Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  Other breeding techniques have gone in and out of vogue as their results have been demonstrated on the track. Inbreeding, the practice of mating two closely related horses, maintains genetic purity and intensifies familial characteristics, both positive and negative, to varying degrees. A sire and a dam who share great speed and a nasty disposition may well yield a comet-like colt, but the colt might also be too troublesome to handle. Sometimes two families show an affinity for one another, called a nick, and breeding between family members produces excellent foals. But nicks are not infallible. The energy around them always dissipates, often in a single generation, and inferior specimens begin to issue. In the end there are no shortcuts, no formulas that have infallibly proven their worth over an extended period. When you talk to breeders they speak of simple commonsense principles. Use quality stock, they say. Learn your bloodlines. Watch for peculiarities. Does a stallion transmit more of his characteristics to his fillies than to his colts? Then he’s a broodmare-sire. Cover your mares with stallions who’ll complement them, supplying talents they lack, or try breeding speed to speed or stamina to stamina in hopes that the desired characteristic will be emboldened. There’s not much else you can do, they mutter, moving dirt around with a boot tip, feeling handicapped because another force is at work and they can’t quite get to it, something beyond eugenics, the crackling around the bodies of lovers bent on conceiving, heat lightning, what the mystic says in saying nothing: a hole in the smoke. Every now and then a breeder makes contact with this energy, harnessing it briefly, but only one person ever tried to describe it. That was Federico Tesio, the Wizard of Dormello.

  IV

  “My aim,” wrote Tesio, “was to breed and raise a race-horse which, over any distance, could carry the heaviest weight in the shortest time.” Tesio was mad about horses. In his youth he rode as a steeplechase jockey in England and traveled to Argentina to break broncos on the pampas and then drove deeper into South America and led a caravan consisting of two natives, thirty-nine stallions, and a mare on an exploratory tour of Patagonia, from Rio Negro to Punta Arenas, over an endless stretch of prairie, shooting llamas and ostriches for food and hobnobbing with the caciques of wandering Indian tribes. One evening the caravan drew to a halt near a red hillock that supposedly marked an oasis, but the spring was almost dry. The horses went without water, but during the night they broke away from camp and returned to a spring they’d left the day before, covering thirty miles in the dark by the shortest possible route. How did they do it? They have a sixth sense, Tesio said, and this was their real attraction, this extrasensory quality. In horses, Tesio found an outlet for his weirdest speculations about the workings of the cosmos. He was a student of energy, its distribution and transmission, how it affected the will, what happened when it dwindled, and he believed in wildness and passion and the supreme power of sexual magnetism to affect the makeup and destiny of offspring.

  In 1898 Tesio retired from his life of action and started a breeding farm near Lake Maggiore in northern Italy for the ostensible purpose of studying heredity. He chose thoroughbreds as the medium for his research because he loved them and because their histories were recorded in such detail. At Dormello he compiled a magnificent library of arcana. Ancient stud books; descriptions of races; thoroughbred biographies (Flying Childers, by Darley Arabian out of Betty Leeds: “In his earlier years he used to carry the mail bags between Hull and Doncaster and on the road he was unbeaten”); descriptions of their markings and temperaments; texts on biochemistry, genetics, and electronics; accounts of odd experiments, like those of Professor Morro with his ergograph, a machine which measured fatigue by graphing the curve of exhaustion (a pulley was attached to the subject’s middle finger)—all these materials came to rest on Tesio’s shelves and provided him with evidence for his fringiest bouts of speculation.

