A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  Of all Italian stadiums, San Siro is the one that most amazes. Or is it just that I’d had so much to drink by the time I arrived? Perhaps ten cars departed from the Curva Sud. Five of us were packed into a small Opel. Forza is driving, his girlfriend, the charmingly tough, sly-mouthed Raffaella, sits beside him. In the back are Marta, recovering from a hangover, and Mauro, a wiry, self-confident loudmouth who starts telling me about his experiences at Oxford. He went to attend a language school, but then stayed and joined the university. ‘Love England. Love the English.’ He even rowed, he says, in the bumps. Can this be true? I don’t press him. He seems nice enough.

  The cars are supposed to stay together, but at the first service station our group gets stuck at the bar for more than an hour. All kinds of people keep appearing. Old friends, old enemies. This is the way with service stations on the road to a game, not unlike Rome airport for the players. Suddenly I find myself standing beside Aiooogalapagos, he of the Più-mati. Doardo, he tells me proudly, comes from his home village of Colognola ai Colli. This calls for another round of drinks. In no time at all I’m on my third. It’s extraordinary, I’m thinking, how the Italians sell beer in autostrada service stations. And extraordinary too that the red-faced Forza isn’t drinking any. ‘Driving,’ he explains. He stands there patiently with his Coke while the two girls get tipsy.

  ‘Why do the Loma lot want to break the gemellaggio?’ I ask.

  ‘Because nobody obeys anybody any more,’ Forza says. ‘Inter’s leaders couldn’t stop some of their troops from attacking us. There was even a stabbing. All the same, I think it should be saved.’

  I’ve often thought that the progress of individualism is at once harder to chart and more dramatic in a society traditionally split into fragments. Sometimes you mistake for individualism what is only factionalism. But when the tightly knit faction itself breaks down, then you’re splitting the atom. It’s explosive. In the more faceless Anglo-American institutions nobody cares what you do.

  ‘It’s getting harder to keep a curva together,’ Forza goes on. ‘The old days are gone. Since you can’t fight the other fans, people fight each other.’

  Nodding, I tell him about a game last week in Serie D where two players from the same team started fighting because one was blaming the other for having made the mistake that allowed the opposing team to score. The referee sent both of them off and the team was thrashed.

  ‘Bet it was down south,’ Forza said.

  It was.

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘Why did your lot lose control of the curva? Why don’t you take it back?’

  Forza is pragmatic. ‘Well, theoretically we could. But we just don’t have the balls any more. We don’t want it enough.’

  To hear him, it might be Cioran analysing the difference between the satiated decadence of western Europe and the raw aggression of the emerging Slavs.

  ‘It’s a question of how brutal you’re willing to be, you know? If deep down you don’t really want trouble, then you’re lost, it’s time to step aside.’

  And so it was that afternoon. In the two or three minutes that I was in the loo on entering the stadium, Forza and Mauro ran into some Loma boys on the terraces. Somebody felt that Mauro looked at him in a way not entirely respectful. The boys attacked. A dozen against two. Forza went down but was then left untouched. He’s respected. He has a past. But Mauro, who has the manner of the braggart, with thin blusterer’s moustaches, was seriously kicked and punched. When I found them again he had a tooth chipped and cheeks cut and swollen. He sat on the steps, head swaying, unable to stand for fear of fainting. Curiously, the two girls travelling with us, who had stood to one side, assured me that this final acknowledgment of the shift of power had been expected for a long time. Meantime Forza didn’t seem overly unhappy with the result. How many things there are, I thought, that I still don’t understand.

  And how many different ways there are of building a stadium! While the huge Delle Alpi and oneiric Olimpico open outwards like generous saucers, turning your face up to the tallest skies, San Siro is severely vertical and closed. Eight or a dozen fat towers with spiralling walkways support massive, dungeon-dark walls. It’s sort of futuristic re-think on a very grand scale of a form that is decidedly medieval, a fort or bastion, at once tall and square, as if the Bastille had been transformed into a leisure centre.

