Read Online Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski - Free Book Online

out of sight. The field was suddenly quiet. It was still a bit soggy and steaming in the sun, but the shiny pools of water had all gone.
    Fabian divided the world of sport into games played with a ball and games played without one. Among those in which the ball was pivotal, polo was, for him, matchless. In the mesh of two opposing teams, each composed of four players, he saw the equation of man and horse, the duel of man with man, as defining poles on a field of tension. The space was compact, encompassing both the solitary drama of the player, isolated in the display of his own singularity and that of his mount, and the massed ritual of group combat exhibited in the contradictions and fusions of the team’s collective will.
    “Pony quick and polo stick,” Fabian would often muse, distilling the essence of polo, the game of six or eight chukkers, each chukker a maximum of seven and a half minutes long. Its constants were the pony—four to six horses, usually Thoroughbreds, all balanced and short-strided, expertly schooled in polo, needed by each player in the course of a game—and the mallet, a sixteen-ounce stick more than four feet long, its shaft a bamboo shoot, a rubber-bound handle at one end, and at the other end a nine-inch-long cigar- or cylinder-shaped head of solid bamboo, maple or mulberry, its hitting surface less than two inches wide, its toe tapered, its heel squared off.
    The polo pony had to be steadily trained for two or three years to become speedy in takeoff, fleet in running, agile in turning and pivoting, quick to stop dead and just as quick to take off again from a standstill. Mounted on such a pony galloping across a green about the size of nine football fields, a polo player might drive the ball with a ferocious blow of his mallet across hundreds of feet. In that flight toward the goal posts, twenty-four feet apart and ten feet high, the ball—a wooden globe three and a quarter inches in diameter and not more than four and a half ounces in weight—often speeding at a hundred miles an hour, could gather momentum sufficient to shatter a horse’s bone, smash pony or rider into insensibility or even death.
    The armored medieval knights, still jousting in mock combat, finally moved off the turf. The two field umpires scuffed and prodded the ground, testing it before they waved their arms to the referee, in the grandstand, to signal that the field was dry enough for the game to begin.
    Fabian took in the babble of fans rustling about him, odds, stakes, small-time betting. The Hybrids, the New Zealand team, seemed to be a favorite. Each of their players was rated at nine out of a possible ten points; many in the crowd were convinced that the Hybrids’ mounts were among the best in the world, so valuable that, unlike the Centauros, the Hybrids bore the expense of taking their ponies home with them after the tournament. The polo fans felt that such prized ponies guaranteed supremacy. They liked the New Zealanders’ link to an Anglo-Saxon legacy of respecting the horse, a heritage which, while refining and perfecting the caliber of horsemanship, invariably brought out the best in the mount.
    Fabian, on the contrary, threw in his lot with the South American Centauros. He knew the common objection to them—that since they sold their ponies at auction after the tournament, they must have left their best breeds at home—but he knew, too, that their team claimed two of the six foremost international polo players, each assigned a top rating of ten points, and two more rated at eight. Moreover, they were players well into the second and third generation, bred in a climate where the polo ponyfilled a need not unlike that of the automobile in the United States. Just as a mechanic here took pleasure in tuning up, revving up or tinkering with a car left in his trust, a skilled South American groom took a comparable freedom in schooling a polo pony to his will. Since South American players never staked winning on