  He expected his farm to be an immediate success, but it faltered at first (“I had not yet learned to reflect …”) and he couldn’t compete with other Italian breeders. Then in 1906 something miraculous happened to him on a train going from Pisa to Rome. (Miraculous things were always happening to Tesio.) He discovered the existence of hybrids. Another passenger, a foreigner, was reading a booklet entitled “Mendelism,” and Tesio snatched it up when the foreigner stepped out into the aisle. The booklet told of Mendel’s work with sweet peas, how he’d crossed tall and dwarf strains to produce hybrids and how after several experiments he’d been able to predict the results of subsequent crossings. This came as a revelation to Tesio. It had never occurred to him before that thoroughbreds weren’t all di puro sangue, purebred. Now he knew why two foals, full brothers, of the same sire and dam, could turn out so different, the one chestnut-colored and a great runner, the other bay and mediocre. If he could learn how Mendel’s laws operated among thoroughbreds, he would have the key to creating an ultimate racehorse.

  Here began Tesio’s Mendelian misadventure. He confined his inquiry to a single inherited characteristic, coat color. Before making any crosses he needed to determine how many true colors there were and how frequently each had appeared over the last two centuries. The research involved was mind-boggling, but Tesio was aided by the tabulations of others, particularly the German Herman Goos, and in less than a year he had cataloged the coat color of every thoroughbred whose birth had been recorded. The statistics convinced him that only two true colors existed: bay, the darker, and chestnut, the fairer. He dismissed gray and the special red of roans as “diseases,” relatively uncommon aberrations that issued in violation of Mendel’s laws. Chestnuts (Ch), he said, were always purebred—whenever two chestnuts mated they always produced another chestnut—but bays could be either purebred (Pbb) or hybrid (Hbb), and the three varieties could be crossed in six different ways.

  Pbb+Pbb=Pbb

  Ch+Ch=Ch

  Pbb+Ch=Hbb

  Pbb+Hbb=Hbb

  Ch+Hbb=Ch or Hbb

  Hbb+Hbb=Pbb or Ch or Hbb # 1 or Hbb #2

  Next he tried to discern which color was dominant. A check of horses entered at major English racetracks in a randomly selected year showed bays predominating four to one. Tesio wondered why. He knew that color was pigment, and pigment was a chemical compound, but these facts were worthless until he heard about the experiments of his friend Paul Fournier. When Fournier had inserted a strand of bay hair into a high-frequency solenoid, a cylindrical conductor of electricity, it gave off a red spark. A strand of chestnut hair gave off a yellow spark. In the spectrum, red has a greater wavelength than yellow and therefore, said Tesio, leaping, bay horses must have a greater wavelength than chestnut horses. This explained their predominance, for in nature “the small gives way to the large.”

  At last Tesio was ready to apply what he’d learned. But the data he’d gathered puzzled him and he didn’t know how to proceed. One day, though, he recalled an “Oriental” tale from Arabia that gave him a clue.

  An old man and a boy, riding on a camel, were fleeing across the desert pursued by a group of Bedouins with murderous intent. When the camel began to show signs of tiring, the old man said to the boy, who was clinging to his waist: “Look back and tell me the color of the leading horse.”

  “It is a chestnut,” answered the boy.

  “The chestnut is fast, but he will soon tire,” said the old man, and they continued their flight.

  After a while he repeated his question and the boy replied: “Now a gray horse is in front.”

  “Never fear, he too will tire,” said the old man hopefully, and on they fled.

  A little later, when the camel showed further signs of fatigue, the old man again repeated the question.

  “Now a bay horse has taken the lead,” answered the boy.

  “In that case,” sighed the old man, “let us commit our souls to Allah.”

  Tesio inferred from the story that a chestnut coat meant speed and a bay coat meant staying power. Since he could breed bays and chestnuts at will, he seemed about to triumph. By carefully selecting his stock
and controlling matings he could, with mathematical certainty, produce the ultimate racehorse. All that was left to do was to verify the final element, the correlation of speed to coat color. Again he turned to racing history and tabulated the winners of five English classics over the last century and found, to his utter despair, that the tale had misled him: there was absolutely no correlation between coat color and speed or staying power or winning ability or anything else under the sun. Tesio was appalled. All along he’d been assuming that characteristics were transmitted from parents to offspring in standard combinations, like eggs arranged neatly in a cardboard carton, but now, after years of work, he saw that the opposite was true. In hybrid animals, even if highly selected, each separate character is passed on independently. Moreover, he decided, speed and stamina were not separate characters but instead the result of other characters in combination. They were nothing more than tendencies. So he was stuck.

