A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  Bateson called his book Naven. It was the name of a bizarre series of religious rituals the Iatmul engaged in at regular intervals. Here the normal behaviour pattern was emphatically reversed. The men dressed up as women and vice versa. The women now assumed, with great excitement and relief, extremely aggressive and exhibitionist postures, the men became abject and passive, and even submitted to simulated anal rape. Bateson suspected that it was this release-through-reversal in carefully controlled conditions that allowed the society to remain sane and stable.

  It would be all too easy to see something of the same thing going on at the stadium. Aside from its immigrant population, Verona has the most homogeneous and conservative society imaginable. My children complain that they cannot arrange to see friends on Sunday because they all without exception visit their grandparents. They all go to catechism. ‘Francesco never missed his catechism,’ Totti’s mother announces to the Gazzetta during the European Finals. When each Saturday night brings its frightening death toll on the roads around Verona, people say, ‘But Roberto was always such a careful driver.’ ‘Matteo was a quiet, ordinary boy,’ protest the respectable friends of a young man who has knifed two prostitutes in the back of his car. ‘Perhaps our children have two souls,’ says a father, reacting to the news that his son is among those arrested for disturbances outside the stadium.

  Two weeks after the Vicenza game, in another train, on my own this time, travelling to the game with Juventus, a man comes into my compartment. He has seen the yellow-blue cover of the book I’m reading, Il calcio a Verona. Born and brought up in Trento, but of Veronese parents, this young man follows every Verona away game on his own, being forced to scrounge and beg tickets on arrival, since, by law, tickets for Verona supporters can only be sold in Verona.

  ‘Yes, all my friends are amazed,’ he admits. His name is Mirko. ‘They say, you’re such a calm ordinary bloke. What are you doing messing with the. brigate?’ He admits it’s become a drug. I ask, ‘What about your girlfriend?’ He tells me a sad story. ‘Never again’, he winds up with some bitterness, ‘will I let the need to say I have a woman get in the way of what I really want to do.’ He really wants to go to away games. He wants to stand in the curva. ‘When the chanting begins,’ he laughs, ‘it’s something else, isn’t it? Chi noi siamo!’ Half-humorously he raises a fist in the air.

  But this sort of behaviour is not Naven. Among the Iatmul Indians the assumption of a different role, the extension of normally limited personality in a frenzy of aggression (our young blond boy yelling insults) or an acceptance of humiliation (our policeman) was underwritten by the gods. It was a duty to welcome this invasion of new emotions. An experience of ecstasy was inseparable from an act of faith. It had meaning. Could we ever say the same of the football fan?

  The week after the Vicenza game, Verona were thrashed four–one at home by league leaders Roma – it’s not a match I want to report on – and in the crush on the stairs leaving the ground I spotted Andrea, the man who is selling me a new computer system. ‘How can they play that badly?’ I wrote him an e-mail half in fun, half in desperation. ‘How can they expect us to watch them when they’re so pathetic?’ ‘Hellas is a faith,’ Andrea wrote back at once. ‘You must never ask why.’ During the game, even as we were being thrashed, the fans had sung: ‘Hellas, la nostra unica fede.’ Our only faith. Their arms are raised in the air, their faces bright with worship.

  But just because people use this inflated vocabulary doesn’t mean that football is a faith for them in the way Naven was for the Iatmul. After all, Hellas Verona clearly is a commercial concern and Giambattista Pastorello does well to keep a sharp eye on his wallet. Il calcio a Verona is full of the tales of those who, drunk with dreams of glory, lost the shirts off their backs for the club. ‘I made a mistake after Verona won the scudetto,’ says ruined ex-chairman Chiampan. ‘I should have sold all the big players at once and started from scratch.’

  Preben Elkjaer was no doubt the biggest of those players, the most valuable property. But he wasn’t God. Or if he was, then there’s a vertiginous turnover of deities these days. ‘Frey is God,’ I heard last year. But this particular idol was on loan from Inter. The Iatmul’s divinities were not so easily replaced or traded, their faith not so frequently lost and found; indeed it was probably so solid they didn’t even realise it was a faith at all. They didn’t have to try.

