by Serge Pey
“That’ll do,” said the Director. “Now you are a man. Go and take care of your dog if you can.”
I went outside into the yard without daring to look at Pablo still chained to the window.
The sun blinded me and lit up the monstrous metal fruit hanging from the line of trees. I was no longer thinking of the piece of wood in my arms. I took Dog by his hind legs and killed him with a single blow, smashing his head down on the pavement. I went back to my hut and vomited on the spot where I used to sleep with him. I was suddenly filled with a great hatred for Pablo, for because of him I had killed Dog. Then I continued to retch but I could not bring anything up.
That night I heard pebbles being thrown onto the tin roof of the hut. Two pebbles on the left of the roof and another over the window. It was Pablo signaling. The hate vanished then from my heart, but I continued to weep at the thought of Dog.
As I held Pablo close in the darkness I felt that I was also holding my dog. They were both dead in their fashion, together, and something else, something new, had come to life. But I too was dead. In Pablo’s arms I felt Dog’s warm body and in my tears I confused the two. But we did not know who was the dead one, or which of us was alive. Dog was breathing like a ghost. That night, after Pablo left, a few hours before daybreak, I decided to escape.
* * *
—
Letting myself be carried along by the current, I swam towards the pebble beach on the far bank.
The oil drum nearest me had released its corpse. In the middle of the river a whirlpool dragged us down. I managed to escape it and then I was carried very swiftly downstream in the direction of the dam. The grownups had spotted me swimming and made an about-turn in their truck. At the river’s bend, just before the rapids, they began firing at me. But by the time I reached the beach I was out of their sights.
I knew that on their return to the camp they would not say a word because they were themselves afraid of being put into punishment drums. The dead body of the boy who had been with me in the drum was floating downstream, and the grownups had now opened fire on it in the belief that he was still alive. They seemed to be playing a game.
I waited for the truck to leave. Then I headed up the mountain.
From above, the river was no longer moving, but lay stretched out like a black ribbon leading towards the sea.
Morse Code
FLORIDOR PUIG AND CHUCHO HILERO the schoolteacher had been friends since the long winter strikes which brought them together in the back room of a bar where they played their first game of chess. Every Saturday after that, in the botanical garden, the two of them constructed disjointed and melancholy games. The history, or rather the legend of Floridor Puig and Chucho Hilero is indissolubly linked to the history of drunkenness and the time-honored moves of pieces on the chessboard.
Floridor Puig was a formidable chess player, brooding and precise. Even as a boy, he used to play in the evenings with his father on a plank on which he had meticulously drawn lines with a hot iron and with chessmen carved from corks. Later on, he made chess sets by cutting up tin cans.
Everyone recalls his remarks to his comrades, who had lost the Civil War, when he spoke of another war that they still had to wage against themselves.
“You have your enemy under your shirts,” he loved to say.
Floridor was also a poet and a schoolteacher. After his first arrest he drew a chessboard on the wall of his cell, which made it easier for him to explain the movements of the pieces to his fellow inmates. Even the turnkey learned the rules of the game by watching through the peephole. The soldiers who had arrested him knew his reputation as a poet and teacher. Several of them had even sat on the benches in his class at the local primary school.
It all began when in a cell that held over sixty prisoners the drum that served as a latrine needed to be emptied: “One drum for sixty! Think of the smell!” Floridor said to me.
He was the one who volunteered.
“Look! The poet is emptying the shit!” said the soldiers. “Now recite us some poems!”
Floridor recited a poem, and the next morning he gave his first collective chess lesson to prisoners and soldiers alike.
The prisoners were not always the ones who appeared to be the prisoners, Floridor said.
* * *
—
The arrest of the two friends came after the coup d’état that shook the country. The pair, ever committed to their dream of human emancipation, founded a resistance group called the King’s Bishops. At night they scrawled quotations from Victor Hugo, Confucius, or Anarchys the Greek on the walls of their town.
The flappy ears of the swarms of informers in the area and the draconian repression of clandestine activity forced these activists to change their names. Proudly, and quite naturally, they assumed as patronymics the names of great chess players of the past. For them History had become a vast network of hope in which pawns, bishops and knights set out to conquer kings.
Thus, for a few months, Floridor bore the name of the twelfth-century vizier Merciliad, who according to legend played with living people as chessmen in his gardens. Chucho for his part went by William Spencer, champion of the blindfold chess tournaments so common at seventeenth-century German fairs. For a whole season, braving the curfew, the two comrades continued to post manifestos on walls.
Inevitably, during one of their nocturnal sorties, as they were daubing a graffito on the façade of the town hall, the whole group was arrested. Incarcerated in the fortress overlooking the market, Floridor and Chucho were placed in individual cells on different floors.
This deliberate separation of the two by the penitentiary administration quite failed, however, to keep them from their beloved pastime. Floridor, from the third floor, and Chucho, on the ground floor next to the kitchens, continued to play games as invisible as they were loud by adopting noise-making strategies whose rhythms would have been the envy of many a percussion section.
