Sudden Death

Soul

In the year 1767, the French encyclopaedist François Alexandre de Garsault, author of various manuals for the fabrication of luxury goods such as wigs, underclothing, and sporting equipment—“trivial arts,” as he himself noted in the second edition of his Art du paumier-racquetier—still distinguished between two kinds of tennis balls: proper balls, made of batting and thread and covered with stitched white cloth, and éteufs, or skin balls — which in Spanish were called pellas well into the seventeenth century — made of lumps of lard, flour, and hair.

The éteufs, covered with calfskin and cross-stitched, resembled our baseballs, with the suture exposed. While the cloth balls were used only on inside courts of hardwood or tile, and tended to come apart after three or four matches, the skin balls could be used for years without any loss of nimbleness or violence: they were intended to bounce on the tiles and roofs of cloisters and the uneven clay of town squares, where tennis was played for money.

In the third decade of the twentieth century, the team that restored the roof of the main hall in the Palace of Westminster found two balls in the beams that date indisputably from the sixteenth century. They were intact. A genetic analysis of the hair from which they were made showed no evidence of a connection with any branch of the Boleyn family. No great surprise: many terrible things may be said about Henry VIII, but not that he had bad taste. Certainly, then, he never bought or accepted as a gift any of the balls of which he might — curiously enough — be called the widower.

François Alexandre de Garsault’s Enlightenment manual contains no instructions for making balls out of human hair. Perhaps he was unaware that during the Renaissance and Baroque periods the material was common currency in the outdoor courts where tennis was a betting sport. Nor does it seem that Garsault, practical man and earnest educator, was a great reader of literature: in Much Ado About Nothing, the inveterate bachelor Benedick has so much facial hair that, according to Shakespeare, his beard has filled many a tennis ball.

From the study of the balls found in the rafters of Westminster Hall, as well as certain clues that come to light when one combs through Antonio Scaino’s rambling Trattato del giuoco della palla (1555), it may be deduced that the core of the pella was identical to that of the proper salon balls: a base of batting kneaded with paste. The base of the salon ball was then wrapped in strips of linen and thread and tapped into shape with a putty knife. Once calibrated, the ball was tied with a string that divided it into nine sections through its upper pole. Then the ball was spun 45 degrees and another nine sections were traced through a second pole. And again, until there were nine poles with nine equators. Each ball a world, a planet dotted with eighty-one ribbons of thread. Finally, the little orb — believed by the ancients to represent the human soul — was covered in cloth and whitewashed.

The pella was fabricated according to a similar procedure, but in more sordid and often clandestine settings: there was something grisly about making balls with human hair, and not everyone was willing to produce an object that took its life from the only part of a dead body that doesn’t rot. In place of the strips of linen, locks of hair were bound around the core and stuck down with lard and flour. It was a lighter ball, less smooth; it bounced like a thing possessed.

Probably because of its soul of human matter, during the Renaissance and Baroque periods the pella was associated in Catholic Europe and Conquest-era America with satanic pursuits.