AND SO, AS always after his afternoon nap, he was once again sitting in front of the chessboard. After the meeting with the man from Lisbon, he had taken to analyzing the games of the two probable candidates to challenge him for the world championship: one was the Estonian Paul Keres, and the other the Russian Mikhail Botvinnik, both prominent exponents of the new generation of Soviet chess, both prepared, both formidable. Of the two, however, Botvinnik was the one with the greatest likelihood of officially representing the Soviet Union. As far back as ’39, in fact, he had sent Alekhine a written challenge, but following the outbreak of the world war their match was canceled. Alekhine had played three games against him: one, in Nottingham in ’36, ended in a draw; a couple of years later, at a tournament organized by a major Dutch radio station, he had tied another match playing White and then lost one with Black. It was the moves in the latter game that he was now analyzing, with the intention of improving his defense. He spent most of the night intent on disassembling and reconstructing that crucial defeat. He would often sit in front of the chessboard until very late, only drifting off to sleep at the first light of dawn. As he slept, however, he continued moving the pieces on a faintly recalled chessboard. That morning, as he was about to wake up, the solution seemed quite close: an absolutely new idea, which unfortunately quickly vanished. It was as if he had grasped the mythical phoenix by the tail a moment before it went up in flames.
He found himself still sitting in the armchair—another night without going to bed. He had no idea how long he’d slept. In the complex arrangement of the pieces left on the chessboard, he immediately recognized the result of the analysis he had been conducting until a few hours earlier. Sleep, however, aside from that somewhat dreamlike illumination that had so swiftly evaporated, had not brought insight: his position was still damnably complicated, and he had not yet found a variant favorable to him.
* * *
AFTER BREAKFAST, HE walked along the beach, but instead of going toward the lighthouse, he chose the opposite direction, toward Tubarão: a tavern down a back alley, near a cove where a flotilla of fishing boats was moored. The day was mild and calm. The strong wind of the day before had dwindled to a gentle breeze.
It was Sunday morning, and after the ten o’clock Mass, the place, already filled with smoke, was jammed with people. Most of them came from the fishermen’s village. They also played chess there. The stakes were generally a couple of cigarettes, but could be raised several times during the game if such was proposed by one of the players: a person who thought he was winning tended to accept, and often offered a counterproposal in turn. The trick was to gull your opponent into believing he had a winning position, or at least a solid one. In short, to bluff, as in poker. For Alekhine winning would be child’s play, but he didn’t want to trick anyone. He had been to the tavern several times, merely as a spectator until, one day, an old fisherman with a frizzy iron-gray beard invited him to play. The challenger had immediately placed a couple of cigarros nacionais beside the chessboard, and Alekhine had done the same. As always, Alekhine felt obliged to politely inform the opponent that he was unbeatable, and therefore in a position to offer him an advantage; at this, the fisherman had turned to the rest of the room and, reporting the proposal aloud, provoked general hilarity. The challenger was surely considered a strong player, since a small knot of curious onlookers were already crowded around the table, rooting for their champion.
Indulging the fisherman, parrying his sporadic attacks here and there, Alekhine avoided taking advantage of the various occasions when he could have concluded the game with a checkmate, settling for a Pawn ending: wanting thereby to make the man think he had won by a narrow margin. The victory, seemingly narrow, put him in a bad mood, however. He couldn’t explain to himself why he had done it. So as not to humiliate the man in front of his buddies? To amuse himself, like a cat with a mouse? On balance, he thought, he had demeaned the game by playing that way.
“Vingança?” the man had proposed with an uncertain smile.
“A próxima vez,” he had replied, getting up from the table.
He left the tavern with an inexplicable sense of prostration. Somehow he felt he had committed a grave sin, as if he’d defiled a sacred icon. Was it admissible—he wondered—to stoop to that level? Was it right to recite a poem by Pushkin to an illiterate, or expound a philosophical principle to an imbecile? One should not cast pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn against you, reads the Gospel. In his moments of unreasonable intolerance, he often came to the conclusion that access to all the arts should have remained the privilege of the few who were able to appreciate them. And the same for chess. Inclined to shun the common herd and the places where it congregated, he took comfort in his dreams of domination and supremacy, the better to conquer the loathing that the masses roused in him—the only remedy that made him feel still alive among the dead.
