Fabian performed all this in earnest, with diligent objectivity, as he had prepared for earlier sieges and combat, much as if his power was determined by the amount of clogging food, fat, wax, husks of dead skin and nail or decay he could strip from the apparatus of his body: a rite of purification, of priming, for the unsullied summons of the encounter.
The slight wrench of pain in his back was by now a familiar companion; he went to sleep with its pressure and awoke at its prod. He had devised a routine to subdue and mitigate it: sleeping with a pillow under his knees, avoiding sharp or abrupt movements, saddling his ponies only when he was squarely balanced on both feet. Still, at polo or on the practice field, each time he stood up in the stirrups—a mallet in his hand, his shoulders and trunk parallel to the line of the ball, whether veering to the right, poised to strike, or swiveling at his hips, then tilting sharply across the horse to hit on the left—each torsion of his body was as adamant as the swinging of an iron gate, pushing the joints and ligaments of his back beyond the point of tolerance, risking a spasm that could immobilize him not only for the instant but for days to come.
To support his back now, he wound an elastic brace around his hips, tightening the fabric like a corset until he felt the middle of his body as an unassailable sheath. He took pleasure in that sensation of tautness and inner compression, curiously relishing the knowledge that even though he had to enlist an external instrument, he could still affect the involuntary mechanism of his body.
Ready at last, he left his alcove and released Big Lick and Gaited Amble from their stalls in the rear of the VanHome. He saddled them meticulously, strapping a bundle of polo mallets to the rig on Gaited Amble, who would follow on a lead rein, then mounted Big Lick. The practice field was about a mile away, and, relishing what time remained to him before thought must yield to habit, he began to advance on it slowly, the sun like a vast ball in the distance.
He slid back in the saddle, without will, his gaze sweeping the shallow meadows, the redolence of thyme and the tart fragrance of damp weeds pricking his nostrils. A surge of longing for the city rose within him, the anonymous lure of its streets, the vortex of men and women, of shape, feature, color making a discordant frenzy in which he could immerse himself—a mortal forest, uprooted, divested of its past, of all that bound it to earth.
He had acted always in the conviction that to master his life, to assert dominion over that indifferent span, what he must do was to shape it into drama, each scene so charged, so unrepeatable, that no interval could be permitted to divert him from the spectacle of which he was both protagonist and solitary witness.
Now it broke on him savagely that in the theater of his life he had contrived to make of himself a grotesque figure, a Don Quixote of the turnpike, a Captain Ahab, moorless in his big ship of a VanHome, and from the void at his center, a hideous, soundless laughter spilled out, derisive, racking him, buckled, polished, poised astride the horse.
Contempt for himself, for Alexandra and Costeiro, for deeds of this world and its ways assailed him like an unbearable stench, a wave of vileness he could not breach. In his imagining, the film of Alexandra in his VanHome began again to unwind, the images unrelenting, a whip of vicious poignancy, goading him to desolation, spiking and bloodying a depth of anguish in which he drifted as the reel revolved.
He shriveled at the thought of what kind of figure he cut in their arena, baffled at what distorting mirror in his vision and character had seduced him into that image of himself as the gallant knight in a tournament of passion, rather than as the paltry clown in a carnival play. The gall of life, a fever of contempt for the part he had consented to enact, fell on him with all its futile weight.
He thrust back in a panic of survival, panting, hot with sudden thirst for the drama before him, tugging at the horse’s bit, goading his spurs deep into its flanks. He punished it with the snaffle and the curb, and the animal reared as if scorched with a hot iron. Fabian began to lash at its neck and belly and flanks until Big Lick, a captive of the bit, whip and spur, hurtled forward, the heave of its bulk parrying the wind, the space ahead a promise of blows that would cease, pain that would end. Gaited Amble, behind, snorting and squealing, careened at the end of the lead rein.
Fabian arrived at the field shaken. He lifted his eyes only to halt, numb with astonishment. The field was broken up with posts and rails, oxers, parallel and triple bars, hedges and fences—the kinds of obstacles used for jumping competitions—perhaps a dozen of them placed at various angles, strewn about without any seeming order of progression.
