In tennis or the other

I was caught by the withdrawal of Roger Federer in Lausanne, Olympic territory. A congress on rewritings, remakes and expanded fictions. We were busy thinking about metafiction in the Hispanic world when someone commented on the news in Swiss French, which is French without cream, but with Nordic filling. The news was not very interesting among European university students, not even when the Basel tennis player’s farewell began to circulate in the koiné that allows us to ask for a burger in Iowa, one hamburger in Munich, a cangreburger in the Mediterranean Sea or a gooper in the Ría de Arosa and the people laughed. Not even when the invincible army, the Hispanics, the red one, the red one and their hypostases in the congressional assembly began to derive their fictions towards the epic parties –they said epic by Greco-Roman accommodation-, the pitched battles, the historical clashes between the Swiss and the ensaimada of Rafa.

Rest in congress sessions is regulated by the Grenoble Convention. And nothing prevents that, between tetrabrik juices, sparkling waters, weak coffee, tea biscuits and chocolate bars, there is talk of this and that, of the divine and the human, of the Florentine embrace and the mythical confrontation between two gentlemen of world sport. Each one adduced his tennis likes and dislikes in the coffee break (a Garcia, not me, ranted against Nadal and did not keep the clothes), carried who more who less his televised memories of master tournaments thousand or grand slam. It was said there clay, grass, hard court; the most skillful released, perhaps randomly, asphalt, clay (also blue clay), brick dust, grass, carpet, cement, plastic, because the metafiction guild is a practitioner of the sport of tennis and, failing that, paddle tennis when they begin to fail the physical form. Someone says, not funny, Cincinnati.

Separated from the group, after reviewing the stellar moments – that’s what he thinks – of his morning conference or licking his wounds for an inconspicuous intervention, a speaker without further ado, a quidam, a who, a guy longing for a plenary session, draws on his memory and remembers the games he watched as a child on television with the father who is no longer there. Nadal and Federer’s withdrawal no longer matter. They already have someone who has narrated his battles, they already have their particular Homer unfolding his exploits, recounting his wounds. No one like David Foster Wallace has written about tennis and its heroes, about their sweats and their setbacks, about their adversities and their sufferings. And the speaker wonders who will write about the memory of the absent.

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