A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  Italiano laughs. ‘Could be. It was a terrible moment anyhow. And can you believe they complained afterwards and said we’d stolen the game? Did you read the interviews? If I’d come off the pitch after ninety minutes in my own goal-mouth I’d think, well, nil–nil was pretty lucky, and instead they have the courage to go and whine, when a draw was fine for them, it was all they’d come for anyway, but disastrous for us.’

  ‘A draw would be the worst possible result,’ the paper says of the elections. ‘The country needs a government that can govern.’ Not, in short, a replica of the Football Federation. And in the event, we got one. On Friday evening AC Milan beat Inter by an incredible six–nil and by Monday evening it was clear that Berlusconi had scored an equally historic victory in the elections.

  For the record, it should be said that Verona voted solidly for the moderate right. The Lega Nord was way down and the racist Forza Nuova who hand out their leaflets at the Bentegodi polled just 1.5 per cent. So much for the endless drivel the international press writes about my town’s extremism. Now it’s down to Napoli next week for what really will be the final showdown for Hellas. Napoli are equal second-to-bottom with us. This is a game we can win. On the net, someone writes: ‘Great, thank God the election’s over, now we can concentrate on football again. Everybody down to terronia next week and remember: only our hatred will bring us victory!’

  Napoli

  Every day I thank God I’m not a Neapolitan.

  Zeno-for-Hellas.it

  THERE ARE THIRTY-FOUR cantos in Dante’s Inferno and thirty-four games in Italy’s Serie A. At one point I thought of writing a book of thirty-four chapters with an allusion to the corresponding circles of torment in every one. The easy analogy is always seductive. How else would Joyce have got the Aegean so fatuously mixed up with Dublin? But I decided against it. What sense would it make trying to stay in Serie A if it were the inferno? All the same, when it came to the thirty-first game, down in Naples, I couldn’t help remembering that parallel. I looked up Canto 31 and found this quotation: ‘e fu tal ora ch’i’ avrei voluto ir per altra strada.’ ‘and it was then that I wished I had gone by another road.’ This at least was appropriate.

  The road we went was the iron road, the railway. At the training session on the Thursday before the game, I ran into Stefano who always travels with Forza’s group. It was Stefano who gave me the nickname ‘il Parroco’ that night returning from Bari. He agreed that Bonazzoli and Mutu, our only two serious strikers, were entirely alienated from the rest of the group. Our chances of winning were minimal. ‘We don’t travel for the result,’ he said in sharp contrast to the voices all around me. He’s a wry, soft-spoken, contained young man, never without a pair of small square dark glasses, never quite clean-shaven. ‘The rendezvous is at ten-thirty Saturday evening,’ he said, ‘for the eleven o’clock night train. We’re organising things for the booze and the food.’

  At Verona station the ticket offices close at ten-thirty, the automatic distributors were broken. There was no way of buying a ticket. ‘Who needs a ticket, butei? Who needs a ticket? El Pastor will pay! He hasn’t paid a lira for new players so he can’t be short of cash.’

  Stefano, Antonio, the phocomelia case and others of Forza’s group arrived pushing a supermarket trolley stacked with salamis, roast chicken, Parma ham, French bread, beer and a 25-litre canister of Lambrusco. To everybody’s dismay, there were only about a hundred of us. To my surprise, I knew almost everyone. ‘You were at Milan, you were at Vicenza, you were at Bergamo.’ ‘But where’s Albe?’ ‘Can’t make it.’ ‘And Fondo. Where’s Fondo?’ ‘Working.’

  ‘Working?’

  It turns out that Fondo works with handicapped children. Sometimes he has to take them on trips on Sunday. I couldn’t believe it. ‘Fondo, looking after people!’ Fondo who always needed looking after on these trips. ‘Oh Fondo’s good at his job. He’s conscientious. Just that the moment he finishes work he gets blind drunk.’

