It was a gorgeous spring day and in the stands there were movie actors, directors, writers, journalists, the most beautiful girls in the city, and those women whose pictures you usually saw in the glossy magazines. There was a great sense of anticipation and everyone was rushing to grab the best seats. I looked for the group in the center stands, where the most expensive seats were, but didn’t see them. Instead, I spotted them on the lower stands at the far end of the court, where you could watch the match without moving your head and root for your favorite just a few meters from the backs of the players. They were all there, wearing strange little white hats—the Diaconos, Eva, the young Russian, the model, the humorist, and the writer with the white mustache, who had published a book in the winter that hadn’t won a major prize. Only Arianna was missing. When Stresa came out onto the court the whole group got to its feet and yelled, but he was very nervous and barely looked at them.

It was a long, brutal match. Stresa was a good player, cool and intelligent, while the Pole, who was blond and much appreciated by the ladies, played with real passion. It was immediately clear that the winner would be whoever was best able to withstand the pressure.

For almost three hours the group swung between excitement and despondency. Whenever Stresa played on that side of the court, they cheered so much that several times the line umpire had to ask for silence. It was definitely a nail-biter, and when at the beginning of the fifth set Stresa started to shoot his backhand into the net I also cheered him on. I don’t know why I did. Maybe because I was cured, maybe because he was suffering in that subtle, cruel way made up of silence and solitude in which tennis can make people suffer, maybe because I’d seen him handing a glass to Eva in the lobby of a theater, and because now, down there, in the middle of all these people yelling, he no longer looked like a disorientated bird but like a fighting cock with bloodied spurs. Or maybe because both of us once had Arianna in our arms and lost her.