A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  ‘Do you?’ Scopa insists. ‘I mean, I’d just like to know where I stand. It’s important to know if a relationship has been consummated.’

  She grimaces, but answers cheerfully, ‘Of course.’

  Everybody sighs. ‘And is he a Naples fan? Don’t tell us you’re going to the game?’

  ‘No, he hates football.’

  ‘And of course you support Roma.’

  ‘Juventus,’ she says.

  Now there’s an even louder groan. Everybody is joining in, perhaps a dozen boys, kneeling on their seats in various parts of the carriage.

  ‘A Juventina with a terrone for a boyfriend!’ Could anything be worse?

  ‘Will you think of us when you’re making love this afternoon. Will you think of me?’ Scopa asks.

  Gabriella giggles.

  ‘No really, let me give you my phone number. I know you’re planning to leave him today. You’re planning to leave him, aren’t you? How can you stay with him now you’ve met us? Will you call me?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Gabriella says sweetly. Scopa is a handsome boy.

  Thirty-Five-Year-Old starts to croon. It’s an old song. ‘I don’t mind you seeing others now, but please don’t tell them it was just sex between us.’

  Gabriella giggles. She offers everyone her cigarettes. The perfumed lighter does the rounds.

  ‘I’m the one you’re interested in, aren’t I?’ the older man says.

  The girl has a lovely way of raising one black eyebrow in a pained but at the same time affectionate expression. Our 35-year-old has a rather wasted, morning-after look about him, but a merry sparkle in his eye. ‘You’ve stolen my heart,’ he announces.

  The girl explodes with laughter.

  ‘Really. Tell her it’s true.’ He turns to me. ‘Tell her it’s true, Englishman.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ I assure her. ‘Gabriella, you’re looking at a seriously passionate man.’ And to him: ‘The fact is, she’s never come into contact with the charm and wit of the north before.’

  The journey drags on. Gabriella is chain-smoking. A fat fan appears and very grossly bares his beer belly at her, wobbling it up and down. ‘Oh please,’ she protests. He disappears. Boys are constantly offering her greasy roast chicken and fried mozzarella and salami and ham. At eight in the morning. When she refuses, they beg her to flash her tits. Or just one tit. ‘Oh please, just one. You see we’ve come down with our demands. We’ve halved our request. We’re willing to compromise.’ This might be Umberto Bossi discussing how many ministers the Northern League is going to get in Berlusconi’s new government. ‘Just one.’ Then Nato walks by again. ‘Has she given it away yet? What’s the point of having it if you don’t open your legs, girl.’ He disappears down the train.

  ‘Come on, one little nipple,’ Scopa says. ‘One dark little nipple.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Show us a bra strap then.’

  This, to my surprise, she is willing to do. She reaches inside the blue cardigan and pulls out a silky grey strap. The boys all groan. But now they’ve seen there’s a second light-blue strap. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My slip.’

  ‘Her slip, butei, her slip!’

  ‘Oh, I’m head over heels in love!’ shouts Thirty-Five-Year-Old. He stands up, grabs his knapsack from the luggage rack and produces a Hellas flag. ‘Take it,’ he says. ‘I want to give you this gift.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Take it.’

  Gabriella accepts and folds the thing in her lap.

  ‘You don’t know’, I tell her earnestly, ‘what it means for him to give you that.’

  ‘A piece of my heart,’ he says. ‘My yellow-blue innards.’

  ‘I’ll always cherish it,’ Gabriella says with head cocked on one side. She has pretty incisors.

  ‘I want you to spread it on the bed when you make love this afternoon.’

  She hesitates. ‘I will.’

  ‘And when you come you must shout, “HELLAAAAAAS!” Like that. HELLLLAAAAAAS!’ And all the boys begin to shout, as if in orgasm: HELLLLAAAAAAASSSSSS!!!!

  ‘Go on, say it.’

  ‘Hellas,’ Gabriella says, matter of fact.

  ‘But wouldn’t that be sacrilege,’ someone objects, ‘a Roman Juventina with a terrone on the Hellas flag.’

  ‘Hmm, not in this case,’ Thirty-Five-Year-Old disagrees. ‘Accepting the Hellas flag, Gabriella has become an honorary buteleta.’

  ‘A what?’ It’s a Veronese word.

  ‘A Hellas girl,’ I explain. ‘One of the group.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she smiles.

