A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  Together with the monk he has a couple of ‘experts’ in the studio, most frighteningly the fellow with the thick glasses and flappy ears whose name is Maurizio Mosca. This barrel-chested little Neanderthal is always hunched over his desk in attack position. When not talking, he fiddles in frustration with a pen whose purpose remains obscure to me. Can he write? Does it squirt poisoned ink? But these periods of agitated silence don’t last long. Mosca treats a conversation the way Zidane and Davids handle the midfield. It belongs to him. If he hasn’t been passed the conversational ball, he will simply go out there and grab it. His oratorical talent is to be measured in decibels. One day I suspect they will find he is doped.

  Meantime outside the studio, but grotesquely present on the sort of huge screen Mussolini would have loved, are a few top executives from the major clubs: Moggi from Juventus, Galliani from Milan, Cragnotti junior from Lazio. Why, one wonders, are these presumably intelligent, certainly powerful men going to submit themselves to what is a three-hour (I repeat, three-hour) shouting match about football, a scenario where everything they say will be contradicted before they have said it, with Mosca jumping to his feet and gesticulating wildly and the fatuous Biscardi yelling, ‘No no no, that’s not true!’?

  Why do they do it? ‘Because’, an ex-president of Roma football club eventually explained to me, ‘if you don’t go on these TV shows, they, the TV companies, who after all are football’s paymasters, find ways of making you and your team suffer for it.’ ‘So you act out of fear,’ I asked this once-powerful man. ‘Of course!’ He was dismissive. How foolish of me to ask. Power and fear are part of the same experience. Power is fear of losing power.

  ‘It’s an outrage,’ Mosca is shrieking. His glasses gleam blindly. He and Biscardi are insisting that sports judges should be able to look at TV proof to punish players whose violent actions the referee hasn’t seen. Moggi, the Juventus representative, is complaining that it is always Juventus who are punished, never the others. Is this possible? A youngish and admirably solemn studio audience looks on, chins in cupped hands, brows knitted, as if the outcome of this battle were absolutely essential to them. Where do the television studios find these people? One can only assume that this is the man in the street.

  ‘Just because you see it on television doesn’t mean you actually understand what happens,’ Moggi reasonably remarks. ‘Workable and demonstrably transparent regulations must be put in force,’ he says.

  ‘Transparent’ is an oft-repeated word in the murky world of Serie A.

  ‘Technology!’ Mosca shrieks. ‘You are resisting technology because you’re scared it will interfere with your power! You won’t be able to fix the games!’

  Again and again, while all these men holler at each other and accuse people they refuse to name of seeking to influence the sports judges and referees, the TV viewer is constantly being shown and re-shown three violent incidents, as follows:

  On day 5 of the first half of the championship – 5 November, that is, in the Christian calendar, Roma’s Batistuta is harried by Brescia defender Siviglia in a touch-line situation where nothing particular appears to be at stake; eventually the two go down together; Batistuta reacts to what he considers a foul; there’s a vigorous brawl with kicks and punches; the referee doesn’t even give a yellow card;

  also on day 5, at the Bentegodi, Inter’s Vieri, jumping for the ball, pushes away our Apolloni then very deliberately elbows him in the face; his lip is pouring blood; a foul is given, but no yellow card;

  on day 9 of the championship, 10 December, while Juventus form a wall to deal with an Inter free kick, ugly Montero is seen giving a punch in the side of the head to Di Biagi, who staggers but keeps his feet; the referee doesn’t notice.

  The images are endlessly repeated. The experts yell. Mosca bangs his fist on the table. When he speaks he sprays saliva. The various presidents must be relieved that they are in distant studios. The audience watch solemnly. Just occasionally the camera pans round the panel to bring in Padre Antonio, who smiles on the scene with condescension, twiddling his holy thumbs, presumably waiting for the moment of closure when he will be allowed to assert the superiority of his calendar to theirs.

