by Tim Parks
‘We’re not getting a season ticket next year,’ I told Michele. ‘This is it. It’s over. I can’t face another season in Serie B.’
My son was gloomy, watching his feet as he scuffed up the glossy match programme in disgust.
‘We can fly to Old Trafford twice a year,’ I said. ‘Why not? I was born in Manchester,’ I insisted. ‘I saw my first games at Old Trafford. It’s perfectly acceptable for me to support United.’
‘But I was born here,’ he said. He ground the programme hard into the cement. ‘And the team stinks.’
Everybody around us on the terraces agreed that we were going down. There was resignation in the air. Why weren’t they angrier? I wondered. Why weren’t they furious? We were going down, the pessimist know-all who always sits in front of us was explaining resignedly, because the owner Pastorello was no more than a businessman. The man had no passion for the team. He wouldn’t spend money on it. He was tight. He didn’t have Verona in his blood. He didn’t suffer when Verona lost. What had he done when we started losing? What had he done? He had found a player on loan again. On loan! A player, what’s more, from the only team that was below us, Cagliari. Could you believe that, a player not even Cagliari wanted to put on the field. His name was Morfeo. ‘We’re second from bottom and he gets hold of a player not even the bottom team will field! What can Morfeo do? It’s incredible,’ the pessimist said, but without anger. ‘What has he done in the first half? Nothing. Because he can’t do anything. We’re going down,’ he said. ‘Next week Milan away. We’re finished.’
The team had left the field to whistles. They returned to the kind of cheers and chants that are shouted against the grain through gritted teeth. Duty chants. We have to support you, we’re going to support you, but you don’t fucking-well deserve it. Then another chant began, to the tune of a clock chiming the hour: ‘Pas-to-rel-lo vaf-fan-cu-lo.’ ‘Morfeo’s useless,’ the guy in front kept saying. ‘He’s too small; he’s too slight. He tries to do everything himself. Not even Cagliari would play him. What did we get Morfeo for?’
Within five minutes Morfeo had scored. Then he set up the equaliser from a beautifully placed free kick. Ten minutes from time, the big Thuram fumbled in the box and we had the winner. In injury time Morfeo struck a bouncing ball from thirty yards and hit the bar. We left the stadium euphoric. We had destroyed Parma. They had been routed, humiliated. Humiliated! What a wonderful word that is when you’re not on the receiving end. The emotion was uncontrollable. We killed them! People were on the edge of tears. My son was shaking his head, endlessly repeating, ‘We did it, we did it, we did it. Siamo grandi. Siamo grandissimi! Great. Truly great.’ Sitting in the car, taking hold of the wheel, I found my hands and wrists were trembling.
‘Unrestrained joy and deep depression always and only occur in one and the same person,’ wrote Schopenhauer, ‘since each provokes the other and both are the result of a great vivacity of spirit.’ Less flatteringly he goes on: ‘Behind any experience of excessive grief or extravagant jubilation, there is always an error of thinking and a false belief.’
In error or not, true or false, I was hooked again. That game did it to me. I was hooked on the team, I was hooked on my son’s response to the team, his home team. And above all I was hooked on the amazing Morfeo. Why had Cagliari let us have him? He was a miracle. And from that day until the end of the season, indeed until today’s game with Bari, Hellas Verona had not lost a single league match. Fifteen games without defeat. In Italy’s Serie A, that’s an amazing achievement. In the growing excitement as we climbed up and up the table, this book was born. A book, for me, has always been a form of defence, I think, against excessive joy, excessive pain, a nosing about a false belief, or something that I would prefer, more positively, to call an illusion. Standing on the terraces in Bari, I tell myself, get ready for it, Tim.
Get ready for what? Nothing. Morfeo is no longer with us. Bar our great Dane in defence, the stars of last season are gone. They are sitting on the benches of Inter, Fiorentina, Parma. Our veteran central defender, Apolloni, is injured. The new trainer, Attilio Perotti, has never coached a Serie A side before. And he’s in his fifties. There’s a bland, too-amiable look about the man. He wears glasses. His chin is weak. He talks about needing time. Time! In the event, he fields a team of humdrum runabouts, busy and dull. A line of four in defence, moving jerkily up and down like a faulty windscreen wiper. A mill of six in midfield, furious and uninspired. And nobody in attack, since, having only bought a centre-forward the day before yesterday, they haven’t even stuck him on the pitch. He won’t know the other guys’ names yet. Needless to say absolutely nothing happens. On either side.