  But most of all, in a ceremony like Naven, or any traditional religious ritual, the complicity of all the participants is total. They know that without the ceremony the world would stop. The Aztec sun would die and fall from heaven if a victim wasn’t sacrificed. The victim knew this and accepted his fate. The killing went ahead uncontested.

  Unfortunately, the policeman at today’s stadium doesn’t see it that way. He’s there to stop two groups of hooligans from tearing each other apart. He doesn’t think of himself as engaged in a ceremony. On the contrary, he probably supports the football federation’s evident desire to discourage fans from coming to away games, to convince them to stay home and dial up the match on the new system that allows you, once you have bought the right equipment, to watch any game you like. Why don’t these idiots stay at home? the policeman is thinking. You can see it in his eyes. Why do they insist on these impossible journeys, this theatre of outrage? ‘Stronzo, pezzo di merda!’ The policeman believes that insults and obscenities are uncivil. He is getting angry. He doesn’t like the idea that in certain situations certain laws are suspended. If he stays put and soaks up the young man’s abuse it’s only because his training tells him that any other approach will lead to havoc.

  Havoc. Football is a hybrid constantly seeking to become something it is not, something pure. Its fans want it to be a faith, they want it to offer that delirium of escape into a different realm of experience. But without a God to underwrite the ceremony, it can never quite become that. Meantime the temple and its owners try to cool the fanatics’ fervour. They know that the game’s bottom line is business, and they would like it to be no more than that: a contest between two groups of young men, on foot, unarmed, for TV rights and cash.

  So however carefully set up, the ceremony at the stadium always risks breaking down. Not knowing quite what football is, the various participants aren’t sure how they should behave. The event can never quite achieve ritual status. The crowd believe in Hellas, but then they don’t believe. They can dream, but they don’t really expect to go to heaven. Alongside the passion there is always irony and ambiguity. ‘O Parroco, have you prayed for our Verona?’ a kid asks me. I recognise a boy from the Bari trip. The one who sat opposite me and munched the endless sandwiches. ‘Sure I’ve prayed,’ I tell him, and we both laugh. The curva raises a forest of arms in adoration, but immediately afterwards we all clap ourselves. We’re clapping our capacity to dream, perhaps. It’s uplifting, but never quite uplifting enough. From time to time something gets out of hand, out of bounds. All ancient religions concur that when a ceremony is profaned and a sacred space invaded, havoc and bloodshed will follow. In football, where the space was never quite sacred anyway and where the ceremony always needs the unlikely alibi of healthy outdoor entertainment, violence is recurrent and probably inevitable.

  At more or less the same time as we were leaving the Bentegodi after our defeat against Roma, a certain Massimiliano Ferrigno, captain of the Serie C team Como, punched Modena player Francesco Bertolotti. The two, once close friends in the same squad, had quarrelled during the game. Ferrigno had been sent off. His team lost. The punch, when he saw his old companion in the dressing-room corridor, was sudden and violent. Bertolotti fell back, banged his head on the floor and did not get up. He is in coma. He may die. Monday’s Arena reported the story here. In a rather larger article complete with colour photo on the front page, the paper reports that, to deal with her fiery temper, Naomi Campbell has taken up boxing.

  And now, only a week after that startling news, in an unrelated incident, a group of Verona fans, including women
and children, were savagely beaten by the police as they left the Stadio delle Alpi in Turin after Hellas’s game with Juventus. There were six arrests. But before we tackle this unhappy incident, let’s read the poem that, along with Il calcio a Verona, I took with me that day in the train to Turin.

  To a Winner with the Ball

  By Giacomo Leopardi, November 1821

  Of glory the face and the jocund voice,

  You must learn, blessed boy,

  And know how much the sweated virtues

  Surpass effeminate indolence. Be alert

  Generous champion (from the swift

  Flood of the years may your skill snatch

  The spoil of your name), be alert and bend

  Your heart to greatness. The echoing

  Arena and the circus, the roaring support

  Of the crowd call you to illustrious deeds.

