“After Spain 82, Peru or the fate of Peru was at stake, above all, on the splendid doll of Jaime Yzaga”

It was 1984 or maybe 1985 when on one of those boring afternoons of my childhood, those that oscillated between three channels on national television, I saw the first tennis match of my life. Peru was playing the Davis Cup and the person in charge of the broadcast was a Spaniard who did not seem to be narrating or inventing an electrifying match in a packed stadium like the football announcers of the time did (my favorite was Elejalder Godos) but rather to be on the ship center of a temple officiating the consecration of the host. His name was Felipe Carbonell and in his way of accompanying the game there was something that sounded like a liturgy, something that went very well with that leisurely, silent and concentrated sport that I watched perplexed before the brand new color television in my house. I do not forget the repeated sound of the ball on the clay before a crucial serve and Carbonell’s voice whispering to the best Peruvian tennis player of the moment as if it were the very voice of his conscience: “Come on Jaime, come on Jaime, come on Jaime”.

It was Carbonell who taught me tennis. As 7 was a state channel, the announcer had to do didactics, so that while narrating he also explained the scoring system of that strange sport, he said to which side of the court the serve should go and what differentiated the first from the second ; what was a game and what a set or a break point. As soon as I understood the system there was no turning back. And in those distant eighties of my childhood, after the collapse of Spain 82, Peru or the fate of Peru was played for me not only in the hands of the volleyball players but in the self-confidence of Pablo Arraya, the lethal serve of Carlos di Laura and especially in the splendid doll of Jaime Yzaga (Yes: “come on jamie”), the little genius capable of beating Pete Sampras himself at the US Open as well as falling into tremendous wells of internal confusion, lagoons so deep and so Peruvian that they taught me how “mental” this sport was, as psychic and solipsistic as Literature. Even today, sometimes when I’ve finished a chapter or closed a scene I like, I find myself clenching my fist as if I’ve won an imaginary set or broken an opponent’s serve.

So the boy that I was, a boy from St. Louis, began to hit a racket in his room, resigned to never seeing, much less stepping on, a real tennis court. The only club I knew was Toby’s, which was shown on TV, and in the local park in my neighborhood (the current Videna) there were only four ping pong tables with holes and no nets. I remember that the only games I saw live were some pretty crazy ones that were played by some kids from a neighborhood near mine who, touched by the same fever, had put a volleyball net in the middle of a tarball court and had painted with chalk brick a fairly uneven court: the points were interrupted by the passage of cars or bicycles, and the matches sometimes ended in endless disputes about whether the ball had gone over the net or had slipped through one of the large holes in the court. volleyball mesh.

But then the miracle happened. The seed that would fix my love for this sport forever and the ability to value and enjoy Federer’s elegance and mastery, Nadal’s courage and fury, Djokovic’s ability to learn and Alcaraz’s brilliant irruption. And all because one day a neighbor from my street and friend, Peter, showed Alex and me the two tennis rackets he had found in a corner of his house: a Wilson brand graphite one (we looked at it as if it were a object from another world) and the other made of wood that was undoubtedly from the times of Alejandro Olmedo himself. It did not matter. If we bought balls, Peter told us, and raised enough money we could rent a tennis court at a place that was in Jesús María and he knew about it. Was he serious? Neither Alex nor I believed it, but then we started raising the money (I don’t want to remember what methods we used) until we reached the amount that was equivalent to us a ticket to Roland Garros itself. And while it’s true that we couldn’t rent a clay court because only one of us had tennis shoes for that surface, and also that the two hours we played on the asphalt court that gave us most of the points we we played were defined by double faults in the serve (none had taken a single class), I am not exaggerating if I say that that time I lived one of the happiest days of my entire childhood, although it has never been repeated. I remember very well that at least twice, or perhaps more, the ball passed the net and I connected it in the air with my racket, feeling the tension of the strings in contact with the ball and the mystical experience of seeing it go out to the opposite court. in a drive or a backhand that would now be called a “winning shot”, an emotion that I have described to my son as that of carrying a Jedi sword against one of the Sith even though he does not pay much attention to me. So I think of another way to convey that emotion to him, although sometimes I wish Felipe Carbonell would come to my aid.

THE BOOK

“Luminous animals” (Penguin, 2021).

The second novel by the author of “Contarlo todo” is published this year in several Latin American countries after appearing in Peru. It narrates the nocturnal journey of a Latin American student on a university campus in the United States where he meets friendship, love and faces the most painful memories of his country.