Passion Play Read online

  To Fabian, the intensity of his acts was always knowable; he seldom had a comparable knowledge of his motive. To track the source of his present act would be no easier than to unravel the tangle within which Eugene and Alexandra acted. He saw the meaning of an act emerging with its consequences, a train of causality hinting ultimately at the impulse that had initially prompted it. He conceived of acute self-awareness as vitiating instinct, and meditative self-analysis as digging a grave for action. Living implied the necessity of maintaining his will, even without a motive, with memory fostering remorse for what he had or had not done. Was remorse over a contest, perhaps won, perhaps lost, but fought to the end, less gnawing than regret over a challenge one had refused? And how could he determine this without discerning what his motive was for entering upon the duel he had provoked?

  Leaving the door of his VanHome like a crusader compelled to abandon the fastness of his citadel, he turned for a last look at it. His gaze swept the world of objects fashioned by other men; serene, untouched, invulnerable, they were indifferent to whatever fate might come upon the one who had lately bent them to his use. The events that drove him from this world had been abrupt and inescapable, but he was not yet their victim, not their prisoner; he was still in command. Soon enough, in battle, the pores of his skin would open to the sweaty, viscous reek of his own fear, the pungency of leather and tarnished brass on his tongue.

  It was time to go. He put on his newest polo helmet, the face guard an internal part of it. He swung heavily into the saddle on Big Lick. Pain pounded in his hand. He held it high above the mare’s mane, the reins girdling his wrist. At a slow trot he moved away from the VanHome, Gaited Amble following behind on a lead rein.

  Eugene was waiting in the middle of the training field. Fabian disengaged Gaited Amble, loosely hitching it to the bars of a crude post at the end of the field. As he approached Eugene, he recognized his mount, one of the swiftest and most powerful Thoroughbreds, its ears pricking with excitement. Fabian looked at Eugene; from beneath his polo helmet with no face guard, Eugene stared back at him. Without a word, Eugene threw the ball on the ground between them.

  They bore down on the ball, Eugene hitting it first in a long forehand stroke. Mallet upright in his unmarred right hand, Fabian tightened his grip on the handle. Locking his calves and knees against Big Lick’s withers, thrusting his left shoulder forward over its neck, Fabian cut his spurs into the pony’s flanks, prompting it to break into its fastest pace.

  Eugene reached the ball at a full gallop, his mallet erect. He pitched it far back above his shoulder, then brought it down toward the ball in a scything arc. Just then Fabian’s mallet sliced the air; its head snared Eugene’s mallet. Eugene, jabbing and twisting, unhooked it, but instead of tracking the ball, he sheered his mount, still at taut rein, sideways toward Big Lick, bruising and jostling the mare as both horses plunged on. With a snorting roar, Big Lick tugged cruelly at the reins bound about Fabian’s wounded hand.

  Eugene kept pricking Big Lick with the tip of his boot, his knee guards ripping and tearing at Fabian’s calves. Wild with agitation, glistening with patches of foaming sweat, Big Lick bolted. Rearing, gouging the air with its forelegs, the mare fought Fabian, its neck distended and thrust out. Fabian wrenched at the reins, and the horse, obeying, plunged forward. The sudden movement scorched Fabian’s arm and shoulder with a torch of pain. Eugene’s eyes brimmed with contempt as he again swerved his Thoroughbred into Big Lick; Fabian averted a side collision only by fiercely gagging his mare to an abrupt halt. Heaving in pain, the pony swerved on its haunches, then bolted away from Eugene at redoubled speed, kicking the grass in frenzied bounds.

  As Fabian gained on the ball, striking it toward the edge of the field, he felt his skull girded with the cold despair of certainty. Instead of rushing ahead, hitting the ball toward Fabian’s goal posts, Eugene was lagging behind. Fabian recognized the strategy: Eugene expected him to head off the ball with a back shot, sending it across the field, toward Eugene’s goal posts. But each time Fabian accomplished the shot, he merely delivered the ball back into Eugene’s arena, and, bolting forward, Eugene recouped the ball before Fabian could challenge him for possession.

  With Fabian now in front of him, Eugene, in a forward shot, sent the ball smashing, not toward the goal posts, but into Big Lick, ominously close to the animal’s head—and Fabian’s.