  I change channel. If this is the level of debate, I tell myself, football will never enchant our whole lives. We will always find ourselves thrown back on such threadbare spells as Easter and Christmas. Of about ten other channels available on the fuzzy set of this cheapest of cheap hotels in central Milan, four are discussing or showing football and three are involved in fortune-telling of one kind or another. There’s a Spanish league game, a discussion with the coach of the team now top of Serie C, and a chat with a referee about his training programme. Meanwhile a woman with a turban does phone-in tarot and Mago Maurizio (mago means wizard) gets in contact with the dead for you.

  Mago Maurizio is far more charming than anyone on the ‘Processo di Biscardi’. Handsome, unshaven, with thick wavy hair and solid square jaw, he smiles seductively at the camera. He is young, wise and psychic, an unbeatable combination. Almost all the callers are women. ‘Can I speak to my brother? He was killed in a car accident.’ Signora Mara is crying. ‘Is it too soon to get in touch with my husband? He died last May.’ This is Signora Assunta. ‘I would like his advice about a problem we’re having with the inheritance.’ ‘His date of birth, please,’ Maurizio asks. He is businesslike and reassuring. ‘Right, good, and now the exact date of death. Thank you.’ How strange that these calendar numbers allow Maurizio to get in touch with the lost spirit at once! As if one were to say: Fabrizio Ferron – first appearance in Serie A day 3 of the Championship 1988, last appearance day 10 … But now I’m suddenly reminded of a large graffito right above the central tunnel that leads out into the heart of the Curva Sud: ‘Oltre la morte!’ it says. ‘Beyond death.’ What can it mean for a football fan to write that?

  I zap back to the ‘Processo di Biscardi’ to find them slow mo-ing Montero’s punch for the thousandth time while off-camera someone is screaming, ‘But this will only lead to more and more players faking and falling down every time anybody touches them.’ This programme, 1 decide, is a trial above all for its audience, like a long and impossibly dull sermon. Why do people subject themselves to these things? But then why do people travel all night in coaches to see their teams lose away? Is it that you can’t convince yourself that something is important unless you suffer for it?

  Zapping back, Mago Maurizio has fallen into a trance and as his eyes gaze blank beyond the tomb his hand is scribbling with insane speed on a block of A4. The letters are huge, the writing aggressive and forward-slanting, not unlike my own. As he does this trick, the portentous kitsch of the Carmina Burana swells up from the background while various telephone numbers flash on and off the screen, exactly as on the telephone sex channels. ‘No waiting!’ it says. ‘24 hours a day.’ Surely not. The boy looks as if he sleeps as well as a footballer. He writes. He tears off sheet after sheet of A4. Signora Assunta’s heavy breathing, perhaps sobs, can be heard in the background. Maurizio’s pen suddenly stops. He looks up and unleashes his most seductive smile. His unshavenness somehow makes this more sincere, more authentic. Then he reads: ‘Know well my dearest one that I bring you joy. The troubles you have been passing through are almost over.’ It’s a formula you get used to if you watch Mago Maurizio for more than ten minutes. It’s as automatic as his writing. If I called and asked him to get in touch with some dead football star to enquire about Verona’s relegation prospects, he would say, ‘Know well, insane fanatic, that I bring you joy. The injury problems that are plaguing Hellas Verona are almost over.’ And he would be right of course: of whom or what, in the end, might it not be said, with a small shift in perspective, that their troubles are almost over? ‘You can also look at life’, Schopenhauer wrote, ‘as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness.’

  Going forward a channel, the disturbance is massive. Valencia have scored. I have to cut out the audio for a
moment. I think it’s Valencia. I couldn’t care less about the Spanish league. There are limits. The goal is being shown again and again. Goals occupy more space than other moments in life. Going back two channels the coach from Serie C has been substituted by a city councillor from the town of Lodi explaining why they are insisting on a referendum about the granting of cheap land to the Muslim community for the building of a mosque. It must be a local channel. First the team, then the councillor. It seems protestors have dumped a ton of pig shit on the proposed site. And how strange, having heard the word moschea – mosque – to think that the loudmouth on the ‘Processo di Biscardi’ is called Mosca, which in Italian means ‘fly’. Certainly he offers the same unprofitable disturbance as the fly buzzing about on your car windscreen. ‘We need more technology,’ the man is still yelling when I zap back to him. ‘More, more, more! There is no reason why we shouldn’t understand everything that happens on a football pitch. Everything.’

