Theory of Shadows Read online

  Every morning, before lunch, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Alekhin—this was the name that no one could pronounce—allowed himself a walk to the lighthouse. Along the coast, stretches of beach alternated with low rocky ridges. That day, the wind coming from the Atlantic was blowing hard, and the frequent heavy storms of the previous days had deposited mounds of seaweed ashore, along with fragments of shells and jellyfish reduced to wobbly masses of iridescent gelatin. The beach club was closed, and the so-called solarium—a wooden platform on stilts that in summer, judging by the postcards for sale at the hotel’s reception desk, was packed with strapping young men and pretty girls in bathing suits—seemed in the winter light like the frail skeleton of an antediluvian animal, its long legs sunk in the sand. The Hotel do Parque, where he was staying, towered above. Along the trail leading to the promontory where the lighthouse stood, the hotel’s baroque façade, covered with dazzling azulejos, continued to run alongside him, the way the moon appears to keep pace with us when it’s low on the horizon; only from the farthest point was he able to see part of the building’s inland side, the one facing the park, dense with maritime pines and tamarisk.

  The beginning of spring was not far off, but swimming season would not begin before May; yet the hotel stayed open. In the dining room, tables and chairs were stacked along a wall; all his meals were served to him in his room. This room, marked by a brass plate reading number 43, was spacious enough, and had a large balcony overlooking the ocean: a magnificent view for anyone, though not for him, who viewed that infinite expanse of water as the very image of the unknown. Often, to ascertain whether there might be anyone else staying in that hermitage, he would walk from one end of his floor to the other, passing a succession of doors, all closed, all identical except for the numbers on their brass plates; sometimes he listened in front of one door or another, but he never heard the slightest sound. He’d also climbed to the upper floors, but there, too, he found doors and more doors, and not a single voice could be heard filtering out from them.

  Though reduced in number, the staff were very efficient, and the chef in the kitchen was at his complete disposal. Maybe, he told himself, the hotel would soon fill with people—a conference, a seminar, or something like that. It had been a month since he’d exchanged a word with anyone, except for a few remarks with Manuel, the young man who served him his meals in his room. Time went by in a succession of long periods of sleeping and wakefulness. Day and night blurred, and the loneliness was now becoming unbearable.

  The last doctor who had examined him had made an inauspicious diagnosis. The man had been explicit: his liver was in serious condition, he was suffering from acute duodenitis, and, besides that, he was beginning to show signs of angina. If he did not stop drinking excessively and smoking forty cigarettes a day, he would not live long.

  “How long do I have?”

  “A year at most.”

  “And if I stop?”

  “A few more.”

  “Then maybe it’s not worth it,” he’d replied, laughing—though there was precious little that was amusing about the thought of death. In fact, fear of dying was always lurking in him, and no matter how hard he tried to bury it in the depths of his consciousness, it would crop up suddenly, usually at night, when, tormented by insomnia, he paced back and forth for hours in his room.

  Eventually, however, when he was nearly broke, he was forced to stop drinking, and settle for the single bottle of Alentejo that was served with his meals.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES HE THOUGHT about how he had come to be there, in Estoril, that last windy strip of Europe, the sole guest in a hotel open off-season. He still found it hard to believe that, at a time when everything had appeared on the verge of falling to pieces, an unexpected meeting had set him back on his feet. Almost like a sign from Providence.

  Only a month earlier, in fact, he had been in Lisbon, but the management of the hotel where he was staying had literally kicked him out, confiscating his luggage until he had taken steps to settle the tab. That evening, he had wandered through the city, wondering where he would spend the night. He had only a few bills in his pocket: just enough to get a bite to eat along with a mug of beer. He had walked to the Ás de Ouros, a bar that stayed open until dawn. It was barely nine, and the place was still half empty. In the center of the room, a pair of elderly dancers shuffled around to the music of an accordion, while a few people were playing cards at some nearby tables, and there was even an area reserved for chess, though it was deserted. So he sat down in that corner and, after arranging the pieces on a board, began moving them distractedly, waiting for someone to come along and challenge him; since even chess was never played without a small wager, there was a chance he might earn an extra drink or two. He would certainly not take advantage of his skills, however, and would grant the opponent du jour a suitable advantage, as he always did.

