"Six-one six-two," said Teresa Lima.
"Teresa — "
"Eleven winners. Do you know what that means?"
She had followed her into the room, which she had not done since Marisa was nineteen.
"It means you played the entire match on your own on a court with another person on it," said Teresa Lima. "Which is what you have done since you were fourteen years old, and which is the reason you are forty-one in the world and not eleven."
Marisa Cardoso sat down on the end of a hotel bed with her shoes still on.
"That's not fair."
"It is completely fair."
"I have been forty-one for two years and I have got there on about a quarter of the money that half the top twenty — "
"I know exactly what you have got there on," said Teresa Lima. "I have been standing behind you since you were fifteen. I know what you have got there on better than anybody alive.
"And I am telling you that the thing that got you to forty-one is the thing that is going to keep you at forty-one until you are one hundred and forty."
"So this is a punishment."
"This is arithmetic," said Teresa. "Sit up and listen to it, because I am going to say it once and then I am going to go to bed, because I am sixty-one and I have been at a tennis court since eight o'clock this morning.
"You are seven and twenty. You have three years left. Maybe four.
"You have made about eleven hundred thousand dollars in eleven years and you have spent nine hundred of it on flights and physios and me, and you have got a flat in Lisbon with a mortgage on it.
"There is a doubles ranking that pays and there is a singles ranking that is going to stop paying, and you are going to sit in that car on Thursday for forty-one minutes and you are going to talk to him."
Marisa Cardoso looked at the floor.
"Do you know what he said about me at fifteen?" she said.
"No."
"Nobody knows what he said about me at fifteen, because I have never told anybody, and I am not going to start at half past ten at night in a hotel in Cordoba."
"Then that," said Teresa Lima, "is the second most useful thing you have said all day."