Where the Ball Is

by High Press Philosophy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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On Tuesdays and Thursdays Ivano Cavallari drove to the pitch at Corte Bassa straight from the Consorzio di Bonifica, in the green Fiat 127 with the surveyor's chain still in the boot, and before he said good evening to anyone he walked the touchline with a length of washing line knotted every five metres. The line was twenty-five metres long. He had cut it in the yard behind the pumping station and placed the knots with the Consorzio's steel tape, which was against regulations.

The pitch lay under the embankment of the Po di Volano. The river ran higher than the grass. You could stand in the centre circle and look up at the top of the bank and know that the water on the other side was above your head, and that what kept it there was the bank and the pumps, which Ivano's office maintained, and which ran all night with a sound like a man breathing through his teeth. Behind the far goal was the sugar factory. It was the end of October, the beet campaign, and the smell of boiled pulp lay over the village day and night, sweet at first and then not. It got into the nets. It got into the kit, which Fausto Tassinari's wife washed on Mondays for nothing.

There were sixteen men on the books, at three thousand lire a month. Fausto kept goal; he was a baker and came to Thursday training with flour in the creases of his knuckles. Gino Zanella, the postman, played right back. The Gamberini brothers, Ettore and Dino, who drove the same tractor on alternate days, played in the middle of the defence, and Ivano had spent most of September getting them to stand level with each other instead of one behind the other, because their father had played libero for Corte Bassa in 1958 and Dino had grown up thinking that was a position you inherited. Remo Bellotti, forty-one, played wherever there was a gap. And at the front there was Loris Bonora, nineteen, home since August from three months with the youth side at SPAL, who had brought back a pair of white Adidas boots and an opinion about everything.

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"The ball is here," said Ivano.

He was standing on the halfway line, pointing at the left corner flag at the far end, where there was nothing. It was a quarter to seven and the floodlights, two poles on the factory side, lit one half of the pitch yellow and left the other grey.

Ten men moved. Gino came across from right back until he was level with the edge of the penalty area. The Gamberini brothers slid left together, Dino half a pace behind Ettore, then not. Remo went to where a man would have to go to stop a pass inside. Pasini, the other forward, shuffled left and dropped. It was not good, but it was a shape.

Loris stood in the centre circle with his hands on his hips.

"Geometra," he said. "Where's the ball?"

"There." Ivano pointed again.

"I don't see it."

Somebody laughed. It was Dino. Ivano looked at Dino, not at Loris, and Dino stopped.

"The ball is here," Ivano said, and pointed at the right touchline, thirty metres from the halfway line, in the grey.

They moved. Gino went forward this time, pressing the space where a winger would receive. Ettore shifted towards the ball and Dino went with Ettore, and for once the distance between them stayed what it should be. Remo went right. Fausto came off his line and stood on the eighteen-yard line, as he had been told to do, looking embarrassed.

Loris walked three steps to his right, slowly, and stopped.

"Twenty metres," said Ivano.

"What?"

"You are twenty metres from where you should be. Behind you there is a pass that goes through the middle of the field and nobody is there to close it."

"There isn't any pass. There isn't any ball."

"No," said Ivano. "There isn't."

He made them do it for forty minutes. The ball on the left, on the right, back to their keeper, a long throw, a goal kick. He did not raise his voice. He walked among them and put his hands on their shoulders and moved them half a metre, a metre, and asked each one: why were you there? Gino said, because the winger. Ivano said, which winger? There is no winger. Where is the ball? Gino looked at the corner flag and moved himself.

Afterwards, at the Bar Sport, Remo said what the whole village said. He said it kindly, with a glass in his hand.

"Ivano. You never kicked a ball in your life."

"That's true."

"So how do you know where Gino should stand?"

Ivano took the sugar bowl and emptied it on the zinc counter, which made the barman sigh. He laid out the packets. Four in a line. Four in front of them. Two in front of those. One at the back, the goalkeeper, and he set the ashtray in the bottom corner for the ball.

"Show me," he said. "Where is Gino."

Remo looked at the packets for some time. Then he picked one up from the end of the back four and moved it a long way across, towards the ashtray, and put it down.

"There," he said.