  ‘And where’s Brillo?’ I asked. It occurred to me that this was the season’s last long trip, and most probably the last trip when the result still mattered. Brillo was the boy who had shrieked at the policemen from the train window leaving Vicenza. I’d got to know him together with this boy Scopa on the terraces at Rome. Scopa was travelling in khaki shorts and a long loose T-shirt. He has a wry sense of humour. ‘Brillo’s with his nonna.’ He looked at me with mock offence. ‘You think Brillo’s a wild boy, don’t you, Englishman?’ ‘He looked pretty wild to me.’ In Rome he had been bare-chested and drunk. ‘Brillo’s nonna is ninety-two. She can’t be left alone and his parents are away for the weekend.’ ‘Poor guy, he must be pissed off.’ ‘Not at all, Brillo loves his nonna.’ Then he said, ‘Ciao nonna! And saluted a woman in her early sixties dressed entirely in gialloblù. This strange, half-witted soul always travels with the brigate when there’s a train laid on. She speaks to no one, watches the game, accepts another defeat and returns. The boys pull her leg. ‘What you doing tonight, nonna? Want to share a compartment?’ Like the church community I grew up in, the brigate are always ready to accept the oddballs, those desperate for a spiritual home. They’re a catholic bunch in the end. The old lady smiles vacantly.

  ‘Your phone, Marco!’ says Stefano. ‘No, it’s yours.’ A constant electronic buzz hangs around the group. People pull out their phones, inspect them and put them away again. ‘Some figa no doubt.’ Meaning skirt. ‘The only skirt ever calls me is my mum,’ Stefano grumbles.

  The order came to move. The police led us through the subway to the platform. Then, climbing on the train among the others in the garish dark, I experienced a strong pulse of emotion. Contrary to all expectations, you have become part of this group, I realised. Or at least you are accepted by them. I shook my head. I don’t know why, but I sensed this acceptance more completely and convincingly tonight than on any other trip. As if to confirm the feeling, even the heads of the Loma Band wandered up and chatted to me in the mill of the train corridor. I had never spoken to them before. ‘We’re not really cattivi,’ the chorus leader I’d been following for months told me. Let’s call him Spada. ‘We shouldn’t be called the Loma Band at all, just that we used to meet in Loma’s restaurant before it closed. We’re just brigate like all the others,’ Spada said.

  Another of the leaden joined us, tall, lumbering, powerful. But he too apparently felt the need for earnest self-examination. ‘Trouble with the brigate’, he said, ‘is that we’ve lost our style. You know. You get people being stupid on their own and getting the public to hate us for nothing. When we do something we should do it together.’

  There was no danger of not being together for the duration of this trip. The railways had segregated two carriages at the end of the train for us. The communicating door to the rest of the train was locked. We settled down with beer and wine and food and the evening began to take on the feel of a slightly extravagant but never outrageous picnic. Singing caught on from one compartment to the next, wine was poured into beer cans, boys rushed out into the corridor to yell improper remarks at girls on provincial stations. Yet I recall not a single act of vandalism directed at the property of Italian State Railways. At most people put their feet up on the seats. Nobody was coked tonight. A tall, bragging clown of a boy, Nato (from Innominato – the unnamed), got into a fight at the station in Bologna and punched a man in the face. The man was kissing his girlfriend goodbye. ‘Go for it, go for it,’ Nato encouraged. ‘Get your hands down her bra. Go on. Get a finger up.’ The couple were amused at first, then the man lost his temper and made the mistake of going to shout at the Veronese. ‘Leave off!’ the boys called from the window. It was too late. Nato punched him and the young lover went down. A posse had to be sent out to drag him back before any serious trouble began. The picnic atmosphere resumed. The old woman drifted aimlessly up and down the corridor in her tattered yellow-blue. She had her things in a small pink backpack like a schoolgirl. ‘Ciao, nonna, want a beer?’

  ‘Oh,
butei, the ticket inspector’s coming.’

  ‘Don’t believe it.’

  The inspector had unlocked the door from the main part of the train and was working his way down the compartments. Nobody had imagined he would have the balls. I was in a compartment with one of Forza’s group at this point, a huge man, Boio, who together with his girlfriend had pulled the seats down into beds and was trying to get some sleep. When the inspector opened the door, Boio lifted a yellow-blue cap from his face, half-opened his eyes, said, ‘Don’t take offence inspector, but the sad truth is we’ve decided not to pay.’ The man nodded. ‘I have to ask of course,’ he said politely. ‘We understand,’ Boio said. ‘It’s your job. Don’t take offence.’ ‘The train was going to go anyway,’ he added to me. ‘All they’ve done is added a couple of carriages. I can’t see why we should pay.’ And from all along the corridor as the man did his futile rounds, people were shouting, ‘Oh, Pastorello will pay.’ And other boys said, ‘I have a ticket, inspector, but I’m not showing it to you, on principle.’ Or more realistically, ‘Inspector, you should have made us pay before getting on, it’s pointless asking us now.’

