Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet

Author:Maddalena Vaglio Tanet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2024-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

33

‘Let’s have a kickaround,’ Stefano suggested to Martino, and that’s how they spent the morning.

Stefano was a tennis instructor at the Press Club in Santa Rita and had been a promising skier. Slow to the point of being lazy, he wasn’t focused on finishing first but on doing things right. His bread and butter had been the slalom, the most technical of descents, and he excelled at it thanks to perfect tracking; he enjoyed the work of his muscles and tendons, the pull of skis that wanted to swerve, the plumes of powder behind him.

‘You’ve got what it takes,’ his instructor told him, smoothing sunscreen as thick as white lead over his nose. ‘What you lack is the competitive mentality.’ And during training he’d yell, ‘Move that behind, Acquadro, shift it! Push! Push!’

When he was about fifteen Stefano had stopped racing entirely. He wasn’t interested in competing, a trait that would turn out to be useful in his relationship with Lea. At the weekend he preferred being with girls to being on the slopes.

Having an asthmatic child didn’t make him nostalgic for trekking, long swims or athletic feats. He never badgered Martino like his father had him.

His father was fanatical about mountaineering and their house had been plastered with photographs of him on rope climbs, at the summit, embarking on a via ferrata, resembling a tiny black insect in a line on a glassy glacier, secured to walls of gneiss or granite, wearing knee-length socks and a cabled woollen jumper, ice-axe and cable hooked to his backpack, lips white with cocoa butter. He’d made Stefano follow him through the same scenery and they too had taken a few photos, but for Stefano they had always been inhospitable spaces where he was engaged in a pointless struggle: demonstrating to his father that he was man enough. At eighteen, Stefano had switched from skiing—still a mountain sport—to tennis, which his family considered a hobby for the pretentious, for spoilt brats.

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