AUTUMN 1942. WINTER 1942
“I thought you’d gone,” says El Quemado.
“Where?”
“Back home, to Germany.”
“Why would I leave, Quemado? Do you think I’m scared?”
El Quemado says no no no, very slowly, almost without moving his lips, avoiding my eyes. He only stares at the game board; nothing else holds his attention for more than a few seconds. Nervous, he shifts from wall to wall, like a prisoner, but he avoids the balcony area as if he doesn’t want to be seen from the street. He’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and on his arm, on the burns, there’s a very faint gloss of mossy green, possibly the residue of some lotion. And yet it wasn’t sunny at all today, and as far as I can remember I never saw him applying lotion even on the most scorching days. Should I deduce that this is a growth? Is what looks to me like moss actually new skin, regenerated? Is this his body’s way of replacing dead skin? Whatever it is, it’s disgusting. By the way he moves I’d say that something is bothering him, though with his kind it’s impossible to say for sure. Suddenly his luck with the dice is overwhelming. Everything goes his way, even the most lopsided attacks. Whether his movements are part of an overarching strategy or the result of chance, of random strikes here and there, I can’t say, but it’s undeniable that beginner’s luck is with him. In Russia, after a series of attacks and counterattacks, I’m forced to retreat to
the Leningrad–Kalinin–Tula–Stalingrad–Elista line, at the same time as a new Red threat, double-pronged, looms far to the south in the Caucasus, poised to attack Maikop, which is almost undefended, and Elista. In England I manage to hold on to at least one hex— Portsmouth—after a massive Anglo-American offensive that, despite everything, fails to achieve its goal of running me off the island. With Portsmouth still in my grasp, London remains under threat. In Morocco, El Quemado disembarks two corps of American infantry—his only simpleminded play—with seemingly no purpose other than to annoy and to divert German forces from other fronts. The bulk of my army is in Russia, and for now I don’t think I can pull out even a replacement unit.
“So why did you come if you thought I was gone?”
“Because we had an agreement.”
“Do you and I have an agreement, Quemado?”
“Yes. We play nights, that’s the agreement. Even if you’re gone, I’ll come until the game is over.”
“One of these days they won’t let you in or they’ll kick you out.”
“Maybe.”
“One of these days too I will decide to leave, and since it’s not always easy to find you I might not be able to say good-bye. I could leave you a note on the pedal boats, true, if they’re still on the beach. But one of these days I’ll get up and go and everything will be over before ’45.”
El Quemado smiles fiercely (and his ferocity reveals glimpses of a precise and insane geometry) with the certainty that his pedal boats will remain on the beach even when every pedal boat in town has retired to winter quarters. The fortress will still stand, he’ll still wait for me or for the shadow even when there are no tourists or the rains come. His stubbornness is a kind of prison.
“The truth is there’s nothing between us, Quemado. By ‘agreement’ do you mean ‘obligation’?”
“No, I see it as a pact.”
“Well, we don’t have any kind of pact, we’re just playing a game, that’s all.”
El Quemado smiles, says yes, he understands, that’s all it is, and in the heat of combat, with the dice going his way, he pulls new photocopies folded into quarters out of his pocket and offers them to me. Some paragraphs are underlined and there are spots of grease and beer on the paper that speak of likely study at a bar table. As with the first offering, an inner voice dictates my reactions. Thus, instead of reproaching him for a gift that might well hide an insult or a provocation—though it might also be the innocent device (involving politics rather than military history!) by which El Quemado engages in discussion with me—I proceed to calmly pin them up next to the first photocopies, in such a way that at the end of the operation the wall behind the head of the bed looks completely different from usual. For a moment I feel as if I’m in someone else’s room: the room of a foreign correspondent in a hot and war-torn country? Also: the room seems smaller. Where do the photocopies come from? From
two
books, one by X and the other by Y. I’ve never heard of them. What kind of strategic lessons do they have to teach us? El Quemado averts his gaze, then smiles innocently and says that he’s not ready to reveal his plans. This is an attempt to make me laugh; out of politeness, I do.