  He did not have to wait long. Someone came forward: a middle-aged man, ordinary-looking, modestly dressed; one would have said he was a sales representative for some insurance company, or else a city official.

  “Eu posso ter a honra de jogar um jogo?”

  The stranger spoke Portuguese correctly, though marked by an accent that suggested it was not his native language.

  “De boa vontade.”

  The pieces were placed back on their starting squares. The man sat down heavily in front of Alekhine, carefully arranging the flaps of the overcoat he still had on. Then he proposed: “A beer?”

  “For a beer,” Alekhine agreed. “But before we begin, I must warn you that I am unbeatable.”

  The other man smiled, skeptical. “Really?”

  “I therefore feel obliged to give you an advantage.”

  “Which would be?”

  “A Knight, a Bishop … even a Rook, if you like.”

  “No, no, if I have to lose, I prefer to do so on equal terms.”

  “As you wish. I warned you.”

  The man did not seem too concerned. The toss was favorable to him; he was White. From the very first moves it was clear that he was not exactly a novice, but after a flawless opening, he suddenly lifted his King from its square and, as a sign of surrender, laid the piece on its side in the middle of the board. The gesture was irritating to Alekhine, even downright offensive.

  “What does that mean? Why do you want to give up? Your position was still a solid one.”

  The stranger laughed. “But my solid position would certainly not have lasted much longer against the world champion.”

  At that point the man, after apologizing for his little deception, introduced himself by the name of Spitzler. He said he was a government official and that he had been specifically assigned to track Alekhine down. He informed the champion that a match for the world title had already been arranged: the challenger was a Russian, whose name, however, was still not known. Soon the news would appear in the international press. He then assured Alekhine of having settled his hotel bill, and lastly handed him an envelope that contained money, along with the address of the Hotel do Parque, in Estoril, where he could stay with all expenses paid. He would hear from Spitzler again very soon.

  “To whom do I owe all this?”

  “You still have friends,” the man said, and left.

  II.

  THE ENCOUNTER HAD restored Alekhine’s self-confidence. He was still the world chess champion, and his pride in the title that he’d held almost uninterruptedly for more than eighteen years had been rekindled in him like a flame. He still held a valid international safe-conduct, a status that precluded any action against him. At first, being able to stay in a luxury hotel, waited on hand and foot, had seemed like a fitting recognition of his merit; but after he’d spent a few weeks waiting to hear from that Spitzler, his stay had become increasingly troubling. He felt cut off from the world. No other papers besides the Diário de Lisboa could be found in the lobby, and the only other outside contact was a radio he kept on his nightstand. Sometimes he managed to tune in t
o some crackly foreign station. Sequestered in that hotel, he felt like a bird imprisoned in a huge aviary: big enough to make him think he was free, but still holding him captive in its netting.

  Participation in the London tournament, which would have been a good opportunity to earn some money, had been denied him, and now he was once again short on cash. He only had a few escudos left in his pocket: the sum given to him by the man he’d met in Lisbon had, as usual, been squandered in a couple of weeks. His indifference to the value of money definitely came from his father, who, before being stopped by the family, had burned through much of the estate, going so far as to lose two million rubles in gold at the Monte Carlo Casino in a single night.

  Recently, Alekhine had written to his fourth wife, Grace Wishaar, who was handling some family property in Saint-Aubin-le-Cauf, in Upper Normandy. Although they were about to divorce, she would never have refused him financial assistance. He had also phoned Francisco Lupi, Portugal’s champion and an old friend of his, asking to write a few articles for Lupi’s magazine, just to earn some cigarette money, but so far he had not received a reply. All he could do was wait.

  Every morning, he followed the same routine: breakfast at nine, a few hours at the chessboard, then the walk to the lighthouse; after that, around noon, he returned to his room and waited for the server to bring him his lunch, accompanied by a bottle of Alentejo.

