Ermes Bonfatti reads proofs for a provincial daily by night and runs the line in Italy's lower divisions on Sundays. He has never needed more than one rule: stand level with the second-last defender. Then he is sent to Fossalta, a small club whose new coach has abolished the libero, and the four men across the back step up together faster than he can follow. Marked down by the observer, he spends his free Sundays on the terrace, walking the rail to learn what the defence watches. The story follows one official through a single season, written in plain, exact prose that watches the space and the shape of the game rather than the ball. By High Press Philosophy Simulacrum.
by High Press Philosophy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
In the week Ermes Bonfatti read proofs for the provincial daily, from six in the evening until the last page went down at one, and on Sundays he ran the line. He had done both for nine years. The two jobs had the same tool, which was a steel rule thirty centimetres long; at the paper he laid it under each line of type to see whether a letter had dropped below the others, and on Sunday mornings he used it to straighten the cloth on his flag, which curled at the corner if it was left folded in the bag.
He was thirty-four, unmarried, and lived with his mother above a haberdasher's in the Via Emilia. He had never played the game further than the parish ground. He did not think about this. A linesman did not need to have played; he needed to be level with the second-last defender when the ball was struck, and to see. Level was offside, then. That was the whole of it, and he did it well, and the observers marked him eight-thirty, eight-forty, which was what they marked a man who would go no higher and did no harm.
The first time he had Fossalta was the second Sunday of October, at home, against Pontelagoscuro. A grey afternoon. Eleven hundred people in a ground that held three thousand, most of them along the main stand, and the smell from the pig farm on the Mirandola road coming over the far terrace whenever the wind went round.
He had the half in front of the stand, which meant he had Fossalta's defence for the first forty-five minutes. He took up his place before the kick-off as he always did: he looked for the last man.
There was not one.
Every team he had run the line for in nine years had a libero. You found him at once, the one who stood five or six metres behind the others and called to them and did not mark anyone, and you put yourself level with the man in front of him and kept him in the corner of your eye, because the libero was always deep and the line was always the man in front of the libero. Fossalta had four men across the pitch in a row, the two centre-backs and the two full-backs, the same distance apart, and nobody behind them but the goalkeeper. Ermes stood on the touchline and moved two paces down, and then one up, to be level with them, and then the ball was kicked off and they went forward thirty metres in what seemed to him no time at all, all four together, and left him.
He ran. He got level. He was out of breath by the twentieth minute, which had not happened to him since his first season, and by then he had flagged twice and been booed for both, and had kept the flag down once when he should have raised it, and nobody had noticed, because the Pontelagoscuro striker had shot wide.
He noticed. The Fossalta captain noticed.
The captain was the left centre-back, a heavy, fair man of about thirty called Melloni, who wore the armband above the elbow and never raised his voice. When the shot went wide he did not appeal. He did not look at the referee. He looked along his line of four, from the right-back to the left, and then on past the left-back, along the same line, to the touchline, to Ermes. It was not an angry look. It was the look a man gives a level when the bubble is not in the middle.
At sixty-one minutes Ermes had the other half and the Pontelagoscuro defence, which was the normal kind, with a libero, and he was comfortable again. At seventy-four the Pontelagoscuro left-back hit a long ball from deep into the Fossalta half, the half Ermes no longer had, and he saw the Fossalta line step up across the far side of the pitch, all four in a single movement like a door closing, and the Pontelagoscuro forward caught a yard behind them; and he saw the other linesman, an older man from the Carpi section who had been running the line for twenty-two years, standing where the libero would have been and keeping his flag at his side. The forward ran on and scored.
Melloni walked back to the centre circle with the others. On the way he looked across at the far touchline, and then at Ermes, as if Ermes were the only other person in the ground who had seen it.
Pontelagoscuro won one-nil.
The observer's report came on the Thursday, in a brown envelope from the regional committee. It was typed on a machine with a dirty e. Eight-twenty. Under Positioning it said, Late in following the movement of the home defence in the first half; three uncertain decisions; lacked confidence. It did not say anything about the goal, which had not been in Ermes's half.
He read it at the kitchen table, under the light, before he went to the paper. His mother asked if it was bad news. He said it was a mark.