The next day El Quemado comes back even stronger, if possible. He attacks in the East and I have to retreat again, he masses forces in Great Britain, and he begins to advance from Morocco and Egypt, though very slowly for the time being. The patch on his arm has disappeared. All that’s left is the burn, smooth and flat. His movements around the room are confident, even graceful, and they no longer reveal the nervousness of the day before. Still, he doesn’t talk much. His preferred topic is the game, the world of games, the clubs, magazines, championships, matches by correspondence, conventions, etc., and all my attempts to steer the conversation in a different direction—for example, toward the person who gave him photocopies of the
Third Reich
rules—are in vain. When he’s told something he doesn’t want to hear, he sits there like a rock or a mule. He simply acts as if he hasn’t heard. It’s likely that my tactics are too subtle. I’m cautious, and ultimately I try not to hurt his feelings. El Quemado may be my enemy, but he’s a good
enemy and those are hard to come by. What would happen if I were honest with him, if I told him what the Wolf and the Lamb have told me and asked him for an explanation? In the end, I’d probably have to choose between taking his word or theirs. Which I’d rather not have to do. So we talk about games and gamers, a subject of seemingly endless appeal to El Quemado. I think if I took him with me to Stuttgart—no, Paris!—he would be the star of the matches: the sense of the ridiculous that I sometimes feel—stupid, I know, but it’s true—when I get to a club and from a distance I see older people trying their hardest to solve military problems that to the rest of the world are old news would vanish solely with his presence. His charred face lends dignity to the act of gaming. When I ask him whether he’d like to come with me to Paris, his eyes light up, but then he shakes his head. Have you ever been to Paris, Quemado? No, never. Would you like to go? He’d like to, but he can’t. He’d like to play other people, lots of matches, “one after the other,” but he can’t. All he’s got is me, and that’s enough for him. Well, there are worse fates; I am the champion, after all. That makes him feel better. But he’d still like to play other people, though he doesn’t plan to buy the game (or at least he doesn’t say so), and in the middle of his speech, I have the impression that we’re talking about different things. I’m documenting myself, he says. After an effort I realize that he’s talking about the photocopies. I can’t help laughing.
“Are you still going to the library, Quemado?”
“Yes.”
“And you only borrow books about the war?”
“Now I do, but before I didn’t.”
“Before what?”
“Before I started playing with you.”
“So what kind of books did you borrow before, Quemado?”
“Poetry.”
“Books of poetry? How nice. What kind of poetry?”
El Quemado looks at me as if I’m a bumpkin:
“Vallejo, Neruda, Lorca . . . Do you know them?”
“No. Did you learn the poems by heart?”
“My memory is no good.”
“But you remember something? Can you recite something to give me an idea?”
“No, I only remember feelings.”
“What kind of feelings? Tell me one.”
“Despair . . .”
“Nothing else? That’s all?”
“Despair, heights, the sea, things that aren’t closed, things that are partway open, like something bursting in the chest.”
“Yes, I see. And when did you stop reading poetry, Quemado? When we started
Third Reich
? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have played. I like poetry too.”
“Which poets?”
“Goethe.”
And so on until it’s time to leave.
SEPTEMBER 17
I left the hotel at five in the afternoon, after talking on the phone to Conrad, dreaming about El Quemado, and making love with Clarita. My head was buzzing, which I attributed to a lack of nourishment, so I headed to the old town planning to eat at a restaurant that I’d noticed earlier. Unfortunately it was closed and suddenly I found myself walking down alleys where I’d never set foot, in a neighborhood of narrow but clean streets behind the shopping district and the port, increasingly sunk in thought, surrendered to the simple pleasure of my surroundings, no longer hungry, and in the mood to keep walking until night fell. That’s the state of mind I was in when I heard someone calling me by name. Mr. Berger. When I turned, I saw that it was a boy whose face I didn’t recognize, though he looked vaguely familiar. His greeting was effusive. It occurred to me that it might be one of the town friends my brother and I had made ten years before. The simple prospect made me happy. A ray of sunlight fell directly on his face, so that he couldn’t stop blinking. The words came tumbling out of his mouth and I could understand barely a quarter of what he said. His two outstretched hands grabbed me by the elbows as if to make sure I wouldn’t slip away. The situation seemed likely to stretch on indefinitely. At last, exasperated, I confessed that I couldn’t remember who he was. I work at the Red Cross, I’m the one who helped you with your friend’s paperwork. So those were the sad circumstances
of our meeting! Resolutely, he pulled a wrinkled card out of his pocket that identified him as a member of the Red Cross of the Sea. The matter solved, we both sighed in relief and laughed. Immediately he suggested that we get a beer, and I was happy to agree. With no little surprise I realized that we weren’t going to a bar but to the rescue worker’s house, not far from here, on the same street, on a dark and dusty third floor.
