The Vowel and the Bombardier

The Vowel They Added in February

There are years that announce themselves with trumpets, and there are years that arrive like the fog off the Navigli, seeping under the doors before anyone has thought to close them. Nineteen thirty-nine was the second kind, and for the club this chronicle loves it began with an act of grammar. On 15 February 1939 the English name the club had carried since its founding — Milan, mercantile, salt-tasting, a word the city had long since adopted as its own — was corrected by an age that had appointed itself censor of the dictionary, and the club became, by decree, Associazione Calcio Milano: a terminal vowel affixed like a customs stamp on contraband. The regime had declared war on foreign words long before it would consent to declare it on anything larger, and football, the most public of all languages, was made to file past the inspectors: Internazionale already did its business as Ambrosiana-Inter, Genoa answered to Genova 1893, and now the red and black of the Madonnina's city were to be pronounced only in approved syllables.

One should not smile too quickly at the bureaucracy of it, because a name is a small thing only until somebody takes it from you. The city shrugged, as Milan the city has always shrugged — it has outlived emperors and occupations the way a good risotto outlives the argument over which wine to pour beside it — and in the bars along the canals one likes to imagine the old word surviving in the mouth long after it had been struck from the letterhead. The chronicler notes the decree and moves on, as the club itself was obliged to do, for there was a more urgent matter that February than orthography. There was the small business of not going down.

Winter at the Wrong End of the Table

The year opened on New Year's Day in Turin, where the team drew 2-2 with Juventus — Boffi after twenty minutes, Buscaglia five minutes later — a result of some dignity that concealed the indignity of the position beneath it. A week later came a 2-4 defeat at home, and by matchday nineteen a club that had been sturdy for two good seasons found itself last, dead last, staring up the table like a man at the bottom of a well studying his small circle of sky. Relegation, the word polite Milanese society preferred not to utter at dinner, had pulled up a chair and sat down.

The bench, in that season of anxieties, resembled a kitchen with too many cooks and no agreed recipe: Hermann Felsner and Jozsef Banas began the campaign together, then Banas carried it alone, and finally Jozsef Violak was pulled in beside him for the last ten matches — a Danubian rotation, the club reaching again and again into the same trusted Central European cupboard. Yet whatever the arrangement of hands on the tiller, the boat slowly, unglamorously, came about. Lucchese were beaten 2-1 away in mid-January, Buscaglia and Boffi doing the scoring; a 2-0 followed at home, Boffi striking twice in the second half; February brought two 3-1 victories, the first garnished by a Boffi penalty and goals from Buscaglia and Scagliotti, the second built entirely upon a Boffi hat-trick — the twenty-first minute, the forty-eighth, the fifty-ninth, a meal served in three courses.

March and April were the long middle of the recovery: 2-0 at Livorno with Boffi and Loik scoring two minutes apart; a 2-2 at Lazio rescued by Boffi in the ninetieth, the striker arriving at the death like the last tram crossing an empty piazza; a 2-3 defeat at Torino to remind everyone that salvation is never a straight road; then two austere 1-0 away wins, at Liguria and at Triestina, both signed by Boffi and both worth far more than their arithmetic. A 2-2 at Modena at the end of May closed the ledger. Ninth of sixteen, twenty-eight points from thirty matches — ten won, eight drawn, twelve lost, thirty-six scored, thirty-four conceded — while Bologna took the title far above. It is not a record to frame. It is a record to survive, and surviving, in the spring of 1939, was the whole of the art.

Novara, and the Cup That Would Not Come

The Coppa Italia, meanwhile, performed its annual seduction. On Christmas Day of 1938 Anconitana had been dispatched 4-0; in April Lazio were beaten 2-1 and then Venezia 2-1 in their own lagoon, and so the club arrived once more at the semifinal, the room in the house it knew best and liked least. At Novara on 7 May the tie was suspended, goalless, in the twenty-seventh minute; the replay two days later was lost 3-2, away, and that was that. The season's chroniclers recorded it as the fourth consecutive year in which the semifinal had been the terminus — four springs running of packing the same suitcase and missing the same train.

