So there we were, in the Hotel Crillon in Lima, Peru (FIDE had found us the only decent hotel within the area). Fourteen competitors, their seconds and two referees, locked up and rattling around in the dank spaces of this enormous hotel. By the third day of our confinement I was so restless that on my own I decided to take the day trip to the city of Cuzco, the lost city of the Incas, where marvelous ruins are surrounded by booths selling replicas of the artifacts. Skittles had long since reached the point of diminishing returns and I knew more about my thirteen fellow grandmasters than I cared to. Chess at the grandmaster level is a very small field, of course: There are only a finite number of grandmasters at any time, much less touring grandmasters, and our little band had trooped that summer from Switzerland to Salt Lake City to Berlin to Lima without any change in our basic relationships—which were bad.
The loathing of grandmasters toward one another is excessive. I am one of the few civil and sane members of the group. Louis is in all ways a more typical example.
Off to Cuzco, then, to see the lost city of the
Incas. It was the first time in many years of travel that I had any sense of
place;
chess matches are conducted in partitions, abscesses of gloom which always look and smell the same. Whether one is in Switzerland or Salt Lake City at a given time can often be determined only by the calendar; everything looks the same from the inside, and the game, of course, is unchanging. As any mathematician will tell you, the range of possible moves within even the opening of a game goes into many, many billions but there is still a constancy to chess which cannot be ignored. One is, after all, playing with the same sixteen pieces and facing the same opponents with the same general ideas over and again. The so-called infinite variation is, then, perhaps somewhat less than publicity for the game might indicate.
But in those revolutionary times in Peru, I felt a sudden, desperate need to get
out
, to restore a certain sense of place after too many months in airless rooms pushing around wooden pieces. It was with a sigh that I settled myself into the small plane to make the three-hour flight, noting that many of my fellow passengers already wore somewhat nauseated expressions.
It was only later that I found out that the flight from Lima to Cuzco has a reputation for being one of the most terrifying. Moving into the mountains, the quality of the air changed. The air was much thinner, and we were advised to use oxygen masks since the cabin was not pressurized. My mask, coming against my cheekbones, cut off half my vision. It was frightening, but it succeeded in blocking off views of the mountains to the left and right, sometimes rearing above us, the plane crazily sucked into the banks of mountains as if it were descent, not ascent, upon which it was bent.
It was at that time that many people began to throw up into their oxygen masks. Experienced traveler that I was, I did not. But I landed in Cuzco in an entirely shaken condition, trembling for several moments in my seat before I was able to arise and make my way through various greenish and slumped forms toward the cabin door. On the ground, leaning against the plane with a tortured expression on his face, a cap dangling from his rigid hand, was a man in military garb who I later learned was the pilot.
Off to the ruins of Cuzco. It is recommended, I learned subsequently (I did my guidebook reading only in retrospect; a bad policy), that one spend his first day in Cuzco in bed, simply becoming acclimated to the thin air, the reduced oxygen of the mountains. But I did not know this at the time, and had no accommodations anyway; I was merely on an impulse trip and so instead of acclimating myself I immediately arranged for a tour of the ruins thirty minutes after my flight, wondering why my respiration was so uneven and why there seemed to be a small, deadly animal rattling around in my chest.
“Excuse me,” I said when I joined the tour to the guide, an elegant man in robes, “I don’t feel well; it must be something I had back in the hotel. I’m an international chess competitor, a grandmaster as a matter of fact, competing here in an International down at Lima.” I wondered why I was drawing such strange, distracted looks from the band of tourists; it must be something in the air, I thought, something about the curious, thin, dense heat of this area which seemed quite tropical to me as I stumbled into place amidst the tourists. “As a matter of fact,” I pointed out to the guide, enveloping him in a confidential hand-hold
and leading him a short distance away from the others, “I would have been playing in the Inter-zonals at right this moment, probably a Sicilian defense, except that there’s some kind of a revolution in your country and the president has cancelled the matches. Bloody little buggers, your revolutionaries, eh?” I said to the guide, whose expression of dismay did not yield. Although I had intended this to be confidential, the tourists seemed to have overheard me.
