To her surprise, the room opened out to a porch with cushioned chairs in place and a ping-pong table. There was another ping-pong table on the newly laid turf beyond.
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Brimmer reminded me a little of Superman when he takes off his spectacles. I thought he was as attractive as men can be who don’t really care about women as such. We played a round robin game of ping-pong and he handled his bat well.
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“I must go along now,” said Brimmer. “I’ve got to meet some people.”
“No, stay,” said Stahr. “I never have said what I wanted. We’ll play ping-pong and have another drink and then we’ll tear into each other.”
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The ping-pong balls lay around in the grass like a constellation of stars.
The Love of the Last Tycoon, Scott Fitzgerald
“See how he puts topspin on his return?”
We got into Pamplona late in the afternoon and the bus stopped in front of the Hotel Montoya. Out in the plaza they were stringing electric-light wires to light the plaza for the ping-pong festival. A few kids came up when the bus stopped, and a customs officer for the town made all the people getting down from the bus open their bundles on the sidewalk to see if they had brought illegal paddles. We went into the hotel and on the stairs I met Montoya. He shook hands with us, smiling in his embarrassed way.
“Your friends are here,” he said.
“Mr. Campbell?”
“Yes. Mr. Cohn and Mr. Campbell and Lady Ashley.”
“Where are my friends now?”
“I think they went to the rec room.”
“And how about ping-pong?”
Montoya smiled. “To-night,” he said. “To-night at seven o’clock they bring out the table. Will you all play?”
“Oh, yes. They are eager for a pingpongnada.”
Montoya put his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll see you there.”
He smiled again. He always smiled as though ping-pong were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about. He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand.
“Your friend, is he aficionado, too?” Montoya smiled at Bill.
“Yes. He came all the way from New York to see the Killer Spin Table Tennis Tournament.”
“Yes?” Montoya politely disbelieved. “But he’s not aficionado like you.”
He put his hand on my shoulder again embarrassedly.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s a real aficionado.”
“But he’s not aficionado like you are.”
Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about ping-pong. All the good players stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with aficion stayed there. In Montoya’s room were their photographs. The photographs were dedicated to Juanito Montoya or to his sister, who was a top women’s player. The photographs of ping-pong players Montoya had really believed in were framed. Photographs of those who had been without aficion Montoya kept in a drawer of his desk. They often had the most flattering inscriptions. But they did not mean anything. One day Montoya took them all out and dropped them in the waste-basket. He did not want them around.
We often talked about the ping and the pong and the players of ping-pong. I had stopped at the Montoya for several years. We never talked for very long at a time. It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each felt. Men would come in from distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about ping-pong. These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them, who were stacked one on top of each other like cord wood to fit them in when the hotel was full.
They were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion for ping-pong. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. There was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent.
“Your American friend,” they would say to Montoya. “Is he aficionado?”
Montoya would glare at them, but without malice. His eyes would narrow to grim little slits, and then he would say “Clearly.”
“Porque?”
“He has learned la tenis de mesa as a nino in the basement of Sacred Heart Grade School.”
And then there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, an actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.
One of them rose now and crossed the room, the look on his face half smile, half chagrin. He extended his hand to my shoulder and clapped it down there in a gentle but manly way. Then he looked in my eyes with both respect and regret for having doubted me and said simply . . .
“Buen hombre.”