Instantly it dawned on him what Costeiro had done, and with that rush of awareness, a throttling sense of entrapment stormed over him, provoking a spasm of nausea, brief and intense; he steadied himself on Big Lick, swallowing in quick, deep gusts. In the distance, parked at the far edge of the field, he caught the gleam of a sports car, its top down. Alexandra, her helmeted head a white dazzle in the sun, sat at the wheel. Costeiro, spruce in his riding gear, lounged against the convertible, toying with his mallet, his head hovering over Alexandra. To the right, at the viewing stands, two grooms were adjusting the saddles of the Argentinean’s ponies.
Fabian rode across the field to the stands, where he hitched Big Lick and Gaited Amble, the ponies calm again after the turbulence of their ride to the field.
He began to stride deliberately toward Alexandra and Costeiro, trying to tug off his riding gloves, sharply aware, as his fingers fumbled with the supple leather, of how cold his hands had gone, gelid sticks, almost rigid. The air was hot on his face and shoulders; sweat brimmed under his helmet. He looked at his hands, marble with chill pallor. Their cold seemed to him a frost of premonition.
He could not tell whether his fear was a response of his flesh, in revolt against a threat to the dominion of character and will; or whether fear had usurped the very province of that character and will, exposing further some critical lesion in their authority.
What he drew strength from was a consciousness of the fitness of his presence, the note of readiness for combat that he gave off in his taut shirt and breeches, the padded leather knee guards, his thick leather boots, the blade of brass zipper that split each of them, glistening.
Coming at Costeiro in the full blaze of morning, watching the springy power of Costeiro’s shoulders and thighs, the gleam and luster of his face, how fluent with a molten grace his gestures were, Fabian had to acknowledge, envy twitching within him, what a worthy rival the Argentinean was. He remembered Alexandra telling him that what she found most alluring during her Latin American tour was the sight of the native Indian men, their bodies smooth and muscular, always hairless, flesh moving toward sculpture, sculpture mobile as flesh. The thought of Costeiro molded with Alexandra, the two of them at night together, one sculpture in love with another, rankled, yet he knew that his envy of Costeiro was at root an adolescent urge to escape his own shape, to become, if only in transient fantasy, someone else, another being.
Costeiro’s wealth, too, was an insolent rebuke to him, and the humiliation of his own last few hundred dollars hidden in a box inside his wooden practice horse galled him. He knew he could still cancel the bout with Costeiro, return to his VanHome, stable his ponies, and wait until he was restored. There was time still to retreat to the turret of the cab, switch on the ignition, take up his own rhythm from the surge of the engine, and move ahead, slipping onto the vacant ribbon of the highway.
He knew, also, how brief was the time before he could no longer afford to buy fuel for his VanHome, feed his ponies or himself. He might soon have to put his whole way of life up for auction. Interest in his books had been dwindling for years; now there might be no serious clients to bid on his VanHome, his ponies, his gear and tack. He could live for months on the money that he might win—had to win—from the Argentinean.
The sight of Costeiro, with his youth, security and easy command, reminded Fabian that he could claim no constant place as home, summon no assistance as he sought to
make his way again, a way uncertain in its prospect and goal. Poverty was a blackmailer with amiable manners: it left all choices to its victim.
He thought of the city and remembered the old, tattered vagrant, trudging and cadging, the yellowing crown of scabs on his head, his feeble hands and lips twitching at the soup, the mumbling mouth.
“Good morning, Fabian,” Alexandra called out, a movie camera and a tripod in her hands, her smile flashing with the provocation that never deserted her. She wore a scarred polo helmet; a moonlight sheen parka, thrown open enough to show the cleavage of her breasts, contrasted with sleek leather pants, tapered down, her ankles wreathed in the golden straps of her sandals.
Nodding coolly to Alexandra, Fabian shook the hand of the smiling Costeiro, then pointed at the field. “What’s this obstacle course for?” he asked.
