A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  So, I left home just before two nourishing within me the firm conviction that one way or another, however tough it might be, I would be bringing home the three points. The pressure rose of course during the long wait, the long back and forth of the players warming up for the game – and the nice thing at this point is to enjoy yourself with your friends trying to see which eleven are going to start the game. Beppe Colucci is there but not Italiano. That was a surprise. Fucking Perotti. Camoranesi comes in and someone next to me starts waving an Argentinian flag.

  In the event, Camo is the one who gives us the biggest buzz in the first half. He runs, pushes, blocks, searches out Bona way up front. Giant Bona shoots, Sterchele punches it away as best he can. Verona step on the gas, maximum acceleration, we’re looking great, Laursen is everywhere. At one point he gets four headers in a row, beating Vicenza’s strikers in the air every time. NO WAY THROUGH. Vicenza are losing hope. But we still haven’t scored. Captain Leo heads over the bar, Mutu shoots past the post. IT’S NOT ENOUGH.

  Half-time. The two curve glower at each other, insult each other. We have a banner that says: ‘Watch out for spongiform cat disease.’ And then another with a Whiskas advertisement.

  Second half begins as a bit of a mess. We can’t keep up the pressure. Then Camoranesi invents a long through ball, as ever for Bonazzoli. Bona hasn’t been playing well recently, certainly he hasn’t looked that good today, but he’s got grit and to spare. Left-back Cardone makes to block him. Bona leans on him a bit, but if you ask me it’s mainly the defender who falls over on his own, looking for a foul. Fool! The referee doesn’t blow. Sterchele gets a foot to the shot but the ball goes straight back to Bona and he shoots into the bottom corner. GOAL!

  Mad run to celebrate under the triumphant curva. General delirium, inevitable yellow card for leaving the field of play. Doesn’t matter. Calm down. Hold on. Fortunately the red-and-whites are mediocre. It’s us on the attack again. Mutu goes down (oh that knee! Stretchered off, we’ll hear the worst during the week), Italiano takes his place, then Cossato comes in for Bona looking more than ever like a growling dog.

  Five minutes’ injury time and at last the suffering is over. I’m clapping, I’m happy, I’m shouting, we’re that bit nearer to saving ourselves. Napoli have drawn, Brescia have lost, Lady Luck is beginning to smile on us at last. In my mind I’m flicking through the calendar, I’m thinking about the two tough games ahead, Rome away, Juve at home. There’s all week to wait. Tension. League tables, calculations. If we beat Brescia away, if we get a result with Fiorentina and Lecce at home, and then down in Naples we could always snatch a … The fan in stand-by mode. Not the best feeling in the world. All the same, two points up on the fourth from bottom, I can sleep a little more soundly now.

  So, last night, to celebrate I opened a bottle of excellent Marzemino, the wine Mozart’s Don Giovanni celebrates. May the celestial gods come to our aid. But for the moment, with Horace, ‘Nunc est bibendum’. Ciao, Tim!

  Poor Matteo, every time Verona win he feels better about leaving his girlfriend; every time they lose, it’s more of a catastrophe. But what about Qwerty? Monday morning, nine a.m. on the nail, he sends his first message to The Wall:

  ‘Morning all … ciao Pam, ciao Aiooo, great Monday, what else can one say?’

  Pam is furious: ‘Qwerty, I shouldn’t even speak to you after the way you let us down yesterday … still, I imagine that your punishment (nice afternoon with the radio?) was exemplary. Ever and only Hellas, everything else … your girlfriend!’

  So they didn’t meet. But that doesn’t mean Qwerty wasn’t there.

  ‘Pam … if I’m not much mistaken I was actually watching the game about five metres from you … oh yes … after long negotiation, permission granted and Qwerty all present and incorrect. Don’t believe me? Want me to describe the girl I reckon was you?’

  It’s the worst thing he could have said.

  ‘Qwerty, aside from the fact that, no, I don’t believe you, even if you were at the game, you’re a shit!!! You didn’t come and speak to us. Why not? Choose from the four following options:

  You are ashamed of us.

  You are ashamed of yourself.

