Football: Renato Cesarini: Just pull it off

Goool – de Alemanha«: It’s been ten years since Brazilian reporters had to announce this news; seven times in one game. They delivered their bad news with a moderate tremolo, only three “o” instead of the usual 23 when their team scores. But in that memorable World Cup semi-final in Belo Horizonte, only the German team had scored goals, apart from the completely meaningless consolation goal shortly before the end. In the end it was 1:7. For Brazil it was a national trauma, the greatest humiliation since the defeat against Uruguay in 1950, when the hosts had already squandered a home World Cup (and then never put on their previously white jerseys again).

The shame of 2014 has also left its mark deep in the hearts and minds of the football-crazy nation. Even the language bears its traces: If something – even off the pitch, in everyday life – goes terribly wrong, in Brazil they comment on it with three dry words: “Gol de Alemanha”, goal for Germany.

Football has found its way into everyday language not only in Brazil. In Italy, for example, there is a saying that corresponds to our saying “at the last minute”. If something is done at the last minute south of the Brenner, it happens “in Zona Cesarini”. This idiom, like the much later Brazilian equivalent of the worst case, also goes back to a specific football event.

If you were asked where he likes it best, the answer would probably be: on the ship.

It happened on December 13, 1931 in Turin. The Italian national team received Hungary, both teams were at their peak and playing at a world-class level. Seconds before the end it was 2:2. It smelled like a draw. Everyone could live with that, except Renato Cesarini. When his center forward Raffaele Costantino prepared to play a nasty back pass, Cesarini simply pushed him aside, grabbed the ball and shot. “After a twenty-meter trajectory,” the shooter would remember after a few years, “and twenty seconds of flight, the ball is in. At the right time, in the right place.” The Hungarians could no longer find an answer; The press, including the international press, celebrated (fascist) Italy and especially Cesarini.

Kurt Lanthaler has now spun a very artistic novel around the saying. It’s not just about football. It’s more about a not entirely atypical immigrant biography: Cesarini, born in the poor Italian south, comes to Buenos Aires as an infant. There he grew up in the Barrio Palermo, among all his compatriots who had turned their backs on the boot. “The Argentinian,” little Renato soon realizes, “is an Italian who speaks Spanish.”

And otherwise? Renato rarely goes to school; If so, it would be better not to wear the shoes that his father, a Neapolitan shoemaker, made for him. He wears them in the circus, where he makes himself useful and which becomes his second home. Football has long since become his first. Renato plays, of course in his father’s shoes, in the youth department of his local club Borgata Palermo. As an adult, he moved to the Chacarrita Juniors, who were promoted to the first division in Cesarini’s debut season.

So much talent doesn’t go unhidden in Italy either. Juventus Turin knocks, Cesarini answers the call. Juve won the Scudetto, the Italian championship, five times in a row, from 1931 to 1935. An era is founded, and Cesarini helped shape it. And the following year he was back in Argentina: he won the championship there too, with River Plate.

Cesarini constantly commutes between his two home countries, to which he is attached but on which he does not depend. If you were asked where he likes it best, the answer would probably be: on the ship. Although Benito Mussolini did his best to promote Italian football, Cesarini was critical of fascism. He is by no means prepared to allow himself to be tamed. His wild life oscillates between tango bars (of which he runs one himself) and nightclubs, circus tents, boxing rings (a sport that fascinates him) and stadiums.

The dazzling Cesarini becomes the darling of the boulevard. And to the surveillance object of Mussolini’s spies; Lanthaler interspersed the spy reports into the novel. By the way, without reducing the literary quality, because this spy is eager to learn and writes accordingly. As a Dante admirer, he is very concerned about Italian culture, for which subjects like Cesarini are anything but a figurehead. Even after his football career and after the war, Cesarini remains a thorn in the side of the right-wingers, now neo-fascists, because as a successful coach he continues to corrupt the youth.

Lanthaler’s “Preliminary Report on the Matters of the Zona Cesarini,” as the full title states, is a masterfully orchestrated novel. The numerous digressions and sideshows require a lot of concentration; A three-page table of contents makes orientation easier. In the end, immersing yourself in the Zona Cesarini is worthwhile, especially for a readership with no football training. It helps her sort out the Argentinians and also the Italians; past and present.

The latter includes Gennaro Sangiuliano, who understands Trump and Putin and, like Cesarini, comes from Naples. Lanthaler also gives him a tip. Sangiuliano, once active in the youth organization of the Italian neo-fascists, served as culture minister in the Meloni government until his resignation a few days ago. He worships Dante and cares deeply about purity in Purgatory.

Kurt Lanthaler: Preliminary report on the Zona Cesarini. Folio, 259 pages, hardcover, €25.