Ivano picked up the packet next to it, the one that was Ettore, and moved it across to fill the space. Then the next, Dino. Then the last. Then the four in midfield, each the same distance. Then the two at the front. The whole set of packets had moved towards the ashtray, and the distances between them were the same as before.

"You played twenty years," he said. "Did you know that Ettore moves when Gino moves?"

"Everyone knows that."

"Then why does he never do it?"

Remo drank. The barman began putting the sugar back in the bowl.

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On the Tuesday Ivano brought the washing line.

He gave one end to Ettore, at the back, and walked the other end up the pitch until the line lifted off the grass, and he put it into Loris's hand.

"When it goes slack, you are wrong. When it pulls, you are wrong."

"I'm not holding a rope during a game."

"No. Today you are."

He called the ball. Left side, deep. The back four slid. The midfield slid. The rope went taut because Loris had not moved and Ettore had, and Ettore felt it pull at his hand and turned and shouted, and Loris, who did not like being shouted at by a man who drove a tractor, pulled back. For a moment the two of them stood leaning against each other down twenty-five metres of washing line, and the rest of the team stopped to watch.

"Ball's on the right," said Ivano.

Nobody moved.

"Ball's on the right," he said again, and they went. Ettore went right with the line in his fist, and the line pulled Loris, and Loris went right because the alternative was to fall over. They ran three steps like that, attached. Then Loris let go.

The rope lay on the grass in a long curve. Ivano went and picked up the loose end and coiled it round his hand and elbow, the way he coiled the chain at work, and put it in his coat pocket. He did not give it back.

"Ball's in the middle," he said. "Our half. Their number nine has it with his back to goal."

Gino and Remo went at once to the man who was not there. Dino stepped out. Ettore covered behind him. They had remembered, from the cups and the sugar packets, that a man with his back to goal is a man to go at. Ivano watched the four of them close round nothing in the middle of the pitch, very tight, so that a ball could not have got out.

Loris was twenty-five metres in front of Ettore, almost exactly. He was standing in a place where, if the ball came out, he would have been the first pass. He did not look as if he knew it.

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They drew 1–1 at Borgo Fiumana on the first Sunday of November, and lost 2–0 at home to the agricultural college the week after, when Fausto came off his line to the eighteen-yard line exactly as he had been told and a boy of seventeen lobbed him from forty metres. Fausto said nothing about it in the dressing room. On the Tuesday he was on the eighteen-yard line again, before Ivano had said a word.

Loris scored the goal at Borgo Fiumana. He took the ball off his own centre-back's foot, beat two men and hit it from the edge of the box, and for the rest of the afternoon he did not come back past the halfway line. The second half was played in two parts, Loris and the others. Ivano wrote down, in the notebook he used for levels and gradients, the minutes in which there had been ten players on the field and not eleven. It came to fifty-one.

At the Bar Sport that evening Loris stood the team a round, which he could afford because he was still living at home. He brought Ivano a coffee without being asked.

"They said I was slow," he said. "At Ferrara."

Ivano stirred the coffee.

"I'm not slow," said Loris. "I was faster than all of them over thirty metres. They had it timed."

"Were you slow to start?"

Loris looked at him.

"Over thirty metres," said Ivano, "if you start when the ball is played, you are late. Even if you are the fastest."

"So when do I start?"

"Before."

"Before what? I can't run before the ball."

"There," said Ivano. "That is exactly what you have to do."

Loris drank his own coffee in one swallow and went back to the others. He did not come to the Thursday session. On the Saturday he telephoned Remo, who telephoned Ivano, to say he would play on Sunday.

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Valcorba came on the third Sunday of November, kick-off at half past two. It was cold and still. At that time of year the sun went down behind the factory chimney at about half past four, and by then you could see your breath against the floodlights if they had turned them on, which on Sunday they never did because the electricity was paid by the Comune and the Comune said a daytime fixture was a daytime fixture.

Valcorba had a centre-forward called Benetti who weighed more than both Gamberini brothers together and stood with his back to goal waiting for long balls. In the first half Ivano watched the brothers close on him every time, Ettore in front, Dino behind, Remo coming in from the side, three men round one, and Benetti, who was used to one man, kept giving the ball away. Corte Bassa were one up at half time. Remo had scored, from Gino's cross, arriving from nowhere in particular.

