A pool of six
May 17, 2025 · 3 min read
Today was the club tournament, in our usual sports hall, with four pistes marked out on the floor in white tape and a table at one end where the results were written up on large sheets of paper. There were twenty-four épée fencers, from fourteen-year-olds to a man of seventy-three, and the morning began with the weapons check: a queue of people holding their épées point upwards while a referee set the weight on each one. Both of mine passed, which after four months of being told that my points were too loose felt like a small victory before anything had started.
Then came the pools. In a pool everyone fences everyone else once, to five touches or three minutes, and at the end the results go onto a sheet like a small league table: wins, the touches you scored, the touches you received, and the difference between them, which is called the indicator and decides the order when wins are equal. There were six of us in my pool, so I fenced five bouts:
- against a student who had started the course with me: won 5 to 3;
- against the club’s best épée fencer, an engineer of about thirty: lost 0 to 5, in one minute and ten seconds;
- against a woman of fifty with a French grip and an extraordinary amount of patience: lost 3 to 5, after the full three minutes;
- against a fifteen-year-old: won 5 to 4, with the last touch to his wrist;
- against a man from the Thursday group: lost 2 to 5.
Two wins out of five, fifteen touches scored, twenty-two received, an indicator of minus seven. That put me nineteenth of twenty-four after the pools, and in the direct elimination, fenced to fifteen touches, I met the woman with the French grip again and lost 9 to 15. Her patience over fifteen touches was even more extraordinary than over five.
Most of the day was waiting, which nobody had warned me about. Six hours in the hall, and if I add up my bouts, about twenty minutes of fencing. But for those twenty minutes I was more awake than I have been at any time since I came to this country, and in the evening I went through the pool sheet line by line, the way I go through measurements at work. The wrist touch against the fifteen-year-old is the one I want to keep. I aimed at it, and it was there.