“It’s for us, Señor Fabian,” Costeiro replied. “When my ponies were schooled, they were also taught to jump. It should come as no surprise. Alexandra tells me she has seen your horses jumping—quite well, too”
“I thought our game was polo,” Fabian said, “not jumping.”
“The game is what sportsmen make it,” Costeiro said easily, speaking with that patient condescension reserved for calming the overwrought.
“Just as love is how lovers make it,” Alexandra broke in lightly.
“What do you make of this, then, Mr. Costeiro?” Fabian asked evenly, still civil.
“I make of this our game. One-on-one polo, with a handicap—a few jumping obstacles to even things up between us,” Costeiro replied. “Surely you didn’t expect that I, always a volunteer on a team of amateurs, was going to let you, a hippodrome sharpshooter, just shoot all the goals, take the money and run?” There was a veiled insolence in his tone, but Fabian did not rise to it. “Of course, you don’t have to play,” Costeiro went on.
Fabian looked at Alexandra. Her helmet was bent toward the camera, and she pretended not to be listening, her face hidden while she played with the knobs and adjusted the various dials.
“What other handicaps have you thought up for me, Mr. Costeiro?” Fabian asked, still evenly.
“Nothing but these.” The insolence gave way to charm. “Today I’m not in the best form. Last night I taught Alexandra to dance the milonga, the stepmother of the tango. She looked so ravishing, so sexy—and, as a result, this morning—” He broke off, implying no explanation was necessary.
“Looking sexy is Alexandra’s handicap,” Fabian said.
“Indeed it is!” Costeiro agreed. “And so this morning I’m suffering from a terrible resaca, what you here call a hangover.” He turned to Alexandra for confirmation.
“The hangover evens things up further,” Alexandra agreed, looking up, her eyes unreadable behind the shield of her sunglasses.
“I suppose I should be grateful to Mr. Costeiro for not having tossed in a bull or a steer so we could also have a rodeo,” Fabian said.
Costeiro rose to the spur with a genial smile. “Indeed you should, Señor Fabian. The cuchilleros, the knife fighters of the pampas, are, like myself, more fond of the bull and the steer than are you, the cowboys of the baseball field.”
“What are the penalties for knocking down an obstacle?” Fabian asked abruptly.
“None, of course. An obstacle is already a penalty.” Costeiro’s smile was tinged with challenge now. “Each time one is knocked down, my grooms will set it up again. That’s all.”
Sensing Fabian’s apprehension, Costeiro leaned back against the car, with an amused expression, his hand stroking his mallet. “Of course, no one can force you to jump, Señor Fabian. You can just circle the obstacles.”
“While you go straight over them,” Fabian replied, managing a smile.
Costeiro broke into laughter. “While I score the goals.”
Alexandra switched from her mimicry of absorption to a mimicry of film-making. “Lights! Camera! Action!” she called out brightly, lifting the camera to her sunglasses, pointing the lens first at Costeiro, then at Fabian, then back at Costeiro.
“I’m ready!” Costeiro announced, slapping his polo gloves against his breeches. “But let’s not coerce Señor Fabian into playing in our film.”
“Fabian can’t be coerced,” Alexandra said, bright still. “Corrupted, yes, but only by vanity. But not coerced. He’s too proud for that.” She pointed the lens directly at Fabian. “I’ve never been able to tell whether Fabian is too proud to be vain or too vain to be proud.”
“I’m ready,” said Fabian, his mouth dry with the tension of what had just passed, what was just about to begin.
“Let’s start, then,” Costeiro said briskly. He took the helmet from Alexandra’s head and set it on his own, adjusting the chin strap, then put on his gloves. He reached into the sports car for a container of polo balls and handed it to Alexandra. “After we’ve ridden across the field to get acquainted with the obstacles, Alexandra will throw out the ball for us,” he announced.
