The First Brazilians

Fog on the Navigli

There are years that announce themselves with trumpets, and there are years that arrive the way fog arrives on the Navigli — without ceremony, sliding over the black water and under the doors, so that a man walking to the tram at dawn cannot say at what precise moment the world turned grey. For the Milan Football Club, 1935 was a fog year. Its first half was the long run-in of the 1934-35 championship, which expired on the second of June; its autumn raised the curtain on 1935-36, which kicked off on the twenty-second of September; and between the two hung a summer in which the club changed its president, changed its captain, and — more quietly than anyone understood at the time — changed the map of its imagination.

This was the heart of Milan's lean thirties: a single national division, Serie A, and a single stubborn fact, which was that the red and black shirt no longer frightened anyone. Above the fog, in the clear alpine light where trophies live, Juventus were completing their fifth championship in succession — the Quinquennio d'Oro, the golden five — while Milan grazed in mid-table with the patient, uncomplaining air of a herd that has forgotten the mountain pastures. Tenth place in June; eighth place, in time, for the season begun that September, with Bologna crowned. Those are the ledgers, and ledgers do not blush.

And yet a fog year is not an empty year. Fog conceals; it also carries. Somewhere on the Atlantic in the summer of 1935 was a ship, and on the ship were two Brazilians, and in the boots of one of them — a quiet man from Curitiba — travelled a small piece of Milan's future self: the club that would one day be unimaginable without Brazil. But we must not run ahead of the calendar. The peasant's rule holds in football as it holds in the rice fields of Lombardy: eat the winter before you plant the spring.

Tenth Place, Measured in Draws

The spring of 1935, then. Milan closed the 1934-35 championship with a record that reads like a shrug performed in numbers: thirty matches, eight won, eleven drawn, eleven lost; thirty-six goals scored and thirty-eight allowed; twenty-seven points and tenth place, packed into mid-table alongside Triestina and Brescia the way commuters are packed into a morning carriage — close, indifferent, going nowhere in particular together.

The eleven draws are the season's true portrait. A team that draws eleven times in thirty is not a bad team; it is an undecided one, a team that can organise a defence and set a table but cannot quite bring itself to demand the better meal. At home Milan were solid enough to stay entirely clear of danger. Away, they were a soufflé in a draught. The season's one flash of the old thunder came absurdly late: in Turin, in January, Milan had gone down 1-0 to the champions-elect, narrowly and respectably; then on the nineteenth of May, matchday twenty-eight, they turned and beat that same Juventus 3-0 at San Siro — Arcari twice, Romani between his goals — a magnificent, isolated act of insubordination that dented the champion's stride without altering Milan's own destination, which is the mid-table condition compressed into a single afternoon.

The goals, such as they were, belonged chiefly to Pietro Arcari — Arcari III, the third of that footballing name — who finished the campaign with ten league goals, or eleven if you trust a different ledger; the accountants of the era disagree, and we shall let them. Carlo Rigotti, a defender, wore the armband, which suited a side whose virtues were defensive: honest, unglamorous, and insufficient.

New Hands at the Helm

In June, with the season barely cold, the club changed its head. Luigi Ravasco, who had governed as the club's extraordinary commissioner, stepped aside and Pietro Annoni stepped up, assuming the thankless Milanese office of presiding over a club whose past was grander than its present. Every institution in that decade of parades understood the choreography of succession; Milan performed its own quietly, in the boardroom rather than the piazza, and it was Annoni who would steer the club through the campaign that began in the autumn.

On the bench, continuity — and continuity of a distinguished kind. Adolfo Baloncieri, a great of Torino and of Italy in his playing days, had taken charge of Milan the previous autumn, opening his account on the thirtieth of September 1934 with a 2-1 win over Pro Vercelli, and he remained in command through the whole of 1935. Here was a man who had known the game from its most refined interior rooms, now asked to conduct an orchestra of honest artisans; he would keep the baton until December 1936, when the Englishman William Garbutt was summoned to replace him. That, too, is a Milanese story: the thinker hired in hope, thanked in patience, released in fog.

The armband changed arms as well. Rigotti passed the captaincy to Giuseppe Bonizzoni for the new campaign — a small ceremony, the kind noticed only by the men in the dressing room, and by historians hunting for the hinges on which quiet years turn.

A Ship from São Paulo

Now the summer's real news, though the newspapers of the day could not have known how the future would enlarge it. Ahead of 1935-36 Milan went shopping abroad — cautiously, in the oriundi market that Italian football then permitted itself — and came home with a cargo unprecedented in the club's history: two Brazilians, Vicente Arnoni and Elisio Gabardo, both from Palestra Itália of São Paulo, the first men from Brazil ever to pull on the rossonero shirt. Alongside them arrived the Argentine José Spirolazzi and, from nearer pastures, the Italians Mario Zorzan, Ermanno Bertolotti and Mario Zidarich.

One must pause on the geography. A mid-table Lombard club, deep in its lean decade, lifting its eyes from the Po Valley and looking across an ocean: there is a modesty and an audacity in it at once, like a trattoria that cannot fill its tables deciding, against all prudent advice, to put a new dish on the menu. Milan and Brazil — the phrase means something enormous now; in the summer of 1935 it meant two names on a shipping manifest and a long Atlantic swell between São Paulo and Italy. Every dynasty begins as paperwork.

