This is one of the matches that keep playing and replaying in the minds of the protagonists, as if on a magnetic loop or under the dome of a planetarium (an error tacitly repeated in the gears and plates of the projector). A mechanical illusion, doubly misleading: what Napoli’s footballing ancestors had never achieved. And Chelsea feeling tensed up with awe beside them, both teams exhilarated by an immersion in pure movement. There was no contact to speak of; maybe a few occasions, like Dossena’s penalty or Drogba’s slyly attempt at scoring denied by De Sanctis. No: it was as when the planets are sliding around each other in the galaxy, or as though Fred Astaire brushed against Adele Astaire as they moved in the main hall; a frisson, an itinerant complicity. That Napoli should end up fleeing England in defeat seemed inevitable, at least since the mutiny of the Chelsea senators; and it seemed right that they should leave European football entirely, emigrate to America, or return to a nativity scene in Positano, where the divers discover sponges, amphorae from Antikythera, statues of nude women, and corroded bronze plates dating back to pagan eras. Until they find out, coincidentally, that Neapolitan soccer is effectively an astronomical calendar, or a shoebox-sized planetarium—made up with arcane symbols, like the corals in the emptied eyes of a drowned skull.
The Mazzarri Planetarium: was he thinking about this too? Venus is Cavani, the morning star; Maggio is out on the side-line like a moon that vacillates on the horizon. . . Maybe that’s what swung this fixture toward London: the contrast between Di Matteo’s sharp but humorless good looks, Drogba’s glazed, opportunistic eyes, and Lavezzi’s strangely fat lips, which seem to be perpetually smiling. Like in a Utopian romance, to understand the game of Marek Hamsik, one needs the patience of a lamb under the hide of a jackass. Hamsik, Cavani, Lavezzi—chance intruders in world literature, famous charlatans with little right in the pantheon of creative geniuses of the Campions League. Their soccer verses are penned hastily between a bed and the gambling table. Stranger yet, for such immense talents, Napoli has staked nothing at all; it has overreached. You can think of the team’s almanac as a parasite, a notorious cheat with a noble academic past, able to ruffle it among emperors and kings. At one stride, the cunning buccaneers of Napoli have outdistanced all the great players of Italy. ♦