As was traditional, the prison administrators, in order to humiliate them, had placed the pair among the common criminals, who treated them with a mixture of respect and fear. For some, Floridor was still the “schoolmaster” whose implacable moral rectitude they well remembered. During the exercise period, they all greeted him ceremoniously: “Good morning, Professor! It looks like a beautiful day. Last night we heard the nightingale sing.”
During the exercise period the other prisoners addressed each of them in the polite plural form as though he was a multitude. Even the soldiers guarding them allowed themselves no loose language out of respect for the pair’s reputation.
Floridor and Chucho seemed to come, moreover, from a secret, inaccessible dimension where the mysterious powers of several worlds were in play. On the chessboard, Florio and Chucho themselves envisioned our world here below, in great detail, as black and white squares separating the paths that bound them together.
So it was that every night Floridor and Chucho practiced the psycho-geometrical art of strategy. With ears pressed to the pipes, chessboard perched on the toilet, and spoon in hand, they played in Morse code like the drummers of a universal music: queenside and kingside castlings, en passant capture, Sicilian defense, counter-gambits, Italian game, Scotch game, reversed West Indian defense. In this prison guarded by a battalion of sailors of the Sixth Army, strategy became the inmates’ chief object of study.
The entire prison listened to these nocturnal chess games in a spirit of worshipful reverence. At night everyone appreciated the acumen on display and the implied homage to popular resistance.
No one dared sleep. The resonating pipes broadcast a kind of tom-tom of hope from invisible and occult constellations. Freedom was playing its music and the musicians invented notes they had never before known.
Having conceived a fondness for Floridor and Chucho, the prison guards enforced silence, and as long as these strange prisoners were playing it
was forbidden to relieve oneself or even open a faucet for a drink of water. Everyone restrained themselves or refrained from pulling the chain so as to give full rein to the brilliance of the captive maestros. The prison’s plumbing was a conduit for an odd free jazz of sacred poetry.
Dash-dash-dot, dot, dot-dash dot, dot dash, resounded the pipes. Dash-dash dot, dot, dot-dash dot, dot dash.
Like cathode and anode, Floridor and Chucho lit a black light in the night whose brilliance everyone heard with their ears likewise pressed tightly against the pipes.
The ritual never changed within the prison’s small eternity. Each player would cover the black hole of his cell’s privy with a chessboard and line up the chessmen carved in cork. Every night a joust of giants was engaged between two virtual armies.
“They are going to begin!” The cry would go up, and everyone, lying on their palliasse, got ready to listen to the dull and sharp sounds of a strategy of which they understood nothing but by whose means the fate of the world, and, obscurely, their own, would be decided in the pipes.
The honor of mankind was beating out the rhythm of eternity in the prison of History.
* * *
—
Not long before they escaped, Floridor and Chucho each had a seahorse tattooed on their left wrist. Floridor’s was white, Chucho’s black.
For a long time Floridor would not explain the meaning of this tattoo to me. One evening, however, and quite by chance, as I looked at the board at the end of a game, I noticed that the only pieces still standing in the middle of the board were the knights. The game had clearly been played with the deliberate intention of not sacrificing any knights. Only then did I learn the meaning of the tattoos on their wrists.
“You see, the knight is the only piece in the game of chess that comes out of the sea and moves like its marine counterpart, the seahorse: both sideways and forwards. In life, if you don’t want to fall down and you want to avoid an obstacle, move like the knight.”
It was not the ordinary knight that the master was talking about, but the higher, Platonic knight of his shadow play.
A step sideways and a leap ahead: real human beings could be identified by tracks left in this manner. The inventors of the game of chess hailed from a civilization lost in ships’ graveyards. A horseman having his mount dance upon the earth was also having it ascend vertically with the freedom of the hippocampus in the sea.
Who deserved to belong to this secret hippocampian society and have a seahorse tattooed on their wrist? The knight was the key to the earthbound game because it came from another, marine chessboard purer than death. Focusing play on the knights was a dance that evoked a memory jealously guarded in the depths of the earth.
After that game whereby the two friends revealed the meaning of their tattoos to me, they drank, as usual, more than was in the bottles they emptied. Their eyes brimmed with invisible hypotenuses, fragrant strategies, holy wars, encircled queens and bishops, and declined gambits. Floridor threw his arm around Chucho’s shoulders and, staggering like a pair of seahorses exiled on land, they headed for the garden, just then surrendering the sun to the night.
A lurch sideways and a lurch forward – thus, just like Neptune’s sacred horses, they tottered to the seashore.
Drunks also move like seahorses and like knights on the chessboard. The two comrades did not wait for sleep to come: they were sleep itself. They were beyond death, they were the sea.
Gently, noiselessly, I lay down beside them. The two masters were sleeping, their chests rising and falling in a childlike rhythm governed by the alcohol of the last stars, when a furious wind from the depths of the sea suddenly got up and stirred not a few boats.