There is a particular flavour to this kind of heartache, and the Milanese palate knows it well: not the bitterness of catastrophe but the thin, persistent sourness of the almost, like a lemon rind turned once too often through the risotto. A club learns its character in such years. The triumphs of legend, when at last they come — and the reader of this book knows that they will come — are built on decades of Novaras, on replays lost 3-2 in provincial towns while the fog rolls down patiently from the rice fields.

Il Bombardiere

Every struggling team is owed one man who refuses the general verdict, and in 1939 that man was Aldo Boffi. Born on 26 January 1915 in Giussano, in that Brianza countryside north of the city where the Lombard plain begins to gather itself for the Alps, he had grown up a Milan supporter, which is to say he arrived at his boyhood club in 1936 already in love — the rarest and most dangerous condition available to a professional. His official debut had come against Torino on the first of November 1936, and by the winter of 1939 he was the beating heart of a mediocre side: a header specialist above all, a striker who attacked the ball in the air with the conviction of a man settling a personal grievance. They called him il Bombardiere di Seregno — the Bombardier — and the artillery was no metaphor; it was a job description.

Consider what he did with that condemned spring. A team bottom of the table at matchday nineteen was dragged, goal by goal, header by header, to safety, and when the season's accounts were closed the Bombardier stood level at the top of the capocannoniere list with Bologna's Puricelli, nineteen goals apiece — a share of the crown earned in a side that had spent half the winter drowning. And he was not finished. Through the autumn of 1939 he scored with the regularity of church bells: a hat-trick against Fiorentina, again at Genova, against Bari, at Napoli, a penalty against Liguria, two in the December derby — on his way to a second consecutive title, this one unshared, twenty-four goals in 1939-40. He remains in the club's records for consecutive scoring matches, a metronome in an orchestra that kept losing the tempo.

And yet the nation barely wanted him. Vittorio Pozzo, who had his Piola and saw no reason to complicate a settled theology, granted Boffi two caps — two — for the most prolific striker of his era. The moralist shakes his head; the historian merely notes that centre-forwards, like prophets, are rarely honoured in their own federation. Boffi took his revenge the only way open to an honest man, which is to say on Sundays, in the penalty area, with his forehead. He died in his home region in October 1987, and one hopes the Brianza buried him facing south, toward San Siro.

New Men for a Darkening Year

Between the two seasons the club rearranged its furniture. Emilio Colombo, president through the anxious campaign, gave way to Achille Invernizzi; Banas and Violak were confirmed together on the bench; and the captain's armband passed from the old guard of Perversi and Bonizzoni to Antonio Gino Bortoletti. The departure of Perversi deserves its own paragraph of silence: fourteen seasons in the shirt, a career begun when the club was another club and the world another world, ended in the very summer the world itself was ending. Bonizzoni left too. In their place came a small migration — Chizzo, Pasinati, Boniforti, Biraghi, Umberto Menti arriving from Vicenza — and, from the club's own nursery, a youth named Paolo Todeschini, one of those names planted quietly in a season's margin for history to water in its own time.

Above all of it, the continent was loading its weapons. Italy had signed its Pact of Steel with Germany in May; through the last days of August the newspapers grew heavier and the conversations in the galleria shorter; and on the first of September the invasion of Poland began, and with it the second great catastrophe of the century. Italy declared itself non-belligerent — a word invented by diplomats to describe a man standing in the doorway of a burning house, coat on, deciding — and would not enter the war until the June of the following year. And so, with a punctuality that reads now as either courage or sleepwalking, the championship of 1939-40 kicked off on schedule, on 17 September 1939, sixteen days after the tanks had crossed the Polish frontier.