  That day, as he climbed the stairs leading from the beach to the hotel, he was forced to stop, overcome by a dull ache in his chest, a pain that he experienced whenever he faced an ascent. He had to wait a few minutes to be able to continue up. By the time he reached the hotel, the pain had subsided; eventually, it disappeared altogether. As he always did when he returned from his walk, he stopped by the reception desk in the hope that there might be a message for him, but this time, as all the others, the clerk’s pitying expression was all too eloquent.

  Right after eating, he lay on his bed, fully clothed, covering himself with his overcoat, and sank quickly into a soothing sleep, so different from the variety he endured at night, from which he often woke gripped by a terrible anxiety. This afternoon slumber was peaceful: in his dreams he met persons, living or long dead, who had departed with some business left unfinished, and with whom he enjoyed endless discussions. Everything in these dreams happened in a logical, coherent way: the scene remained unchanged, everything firmly in its place, and nothing bizarre or terrifying occurred, as it did in his nocturnal nightmares. Though he often found himself talking to deceased individuals in those afternoon dreams—people whose funerals he had surely attended years earlier—everything seemed very credible to him: all barriers between life and death, between past and present, stood revealed as insubstantial. Sometimes he could observe himself wondering whether these dreams were dreams at all. Doubt would only arise from some dissonant detail: someone, for example, who had never served in the military but was wearing the impeccable uniform of a tsarist captain of the guard; or one who in life had been a rigorous teetotaler but here was downing a pint of beer. Alekhine had found that, the stronger the wind blew outside, the more vivid his visions became.

  That afternoon, his mother appeared to him, seated beside him in the spacious living room of the house where he had spent his youth, in Moscow. The large window that overlooked the Arbat was embroidered by winter frost. Tsar Nicholas II stood in the doorway, waiting to come in to confer a very high honor on Alekhine. Behind the tsar, the minister of culture held in his hands a blue vase of the finest Sèvres porcelain, adorned with the imperial eagle. In the dream, Alekhine knew that the tsar himself would present the vase to him in recognition of victories achieved. Nevertheless, his mother hugged him to her, weeping softly, and, with a linen handkerchief, wiped at the tears that kept rolling down her face. “Tisha,” she said between sobs, using the pet name she’d given him as a child, “it is still too soon, it is not yet time.”

  Though he knew that his mother had been dead for many years, that fact did not disturb him at all.

  “The tsar has been waiting for an hour, Mama. We can’t make him wait any longer.”

  And it was precisely this last detail that woke him: not so much that he was talking to his deceased mother as the fact that the tsar had come to their house and was waiting patiently for an invitation to enter. It was this that made him certain he was dreaming. Realizing it and waking up were practically a simultaneous occurrence. An instant before coming around, he could still make out the figure of the minister of culture shouldering a violin and drawing out the first notes of a popular cavatina …

  * * *

  HE OPENED HIS eyes. The wind was rattling the roll-up shutters. The rays of the setting sun filtered through the drawn curtains. Often his afternoon dreams were slow to dissolve, but this time the violin chords he heard, though mingled with the whistling of the wind through the window casings, were too audible to be the result of simple suggestion. Almost immediately, he recognized the exercises by Otakar Ševčík: his sister, Varvara, had practiced them each day with grueling dedication. There was a long moment of silence, then the first notes of a concerto with which he was also familiar rose up.

  He leaped to his feet to listen. The sound came and went, sometimes clearly, sometimes covered by the wind’s bluster. He moved along the walls until he found where it was coming from. There was no doubt about it: someone in the next room was playing the theme of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. So there was another guest in the hotel, perhaps one who’d arrived that very morning, while he was out taking his walk. At the thought of someone with whom he might exchange a few words, Alekhine felt a certain excitement. By then, however, the chords had stopped, and in the lingering silence that followed, he was again seized by doubt: had it merely been a hallucination?