When I opened my eyes the sun was high in the sky and the gulls could no longer sport with it. Floridor and Chucho were still snoring fit to rival the bells of San Subra, which had started to sound the Ave Maria of the High Mass, so scorned by that the partners.
I told myself, closing my eyes, that this was how I loved mankind. I began to take a long piss into the sea. As if I were using a pencil, I wrote my name in the waves. Afterwards, it seemed to me that the sea was bigger. I had not been pissing, but filling the sea. The sea never knew it.
I took two steps forward and one sideways. Throwing myself full-length on the sand, I closed my eyes so as not to see the sky.
Chess and Beauty
SO IT WAS that in prison, then in the resistance, and now in their newfound freedom, Floridor and Chucho, regular as clockwork at five in the afternoon, like a corrida, played chess. The evening breeze would refresh their dreams along with all the memories that came from infinity like prophecies looking into the past.
Once free once more, the two friends had replayed every game and invented all possible games: the cubic game in which all the pieces can move vertically as well as horizontally; circular and spherical chess; blindfold and simultaneous variants, and so on. Voracious readers, they had even devised a literary form of chess in which they assigned a verse to each piece and to each move. At the end of each game, by combination, a poem was composed which they committed to memory and recited to each other on bleak evenings with the window open onto the mountains that dominated the town. They kept their eyes closed, and the poem turned back into a great chessboard and faithfully retraced the inexorable evolution of their game.
The knight was behind the queen
And on the rook the poppy bloomed
The pawn was thirsty in the column
where the bishop was splitting his sides
“No need to choose between love and play,” Floridor would say. “Those who play at love will always know how to play the game, and those who love to play can always love.”
Playing chess had become a higher form of clarity amid the randomness of the stars, of which we are the shadows or at times the imperfect numbers of their cumulation.
Light versus dark. Dark versus light. Straight, diagonal or jumping. But without hope. For equilibrium does not imply hope; if it did, hope’s copper weight would outweigh all comers in its ineluctable scale. The combat between dark and light is an everlasting struggle beyond both light and night. Winning a game in History means knowing how not to win it.
“Our defeats,” Floridor liked to say, “are greater than their victories.”
For Floridor the game of chess was the grid of that endless combat. Everyone knows that true chess players must have no hope, otherwise they will lose any future. Hope is the ultimate prison, and the checkerboard is the first free prison where humans play on a par with the gods, because the world was created through play. But the enduring secret goal of the two comrades was to create a game whose outcome would be the rules of that game, or, in a word, beauty.
Attracted by the beauty of death, Floridor, now an old man, had decided that winning a game no longer interested him. Thereafter this champion, capable of playing on several boards at once, proceeded to lose all the games from which he would once have easily emerged victorious over his adversaries.
People said that Floridor had changed and that his legendary powers of concentration had vanished along with his strategic obstinacy. There were even some children who came to his door to goad him, and, sad to say, he would lose in front of them and beneath the barbs and facile mockery of passing amateurs.
And yet a few grand masters and the handful of loyal friends he still had left continued playing regularly with Floridor in his courtyard, away from all prying eyes.
What intrigued me over many months was the deference paid to Floridor, which I noticed whenever I happened to witness those intimates’ farewells to him in front of his house at dawn: “Thank you, Maestro, what a great lesson you gave us tonight by immobilizing your king amidst Black’s pieces when everyone had given you up for lost!”
I could not help wondering why these incontestably great players wasted their time measuring themselve
s against a man who could no longer focus his attention and let his pieces be stolen like a beginner at checkers. Was it out of friendship, pity, or compassion, or out of respect for Floridor’s past virtuosity? Fascinated by this puzzle, I faithfully attended the wine-soaked gatherings in his cellar until one day I received the signal honor of an invitation to the secret sessions he held with his illustrious friends.
I have to admit that for the longest time I understood nothing and would fall asleep before a game was decided, continuing to attribute the congratulations offered by winners to a sort of condescension, or even to a simple compassion extended to a former master who had lost his mind. But one afternoon, after my usual stroll, I finally managed to disentangle the true secret of that old master’s play.
I had paid a surprise visit to Floridor, who, as often, was in his garden playing against someone unknown to me. After the start and continuation of a classic game, during which Floridor violently attacked and ruptured the rank of pawns arrayed against him, I saw him refrain from capturing the queen and instead take an insignificant pawn. Between a queen and a pawn, no player would normally hesitate. But Floridor had passed up the queen without evoking any apparent reaction from his adversary, who was perhaps used by now to Floridor’s new obsessions as a player.
On that day, as the game drew to its end and as Floridor, driven by a mad inconsistency, headed towards defeat, I was standing up and looking down over the chessboard when I noticed that in the center Floridor’s pieces now formed the outline of a woman’s face.
The king and queen were the two eyes, a line of pawns the mouth, and a knight the nose, while the two bishops stood guard over the ears like dangling earrings. The general outline of the face was supplied by the adversary’s pieces on the march towards the king and his imminent checkmate.