The players run around in the litter. Or rather they fall over in the litter. They are constantly falling over. The referee constantly blows his whistle. Two people go up to head the ball, foul. Someone lifts his leg, foul. Slide-tackle, foul. A total of fifty-nine fouls, tomorrow’s Gazzetta dello Sport will note in its canonical list of statistics. This game is being stopped every ninety-one seconds, for God’s sake. And this is typical of the new-style Italian referee, a great show of authority and severity and very little effort to distinguish between the real foul and the fake fall. The ball strikes Laursen, our Dane, on the elbow, handball. Their goalkeeper stumbles at a corner, foul.
But I should have expected as much. Before the game Captain Leo Colucci, speaking in the local paper, referred to Bari as ‘cattivo’. It’s an impossible word to translate. The dictionary gives ‘bad’, ‘wicked’, ‘evil’. But Colucci doesn’t mean it in a pejorative sense. For he adds, ‘We’ve got to become more “cattivi” ourselves.’ He means hard, tough, smart, fouling when fouling is necessary, falling over whenever the ref will give a foul. To investigate how ‘cattivo’ comes to be used in a positive sense in the particular context of football would be to open up the whole conundrum: is it more important that my team play well, or that they don’t lose? An impossible question. I’m not even going to ask myself: would you mind them losing if only the game was watchable. Of course I’d mind. Meantime, Colucci has a personal investment in cattiveria. He is our one ‘scontrista – the midfield player who determinedly confronts the others, an Ince figure. But then I loved Ince. I love Colucci. I love his spirit. I’ll watch Colucci, I decide. It’s something I always do when the game is dull. I choose a single player and follow him, try to see what he’s up to.
But if only they’d clear the litter, damn it! This is something I find it hard to believe. There are a good two hundred policemen at the game. There was a pre-match parade of junior teams. There are officials and groundsmen galore, and with all these people they haven’t cleared the litter, for the first game of the season, televised nationwide! At least we could look at a nice green pitch.
The game is dull, dull, dull! Not a single incident to describe. This is a game when absolutely nothing is going to happen, I realise. Until what does happen is that quite suddenly I need a shit. It’s infuriating. I need a shit immediately. You travel twelve hours in a coach, your body behaving admirably, you eat and drink judiciously, you congratulate yourself on not feeling that bad despite not having slept all night, you console yourself that if Verona are not doing anything interesting, then neither are Bari, who still, after thirty minutes, haven’t had a single shot on goal, or even remotely around the goal. And just when you’re thinking, I can even enjoy the litter in a way, the way it flutters and mills around, suddenly you need a shit. At once. ‘Terroni di merda,’ the brigate are shouting. Terroni shitheads.
I’m standing just beside the knot of the chorus. Not among them. This is what writers do perhaps. They’re drawn to the energy of groups, then they stand just to one side of them. They never know if they’re saying ‘we’ or ‘they’. It’s an illness.
But now my bowels force me to cross that short space. ‘Where’s the bog?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ‘Where’s the loo?’ ‘No idea.’ I have to walk right through the core of the group and ask a policeman. He
looks at me suspiciously. ‘Underground,’ he says. ‘There’s another flight of stairs when you get to the ground.’ As I head off down the stain he starts to follow me. ‘Per la Madonna,’ I tell him. ‘I just need a shit.’ Convinced, he retreats.
Then I’m halfway down, tackling one huge deserted flight after another, the whole thing open to the desert scrub to the east whence a ferocious wind is clutching at my clothes, when a great roar comes from inside the stadium. Oh no! It can’t be!
Rushing over to the side of the flight I see the first advantage of a stadium designed in segments. Through the gap between one section and the next, through pillars and beams, I have a low view of the field. Verona have a free kick on the edge of the box. The Bari players are protesting furiously. The ref forces them back. Italiano is going to take it. Vincenzo Italiano is our free-kick specialist. Another southerner. Amazing we haven’t sold him. Two minutes fussing over the barrier, while I’m pressing my knees together. Hurry up! Italiano takes his long run up, the shot goes over the bar. And I rush down four more flights of stairs.
