is something so humiliating about it. Death is bad enough, but to die in public would be in the worst of taste.
Louis stares at me impassively. Desperately I lurch forward from the chair, tottering like a very old man, and take a few staggering steps back-stage.I try to draw air into my lungs, which seem paper-thin, composed of some wire mesh which will not yield to the act of inhalation. Then at last, as I stand there in panic, I feel tentacles surrounding me, purple surfaces, the smooth, slimy scales of the Overlords winding around me. Half-pulled, half-supported by their weight, I am dragged off to the backstage area. Their alien eyes as they peer at me seem to be filled with concern (but then again I am prone to misinterpretation on many levels), and they are not so much aiding as threatening me. Who is to say? Who is to know? Life, this situation, the true motivations of the Overlords, are often as impenetrable as the game of chess itself. As I am pulled backstage amid the murmurous cries of the audience, it is with the feeling that I may never truly get to the end of this and will descend, brushing against the slippery scales, to the receptacle of final uncertainty.
INTERREGNUM:
King’s Knight
In Lima, at the time of those Interzonals, there was some kind of local political problem which made us unable to use the facilities of the hotel for some time; revolutionaries were allegedly threatening the democratic reign of the president, and the president had felt it best to cancel public events. FIDE tried rather desperately to convince him that chess was not a public but a private event, and that there would be no more than thirty or forty spectators, participants, referees and judges in the great hotel ballroom at any given time. (These were the days when chess had not yet achieved its stunning international reputation and high level of public interest; fifty dollarsabove expenses was considered a reasonable sum to take out of a three-day tournament for an honorable mention.) The president, however, could not be convinced. He feared that assassins in the guise of chess followers would somehow use the tournament as a means to penetrate the hotel and from there set up a guerilla cell to topple the democratically appointed government. South American rulers have always been difficult for me to understand. Our own regimes would doubtless look exotic to South Americans; they have always seemed that way to
me.
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 theIncas. 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
Louis stares at me impassively. Desperately I lurch forward from the chair, tottering like a very old man, and take a few staggering steps back-stage.I try to draw air into my lungs, which seem paper-thin, composed of some wire mesh which will not yield to the act of inhalation. Then at last, as I stand there in panic, I feel tentacles surrounding me, purple surfaces, the smooth, slimy scales of the Overlords winding around me. Half-pulled, half-supported by their weight, I am dragged off to the backstage area. Their alien eyes as they peer at me seem to be filled with concern (but then again I am prone to misinterpretation on many levels), and they are not so much aiding as threatening me. Who is to say? Who is to know? Life, this situation, the true motivations of the Overlords, are often as impenetrable as the game of chess itself. As I am pulled backstage amid the murmurous cries of the audience, it is with the feeling that I may never truly get to the end of this and will descend, brushing against the slippery scales, to the receptacle of final uncertainty.
INTERREGNUM:
King’s Knight
In Lima, at the time of those Interzonals, there was some kind of local political problem which made us unable to use the facilities of the hotel for some time; revolutionaries were allegedly threatening the democratic reign of the president, and the president had felt it best to cancel public events. FIDE tried rather desperately to convince him that chess was not a public but a private event, and that there would be no more than thirty or forty spectators, participants, referees and judges in the great hotel ballroom at any given time. (These were the days when chess had not yet achieved its stunning international reputation and high level of public interest; fifty dollarsabove expenses was considered a reasonable sum to take out of a three-day tournament for an honorable mention.) The president, however, could not be convinced. He feared that assassins in the guise of chess followers would somehow use the tournament as a means to penetrate the hotel and from there set up a guerilla cell to topple the democratically appointed government. South American rulers have always been difficult for me to understand. Our own regimes would doubtless look exotic to South Americans; they have always seemed that way to
me.
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 theIncas. 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
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