  Then very unwisely, the boy beside her pulls two sheets of paper from his bag and says, ‘What about these?’ He thrusts them in her hand. It’s pornography downloaded from the web. One page of obscene cartoons and jokes, one page of women masturbating, couples fucking. Immediately Gabriella pushes it away. ‘Don’t be disgusting.’ There’s a brief silence. Then she relents. ‘Say something in dialect,’ she says. ‘See if I understand.’

  Now the boy is embarrassed. Though he speaks dialect all the time, he can’t think what to say. At the very same moment, a squat lad with shaven head and bright black eyes appears and sits on his friend’s lap so that he’s leaning right over the girl and immediately he starts talking to her in the fiercest dialect. His friend with the pornography translates. ‘Mi fai un sesso tremendo,’ the skinhead says. You’re giving me a hell of a hard-on. ‘O per favore! Come on, I’m in love with you. Come on. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Your boyfriend’ll never know. We can go in the toilet.’

  Gabriella giggles. She seems fascinated by his dialect. The charade goes on and on. Now there is another boy sitting on Thirty-Five-Year-Old’s lap. It’s quite a crush. Six of us in a space for four. ‘Won’t you give us your bra. You could slip it off without us seeing your tits. Give us your bra. Please, a token of this meeting. Otherwise it’ll be as if we’d never met. Won’t you show us a nipple?’

  ‘If she did,’ I whisper to Thirty-Five-Year-Old, ‘the boys wouldn’t know what to do.’

  ‘Dead right,’ he laughs. ‘Everybody would be shocked.’ Then sagely he adds, ‘It’s just a joke, so as not to think of the game.’

  At once, there I am, back in the hotel in Lecce with Agnolin explaining that any scurrilous conversation I’ve heard is purely therapeutic.

  ‘Please can I touch your cardigan.’ It’s Scopa. She lets him. A chorus of demands begins:

  ‘Could you just let us see what material your panties are made of?’

  ‘Would you let me touch your earlobe with my little finger?’

  ‘Could I kiss your cheek, please?’

  ‘Verona,’ someone explains to her. ‘Romeo and Juliet. Home of romance. Have you ever been?’

  She hasn’t.

  ‘Oh, you must come to Verona. It’s the most beautiful city in Italy. You wouldn’t believe it. And so clean after the south.’

  There’s a moment’s civic pride.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she says.

  ‘Perhaps we’re being too subtle,’ Scopa reflects for the benefit of his friends. And to Gabriella: ‘I mean, we haven’t touched you or pinched you, have we? I hope you weren’t getting worried. We haven’t done anything we shouldn’t, have we? Not like those southern men who just whip it out and come all over you, don’t they.’

  She’s shaking her head. But she seems nervous now, checking the names of all the stations. It seems she has to get out a stop or two before Naples.

  ‘I bet if you’d known you were going to find us lot on the train, you’d have got on a different carriage wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she smiles wanly. ‘It’s fun.’

  Her handbag trills. It’s her boyfriend calling her mobile. She’s relieved. Thirty-Five-Year-Old tears six inches off the end of a French loaf and jams it on to the top of his plastic flagpole. It’s obscene. Meantime, while she speaks on the phone, all the boys have started singing a popular son
g: ‘Che fretta c’era, maledetta primavera, lo sappiamo io e te.’ What hurry was there, bloody springtime, you and I know.

  ‘Hope you’ve got sponge panties on, otherwise your boyfriend’ll know.’

  She shuts her eyes. She refuses a beer, a leg of chicken, a sandwich, a brigate cap. Then at last it’s her station. She jumps to her feet.

  ‘Please, please take this in remembrance of us.’

  One of the boys with a hedgehog head of hair has put a piece of chicken skin in a small transparent plastic bag. Flustered, Gabriella accepts it. She stumbles over extended legs out of the train. Everybody rushes to the other side of the carriage, falling over the passengers there to pull down the window. They want to see the boyfriend. He isn’t there. Gabriella waves, clutching her flag and her handbag and disappears down the stairs. Someone yells a generic ‘Napoli Napoli vaffanculo’ and then it’s all over.

  ‘So,’ I put it to Scopa, ‘so, imagine you have to choose: you can either have a night with Gabriella, and Verona lose, or no Gabriella and Verona win. What do you go for?’

  Scopa shakes his head at the stupidity of this question. ‘Verona have to win today,’ he says. ‘We have to. There are plenty of Gabriellas, but only one Hellas Verona.’