  Today our dear country is

  Coaching you to repeat the examples of the ancients.

  After this first stanza, I should assure the reader that the original is written in beautifully rhyming verse. But however cumbersome my translation, I think it’s worth looking at the thing. Leopardi’s ball-player throws himself into the game in search of glory, immortality even. The ancients are in the background, though their deeds were of quite a different nature. The crowd urge the player on. Somehow they will share in his achievement. Travelling to Turin 179 Novembers later, I and the man opposite me, his nose now joyously buried in Il calcio a Verona, were certainly hoping to share in Mutu’s glory that afternoon, or Gilardino’s, or more likely our goalkeeper Ferron’s. But at the same time we were eager that Juventus strikers Del Piero and Trezeguet and Zidane be denied glory. We would love for them to leave the pitch humiliated. Sport is a cruel business, as Leopardi’s next, horribly contorted, verse reminds us.

  He did not dip his right hand

  In barbarian blood at Marathon

  Who could look lukewarm at the

  Naked athletes and their arduous trials

  On the Olympian field, or, seeing

  The blessed palm and victor’s crown,

  Not feel his pulse race to emulate.

  In Alpheus, perhaps, the hero who led

  The Greek ensigns and wielded Greek steel

  Amid the Persians, earlier cleansed

  The dusty manes and flanks of the victorious horses,

  So that, tired and terrified, the pale legions

  Fled, and the deep waters of the Euphrates and

  The enslaved shore beyond echoed

  With inconsolable grief.

  This is difficult, isn’t it? Why did Leopardi, who was no fool, make a poem about a ball game so hard that today your average Italian reader needs a crib to approach it? Struggling to translate the thing, some days now after the Juventus game, I begin to suspect that that high poetic tone and extravagantly archaic syntax are partly there to hide the cruelty and pessimism of what the poet is saying. Let’s see if we can gloss.

  Alpheus was the river that flowed by the Olympian fields, home of the Games. Before the battle of Marathon the Greek general looks for inspiration by washing down his horses in the river of athletic achievement. The link between military glory and sporting prowess, between ancients and moderns, is thus established. Meantime, anybody who could be indifferent, the poet tells us, to ball games would also have been useless on the battlefield. The same aspirations are involved.

  But, aside from glory for the winners, what do these aspirations lead to? The immediate result of the Greek success is ‘inconsolable grief’ for the losers. Leopardi, singing of glory, has nothing to say to alleviate the sufferings of those who pay the price of another’s fame, those who face relegation. But when Hellas go to Juventus you have to be prepared to lose. ‘We are not going as sacrificial victims,’ Attilio Perotti tells the newspaper the day before, confirming that this is what everybody believes: we are going as sacrificial victims.

  No comfort for the losers, then. But the poet’s pessimism is only just beginning. In the next verse, read between glances at swamped rice fields between Milan and Turin, Leopardi reveals that it is precisely because he has no religion and believes in nothing at all that he can think winning with the ball is so important. As so often, it’s hard not to see some uneasy relationship between the phenomenon that is modern sport and the decline of religion.

  Shall I call vain what unlocks and stirs

  The hidden sparks of native virtue,

  Reviving in sickly breasts

  The lost fervour of our vital

  Spirit? Since Phoebus first shifted

  His chariot’s sad wheels, has human effort

  Ever been but a game? Is truth any less

  Empty than falsehood? With delightful deceit

  And happy shadow-play, Nature herself came

  To our aid: and now that unhealthy custom

  No longer lays its bait to lure errors of greatness

  People have turned glorious pursuits

  Into bare and humdrum hobbies.

  It’s funny here seeing how the Italian crib (without which I would never have understood those final lines) tones down what Leopardi is saying. ‘Nature comes to our aid’, it explains, ‘by filling the emptiness and meaninglessness of life with delightful fantasies and happy dreams. But because our senseless modern way of living offers no fuel to feed the great illusions of the past, people have transformed the endeavours that once brought glory into squalid, ignoble leisure.’