  Turning for the ball slowed Fabian down; unfaltering and much faster on his pony, Eugene again seized the ball. Fabian prompted Big Lick into a flat-out gallop and, looking back, caught sight of his opponent straining in a swing; in that moment, the ball soared, whistling by Fabian’s neck as he bent sideways. It had missed him by an inch.

  Now, as Fabian bore down on the ball, Eugene behind him in close pursuit, the horses heaving and snorting, Fabian no longer allowed himself to think of his pain. Perception yielded to fear, and he knew his life was now at stake. Reluctantly he saw that Eugene was no longer playing to kill Fabian’s inner conviction of his own mastery: Eugene was playing just to kill. Stick-and-ball offered a convenient guise in case he should succeed. So the pattern swiftly emerged: as Fabian went in pursuit of the ball, Eugene followed, riding him off to dodge the track of the ball, bumping him at full gallop, aware that Fabian’s wound of the day before reduced his control and made him more vulnerable. Fabian, who had hardly slept during the last two nights, began to feel stamina seeping out of him.

  Steadfastly refusing to be drawn into Eugene’s fury, Fabian still hoped that their confrontation on the same field, which, in the past, had so often brought them together, would lessen his friend’s conviction of betrayal.

  He countered Eugene’s assault by slowing down to an easy pace, then twisted abruptly across Eugene’s path in a sinuous thrust, striking the ball at every chance. With the ceaseless leaching of his strength, his legs grew stolid, sweat clouded his vision. His only strength rested in his aim, and he wondered how long he would be able to maintain it. An image of himself lying dead on the field dominated his thoughts.

  Polo, even when played under strict formality, barely managed to restrain the force of human flesh, the speed and mass of the horse. To Fabian, this had been the game’s sheer beauty; it was now its ultimate terror. He recalled vividly one of the amateur polo games he had witnessed in Los Lemures. During the first two or three chukkers, the pace was leisurely, safe and slow, giving each player a chance to demonstrate his skills and to relish the accomplishment of the others.

  One of the players was an old acquaintance of Fabian’s, a recently retired American businessman who had arrived for the occasion only two days earlier. He was accompanied by his wife and his two sons, whose wives and children also were in the party, all enthusiastic not only about the holiday, but for the happy chance to see him resume polo, the sport he had been most fond of as a young man, and to which, after three decades of what he called executive golf and tennis, he was most eager to return.

  During the last chukker, a substitute player was enlisted by one of the teams. He was a young ranchero, a local boy, not often given the chance to take part in a game reserved for visiting polo players. Eager to make his mark in front of his companions and other spectators, he promptly threw his pony into a reckless display of speed, performing at the same time with an uncanny mastery of the ball. By playing so much faster than others on the field, he engaged the spectators on his side; cheered for every strike, he forced the line of attack and defense to be extended across almost the entire length of the field. Even though the other players were tired and on the brink of ending the game, prompted by the applause of the spectators, they quickly surrendered to the rapidly increased pressure of the game, and Fabian saw how his friend, reluctantly and with effort, was compelled by the speed of his team to mobilize his pony, chasing the ball at the same headlong pace as the other, younger players.

  With only three minutes left to the end of the game, the young ranchero scrambled for the ball in a frantic gallop that left his pony
choking for air. The other players, challenged by his aggression, spurred their ponies downfield, jabbing, fighting for possession of the ball. Fabian saw the American suddenly pull out of the scrimmage and, wielding his mallet like a hockey stick, come at the ranchero, attempting to ride him off. As the tumult of hoofs pounded the ground, the crowds in the stands, responding to beat and tremor of the earth, broke into volleys of shouting and applause, inciting the players to goad their sweat-sodden mounts to even more drastic speed. Heedless now of everything but possession of the ball, the ranchero pitched into a steep turn, the American hard on his heels. At that moment, in a blink of time, swift as a coiling wrist, the wave of horses and men swelled, then as quickly broke, spilling from its center, in a jet of fluid motion, the glimpse of a horse thrown sideways, then buckling, its neck a sculpture of terror, its rider, the American, frozen in air, a puppet suspended above the empty saddle.

  Horse and rider went down in the rolling tide of flesh, human and animal, closing then unfolding above the other players, as if what lay on the ground were a prey they had run to earth.