  Recalling the dream he’d just had, he reached up to the bookshelf and took down a wooden case bound in Moroccan leather; it held the vase of Sèvres porcelain that he’d been given by the tsar in recognition of having won, at age sixteen, his first chess competition of some significance. He wanted to make sure it was still there. Each time, it was like opening the panels of an altarpiece. That object represented the highest honor that had ever been conferred on him; it was a talisman with which he would not part for any reason. He took it out to gaze at it. In the light of sunset that flooded the room, the blue surface took on intense hints of ruby red. Finally, he laid the vase carefully in its case and went back to the chessboard. His mind, however, kept returning to the violin he’d heard coming from the room next door.

  He waited impatiently for the arrival of the boy who served him supper. Manuel was fifteen, rather self-confident for his age, and with Alekhine, for some reason, he usually made an effort to say a few words in German. During that month, the boy had told him all about his family and his ambitions. He was working to support himself while he studied, he explained, and when he grew up he was going to be a journalist. Often he approached the chessboard, observing the positions from time to time as though he understood the game, and every now and then he took the liberty of removing a book from the shelf and leafing through it while waiting to be sent on his way with a coin in his palm.

  “Is there perhaps a new guest in the hotel?” Alekhine asked him now, feigning indifference.

  “He’s a violinist,” the boy said, making the gesture of holding a violin. “Er ist ein Geiger.”

  III.

  THAT EVENING, ALEKHINE lingered in the lobby, expecting to meet the violinist. Who could say? Maybe, despite the gusty wind that discouraged going outside, he would come down to take a walk. After a while, however, Alekhine decided to return to his room. Climbing the stairs, he again felt a constriction in his chest. Angina pectoris—that was the precise name. By now he was becoming accustomed to tolerating the regular attacks. When he was back in his room, he tried tuning the radio to some foreign broadcast, but caught only snippets of popular music: aside from Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw, who were now all the rage on every
frequency, the only thing he could manage to find was a mournful female voice singing Lusitanian tristeza.

  The dream he’d had a few hours earlier had not completely faded, and the strains of that violin had transported him back in time. The house in Moscow, where he had spent his childhood, loomed up in his mind: he saw again the wooden parquet, its large squares scattered with Bokhara rugs; he saw the massive pendulum clock in the living room, the tiled stoves, the samovar with its copper reflections … He hadn’t been back to Russia for decades, and perhaps his last words in that language had been spoken to his mother, his mamushka, before she went to die in a hospital bed. She was gravely ill, and when he’d approached her bedside she hardly recognized him. “It is still too soon. It is not yet time,” she kept repeating. They were the same words he’d heard her say to him as a child, as she taught him his first concepts of chess: “It is still too soon to move that Pawn, it is not yet the right time to do it. You must wait. Be patient.”

  As a child, he’d been fascinated by the chessboard in an extraordinary way: it was as if a force released from underground had manifested itself on the surface, radiating through the geometries of the parquet at home, through the marble intarsia in the churches, the pavement of the streets and piazzas on which he walked. For him the flagstone paving had a magical aspect. The lines marking the porphyry slabs were never to be stepped on, for any reason. If just one were to crack under the weight of his foot—or so he imagined—the entire street and the piazza as well would somehow buckle, deformed by frightening alterations. The problem arose during walks along the streets of Moscow, when his sister, Varvara, held his hand and, not in the least suspecting his most hidden fears, tried to restrain him and make him walk in step. Besides having to avoid stepping on the lines, it was also necessary to place his foot precisely in the center of each square; some slabs might tilt under his weight and make him fall, or conceal other traps ready to swallow him up. Fortunately for him, the risky sections were almost always recognizable from a distance and therefore easily circumvented. Was the color of a given stone darker than the others? Was it streaked by veins? Did it have moss on its edges? Better not to step on it. And when Varvara, unaware of the danger, stubbornly refused to change course, leading him inexorably toward some fatal square—well, then, he was ultimately forced to leap ahead of her with a sudden tug on his sister’s arm, catching her by surprise, and often putting her in danger of losing her balance.