Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

Beth looked at her coolly. Mrs. Wheatley was pale and clearly overweight. She held the glass by the stem in one hand while her other hand fluttered at her thick waist. There was something deeply pathetic about her, and Beth’s heart softened. “I don’t want lunch,” Beth said, “but you can drop me off at the zoo. I’ll take a cab back.”

Mrs. Wheatley hardly seemed to hear, but after a moment she turned to Beth, still holding the glass in the same way, and smiled vaguely. “That’ll be nice, dear,” she said.

Beth spent a long time looking at the Galapagos turtles—big, lumbering creatures in permanent slow motion. One of the keepers had dumped a bushel of wet-looking lettuce and overripe tomatoes into their pen and the five of them pushed through the pile as a group, munching and trampling, their feet like the dusty feet of elephants and their stupid innocent faces intent on something beyond vision or food.

While she was standing by the fence a vendor came by with a cart of iced beer and, hardly thinking, she said, “ Cerveza Corona, por favor ,” and held out a five-peso note. The man flipped off the bottle top and poured the drink into a paper cup with an Aztec Eagle logo. “ Muchisimas gracias ,” she said. It was her first beer since high school; in the hot Mexican sun, it tasted wonderful. She drank it quickly. A few minutes later she saw another vendor standing by a circle of red flowers; she bought another beer. She knew she should not be doing this; the tournament started tomorrow. She did not need liquor. Nor tranquilizers. She had not had a green pill for several months now. But she drank the beer. It was three in the afternoon, and the sun was ferocious. The zoo was full of women, most of them in dark rebozos, with small dark-eyed children. What few men there were gave Beth significant looks, but she ignored them, and none of them tried to speak to her. Despite the Mexican reputation for gaiety and abandon, it was a quiet place, and the crowd seemed more like the crowd at a museum. There were flowers everywhere.

She finished her beer, bought another and continued walking. She was beginning to feel high. She passed more trees, more flowers, cages with sleeping chimpanzees. Around a corner she came face to face with a family of gorillas. Inside the cage the huge male and the baby were asleep head to head with their black bodies pressed against the bars in front. In the middle of the cage the female leaned philosophically against an enormous truck tire, scowling and biting a fingertip. Standing on the asphalt outside the cage was a human family, also a mother, father and child, watching the gorillas attentively. They were not Mexicans. It was the man who caught Beth’s attention. She recognized his face.

He was a short, heavy man, not unlike a gorilla himself, with jutting brow ridges, bushy eyebrows, coarse black hair and an impassive look. Beth stiffened, holding her paper cup of beer. She felt her cheeks flushing. The man was Vasily Borgov, Chess Champion of the World. There was no mistaking the grim Russian face, the authoritarian scowl. She had seen it on the cover of Chess Review several times, once with the same black suit and splashy green-and-gold tie.

Beth stared for a full minute. She had not known Borgov would be at this tournament. She had already received her board assignment by mail: it was Board Nine. Borgov would be Board One. She felt a sudden chill at the back of her neck and looked down at the beer in her hand. She raised it to her mouth and finished it, resolving it would be her last until after the tournament. Looking at the Russian again, she panicked; would he recognize her? He must not see her drinking. He was looking into the cage as though waiting for the gorilla to move a pawn. The gorilla was clearly lost in her own thoughts, ignoring everyone. Beth envied her.

Beth had no more beer that day and went to bed early, but she was awakened by Mrs. Wheatley’s arrival, sometime in the middle of the night. Mrs. Wheatley coughed a good deal while she was undressing in the darkened room. “Go ahead and turn the light on,” Beth said. “I’m awake.”

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Wheatley gasped between coughs. “I seem to have a virus.” She turned the bathroom light on and partially closed the door. Beth looked at the little Japanese clock on the nightstand. It was ten after four. The sounds she made undressing—the rustling and partly suppressed coughing—were infuriating. Beth’s first chess game would begin in six hours. She lay in bed furious and tense, waiting for Mrs. Wheatley to be quiet.

Marenco was a somber little dark-skinned man in a dazzling canary-colored shirt. He spoke almost no English and Beth no Portuguese; they began playing without preliminary conversation. Beth did not feel like talking, anyway. Her eyes were scratchy, and her body was uncomfortable all over. She had felt generally unpleasant from the time their plane landed in Mexico, as though she were on the verge of developing an illness that she never quite got, and she had not gone back to sleep the night before. Mrs. Wheatley had coughed in her sleep and muttered and rasped, while Beth tried to force herself to relax, to ignore the distractions. She did not have any green pills with her. There were three left, but they were in Kentucky. She lay on her back with her arms straight at her sides as she had as an eight-year-old trying to sleep by the hallway door at Methuen. Now, sitting on a straight wooden chair in front of a long tableful of chessboards in the ballroom of a Mexican hotel, she felt irritated and a bit dizzy. Marenco had just opened with pawn to king four. Her clock was ticking. She shrugged and played pawn to queen’s bishop four, trusting the formal maneuvers of the Sicilian to keep her steady until she got into the game. Marenco brought the king’s knight out with civil orthodoxy. She pushed the queen pawn to the fourth rank; he exchanged pawns. She began to relax as her mind moved away from her body and onto the tableau of forces in front of her.

By eleven-thirty she had him down by two pawns, and just after noon he resigned. They had got nowhere close to an endgame; when Marenco stood up and offered her his hand, the board was still massed with uncaptured pieces.

The top three boards were in a separate room across the hallway from the main ballroom. Beth had glanced at it that morning while rushing, five minutes late, to the place where she was to play, but she had not stopped to look in. She walked toward it now, across the carpeted room with its rows of players bent over boards—players from the Philippines and West Germany and Iceland and Norway and Chile, most of them young, almost all of them male. There were two other women: a Mexican official’s niece, at Board Twenty-two, and an intense young housewife from Buenos Aires; she was at Board Seventeen. Beth did not stop to look at any of the positions.

Several people were standing in the hallway outside the smaller game room. She pushed past them into the doorway, and there across the room from her at Board One, wearing the same dark suit, the same grim scowl, was Vasily Borgov, his expressionless eyes on the game in front of him. A respectfully silent crowd stood between her and him, but the players sat on a kind of wooden stage a few feet above floor level, and she could see him clearly. Behind him on the wall was a display chessboard with cardboard pieces; a Mexican was just moving one of the white knights into its new position as Beth came in. She studied the board for a moment. Everything was very tight, but Borgov seemed to have an edge.

She looked at Borgov and quickly looked away. His face was alarming in its concentration. She turned and left, walking slowly along the hall.