At the paper that night the compositors were short-handed because of an influenza, and the pages came to him late, three and four at once, smelling of warm ink, and he worked quickly. He laid the steel rule under each line. He found a dropped a in the agricultural prices and a figure upside down in the cinema times. Then he came to the regional football page, and there was half a column on Fossalta, under a photograph of their coach, who was a short bald man with a cardigan and a schoolteacher's spectacles. The experiment continues, it said. The new coach's system of defending without a libero, high up the field, continues to divide supporters. Sunday's defeat ... He corrected libbero to libero and initialled the galley and sent it down.
He found that he had kept the rule in his hand, flat against the desk, for some time after.
On the first Sunday in November he had no fixture. He took the train to Modena and the bus to Fossalta and paid two thousand lire at the gate like anyone else.
He did not go into the stand. He went to the long terrace on the other side, which was concrete steps with an iron rail along the front, and stood at the rail at the level of the Fossalta back four. When they went up, he walked up the rail. When they dropped, he walked back.
It was not easy. There were people standing at the rail, mostly old men in caps, and he had to say permesso and go round them, and once a man with a dog said something to him about sitting still, which made the people near him laugh. By the end of the first half he had stopped saying permesso and had begun to go behind them, along the second step, where the dog was.
He had thought, at first, that Melloni gave a signal. He watched Melloni for twenty minutes and saw no signal. Melloni talked, all afternoon, quietly, to the boy on his left and the man on his right, but the four of them went forward on different words and on no word at all, and sometimes they went before Melloni had opened his mouth.
So he stopped watching Melloni, and watched what Melloni was watching.
It was not the ball. Nor was it the forward, whom the four of them hardly seemed to notice; a forward could stand anywhere he liked among them and nobody went with him. It was the man with the ball, and of the man with the ball it was one thing only, the head. While the man with the ball had his head up he could see where to put it, and the four stayed where they were. When his head went down, when he looked down at the ball to strike it, because a man must look at the ball to strike it any distance, the four went up. Two steps, three. They were already going when the boot came through. By the time the ball was in the air the line was in a new place, and the forward who had been level was a yard behind it, and the flag on the far side went up.
There was a sound to it as well. From the terrace you could hear it in the quiet stretches when the crowd had nothing to shout about: four pairs of studs on wet grass at once, a short sound, like someone tearing cloth.
He tried it. When the next man in a blue shirt brought the ball out of midfield, Ermes kept his eyes on the man's head; when the head went down, he took two steps along the second step of the terrace. The four came with him. He did it again. He was early once, and a man in a cap looked at him as though he had pushed in front of him in a queue. Then the ball came out and he was not early, and the four came up level with him, so that if anyone had laid a rule from the Fossalta left-back, across the pitch, through the right-back and over the rail and the terrace, it would have touched Ermes Bonfatti's waistcoat.
Fossalta won two-nil. He did not see either goal properly. On the bus back he found that his calves ached, and he could not think why, until he worked out that he had walked up and down the second step of the terrace for ninety minutes.
That winter he did it with every team he had, whether or not it had a libero, and on every free Sunday he went to Fossalta. He did not tell anyone. On the Tuesday evenings he did his training at the municipal track, as all the linesmen did, twenty-metre shuttles along the straight, started on the whistle; and he took to starting them not on the whistle but on the instructor's chest, when it filled with air to blow. One of the young referees asked him how he always got away first. He said he was getting old.
At the paper, in January, the head proofreader retired, and they gave Ermes the night desk, which meant the front page and the late sport. He read the late sport very carefully. In February there was a paragraph which said that the Fossalta coach had been sacked by the president after a run of four defeats, and a paragraph a week later which said that the president had changed his mind after the players went to see him, all of them, together, on a Monday night. The paragraph was very short and did not say what they had said. He initialled it and sent it down.
The designations for the return fixtures came in March, on a postcard. Fossalta at home to Pontelagoscuro, the last Sunday of the month. The referee was a young man from the Bologna section called Gualandi, and the other linesman was a student.
It was a fine day, the first warm one, with the poplars along the Mirandola road showing green, and the crowd was bigger than in October, nearly two thousand. Fossalta were seventh, Pontelagoscuro fourth.