  Inside, stacked one above another like boxes at the opera, the terraces slope very steeply downwards to plunge right to the touch-line. There is no athletics track. Above the head, the sun and stars are forgotten. Eighty thousand people thus face each other at the closest possible quarters. It’s an unparalleled scenario for mounting the thundering chant. And no sooner were we packed into our tiny segment than the Inter fans took advantage of it to break the gemellaggio before we could: Verona, Verona, vaffanculo. The chant was different today, formal somehow, like the tearing-up of an old contract. Later, a few hundred Inter supporters tried to get across the terraces and attack us. But again the gesture seemed more a ritual than a real attempt at violence. The police were well-informed and prepared. They had their gear and they were there in force. There was no getting past them.

  ‘Pretty unimpressive,’ Forza complained. Despite the fact that he hadn’t wanted the break-up, he seemed disappointed by how tame it all turned out to be.

  As for the game, it might be summed up in a small subtitle at the bottom of a full page dedicated to the match in tomorrow’s Gazzetta: ‘Ferron’s Protest: “There was no penalty.”’ Having filled columns of print with flattery for a team whose supporters make up a large proportion of the paper’s customers, the little article, set apart in a box that is not for the consumption of Interisti, admits that Ferron is right. At the very end of a first half in which Bonazzoli missed an open goal and Adailton struck the post, Ferron rushed out to dive at a through ball. Vieri came charging towards him and, although Ferron was already stretched on the ground before the big striker arrived, he deliberately ran into the man and fell over. The referee was uncertain, but the linesman raised his flag and thus decided the game.

  ‘At least Chievo aren’t winning,’ Pam said. I had found this pillar of the Più-mati at the very top of the guest section. She was standing erect and grim in a pink jacket, arms folded, gaze set, like Napoleon at Waterloo. The news had just come up: Chievo 0 – Ravenna 0. But incredibly, as we soon discovered, all Chievo’s rivals had lost. The dam boys had extended their lead. ‘It can’t be happening,’ Pam shook her head. ‘It can’t be.’

  On returning home that evening, I opened the Più-mati’s site, Solohellas.net, but then discovered that the familiar link from that to the official Hellas site had been cut. A window appeared on the screen: ‘Cutting this link is my way of beginning the protest against an inept management that has thrown away years of hard work.’ Beside this sombre statement was a photograph of a hearse with the Hellas badge on the door.

  But down in the basement where we keep our TV, my son just can’t get over Vieri’s dive. He’s watched it a dozen times on the video. ‘He dived. He dived! And Morfeo last week, pretending he’d been hit when he hadn’t. How can they look at themselves in the mirror? Why don’t the guys who give out the suspensions do anything about it? They could easily say, OK, Vieri dived, out for a game.’

  My son is right. They could do that. They could clean up football.

  ‘Why don’t they, Dad?’

  While I’ve never had any trouble talking to my son about God and death, and even sex, these matters are more perplexing.

  ‘Because in the end, Mick, people must want things as they are.’ Really, this is the only conclusion I can come to. The game is how we want it. Otherwise this obvious cheating would be punished. People don’t want their sportsmen to be men of moral stature. They don’t want the rules to be absolute. They want protest and drama. They want a scenario that they can argue over till doomsday. ‘We lost,’ Michele says, ‘but we didn’t deserve to lose.’ There is a dour sat
isfaction in his voice.

  Asked about the end of the gemellaggio between Verona and Inter fans, Rino Foschi says grimly, ‘Ridiculous. The serious thing is the game. There was no penalty.’

  Qwerty

  Ever and only Hellas Verona, everything else … nomads outside the city gates.

  Ivan, Vicenz@cittàsecondaria

  MY FRIEND ROBERTO and I are concerned about a mutual friend, Alessandro, a man in his fifties. His affair with a plain young Neapolitan girl, barely twenty-two, of no special intellect or personality, has being going on for almost three years. Every week, twice or three times, he risks all kinds of trouble with wife and family to see the girl for no more than ninety minutes. Exasperated, Roberto, an AC Milan supporter, tells me, ‘I said to him, Sandro, I said, I have the video of Milan beating Ajax to win the European Cup. Fantastic game, historic moment. Orgasm for the rossoneri. You know. I’ve seen it, what, a dozen times. But in the end, enough is enough, Alessandro. Enough! How many times can you watch Van Basten slotting it in? People start to find you weird. Get on with something else!’

