Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Something astonishing happens after half-time. The action is at the far end where Siena have a free kick. It comes to nothing and suddenly Tutino, way inside his own half, has brought the ball down with the outside of his left foot and is sprinting towards us. No one’s near him. Two, three touches, lunging forwards. Still no one near him. A couple more nudges, he’s outside the area but, fuck it, he smacks it so hard with the outside of his left boot that it bananas away from the Siena keeper and into the very top corner of the goal. The score is 2–0.

  The rush of adrenalin and love and ecstasy is intense. Chill is shaking his fist at me, as if berating me for not believing. Everyone is hugging, singing, reaching for their phones to call friends and send videos, trying to capture this once-in-a-generation moment when fate is smiling on the absolute underdogs.

  The ecstasy doesn’t last long. Siena are awarded a penalty and it’s 2–1 before you’ve even caught your breath. This whore of a team, the man behind us is saying, has betrayed us so many times, we know the way it’s going to go. The black shirts of Siena keep pounding away at that goal, so far away from this end that you can barely see what’s happening.

  It’s suddenly tense but not as tense as it should be. The ultras are singing and singing. I can see Left-Behind there, screaming like it’s his last night on earth. That’s their way of dissipating the dread that the dream is over. They really thought it was their year. And now it’s slipping away and all they can do is bear witness to their presence by being as loud as possible.

  This new song is an old favourite, apparently started (although the provenance and dates of all ultra inventions are hotly debated) by Torino ultras. To the tune of the Beach Boys’ ‘Sloop John B’, we’re singing what has been an anthem all year: ‘It seems impossible, that I’m still here with you, this is an illness that never leaves. I want to go away, away from here, but I can’t survive far from you.’ It’s a song that seems to encapsulate much of what this ultra life is like: it’s an addiction or illness, something you can’t do without. The ‘here’ is less about the team than the terraces.

  Everyone says that being an ultra is a way of life. But it’s a way of life that has evolved, mutated, regenerated and reinvented itself. And it’s the evolution of the ultra world that makes Ciccio so melancholic.

  ‘It truly, truly hurts me to see what happens on the terraces now,’ he says, ignoring the game. ‘It makes me suffer greatly. Because I know we’re responsible. It was us who created this world. But the thing has got out of hand. There’s been an escalation, and we’ve gone from fist-fights to knives, from knives to flares, from flares to ambushes, to Molotov cocktails, to bombs and to pistols. It keeps getting worse.’

  Ten months earlier, Cosenza (Casa degli Ultrà)

  It’s the Tuesday night before the first game of the season. Everyone is gathering in the squatted building for the Curva Sud’s weekly meeting. The air is dense with smoke from cigarettes and spliffs. There are about twenty to thirty people. A few come late and a few storm off, so it’s hard to be precise. There are half a dozen women: Susi Sete (‘Boozy Suzy’), MonSicca (‘SkinnyMon’) plus a few others. But the atmosphere is highly testosteronic.

  The Curva Sud broke into this abandoned building last winter. Squatting is usually done by far-leftists for the creation of ‘social centres’ and, more recently, by far-right extra-parliamentarians like CasaPound. But it’s unusual for an ultra group to take possession of an empty building. The group quickly rechristened the place ‘The House of the Ultras’. They painted all the radiators and steps red and blue. They cleared out spillikin needles left by heroin-users and stripped out what was left of the bathrooms. They issued a press release and dealt with a flutter of interest from the Calabrian papers.

  Their slogan was ‘fuori le curve dagli stadi’ (‘get the terraces out of the stadiums’). It is the sort of rallying cry that can cut in all sorts of different ways, according to what is meant by ‘the terraces’. The Curva Sud group says the slogan means taking the ethics of the curva into the streets: a party atmosphere to battle repression, exclusion and intolerance.

  The building was in the shadow of the old centre of Cosenza, the hill the other side of the Busento river. The ultras’ new ‘house’ was central and anyone could reach it on foot. But there was plenty of parking around about for the days when hundreds met there and piled into minibuses for away matches.

  Inside, it’s identical to most ultra dens: a computer with the group’s Facebook page open, paper and biros used to add up how many are going to the game, who has paid up, who is owing. There are beer bottles and ashtrays everywhere, as well as sofas and speakers wired up to cracked phones.