Alexandra took a ball from the container and juggled it eagerly. The promise of competition stimulated her. “First a ball to the players, then a kiss to the winner,” she said. “Or should the loser be kissed first?” She took off her sunglasses. “What would you say, Fabian?” She looked at him directly, but even without the sunglasses, Fabian could find no expression in her eyes.
“I suppose it depends on the needs of the one who is kissing,” he said. Abruptly, he turned away from Costeiro and Alexandra, and started to walk toward his ponies. As the last drops of dew misted on the leather sheen of his boots, he was conscious of how indifferent he had been to the sun in its healing warmth.
Big Lick and Gaited Amble stood calm, submissive, tethered to their posts. Fabian quickly loosened each pony’s martingale, the leather strap that ran from the bit down between the forelegs, circling the horse’s girth; he also removed a noseband from above its muzzle that was used to prevent the animal from tossing its head about in defiance of pressure from the bit.
For his first encounter with Costeiro, Fabian decided on Big Lick, although the pony flinched as he took the reins, neighing in apprehension from the remembered run to the field. He then selected a short, light mallet, its cane flexible, perfect for tricky shots.
He swung into the saddle and cantered toward the middle of the field, conscious of the peace, the fresh stains of paint on the obstacles a pleasant blur to his eyes. As Big Lick wove its way around the obstacles, he calculated their height and width, the space between them, the number of strides the horse must take before each jump. He kept imagining what soon might be a reality: his collision with Costeiro, the rebounding of horses and mallets against the barriers, falling on each other, thrusting, parrying for the ball when it lay between the obstacles or was caught under them.
Fabian knew that, by arranging for obstacles and jumps to impede their game, Costeiro hoped to diminish his opponent’s ability to strike well, the very control he claimed he wanted to generate and exploit in their competition. In that strategy, in Costeiro’s scheme to defeat Fabian by the random disordering of the field with barriers—thereby imposing on the rider an unnatural, disjointed movement—Fabian saw the Argentinean as an exponent of the team mentality, which stressed the passing of the ball from one player to the next to achieve an uninterrupted flow in the game.
The irony of the plan, not lost on Fabian, who savored it with a grim relish, was that by resorting to just such maneuvers and wily ruses, the Argentinean only confirmed Fabian’s preeminence in the art that issued directly from what Fabian saw as the very essence of any game: the mind of the man who played it, his ambition to take each shot as an independent event, formally detached from what preceded it and from what might follow—the reverse of a group code.
He tested his speculation by surveying the several practice jumps that Costeiro, his mallet raised upright, took in rapid succession. From a distance, it seemed that his pony cleared each obstacle smoothly, cresting the gentle swell of an invisible wave, sloping
fluently with it toward the ground, the jump completed with the animal unshaken, the rider secure in his seat, mallet curved in a hit at the ball. But as Fabian moved closer, intent in his scrutiny, he began to see defects in the Argentinean’s technique.
He noticed that, without comprehending the basic realities of jumping, Costeiro exhibited a mannerism, common among polo players, of reining in decisively, clipping the animal’s reach, and, by stiffening its spine, cribbing its freedom of movement, forcing the pony to slow down in the face of the obstacle. By slowing his mount on the brink of a jump, so dangerously close to a blind area of the animal’s vision, the Argentinean nullified its instinctual gift to calculate, from a proper distance, the height and depth of an obstacle, and the momentum and effort needed to clear it.
The heavy gear that Costeiro’s grooms had laden on their master’s pony—as poorly schooled at jumping, in Fabian’s view, as the man who rode it—could easily become an additional handicap. With the pony’s martingale taut under its neck, the noseband dropped low, ready to constrict the nostrils whenever pressure was exerted on the reins, the neck confined, Costeiro’s pony could neither raise its head to see the obstacle at close range nor stretch out its neck to achieve balance in preparation for a jump. With so many restraints, Costeiro had only reinforced the pony’s habit, artificially cultivated for polo, of propelling itself on the hock joints in its hind legs only, somewhat like a rabbit or a kangaroo, instead of relying, in a jump, on the freedom and momentum of its entire mass.
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