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  What if, instead of a black hole, it was a halo? It was a halo! Why couldn’t a man like Walaschek, in his individualistic individuality—monastic, monos, mono—why couldn’t he have been taken up to the sky in a beam of light?

  – Yes, yes, interjected a member of the Society of Jesus by the name of Père Jean-Pierre. – In abandon, the only rule is the present moment; and the soul is as light as a feather, fluid as water, simple as a little boy; it’s as mobile as a ball in receiving and following all the impulses of grace. Souls like this are no more consistent or rigid than cast metal; and just as metal takes the form of the mold into which it is poured, these souls bend and adapt with equal facility to all the forms that God wants to give them; in a word, their pliability resembles that of air, which yields to every puff of wind, and assumes any shape.

  – All we needed was a priest, grumbled Snoozy, opening his left eye a crack, and taking advantage of this subliminal jolt to take a big swig of beer. All we needed was a priest. Nuntio vobis gaudium magnum: the gap has been filled. The priest is here. The priest hath spoken. Priests are like parsley, like potato beetles, like robinia, they invade every wasteland.

  A priest used to listening to all sorts of confessions wouldn’t let himself be bothered by crap from some ignorant ass. His badger eyes lighting up in his big plump face, he said:

  – Have you, Mr. Walaschek, experienced ecstasy?

  – Ecstasy? Ecstasy is floating in air. I’ve known lots who are better than I, a Brit, for example, Robinson, I believe. Our Gyger. Gyger paired up with the giant Steffen, and they made a good barrier, much better than the Maginot line. Once I saw Gyger make a play that was a marvel. There was a high ball coming from far away, a long pass for the center forward. Gyger sprang for it immediately and jumped up for a head butt. And everyone stood there motionless, because everyone, even we Swiss, I as well as the others, thought Gyger’s timing was off, way too early. But Gyger kept going up, then he contracted his Germanic—not German—muscles a little, then he stayed in the air like that for an endless moment, and I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head, and then his tan head hit the ball straight on with a dull thud. He looked like a Greek bronze hanging on an invisible string. But who remembers Gyger now?

  – He had Germanic muscles? Simone Weil jumped in, not in ecstasy, just conquering her acute shyness—she who loved the discipline and will of the Germanics as much as she hated the arrogance of the Hitlerites, the Napoleons, sun kings, the abhorred Romans.

  – I said Germanic just because, I could have used another word. Minelli had Germanic muscles too, without belonging to the German race.

  – If I understand right, chimed Mr. Window, in the tone of a teacher trying hard to make his students laugh, that also means that if he’d charged at me one hundred percent, Gyger would have obliterated me?

  – Like a Jew.

  – Bless you! the teacher said.

  – Oh, what an irreparable loss for the Wind Factories that would be!

  They all turned toward the back: it was the voice of Asshat—that’s what they called him, because on top of his reddish hair he always wore a military wedge cap. And since everyone’s eyes were on him, on his baker’s face, he was emboldened and said:

  – Mr. Klee’s O is nothing but a donut, a donut with a hole, the ones that ugly brute Herr Göring liked and also that Countess Cack up my cul-de-sac who refuses to look me in the face. Hitler, on the other hand, liked cookies. Because Hitler was someone, if you’ll allow me to use a peasant term, was someone who was raised on angrùan, that is, rose hips, which tighten you up (because that’s how you say tighten in Latin, my Latin teacher explained it to me), they tighten you up in the rear just like they do in the mouth; with types like Hitler the bottom and the top are the same thing, that’s why Hitler barked with his mouth contorted under that ugly moustache. For him, talking must have been like it is for someone who’s constitutionally constipated to take a shit: he has to strain every muscle in his ass.

  But the others, forming a semi-circle, seemed to say, and actually one of them did say: – Now instead of the Doctors of the Church we have to listen to bakers? So me, a truck driver, I can get up and say my two cents as a truck driver, and go on and on longer than the number of miles I’ve put on my truck going down all the roads of Europe lain end to end.

  In short, what happened was that—as happens in all the public assemblies in the world—at first nobody says a word, but if you do the slightest thing to encourage them to talk, and finally you find the one who, just to get it over with, says he’ll break the ice, then it’s all over: too much confidence leads to the loss of reverence. The truck driver rose to his feet and looked around the room as if he were the Duce’s right hand. He was the antipodes of someone like the man from Fontana, smart and humble, who said to his next-door neighbor as he was going out with a length of twine: Don’t get excited now—even if I’ve traveled the world I’ve always just been making bales of hay.