  This gives the gist, but not the grim grit of it. Leopardi used the word ‘error’. The pursuits that brought glory, the grand illusions of the past – military prowess, artistic endeavour – were in fact errors, because nothing is worth anything at all, nothing was ever any more than a game. What we most admire comes from what is erroneously granted meaning. Or to put it the other way round: football is as meaningful as anything will ever be. So go for it! There is nothing else. Our national sport, in this reading, is the tropical bloom of modern decadence.

  The person capable of swinging from extremes of joy to extremes of depression, Schopenhauer told us, is living in the thrall of an error. The austere German shakes his head in disapproval. But better a thrilling error, the Italian Leopardi had already decided some decades before, or any error at all for that matter, than the truth that the world is a ‘solid nothingness’. Better to kneel before the TV in ecstasy when Scholes scores and bang your forehead against the wall when Kanu equalises, than simply watch a blank screen. All of a sudden you realise that the purpose of any culture is to foster collective self-deceit, to provide an enchantment within which we can live out our thrills and fears in a pageant of colour, to dangle the bait that will lure ‘errors of greatness’, in short, to ‘make us dream’. ‘Fantastic,’ Mirko whispers over a photograph in my book. ‘Do you remember Galderisi?’ ‘Before my time,’ I tell him. ‘Galderisi was a genius,’ he says. If we had Galderisi today we could kill Juve.

  Could we? I’m not convinced. Modern man – this was the conundrum Leopardi endlessly set himself – no longer believing naturally in anything at all, no longer born into a world where illusion is compact and homogeneous (as was Naven for the Iatmul), has to make a big effort to deceive himself consciously, he has to decide to be in error, he has to go in search of illusion, and this is a very tough prospect. Certainly it is a tough prospect to imagine Verona winning in Turin. Turin is hard. All the same I know that when I get into the stadium, when the rousing chants begin, when the players start passing the ball and Verona perhaps hazard a strike on the break, then, foolishly, wonderfully, I will start to hope. ‘Giochiam’ con voi!’ the brigate will sing to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘We’re playing with you!’ It’s easier to believe things when there’s more than one of you at it. Perhaps that is the logic of all religious proselytising. If I can get others to believe, I’ll be more convinced myself. In the station in Verona, as I was buying my ticket for the trip, I noticed a new advertising space. A four-metre-hig
h black pillar had been set up in the middle of the big foyer. In letters the pink of La Gazzetta dello Sport it announced: ‘To the Arena to sing. To the Stadium to Dream.’ Only the combination of place and crowd make a certain mental state possible. ‘Buon viaggio, tifosi gialloblù,’ the ad finished, and underneath. ‘The Gazzetta, your daily pleasure.’

  But before the dream of the stadium or the pleasant after-echo of the daily papers, we still have two stanzas of Leopardi’s nightmare to get through. Here he imagines that if the athletic and military virtù of the past is not recovered then Italy will soon descend into ruin.

  The time may come when herds trample

  The ruins of monumental Italy

  And the seven hills are offended by

  The plough; nor perhaps will the Earth

  Circle the sun many times before

  The fox slinks in our cities and dark woods

  Rustle between once high walls:

  All this if fate does not free perverse minds

  From the fatal forgetfulness of our country’s

  Destiny, if the heavens, made merciful

  By the memory of deeds past, do not snatch

  Our abject people from imminent ruin.

  Leopardi joked in letters to friends that, glancing through the titles of his poems, his father, Monaldo Leopardi, would never have been able to guess what was in them. He was twenty-three when he wrote ‘To a Winner’ and still financially dependent on the right-wing Monaldo who was worried about his eldest son’s revolutionary politics and pessimistic philosophy. On The Wall somebody who signs himself Alcohol remarks ‘thank God Papa thinks I’m using the computer for homework!’

  All the same, reading this odd poem on the train, I’m convinced that Leopardi was trying to talk seriously about sport, or rather about winning. If you can’t, against your better judgment, he seems to be saying, believe in your team, your country, or in fact anything, if you can’t, in essence, be infantile, then it (team, country, whatever) and you yourself may disappear from the face of the earth, for you will be left with no resistance to nothingness.