  Súrici (‘Mouse’) must be in his early twenties. He’s walking in the middle of the circle, swinging a metal baseball bat. He’s doing it playfully but there’s an edge about it too. Sometimes he puts the bat down and picks up the industrial stapler, pretending to staple someone’s neck. ‘Bam,’ he shouts, and everyone laughs.

  U Lisciu (‘Chill’), a fifty-something man with pen and paper behind the bar, calls everyone to order. He explains the cost of the minibuses going to Monopoli on Saturday. Everyone loves Chill. He used to come to games, for years, with one small banner: ‘Fantastic World’. Then Mouse gives a little speech. He wants to get things clear from the start. He’s short and paunchy, with close eyes and an exuberant energy that slips from good humour to fury in an instant.

  ‘None of you has to come with us,’ says Mouse. ‘I’ll never force you to fucking come with us. You go wherever the fuck you want…’ He pauses, rotating the bat slowly above his head like a scarf. ‘But if you come with us, we’re a group. United. Together. Compact. Shoulder to shoulder. This season we’re going to serious piazzas. We’re going up against the Catanesi, against the Reggini…’

  ‘The Leccesi,’ someone chucks in.

  ‘The Leccesi.’ Mouse smiles at the thought. ‘We’re up against the Catanzaresi.’

  ‘Mouse,’ says Lastica (‘Elastic’), ‘aspè’ (‘wait up’).

  Pent-up anger explodes. Now everyone is shouting who they think should speak. ‘Let Mouse finish’ or ‘Go on, Elastic.’ In the end, it’s Elastic who is left standing after the verbal brawl. He is tense with a taut face. He probably got his nickname because he’s rubbery and can hurt you with a flick of his fist.

  ‘Why are we going in a minibus’, Elastic asks, ‘if we said ten days ago we were going to take the train?’

  ‘Who the fuck said we were taking the train?’ Mouse whispers the question, stretching his neck and scowling. ‘Did I say that?’ The place is very silent now.

  Elastic is knocked back. He had made an assumption without running it by Mouse.

  ‘Was it decided in sede?’ Mouse is still whispering. The sede (like the ‘seat’ of a government) is the grandiose name for this squat.

  Elastic feels insulted. He’s steaming now, as he is during the games when the team – the lupi or ‘wolves’, after their team logo – are playing like shit. ‘It was on the chat,’ he says limply.

  ‘Fuck the chat,’ Mouse explodes, smashing the baseball bat onto the tiles. ‘Fucking chat chat chat chat chat. We decide everything here, together.’

  ‘Sounds to me it was all decided before we came in,’ Elastic shouts back, and the room explodes again. Everyone is yelling now, arms raised, fingertips bouncing onto chests or onto foreheads. It’s all in dialect, a thuddy mixture of Ds and Us. There are sawn-off syllables – the last ‘re’ of every verb is missing, as is the end of every name.

  The argument somehow goes to the heart of everything: it’s about who makes decisions and how, it’s about unity and autonomy, it’s about organization and respect, for the leaders and for the troops, it’s about money and egos. But amidst the anarchic shouting, there’s an order. Three or four people raise their arms, trying to catch the eye of Chill, who’s standing behind the bar and roughly deciding who should speak.

  Walking around the ring of chai
rs, inside and out, is U Mundatu (‘Baldy’ or ‘Egg’). He’s like an old-fashioned jester at a monarch’s court: a clown and peacemaker. As everyone is growling, some storming out, he’s interrupting courageously, telling home truths to whoever needs to hear them. He’s a hardcore stoner, so offers a joint as a balm, bringing people back into the circle. He can flare up, too, but his big brown teeth are soon grinning again. And so between Chill and Egg, the meeting – in all its aggressive, chaotic but purposeful energy – goes on.

  Tensions are high not just because it’s the start of a new season but because of the split amongst the city’s ultras. A man called Pietro left the Curva in 2015 to form his own group, the Anni Ottanta (‘The 80s’). The group’s title harks back to the glory days when Cosenza had the finest ultras in Italy. The move was about many things, including wheelchair access and opposition to the Tessera (the obligatory fan’s ‘loyalty card’ needed to gain access to certain games), which the Curva had slowly started adopting. It was about egos, too, of course: about who should lead the singing and who had a direct link to the founding fathers. Although the Curva Sud called itself ‘1978’, none of them were around back then, so Anni Ottanta claims to be the city’s authentic ultra group. There’s only one way to find out who is more ultra, says Vindov (‘Window’, a young lad missing a couple of front teeth): to ‘come to the hands’ and fight for the title.

