by Tim Parks
Can there really be a group of Cameroon students who support Hellas Verona? I wondered. Or is someone trying to demonstrate how unfounded and stupid half the things written about sport are? For sports journalism, I realised, as I watched events unfolding the week after the Parma game, is a sort of extreme parody of journalism in general: a clatter of exciting misinformation.
Meanwhile, in the opinion columns and phone-in radio-shows the racist debate rages on. ‘I’m proud to be Nazi,’ one member of the Loma Band phones to say. ‘How the hell can they call me racist,’ Aiooogalapagos writes on The Wall, ‘when I work alongside someone from Vicenza?’ ‘Oh forget politics,’ comes the response. ‘Let’s play, fuck, eat and Forza magica Verona!’
But sadly politics won’t be forgotten. And as the days pass the feeling grows that things are coming to a head. The Hellas fans will be punished, the stadium closed. A man from Channel Five, one of Berlusconi’s TV stations, comes and rings twice on my doorbell. They need to interview me. Then the German national channel arrive. They want to know why I support a racist club. The Germans! My wife tells them all I’m out.
‘The truth is,’ a laconic voice cuts through hyperspace, ‘they don’t want us to stop the monkey grunts. They love calling Verona racist. They want to close the Bentegodi. We crash into Serie B. Chievo come up and replace us: the acceptable face of the Veneto. Butei, when we go into the stadium on 11 February, they’ll be auditioning us for scapegoat.’
The 11 February game is against Bari, who usually field two blacks. The stage is set for a dramatic afternoon.
But before that there is Perugia away and another week of tension.
Puliero
I am a football enthusiast writing from Australia. Who are Verona’s best players at the moment?
Simon Simon, Sydney, Australia
Simon Simon … the best player at the moment is Preben Larsen Elkjaer or Hans Peter Briegel …
[email protected]
‘RETE! GOL! ALÈ Alè Boom Boom Boom! Bravi Ragazzi, Forza Hellas!’
Long before I actually took to going to the Bentegodi, this was the siren shout that tugged at me, that reminded me I had once been a football fanatic and that one day I would have to yield to my baser instincts and head for the stadium again.
‘Alè! Alè! Boom boom boom! Gol!’
The voice came across the air. Rita and I would be walking up on the hills above the city on some crisp cold day, ice on the cypresses, the sun dazzlingly low, when all of a sudden it would explode from around a hairpin, or behind a barn, or within a thicket. Rete!!!!!! An elderly gentleman, perhaps, was holding his fur-coated wife with one arm, while the other pressed a small radio against his ear. Gol! Goooool!!!! The gentleman turned to his wife and embraced her. Or on a warm spring day it might be boyfriend and girlfriend on their stomachs in the meadow grass beneath the cherry trees. Briegel … Galderisi … cross … Elkjaer, RRRRREEEETEEE! The boy jumps to his feet and runs two or three times around a tree, trailing his yellow-blue scarf behind him.
Hoarse and compelling, the voice was that of Roberto Puliero, perhaps the most recognisable man in Verona. Almost twenty years after I first heard him, ten yean after I myself became a regular listener to his nail-biting accounts of Hellas Verona’s vicissitudes, I find myself sitting beside him in the back of a big black BMW Series 7, headed for Perugia. Roberto is worried. He doesn’t usually ask the radio station to provide him with a fast car and a driver. But once again Verona have been given the Saturday afternoon losers’ slot. And on Saturday evenings Puliero has to be back in Verona by quarter to nine at the latest. As well as being the radio commentator for all Verona’s games, he is also the director and lead actor of La Barcaccia, a small local theatre company. At nine-fifteen he must be on stage for a rendering of a work by the eighteenth-century playwright Carlo Goldoni.
Here is an irony then. Notorious throughout the peninsula for its supposedly brutish fans, Hellas is most frequently associated in the Veronese mind with a highly cultured man, warm, liberal and charismatic, a man recently invited by the centre-left to stand as town mayor against Signora Sironi. ‘I’d enjoy the campaign,’ he admits. ‘I’d like that, speaking to people in the piazza. But what would I do if they elected me?’ Sensibly, he has declined.
