The girl’s on her feet again. ‘Shoot now!’ But never for a moment does she imagine that Bonazzoli can hear her. She knows his world is quite separate. What is going on?
The Saturday before the game there is always a full page advertisement in the Arena. Right across the top, a broad grey band bears the slogan:
FORZA GIALLOBLÙ FORZA GIALLOBLÙ
Immediately beneath are the names of the teams:
H. VERONA vs NAPOLI
Then, right across the centre of the page are two large diagrammatic football pitches laid side by side, each giving one of tomorrow’s teams and the formation they play in. Here for example is what’s on the left diagram today. The team reads from left to right:
H. VERONA (4–4–2)
But now comes the curious thing. Right in the middle of the page – squashed, that is, between the two football pitches and their teams – there is just about room for one elongated vertical advertisement, which thus takes pride of place and becomes the focal point of the whole layout. It reads:
CENTRO
ZEUS
Giuseppe Strano:
Tarot, Astrologer, Spiritist
Specialist in matters of the heart
Consult him for:
Love, Business and every forma negativa
Placed between the two teams, in the conundrum of their eventual engagement, we have a mago, Giuseppe Strano, which is as much as to say, Joseph Strange. He’s in the right place. ‘Magic exists as a primitive explanation of the world,’ said the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, ‘and continues to flourish wherever science is unable to offer reassurance.’ Certainly there could have been no reassuring, scientific explanation on that bitter cold Sunday afternoon, 14 January, when, on a sodden pitch, without having done anything to deserve it, Napoli scored fifteen minutes from time to go one–nil up. Doub
tless many in the Bentegodi who witnessed this injustice felt convinced that Verona were the victims of a ‘forma negativa’, a jinx.
‘As a historian of civilisation,’ wrote the German scholar Aby Warburg in 1923, ‘what interested me was how, in the midst of a country that had developed its technical culture into a remarkable precision weapon in the hands of the rational man, nevertheless there survived a small enclave of primitive pagans who, while facing the struggle for existence with absolute realism when it came to their hunting and their agriculture, all the same went on practising with undiminished faith magic rituals that we tend to look on with contempt as a sign of complete backwardness.’
Primitive pagans? Warburg was speaking of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, their tendency to exhort a sky that couldn’t hear them to rain, an earth without ears to be fertile, but the paragraph might as well refer to the Brigate Gialloblù, or any fan praying to someone who can’t hear. Warburg goes on to talk of magic as a stage lying between totemism and technology; it involves, that is, an intense desire to manipulate events through a process of cause and effect, but without having developed the technological means to do so. You do a certain dance to make the clouds come. You wear your old blue-and-yellow scarf for forty-eight hours before the game in the vague hope that this might prove propitious.
‘This coexistence between fantastical witchcraft and rational utilitarianism seems to us to be a symptom of scission,’ reflects Warburg. ‘But for the Indian [or football fan] there is nothing schizoid about it at all. On the contrary: it amounts to the liberating experience of an unlimited possible correlation between man and the surrounding world.’
‘Dagliela bene!’ the girl is screaming again. This time Melis passes at once, a perfect through ball to Mutu. ‘There,’ she claps her hands. ‘There, see that, ESP! He heard me.’
‘Vai magica Hellas!’ is Pietro’s favourite shout. ‘Go, magical Hellas.’
Having agreed that magic is an attempt to manipulate the world, the anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor tackled the thorny question, why does the believer in magic keep at it when it clearly doesn’t work, when the scarf wrapped round the neck for forty-eight consecutive hours is followed by such a miserable drubbing you feel like hanging yourself with it? When you pray to Perotti to behave sensibly and he never does.
The conclusion the anthropologist came to was that the practitioner of magic could explain away its failure only by positing the greater power of some opposing magic: we deployed all our spells, but somebody else cast a counter-spell, a forma negativa. One can see the logic of this, but it has to be said of that game on 14 January that, although the Neapolitans are committed fans and notorious believers in magic, they were nevertheless hopelessly outnumbered at the Bentegodi. How could their influence be more powerful than ours?
The anthropologist Sir Alfred Radcliffe-Brown had a different take on this loyalty to the futile formula. More important than the efficacy of magic, he felt, was its social function, which was ‘to underline the importance to the group of the desired or protected event’. Writing threatening messages to Pastorello, or begging Adailton to shoot, you express how absolutely crucial it is to all of us that Hellas win.
In this regard, Radcliffe-Brown mused on, magic offers a way of ‘ritualising optimism’. You insistently repeat what you most desire and thus tense yourself and others towards a happier future. Before each game that Hellas play, someone signing himself Zeno (Verona’s patron saint) writes to The Wall predicting the day’s result, always in our favour. ‘Verona 4, Napoli 1: goals by Mutu, Bonazzoli and Melis. All in the first half. Penalty to the filthy terroni early in the second. Final goal in the closing seconds from the mythical Gilardino.’
But ten minutes from time, on this miserable afternoon of 14 January, it was still one–nil to Napoli. From almost thirty yards out – their first serious shot of the game – Bellucci had struck a ball that curved hard and fast into the top left-hand corner of Verona’s goal. It was perfect. No magic of Ferron’s could have resisted it.
