In the catalogue of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam—where I had wandered senslessly until my feet and bilingual uncertainty reached a pitiful state—I found the disquieting translation of a seventeenth-century hermetic text engraved at the bottom of a greasy still life by a Dutch painter unknown to me: “That which is extraordinary has an extraordinary bad fate.” In an intricately camouflaged way, the verse reflects in a raspberry glow the praise of the Juventus man, liberated from bonds, uncommon, standing high above a footballing crowd of petty philistines. Every artist has a prophetic gift, a foreboding of his ill-fated end. Weightless and vertiginous, this mechanism lodges within, like the light of a green jasper penetrating the catacombs of a Rosicrucian. The callous hands of a Juventus supporter emigrated from the South have such systematic stubbornness to be worthy of a martyr’s palm.
In the gentlemanly circles of Turin, many educated women share a passion for Juventus that is both ideological and ostentatiously graceful. They talk with scorn about the Peeping Toms of other people’s teams, letting the conversation flow from the pitch to the fine wines of Piedmont, while deep carpets and tapestries, like in a novella by Stefan Zweig, absorb the brightness and noise of the street. Luckily, other fans recklessly breach this classy restraint, working the whole gamut of misleading maneuver and conspiratorial vindictiveness—the feverish life of those who by their fall and sin aim in a roundabout way at the highest good. Once I visited the small town of Asti in the aftermath of a Juventus scudetto. I could not get rid of the feeling that every title here is assigned in foggy weather. The city has always appeared to me like a mask concealing a carnival of activities. In vain did I look for shouting drunkards on the cobblestone or other silhouettes pregnant with historical events. Ascetic and cheerful like the brass section of a street band, every Juventus title belongs to an indistinct sphere of fantasy, the flimsy domain of tellers of tales. Thus, too, it looked when it was time to part from Asti (as earlier from the Rijksmuseum). Farewell, still life. Good night, enemy’s severed head. ♦