  This is Mosca’s style. He stabs his pen at a piece of paper. Perhaps that’s what it’s for. I zap back to compare it with the Mago’s pen and as I do so it occurs to me that his name too is Maurizio. Mosca and the Mago share the same saint’s day, but the latter uses a more impressive pen, a fountain pen. ‘Could you tell me whether my grandson is going to survive?’ asks a quavering voice. ‘He was born last Thursday, two months premature with a hole in his heart.’ Just as people are willing to take their most intense emotions to football, so they will bring their most intimate grief to TV sorcerers. ‘Know well that I bring you joy,’ Mago Maurizio says. What is impressive about him is how, when he goes into trance, he always scribbles in a different style of handwriting, as if there truly were some alien spirit moving his wrist. I don’t think I could do this. ‘Sia serena, Signora Anna.’ Be serene. ‘The boy will live and grow strong.’ ‘May Christmas bring serenity,’ Padre Antonio is saying. At last the ‘Processo’ is over. ‘Your sport is a wonderful thing, but I fear it lacks serenity.’ Paid to yell scandal and goad the big executives into saying something they shouldn’t, Mosca and Biscardi bow their heads in wise agreement. ‘May God bless you all this Christmas season.’ The monkish smile is as empty as the Arctic north.

  I turn off. I will never, I decide, never watch ‘Il Processo di Biscardi’ again. There is a limit to the research one can do for a book. Lying down to sleep it occurs to me that if the world has become a madder and madder mixing of absolutely everything, then it is with the remote control pointing at the TV screen that this becomes most apparent. The remote control, I tell myself, the practice of zapping around dozens of channels, has made it impossible for any one calendar to assert itself. Didn’t somebody send me an e-mail entitled ‘Happy Divali’? Didn’t Lodi’s councillor say we should be more aware of Muslims during Ramadan? Armed, disarmed, by the remote control, it has become impossible to be solemn about the way we fill up time. It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish Christmas from Easter, Spanish teams from Italian, the Panettone from the Colomba. Where once there was rhythm, a dignified division, now there is quantity and noise. Yet at the same time we now feel obliged to appear solemn about everything, so as not to offend those still inexplicably locked into the doomed worlds of old religions, or, even worse, the kind of well-wisher who gave me a 2001 diary where, alongside the saints’ days, are all the UN celebration days: 8 March – women’s rights; 21 March – for the elimination of racism; 23 April – for books and the respect of copyright. Can you imagine? Respect of copyright! If ever there was a spell stillborn, here it is. For myself I keep my Hellas calendar in my wallet. Often I pull it out to reassure myself of the emotions that stretch before me or, just occasionally, to savour again those that stretch behind. But I always feel a bit embarrassed when non-believers see me with my blue-and-yellow calendar. I always pretend football’s a bit of a joke.

  In any event, more or less at the same time as I was pondering these several imponderables in my hotel bed in central Milan, a few hundred yards away a workman spied a brown paper package behind one of the gargoyles on the floodlit façade of the duomo: a bomb. And in the morning, when I turned on the TV for the news, something one does only in hotels, the reaction of the political parties was not unlike the reaction of the executives of the powerful clubs to any proposed change of the rules. ‘I don’t know who did this, but the intention is clearly to damage our cause,’ says one. ‘It’s a right-wing plot to destabilise the country before elections.’ ‘It’s a left-wing plot to give people the impression that the right wing is seeking to destabilise the country before elections.’ At once you sense that no one will ever get to the bottom of this.