“Oh well,” I said to them, “if that’s the way you’re going to be about this, if you’re going to be stuffy just because I’m trying to acclimate myself to your country, then I won’t say a word more, not a single word.” Shrugging in an informal posture I had never before discovered in myself, I backed away from the guide, merging with the tourists in what I took to be an inconspicuous posture. “Let’s go,” I said when there was a long, thick pause. “Let’s go and see some goddamned ruins. Unless it’s all a hoax, of course, or unless the tour also has been called off because of your revolution.”
In retrospect it is easy to see that my disgrace was compounded by psychogenic changes, that what appeared to be a certain giddiness and lack of sobriety was only the effect of the atmosphere. But at the time, my conduct seemed to me amazingly controlled and completely rational. I was unable to grasp why a certain pall had seemed to fall over the group.
Nevertheless, the tour began, the guide taking the tickets with an uncomfortable expression. His hand, when it came near mine to take my ticket, revealed a tremor. I was strangely acute, although most of my acuity was hallucination. Then we trundled off, fifteen tourists of various nationalities
and myself, poking and prying through the ancient city of Cuzco. My initial giddiness began once again to fade to weariness and a certain regrettable sense that I had disgraced myself.
I decided to be inconspicuous. Now and then these moments of self-consciousness flare up (as I have perhaps pointed out). Often I can be ignorant of my physical aspect for days. Weeks will pass when the only thing on my mind is tournament chess, and then a sequence of events will come to pass which brings out an undue impression of self-awareness, a lumbering physicality, a sensation that I am committing an endless series of blunders which will lead to my exile from the common ranks of humanity.
It may be this embarrassment which overtook me as our little group, dangling cameras and stray pieces of clothing, began to wander through the artifacts of the ancient Incas. It was very important to blend into the crowd, to call no attention to myself. I felt grotesque, distended.
Staring into those piles of artifacts, neatly heaped behind little glass cases in some of the buildings, looking into the large, dark pits in which the guide stated that the golden hoard of the Incas was hidden, I found this sensation of undue clumsiness beginning to dissipate; it was succeeded by a larger, more fascinated aspect.
“Pizarro’s conquest was complete,” the guide informed us, “the ancient Incan civilization was completely destroyed, the Spanish mercenaries soon colonized Peru completely. Nevertheless, not long after the conquest was complete Pizarro was murdered, allegedly by his own men, in a power struggle. It is often thought, however,” the guide went on, with what appeared to be a wink, “that he was not murdered by his own men at all, and
that indeed it was the curse of the Inca nation itself which was visited upon him. We do not know about that,” he said, “but it is known that here in Cuzco are the remains of an ancient, vital civilization more advanced in many ways than any subsequent civilization. Through the centuries many men have come to comb through these artifacts and to look for what they think might be the hidden treasure of this civilization. But, of course, they have been unsuccessful.”
“Completely unsuccessful?” I said. It was quite difficult to talk, and I had no desire after my earlier outburst to draw further attention to myself, but the question was compelling. “No signs have ever been unearthed?”
“None,” the guide said, “none whatsoever.” He moved on; our little group went stumbling through the ruins, hanging on perilously for balance at times. The light was lovely and reflective, slow and distant, falling among all those ruins. As we made our way through those spaces something occurred to me: Chess too is an artifact, a set of ruins in which, however distantly, may be perceived the intricate and terrible outlines of a long-perished civilization. All of us, grandmasters arid patzers alike, in our obsessive quest across the board, our attempts to find the proper combinations and patterns which will lead to some understanding of the game (the game has never been truly understood, even by Fischer, even by Alekhine) are merely stumbling to unearth some gleaming and true artifact which will bring us the message fully and unlock the way to the secret, hidden treasure.