  One after another, the players began to dismount; from both ends of the field, the umpires, grooms and the man’s family rushed to the fallen player. They dropped to their knees and bent over him. The setting sun stained the blood that spilled from his head and neck, brimming into the helmet that his fall had knocked askew, oozing through his torn shirt; nose and jaw lay limply together, pulverized by hoofs; flesh and cloth blended, matted with grass, caked with mud. While the ambulance slowly crossed the field, the ponies sniffing blood and the odor of death, prancing in fear, strained at the reins the silent grooms held taut.

  Now, facing Eugene, Fabian felt his spirit draw back from the vision that had obstructed it—and from the fear of death and the seduction of survival. Awake to life, he was in a trance, in which perfection was the brain’s unalloyed response, enacted by the body with the certainty of sleepwalking. With Eugene racing at Fabian’s left, readying the assault to unseat him, Fabian slowed Big Lick to a canter, the ball at the pony’s right side. In perfect obedience, bobbing its mane imperiously, Big Lick responded instantly. Slightly to the front, Eugene, assuming that Fabian was still dribbling the ball forward, gathered momentum to drive him off course.

  Poised above the ball, his mallet erect, Fabian rose in his right stirrup and hunched over Big Lick’s shoulder; he quickly drew his hand close to his chest. Then, swerving his body to the right, his left knee and thigh braced high against the saddle, he unleashed all his strength into his arm, uncoiling it in a long drive beneath the pony’s shoulder. In one smooth, measured blow, Fabian’s mallet struck the ball dead center; crossing under the pony’s neck, it catapulted into the air just when Eugene slowed down his horse and turned to the side, his mallet vaulting. He arched to look back at his enemy, and in the second that the glance consumed, Fabian’s ball smashed into Eugene’s face, the impact cocking his helmet forward, over his forehead. Amid the din, Fabian caught the high, thin echo of cracking bone. Eugene slumped in the saddle; his body pitched forward, then tumbled to the ground.

  Even before Fabian dismounted, he knew that his friend had been felled by a fluke hit.

  Memory was a fraudulent bookkeeper and, with time, Eugene was little more than a recorded fact, but here, at the tournament named for him, Alexandra Stahlberg was not. Facing Fabian, she took the arm of her companion, a man in his early twenties, familiar to Fabian. He was powerfully built, his compact physique defined by the sleek cut of the tuxedo, his patrician head and features molded with a glowing Latin harmony.

  “This is José-Manuel Costeiro.” Alexandra pressed Costeiro’s arm, but her eyes stayed fixed on Fabian. “And this is Fabian, my old friend I told you so much about.”

  Fabian remembered recent photographs of Alexandra in the society pages of polo and riding magazines; Costeiro, whom Fabian had once seen playing for the Centauros, was always at her side or somewhere in the background. He came from a distinguished Argentinean cattle-breeding family who were proud of his skill at polo, but who disapproved of his indulgence in women; with both, his talent was formidable.

  As a waiter poured champagne, Fabian felt Alexandra and Costeiro staring at him. He looked quickly at Alexandra across the table. Her face shone with a soft luster, almost childlike, he broad, mobile mouth framing wide teeth. Only her green eyes pierced intensely.

  “Do you still play polo one-on-one for stakes, Fabian?” she asked with that easy, ingenuous smile.

  “It depends on what stakes and against whom,” Fabian replied.

  “Against me, Señor Fabian,” Costeiro interjected, leaning forward and smiling evenly. He paused, his eyes bright and hard; then, when Fabian remained silent, he continued. “Two ponies, and first to score five goals—with no time limit.” He fingered his glass; then he proposed a sum.

  “That’s about three times as much as I can afford, Mr. Costeiro,” Fabian said.

  “I know you write books about horsemanship and appear on television talk shows; you can’t be a poor man, Señor Fabian,” Costeiro said.

  “In this country, writing books and appearing on television are vanity sports. I make my living on a horse.”

  Costeiro’s eyes softened as they rested on Alexandra. Then, as if the sight spurred him, he turned back to Fabian.

  “How about this: If I lose, you take the full sum. If you lose, I take one-third. Agreed?” He waited, full of force, eager.

  Alexandra cocked her head, observing Fabian. No expression betrayed her thoughts.