  A few days later, on 22 December, San Francesco if you will, a bomb actually did go off, this time outside the offices of the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto down in Rome. ‘This is a pre-election strategy of tension designed to damage the centre parties of the left.’ ‘This is clearly designed to split the centre-right coalition and keep the left in power.’ As I read these statements, I can hear Fondo’s raucous voice: ‘In the election campaign, c’è una bomba!’ And turning, as I always quickly do, to the sports pages, it’s to find that the Football Federation is delaying the start of all the weekend’s pre-Christmas games by fifteen minutes in order to protest against those who threw two Molotov cocktails against the Inter players’ bus after the team went down six-one to Parma in the cup. ‘The players must defend their right to lose!’ the Federation announces. ‘Fuck off,’ someone responds on The Wall. ‘We’re only two points clear of the relegation zone. We can’t fucking-well afford to lose.’

  But however unpromising this attitude, it has to be said that Padre Antonio would have been proud of the Brigate Gialloblù during the away game at Fiorentina on 23 December. It turned out to be exactly the thing we needed to prepare for the serene – that is emotionless – two weeks to come. For the curious thing is that Verona fans, who always insist on shouting and writing ‘soli contro tutti’ (alone against everyone), have a gemellaggio, or twinning, with Fiorentina fans. That is to say, where normally there is the theatre of hatred, here we have a theatre of friendship and even brotherhood. Where normally we shout ‘Juve merda, Vicenza vaffanculo’, today we chant ‘Forza Viola’, for Fiorentina play in purple. And the authorities are aware of this different charade. They know we are friendly. So instead of being kept rigidly separate by lines of riot police, the fans are allowed to mingle freely with each other outside the ground. Little boys run in and out of the crowd, asking if you will swap your Hellas scarf for their Viola scarf. There are smiles and embraces.

  Why? In what way are the people of Florence different from the people of Milan or Bologna? ‘Tradition,’ Beppe tells me. I’m driving down to the game in a minibus with the group who call themselves The Maddest Ones. ‘But when did it start?’ I ask. What’s the story behind it? Nobody knows. Can I shout, ‘Fiorentina vaffanculo’? ‘Not if you don’t want to be lynched.’

  The stadium was freezing. We were herded into the only corner not in the sunshine and obliged to watch the game through a grim cage of Perspex and netting, something even more galling when the fans were so friendly that we might just as well have watched the match holding hands. After an hour’s shivering wait, the players come out on to the field and Fiorentina at once confirm their recent form by creating five scoring chances in the first few minutes, all of which Ferron amazingly saves. I wish Massimo could see him now. I like Ferron. I like his courage, his manly calm, his concentration. I think he’s a great keeper. Again he saves what should surely have been an easy goal. Who knows, perhaps today is going to be the day. But no. To show that we are not short of Christmas spirit, Fillipini, one of the reserves drafted in at the back for the suspended Apolloni, handles the ball for no reason in an empty penalty area. Rigore. One–nil. The stupidest goal of the season so far.

  As the second half opens, Bonazzoli heads against the post. A few moments later we have a promising free kick just inside the Florence half with all players moving upf
ield to put the pressure on. Standing on the ball, the young Marco Cassetti – he who gave away the penalty in Bari – looks around. Is it that his irritatingly long hair gets in his eyes? Why can’t the manager insist that a player get his hair cut? Instead of kicking directly towards goal and the waiting head of Bonazzoli, Cassetti taps the ball sideways across the centre circle to where he imagines Anthony Seric, another rarely seen reserve, is expecting it. He has not seen that Rui Costa is standing between them. And Rui Costa is only one of the world’s fastest and most talented strikers. In a few seconds he and Enrico Chiesa are alone in front of Ferron and this time there is nothing the keeper can do. Cassetti is in tears. I am outraged.

  It is at this point that I am obliged to acknowledge the superiority of the much-maligned brigate to my irretrievably neurotic and rancorous self. While I, in the centre of the crush, was shrieking at the idiot in front of me whose monstrous flag was blocking my vision of our pathetic attempts to equalise, the brigate had already understood that the game was lost and that since this was Christmas and what’s more we were twinned with Fiorentina, we should do our best to put a brave face on it. About fifteen minutes from the end, the game now quite dead, the chant leader shouts through his megaphone: ‘On the count of three, we score.’