My room at the Del Mar was bigger than the whole apartment, but my host’s good intentions compensated for any material deficiencies. His name was Alfons and he said he was studying at night school: the springboard for a future move to Barcelona. His goal: to become a designer or painter, mission impossible, judging by his clothes, the posters that covered every bit of wall space, the clutter of furniture, all in the worst possible taste. And yet there was something uncanny about the rescue worker. We hadn’t exchanged more than two words, me sitting in an old armchair covered with an Indian-print blanket and him in a chair that he’d probably built himself, when he suddenly asked whether I was an artist “too.” I answered vaguely that I wrote articles. Where do they come out? In Stuttgart, Cologne, sometimes Milan, New York . . . I knew it, said the rescue worker. How could you know it? By your face. I read faces like books. Something in his tone or maybe in the words he used put me on my guard. I tried to change the subject, but all he wanted to talk about was art and I let him.
Alfons was a bore, but after a while I realized that it was nice to be there, drinking in silence, and protected from what was going on in the town—that is, from what was being plotted in the minds of El Quemado, the Wolf, the Lamb, Frau Else’s husband— protected by the aura of brotherhood that the rescue worker had implicitly spun around us. Beneath the skin we were brothers-inarms, and, as the poet says, we had recognized each other in the dark—in this case, he had recognized me with his special gift— and we had fallen into each other’s embrace.
Lulled by the stories he couldn’t stop telling, to which I paid not the slightest attention, I revisited the notable incidents of the day. In the first place, in chronological order, the phone conversation
with Conrad— brief, since it was he who had called— which basically revolved around the disciplinary measures that my office planned to take if I didn’t show up in the next forty-eight hours. In the second place, Clarita, who after straightening my room agreed without much protest to make love with me. She was so small that if by means of some kind of astral projection I could have looked down on the bed from the ceiling, I’m sure that all I would have seen was my back and maybe the tips of her toes. And finally the nightmare, for which the maid was partly responsible, since once our session was over and even before she got dressed and returned to her labors, I fell into a strange doze, as if I were drugged, and I had the following dream. I was walking along the Paseo Marítimo at midnight, aware that Ingeborg was waiting for me in my room. The street, the buildings, the beach, the very sea, if such a thing is possible, were much larger than in reality, as if the town had been turned into a destination for giants. And yet the stars, though they were as numerous as usual on summer nights, were noticeably smaller, pinpoints that cast no more than a sickly glow over the vault of night. I was walking quickly, but the Del Mar still failed to appear on the horizon. Then, just as I was losing hope, El Quemado came walking wearily down the beach with a cardboard box under his arm. He didn’t wave, but sat down on the wall and pointed out to sea, into the darkness. Even though I kept a cautious distance of some thirty feet, the lettering and orange color of the box were perfectly visible and familiar: it was
Third Reich
, my
Third Reich
. What was El Quemado doing out so late with my game? Had he gone to the hotel and had Ingeborg given it to him, out of spite? Had he stolen it? I decided to wait and not ask any questions yet, because I sensed that in the darkness between the sea and the Paseo there was another person, and I thought that El Quemado and I would still have time to resolve our business in private. So I stood quietly and waited. El Quemado opened the box and began to set up the game on the wall. He’s going to ruin the counters, I thought, but still I said nothing. The game board shifted a few times in the night breeze. I can’t remember when exactly El Quemado arranged the units in positions that I had never seen before. Germany was in
bad shape. You’ll play Germany, said El Quemado. I took a seat on the wall facing him and studied the situation. Yes, a bad business, all the fronts about to collapse and the economy sunk, with no air force, no navy, and a land army outmatched by such great foes. A little red light went on in my head. What are we playing for? I asked. Are we playing for the championship of Germany, or of Spain? El Quemado shook his head and pointed again out to where the waves were breaking, toward where the pedal boat fortress rose, huge and forbidding. What are we playing for? I insisted, with my eyes full of tears. I had the horrible sense that the sea was approaching the Paseo, slowly and without pause, ineluctably. We’re playing for the only thing that matters, answered El Quemado, avoiding looking at me. The situation of my armies didn’t offer much hope, but I made an effort to play as precisely as possible and I rebuilt the fronts. I didn’t plan to surrender without a fight.