Celestial Chess

by Thomas Bontly

  With this background, I returned to the notes Stemp had stuffed into the volume. Between pages 19 and 20 (recounting the earl’s years in Italy): “Galileo, first telescope, 1609”; and between pages 35 and 36 (the earl’s quest for manuscripts to augment his collection): “Creypool Abbey, March 12, June 6, August 21, 1639”; and the most curious of all, a sheet inserted among the final pages bearing the following: “Nova, 134 B.C” 1054 A.D., 1572 A.D., 1604, ????” Finally, there was a name written lightly in pencil and blurred to near illegibility on the back fly-leaf: “G. Gervaise, d. 1175.”

  I was still pondering these cryptic entries when Yvetta returned from her bath, matter-of-factly tossed her robe on the bed and broke open a new package of black net stockings. Her skin was pink and glowing, redolent of bath oil and, despite her diminutive frame, as richly contoured as a Botticelli nymph.

  ‘‘You live with your nose in a book,’’ she told me, affectionately scolding, as women will once they’ve captured your attention.

  “Hmm. I think I’ve had my nose in some interesting places lately,” I said.

  She giggled and stood up to attach her stockings to dangling black garters. “For you it is so hard to be serious. Do I frighten you so much, David, that you can only make jokes with me?”

  “I didn’t realize I was frightened of you.”

  “Bah! All the English are frightened of their women. It is one reason why I can stay in this country no longer.”

  “But I’m not English,” I reminded her, glad for once that I was not.

  “It makes no difference. You and Colin—you are both very English in that respect. You have your little world and you will not allow women to intrude—is it not so? You refuse to take us seriously.”

  “I promise I shall be very serious this evening,’’ I told her. “We shall discuss love and art, truth and beauty—whatever you like. But now I’d better wash up and shave, before you lose your big night on the town by standing around in that fetching state of undress.”

  “You see?” she called after me as I made for the bathroom. “You are never serious!”

  G. Gervaise, I thought, scraping away at my whiskers. Hadn’t there been a twelfth-century priest by that name, author of several obscure Latin treatises on free will? Not to be confused, I recalled, with Gervase of Canterbury, though this Gervaise was also a disciple of the great Thomas à Becket. I remembered a nasty young assistant professor who had tried to trick me on that very point during my orals for the doctorate. If it hadn’t been for that prick of scholarship, I might not have remembered Gervaise, whose work was seldom if ever read. Perhaps it’s time, I thought, that someone take a look at those treatises.

  Before we left the hotel room, I took the precaution of hiding Stemp’s pamphlet and its notes in the hollow basin of the overhead light fixture.

  “Are scholars always so frightened someone will steal their books?” Yvetta asked with amusement.

  “Only when one’s room has been broken into once before,” I said, “and when one’s fellow scholars start having mysterious accidents which may not be accidents at all.”

  “Lieber Gott, has that happened?”

  “I’ll tell you about it at dinner,” I said.

  We found a pleasant little restaurant in Soho, vaguely Italian, redundantly romantic, and by conspiratorial candlelight I made good on my promise to talk seriously, telling Yvetta a good deal more about my research than she wanted to hear.

  “But, David, these manuscripts—why are they so important to you? If this poet person was—how you say—off his rocker, then what good is his poem?’’

  “It may still be a great poem,” I said. “A poet’s madness may give us God’s own heavenly nonsense in disguise. Besides, if I’m right about the dating and the quality of the poem, it will make my reputation as a scholar.”

  “And is that so important to you?”

  “Of course it is. In every discipline there are always just one or two big names—men whose discoveries have transformed their entire field. It’s only those men who make scholarship pay, who get the grants and prizes, the plush jobs—’’

  “So—it’s all just a matter of money?”

  I was reminded, by her womanly skepticism, of why I’d been reluctant to discuss these things with her at all. “It’s more than just money, Yvetta, though God knows that’s important too. But one wants to make a contribution—to do something meaningful with one’s life . . .”

