Passion Play (7 page)

Having taken occasion to remind the spectators that, only two years before her husband, Eugene Stanhope, had been killed tragically in a freak accident while preparing for this very tournament, she paused, then closed by announcing that the Eugene Stanhope Stables, breeders and traders of some of the country’s finest horses, would be open after the game as a courtesy to visitors, free of charge.

Barely had Lucretia Stanhope finished when four turbopowered Grail Industries helicopters, hovering in formation above the field, descended slowly, wafting through the air to a point a few feet above the ground, the powerful downdraft of their blades blasting the puddles out of the sodden turf, hastening evaporation.

At the far end of the field the drivers and owners of perhaps seventy vintage cars and about half as many antique planes-museum pieces rolled out annually for the parade that always started the polo tournament—began gently to swab down the gleaming waxed surfaces of their machines. Television crews settled into their perches on the aluminum towers that had been erected for the match.

Several photographers, burdened with camera gear, scurried about, quick to spot star players who had begun to emerge from tents around the field. Some were already snapping the better-known polo ponies as their owners’ grooms started to saddle them
up at hitching rails next to trailers and motor homes. Still other reporters prowled through the stands, on the lookout for personalities from the local and international jet and polo sets always drawn to the tournament.

A motorcade of two dozen open convertibles sporting balloons, flowers and American flags began to circle the field. They carried officials of the various U.S. polo associations and officers of the corporations that supported the tournament and contributed to the purse. The antique cars inaugurated the parade, proceeding slowly in sequence, each braking carefully to avoid collision. They were followed by high school marching bands, with bouncing cheerleaders in miniskirts. Behind them floated a large flower bed nestled on a moving platform from which Miss Polo Cup, a vivacious brunette in a bikini and polo helmet, pelted the crowd with flowers. Bringing up the rear of the parade, four stunt riders encased in medieval armor, lent by one of the local museums, conducted a mock jousting tournament. Pivoting their mounts, they bore down on each other at full gallop, lances out-thrust, horses straining beneath the unaccustomed weight of metal-clad riders, and with spectacular showmanship averted by inches the brutal jar of body and armor.

A middle-aged man, his gaunt features marked only by a thin mustache, turned toward Fabian. The man was dressed in a faultlessly tailored safari jacket, white breeches and two-tone shoes, a brier burl pipe in his manicured hand.

“I say, this is quite a show they’re putting on here,” he said with an exaggerated English accent. “These copters alone could take over my whole country, you know.” He laughed, showing uneven yellowed teeth. “Who do you suppose that rabble could be?” He pointed his pipe with disdain at the stands.

“Polo fans. Stable owners. Farmers. Breeders. College polo teams, plain folks like you and me.”

The man twitched his shoulders. “Plain folks? I flew first-class to this tournament.”

“Where from?”

“From Brunei, my home, by way of London, of course.”

“Brunei? That’s exciting,” said Fabian, not certain he had ever heard of the place before.

“Exciting? Not really.” The man puffed another cloud of
smoke. “Our only natural resources are squash and badminton—and the breeze of the China Sea.”

“Squash, badminton and the breeze?”

“Well, yes. And, I’ll be damned, polo, of course.”

“And polo?”

“Polo. Recently introduced by our gracious government.”

“By your government?”

“Yes. By His Highness the Sultan and his brothers. It will be played by the Royal Brunei Regiment, as well as by the police force and our air wing, of course.”

“But of course,” said Fabian.

Sweeping slowly back and forth, the helicopters completed their task. To a storm of cheering from the stands, they gradually rose, hovered for a moment, and then wheeled 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 pony
filled 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 one horse, changing ponies several times during a game, and kept equally skilled mounts in reserve, to them training a pony meant, above all, making it a fast runner. To prolong endurance and accelerate pace, they might inject the horse with stimulants rousing it to a pitch of heady charge. They knew how to liquefy its blood to speed circulation and how to numb its legs to pain and fatigue by local anesthetic or by a procedure called nerving, which deadened feeling in the animal’s legs.

From opposite ends of the field, the Hybrids and the Centauros now entered the arena, proceeding toward a point before the grandstand. The players wore cotton T-shirts in their team colors, sleek-fitting white breeches and high leather boots capped by thick-ribbed knee guards. Wide-rimmed pith helmets or the newer plastic helmets enclosed their heads; their eyes and faces were shielded by narrow guards. Their ponies were trussed with cheekpieces, throatlatches, bands across the nose and brow; they were harnessed with lip straps, snaffles that gagged, curb bits and chains, breastplates, stirrup irons with broad footplates. Tightly coiled bandages blazing with team colors cushioned their legs against the mallets, the ball, the flying hoofs of other horses. Marshaled in formation, mallets held upright like flags on parade, players on mounts reined tautly, they suggested fleetingly a moving frieze of man and horse approaching ceremonial combat.