  ‘Abandon all hope …’

  Yesterday I consulted the Tarot cards and alas they didn’t have anything good to say about tomorrow’s game. Napoli are going to beat us two–nil … FORZA HELLAS!!! ALONE AGAINST FATE!!!!

  Piotre

  HOWEVER FEW OF us there are, they are always there waiting for us. However hot the weather, they are always dressed the same way: the black boots, the black bulky trousers, the belt with the holster and gun, the heavy black jacket, bursting with pockets, the blue riot helmet with Perspex visa. And however calm we are, however relaxed, or sometimes despondent, they always have their truncheons in their hands, tightly gripped. Perspiring abundantly in the suffocating heat of Napoli Centrale, one holds a tear-gas launcher on his arm. Another raises his video camera to follow every move we make. Walking down the platform, the brigate are singing, ‘Pizza quà, pizza là, Napoli va a cagà!’ Pizza here, pizza there. Napoli piss off.

  We’re taken to a side-entrance to be frisked. ‘No flagpoles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard. No flagpoles.’

  ‘But we brought them on purpose. It’s a choreography for the team.’

  ‘Crap. You’ve only come here to cause trouble.’

  ‘That’s not true. We’re here for the team.’

  ‘Crap.’

  Thus the head of the police to Spada. We’re obliged to strip our flags from our poles and chuck the latter in a pile in a filthy corner.

  ‘They’re potential weapons.’

  ‘No, they’re not. We had them made specially thin so they couldn’t hurt anyone. Look!’

  Spada takes a pole and bends it. It folds like polythene.

  ‘No poles, you’ve only come to cause trouble.’

  There are about thirty policemen. My bag is opened. I have a bottle of mineral water. The policeman pulls it out, removes the plastic top and thrusts it back in my hand.

  ‘But I need the water!’ It’s ten in the morning. It’s a hot day.

  ‘You can carry it open. A bottle-top is a potential weapon.’

  Spada is despairing over his flagpoles. Somebody starts up a chant, ‘Teròn, teròn, teròn è uno solo, si chiama San Gennaro ed è un vero teròn.’ There’s only one terrone, San Gennaro, Napoli’s patron saint. Perhaps one has to have lived in Italy some time to appreciate how offensive this is. Some of the boys tell the culprit to leave off.

  ‘What you could do,’ I suggest to the policeman, ‘is take the flagpoles to the game in the police van and give them to us when we’re already in the stadium and can’t hurt anyone. Then we give them back when we leave.’

  The policeman hesitates. Spada insists, ‘What can possibly go wrong with that? We had them specially made to fare bella figura at the stadium.’

  ‘OK.’

  So we go back to the pile in the corner, get the flagpoles and start loading them up in the police trucks. The policemen still frisking the last few butei are confused by this change of plan.

  Then, exactly as we pile into the two buses waiting in the filthy little piazza at the station’s back entrance, a group of thirty or so young men appear from behind parked cars hurling cobblestones. Two windows smash. Someone goes down in the corridor struck from behind. Then about five rockets are fired. They are big red fireworks, perhaps flares, aimed to pass through the broken windows. They miss, sizzling away over the bus. The butei rush to the door to get out and face their assailants. The police block them. They are banging with their truncheons on the driver’s cabin. ‘Drive! Go!’ The bus accelerates away from the scene. The police make no attempt to follow the vandals. Nor do they use their tear-gas. ‘Why not?’ The boys are incensed. They’ve been frisked, then immediately attacked. ‘Oh if only I had my plastic bottle-top to throw,’ someone mocks. ‘That’d scare them.’

  But there is always one friendly policeman. This seems to be a law of group dynamics. I remember a very chatty, ordinary man on the edge of the scuffles in Vicenza; a matey wit with a riot shield on the tube in Milan. Today it’s the officer with the tear-gas launcher. He sits down by the smashed window, weapon pointing out at the street in case of further trouble. He shows us how it works, where the canister is loaded, how you fire. ‘Go on, go on, shoot, shoot!’ the butei laugh. ‘Those guys over there. Go on.’ The policeman grins and points, doesn’t shoot. ‘We don’t go after the hooligans in Naples’, he says, referring to the incident of a few minutes before, ‘because we’re afraid they might have guns.’

