The Vowel and the Bombardier

The Vowel They Added in February

The letterhead changed on 14 February 1939. Milan — English, mercantile, salt-tasting, a word the city had adopted so completely that it had long since stopped hearing anything foreign in it — became by decree Associazione Calcio Milano: a terminal vowel affixed like a customs stamp on contraband. The club had carried the English name since its founding; the correction took an afternoon in an office. 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. Now the red and black 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, having outlived emperors and occupations and a good many decrees before this one; in the bars one likes to imagine the old word surviving in the mouth long after it had been struck from the stationery. A decree can be printed, and it can be read out over a wireless set to a room that has stopped listening; what it cannot do is make the new word sound like the thing people had been saying since the club was founded. There was in any case 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, studying the table the way a man at the bottom of a well studies 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, held too many hands at once: Hermann Felsner and József Bánás began the campaign together, then, from October, Bánás carried it alone, and finally in March József Violak was pulled in beside him as technical director for the last ten matches. Yet whatever the arrangement 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 with 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, spaced down the afternoon like stops on a timetable.

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 the single goal each contained. A 2-2 at Modena at the end of May closed it. Ninth of sixteen, twenty-eight points from thirty matches — ten won, eight drawn, twelve lost, thirty-six scored, thirty-four conceded — while far above, Bologna took the title on forty-two points, Torino came second on thirty-eight and Ambrosiana-Inter third on thirty-seven. 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. It was 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. A club learns its character in such years. The triumphs of legend, when at last they come, are built on decades of Novaras, on replays lost 3-2 in provincial towns while the light goes off the rice fields and the last train home fills with men who have nothing to say to each other.

Il Bombardiere

Aldo Boffi was born in 1915 in Giussano, in that Brianza countryside north of the city where the Lombard plain begins to gather itself for the Alps. He grew up a Milan supporter, which is to say that when he arrived at the club in 1936 he arrived already in love — the rarest and most dangerous condition available to a professional. His official debut came 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. There was nothing ornamental about him. He did not beautify a match; he ended it, and then stood in the goalmouth with the expression of a workman who has been told the job will take all afternoon and knows better. 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 ended the Bombardier stood level at the top of the capocannoniere list with Bologna's Ettore Puricelli, nineteen league goals apiece — twenty-one for Boffi across all competitions — 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 went on scoring almost weekly, on his way to a second crown in consecutive seasons; the count of that one is the next chapter's to set down. 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. 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; Bánás 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 to pack for the journey home. 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, Boffi scoring again; 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 out, a 2-0 defeat entered by decree, the terraces in that nervous October carrying more current than the wires could hold. One does not excuse it; one 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.

The return match at San Siro in the spring would be lost, and Ambrosiana would enjoy the season's last and largest laugh; a chronicle that hides that is not worth reading. 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 that December evening — in the year of the confiscated name, the near-relegation, the fourth lost semifinal, the war begun beyond the Alps — those three goals were the evening's entire argument, and the argument was unanswerable.

Ninth, Then Eighth

The club was made to change its name and declined to change its nature. In February it looked up at the whole division from underneath; in December it beat the future champions by three. The Coppa Italia broke its heart for the fourth spring running. A boy from Giussano finished top scorer in Italy for a side that had flirted with the drop, and then set off at once to do it again. 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.

Whatever the stationery said, the club had never stopped being Milan in fact, and that was the one thing the inspectors could not reach; it is also, if one is honest, the whole reason anybody loves a club at all. Bologna won that spring's league and Ambrosiana the next one. Milano — ninth, then eighth — won only the derby. The June that would put Italy into the war was six months off, and nobody walking out of the Arena that evening was counting.