  So projecting his voice from his stomach like an understudy of the Duce, the truck driver posited, no doubt about it, that Mr. Klee’s O was one of those circles—cercini—that women in the south put on their heads to carry jars—that’s why their backs are as straight as wires. – And once I saw a player called Lempen who seemed like he had one of those circles right on his forehead . . .

  But the truck driver, seeing that they were all turned toward him, with their ears perked up like jackrabbits’, felt his gab motor switch off, as if his battery had suddenly drained, so he looked pleadingly at his daughter’s geography teacher. Who, like a good teacher, understood immediately and didn’t make him say it twice.

  – Yes, I know. I remember that young man Lempen very well. Once he stopped the ball with his head, in mid-field, and the ball stayed there, like a magnet, because the way Lempen’s nose met his forehead, it formed a nice little basin, a little foppa, as the shepherds in our Alps say, that matched the curve of the ball perfectly. The Arctic of the ball fit into the vault of Lempen’s sky. Lempen ran in long strides, solemn, aristocratic, with that ball magnetized onto his head, toward the opponent’s goal. At sixteen meters, what did he do? He stopped, jerked his frontal Antarctica and like a world-weary Atlas, let the world roll down his thigh to his instep, setting up a hopeless shot, casting the world into the void: straight into the net.

  There was a—though in truth, slightly timid—round of applause for Lempen, but without detracting from Lempen’s good, great, immense merits, the thin baker decanted one of his deepest skepticisms into the fat baker’s right ear:

  – These guys are crazy: black holes, jar-bearers. Fit to be tied. There are too many philosophers around nowadays and philosophers are the sort who are capable of going to the osteria and instead of ordering an omelette they demand a plate of philosophy. And if the waitress brings them a big frothy mug of horse piss instead of a beer, they drink the horse piss and think it’s their Carlsberg. And with all their persistence in believing for belief’s sake, they’d even get themselves killed without batting an eye. Or put on the grill to roast like a spare rib. In the Sicilian bull down in Agrigento. Steer clear.

  Out loud, vehemently, a colleague of the geography teacher’s jumped in. A history teacher.

  – Why is it that in this country, which began in long-ago 1291, a country completely shorn of its memories, why is it that nobody talks about Lempen, Walaschek, Vonlanthen, anymore? Try asking the first kid who passes by. He’ll look at you like someone on insulin shock treatments. Vonlanthen played in Italy, and the Italians, constitutionally incapable of pronouncing a foreign name correctly, called him Volante. Der fliegende Schweizer, the flying Swissman. He wasn’t a pure sprinter, but he had a long stride, and at the first game he played—in Genoa, the Italian Academy of Soccer (in the stands, mixed with the plebs, were the Peripatetics of soccer, Aristotle and all the Alcibiadeses of the stadiums)—everyone proclai
med, with a broad consensus, that few trotting halfbacks could have competed with Volante’s loping stride when it was worthily executed.

  Walaschek closed his half-closed eyes even more. He dreamed.

  Pulver

  Alcibiades Hannibal

  Lempen Socrates Aristotle

  Plotinus Walaschek Plato Vonlanthen Sulla

  – Why Sulla? the history teacher shot forth, like a viper. He was completely and totally like Stalin. With his proscriptions! Of course, Sulla didn’t have the messengers Stalin did, with his “technology,” which allowed him to send his carrier pigeon all the way to Mexico to bash Trotsky’s brains in! Thus striking fear into everyone, because everyone felt like they were reachable—and they were—in any part of the world. By the Great Purger, there in Moscow.

  – Why Sulla? It’s a nice name, fast, for a winger. Like Gento, which rhymes with vento, wind. A guy from Bellinzona, seeing him on TV, said: To buy him from Real Madrid we’d have to sell at least one of our castles.

  – If you took a poll, half the city would have been for it. Bellinzona has three castles, after all—there’d still be two left.

  But now, pretty much everyone, spurred on by the two bakers and the truck driver who was putting on airs like some sort of jet-setter, everyone wanted to jump in with an opinion, democratically requesting (are we or are we not in Switzerland?) a turn.

