On Wednesday nights we play basketball as if we were still twenty. We arrive with our enthusiasm intact, we play a first warm-up game in slow motion, and for two hours we try to convince our bodies that technique and memory are enough. Of course, the body disagrees.
A few weeks ago, it decided to let me know in my right shoulder, with a kind of double message: a stab of pain that appears every time I jump for a rebound, and a burning sensation that seeps into defensive turns and forward passes. It’s a bilingual injury, let’s say.
Since then, during breaks in each game, I sit on a bench, take a piece of ice, and slide it over my skin as if I were searching for something hidden. I move forward, stop, and go back. I draw an invisible map where the muscles contract and defend themselves, trying to find the exact point where the tension resides.
There is something a bit humiliating in that gesture. You arrive sweaty, breathing still accelerated, and suddenly you are reduced to holding ice against your body, as if the ultimate goal of the sport were to reach a pain-free temperature. Sometimes, while the cold does its work, I feel as if I am participating in a ceremony I have inherited.
More than two thousand years ago, in ancient Greece, Hippocrates recommended applying snow or cold water to reduce inflammation and hemorrhages. It is not hard to imagine the scene: in a stone courtyard, under the Mediterranean sun, a man lies stretched out on a cloth. Another returns with snow wrapped in damp cloths and places it on the sore muscle. The man on the cloth is someone who can afford that luxury.
For a long time, relieving pain was the privilege of very few. Applying ice required significant logistics. It was almost a demonstration of power. Ice had to be cut into blocks during winter, wrapped in straw or sawdust, buried in underground deposits, and monitored for months so it would not melt.
In the 19th century, in mountain sanatoriums, snow and frozen air defined an aesthetic of cure. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s novel, cold appears as a form of relief.
The wondrous object that gypsies displayed at village fairs now appears in an everyday gesture, almost unconscious, every time we open a small door in the kitchen.
From being an exotic privilege, ice has become an essential element in locker rooms. From a symbol of status to a global commodity. In that journey, it appears in all bodies: that of the patient who received mountain snow, that of the sick in sanatoriums, that of athletes immersed in ice baths, and that of those of us who seek in the cold a form of truce.
Ice has something of magic and a great deal of pause. It halts the advance of pain, delays deterioration, and makes us think that continuing is still possible. Applying ice is, in a way, negotiating with time.
On Wednesday nights, when the game resumes and the ball bounces again, I remain still for a moment. Then I set aside that promise of relief and return to the court.