An antique biplane, trailing the banner of Grail Industries, circled the field, startling the mounted horses; when it flew away, one of the umpires tossed the ball into their midst. The game began. In an explosive melee, players and ponies took off at full pace, mallets threshing the air, clumps of the still-damp turf flying at the impact of hoofs scrambling, braking to a dead stop, pivoting.

Within moments of takeoff, the distinctive polo style of each
team revealed itself. The Hybrids adhered to their familiar strategy of playing the man rather than the ball. The pony’s secure and easy grace was foremost in each player’s style. He held the reins, either single or double, in the English fashion, one finger between each curb and snaffle, the hand clenched in a fist around the whip, knuckles up. Even at the game’s hottest pitch, he spurred his pony more by the pressure of knees and calves than by punishing it with a whip, bridling the mouth only in short spurts, his mount balanced, its leading foreleg always on the side of the turn. In taking out after the ball, the player rose, balancing with his knees, shoulders tilting over the pony’s ears, his suppleness in the hips and waist a visual pleasure. As he jockeyed the reins with his left hand, his use of the mallet with the right was invariably correct: its handle in the palm of his hand, between thumb and forefinger, the mallet wheeling in a swing—a forehand always to the front of the pony’s forelegs, a backhand near its hind legs.

Mounted on fast and bold, superbly trained Argentinean Thoroughbreds, the Centauros were celebrated for their speed and audacity. With a peculiar vehemence of temperament, each player kept his pony under relentless check—the snaffle reins bunched together between the thumb and first finger, the curb reins between the first and second fingers, the whip held by the thumb against the palm, the knuckles of the fist sideways—the bit and spur steady pressures in a sequence of changing pace, fierce stops and deft turns. His eyes on his opponents, on the line of attack and on the ball, each Centauro, an image of perfection, drove and whipped his pony, flanks already bloodied, into a frenzied gallop. The Centauro was unique in his habit of momentarily transferring the reins to his right hand, next to the mallet handle, thus freeing his left hand to use the whip with full force. His grip on the mallet firm, wrist supple, elbow close to the ribs, arm and shoulder in harmonious alignment with the mallet as it struck—he scooped the ball smoothly off the ground, propelling it in an arc into the air.

Fabian remembered an incident in a game that called up echoes of a memory beyond time. A South American player had violently accelerated his mount; it responded by raising its foreleg
in a propulsive drive well ahead of its forward weight just as its rear leg hit the ground. By instinct, the pony stretched out in a buoyant spring, its ears sleekly flattened to counter the drag of wind. In a single frozen shaft of movement and force, millennia fell away, and Fabian saw the streaming flight of a horse from its flesh-tearing foes. The speed pounded. Suddenly, turning to strike the ball, the player pulled brutally on the reins, gagging the pony. The animal abruptly lost momentum, its natural rhythm snapping with the retracted foreleg. As the rider spurred his mount to push off, its foreleg crashed on the turf, shattering the bone just below the knee. The pony, foaming in its frenzy, kept at the gallop, its splintered leg buckling, a bare bone protruding at every footfall, until, staggering, the animal pitched and stumbled. Only then did the rider, as frenzied and possessed as his mount, become aware of what had taken place.

The gala to celebrate the tournament, sponsored by the residents of Stanhope Estates, was given at the Polo and Golf Club for members of the competing teams, other polo players and visiting international personalities in sport and society. Fabian arrived without an invitation and wandered uneasily among the formally dressed crowd.

In one of the rooms, he heard his name. A middle-aged man in a blue suit was heading for him, his silver tie pierced by a stickpin in the shape of a polo ball of pearl being struck by a gold mallet. The man’s eyes settled on Fabian with a bird’s rapacity.

“I know who you are,” he announced, closing in with an air of mock conspiracy.

“So do I,” Fabian replied.

“There you are, the famous Fabian,” the man exclaimed, dragging Fabian by his upper arm to a corner. “Michael Stockey,” he introduced himself. “I kept looking for you among the polo mercenaries here,” he said, “but I was told you hadn’t sold to anyone. True?”

“I hadn’t sold because there weren’t any buyers,” said Fabian.

Stockey edged closer. “Come to think of it,” he said in a cheerful
voice, “you and I met once before. At the polo tournament at Los Lemures, in the Caribbean.”

Fabian apologized for failing to remember their meeting. Stockey was undeterred.