  You weren’t there.

  You don’t exist.’

  For my own money, the explanation is that Qwerty only got his permission by convincing his girlfriend that it would be an interesting experience for her too. Once in the stadium he feared she might grow suspicious if he tried to introduce her to the blonde and attractive Pam, always prominent at the heart of the Più-mati. Or perhaps having read the fierce messages of McDan and Cris@do-I-bother-anyone, he was afraid they might be beyond the pale and shock his precious partner. While I love to see girls at the stadium, my feeling is that it’s always a mistake to take a girlfriend you care about unless she would have gone without you. At the game, the fan wants to be Mr Hyde, not the respectable Dr Jekyll, and this can be hard for a non-footballing partner to take. No doubt Qwerty spent the whole game being too respectable, wishing he could cross those five metres to the Più-mati and roar.

  CD Rom

  Watch out, Roma! On Sunday we’re going to steal the Coliseum …

  Il Bandito

  IN EARLY APRIL I sat on a thesis commission in Milan where four or five graduating students presented theses on the CD Rom as a new medium for narrative. The students, for the most part pretty young women, are excited about CD Roms. Perhaps they imagine that the essential nature of storytelling has changed, and with it the balance of power between themselves and the older generation. ‘The simultaneous deployment of text, picture and sound together with the interactive nature of the medium make it at once more involving and more intense than traditional forms of text-bound expression.’ So reads a typical conclusion.

  I am sceptical, but a little nervous too. And as the tedious afternoon drifts by, it dawns on me: Tim, you should have presented this book as a CD Rom! Football is a game after all, why not make one’s approach to it a form of play? I sit there, fiddling with my pencil, listening to the eager student, my mind suddenly thronged with all the ways I could have engaged people had I gone for the CD Rom: pictures of the curva seething with banners, highlights from the games, endless links between cities, teams, sports, politics. Just to think of the rich back and forth of all those connections is quite intoxicating. And there would be sound too: the witty slogans, the curva in full song, the wild roar when the ball balloons the net. I can already see the reader opening the hypertext map, skimming through a list of games, the names of the players, who was on the bench at Delle Alpi, cam-shots in the Zanzibar bus. Damn. I’ve made a great bollocks of it all. This book should be a CD Rom!

  One of the characteristics of the Italian thesis commission is that if the student presenting his or her work is not your student, you are free to ignore the presentation, to read a book perhaps, write a letter, mark exams. Some professors even chat to each other. Sotto voce of course. In this regard, being a professor on a thesis commission is altogether less demanding than, say, being a linesman in the Stadio Olimpico.

  Linesmen!

  Sitting in the theatrical professorial gown that establishes my role, I feel my body temperature rise. Linesmen! If I had written this story on CD Rom, I tell myself, a click on the entry ‘Linesmen’ would have taken the reader straight to 1 April, April Fools’ Day, straight to the magnificent Olimpico, and the fifty-fifth minute …

  While the girl defending her thesis with microphone and mineral water speaks of ‘the new parameters that will have to be developed if we are to offer adequate criticism of hyperfiction’, I rapidly jot down all the links that would take us to last week’s game in Rome.

  Tickets: I remember opening my wallet on the Thursday or Friday and experiencing a quiet surge of contentment on finding that stiff pink-and-red ticket snuggled there among the dwindling bank-notes: ‘AS Roma vs Verona, Stadio Olimpico, Settore Ospiti.’ Yes, just possessing a ticket – this will have to be said somewhere, w
hether in book or CD – makes the world a better place and myself a calmer person. There it is. Safe in my wallet. It can’t be taken away from me. I’m sure all fans feel this: the immense reassurance of the ticket bought!