  For starters, no less boldly than a father of the bride who plants himself in the center of all seventy guests for the commemorative photograph, Mr. Pearlsbeforeswine (this was the secret nickname his neighbors had given him, and it had spread throughout the neighborhood), a retired sergeant major, said:

  – Ladies, gentlemen: to me, that circle—if it is a circle, which is something yet to be proven—can have only one meaning: it’s the bowl for the Kappel War milk soup. In Zwingli’s time, Swiss Catholics and Swiss Protestants—O woe, woe, woe!—were battling each other. But in the end, the Swiss spirit prevailed over differences in faith. The Catholic leaders and the Protestant leaders gathered around a big pot filled with bread and milk and ate this soup together on the border between the cantons of Zürich and Zug. Anyone who reached past his side received a friendly hand-slap with the spoon. They were wooden spoons. Thus in 1938, on April 18 at the Wankdorf, thus every day, from Geneva to Buochs, Basel to Chiasso: instead of the pot, the cup; instead of the soup, a cheery wine. From the Swiss Cup drink the captain of the winning team, the federal councilor, authorities, and managers, the winning team, the losers. Every region in the country, every valley, the nation’s villages, its cities, joined in the diversity of languages and faiths—they drink, metaphorically, from the Cup.

  One and all gather ’round the flag.

  Red is the flame that burns in our hearts,

  White the smile that noble fervor imparts.

  If ever one day we see it from us be lift,

  For the white, for the red, we shall raise our fist.

  They drank red and white. Walaschek, who in that very year, 1938, had endless troubles acquiring a Swiss passport, closed his laughing eyes at the abundance of names that came gushing out:

  Tell

  Euler Oecolampadius

  Lavater Winkelried Stauffacher

  Gotthelf Calvin Zwingli Walaschek Keller

  Jung

  Paracelsus Gessner

  Hodler Bachofen Vadian

  Koblet Walaschek Ramuz Grock Constant

  A bit overwhelming, the German presence in the first formation. The Italian-language newspapers would have made a fuss. They always do. The same old vexations of those Vögte, reeves, on the other side of the Alps. The leopard may change its spots, but . . . And Francesco Chiesa once gave a botanical-moralistic speech saying that the Swiss, by trampling the Italian flower that grew in the Swiss garden, were damaging their own garden. They should have given Chiesa the Grand Schiller Prize a second and third time. In the second half, they could bring in Borromini and Serodine, Swiss who, moreover, were a little suspect, corrected or corrupted as they were by the Roman air. And Major Davel? They might have blamed the Vaudese. And Werner Stauffacher, Hans Waldmann, Le Corbusier, Cendrars, Giacometti, Spitteler, the two Burckhardts. On the bench, Scartazzini and Orelli (Johann Caspar), but, my dear sons, there are only eleven spots, and a center halfback like Winkelried (“By gathering with a wide embrace, / Into his single heart, / a sheaf of fatal Austrian spears.”), you certainly can’t leave him out. More grace than we asked for, St. Anthony!

  – La grz’ia t’ st’Ntonio è ’n la brca t’ furbol!

  St. Anthony’s grace is part of the business of football, or “furbol,” as the butcher put it, who had garbled his words a little trying to speak standard Italian. Thus he made a frantic phone call direct to the ear of the pharmacist, who, with the meticulousness of a man meting out poison, meticulously translated:

  – Mr. Painter! May this perchance be a ring that his lordship painted on humble paper, a rigid round chain—one of the rings of which the so-called sporting organizations avail themselves to catch and bind innocent youths, bind their hands and feet?

  The pharmacist stood up, walked over to the table where there was a small bottle of the produce of some national spring—he wanted to water his mouth before spouting other locutionary flowers. But he didn’t take into account the journalists present, and one of those paper-staining phonies saw that it was the ideal moment to nip that latinorum in the bud. He rushed to speak, trying to flatter the noble pharmacist at the same time:

  – It’s true, it’s true. As the man of science said so well, they catch them by the thousands. They have a whole web and where the strands meet they plant their local referees, the coaches of little teams, the fan clubs who root out a susceptible kid as soon as that kid dribbles the ball à la Schiaffino, so to speak, or parva si licet, a shot à la Mortensen. He’s got the stuff, he has talent. And they buy these guys for nothing. I mean, they give the kid, instead of a contract, they give him a nice spot at the academy, they bring him up as if in Sparta—logical analysis in the morning and kicks in the shins after lunch, crosswords in the evening and then early to bed. When it’s the right time they’ll throw him in with the Juniors 4, then 3, then 2, then 1, then with Hopefuls B, Hopefuls A, and if he has any talent, fifteen minutes on the top team, if the top team is already up three to zero. Billiards and Scala Quaranta at night, hearty slaps on the back, snickering, jealousy, secrets. If his debut on the top team goes well, his ranking will shoot up. They’ll send him out on loan, or open him up to shared ownership, or sell him outright to some provincial team.