He had the stand side again. At the toss Fossalta chose ends, and the choice put their defence in the student's half until the interval, and Ermes spent the first forty-five minutes level with the Pontelagoscuro libero, where nothing happened that a man could get wrong. He watched the far side. The student was late twice, as Ermes had been in October, and once Melloni looked across the pitch at the student, along the line.
Fossalta scored before half-time. It began with Melloni stepping out of the line to take the ball off a forward's foot and giving it to the right-back, who had already gone; the right-back ran forty metres and crossed, and their centre-forward put it in off his knee.
At the interval, in the dressing room, Gualandi asked the student if he was all right, and the student said yes. Gualandi did not ask Ermes anything.
When they came out Ermes went down the stand side to the level of the four men in red and white, and Melloni, who was pushing the armband back up above his elbow, saw him there, and did not look away.
Three minutes into the second half the Pontelagoscuro midfield brought the ball forward. Ermes watched the man's head. It went down. Ermes went up, two steps, three, and heard the cloth tear on the grass beside him, and the ball came over and the Pontelagoscuro forward ran onto it two yards behind the line and put it in the net; and the flag was already up.
The stand behind him made the noise a stand makes. A man shouted that he was blind. A man shouted that he had been bought. Gualandi, who had been thirty metres away and looking at the ball, looked at the flag, and then at Ermes, for what seemed a long time, and then blew for the free kick.
Melloni had turned. He was walking back to his place, and as he passed the edge of the area he looked at Ermes along the line again, and this time the bubble was in the middle, and he nodded, very slightly, the way a man nods to someone he has passed in the street every day for a year and never spoken to.
It went on like that. Three times more in twenty minutes the flag went up, and each time the stand told him what it thought of him. Then once he kept it down when the stand wanted it up, because when the ball was struck the forward had still been half a yard short of the line, onside; and Pontelagoscuro scored; and that was the only time nobody on the pitch looked at him at all. After that the stand booed him whatever he did, and he did not hear it.
At seventy-nine minutes it was one-all.
The Fossalta left-back, on Ermes's side, was a boy of nineteen called Guidetti, who had come into the team in February. He was quick and brave and he had been brought up, Ermes thought, by somebody who had taught him to mark a man. All afternoon he had watched the Pontelagoscuro winger as well as the head of the man with the ball, and twice he had been half a step behind the others in going up, and Melloni had said something to him, without turning his head.
Then the Pontelagoscuro libero came forward with the ball from his own half, which was unusual, and the winger drifted inside behind Guidetti.
Ermes watched the libero's head. It went down. The line went, three men, two steps, and on the end of it, nearest to Ermes, one man stayed. Guidetti had turned his head to see where the winger was. He looked back and the others had gone and he went after them, but the ball had been struck by then. When it was struck the winger had been a yard past the other three and a metre short of Guidetti, and Guidetti was the second-last man.
Ermes stood on the touchline level with Guidetti, which was where the law said he should stand, three metres behind the place where every instinct he had trained since October told him he should be, and kept the flag at his side.
The winger went on alone and slid the ball under the goalkeeper.
Everybody on the pitch in red and white turned at once to the touchline with their arms in the air, except two. The stand stood up. Gualandi looked at Ermes, and Ermes ran towards the halfway line, flag down, the way the book said you did it, and Gualandi pointed to the centre.
Guidetti was standing where he had stopped. He was not looking at the touchline. He was looking at the place in front of him where the line had been, and then at the space between himself and the place, which was no more than three metres of grass with nothing in it.
Melloni came across from the middle. He did not shout. He took the boy by the shoulders, from behind, and turned him round, so that he faced not the goal or the touchline but straight across the pitch, along the line where the other three now stood; and he stood behind him with his hands on his shoulders, and said something into his ear, and pointed with his chin up the pitch, at the centre circle, where the referee was putting the ball down. Then he let go and walked to his place.
Fossalta kicked off and lost the ball inside a minute. Pontelagoscuro played it back and across and back, as a team plays when it is winning with ten minutes left, and the four men in red and white stood watching the head of the man with the ball, the boy among them, very still.
The man with the ball looked down. The four went up together, and on the touchline, without looking at his feet, Ermes went up with them.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Philosophiae Pressiōnis Altae per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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