Roberto Puliero is built tall and square. In his early fifties now, his broad, wrinkled, mobile face is the result of years of extravagant mimicry and clowning. He wears his fuzzy hair long and absolutely unkempt, but then, with improbable vanity, he dyes it coal-black. His voice, strained with overuse, rich and nasal with dialect intonations and generous with emotion, is absolutely distinctive, immediately seductive. Halfway into the journey we stop at an autogrill where he stocks up with biscuits and chocolates for the return trip. Perugia is three hundred kilometres away and high in the Apennines. The sky is threatening snow. ‘I’ll need energy for the stage,’ he explains.
Roberto is worried that he won’t make it back in time. ‘We must be out of the stadium the moment the final whistle blows.’ He’s worried about all the political hullabaloo surrounding the team; it must be affecting them, he thinks. He’s worried about the incredible number of injuries. Mazzola has mumps. He’s worried that Pastorello hasn’t used the New Year’s window in the transfer market to bring any really good players to the team. Last year at least we got Morfeo. The big clubs have stars on their benches who they’re eager to lend out for a few months to give them some match experience. And this year, who? Teodorani, a 22-year-old left-back from Roma to replace the disappointing Cvitanovic and Seric. And a kid, a child almost, Lanza as a possible centre-back when Apolloni is out. Apolloni is out again today. But who has ever heard of these people? Meantime Brescia and Atalanta have both picked up big players. Napoli have bought the Brazilian, Edmundo. Why can’t we have people like that? The defence is weak. He shakes his head. The midfield has neither skill nor stamina nor character. When on earth will Leo Colucci return? And now he has heard that the players are all arguing and Perotti hasn’t got a grip on things.
‘I don’t like Oddo’s attitude,’ he says. ‘I’m not convinced by Oddo.’ The underlying problem, he feels, is that Pastorello is only in it for the money. Puliero, it turns out, has an instinctive aversion to the figure of the entrepreneur. He is a child of the ‘68 students’ revolution, one of those people who are physiologically left-wing. ‘The man should spend more. But he’s tight. The players are all on loan or half-owned by other clubs. It’s difficult to establish a team spirit.’
I am fascinated by this attitude. On the one hand there is a resentment of money – football has been ruined by money! – on the other hand the insistence that money be spent lavishly, beyond the point of folly. Behind it all is the suspicion that the owner doesn’t suffer emotionally as much as the fan does, the fear that someone else is considering in merely money terms what for you is immensely important, even sacred. The only way for the rich person to demonstrate real passion is to throw his money away, as does the president of Inter, Moratti, with the most unhappy results. Inter change players and coaches faster, more expensively and less effectively than any other club in Europe. ‘But the fans respect him more’, Puliero says, ‘because they know he cares.’ Then he adds, ‘Even though he’s obviously an idiot.’
The chauffeured car climbs into the hills above Bologna. The vineyards and olive groves are bleakly grey-green in the winter light. From pessimism it’s an easy step to nostalgia. Puliero begins to remember the better days of the mid-eighties when Hellas were always in the top five or six teams. He knew all the players in those days. They would often have a pizza together. He laughs. ‘People would stop me in the street and congratulate me on the team’s success, as if it was me playing. During the second half of the ’85 season when it became clear Verona had a chance of taking the scudetto, loudspeakers were set up in Piazza Bra and crowds listened to the away games in the square.’ I remember this myself. I remember standing by the Roman Arena with my wife, feeling drawn
to that urgent voice, eager to stay and listen, and her saying, ‘Tim, come on, let’s get home, it’s freezing.’
‘And the funny thing is’, Puliero tells me, ‘that officially it was illegal for me to be broadcasting. Private radio stations weren’t allowed to broadcast the game. There was a state monopoly. I had to sneak into the stadium with a walkie-talkie and heavy batteries. Once my wife wrapped the batteries in gift paper and said we were taking Christmas presents to friends after the game. Or if it was a low stadium I’d see if someone would let me use a balcony overlooking the ground.’
As with so many Italian laws, officials would go through the motions of telling him that what he was doing was illegal, then let him get on with it anyway. The important thing is that illegality be established, not prevented. Meantime, in Verona thousands of people, including policemen, were standing in Italy’s biggest piazza listening to an illegal broadcast sanctioned by the town hall.