  ‘Police’ might be another important link. I am writing rapidly now as the student expounds on the CD Rom’s use of ‘cognitive space and symbolic metaphor’. Or again, ‘Supporters’ clubs’. On Saturday evening, 31 March, just as my train was pulling into Roma Termini, I received an SMS on my telefonino. ‘Il Lupi Scaligeri request the honour of a drink with Il Parroco [my nickname has not only stuck but travelled] on the evening before this historic encounter.’ Il lupo, the wolf, is the Roman animal par excellence, the beast that suckled Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars. The Lupi Scaligeri are a small (very small!) group of Roman citizens who support Hellas Verona. ‘I don’t believe it,’ the passenger beside me shook his head when I explained. We had fallen into a conversation. ‘Why would they do that?’ You can see his point. It would be like someone born and bred near Stamford Bridge supporting Burnley.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ I demanded towards midnight. I was getting excited, what with the beer and the ticket in my pocket. ‘You grew up here,’ I said belligerently, ‘you still live here. In Rome. Support Roma, for God’s sake! Or at least Lazio. Why not?’

  The Lupi’s answers were unsatisfactory. ‘My aunt is Veronese,’ says a small barrel-chested man. ‘We went on a school journey to Verona in my teens,’ says another. And one very quiet fellow could offer no explanation at all. It then emerged that he works as a parliamentary reporter for the tiny and attractively subversive Radio Radicale; and even later it came out that he is a signed-up member of the stuffy and now almost extinct Partito Repubblicano. This lucid, intelligent man, I realised, as he talked about Radio Radicale and Il Partito Repubblicano, has constructed his whole identity around the support of minuscule but embattled minorities and manifestly lost causes. What other connection could there be between the notoriously right-wing Brigate Gialloblù and the infamously left-wing Radicali, or for that matter the austere and obsolete Repubblicani?

  ‘Ragazzi,’ I finally put it to this bizarre fragment of footballing fandom, ‘supporting Hellas in the eternal city of Rome is a pathology. You guys have big personality problems. In the powerful centre of empire, you hunger for provincial martyrdom. You’re sick!’ And all the Lupi Scaligeri nodded eagerly and laughed and raised their glasses and together we cried, ‘Forza Hellas! Forza gialloblù!’

  The presidente of the thesis commission raised her eyes and looked from one side to the other along the row of distracted professors. ‘So,’ she was saying, ‘if none of my colleagues has any further questions, la signorina may retire while we discuss her presentation.’

  This passing invitation to those not directly involved in a thesis to make some comment upon it is the merest formality, not unlike the clergyman’s ‘If any man can show just cause or impediment …’ No one ever intervenes. Why should we? We don’t want to upset the tutor involved. We don’t want to pester a student who is about to be given her degree. Above all, we don’t want to be in this room a moment longer than is necessary. But today, after what was now the third or fourth eulogy to the CD Rom as the future of narrative, and perhaps precisely because I had become so distracted with the notes I was making, I suddenly found myself intervening:

  ‘Er, Signorina, you have mentioned that the CD Rom brings the user or consumer closer to reality because it involves the simultaneous use of various media.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  My colleagues were open-mouthed.

  ‘You have also suggested the superiority of the non-linear and interactive nature of the medium to the tedious and obsolete linear succession of the pages in a book, pages that the reader is obliged to take or leave, as they come.’

  ‘That’s, right.’

  ‘I was just wondering’ – I toyed with my notes – ‘whether perhaps it wasn’t precisely this linearity, this succumbing to the sequence of events that brings written narrative so close to our experience of life, and thus makes it so seductive. In the end, we all find ourselves involved in stories whose ends we cannot know and over which we have little control. We turn the pages in an agony of expectation, wanting to know how things will turn out.’

  The student, a good-looking girl, turned to her thesis tutor with the expression of one who has been betrayed. This question hadn’t been expected. She was unprepared, the way Doardo seemed so unprepared that day against Bari when Ferron was sent off and the boy suddenly found himself facing a penalty beneath the Curva Sud. Doardo just dived to the right and hoped. The girl, whose tutor could help her no more than Perotti on his bench can help his players, fell back on a defensive non-sequitur.

  ‘Obviously, we can’t say that the CD Rom is already superior to the traditional narrative. I mean, it’s in an embryonic stage, we don’t know how the form will develop or what it will lead to. All we can do is wait and see.’

  ‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘The development of the CD Rom is a linear narrative. It unfolds page after page.’

  Rete! Gol!