For perhaps a thousand spectators there are two Turkish loos with no doors and no paper. But I have my tissues. Though depleted there are just enough. But now the flush doesn’t work. On the wall it says: ‘Verona, you’ll always be Serie B, even when you’re in Serie A.’ A fascinating play, it occurs to me, with the literal and the metaphoric. Hurrying up the stairs, I find a man with a tray of wares and treat myself to a Coke and a bag of crisps. He untwists and keeps the plastic top to the plastic bottle, in case I decide to throw it down among the litter on the pitch. And maybe I would have.
At half-time I chat to the older driver. The younger is sleeping in the coach. He smiles. No, of course he doesn’t mind the insults. He smoothes his big moustache. ‘It’s a job, isn’t it. They’re only playing. Actually, it’s fun. We should be back around three a.m.,’ he reckons, ‘if everyone behaves. Not much to get excited about,’ he says of the game. ‘Unscathed,’ I tell him abruptly. ‘The important thing is to come away unscathed, so we can start the season at home.’ ‘Bomba,’ Fondo screams. ‘On the pitch, there’s a bomba.’ But he’s running out of steam.
Yes, if we come out of it unscathed, it will be OK, I’m telling myself through the second half, honestly one of the most tedious I have witnessed. Seven yellow cards have been shown. Our supposed Romanian genius, Adrian Mutu, is substituted without having done anything. Their supposed boy genius, Cassano, falls over every time he is touched. OK, no emotions, but at least unscathed, I’m thinking, when ten minutes from time the referee gives Bari a penalty.
There are no words for a decision like this. Bari’s winger was crossing from the right, but he hit the ball too hard and the wind carried it high in the air. It presented no danger at all. All the same, the clever Swede Osmanovski attaches his arm to a defender, Marco Cassetti, one of the new arrivals (from Serie C!), pretends to turn and falls over. Perhaps overconscious of those television cameras, desperate to have something happen, knowing that a penalty is never wrong when given to the home side, the unforgivable referee, who has killed the game from beginning to end, whistles. Their great big Swede Andersson sticks the ball straight in the net. The Bari curva goes wild. The brigate erupt.
Now here’s an interesting thing. I am absolutely furious with the referee. I’m screaming myself hoarse shouting abuse at the referee. I can’t believe that not only have I not slept, not only have I breathed smoke all night, not only have I had to shit in a Turkish loo and seen no decent football, but we’re not even going to get away unscathed. I have chosen to write about Hellas Verona F.C. in precisely the year that they’re not only boring, but unlucky. And it’s all the referee’s fault.
But the brigate don’t even seem to have noticed the referee. They are furious with the Bari fans. How can they exult when they haven’t had a single shot on goal all the game, when the penalty was the most obvious of gifts? A number of fans rush past me and throw themselves at the fence. Fondo starts to climb the railing and is pulled back. Someone throws a plastic bottle without its top. At this moment, watching their faces distorted with rage, I feel they really would cause trouble, they wouldn’t hold back if the opportunity for a clash came. But either side of us there are at least thirty empty yards. The police are unimpressed. Then the boys re-group and grimly resume their chanting. ‘Hellas Verona segna per noi.’ Score for us. Please. We’ve come so far.
Surprisingly, the team react. I wouldn’t have thought them capable of it. Suddenly, from nowhere, they have energy, but only eight minutes to do something with it. Substitutions are made. Gilardino, the eighteen-year-old striker, comes on. The coach has balls, I have to admit, to make a decision like that. What a moment to have the boy debut! And he brings on another player, the winger Claudio Ferrarese, a kid I’ve always loved because he can dribble, but a player who somehow never sees more than a few minutes of any game.
We get a corner. Ferrarese’s doing. Another corner. Again Ferrarese. Gilardino is brilliant at holding the ball even with three men on his heels. But they’ll never score, I tell myself. These people should have been brought on earlier. The coach is a fool. We are paying the price for having come and played for a draw, though before the penalty we had come closer to scoring than they had. If there’s one thing in the world that’s unfair, I tell myself, it’s football. We won’t even have a shot! Ten minutes’ furious attacking and not even a shot. It’s a miserable day.
Ferrarese wins another corner. And another. Here it comes. High, oh God, too high. But the wind is against it. The ball suddenly dips into the area. Down it plummets to where the big and totally undistinguished defender Natale Gonnella is loitering on his own. Gonnella is the immature understudy for the injured Apolloni. Has Gonnella ever scored for us? I don’t think so. Without even moving he sticks his foot out and hits the thing first time.