  V

  But Tesio had never belonged in a world of figures. His genius, like Pico’s, was for registering previously unperceived concordances and applying them to the breeding art. What he saw, he saw in flashes. Several disparate notions would suddenly cohere, and he’d understand that inbreeding was useful not only because it reduced the variables in a pairing, but because the deities of many religions were closely related. The myth of perfection had its roots in proximity. Isis and Osiris conceived Horus, the God of Agriculture, while they were still in their mother’s womb, and Jupiter birthed Minerva parthenogenetically, right from his brain. According to the Bible, the entire human race was a by-product of the most severe inbreeding, Adam coupling with his fleshed-out rib. Therefore, inbreeding made sense; divinity provided the supporting testimony.

  Tesio was an adept of such equations. Nicks were effective, he said, because their “energic make-up” was the result of the harmonic combination of electromagnetic waves mixing together as pleasantly as oil and vinegar on salad greens. Have you ever noticed, he would ask, how the markings on wild animals (penguins, tigers) always occur symmetrically, identical on both sides of the body, while in thoroughbreds asymmetry always prevails? The stars on a filly’s forehead, those little white spots, often have a comet’s tail that trails down toward the nose, swerving to one side “as if the brush had slipped from the painter’s hand.” This was a consequence of hybridism, a disorder caused by man.

  Mendelian laws operate randomly, said Tesio, and yet all thoroughbreds have two special traits, “a high degree of nervous energy and a certain ‘quality’ derived from selection.” These traits, he felt, must be transmitted in some manner not accounted for by the laws, passed on directly rather than inherited. Tesio did not know quite how. By “quality” he meant personality, the way a colt or filly favors sire or dam and recapitulates aspects of the behavior of one or the other. Nervous energy was a more inclusive term and stood for willpower, sexual drive, the life-force. Every horse was given a set amount of it at birth, and no more. This was a thoroughbred’s capital. Success depended on expenditure, turning on the juice when necessary, but also, and equally, on periods of rest, during which the energy stores were replenished. If a mare had squandered too much of her energy while racing, she wouldn’t have enough left to pass on to her foals when she was first bred. Good racing mares were often poor broodmares, at least until they’d been rested for a while, but lightly raced mares and mares who’d never raced at all produced a large percentage of successful distance runners. Stallions who’d raced until the age of six were poor studs, tired and burned out, and the descendants of any horse who’d run on drugs would be low on energy for a generation or two.

  Tesio believed that horses had to couple fervidly, almost swooning, to fully charge their get. To illustrate his point, he told the story of Cavaliere Ginistrelli of Naples and his beautiful filly Signorina. Ginistrelli had taken her to England and raced her at Newmarket, where she’d beaten most horses in her class, and he had high hopes for her as a broodmare, but Signorina yielded only mediocre colts despite being covered by premier stallions. In a last-gasp attempt to coax something marvelous out of her, Ginistrelli engaged the services of the great stud Isinglass for three hundred guineas. On the appointed morning Signorina’s stable boy led her down High Street toward Isinglass’s stall. It was the custom for third-rate studs wanting for business to be showcased on High, paraded up and down like low-rent gigolos, and one of them, Chaleureux (warm, in French), caught a whiff of Signorina and became intoxicated. Signorina responded in kind and wouldn’t move.

  Ginistrelli accepted the romance with equanimity. “They love!” he exclaimed. “A love match it shall be.” Eleven months later Signorina gave birth to a daughter, Signoretta, who grew up lovely and swift, a star filly, and went on to win England’s Derby and then, two days later, the Oaks, a feat which only two other fillies had ever accomplished. Later, Signorina was bred to Isinglass and bore a half-sister to Signoretta, Star of Naples. Ginistrelli auctioned Star off for five thousand guineas. She raced steadily until her fifth birthday but never finished first.

