Passion Play (12 page)

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.

As Fabian threaded his way among the obstacles, Big Lick
intermittently shying and bucking at one or another of them, he continued to contemplate Costeiro’s strategy, to ponder his own. He concluded that the Argentinean, like so many other polo players, valued teamwork and the urgency of the game, its incessant volley of pressure, danger, skill; solitary forms of horsemanship—even jumping—presented themselves as inferior in drama and thrill, and therefore were to be carried out casually, as gentlemanly diversions that called for no further authority, preparation or expertise.

He was distracted by a slight commotion at the fringe of the field. Two of Costeiro’s grooms helped Alexandra set up the camera on its tripod, and Fabian saw her in the distance, the sheen of her jacket a luminous backdrop to the black metal. The Argentinean, still practicing, preened for her with several fresh jumps, now hitting a ball one of the grooms threw to him, radiating the conviction, as his mount cleared the obstacles, that he was as accomplished a jumper as he was a polo player. Fabian observed that whenever Costeiro’s pony was accelerating to clear the obstacle, the Argentinean, plying his mallet in anticipation of striking the ball, would tilt over the horse’s mane, shifting his weight above its shoulders, burdening its forelegs before his horse had a chance to clear the obstacle. If he was about to attempt a back or side shot, he would bend back or sideways, shifting his weight onto the pony’s rear, burdening its hind legs with further weight. In both instances, Costeiro carelessly tended to tip the pony off balance at the exact moment when, to hurdle the barrier, the animal most needed its balance.

It was time to practice. Fabian threw Big Lick into a leisurely trot and then steered the horse toward the first of the obstacles.

The mare took the jump smoothly, the hoofs of its forelegs higher than its belly, hind legs tucked in neatly behind the thighs, lifting its heaviest bulk in a clean sweep above the barrier, the pony’s performance a reward for the time and care he had spent in maintaining Big Lick and Gaited Amble at jumping.

He repeated the maneuver, continuing to guide the horse solely with his legs, his hand gently holding the reins, his mallet at the ready. Each time he jumped, giving Big Lick its lead, the freedom to stretch out its neck, to balance its head, Fabian was careful to maintain a steady seat and not to shift his weight in a
polo saddle that did not offer the support of one properly canted for jumping. To curb any association of jumping with pain, which could impel the mare to stop short in front of an obstacle and unseat him, he refrained from using the whip before a jump and was cautious not to rein in the horse too abruptly after it had cleared the obstacle.

A half-dozen of Costeiro’s grooms moved into positions along the field and at the goal posts. Costeiro raised his arm, a signal that he was ready to start. Now he and Fabian began to ride toward the center of the field.

Alexandra, her hair a liquid fan about her neck, stepped from behind the camera as the two men advanced toward her. Fabian saw the white ball in her hand; he sensed the stir she created, a schoolgirl about to play, waiting avidly for the signal to toss the ball.

As Fabian and Costeiro came to a halt at the edge of the field, she threw the ball in, a lithe arc cleaving the morning light. Before it tumbled to a halt beside them, Costeiro, heaving in his zeal to get at it, already seized by the heat of the game, swerved his pony, his mallet scooping the ball gently into the air. As it scythed upward, he chased under it, his mallet a pendulum, his mount smoothly negotiating a parallel bar in pursuit of the ball. Just as his horse crested the bar, he caught the ball in flight, arrowing it toward the goal. Fabian, three lengths behind, unable to overtake him, watched the Argentinean’s pony take three more obstacles with springy ease. About a hundred yards from the goal, Costeiro bore down on the ball. Once again his mallet made faultless contact with it, a clap of triumph. In vaulting catapult, the ball drove straight between the posts—making the goal.

Spurts of applause, yelps of Latin exultation and encouragement erupted from his grooms at the goal posts and the fringes of the field. Costeiro, slowing down, raised his hand to announce his scoring the first point. Tipping the brim of his helmet, the Argentinean, flushed with the pride of his performance, his habit of command unruffled, pranced his pony about in front of Alexandra’s camera, responding to her wave of victory with the homage of his raised mallet. As Costeiro and Fabian moved
across the grass toward her, again returning to the starting point, a groom handed her a fresh ball, and she burst out from behind the camera, glowing with excitement. Boldly she threw the ball down, like a challenge, between the two men.