Sudden Death

Tennis, Art, and Whoring

In the thirteenth-century work The Book of Apollonius, written in an early form of Castilian, the king of Tyre is blown off course by a storm and ends up in the city of Mytilene, where his daughter, Tarsiana, has been sold into slavery at a brothel and waits for someone to rescue her; like Scheherazade, she sings riddles that delay her surrender to the patrons.

When Apollonius and Tarsiana meet, they don’t know that they’re father and daughter, and she challenges him with riddles because he comes preceded by his reputation as a clever man, able to untangle any enigma. One of her rhymes, probably the oldest reference to tennis balls in Spanish, goes like this:

Hairy within and hairless without,

Tresses hidden deep in my breast;

I pass from hand to hand, always beaten about,

When the time comes to sup I sit bereft.

The tennis ball in The Book of Apollonius is described in a way reminiscent of the work that Tarsiana manages to stave off. The ball is like a shaved woman—“hairless without”—that is hit—“always beaten about”—and that isn’t invited to eat—“when the time comes to sup I sit bereft” because once it’s been passed “from hand to hand” it’s good for only one thing: to bounce around the piazza, making money for others.