A Season With Verona

by Tim Parks

  Good, right, resolved. End of problem. I click on the TV and there is Marsiglia, exact antithesis of the bawdy brigate.

  It’s a documentary programme called Sciuscià, produced by that man Michele Santoro, he who sent his cameras up to Verona to capture the Lega at their most xenophobic, only to find that they had cancelled their meeting. A sciuscià is, or was, a Neapolitan urchin who made his pennies shining shoes. The programme, then, a RAI production, which is to say, Italian public TV, is on the side of the poor, or the victim (but in the modern world the poor are always victims, and vice versa). Santoro, robust and jowly, is the implacable champion of the wronged. Which means he is constantly in search of scandal.

  Today’s scandal is the way the city of Verona treated Luis Marsiglia. The programme is called ‘The Liars’. ‘So who was lying?’ the presenter demands. And he means, not Marsiglia, but the Veronese. It’s a fascinating retelling of the story, or rather of the background to the story, since almost nothing is said of Marsiglia’s account of the fake assault on himself, the weeks of false testimony to police and media, etc., etc.. Rather we must understand why an intelligent and sensitive man would resort to such a ruse. Because he was persecuted.

  Marsiglia, it seems, in talking about the Holocaust, offended the extreme and racist Veronese right. They were out for his blood. The claim that Marsiglia was not in possession of a degree was the merest excuse for dumping him. This is demonstrated by the fact that once the Curia had removed him from the Liceo Maffei, where the well-to-do folks go, it was nevertheless willing to have him go on teaching elsewhere. Anyway, the presenter claims, even if Marsiglia didn’t have his degree certificate, he had completed all his studies. And suddenly we are in Uruguay. Public TV has forked out the money to send cameramen, interviewers and producer all the way to South America to interview the one or two ancient priests who were teaching at the Theological College of Montevideo when Marsiglia was there many years ago. They assure the presenter that Marsiglia had studied quite enough to teach religion (though what he actually taught was the Holocaust).

  Hilarious here, for an Englishman lying on his bed after having taught a day at a university in Milan, is the implication that in order to teach anything you merely need to be capable of doing so: a dangerous, laissez-faire notion. Far from it. Actually, you don’t need to be capable at all. To teach you need a certificate. You need a degree. Italians spend half their lives getting certificates, not learning how to do things. The document is crucial.

  Documents! When the programme breaks for ads, I fiddle in my bag, pull out my newspaper and hurry to the sports pages. ‘Documenti falsi!’ is the headline. There is a list of foreign players, mainly South Americans, whose European passports are considered fake. Veron, Recoba, Cafu. Mountains of paper are under scrutiny. Only the official certificate, thoroughly stamped and dated and validated, makes appearance reality in Italy. Life is so evidently without substance that everything must be certified. When the certificate is counterfeit, confusion reigns. Has the whole of Serie A been falsified this year?

  But now the programme has started again. An old friend of Marsiglia’s is introduced as South America’s finest young novelist. I have never heard of him. ‘I will say, brother, welcome back!’ the writer declares of an eventual meeting with the hounded professore. Unaccountably, the famous man hasn’t actually seen Marsiglia yet in the two months he’s been back. But they are the closest of friends. To his credit, Marsiglia himself has refused to be interviewed. He has learned enough about the media to keep away. But we are invited to believe that he is unable to appear before even Sciuscià’s friendly cameras, because so damaged psychologically by the terrible people of Verona. To convince us how terrible they are, we are shown the local bishop saying mass in Latin with a bunch of diehard Catholic traditionalists, a couple of bigots from the Lega Nord and a group of thugs outside a discotheque.

  Only in Italy, it occurs to me later as I settle down to sleep, would a whole city be isolated and stigmatised in this way, as if it were radically different from the cities around it. I can already hear the swelling chorus of complaint that will be filling the Veronese papers and The Wall over the coming days. The brigate, I tell myself, are bound to become involved.