At despairing moments like this, what I always ask myself is: why do people invest this enormous desire for control, for magical cause and effect, in an area where they know they can have no such control? After my week at the bank, at the school, in the factory, why don’t I choose an entertainment where I can enjoy some reassurance as to the outcome? Computer games, for example. A little wine-bottling.
Or again: having chosen an entertainment where we have no control, why don’t we sit passively and just suffer or enjoy it? Why do we seek to influence events? Here I am on my feet again, screaming, ‘Cassetti, for Christ’s sake, don’t pass back. Fuck and shit, Cassetti, attack!’ Is it that we actually want this exhibition of helplessness? Perhaps the theatre of the stadium allows us to act out our most intimate intuition: that in the end and in all the truly important things of life – where we were born, who we are, our passions, our children, our illnesses and aging – we never had any control at all.
Down but not beaten, the curva rallies with bitter determination. Sing despite everything is the rule. ‘Tu sei il Verona, il mio Verona!’ I make a brief attempt to join in but I can’t do it. I feel sick. Your book is going to be a book about relegation, I tell myself. That’s the bitter truth. Perhaps writing about things brings bad luck. In just a few minutes from now Hellas Verona will be third from bottom.
Support for Radcliffe-Brown’s vision of the social function of magic comes from further studies on the American Indians. ‘The Zuni tribe under strong pressure from Spanish explorers and Franciscan missionaries to repudiate its indigenous customs, would, figuratively speaking, draw a magic circle around their innermost belief and ceremonies, above all their mask dances.’
Masks! As we had filed into the Bentegodi that afternoon, it was to find that the brigate had provided not flags, nor ticker-tape, as on previous occasions, but, on every single seat of the curva, a small white surgical mask of the variety American cyclists wear in city traffic: to protect ourselves from the smell of those terrible Neapolitans. There is a local song that runs:
Senti che puzza,
scappano anche i cani
sono arrivati i napoletani.
Get that smell,
Even the dogs are running
The Neapolitans are coming.
So as the teams ran out into the stadium, it was to find ten thousand people wearing small white masks and singing, ‘Siamo i tifosi dell’Hellas e abbiamo un sogno nel cuore, bruciare il meridione, bruciare il meridione.’ ‘We’re Hellas fans and we have a dream in our hearts, to burn the south.’
Until fifteen minutes from the end of the match it seemed that, at least in footballing terms, that dream might come true. For all the first half and most of the second, Hellas had attacked and Napoli had defended. In Napoli’s goal, Mancini had saved well on two or three occasions. Five minutes after Napoli scored, Verona won a corner. Martin Laursen rose to meet a high ball at the far post and crashed it down … against the woodwork. That’s it, I thought. We’re jinxed.
‘We’re going down,’ muttered Pietro.
‘We’re already down,’ said the pessimist who sits in front.
In the past, when I used to hear people talk of their fear of relegation, I thought it was a mere question of footballing prestige they were worried about, of seeing a high-quality game. Only recently did I realise that what is really at stake is the taboo thought: what if our community disintegrates? Imagine: the club goes down first to Serie B, then to C; the Hellas fans dwindle; the Juve and Milan and Inter fans multiply. When the brigate sing, ‘When Hellas are in Serie C, in the stadium we will be,’ what are they trying to do but ward off the terrible suspicion that maybe they won’t be there at all? The brigate will be gone, swallowed up in the world of modern entertainment where football means nothing more than an afternoon’s cable viewing. If this isn’t cultural harassment, what is?
Under threat, the Zuni drew a magic circle round themselves. I’ve often thought of
the Bentegodi as a magic circle. The opposing fans are admitted into one small segment only in order to be driven out by a Hellas victory. A ritual exorcism. But today even our gas-masks can’t protect us from the heavy smell of defeat. With ten minutes to go and the tension in the stadium almost unbearable, Ragioniere Perotti at last decides to take a risk. He pulls off Melis and throws in a third striker, Adailton. ‘Vai Ada!’ shouts Pietro to the boy who can’t hear. To our right three older men get to their feet and head for the stairs. They have lost faith.
The game was drawing to a close. The Napoli players, quite naturally, were wasting time, falling over and shrieking in fake pain, raising their hands to call for the team doctor, taking for ever to set the ball down for a goal kick. And at this point there came a sudden roar of pain that seemed to have nothing to do with anything happening on the pitch. At once I raised my eyes to the big screen over the Curva Nord where an electric ribbon of light was bringing the results of other games. As at Lecce last week, the news so far was all bad. Brescia were winning, Reggina were winning. But now worst of all came a revised score-line from Serie B: a team called Chievo Verona had equalised at Salerno. As one man the curva groaned. The misery was too much. And so, just as we reach this crucial and desperate moment of the season, the last five minutes against Napoli, I fear I shall have to interrupt my story to talk about an even greater threat to the Hellas community: Chievo Verona seem to be headed for Serie A.
I admit I’ve been putting off this part of my tale. I should have mentioned it way back, perhaps at the very beginning of the book. Then I could have said, ‘Actually the city of Verona has two football teams, one in Serie A and one, rather surprisingly, in Serie B, rather than Serie C, or D where it belongs.’
