Books & Rough Business

XIII

71 Tullio Pironti XIII I didn’t need Ada along with me, on the long drive north to the fight, in order to feel the heat of spring. The Fiat that Camerlingo had borrowed for the evening held men only, and not just my coach and myself, but two others out of the squad on the night’s card, plus a knowledgeable old corner-man at the wheel. The whole way up, we kept the windows down, and now that I think of it we were a pretty sizeable bunch for that car. Camerlingo couldn’t have arranged anything larger than a humpbacked 600, the fist-shaped vehicle that that ruled the Italian roads throughout the 1950s. But I didn’t notice the squeeze at the time. I couldn’t have felt more anxious if we’d been ten in that car. Nor did it help to think that the others Camerlingo had selected for tonight, Fredo and Peppe, had the kind of technique he kept praising in me, the balance and timing , the stinging jab. I don’t think I said two words the whole way up to the outdoor ring. But then, none of us were much good for conversation. Tonight we had to do our work a long way from home, nearly an hour’s drive up in the northern hills. In those days my country’s American-style autostrade remained largely in the planning stages, and in the Italian South most roads still followed the old Roman byways.Tonight’s match was in a field outside Capua, a town first set up by Etruscans, who’d come from the hills of Umbria andTuscany. Inner Naples, on the other hand, was all about the sea, settled by Greek voyagers. Even today Capuans think of their home as something other than a suburb, and rightly so. It’s across the Volturno, not such a large river but always a major dividing line—the site of vicious battles, in 1943, between the Wehrmacht and the American Fifth Army. Across the 72 Books and Rough Business river Camerlingo and the rest of us began to inhale a winy thickness we’d never encountered before, as we crossed a plain of fresh-sprouting hemp. Finally one of us spotted, up ahead, the lights of the ring. It sat at the center of what must have been, before tonight, a pretty meadow. Now the ground, sloping away beyond the end of the road, had been furrowed by car wheels, the grass tramped flat by folks on foot. We could hear the crowd, roaring already. Maybe they were complaining about the venue. I’m no Dante scholar, and back then even less so, but as I unfolded stiffly out of the car I couldn’t help thinking of the bolgia in the Inferno: the “pockets” of suffering he scooped into the geography of his lower hell.The ring looked solid enough, the canvas free of wrinkles and the flooring reliable—naturally I checked such things first—but around it hundreds of onlookers had to scramble for seating. The mismatched chairs, some indoor and some outdoor, had mostly been taken by the women who’d found their way out here. Ten or a dozen of those had children on their laps, too. But most of the kids and nearly all the men made do with bundling a jacket over a weedy hillock or setting a board between two outcroppings of rock. And in that bolgia, Tongo Troianovich was the demon ruler. Out in the Campanian countryside you got a lot of Slavs, laborers down from the devastated cities of Poland or the Ukraine. Nowadays, in the same way, the most backbreaking farm assignments, or the worst jobs in construction, have been taken on by Africans out of the war-torn sub-Sahara. Nowadays the crowd favorite would be a Somali or an Eritrean. But that night the undisputed king, even before I showed my pale and unlined Neapolitan face, was Troianovich. It wasn’t hard to spot this talkative bruiser. He’d put down the most famous fighter to come out of the Olimpia, and here was plainly among his people, chatting up the fans, making the rounds of the crowd at the center of a busy entourage. For tonight Troianovich had decked himself out in a robe of black silk, against which his bandaged hands seemed to glow, and these he waved at anyone who called his name. He grinned and shouted back...