During the interval the fog came off the river.

It always came the same way. It came over the top of the embankment like milk over the lip of a pan and lay down on the pitch, and you could see it move, very slowly, from the river side towards the factory. By the time the referee led the teams out again the far goal had gone and the near one was going. The referee was from the Ferrara section, a young man with a moustache. He walked to the centre circle and looked towards each goal for a long time. He could see one crossbar. He thought he could see the other. He blew his whistle.

Ivano stood on the touchline with his hands in his coat pockets. One hand found the coiled washing line.

For the first ten minutes he could see the near half and the backs of his own defence. Then he could see only the white of Fausto's jersey, and then he could see nothing past the penalty area, and then nothing at all, only the grey, and the shapes of the Valcorba substitutes on their bench twenty metres away, and sometimes a man going past at a run, close, and gone.

He heard instead.

It was the first thing he had taught them in August, before the rope and the sugar. When the ball moves, you call. One word. The man going to the ball calls mia. The man covering calls dietro. The line calls su to step up and giù to drop. Remo called dentro to the wide men when they had drifted. Ivano had made them do it in the shadow play until Gino said he felt like an idiot, and Ivano had said, good, then you are calling loud enough.

Now it came out of the fog to him.

Mia. That was Dino. Dietro, dietro. Ettore, behind him. A thud, a long one, Benetti's ball going nowhere. Su! Four voices. He heard them move, not the feet but the voices, coming up past him together in a line, the same distance apart. Dentro, Gino. Remo. Sì. Gino. On the far side something he could not make out, and then a Valcorba player shouting a name and nobody answering it.

He counted.

He did it the way he counted pumps on the board at work, red light, green light, left to right. Fausto, shouting at nobody, which Fausto did. The four at the back. Remo. The three other midfielders, two calling, one only grunting, but present. One forward, Pasini, at the near side of the front line, calling mia and then tua in the voice he used when he was frightened.

Ten.

There was a gap, ahead of Ettore. Twenty or twenty-five metres ahead of him, left of centre, where the second voice of the front line should have been, there was no voice. There was fog and the beet smell. Somewhere in the gap a Valcorba midfielder was calling for the ball, easily, as a man calls who has time.

Ivano did not shout. A man on the touchline in fog cannot see either.

Mia, said Dino. A boot. The ball came out of the grey along the ground, quite slowly, and crossed the touchline a metre from Ivano's feet and stopped against the advertising board for the Cassa di Risparmio. He did not pick it up. A Valcorba substitute came out of the fog, took it, and was gone. Su, called the line, and went up.

Then the voice came. It came from the gap, from almost exactly the place, a little to the right.

Qui.

Not mia. Not one of the words. He had not taught them qui. It was Loris, saying here, to whoever might have the ball, because he could not see who did.

Ivano heard a pass. He heard someone take it on the first touch, and it was not Loris, because Loris was still calling; the ball had gone past him or round him, to a third voice that came in from the left side shouting nothing at all, running. Remo. It was Remo's breathing. He would have known it anywhere; he had listened to it for three months.

There was a shot, or something like a shot. Then a lot of shouting, from both sides, so that he could not tell anything.

The referee blew three times.

He blew again, from the centre circle, and then he came out of the fog to the touchline, the young man with the moustache, his shoulders wet. He said to Ivano and to the Valcorba coach, both together, that he could not see either goal from the middle of the pitch and the match was suspended and would be replayed, the federation would write. The Valcorba coach said something about the Comune and the electricity. Ivano said nothing. He was looking past the referee into the grey.

They were coming out. He could hear them before he saw them, not calling now, only talking, and then he could see them, his own team in their red shirts coming off the pitch towards him in the fog. They came out the way they had been standing. Fausto at the back on his own. The four in a line. Remo and the three in front of them. Pasini and, to his left, Loris, his white boots dark with mud to the ankle.

Ivano took his right hand out of his pocket and began to walk across the front of them, from Ettore to Loris, counting his paces under his breath, as he did on the reclaimed fields when the chain was in the car and he had only his legs.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Philosophiae Pressiōnis Altae per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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