  Still I could see she was not satisfied, and we went around and around with it all through dinner and afterward, as we strolled arm in arm through the fog-sinister streets of London. I spent more money than I could afford, and wasted a lot of rhetoric trying to persuade Yvetta that I knew what I was doing with my life. Finally, at two in the morning, as we emerged from a “private” club where we had seen large sums of money lost at the roulette tables and large amounts of female flesh exposed for the edification of a blasé audience, Yvetta turned suddenly amorous.

  “Liebchen, we should not spend any more of your money. Let’s go back to the hotel. I want to make love to you so that you will never forget me!”

  She was as good as her word, poor unappreciated Fräulein, and before the night was over I smoked several cigarettes at the bedside, gazing upon her sleeping childlike face as if seeing a loved one through the crisis of some dread disease.

  At breakfast, Yvetta produced a ticket for the Dover boat-train and informed me that today she was going home to Vienna. I could have argued with her, but I didn’t.

  With a lump in my throat and all sorts of words held firmly behind clenched teeth, I saw her to the station. We had nearly an hour to wait in a dismal tearoom sur-rounded by strangers and lonely vagabonds, and we did not use it to any good purpose. Finally, on the platform itself, the great train hissing up at us from its concrete channel, Yvetta seized my hand, looked earnestly at me and said:

  “Auf Wiedersehen. I wish you well with your studies. When you become rich and famous, and learn that it does not matter after all, look me up in Wien. It will be too late for us, of course. I will be old and fat, a poor man’s wife and the mother of his babies, but perhaps we can have a glass of wine together and remember the old times, eh? Then we shall both feel a little sad about how stupid and stubborn we have been . . .”

  “Yvetta,” I said, quite against my will, for I knew how corny her speech was, “don’t leave me—not yet. Give it a chance to turn into something better.”

  “It will not get better for us, only worse. In some ways you are very sweet and I feel sorry for you, but I won’t let you hurt me the way Colin did. You are not quite a whole man, David. There is something missing in your heart, and you will always hurt people until you find out what it is.”

  That afternoon I went around to the address on the card Mrs. Stemp had given me, but 83 Blackfriars Road, when I finally found it, turned out to be an empty warehouse.

  The Abbot Eadmer:

  Geoffrey Gervaise—yes, I remember the lad. Took quite an interest in him while he was here at Wellesford. Of course, we were rather in the same boat, the two of us. We had both been exiled to that sanctified sheep farm on the moors. The difference was that I had seen something of the world in my time, had studied at Paris and Salerno, had spent several glorious years in Rome, where I’d had a first-rate position in the Church, an adviser to bishops and cardinals—yea, even a familiar of the Pope. I missed Rome, you can be sure of that. The climate, the cuisine, the company of learned men, the pomp and ceremony of the papal palace—of course I missed all that. And spent many bitter hours alone in my quarters or in the chapel regretting those rash commitments of my youth which led to this exile.

  No, I shan’t bore you with that tedious tale . . . I backed the wrong man; it’s as simple as that. They could have vented on my ample person the wrath Abelard escaped; they could have cut off my cullions and put me to copying hymns and singing soprano in some boys’ choir in the Alps. But I’d been gracious with my favors while I s
till had them to dispense, and a few of those favors had gone to the right people. They arranged this place of exile for me, where I might retain a certain status among men inferior to me in every conceivable way, and I was glad to get out of Italy with all my parts, believe me.

  Ah, but that Bernard of Clairvaux was a firebrand! There was no arguing logic with him. He simply swept it all aside with his fiery sermons and pulpit-thumping rhetoric—and all his pious tripe about the Virgin. Good Lord, the man could’ve persuaded the devil himself to set out on a crusade! Abelard didn’t have a chance. I should have abandoned the cause as soon as the bishops dragged the eunuch before the Council of Sens. But no; I remained loyal to my old teacher (and besides, he was right!), so after the verdict was handed down it was I who arranged for the defeated scholar to present his case in person to the Pope. When he died on the way to Rome—and who could have predicted that?—I made my own peace; what choice did I have? Abelard was an arrogant son of a bitch, but if you had any sense of largesse in such matters, you had to admire his style.