  The butcher who was mangling his words in that speech about boys bought and sold like prostitutes, call girls, women to be trafficked, switched on his mental computer and from this computer it came out that, all things considered, he treated his little pigs no worse when he tied a rope around their legs and tied the rope to one of the rings at the butcher shop; and if he could give his piglets some advice, it would be: relax, don’t move, don’t yell, you’re not going anywhere anyway.

  The diabolical Klee, however, thought: if sports really have a certain fascist connotation, does that mean that there’s something good about fascism? Or is that an enthymeme? Life is full of enthymemes, of cherry-rationales with worms inside them. And when a “Johnny of the Vine, who sometimes smiles and sometimes cries,” a Gianni Rivera for example, who gets onto his first team at sixteen, gets to pair up with Schiaffino—does he or doesn’t he pay the expenses for a thousand boys and ten academies? The expense! But back at home, when they find out that Gianni is playing on the top team, the entire family, the entire community, the entire territory—the nation, from the provosts lined up for the big Mass to the altar boys who convert to the boys’ team. The stadiums fill up when they win, it’s true. But everything is built on the faith of the faithful, especially in a period of crisis, which sooner or later c
omes for everyone.

  The nation and the world, the universe: from Ambrose’s old Ambrosiana to Internazionale, from Internazionale Milano to Inter Milan. It’s not Bern, the city with the Wankdorf, where Eugene Walaschek played, but “Young Boys.” In Basel the “Old Boys” stay young and in Zurich it’s the “Young Fellows” and the “Blue Stars” or “Red Stars.” Many towns forget themselves—or dream? (for all of life is a dream, and dreams, after all, are dreams)—and call their teams Racing, Dinamo, Rapid, Urania. Juventus is a name beyond the city, both beneath and beyond the nation.

  Klee laughed openly with a truly degenerate laugh. But Klee—if you’ll pardon the insinuation—what did Klee know about Sindelar, whom the sports writers called “Der Papierene,” the Paper Man, for his slender grace and dexterity and adroitness and feline dribbling skill, but who was actually tissue paper in the face of a Nazi tank? If only he had the bulk of a Plánička, the great Czech cat, shrewd, massive, spry, the only one who was able to succeed Zamora as all-star goalie. No, paper—burned by gas.

  Suddenly, a wind came that shook all the leaves off all of Klee’s trees, and all the birds hidden in the leaves flew off, half-carried by the wind.

  – It’s not so funny, said Lodovico, the chub fisherman. He had a grandson who, ever since they’d put him with the “young talents,” it was like he’d been brainwashed.

  – He won’t even say hi to me anymore, that says it all!

  No, that didn’t say it all; all eyes were on the fisherman, waiting for something else.

  And so the good Lodovico of the chubs slowly added some things:

  – To me, Mr. Klee’s O is the circle that they cut in the ice, when the Balaton, or all those lakes like the Balaton, freeze, and when they’re frozen like that they put a light over the hole and all the fish rush over, and they’re all there for the taking, hundreds of pounds’ worth, you can sell ’em to all of Europe and still keep a glut for yourself. It’s a kind of fishing I don’t like. It’s not a sport, at least not in the way I think of sport. But that’s what almost all those glutton tycoons do, at least ninety percent of them, just like the tycoons of oil or construction or whatever other tomfoolery, they seem like philanthropists but they play the devil’s game. They know they can wring their workers like rags. They know that when they’ve squeezed everything out of them they can just get rid of them. They know there’s a thick cement that binds them, the schmucks, a drug that placates them and puts them to sleep—it’s sports, the home team, the Big Family of Sports. They squeeze fans and players like lemons, and anyone who can’t take it gets thrown into Gehenna.