* * *
THAT SUNDAY, HOWEVER, he decided to return to the Tubarão with very different intentions. He wanted to show them all how chess should be played. He had brought two packs of Caporals in anticipation of a challenge—a more than sufficient supply.
As soon as he took the three steps down into the tavern, which was packed as usual, the din abruptly died down and everyone fell silent, looking up at him. The innkeeper ceremoniously invited him to the bar and, after wiping his hands on his soiled apron, filled a glass of red wine to the brim and offered it to him with a comical, theatrical bow. Finally, the innkeeper turned to those in the room: “Vamos fazer um brinde ao campeão mundial de xadrez!” he said loudly, urging the onlookers to toast.
Greeted with that unexpected welcome, Alekhine felt disoriented—it had every appearance of being a solemn farce. Nevertheless, he decided to respond to the toast. It was really odd, he thought. If they were pulling his leg, they had to be acting under someone’s direction: it seemed unlikely that they could have orchestrated it themselves, that all of them, from the innkeeper down to the last customer, were staging this performance with the sole intent of mocking him. Moreover, he saw no trace of ridicule in the eyes of those present, and even the old fisherman who had challenged him on his previous visit was staring at him with an expression of respect and admiration. Meanwhile, after wiping a rag over the bar counter, which was smudged with circles and crescents, the innkeeper carefully unfolded a page from the Diário de Lisboa. There Alekhine immediately recognized a photo of himself; though it had been taken a few years earlier, it was still a good likeness. The article took up half a page, announcing the upcoming match for the world title. As he’d expected, the challenger was Mikhail Botvinnik. Abruptly, he no longer heard or saw anything around him: there was only the sheet of newspaper, which his eyes scanned eagerly. The stakes, the article’s author reported, were ten thousand dollars, and as holder of the title he was entitled to choose the location of the match. Rather than Nottingham, he would prefer London, where he still had acquaintances. As for the date, as soon as possible! By now he was tired of this involuntary holiday. He could only hope that the contentious speech given by Winston Churchill a few weeks earlier—about the “iron curtain” dividing the continent—would not rekindle hostilities between Europe and the Soviet Union, thereby thwarting the long-awaited challenge for the second time.
* * *
HE WASN’T PERMITTED to leave the tavern until he had taken part in countless toasts. After all those glasses of vinhozinho, anyone else would have staggered out of the place; for him it would have taken quite a bit more. He felt only slightly euphoric at the news. Finally, he would make his return to the world stage, and although the challenger was the most formidable of opponents, his ego inspired in him the certainty of being the best player of all time. Of course, no chess player, no matter how well prepared, would be capable of stepping onto the world stage without trusting his inner conviction of being the best, and Botvinnik undoubtedly thought the very same thing. The difference was that the Russian champion seemed like a lion prodded by a trident and forcibly driven into the arena. Standing behind him was the Soviet system, to which he was answerable. The responsibility was enormous for a young man of thirty-four. Botvinnik was now under the aegis and the yoke of “Little Father” Stalin, who did not readily tolerate being disappointed by his children. After the deaths of Capablanca, Lasker, Nimzowitsch, and other talented chess players, there weren’t many other prominent names remaining in the Western world who could oppose the Soviet Union, which conversely boasted of turning out the best players on the planet. Only he remained, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Alekhin, the last bastion: if Botvinnik were able to beat him, the younger man would be proving to the world, once and for all, the supremacy of the Soviet school. Making the match even more exciting was that it would be two Russians competing, not only from different generations, but also with contrasting views and ideals: a dissident versus a strong supporter of the system. Botvinnik had to win at all costs, or risk losing the privileges he’d acquired—and that, Alekhine thought, might very well be his Achilles’ heel.
He returned to the hotel with a sense of buoyancy that he hadn’t felt for a long time. Even the staircase seemed less strenuous than usual; as he climbed the steps, he noticed only a slight fluttering of his heart, like an affectionate reproach. He imagined that some of the staff would have read the newspaper and spread the news. What in fact gave him the greatest satisfaction, besides winning, was the approbation of his admirers; his long period of inactivity had depressed him no less than the solitude. Among the hotel’s employees, however, he didn’t notice any difference in behavior.
