Più che come ricordi o come flash di memoria si impongono come fotogrammi. Chiari e dolcemente in movimento, in una sequenza che non è la loro ma che soltanto di poco si dilata e rallenta per lasciarli guardare, gustare fino in fondo. Ne esco abbastanza male. Mi vedo in ginocchio nella polvere e nel fango del campino di via Rodari, con le mani ai fianchi a guardarlo scivolare via per l'ennesima volta in quei passettini scomposti ed a loro modo armonici, zompettare e scavalcare orsi fino a dieci metri dalla porta, poi tirare e cadere per l'impatto con la palla ed infilare per la quinta o la sesta volta il nostro Leo che, nonostante la riconferma, goalkeeper would not be ever. That was the last contest between the sections A and B, were in fifth grade, then we would have gone to great schools and the teams would change. We lost ten to four and it was, I swear, last time I felt hatred for Nino. Then the hate turned into admiration and affection, perhaps in friendship, partly because Nino ended up in my section D for three years and was my right wing. At the school of the great, which is something else entirely.
We just stuck to the green lawn of the classrooms full-time and played a lot more, almost every day, sometimes even when it rained, in those times when only the teachers think of anything else. It was in that year that he began Nino in a real team, in the last games of the season, with the jersey with the number sewn back and the true colors, red and blue, which seemed very seriously, meaning the years, and even smaller in stature calzoncioni those that came almost under his knees to kiss the socks, tied with white thread always too tight on the calf, on pain of movement and mobility of the ankle. We had twelve and Nino was really small. From the old wooden bleachers Fraticini former camp, with ice that defeated numbing me from the sun and I colored the right hand rose, I saw him warm up and get into the field ten minutes from the end, with fourteen shoulders to take over a seven battered and exhausted, I saw him break away from the bears, take a hit on the right , then a left to reach the ball and start the spell, that rock with leather that looked like part of the right foot, all mud and pain, all one, with the coach who yelled the first to pass the ball and then remained with his mouth open and the huge brown cigar dangling, to admire it, like me, small and uncoordinated, their way and jump over the boundary of the area cursed, and then a bear, the last, and then the shot and then down with the butt on the ground that it would not have learned anything, and the ball in the net and the goalkeeper, a bear, really, who still had to understand even just a comma, all that talk. My pink icicle came to earth, and maybe even a cigar brown coach. And he, Nino, not even rejoiced, seemed stunned, awed by the army of men older than him, and his friends gave him some envious and appalled pat on the back and said good, nothing more. He played the other two games as a starter and scored three more goals. The following year he was the idol of the team, the champion, and what mattered, for another two years, my right wing.
Era piccolo piccolo, Nino, il più piccolo della classe, era scuro di pelle ed aveva i capelli e gli occhi nerissimi, i tratti forti e decisi anche in quel visino da bambino, inequivocabile figlio del sud e del Mediterraneo, le spalle strette e cadenti, le gambine corte e sottili, leggermente curvate all'interno come i giocatori veri, i piedini piccoli, quasi minuscoli, a prima vista inefficaci ad ogni eventuale ulteriore richiesta di equilibrio. Nino era piccolo ed era fuori dal branco, silenzioso, taciturno, cresciuto su una strada che non gli aveva regalato altro che quella leather sphere, no inhibitions, no impudence, that sounded rude or anything useful in life. He spoke little and learned with difficulty, and seemed sad. Many of us do not spared at all, and today the cynicism of that age can not help but remember with a smile, a bitter smile, loser, coward. We were nice and bright, our mothers were doing the race to buy the most beautiful sweater already looked at the girls and when we could even touched, rent porn movies with her brother of Sandro age and listened to rock music because it sounded demonic. Nino was the rat, the black man, even if the foul was not dirty, he knew only redeem himself with three hundred dribbles below and even seemed to want to do, not bragging, not showing, he was afraid. Maybe sometimes I too made fun of, perhaps cynicism or maybe because I just wanted to shake him and get him out of that sleep, I do not know, I know for a fact that art between his feet and began to love it enough, no envy, no jealousy, only love for that magical dance incorrect, the four steps for me worth the compensation and for the rest of the group, the multiplication of the sneers off the field.
In those years Nino played two good leagues, and was seen by the selection stravisto provincial and took it with him when Nino was already fifteen years, I do not know for how long, maybe two seasons, they told me that he soon returned to the local team and I only know that great Sample never took the right road, and never became a great champion. Something was missing, said the men and those of the Bar of campino Zotti, something small but important blow to decisis decisive moment, the coldness of the penalty taker at the last minute of the Cup final, character issues and just. They said he was afraid. These things I've never believed, but perhaps it was. Nino had many goals, he missed a few but very important penalties and missed seven out of eleven in his last championship with the Provincial. An amazing thing for me. However, at least by birth, growth, and we lost a bit 'all, each in pursuit of any one of many lives among which there happened to be able to choose from, all equal, all melancholy and sad approved, each with dreams stifled and repressed in the drawer closed , with the key thrown into the river, leaning against the iron railing of a routine to wait to see your body move, perhaps as late as possible. And he, who perhaps had not even a dream, that perhaps he was the only one of sixty-eight of this unfortunate class petty provincial town, which alone can aspire to something a bit ' not mean, well, he lost like us, a victim of everything and nothing, everyone and anyone, perhaps only of himself and of the narrow little head black, was lost to do the work of his father, a bricklayer and ' scaffold man, that I just can not imagine those little hands and legs in those from mouse, to pull up homes for the Bears. Sante, who fifty years and more of us from the windows of the Bar Zotti saw us all grow, Nino said that the shoes hanging from a nail fastened to aluminum, in his room, saying that when the nail is made weak and would be folded to make them roll on the ground, he probably would have sold my legs, and maybe that day would have said enough, but it is just another of the many stories that I have never believed.
His father died five years ago, the victim of a job poorly done; Nino left with his mother and four or maybe five or six brothers, one smaller than the other, almost all to put brick on brick and lime mortar. Then one of them, I think the eldest, was arrested for drug dealing in Rimini, when he was on vacation, three or four years ago. Salvatore, the only one who knew of view too, got married and went to live in Turin. The others do not know.
Nino has been missing for a year and nobody knows anything about him, not even his mother. Not even took away a bag, no nothing, said nothing to anyone, did not leave written anything, did not call, nothing. Someone swears he's gone off with Isaeva, a Bulgarian girl who attended a couple of months and that she too is gone. Gone, perhaps in Bulgaria. Some people think that they have kidnapped the Arabs, for it to play in an imaginary league interplanetary. Someone else thinks he's dead. Research has a rubber face and shit, and credibility hunted down the asshole, and they seem mute and resigned to anything.
I that I was wrong so many penalties in my life, perhaps all, this life that I've put on the to the sound of nails and blasphemies of aluminum on the world, here, I like many others I imagine with that piece of leather attached to the foot to kill bears in a Bulgarian pitch on the outskirts of Sofia, with his ass on the ground after a shot and broken Isaeva in the eyes of my eyes, I imagine, tall blonde and white, with shoes red and with all those smiles that Nino was left on the street. In her room has never been found any nail, and even the shoes, but found a drill hole on the wall behind the door, a tiny little hole, and you know, some legends are just die hard.
Fortunately, for us who we are.
[ Nino and lever football Class of '68 - story inspired by the (almost) same name song of Francesco De Gregori and winner of the "Words & notes," first year, organized by the Public Library of Empoli Florence - published in the homonymous (yes this time) special edition book Millelire Alternative Press, March 2000]