  So—it was years later, and I’d been tending the flock at Wellesford long enough to know how little it offered a man of my talents, when this perfect barbarian of a Norman knight arrives at our gate one evening with a fourteen-year-old boy in tow. Said the boy had befouled his own sister, then run a pitchfork through his cousin. He said the boy was possessed—kept screaming about Satan and some serpent that was going to carry him off to hell. There’s a lot of hysteria bred into these noble families, I’m afraid, and they only make it worse by turning their children over to the peasants. No wonder the boy was half mad when he joined us!

  Still, he made an admirable novice. Meek, mild, anxious to please—you couldn’t have asked for a more malleable subject. True, there was something a bit strange in those piercing eyes of his, and that strangeness clouded his gaze on occasion, as if some evil memory was passing like a thunderhead across the light of his reason. Yet monastic life seemed to agree with him. He took to his lessons so quickly I was hard pressed to find a monk learned enough to teach him and finally had to take over the task myself. We read the ancients together—Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal. It was good to have someone to talk to about those favorites of my youth. The boy was interested in the vernacular too—those treasures in the mother tongue which so few of the learned can read any more. Wellesford had rather a fine collection of the old Saxon scripts, and the boy developed a great feeling for the language, though he knew but a few words when he first came here.

  It was a pleasure, I tell you, to see his young mind take possession of the riches I set before him. He was a brilliant lad, and he’d had a most pitiful upbringing. That father of his! A prime example of the petty tyrants we had to put up with in England during the reign of King Stephen. I don’t know if the boy ever heard about it or not, but one of the first things Henry did upon assuming the throne was to tear down the castles of Stephen’s vassals. The elder Gervaise—Sir William—fought to save his little kingdom, but Henry’s men put an arrow through his throat. I heard about it from the manor priest, who came running to the monastery for refuge. I asked him not to tell the boy. Geoffrey seemed by then to have forgotten all about his wretched family, and I didn’t want to stir up troublesome memories.

  There were reports about Geoffrey, of course—some rather disturbing ones. The monk in charge of the sheep-fold would complain that Geoffrey neglected his duties, letting some lamb wander off into the heather as he sat staring up at the sky, as if trying to make out the stars in broad daylight. I took the boy off shepherd’s duty. Any simpleton could tend the flock. Then there were his nightmares. The novices in his wing complained of his frequent screams at night, and I finally had to order a dram or two of wine before bed to make sure he would sleep soundly. But I suppose the most disturbing report of all came from his confessor. He came to me quite shaken, the poor old innocent. He didn’t want to break the seal of the confessional, yet thought I should know—for the good of the flock, et cetera—that Geoffrey had been “seeing visions” of a most licentious sort. A young woman—his sister, perhaps—sometimes appeared to him in his cell. Sometimes she disrobed and displayed herself to tempt him. I knew well enough what ailed the lad, and I concluded that his visions would cease when he left to study at Paris, where naked females are as plentiful as lice. If more of the monks had been as honest as Geoffrey, I’m sure a good many naked females would have come to light in the confessional.

  I had intended all along to send the boy to the university at Paris. I was grooming him for it. I took him through the trivium and quadrivium myself, not trusting any of the monks to handle the job properly. When he arrived in Paris, where I still had friends, the masters there would know he was old Eadmer’s pupil, and they’d remember the teacher in the brilliance of the protege. Who knows? With that fool Bernard off hunting heretics in another part of Christendom, the bishop might even think it safe to send for me . . . Old men are fools indeed, are they not?

  But I’m forgetting the most wonderful of all the boy’s attributes. He was a wizard at chess—an absolute wizard! I remember our first few games, which I granted as a reward for his diligence at his studies. Like any beginner, he failed to keep track of his pieces, to look ahead, to grasp the complexity of the game. But unlike most beginners, he never lost heart. Beaten, he always studied the board and went back over the game until he understood why he had been beaten. I could see he meant to master the game and could hardly contain my glee, good chess players being so hard to find in an English monastery. Soon I was as anxious to get out the board as he was, and I suppose we more than once hurried through our daily lesson in order to get to our game.