  All summer the tensions have been stoked. Insults fly on Facebook. The Curva Sud accuses Anni Ottanta of many things, mainly that they were never around when all the other groups stuck with Cosenza through relegations and bankruptcies. The Anni Ottanta, they say, are being manipulated by the semi-retired leaders from those old days who disdain the lawlessness of the Curva. Sometimes the accusations are the same in both directions, that the rival group has accepted criminal elements to act as spalle (‘shoulders’) in the heat of battle. For its part, Anni Ottanta says the Curva is so anarchic that its singing and choreographies are embarrassing and that, most seriously in this profoundly anti-fascist city, there are now elements within it who aren’t anti-fascists. The only thing both sides agree on is that no one from outside is supposed to stoke the divisions by talking about them.

  So, Mouse and Chill and the other leaders of the Curva have a tough job. They know that they have to respect the dozens of smaller groups that come under the umbrella of the Curva Sud: the Alkool Group, Cosenza Vecchia, the 90s Gang (with their slogan, ‘Zimeca’ – more or less ‘shit-stirrers’), the Sciollati (‘the messed up ones’), the Brigate (the ‘Brigades’), and so on… There are dozens of groupings and ‘currents’, each with proud leaders and slightly different agendas and supporters. But at the same time, the Curva has to remain compact and united, not just at dangerous away games where fights are inevitable, but even on home turf.

  Part of the Curva Sud’s difficulty in its search for unity is that Cosentini (the inhabitants of this vibrant city) are viscerally opposed to the imposition of order. The Cosenza ultras proudly relate the criticism, voiced about them by a policeman on TV, that ‘you never know how many they are, what time they’re leaving, nor when they’ll arrive, they appear out of nothing, and most of all they don’t pay for their tickets’. That element of surprise isn’t strategic. It’s because they don’t even know themselves when or where they’re going to roll up. Appointments are as firm as butter in the sun.

  Cosentini are proud of that anarchic streak. Some followers of the Wolves call themselves ‘lupi spuri’ (‘bastard wolves’), as if they’re not even answerable to the pack. They relish the unnerving way they appear and disappear: one of their famous banners once boasted that ‘Cosentini like playing hide-and-seek’. Getting everyone together, in one place, is a tough task. One poster about a protest promises ‘a messy and disordered march’. That disorder is not a result of incompetence but of creative energy: the city is so small – just short of 70,000 souls – that you easily get side-tracked by a friend of a friend. It’s so stimulating that you often find yourself enticed down a cobbled alley by a sudden impulse.

  The banditry isn’t just a pretence. In Calabria the scorn for authority is about something deeper. This is a part of the world where many of the citizens are convinced that nothing good will ever come from the state, from city hall or from the church. They have long distrusted the powerful, and judge each individual on their own merits, not their acquired grandeur. So here there are no titles, and often not even proper names or surnames but just nicknames instead: U Rimasto (‘Left-Behind’), Mezzo-Chilo (‘Half-a-Kilo’), U Fissato (‘One-Track’) and so on.

  The city is way down on the big toe of the Italian boot and is a place of both compromise and intransigence. The name comes from the historic agreement, the ‘consensus’ of 356 BC, in which the warring Bruttii tribes recognized each other and made peace. The Pancrazio Hill, at the foot of which the Crati and Busento rivers unite, became the Bruttii’s new capital, ‘Cosentia’. Anyone who messed with the Bruttii usually came off badly. They were tough mountain people who lived on the high plains of the Silan mountains. In the fourth century BC, the Greek colonies of Magna Grecia – all along the Calabrian and Lucanian coasts – asked for assistance from home to suppress this war-like people. Alexander I of Epirus (the uncle of Alexander the Great) was despatched but despite a peace accord with Rome, he was killed in 330 BC near the Acheron river, in the lost city of Pandosia Bruzia. Another attempted invader, Alaric (who sacked Rome in AD 410) is buried somewhere here.