  When the girl retired, my colleagues evidently thought that I had been aggressive and unkind. Why had I done that? I’d never been so unpleasant before. How could they have known that I had been thinking of the football season, of the terrible fact, as I prepare this book, that I cannot know whether Perotti will be fired or not, or whether Verona will be relegated or not, I can only wait and see.

  If I did the book as a CD Rom, I thought as I hurried away from the university, it would lose the pathos of the sequence. The games come one by one. And then certain people I know would only click on the matches we won and never on the defeats, the way my son now only videos the highlights of Verona’s victories, and refuses to bother with the games we lose. ‘Dad, what’s the point of five minutes of Bonazzoli not putting the ball in the net?’ So I could hardly expect, on 1 April, that he would be recording our performance at the Olimpico. What chance had we got against Roma, the league leaders?

  Again I walked up the Tiber. It had rained only the day before, but this afternoon the light was so bright that the fierce dark of the umbrella pines seemed scissored out of the midday sky, while the Renaissance brickwork and the white stone of the baroque stood out against each other in harsh and beautiful contrast. What a rich scene this is: the hills with their churches and fortresses, the quiet pull of the river, the loud political posters, the vendors selling red-and-yellow hats, scarves, flags, pennants, the swelling crowd drawn with simmering excitement to the great magnet of the stadium. My ticket in my wallet, I was in a reverie of quiet pleasure when all of a sudden a beer bottle struck the pavement beside me. Then another and another. I was under fire.

  This happened round the north side of the stadium. I had been approaching the settore ospiti. Came the blast of a siren. That meant the buses of the Verona fans were approaching. In seconds the innocuous crowd around me had been replaced by a group of a hundred or so Romanisti with scarves tied round their faces and caps pulled down over their eyes.

  The police had sounded their sirens, alerting the Roman welcoming party, but they hadn’t radioed ahead to warn their colleagues to have the big gates into the guest sector opened. Two buses arrived. A group of perhaps forty policemen formed a cordon to defend them. I was no more than two or three yards away, heading for the gate, when the shower of bottles came from behind.

  I was wearing no colours. I have no desire to find out what it is like to be stabbed in the buttocks. But as a result I could not run towards the police and the gate. The men were gripping their truncheons. They wouldn’t understand I was a Hellas fan. Yet I was so close to the gate that I couldn’t run back to the Romanisti. They would know I wasn’t one of them. I decided to stand still.

  It lasted two minutes. The police held their line behind their big riot shields. The gates swung open. The buses, repeatedly hit by cans and bottles, rolled forward to safety. It was
over. Luckily, I hadn’t been hit. I hadn’t even been afraid. That was strange. Then, just as I imagined that we were back to normality – for the Rome fans had begun to disperse – the police ran past me and charged them from behind. They didn’t arrest anyone. They caught two or three and gave them a good beating, and that was that. A routine Sunday afternoon.

  When I think back on this incident – the arrival of the buses, the bottles and beatings – it all seems quite inexplicable. I can’t believe that the police sound their sirens on purpose to generate trouble. Yet that is the effect. I can’t believe that they planned to wait until the Rome fans were dispersing and vulnerable before attacking them. But that’s what they did. And if the Rome fans really wanted to attack the bus, to do serious damage, why didn’t they gather at some other place, the autostrada tollbooth, for example, not the ceremonious gate to the Olimpico.

  No, this is one of those incidents that cannot be explained by assessing the conscious intentions of those involved. You have to look at the end result, the social function. And the result was that the group identities of the Veronese, the Romans and the police were all powerfully reinforced, while adrenaline ran in rivers. Never have I felt more gialloblù than when I got into the stadium that day. Never have I shouted louder, right in the core of the Loma Band. I sang myself hoarse. I remember a chorus of ‘giochiamo con voi’ that lasted at least ten minutes. And when Verona scored – yes, we scored – I was pleased to find myself in a chaos of jumping falling surging bodies. It was the most exciting moment of the season. The whole vast Olimpico, sixty thousand Romanisti with their red-and-yellow scarves, silenced by the tiny figure of Mauro Camoranesi, obliged, in their misery, to listen to five hundred Veronese roaring their scorn.