Why is Puliero such a successful radio commentator? Other local stations now offer game commentary, but no one listens to them. The agony of football on the radio is that your anxiety about the result isn’t mediated through the attraction of the spectacle. It is suffering or elation of the rawest variety. What Puliero does is to bring a theatricality, a sense of performance to the occasion that in part at least substitutes for the absent spectacle of the game, and thus makes the result more acceptable. His voice is full of grand gestures. He suffers as much, no, more than you do. And, like the experienced fan on the terraces, he combines complete partisanship – he really wants Verona to win – with a determinedly objective vision of the game. He never pretends the team is playing better than it is. He doesn’t imagine there’s a penalty every time a Verona player falls over in the box. In this he is the exact opposite of the standard Italian commentator on public radio who pretends he is impartial but then constantly insinuates that the team he is rooting for is being hard done-by.
Most of all, though, and this is uncanny, Puliero has a way of hinting to you what is about to happen. He reads the game so well that you are already prepared for the goal when it comes, particularly the opposition’s goal, which is the one that is so hard to bear. His voice begins to fall, you can sense that he barely wants to talk to you, so appalled is he by what is happening on the pitch. ‘Attenzione, attenzione pericolo a sinistra.’ Danger on the left. Then there is a brief silence, a barely whispered phlegmatic ‘Gol’. More silence, then the repetition: ‘Gol. Gol di Pippo Inzaghi.’ Then the verbal head-shaking: ‘Ahimè, ahimè, amici sportivi veronesi – alas, alas, my Veronese sporting friends – once again our poor Hellas have demonstrated all their many, many limitations!’
But almost immediately, his voice picks up. And as the brigate, staggering from the punch, quickly gather their wits and renew their singing to rouse the team, so Puliero switches from addressing the public to exhorting the players: ‘Coraggio ragazzi! Coraggio! Perhaps there is still time. Perhaps all is not lost. All’arrembaggio! Forza Hellas!’
‘Arrembaggio’ is a wonderful word. Try repeating it a few times, throwing all the stress on the ba and making sure you linger over the soft double g. The dictionary definition is: ‘the action of boarding and attacking an enemy ship once grappling hooks have been attached’. It’s an all-out assault. You imagine the blue-yellows swarming into the opposing team’s area, determined to equalise. You turn up the radio volume a little, you begin to hope. And then a low voice from the Radio Adige studio interrupts. ‘Roberto? Roberto?’ Puliero stops. ‘Just to say that Chievo have scored. It’s two-nil.’ Damn! The boys from the dam are winning again!
High on the snow-driven Apennines now, Puliero agrees that being a good commentator has a lot to do with acting. ‘You’re playing a part. You have to do it with complete conviction.’ Laughing, he tells me how once when one of the Veneto teams had had their stadium disqualified and were obliged to play a game with Avellino at the Bentegodi, he was asked by an Avellino radio station, whose commentator hadn’t made it to the ground, if he would do the match for them. ‘No problem. I had no problem at all sounding completely fanatical about the team. Supported them breathlessly the whole ninety minutes.’
I’m appalled. Avellino! It would be like pretending enthusiasm for Scunthorpe.
We drive through an Etruscan gateway and up a narrow, cobbled street. Perugia is a very beautiful town, cluttered about the steep slopes above Lake Trasimeno and the Tiber valley. Naturally, we’re going to see nothing of it, except perhaps the few campanili and rocky hilltops visible above the stadium’s stands. Among other things, the place is famous for having a university for foreigners with excellent facilities for learning Italian. It’s the only one in the country. A couple of years ago they even set up a special school for helping foreign football players to improve their Italian. It appears that to date not a single player has actually signed up. Perhaps the transfer market really is too fast and they’re afraid they’ll be in another country before they’ve mastered the inflexions of the present tense.
I wanted to watch the game with the fans; Roberto was going to the press room. We parted in a car park outside the small attractive ground and met up again less than two hours later to jump into the BMW and roar away into what was now heavily falling snow for Roberto’s appointment with Goldoni. In the meantime absolutely nothing of any interest had happened. For if football is a sport where everything can happen and emotions may be wound up to fever pitch, it is also a pastime where the utter dullness, the endless repetitiveness of human existence can be held in the palm of the hand for an interminable ninety minutes. Perugia played badly and scored, once. Verona played badly and failed to score. Even the fans seemed short on energy. The brigate arrived late, their buses held up in a traffic jam. The Perugia fans raised a long banner: ‘An anti-racist town is always in Serie A.’ It was a provocation too banal to elicit any response. ‘No comment,’ Roberto said, hurrying back to the car from the press room. I made none.