  How many times? Football and erotic experience have this in common: there’s an inevitable sameness about each game, each encounter, yet a seemingly inexhaustible yearning to repeat. Both generate around them a mad abundance of mental material: conversation, boasting, dreams, writing, nostalgia, photographs. If the most common kind of website is pornographic, football can’t be far behind. In a German hotel on a Saturday midnight, alternate TV channels will be showing girls or goals. What else is there? The same limited series of poses, of actions, are endlessly contemplated. And lying on your bed, zapping back and forth between one and the other, you can’t help asking yourself: how different are we then, one from the other? Every sexual embrace is the same embrace perhaps, every goal is the same goal. It’s a needless superabundance.

  Then Sky Sport interviews Maradona and with some relief you tell yourself: no, Maradona was unique. On CNN they’re showing old footage of Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was quite unique, you’re obliged to reflect. You’re relieved. Paul Gascoigne is definitely an unrepeatable phenomenon, you finally acknowledge, going back to Sky Sport. Would we ever want to repeat it? So the mind toggles back and forth between a vision where we are all an expression of the same unchanging human spirit, nothing to choose between us, nothing to choose (take note, Perotti) between Bonazzoli and Gilardino, Mutu and Adailton; or a vision where we are every one of us quite individual and irreplaceable. ‘What will we do without Laursen next year?’ someone writes on The Wall. ‘Stay with us, Martin, or I’ll kill myself.’

  Between these two forms of aberration lies what makes all our gloating and repetition possible: the particular time, the special place, the combination or collision of historical circumstances – blonde hair, an awkward bounce, a sudden downpour and, above all, the surrounding community, the other people you come across. Monroe doesn’t exist without Kennedy and Joe DiMaggio. Who would Gascoigne be without Tottenham and England and Jimmy Five-bellies? It’s the freshly shuffled pack that makes each new card game possible, the weather, or a bout of flu. And so, although this book is nothing more than the repetitive account of thirty-four games of football, let me insist that the twenty-third game, the derby between Verona and Vicenza, most often repeated of all Verona’s games, was, despite the poor-quality football, nevertheless quite special. For one young man in particular it marked a crisis point in his life.

  It was Friday 16 March. I had watched Hellas training under heavy rain. Again! Having dried off back at the office, I was surfing through a different kind of liquid, a deluge of insults between Vicenza and Verona fans on The Wall. As ever, what strikes you about these messages is the sense of a shared identity in a centuries-old antagonism. ‘Dear Vicentino,’ reads one message, ‘the only thing you have to be proud of is the hate you feel for us … without us you wouldn’t exist.’

  How reassuring it all is! The teams and their fans, the towns and their stadiums, their women, monuments and restaurants are all interminably compared and contrasted. The Vicentini are happy to sign themselves Lane, Wools, in remembrance of their industrial past. The Veronese never forget to condemn them as magnagati, cat-eaters, in remembrance of their previous poverty. ‘We have the finer architectural tradition.’ ‘We have a bigger centre and better entertainments.’ And all the while the validity of furiously opposed visions of each other is allowed to hang on the result of Sunday’s game. The game will decide which town is superior. ‘Ready to lose the nth derby, arseholes?’ writes a Vicentino. ‘Poor dreamers, for you SERIEEEEE BBBBBBBBBBB HELLAS = NAZI.’

  Then right in the middle of the most animated back and forth, a sad and unexpected truth emerges. Not everybody involved in this culture war will be able to come to the game. A new contributor, who signs himself Qwerty, confesses that his girlfriend ‘doesn’t let him come to the stadium’. She has other ways of spending Sunday. Football and erotic experience may have much in common, but they rarely mix. Qwerty is facing a major conflict of allegiance. ‘Dear Aiooogalapagos, Pam, Penn,’ he writes, ‘since it seems there’s just a chance that I’ll make it to the game, tell me where the Più-mati hang out so I can meet you …’

  ‘OK,’ Aiooo replies. ‘Looking down at the field from the top of the curva, move left from the main entrance. Welcome to paradise.’