  It wasn’t without moral and educational value, you know. Men win at chess not only through logic—through superior cunning and experience—but also through the exercise of those attributes of character we call “virtue”: courage, self-discipline, steadiness of mind and heart, and an unwavering dedication to the task at hand. With each succeeding game I was privileged to observe the unfolding of a character which was really quite remarkable.

  I remember the evening on which Geoffrey first gave proof of the power and mastery of his game. A fiendish blizzard howled across the moors. The monastery was like a tiny island in a sea of turbulent snow; we’d been sealed within the inner walls for days. Blasts beat against the roof and drafts guttered the candles, sent our fires roaring up the chimneys. The supper hour came, but I ordered food delivered to my chamber so that we could proceed with the game. The young rascal had me by the throat. He’d anticipated my every move, countered all my stratagems. I could but fight on for a draw, out of a teacher’s pride, and out of respect for the strength of my pupil. As the game neared its close, I chanced to raise my eyes from the board to see Geoffrey’s intense young face just across from me. He was by this time—what? sixteen? —with a face already taking to itself the hard lean contours of his line. Hair dark, brows and eyes darker, a long straight nose and prominent jaw, a mouth which when his teeth showed suggested the ferocity of his father. I saw this face by candlelight, deeply shadowed as it bent in concentration over the board, and I suddenly felt—what? My own helplessness, surely, but also a kind of awe at the composure and majesty of my pupil. It was nearly a transfiguration. And it dawned on me that I was not the boy’s true opponent. The game he was playing existed only in his own mind, and his effort was nothing less than to grasp the harmony, the design, the fate which governs the cruel microcosm of the chessboard. I’ve never taken my chess as seriously as all that, and no doubt I have my shallowness to thank for my sanity. But I had a moment—a truly distressing moment, believe me—when I wondered if by teaching Geoffrey the game I had brought upon him that salvation he so earnestly sought—or his everlasting damnation.

  For several weeks thereafter our games commonly ended in a draw. I did try to beat the boy. It occurred to me that I should stifle his growing obsession with the game and the illusion of power that it gave him. But I was u
nequal to the task. My reign as champion of the monastery was at an end. I refused to play with him. I forbade him to play under the pretext of a Lenten penance. It was all to no avail. The seed I’d planted would grow—would take possession of his soul. Yet I hoped and prayed (the most earnest prayers which had come from these old lips in many a year!) that eventually he would tire of the game and, having proved whatever it was he was so determined to prove, turn his extraordinary mind to all those other matters which ought to occupy a reasonable man.

  To that end, I sent him off to Paris a year earlier than I’d planned. In a way, I was glad to get rid of him; yet I missed him a good deal. I still do. It’s a shame what they’ve done to Gervaise. God may be merciful, but man is a pitiless wolf. Look what they did to Abelard. Look what they did to Becket. Yes—I will say it—look what they’ve done to Eadmer. I confess I don’t understand Christianity any more. Perhaps I never did. The world made sense to the pagans because they knew their gods were not to be trusted—petty tyrants and frauds who despised human courage and loved to punish man for aspiring beyond his station. That was a tragic vision some of us can understand. Christianity blames it all on the devil, I suppose. I’ve never met the old gentleman myself. You’d think Satan would take an interest in the soul of a fat, bored, lonely, gluttonous, intellectually arrogant old man. I could use the company. I wonder if the devil plays chess.

  Master Victor of Bordeaux:

  We had a bad winter in Paris the year young Geoffrey Gervaise came over from England. Let’s see—that would have been the winter of ’53. A man had to carry a staff when he went out, to fend off the beggars. Came in handy for wolves, too, the devils were aprowl all over the city. I saw a pack of them attack a small child near the Seine, not more than a quarter mile from my lodgings. Her father came running from the woodpile and laid into them with his ax. A few of us tried to help. I struck one of the demons across the skull and it turned on me with a horrid display of fangs, the child’s blood matting the fur around its mouth. Filthy beasts; devils incarnate! One wolf down, its guts oozing from the gash in its belly, the others still managed to carry off the child’s severed arm. They dragged it downriver and we could hear them snarling at one another over the prize. The father was beside himself with rage and grief. We bound up the stump as best we could, and the poor man carried his mutilated babe off to his hovel.