  In an extraordinary couple of pages in his Discourse on the Present State of the Customs of the Italians, Leopardi, in 1828, came to the conclusion that society in Italy, so far as it existed, was above all ‘a school for insult’. ‘In Italy the main and most necessary talent for anyone who wants to engage in conversation is the ability to show through word and gesture every kind of contempt for others, to destroy their self-esteem as completely as possible, to leave them dissatisfied with themselves and consequently with yourself.’

  If I had read this out of context, my first thought would have been that the writer was describing the exchanges between football fans. But Leopardi meant life in general. And sure enough, the day after the Sciuscià programme an interminable slanging match begins. The centre-right mayor of Verona, a lady called Michela Sironi, accuses Santoro of arrogance, bad faith, intellectual dishonesty and prejudice. Santoro says that he is willing to come to Verona to debate the xenophobia issue, but adds, ‘So long as the debate is not in Latin.’ I can hear the fans singing, ‘Can’t understand how the fuck you speak.’ The Church rebuts all the criticism in the programme and invites the Veronese not to pay their TV licence: why should we pay for public TV if the money is spent on insulting us? Inevitably, court cases are begun. It was in this atmosphere, with the city of Verona enjoying an orgy of collective indignation about the way it is being presented in the national press, that Hellas entertained Parma at the Bentegodi on 28 January.

  I Più-mati

  Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo! Oo!

  Ringoboys, Reggina

  IT WAS BEFORE the game with Parma that I discovered that Pietro, who keeps our seats for us, still plays football regularly, well into his thirties, and is in fact president of the football club of the village suburb of San Giovanni Lupatoto. He plays Sunday morning and watches Sunday afternoon. I suggest to him that we do an away game together. He tells me he used to go to lots of away games but has now stopped. ‘Is it family commitments?’ I ask, the common Italian expression for wife trouble. Pietro shakes his head. ‘If you do the away games, it takes you over. You lose a sense of proportion. It fills your whole life. It’s too strong.’

  At once I’m aware that he is describing something I have felt growing in myself, a sense that I am losing control of my thought patterns. My mind is full of chants. I’m constantly whistling the triumphal march of Aïda, ‘Alè, forza Verona alè’ or ‘Guantanamera’, ‘Non si capisce ma come cazzo parlate!’ Even at the breakfast table, even in the corridors at the university. Forza gialloblù, gialloblù, gialloblù, giallobluuuuu! And after every away game the bus rumbles on longer and longer in my head. Stevanin! Stevanin! The bottles clink backwards and forwards on the tidal run of my thoughts. In Italia Hellas! In Europa Hellas! This is it, then, I tell myself, as the players come out of the tunnel, the enchantment the brigate live under: the background noise of the mind is for ever gialloblù.

  The game starts. There are the usual yellow-and-blue smoke-bombs. The bang of a big firework is vastly amplified by the concrete circle of the stadium. Then the ritual insults. Parma have recently fired their manager and Arrigo Sacchi, ex-Milan, ex-national team, has taken over. Sacchi means bags in Italian. ‘Sacchi di merda,’ the crowd sings. Bags of shit. You’re bags of shit. I love it.

  Then comes the one thing that for me always breaks the enchantment. The majestically black Lilian Thuram, French international, European and World champion, touches the ball, and the curva, or a small part of it, begin their monkey grunts. ‘Oo! Oo! Oo!’ The rest of the stadium falls silent. ‘Oo! Oo! Oo!’ A new tension is in the air, corroding the happy spell of the encounter. The crowd know this is trouble. What could more effectively co
nfirm Santoro’s thesis that Verona is a hateful, xenophobic, racist city than a bunch of fans taunting a black? These monkey grunts, I tell myself, will prove that Marsiglia was hounded out of Verona by right-wing barbarians.

  Before the game, all the talk had been of last year’s victory over Parma when Morfeo took us from three–one down to that famous four–three victory. If football is so successful at generating community, it must be because it offers such vivid episodes around which the collective memory can build its myths, and then frequent triggers for recalling them. But no one will ever wish to remember Verona–Parma, 28 January, 2001. Bonazzoli missed an early chance. Ferron was stretchered off after a collision. Doardo once again wasn’t up to it. Parma scored. The racist taunts grew louder. Fifteen minutes into the second half, just when Verona were applying maximum pressure, Anthony Seric made a terrible error. The pitch was again sodden after heavy rain. Running back for a long ball, he slid on the mud and let it slip under a leg. Di Vaio went on to score. Next time Thuram got into the action, the monkey grunts were louder still. Mutu won a penalty, took it himself and hit it over the bar. The grunts were furious. But by now the game was dead. People were already leaving. Needless to say Chievo, with their two black players, had won away.