  “The arrows of an equine cupid roused the sexual urge to a maximum of tension,” Tesio wrote, disregarding possible Mendelian explanations for the disparity between Signoretta and Star of Naples, “which endowed the resulting individual with exceptional energy.” He went on to add that a filly of Signoretta’s caliber could never be produced by artificial insemination. Horses brought into existence by means of tubes, needles, and disembodied sperm would of course have no nervous energy. They looked normal, yes, and inherited their traits normally, but they had no drive, no will to win. In the past twenty years no thoroughbred conceived artificially had won a classic race anywhere in the world. Only nature could bestow the muse-kiss, that transcendent infusion.

  Then Tesio stated his law.

  All life is based on the consumption of energy to gain supremacy and on rest to restore that energy. In the rivalry for selection of racing stock, no thoroughbred family can hold the supremacy of success for more than a small number of generations in direct line. This number of generations and the degree of their attainment are irrevocably limited by nature. When these limits are reached, the top producer of the moment must surrender his supremacy to another producer slightly inferior as an individual, who may occasionally belong to a collateral branch but in most instances will represent another family altogether. He in turn will start a new line of top stars. After running its cycle this line too will surrender the sceptre—which it may eventually regain after a period of rest.

  VI

  A photograph of Tesio as an old man shows him leaning on his cane, watching a race at Ascot. His head, bald and settled like a Brancusi egg inside his fedora, seems too big for his body, as though ideas had made it grow, pushing bone and flesh outward toward the ethereal realm he loved to explore. In the town of Dormello people called him the Wizard. Over the years he bred countless champions, including Nearco, who was undefeated in fourteen outings and just as magnificent at stud, siring Nasrullah, who sired Noor, who beat Citation twice at Golden Gate, signifying a diaspora of no mean proportions, and Ribot, who was small and a little dumpy but who won four European championships as a four-year-old and went on to stand successfully in England, Italy, and the United States. Between 1911 and 1953 Tesio’s horses won the Italian Derby twenty times. He sent his mares across the globe in search of seed, following his hunches, exercising infinite care in selection, and yet he would sell any of his stock, even Nearco, if the price was right. Attachment? Tesio had no use for it. There was no question of perfection after all. Every thoroughbred was as close to perfection as it could be.

  At Dormello Tesio worked from dawn to dusk. He employed no trainers or stable managers and supervised everything himself. The farm was divided into several smaller farms, poderi, and horses were parceled among them by class, yearling fillies here, broodmares there. If contagious disease struck, Tesio could find its source more readily and keep it from spreading. He wouldn’t irrigate any of the pastures b
ecause irrigation was contro natura and robbed the grass of its strength. In autumn, when the pastures began to wither and turn brown, horses used their hoofs to dig up roots, and extended their necks as far as they could to reach the last green leaves of the acacia trees. They were nervous and wanted to migrate south, said Tesio, just as they’d done before being domesticated. Their sixth sense, which operated like a radio receiver, picked up the distant vibrations of winter and formed in their minds an image of the earth barren and stripped of greenery, of nourishment. So when the leaves fell and the breeze turned cold, Tesio sent his horses to Olgiata, an estate in the Roman Campagna where it was always warm and the grass grew all winter long.

  VII

  Reading Tesio excited me. He brought me closer to what I was after, confirming suspicions about thoroughbreds I’d held from the very beginning. I thought their attraction was deeply mystical, deriving from some long-standing though lately violated bond between humans and animals, but the traditional view of racing—that it was a gambler’s sport dependent on greenbacks for its survival—was at odds with this perception and kept confusing me. Tesio had the opposite effect. He made me more confident in what I believed. Gambling was no doubt central to the racetrack scheme, but the sort of wager being made had a double nature and was of a different order than generally supposed.