What are the chances, even for the world’s great footballing geniuses, of striking a ball like that accurately on the volley? A high long ball swirling in the wind? What are the chances, having struck it, of its penetrating the twenty players between you and the goal, one of whom, of course, can use his hands? The stadium holds its breath. But there it is. The net lifts. It must have gone in. ‘It’s gone in, Dio boia!’ Gonnella has scored. Gonnella! We’ve done it!
All of a sudden I’m locked in a fierce embrace with someone I’ve never met before. He’s young and drunk and delirious. The brigate run at the fence. ‘Now bang your drum,’ they chant. The Bari end is silent. The ref, I tell myself, has done us a favour. Everybody feels like a million dollars. We’ve had our emotions. And right at the end, with the final whistle, at last it happens: a moment’s contact between fans and team, a moment’s acknowledgment. Big Martin Laursen and Colucci and a couple of the others come over to stand beneath our segment. They wave, way down beneath us in this ridiculously high stadium. The fans yell, clapping their hands above their heads. Everybody is moved, they came to salute us, everybody is proud … and exhausted.
How quiet, how subdued the return trip is! Fondo has come off his high. Slumped in his seat, he sleeps. ‘There’s a bomba,’ someone shouts, right by his ear. He sleeps. I could kill him. In front and behind, two police cars are escorting us. Quite deliberately they are driving slowly so that we will get home even later. Albe sits next to me. He explains the scar on his shoulder. ‘No it wasn’t a fight.’ He laughs. ‘Haven’t you seen? Me? I’m a peace-maker me, Dio boia. I do everything I can to keep the peace, Dio bon. There are people who owe their lives to my peace-making.’
‘Is it true you’re a parroco?’ someone asks me at the first service station stop. For a moment I don’t understand. Parroco is a word I never use. It means parish priest. ‘Someone told me you were a parroco.’
It’s a dapper boy with small dark sunglasses. Behind him a couple of the younger kids are giggling.
‘Are you joking?’
‘Ciao, Parroco,’ someone says. And there it is, I have my nickname. I’
m Parroco, a parish priest. Is it because of my bald spot, I wonder? My father was a clergyman of course. Could it be I am like him in some way? I always thought the business of writing maintained a sort of perverted continuity with Dad’s profession. ‘Did you pray for a miracle, Parroco,’ one of the kids asks. ‘After the penalty?’ ‘I prayed for a fucking lightning bolt to strike the ref.’
Towards midnight, just as I’m nodding off, they begin to wake up. They start to tell jokes. Everybody is cheerful. The team are better than we thought. They reacted. They didn’t take it lying down. ‘Parroco, what do you think of the team? They’re not that bad, are they? You’ll pray for them won’t you, Parroco?’ Cain in particular starts to tell jokes. Mostly silent and lugubrious all the way down, perhaps reflecting on the day when he will be too old for this, too old to defend his place in the curva, he cheers up and starts to tell one joke after another, almost all of them at the expense of homosexuals. Funny, it occurs to me, a group of men embracing each other and sleeping with their heads leaned against each other, telling jokes about homosexuals.
‘So this queer goes to the doctor. Dottore, Dottore, Dio boia, I’ve got this pain in my arse. Dottore, help me, Dio can. Right? So the doctor examines him, sticks his finger up. Can’t feel anything, he says. Further up, Dottore, Dio boia, further up.’ He’s got his whole hand in now.’
Cain’s eyes are shining as he leans into the aisle telling this joke to a group of adolescents with beer cans stuck to their mouths.
‘He’s got his whole hand in, Dio boia. Further up, Dottore, the queer says. He’s got his whole forearm in. Further up, Dottore. Oh, right, there I’ve found something the doctor says. Pull it out, Dio boia, pull it out, Dottore. And the doctor twists and turns. There, got my fingers on it, got it, slowly does it, out it comes, there! And in his hand he’s holding … a white rose! For you! Dottore, the queer says in a drooling voice. For you! For you! Get it, Dio boia! Get it?’ Cain demands. He pushes his red face towards us, his thick lips. ‘The queer said: For you!’ Everybody is laughing their heads off when the coach comes to a sudden stop. In a tunnel.