Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski Read Free Book Online

with him, and soon Fabian dropped relentlessly fromone team after another, slipped gradually into the notoriety of isolation, a maverick. For a while he was polo coach at one of the Ivy League colleges, but it was not long before some of the school’s older alumni, considerable polo players themselves at one time and now on the board of trustees at their alma mater, denounced his presence in their collegiate athletics, citing what they called his inability to play in concert with polo teams of Europe, England or the Americas.
    As a student, Fabian had thought that his distrust of team play was simply the fear of being trampled to death by a massed tonnage of horses and men, each player, no less than his pony, driven by momentum that, like the goal scored, did not spring from the solitary force of his own will to live, from his unique instinct to survive, but stemmed, rather, from a collective strategy in which an individual destiny mattered little.
    Later in life, he decided that the spirit of the collective and the team bore for him another implication less ominous but equally disturbing: collective responsibility diluted one’s faults, but it also diminished one’s achievements, took away from them stature and consequence. One could no longer distinguish what was due to oneself and what to one’s team; the boundaries of success and failure, victory and defeat were blurred in a tangle of humility and pride. Even further, the collective mood was insidious: after an impressive score, applause for the group left players heady with a sense of invincibility; then a player, racing his pony too fast at a turn or jostling an opponent too impetuously, would find his mount suddenly losing its balance and falling, burying him under it, just at the moment he was most confident of his prowess. The loss of a player in a crippling accident often devastated the team’s morale, impairing each player’s sense of security, leaving him prone to accident and easy panic.
    Fabian’s polo—polo as Fabian played it—was the ground of his being in the world, the only uniqueness at his command. Shunned by most teams, he resigned himself to traveling around the country in search of work as a polo referee or as a player in one-on-one polo games with wealthy opponents. Since these engagements were infrequent, he explored almost desperately the avenues of other talents, but found none.
    At times he worked as a riding instructor or lecturer, but, as heacknowledged with chagrin, by many of the formal standards of horsemanship, he was not thought to be a faultless rider. According to these standards, the goal of horseback riding was to achieve that utmost security of a good seat, the calves, thighs, knees, hands, voice deployed gently by the rider to communicate his will to the horse without submitting it to unwarranted checks or restraints or violating its natural instinct toward self-preservation, its harmony of balance and sudden reflex.
    Polo, however, was a game of surging takeoffs, of abrupt halts and sudden veers and pivots. It demanded a rapid displacement of the weight of a horse and its rider; it called for the strategy of reins insistently pulling on a horse’s mouth and bearing on its neck, the ceaseless prod of the spurs and the nip of the whip, the smiting heat and clash of one horse evading collision, colliding, seeking collision with another. Years of playing polo, practicing for it, riding ponies bred and schooled exclusively for that game had evolved in Fabian habits contrary to the safety, decorum and propriety of dressage, a hunt or a jump. Practicing at a stable, arena or paddock, he would often exhibit a demeanor in his horsemanship that disturbed, sometimes even shocked, other instructors, whether beginning or advanced. Worse yet, the incorrigibility of his mistakes, and their vehemence, frequently tended to unnerve even the most pliant and submissive mounts.
    To write about horses and horsemanship became, for Fabian, one way