  But paradise is notoriously hard to get to. Other fans from both sides of the Verona–Vicenza divide break off their insults to help this man on the road to salvation:

  ‘Qwerty, don’t tell me you’re going to miss the derby!!! I left a girlfriend because she wouldn’t let me go and see Verona–Monza, in Serie B … Dio can, show her who’s boss!’

  ‘But Qwerty, how can you let yourself be sodomised like this? It’s Verona–Vicenza, for God’s sake. Shit, it’s just two or three hours, you’re not going to be away all day. Dio bono, I’ve been married four years and was engaged for ten before that and I’ve seen all the games at the Bentegodi, all of them!’

  Qwerty is humbled: ‘Dear Bandito, dear Icio, dear Pam, I’m sure you’re right … but, well, hmm … in any event, you never know, the long work of slow and gradual persuasion continues and I haven’t as yet despaired of achieving positive results (at least she lets me hear Puliero on the radio these days …)’

  Bandito, as his pseudonym suggests, goes more for the fait accompli than the patient negotiation: ‘Listen, Qwerty, on Sunday, you get on your Vespa and head off to the stadium without a word to anybody. You go home at five, and without making any comment you take the lady to AT LEAST THREE SHOPPING CENTRES … You’ll see: next year you’ll be with us in the curva every Sunday, away games included.’

  But that’s a high price to pay: ‘Bandito, shit, not one but three, THREE, shopping centres! I hate the places. Still, I promise I’m doing everything I can to be there. Meantime, I’d like some advice from the Hellas girls, Pam, Cinzia: what about, if, in return for being able to go to the game, I offer, in this order:

  To shave every day (or almost)

  To buy a new shirt or two to replace the worn-out rags I have

  To take her to the lake more often …

  Do you think that will be enough?

  The girls don’t respond. The man signing himself Icio is unimpressed:

  ‘Qwerty, that’s pathetic. All you have to do is look your lady in the eye and tell her that she’s a very special gal, that without her you’d die, that you’d scale K2 for her, that no other woman, repeat, NO OTHER WOMAN is as good as her, that nowadays no other girl, however luscious, so much as turns your head, so absolutely and completely are you pleasured, satisfied and indeed overwhelmed by her vivacious beauty … that for her you would throw yourself from any bridge, parapet or in general high place and that, above all and finally, for her and only for her on Sunday you are going to the stadium to watch THE DERBY!’

  Will Icio’s method work? Does Qwerty have the panache to pull it off? On Friday evening, just before everyone knocks off from t
heir work computers, the discussion is still going on:

  ‘So, Qwerty, are we going to see you Sunday or not?’ It’s Aiooogalapagos.

  ‘Dunno, Aiooo. Hope so. Tonight, I launch the decisive offensive. In any event, looking down at the pitch, I go to my left from the top of the stairs. OK? Presumably I’ll recognise you.’

  ‘No problem. We’re under our banner.’

  So Sunday afternoon, looking down at the pitch, from my position on the east of the curva, I also turn left to where the Più-mati have hung their banner. Is Qwerty there? How many of the thousands of young men milling on the terraces have had to struggle to be at the Bentegodi today? How many will return home to anger and resentment? And how many not present at the stadium today are resentful and angry because this time they were the ones to back down? Didn’t I myself have to tell my wife I was going to write a book about football before my presence at all these games could be agreed?

  Since we’ve arrived very early today, I pop back down the stairway to get myself an espresso in the bar. In the throng of men pushing back and forth in the broad corridor I feel wonderfully at home. People you hardly know salute you. People you’ve never seen exchange a comment on the game. It’s the intimacy of strangers, an experience that makes the web and the stadium so similar. Chatting to a supporter with a stud in his tongue, reading an anonymous message on The Wall, you at once feel an intense complicity, a complicity often directed against those who are most important to you in your life, those who would rather you didn’t come to football games. Is one of these boys Matteo, I wonder, shoving my way to the till? I scan the faces. About a month ago someone started e-mailing me match reports after every game. He has heard I am writing a book. Later he revealed that the season had become so important to him because he was going through a painful break-up with his girlfriend. He signs himself Matteo, though I have no idea if that’s his real name. I have never met him. No doubt he is somewhere down there in the heart of the curva where Qwerty yearns to be. In any event, here is his account – received the same evening – of this most crucial of all derbies.