  Before turning on the TV for ‘Novantesimo minuto’ that evening, I knew that the sanctimonious presenter, Fabrizio Maffei, would make a meal of the affair. I knew he would shake his well-groomed head, and grimace beneath his fashionable glasses, and talk about ‘real’ fans who were only interested in football and those ugly racists who only went to the stadium to insult and knew nothing at all about sport. It’s wonderful how simple the world is to the pious mind. And this unctuous, entirely predictable fellow would then no doubt mention – it has been all over the papers – that when the second half of the season begins, on 11 February, new rules are to come into force allowing the powers-that-be to impose a stadium ban on any club whose fans have indulged in racist chants. Forced to play on neutral ground, Verona, who never win away, will be doomed. In the event, what Maffei actually said, with excited earnestness, was: ‘Let’s hope these new rules are applied rigorously!’

  All this I had expected, but not the suicidal interview that Giambattista Pastorello was at that very moment giving over the phone to a local TV station in Parma. Perhaps because our top scorer Bonazzoli is on loan from Parma, the journalist asked Pastorello if there was any truth in the rumour that Parma wanted to have Bonazzoli back now in exchange for their Cameroon striker, Patrick Mboma. Pastorello replied:

  ‘If I made a swap like that I’d have to go and buy a team in Finland or somewhere: the fans here in Verona would put me on the rack. Add to that that I’d be exchanging Bonazzoli for a coloured player, well, enough said.’

  Within minutes the entire world of sport – the president of the football league, the president of the Italian Olympic confederation – was condemning Verona, condemning Pastorello for his lack of courage in facing the racists. By seven o’clock we even had a strong condemnation from the centre-left Minister of Sport. The smell of elections grows stronger by the hour. Determined to be tougher on racism than even the left, Verona’s Mayor Sironi announces she will definitely close down the stadium if this goes on. The chief public prosecutor Guido Papalia declares that he is considering an investigation into racist crimes at the stadium. Has Pastorello been threatened? he wants to know.

  Next morning pages and pages of the national press are given over to racist Verona – ‘and this less than twenty-four hours after Holocaust Commemoration Day,’ thunders the Gazzetta dello Sport. Small incidents like a drunk driver killing a mother and two children are all but overlooked. It was inevitable. But now events took a surreal twist. Towards ten-thirty on Tuesday morning, I left my dusty office to grab a coffee and check the papers in the local bar. Yet again a whole page was dedicated to the ‘Verona crisis’. In the middle of it all was a small article entitled, ‘In the Curva Sud, brigate in command.’ A subtitle promised: ‘Map of il tifo gialloblù’ – the Verona fans. After a summary history of the famous brigate, the article tells us:

  As well as the brigate in the curva, there are a number of other groups, the most important of which is ‘Gruppo primo Febbraio 1987’ led by Tim Parks, an English writer who has lived for many years on the banks of the Adige. This is a fringe group that broke off from the brigate because it didn’t agree with either its ideology or behaviour. To distinguish themselves, its members abandoned the curva and took over an area at the top of the West Stand.

  Tim Parks! Me! I lead a group of fans. It’s written there in the dreamy rose-pink of the Gazzetta dello Sport. I am an important person in the world of Veronese football, though I have no idea what the significance of 1 February 1987 might be.

  No sooner have I finished reading this news than the mobile is ringing. My wife tells me that three national TV stations have called inviting me to participate in talk-show debates on Verona, football and racism. Naturally, I refuse. ‘But who would have told them such a ridiculous thing?’ Rita asks. ‘It must be a joke.’ All at once it occurs to me: ‘I Più-mati’ – which is to say, The Maddest Ones.