  When I think of all the trouble I’ve had with inspectors over the years, surly, nit-picking men telling me I’ve forgotten to stamp my ticket, or that I haven’t taken the route indicated, or my Intercity supplement needs to be upgraded for Eurostar, or my Carta Verde isn’t good for the Wednesday afternoon train, it is hard not to feel attracted towards this different approach.

  Then suddenly it was six in the morning – I had actually slept, I have learned how to sleep in impossible, crowded, noisy conditions with people singing and laughing. We were being turfed off the train in Rome. We had to change. People headed down the platform, hoping for a coffee, but the police were there to block us. ‘You can’t leave the platform.’ And we weren’t allowed to take pictures either. ‘Who are you?’ a young policeman asked me. I had just taken a snap of the scene. Seeing the flash, he was seriously hostile. He held me by the wrist, a rather studious-looking boy whom I felt I could easily have dealt with, were he not so secure in his black uniform. ‘Oh, maresciallo, this man’s taking pictures. We’ll have to confiscate that.’ ‘Why? It’s just a picture.’ ‘You’re not supposed to take pictures of the police.’ ‘Who says? Nobody’s behaved badly.’ ‘Give me that camera.’ He was determined to have it. All at once I found I was applying the technique Obi-Wan Kenobi teaches in Star Wars. ‘This isn’t a problem,’ I said. I looked him in the eyes. ‘There’s no problem with my taking photos. You don’t need my camera. It’s just a stupid disposable. Look. Let me keep it.’ He seemed puzzled and his grip on my wrist relaxed. He let me keep it. Some weeks ago I met a photographer from Padova who is suing the police for destroying the film in his Nikon when he was taking pictures of after-game disturbances.

  One speciality of the police is giving contradictory orders. You can’t stand there. You must stand there. You can’t go now. You must go now. They discuss our movements intently on their radios. Apparently it is difficult to get different sections of the police to agree on a line of action. ‘Want some fried mozzarella?’ Scopa offers. He has some very sticky paper in his hands. ‘Not for breakfast, thanks.’ Suddenly four policemen are running up the platform to prevent us from coming into contact with Roma supporters gathering in an area three or four platforms off for their away game with Bari. Around the coffee machine, the boys laugh and clap: ‘Hop hop hop!’ they shout. It’s what gym teachers call out when they’re getting kids to do exercises. In their heavy uniforms, the police officers are already sweating. They grip their truncheons tighter. Now someone’s seen a red-and-yellow flag. ‘Roma merda!’ they begin to chant. Nonna beams vaguely. ‘I saw you at Vicenza,’ I tell her. Right in the middle of the trouble actually. ‘I’ve been following Verona for forty years,’ she says.

  We were supposed to get on the quarter past eight train that stops at Napoli Campi Flegrei not three hundred metres from the San Paolo stadium. But now suddenly there was a change of plan. Coincidenza! Quite unexpectedly we had to get on the quarter past seven local to Napoli Centrale. The advantage no doubt was that the train was waiting there beside us. The local police could wash their hands of us at once. But the guard was already blowing his whistle. The doors were closing. And no segregated carriages had been provided. All of a sudden the notorious Brigate Gialloblù were being hurried on to a packed train where they were actually going to mix with normal people. And not only normal people but even extra-comunitari. It was a startling development.

  Literally pushed through the doors by the police, we filed along the crowded gangways of an open carriage, working our way up the train. ‘Got your passports, have you, gentlemen?’ asks Scopa of a group of Senegalese, ‘your permessi di soggiorno? If not, we know someone who can forge them for you. You can trust us.’ His voice was kind and convincing. ‘No, we’re fine,’ they smiled. ‘We forged passports for Cafu and Veron, you know. No kidding. If you need any help.’ ‘No, really we’re all in order.’ They spoke in rudimentary Italian. Deadpan, Scopa mimicked them. ‘Bravi. Bravissimi. I’m happy for you.’

  Looking vaguely Australian in his short baggy trousers and broad brimmed hat, Scopa was now trapped by a door that kept opening and closing. A bulky blonde Signora appeared, extravagantly perfumed and stylish on this miserable early-morning train. ‘Are Madame’s papers in order?’ Scopa asked politely. ‘Need any help with your permesso di soggiorno?’ She pushed past him angrily. ‘No sense of humour down south.’ He shook his head.