The Autumn of the Non-Belligerents

It began badly, as this club's seasons in the era liked to do: 2-1 to Torino at the Corso Filadelfia, Pasinati's goal after sixteen minutes the only consolation carried back across the rice fields to Milan. Then the team turned, and for three months it played the best football of its recent life. Fiorentina were beaten 3-1 at home, Boffi claiming all three himself — twice in the space of two minutes, the twenty-first and the twenty-third, and again in the eighty-first, with only a penalty in reply; a 1-1 followed at Genova 1893; and on 8 October Bari were dismantled 4-0, the scoring opened, with the era's dry humour, by an own goal from Fusco before Loik, Boffi and Pasinati made the afternoon respectable on their own account.

The autumn was not all silk. Lazio came to Milan and won 2-0, the inevitable Piola among the scorers — Pozzo's chosen one, scoring in the house of the man he kept from the national side, an irony nobody on the terraces needed explained. Novara, that year's recurring toothache, won 1-0 in Novara. And on 29 October the home match against Bologna produced the season's strangest afternoon: on the field it finished 2-2, Milan clawing back two late goals, but the sporting judge, citing the crowd's intemperance, ruled the match closed at the eightieth minute with Bologna two ahead — the comeback struck from the ledger, a 2-0 defeat entered by decree, the terraces in that nervous October carrying more electricity than the wires could hold. The chronicler does not excuse it; he records it, and observes that a city waiting for a war does not always watch football calmly.

Yet the team kept coming. A 2-2 at Juventus in November; Venezia beaten 2-1 with goals from Chizzo and Boffi; then, on the third of December, a 4-1 away at Napoli of genuine handsomeness — Chizzo past the half hour, Remondini twice in the final six minutes, Boffi in between — followed by a 1-1 with Liguria, Boffi from the penalty spot. By mid-December this renamed, rebuilt Milano sat among the season's protagonists, authors of the strong first half of a campaign that would, in the spring beyond this chapter, sag to eighth while Ambrosiana-Inter carried off the scudetto. But the sag belongs to 1940. December 1939 belongs to something else entirely.

Three Goals at the Arena

On 17 December 1939, at the Arena Civica — the old stone amphitheatre where the city had gathered for spectacle long before it consented to call the spectacle football — Milano met Ambrosiana-Inter, the neighbours who would finish the season as champions of Italy, and beat them 3-0. Chizzo, the new arrival, opened after nineteen minutes; then Boffi, twice, in the fifty-sixth and the seventy-fifth, the Bombardier signing the derby the way he signed everything else that year, in his own hand with no co-signature. Three to nothing, against the eventual champions, in the last derby of a peace that was no longer really peace.

Honesty, which is the only sauce this kitchen serves, obliges the note that the return derby at San Siro in the spring would be lost, and that Ambrosiana would enjoy the season's last and largest laugh. But a derby is not an instalment in a title race; it is a thing complete in itself, a Sunday that gets framed and hung on the wall whatever the May table eventually says. And for the supporters who walked home from the Arena through the December fog — in the year of the confiscated name, the near-relegation, the fourth lost semifinal, the war beginning beyond the Alps — those three goals were the evening's entire argument, and the argument was unanswerable.

The Verdict

What, then, was 1939? It was the year the club was made to change its name and declined to change its nature; the year it stared into the cellar in February and was beating the future champions by three in December; the year the Coppa Italia broke its heart for the fourth spring running; the year a boy from Giussano finished top scorer in Italy for a side that had flirted with the drop, then set off at once to do it again. It was, in short, a year in which almost nothing was won and a great deal was proven — and clubs, like men, are built far more by the second than by the first.

The historian, closing the ledger, permits himself one long look forward. The war whose first September this was would swallow the seasons to come; but whatever the letterhead said, the club had never stopped being Milan in fact, and the story would travel further than anyone shuffling out of the Arena that December could have dreamed — to supporters on the far side of the world who would one day rise in the dark, generations later, to follow the same red and black. What Boffi and his fog-bound comrades were defending in 1939 was never merely a name; it was the one thing the censors could not reach, which is the reason people love a club at all. Bologna won that spring's league and Ambrosiana the next one. Milano — ninth, then eighth — won only the derby and its own future, and on the evidence of this chronicle it was much the better bargain.