  How can I explain? After La Stampa published my article on the Juventus game in November, after the Arena then followed this up with something particularly inaccurate about me, shortly before Christmas, I put a little note – my first – on The Wall, disclaiming various things they had said and winding up with the obligatory FORZA GIALLOBLÙ. The immediate response was a message of solidarity from Il signor Pennellone (Mr Paintbrush). He was the webmaster, he explained, of Solohellas.net. Only Hellas. I checked it out. The site is a testimony to the lengths people will go to spend absolutely all their time thinking about football. The graphics are rich and jolly, unlike the frozen solemnity of the official site. There are pictures of the fans at all the games. There is a wonderful insulting machine. You type in the name of the object of your contempt, sex, place of birth, and above all football team, after which, at the click of the mouse the software offers a range of insults at once both appropriate and preposterous. Did Leopardi foresee the invention of such a thing? But above all, I found that Solohellas is the spiritual retreat of the most frequent writers to The Wall – Lo Scaligero, McDann, Pam, Paruca (wig), Cris-do-I-bother-anyone, Only-Hellas-I-hate-the-big-teams, Aiooogalapagos, Ash, Alcohol. Here these people hold court in brief and brutal articles on the game, the players, the now-evident national plot to banish Hellas to Serie B and replace the club with Chievo. After a brief exchange of letters, Pennellone invited me to join the group for dinner. ‘We call ourselves I Più-mati,’ he said.

  So it was that 1 found myself standing outside the Bar Bentegodi, opposite the stadium, at nine o’clock of a Friday evening. It was raining again. My book is going to be rained off, I thought. Nobody will believe it can rain so much in Italy. Waiting, I remembered some of the messages these people had written: invitations to storm Hellas headquarters, to burn the players’ cars, to descend on Vicenza and lay waste its ancient centre. I remembered challenges to the fans of rival teams to meet and fight at specific places at specific times. I was a little nervous. And instead the people who turned up were a bunch of regular if oddly heterogeneous folk on a night out. The ferocious Pam in particular, who I had imagined was a man (since Pam isn’t a normal name in Italy, and Pam’s messages are particularly masculine), turned out to be a peroxide blonde in her early thirties with a husky voice and an acid wit. The terrible Alcohol was a sweet if overweight sixteen-year-old. The grim Cris-do-I-bother-anyone was a polite, well-spoken charmer. Pennellone, or Mr Penn, wore a carnival hat with moose antlers and turned out to be an insurance broker.

  I should have expected this. It was all there in the name of the group, which is a play on words, a play between Italian and dialect, between public identity and private delirium. Piumati, in regular Italian, means ‘the feathered ones’. The Solohellas homepage has a yellow-blue feather that flutters down across the screen. To say ‘the ma
ddest ones’ in Italian, you must say: i più matti, with a double t. But in Veronese dialect the double letters are neither pronounced nor written. So to the ear più-mati could be either feathered ones or nutters, either light-hearted sane folks, or ferocious hooligans. In this way the Più-mati flutter between Italian and dialect, between their everyday office identities and their monstrous projections in yellow-blue hyperspace. Like the stadium, the net is a zona franca where one can be anyone and say anything.

  It was through the net that the Più-mati had come together. Of widely different ages, from widely different backgrounds and income brackets, they have three things in common: they are Veronese, they support Hellas, and they never take themselves seriously. It’s a pleasing cocktail. When we staggered out of a hillside trattoria towards one a.m. they invited me to continue the evening in a bar by the lake fifteen miles away. I declined.

  ‘The Più-mati must have done this,’ I told my wife, seeing this bizarre news in the Gazzetta dello Sport: Tim Parks, leader of the 1 February 1987 group. They love to spread silly rumours. The following day, for example, I had a sneaking suspicion that the Più-mati might be behind a letter published in the Arena and quite improbably signed by the ‘Association of Cameroon Students for Hellas’. It was about racism, of course, and Pastorello not being able to sign Mboma because of the brigate. ‘We hope’, the letter finished in perfectly pompous Italian, ‘that soon this outstanding Cameroon player can come and give his contribution to the success of our Hellas Verona.’