  “Agreed,” Fabian said.

  “Tomorrow morning, then.” Costeiro sat back pensively. “Nine o’clock in the practice field closest to Brook Forest and the Hunter Paces trails. No spectators—just my grooms, don’t you think?”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen.” Alexandra broke her silence vivaciously. “Since I arranged this game, do I get my agent’s cut?”

  “You’ll get your cut from me,” Costeiro said, all smiles.

  He looked at his watch. Alexandra interpreted the signal and stood up languidly. Both men rose with her.

  “Can’t I even watch the game?” she asked, pouting, draped against Costeiro’s shoulder.

  Costeiro embraced her amorously. “Of course you can. But only if Señor Fabian doesn’t mind your being there.”

  “Fabian is my friend. He wouldn’t lift his finger against me. Would you, Fabian?”

  Fabian raised the ring finger of his left hand. Since the severing, the wound had healed, but the finger remained slightly crooked. “For you, Alexandra—not even a finger,” he said with mock courtesy.

  He watched Alexandra and Costeiro cross the room, then slowly left the club and returned to his VanHome. He climbed the stairs to the alcove and slid the dome open to the night sky. As he shed his party clothes, he contemplated the easy guile with which Alexandra had arranged this match. What was she hoping for? In the coming game, Costeiro would have advantages over Fabian: he was younger and stronger, with superbly schooled Argentinean ponies at his command. What if, to unleash Costeiro, Alexandra had told him that she and Fabian were once lovers? Wrapping himself in a warm blanket, still unknowing, he lay down to unquiet sleep.

  The sun woke him at dawn, moist air cool on his face. Shivering, he looked out through the open dome. Aimless patches of fog roamed the woods, then slipped away, baring a grove of elms. Rising from the thick carpet of underbrush, the trees stood bare, inexplicably stripped of their foliage.

  He slipped coming down the steps from the alcove, bruising his shoulder against the door. An accident, he wondered, or was he losing his coordination under stress? In a game, a blur, a smudge, a single break in the chain of coordination might bring him to earth.

  He knew that his own apprehension and fear were hazards that might, at any moment before or during his fight with Costeiro, bend him to the humiliation of gagging, vomit or the wrenching flood and waste of the body.

  As a precaution, he began his preparations for
the match by quickly forcing his stomach and bowels to rid themselves of food and waste, a cleansing evacuation without pain or any other unpleasant side effects. He had learned to do this during his travels in countries where the practice of voiding one’s stomach, intestines and bladder was done at will, a recourse when people wished to pleasure themselves at table without distraction or where a failure or reluctance to continue partaking of the largesse of one’s host would be construed as an insult.

  Fabian then turned on a tape recorder, raising the volume until it consumed the space around him with random songs and melodies he had recorded from his VanHome radio, the music reminding him of an evening with a lover, an afternoon of ease among friends, a day of writing, the whiling away of a forest noon, no menace to cloud the enclosure of his thought.

  He had listened to this music often, the current of his memory moving toward those interludes of harmony and light. Now, as always when he played it before a game, the music came at him like a rallying cry, a call to arms, the bugle that would alert the line of emotional defense he needed to stave off fear.

  He let the heat of a bath invade him, unraveling the knot at his center. Then he lathered and rinsed his hair until it slipped between his fingers. He was careful not to burn his scalp with the hair drier, and he brushed his hair as if he were polishing it, arranging it by habit on both sides of the widow’s peak, a gesture that had become mere reflex by now, a shadow of an atavistic belief that his vigor depended on how much pelt covered his scalp.

  He brushed his teeth with the firmest brush he had and the powder to which he was accustomed, then he massaged his gums with yet another brush, soaked in a solution that scaled the tissue, a prelude to the jet of water he finally shot into his mouth, laving his teeth and gums, until he felt vivified, without stain.

  Then, with precision, almost surgically, he shaved, planing his skin to the polish he would bring to a night of love. There was still time to kill, and he trimmed his fingernails and cuticles, vigilant not to cut himself; he proceeded then to his feet, trimming his toenails, dislodging the dead skin that had formed around them and under the toes. Next he swabbed his ears with wads of cotton, scrutinizing the film of yellow wax, the dirty smudge that soiled the cotton, scouring the channels that curved behind the lobes.