Nonetheless, there was a new development: for the first time since he’d been staying at the hotel, he saw, on a couch in the lobby, a man whom he had never seen before. It must be the mysterious violinist who occupied the room next to his. He was in his forties, small in stature, with a mass of blondish hair that must once have been thick and was now thinning. He was wearing gray corduroy pants, a flannel shirt with dolman sleeves, and a colorful scarf. Sitting comfortably on the couch, surrounded by the pages of a musical score that he had spread out around him, he was making notes on one sheet with a pencil stub. He was so focused that he wasn’t immediately aware of Alekhine’s presence. When he finally looked up and saw the master, he sprang quickly to his feet—scattering his papers—and, as if he’d been expecting him, came forward with a broad smile. Alekhine wasn’t surprised: two castaways who meet on an island are quick to become friends.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” the man began, extending a slim hand. “I am David Neumann, and I sincerely hope that I did not disturb you yesterday afternoon. My fault: I didn’t think to inform the management that I might trouble someone with my violin…”
Alekhine thought he could make out the guttural inflections typical of the Flemish language in the man’s voice.
“No bother, believe me. Your music took me back to my childhood, when I would listen to my sister, Varvara, practicing the violin.”
Neumann became serious: “If there are certain times when you would prefer strict quiet, don’t hesitate to tell me. And if you prefer, I can ask the management to assign me a room on another floor.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you can even practice in the middle of the night. Especially if it means listening to the music of the great Tchaikovsky.”
“I see with satisfaction that you are obviously an authority on music as well as chess … because you are the celebrated Alekhine, are you not?” And, noting Alekhine’s surprised reaction, he quickly added: “I read the news in the Diário de Lisboa.”
At those words, Alekhine was flooded with a wave of warm satisfaction. “So you play chess? In addition to playing the violin, I mean.”
Neumann laughed, blushing: “No, no, not at all. I only played chess as a child. The real enthusiast was my father, a great admirer of yours. I still remember the boundless interest with which he followed all the games of the 1927 match you played against that Cuban … what was his name?”
“Capablanca,” Alekhine muttered. He would have preferred not to have to pronounce that name; it made him irritable just to hear it.
“My father had a friend in Buenos Aires who telegraphed him the moves of each game. It was a memorable encounter, wasn’t it?”
“Truly memorable.”
What he actually wanted to say was “A match to forget.” And he would have forgotten it, if only there weren’t always someone to remind him of it.
* * *
IT HAD BEEN almost twenty years since that titanic battle had taken place, lasting more than two months, through thirty-four grueling games. A skirmish from which Alekhine had finally emerged victorious—winning the world championship crown—but which had also depleted him, draining him of every ounce of energy. For Capablanca “the invincible,” the defeat had been a crushing blow. At the resumption of the last, decisive game, which had been left unfinished the day before at the fortieth move, the Cuban champion hadn’t even had the courage to show his face in the tournament room, and had merely sent a message in which he announced his definitive withdrawal. Although Capablanca was rightfully entitled to a return match, Alekhine—citing the choice of venue or insufficient prize money—found every excuse to postpone the encounter. He had even avoided participating in tournaments in which the Cuban was present. Rather than square off with him again, he’d have played with the devil himself. And though Capablanca continued to protest, demanding what was rightfully his, Alekhine had hastily arranged a few matches with less aggressive opponents, even readily accepting the resounding defeat he suffered at the hands of the Dutchman Max Euwe. And so, at least for the time required to organize a return match, he had been safe from his challenger’s demands—demands that Capablanca had insistently renewed after Alekhine had regained the title in 1937, and which persisted until the Cuban’s death four years ago, in 1942, from a stroke that he suffered while he was at the Manhattan Chess Club observing a friendly game. The news of Capablanca’s death had removed a weight from Alekhine’s chest; nevertheless, he could not help mourning the passing of his chosen opponent, who at one time had been a friend, but who in the end had become the man he most hated and feared.
* * *
“ARE YOU FEELING all right, Dr. Alekhine?”
He realized that he must have a very strange expression on his face if the violinist thought to ask him that question.
“Yes, of course. Why?” he replied curtly.
“I hope, Dr. Alekhine, that I have not awakened painful memories for you.”
“No, not at all. The match in Buenos Aires was a wonderful experience,” he said, forcing himself to assume a relaxed, even cheerful air.
A waiter arrived, letting him off the hook, and informed them that, in anticipation of new arrivals, the dining room would return to partial operation starting the following day. There was always, however, the option of calling room service. Neumann glanced questioningly at Alekhine, who confirmed, in a mildly condescending tone, “Tomorrow evening I will gladly go down for dinner.”
Neumann simply nodded yes.