There are movements that, when seen in slow motion, are of a superior beauty. The writer Luis Torres de la Osa maintains that, in tennis, that place belongs to the one-handed backhand. “On an aesthetic level, the one-handed backhand is infinitely superior to the two-handed backhand. The plasticity of the movement has to do with symmetry (one of the classic parameters of beauty): while the arm that hits the ball advances generating an upward curve, the other expands backwards, slapping the air with the back of the hand. The body of the tennis player, axis of symmetry, is almost like a mirror, and if the image is frozen at the right moment, the tennis players seem to be dancing, or looking for a hug, or floating, like a polyp in the dark and magnificent waters of the ocean.”
Tennis night (Libros del KO) is the book in which Torres de la Osa evokes a childhood and adolescence that were marked by the tennis courts – it was once a promise – and in which music, literature, chess or The sport is intertwined in the five sets that it presents as chapters before reaching the sudden death of the outcome. An air of evening melancholy runs through a story in which an accurate portrait is made of life in tennis clubs, with the world of adults separated from that of children, the electric irrigation sprinklers cooling the summer and cooling the tensions that They are generated around the pool, the labyrinthine facilities as a promise of an infinite world, full of surprises to discover, a fronton in which to sneak cigarettes or a billiard room in which no one ever plays.
Torres de la Osa talks about tennis. And also of beauty, of sex, of death, of the passage of time, of desires, of moments whose sensations remain recorded forever. Of the unique atmosphere that surrounds Saturday mornings, when everything has to be done and life seems like an immense range of possibilities.
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