And four hours later I was in the theatre watching a play called La cameriera brillante, which might be translated, ‘The Canny Maid’, or ‘The Witty Servant’, or ‘The Brilliant Housekeeper’. We had raced through the snowy hills, the dull plain, shaking our heads again over the enigma of highly paid players who didn’t seem eager to play, a coach who had no idea who to put on the field from one game to the next. Would Perotti be fired? We ate our chocolate biscuits. By eight-forty we were in Verona; my wife and elder daughter, Stefi, were already waiting at the theatre in a dingy back-street near San Zeno. And now here we are in the front row, with the actors’ feet hurrying to and fro at the level of the eyes, far closer than you can ever get to a football field these days. Thank God I don’t have to worry whether they’ll win or lose.
We are back in the eighteenth century, somewhere in the Veneto. People are wearing long velvet coats, lace ruffs, extravagant hats. The plot is simple, schematic and effective, qualities that Perotti might do well to reflect on. An aging widowed landowner, Pantalon dei Bisognosi, alias Puliero, is reluctant to marry off his two daughters to two rich young men. One daughter is modest and undemanding, the other demonstrative, arrogant and worldly. The grooms-to-be are fantastically unsuitable: an extravagant southern fop is to marry the modest daughter; a gloomy, misanthrope farmer is promised to the society girl. The fop does nothing but boast previous successes with countesses various. The farmer thinks only of getting back home to watch his peasants at work. What unites the two is a tendency to think of the girls as nothing more than dowries and social convenience. The cantankerous father has seen through them and is determined to send them packing. But he has a weak spot. He is in love with his young housekeeper, a woman of flashing wit and great manipulative genius. Constantly flirting with her master, interminably working on the daughters and their suitors, only she seems capable of making something happen.
I lie back in my seat. How different from the stadium! No fences, no police hemming us in! And yet …
‘I can’t under
stand you when you speak that blasted Tuscan!’ the old man complains to his maid. She is teasing him. He speaks in a fierce Venetian dialect; the fop speaks Tuscan. The two servants are from Bergamo. Argentina, the housekeeper, demonstrates her intellectual superiority by her ability to switch back and forth between dialect and Italian. She coerces all the characters to take part in a play within a play, where the old Pantalon will have to declare his love for her. In Tuscan. And he can’t do it. He can’t get his tongue round it. Soon all the familiar language insults are flying back and forth. ‘Non si capisce ma come cazzo parlate!’
The purpose of the housekeeper’s little commedia is to have everyone act out a personality opposite to their own. The fop must learn to be humble, to say he is not worthy of his lady’s hand. His modest fidanzata must be imperious. Needless to say, they all balk at their lines, introduce vicious asides, throw down the script in disgust. Yet in the end the housekeeper wins the day. Everybody marries. Everybody is persuaded that they have more to lose by opting out than by compromising their instincts in the collective theatre of community.
But is this a happy ending? These people are marrying for money and convenience, aren’t they? Or are they? Perhaps deep down they were just waiting for a chance to compromise, to leave their more intractable selves behind. Goldoni is ambiguous. We don’t know quite what any of these people are thinking, or what the future will bring. We only see what’s there on stage. We see that romance is beautiful but that only a fool would ignore economics.
And towards midnight, at the pizzeria where the actors always eat together after the play, I put it to Roberto that actually this is the same ambiguity that surrounds Pastorello and so many of the people involved in the business of football. We would like the coach and the players and the owner to be more passionate, more sentimentally attached to their clubs, but we know that football, like marriage and families, has also largely to do with money. And then maybe they are more sentimentally attached than we think. Maybe they have to fight against their sentimental attachment so as not to be ruined financially. How will we ever know how much Pastorello cares? Of course he bought the team to make money, the players only came to the team to make money, but maybe, as in the ideal marriage of convenience, affection sets in. Didn’t Bari-born Leo Colucci recently say in an interview: ‘This yellow-blue shirt is my skin, these colours are in my blood’?