It is an insight which did not change my life, but it was highly interesting and it comes back to me at this particularly crucial stage of my existence.
Chess is an ancient game; it is rumored to have begun in Persia in the twelfth century, although its antecedents in more primitive form can be traced back even further. There is a very definite scholarly point of view, of which I am the sole proponent, which holds that the game was invented in Peru somewhere in the middle of the sixteenth century and that all of the ensuing political struggles of the world can only be seen as a, series of stumbling, halting efforts to get back to its purest inceptions and outlines. One cannot be sure of this, however. History is a difficult and imprecise study.
The hall is equipped with huge megaphones through which the referees can announce the moves as they are made. This takes quite a while, since the announcements are made in at least twenty-five languages for every move, beginning, of course, with English. As the Overlords assist me through an exit I hear Louis’ next move intoned. He has selected exactly this point of time to move, a point of time at which I have been forced to leave the game not under my own power. This is exactly in line with his small, mean personality and his exploitation of cheap psychological tricks in order to win dishonestly an advantage he could never win if he were to play in the moral and upright fashion I do. Louis has always sought advantages of this sort but this moment is the nadir of his career: making a move while his opponent, stricken by a wave of illness, has to be assisted off the stage. Still, what is one to do? My determination is unflagging; I vow to myself that I will recover from this illness shortly and make him pay dearly for what he has done tome.
Bishop to Bishop Four. It is precisely the kind of move one would associate with Louis. Clear and stark, the outlines of the board, the posture of the pieces surge into my mind and I see now what he
has done. He has continued his amateurish and unsound attack by posting the King’s Bishop at an unsafe square, one where it can fall quickly to a series of clever traps and pitfalls which I will set for him. The normal continuation in the Ruy Lopez, of course, would be Bishop to Bishop Five, a more extended posture from which he would be able to defend the Bishop with the King’s Knight. But this has never been Louis’ style, never at all. Truly he is an unsound player. It is surprising that he has been able to get even this far in grandmasterly chess.
But I cannot, for the moment, bring further concentration upon the game, so overwhelmed am I by my unfortunate illness. “Sorry. Sorry about this,” I murmur apologetically as I am conveyed into a large, lush waiting room I have never seen previously. There is a mortuary aspect to this room, with its red curtains, green cot, many pillows scattered throughout, and a box of tissues discreetly placed on a hideous luminescent table to the right of the couch. “I didn’t mean it to be this way, don’t worry about a thing, the forces of good will triumph after all,” I say, while various Overlords minister to me, place me on the couch, bring me tissues by the score with which I can absorb the moisture that comes sopping off my face. “I’ll be all right in a second, just a little passing illness, a fit of vertigo.” I think of the wretched Timmons, the only grandmaster ever to die during the course of a chess match in the Buenos Aires tournament—suddenly squealing like a pig and upending a chair in the middle of an intricate, winning Nimzo-Indian. He lost on a disqualification. Since then, Timmons has gotten more notice in death than he ever found in life for his gaucherie. It is the secret fear of any chess player (whether
he will admit it or not) that he too might somehow be stricken in public, and left to die in the midst of gloomy calculations of the game. Our rather sedentary profession, with its high proportion of aged and aging grandmasters, certainly presents this as a statistical possibility.
Still, it is impossible that this would happen to me; I am barely over fifty and far more active than most grandmasters. Also, I have a horror of appearing awkward in public. All in all then, as I stretch out on the couch, holding a little halo of tissues to my nose, I feel a faint recovery of strength, although it is hardly of such dimension that I would consider resuming the match. Various Overlords lean over me murmuring consoling words, none of them in any language that I can grasp. Then one by one, talking to one another earnestly as they form a second group at the door, they pass through, closing the door upon me. I find that I am in the room alone with my old friend Five, whom I recognize not only through his hue but by a certain characteristic flexing of the tentacles which could only be his gesture. One of those tentacles touches me delicately now. “Are you feeling better?” Five says.