Gabardo of Curitiba

Let us give the man his due, because history mostly has not. Elisio — Eliseo, once the Italian registrars had finished with him — Gabardo was born on the first of July 1911 in Curitiba, in the state of Paraná, and he crossed the ocean in 1935 with Arnoni beside him: two pioneers who could not have known they were pioneers. A midfielder by trade, he crossed as a name on a shipping manifest and arrived as an entry in a ledger — the eternal fate of the newcomer, to exist first as someone else's idea of him.

His debut came on opening day itself, the twenty-second of September 1935, in the 2-0 home win over Alessandria, the new Brazilian pair presented to the public together. His first Italian season was an apprenticeship rather than a conquest: twelve appearances, two goals, a man from the Paraná winter learning the different cold of a Lombard one, learning a football that treated space as something to be rationed rather than spent.

And here, in time, the two pioneers took their different roads. Arnoni gave Milan fifty-seven official matches and eleven goals before turning for home and the clubs of Brazil. Gabardo lasted the same three seasons — seventy-one official matches, eleven goals in red and black — and then, instead of the boat home, chose the peninsula, wandering as journeymen wander, to Liguria, to Genoa, to little Gattinara, before returning at last to his native Curitiba, where he died on the eighteenth of March 1969. The man from Paraná scored no legends. He merely opened a door, and through that door, in decades he never saw, would walk the Brazilians who made Milan a second home of their nation's genius. Somebody has to be first. It is the least thanked of all footballing jobs.

An Autumn in Two Tempos

The new season, meanwhile, began the way false springs begin: warmly. Alessandria were beaten 2-0 at home on the opening day, and a week later, on the twenty-ninth of September, came the derby. It finished 1-1, Moretti scoring for Milan, and the point was — the connoisseur of neighbourly misfortune will savour this — the only one Ambrosiana-Inter managed to extract from their own wretched start to the season. A derby draw that doubles as an act of charity: the fixture has known stranger arithmetic, but not much.

Then October, and the fog rolled in on schedule. A 1-0 home defeat to Torino on the twentieth of October, matchday five, punctured the bright opening, and there followed what the club's own historians would come to call il solito calo vistoso: the usual conspicuous decline. Usual. There is a whole decade of heartache folded into that adjective, the resignation of a support that had learned to read September's promises as October's debts.

The campaign begun in that autumn would run its course to May 1936 and deliver Milan to eighth place: ten wins, eight draws, twelve defeats, forty scored, forty-one conceded, twenty-eight points, level with Napoli, Alessandria and Genova 1893, while Bologna took the title with forty. From tenth to eighth, then — progress of a kind, if one squints; the sort of progress a man makes rowing upstream, measured against the bank in centimetres.

The City Takes the Stadium, the Regime Takes Its War

Off the pitch, 1935 rearranged furniture that would matter for a century. The San Siro stadium — Milan's home since 1926 — passed in that year into the ownership of the Comune di Milano, becoming a civic sports facility, the people's ground in law as it already was in feeling. The great municipal enlargement, the tiers that would swell it toward sixty thousand and beyond, belonged to the later thirties, to the works of 1937-39; but the deed was done in 1935, and Milan played on at San Siro, tenants now of their own city.

And beyond the touchline, the decade showed its teeth. On the third of October 1935 — four days after the derby — Mussolini's Italy invaded Ethiopia, and the Second Italo-Ethiopian War began; by November the League of Nations had answered with sanctions. Football did not stop; football under that regime was never permitted to stop, for the parade ground and the stadium had been conscripted into the same theatre. But let the reader hold the two dates side by side, the derby and the invasion, four days apart in the same city's newspapers, and understand what it meant to follow a mid-table team in 1935: the game was the parenthesis, and the sentence around it was darkening.

Verdict in Grey

What, then, was 1935? Not a triumph: the cabinet gathered another year of dust while Turin toasted a fifth consecutive title. Not a tragedy: tenth place and eighth place are not wounds, merely the long dull ache of the unexceptional. It was something subtler and, in the end, more important — the year a becalmed club quietly re-rigged its ship, a new president in Annoni, a new captain in Bonizzoni, the faithful Baloncieri still at the wheel; and above all the year Milan first tasted Brazil, in the modest persons of Arnoni and Gabardo, the way one first tastes saffron in a risotto without yet knowing the dish will one day be named for it.

Ninety years on, the supporters of this club in Adelaide — who keep their own vigils in the small hours, on the far side of all the world's clocks — can read the 1935 ledgers without finding a single match worth a sleepless night. And yet no honest history of the Diavolo skips this fog year, because in it the club began to learn the lesson that would one day make it immense: that Milan is not a dot on the map of Lombardy but a port, and that the red and black shirt travels. The man from Paraná came ashore in 1935 with two goals in his first season and a door held open behind him. Judged as a football year, it was grey. Judged as a chapter, it was the grey of a sky about to be crossed.