  In the nineteenth century, Cosenza was at the forefront of the insurrections against the Bourbon monarchy: the carbonaro Vincenzo Federico and the Bandiera brothers (actually from Venice) were put to death in Cosenza for fighting to unite Italy. And when that unification brought a brutal repression by Piedmont troops in the South, Calabria became famous for its brigandage. According to one historian, Vincenzo Cuoco, Cosenza was always ‘a place of antique and ardent republicanism’.

  But the city wasn’t famous only for its rebellions. It was one of the most important cradles of modern philosophy, with the writings of the sixteenth-century Bernardino Telesio influencing Bacon, Bruno, Campanella and Descartes. Cosenza was even nicknamed the ‘Athens of Calabria’, and Norman Douglas wrote that ‘the literary record of Cosenza is one of exceptional brilliance. For acute and original thought this town can hardly be surpassed by any other of its size on earth.’

  Which is perhaps why this squatted ultra building in the deep South feels like the twenty-first-century equivalent of a gathering of brigands. In this shouty, egalitarian assembly, people are drinking and spliffing hard, while discussing strategy, enemies, evading capture and the conquest of new spaces. And when the business is over, people drink and smoke some more, and pump up the music – a mix of ska, punk and hip-hop.

  Although it’s anarchic here, there’s actually a heartfelt organization at work. When the ultras moved into this building it was grim. Formally a school dining room – half a dozen rooms on the ground floor and a large basement – it had been used as a crack-and-smack den for as long as anyone could remember. Needles, excrement and broken glass littered the floor. Rubbish was piled high in the corners. Now it feels like a sparsely furnished flat: there are sofas, chairs, a bar, a toilet. They’ve got cardboard boxes of T-shirts and scarves. There are dozens of plaques and scarves from other ultra groups and memorials to dead comrades. The scarves on the walls all have a similar theme of generic outlawry: among them are the names ‘Smoked Heads’, ‘Rebel Tendency’, ‘Clandestines’ and ‘Fedayeen Bronx’. But there’s a house-proudness here too. There’s no flush in the toilet, so you’re supposed to fill a tupperware tub from the tap to flush it. There’s a handwritten sign to remind everyone: ‘An ultra always flushes the bog because he respects his territory and his brother who has cleaned it.’

  The most striking element is the chromatic fundamentalism. Everything is painted in Cosenza’s red-and-blue: the steps, the radiators, the doors, the window frames. You see something similar in the
city itself: curtains, bonnets, hubcaps and shop shutters painted in the team colours.

  It’s the colours, you realize, that create the tribe. It’s the colours that create the deep bonds. They’re what you live and die for. As one of their songs goes: ‘When I have to die, I want to bring my colours to paradise.’ They’re the totem. You defend them and impose them. Your colours aren’t just simple hues, they’re who you are. An insult to the red-and-blue is as intolerable as an insult to your mother or sister.

  And yet no one mentions the football. There’s never talk of any player. ‘Cazzo,’ says one guy, ‘I don’t even know who we’re playing on Saturday. I don’t really give a fuck. The important thing is that we carry our colours there, that we make ourselves heard and make ourselves respected.’ The real game is between the ultras.

  *

  Classical writers always knew that agon – the sporting ‘struggle’ – had an alchemic effect on the character of those watching. ‘Effervescimus ad aliena certamina,’ wrote Seneca (‘We get worked up at the struggles of others’). Tertullian, in his essay ‘On Spectacles’, wrote that ‘there is no spectacle without disturbance of the spirit… For even if a man enjoys spectacles modestly and uprightly, as befits his status or age or even his natural disposition, his soul is not unstirred and he is not without a silent rousing of the spirit.’

  But as well as being spiritually uplifting, sport could also open the gate to man’s baser instincts, especially when the Greek agon gave way to the Roman circensis, the circus of gladiatorial fights and killings. Augustine writes of Alypius: ‘… he saw the blood, he drank in the savagery, and did not turn away but fixed his gaze on it. Unaware of what he was doing, he devoured the mayhem and was delighted by the wicked contest and drunk on its cruel pleasure… He looked, he shouted, he was fired up, and he carried away with him the madness that would goad him to return.’