  So much for the terrifying brigate.

  It was a warm, leaden morning. Bare scorched hills rose shapelessly from the deep cutting of the line. The train stopped, started, rattled through tunnels. By a miracle I found a seat at a window opposite a pretty young girl. She was smoking in an absorbed kind of way, an exercise book on her lap, face turned determinedly to the window. Beside me was one of the Loma leaders, Spada, and opposite him one of the younger butei with long black hair bursting out of his brigate cap. Seeing the girl, Scopa stops in the corridor. He flourishes a cigarette. ‘Got a light, signorina?’

  The girl has a floral pink plastic handbag on the floor by her feet. She reaches down, rummages and finds a pink lighter. Scopa takes it and runs the slim cylinder back and forth under his nostrils. He shakes his head. ‘Perfumed,’ he says. ‘It’s too much!’ The girl giggles.

  Suddenly everybody needs a cigarette, everyone is asking for a light, everybody has smelled the girl’s perfumed lighter. ‘Chanel. Fantastic. So delicate!’ Scopa begins his twenty questions. Who, where, when? It seems she’s called Gabriella. ‘That’s a beautiful name. Isn’t that a beautiful name, butei? Gabriella. Can we call you Gabi?’ She’s Roman. She’s nineteen. She studies pedagogy, which means she goes to teacher-training college. As if embarrassed by her childish handwriting, Gabriella puts the exercise book away in her bag.

  Scopa starts getting serious. ‘Could you fancy a guy like me, Gabi? What do you think? I’m carino, aren’t I? Well, just a little bit. Do you think I’m carino? Could you go with a guy like me?’

  Nato appears. There are people who, when travelling in groups on trains, feel the need to work their way endlessly back and forth along the carriages, checking up on all their friends. He has a beer in one hand, a leg of chicken in the other, a flag round his shoulders.

  ‘What have we here?’ He looks at the girl. ‘Hey hey hey hey hey! Is she going to give it to us boys?’ He looks at the others. ‘Is she?’ Then to the girl: ‘What’s the point of having it, if you don’t use it. Open your legs, kid!’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Spada says, annoyed. ‘Don’t be so invasive, for God’s sake.’

  He actually used the word invasive! This crude behaviour in front of a nice young lady isn’t the brigate style he dreams of, the style that has people on The Wall writing: ‘Honour to the butei who went to Naples, honour to the yellow-blue army.’

  ‘Out with those tits, show us those tits,’
shouts Nato. He starts a little chorus frequently sung at the expense of women policemen in the stadium. ‘Fuori le tette.’ Sitting by the window as all the boys join in, I’m getting nervous. I’m wondering how I’ll react if something really unpleasant starts to happen. The girl is now surrounded by a crowd of wild boys. I begin to feel vaguely responsible. But Nato has already lost interest. He’s wandering off. It’s only seven-thirty in the morning after a pretty rough night.

  ‘Could you fancy me?’ Scopa repeats.

  ‘I’m sure you’re very nice. But it’s not the right moment.’

  ‘Oh, so we already have a boyfriend, do we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gabriella is small and very girlish with a denim skirt pulled down to slim, even bony knees, pale, thin calves, white socks and grey gym shoes. Up top she has a pretty blue cardigan open over an impressive and very deliberately exhibited cleavage. Her features are small and neat under a ruffled helmet of black hair, the kind of style one associates with the 1960s. A glint comes into Scopa’s eyes. ‘No, don’t tell. Don’t tell me you’re going down to Naples to see this boyfriend.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh no!’ everybody groans. ‘Butei, she has a terrone for a boyfriend!’

  ‘Leave off,’ Spada mutters.

  ‘Aren’t there enough handsome boys in Rome without going out with a terrone?’

  ‘I fell in love with him,’ she says. ‘He’s very dolce.’

  ‘Do you have sex?’ Scopa asks. ‘Sorry if I seem rather inquisitive.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Spada says. He gets up in disgust and leaves his seat. Immediately it’s taken by one of the others in the group, an older man, in his mid-thirties perhaps, who leans forward and smiles meaningfully.

  ‘Ciao, Gabi! You’re a beautiful girl.’