  It was at this point that the day began to take on a seriously Dantesque quality. Naples is not a big town. From the station to the stadium can’t be more than five or six kilometres. But the packed bus contrives to take half an hour, setting out on a stretch of autostrada. Instead of the Naples I know I see a group of commercial tower blocks a couple of miles away on our left. After twenty minutes they are still there, still a couple of miles away on our left, but now we are seeing them from the other side. We’re making a huge circle. On each side of the bus, police vans have their lights flashing. Below the elevated road are the squalid suburbs, the abandoned factories, the seedy tenements. In a street of broken asphalt a dozen dogs are fighting over scattered garbage. ‘This is the south,’ the man beside me is muttering. ‘What shit!’ It is one of the lovely ambiguities of the brigate that though they infallibly leave behind a litter of beer cans and greasy paper, they are nevertheless very sensitive to urban decline. One suspects that at home they have a wastepaper basket in every room and always clean up the bathroom after themselves.

  ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ somebody demands.

  Having taken us right round the city, we are unloaded and pushed through a rusty gate into a desolate yard. I look up to find the stadium but it isn’t there. There are crumbling brick walls and what looks like a ruined warehouse. Weeds are flourishing in the gravel.

  ‘Where’s the bathroom?’

  ‘There is no bathroom. You can piss in the grass.’

  ‘I need a shit.’ The policeman shrugs his shoulders. Their boss promises that soon a mobile kiosk of some kind will materialise to sell us food and drink. We haven’t had access to any kind of bar or shop since ten yesterday evening. The kiosk doesn’t materialise. The grass has been abundantly pissed in by others before us. We are going to be in this yard under a sultry sky and thirty-degree heat for at least three hours. People mill. They try to arrange a game of football with newspapers wrapped tight in a flag. It doesn’t work. We can’t get involved. Everybody’s tense. Verona are surely going down if they don’t win this one. They stretch on the ground. After a while people begin to accuse each other of farting. ‘Oh disgusting.’ ‘Dio boia.’ ‘Oh gross, Dio can.’ But then we discover that the smell is coming from a drain a few yards from where we’r
e sitting. Everybody jumps up. ‘What filth, what shit the south!’ We’re like a group of sinners arriving in hell and finding it doesn’t have adequate sanitary services. Perhaps hell, it occurs to me, will be the ultimate away game, an interminable wait for a match that never begins in the circle of some infernal stadium, tormented by devils in the shape of policemen and opposing fans.

  Finally we’re piled back into the bus, unloaded at the stadium and rushed into the gates past a hostile crowd, the police shrieking and shoving us from behind as if trying to get a group of paedophiles past an enraged lynching party. In the stadium we are allotted a low corner-segment, safely segregated and hung round with nets to prevent any projectiles from going in or out. The famous San Paolo is a huge, old-fashioned, grey cement bowl. To greet us is a banner: ‘VERONESE MAIALE: L’AFTA IL TUO VERO RIVALE.’ Veronese Pig – foot-and-mouth the match for you. There’s still an hour to wait.

  After a few brave choruses, it’s unusually quiet. Forza sits on his own and stares. Stefano sits on his own, his head in his hands. This is the crunch game. An unusual number of people find they need a shit. There’s only one toilet with a door that doesn’t lock, a flush that doesn’t work and no paper. As always, people ask me if I have tissues. I do. When eventually I get to use the place myself it’s filthy. A policeman comes to check on me while I’m performing. Is he worried I’m vandalising the place? Or is it more likely that I’m committing suicide?

  At least the pitch is in good condition. At last the players come out. The Neapolitans perform the ritual hanging of a blue-and-yellow manikin from the parapet of their curva. The brigate give them the ironic slow handclap. The game begins.

  Verona are at full strength today. So no excuses. Seric seems to be back for good now, deservedly so. He’s feisty in defence, confident when he pushes forward. Italiano is there too. Would that Perotti had settled on his strongest team some time ago. In any event, Verona attack. For a while they look better than Napoli, who are muddled and frequently whistled by their own fans. On the break Bonazzoli beats their keeper to a bouncing ball, and tips it over his head. It lands on the top of the crossbar. At a corner Apolloni is left on his own to head for goal. He heads wide. At another corner Laursen heads on target. Excellent save from Fontana. In the forty-second minute, with their first real shot of the game, Napoli score. Verona try to hit back, but they are losing their nerve. Things are going wrong too often. For the whole second half they push forward, but ever more raggedly. Apolloni again finds himself alone with a cross to head in. Again he heads wide. I remember the boy who consulted his tarot. Hellas, alone against fate. In the eighty-second minute Laursen makes a careless back pass to Ferron, the young striker Mauri slips in and scores. Two–nil, as predicted.