by Serge Pey
I was flabbergasted. That night I fully grasped the nature of the old master’s higher game – which everyone, out of ignorance, subjected to ridicule – and understood the enthusiasm that motivated his covert team in their search for a new conception of the game of chess.
Floridor did not want to win for winning’s sake, because his strategic goal was above all to create beauty. What good was the death of the bull if the choreography of the corrida was second-rate or bungled?
So it was absolutely not simply a matter of putting the king in check, as in the secular game. It was necessary that the path leading to the death of the king should be of an impeccable rigor and beauty, and that this principle should apply to one’s own king likewise.
For defeat ought to be as beautiful as triumph. The honor of death in chess was as fundamental as victory. Knowing how to lose was as noble as knowing how to win. The value of the game lay not in the glorification of the speed and effectiveness of the winner but rather in the artistry of either the defeat or the victory.
In this higher realm of the game, the one who lost often received more plaudits than the winner, for his death had been morally and aesthetically superior to any victory.
To kill or to kill oneself: no difference.
Not long after the night when I saw the image of a woman’s face on the chessboard just prior to the death of the king, the old master and his friend Chucho allowed me to take part in the work of their secret society, whose headquarters was the spacious cellar beneath a bar in San Subra. It was there, in this dark temple, that the aesthetic principles of a rite invented and destroyed in every game were exposed with great intensity.
In the cellar of that bar, which we called The World, once the doors were firmly closed, these chess-loving comrades arranged their men on wooden tables and planned games of a spiritually superior kind.
In the eyes of Floridor’s secret society, the winner was the player who conducted the purest campaign. And in the euphoria of our ceremonies we allowed the game to be the winner, very often celebrating two winners, both victor and vanquished, inasmuch as it was indeed the game itself that won and not the players, whom the game from a great height manipulated with strings hidden up the sleeve of eternity.
“Beauty is a double of madness. For chess may be played with the method of love or with the method of death. Tournaments are always tournaments of death. And so, my son, if you play do not try to win but seek the pure game that will let you witness the emergence of a form. Losing can be winning. Winning is merely the first step in initiation into the game. True masters know that winning is an illusion to which even children may attain. The true player, who no longer plays, pursues other goals in a quest for the truth of the game.”
The Arrest
THEY CAME TO arrest me at my house, behind the railway station.
The network in which I was active had been assigned the task of forging papers. I used to make identity cards with the most official-looking rubber stamps purloined by another network member from police headquarters. Half of my work involved the alteration of documents stolen in cafés or pickpocketed in the street; the other half, which paradoxically required less effort, consisted in the creation of complete credentials from scratch. I worked in my cellar with a kerosene lamp and a miniature printing press.
In my view, making a fake document is not a form of deception but a way of entering another space. Starting from names found on gravestones or in birth and death records, I would bring an unknown person to life. My false papers were created from the names of the dead. I believe that the dead are not dead, as is generally supposed, but keep us on our feet by holding tight to our legs.
At the graveyard I would pick tombs whose epitaphs had worn away. My false papers thus became passports for the living. A password, so to speak, between those who were dead and those yet to come alive. It made me happy to think that a dead person would be fighting alongside us against the enemy. That was my interpretation of resurrection. I was putting ghosts into circulation.
True, the neighbors’ dog had barked. A warning, a danger signal, is not part of a rational system, but we sense danger, often before it arises, when it is near. Who knows how much energy is mobilized by danger in realms unseen? This time, though, I heard nothing. I was thinking about the approaching end of the war. Happiness may put you to sleep in dire situations but anxiety always remains as a reservoir of lucidity. Peace is blind because it forgets that life is a balance board – a never-ending, never-resolved contest.
It was when I saw a woman watching me by my kerosene lamp that I realized that I was surely going to be betrayed. My inept claim that I was printing labels for my bottles of wine was quite inadequate. Two days later my house was raided and my clandestine workshop discovered. I let myself be led away, putting up no resistance as soldiers carted off my counterfeiting equipment.
I was thrown onto the concrete floor of a bathroom. Every morning two men came to take me out for interrogation. I recognized one of them, a former messenger boy who had opened a flower shop in the neighborhood. I also recognized the house of a trade-union lawyer who had been arrested two years earlier. I had never been in his house, but I was shaken to see men in white shirts with rolled-up sleeves occupying it. His books, once visible from the street, had disappeared from the library along with the pictures. Now only the chandelier continued to shed its light; it occurred to me that light was neutral and could illuminate anything at all.
To ask a question is to understand the answer. A question mark is a rearing snake that bites every answer to death. A question’s strength is attack; an answer’s strength is defense. The challenge, therefore, is to respond in an interrogative way. Every response must itself turn into a snake.
I refused to answer their questions. I simply stated that a man unknown to me would leave in my mailbox a photo and the address of the person for whom I was supposed to forge papers. I did not say how I used to look for names in the graveyard, nor that I found the day and month of dates of birth in the annals of the great freedom fighters of our world.
When I finished a job, I told them, I would hang a bedsheet in my garden along with a pair of pants. If the pants were to the left of the sheet, it meant that the work was done and that I would put the papers under the pot of flowers facing the street. Whether it was the milkman who picked them up, or the newspaper man on his bike, or a roadworker, I never knew. I told them nothing. I gave no names.
Something inside me, beyond pain or hope, chose not to talk. I said no, so to speak, in order to exist.
A no older than the universe. A sign of creation set against the void. But a no beyond yes and no. A negation from a sense of honor greater than us. I did not talk.
Every morning, in the interrogation room next to the bathroom, I was bolted to a rack and immersed in a tub. When I was lifted out the water was red. This went on for three weeks.
Then came a morning when I was thrown into a railroad car with about a hundred comrades. My friend Saez had managed to conceal a file, a rat-tail round file, beneath the truss he wore as a disabled person. That file was our one and only hope. We both smiled, and at the beginning of the journey we talked about the number of tools named for animals: herminette (stoat) for an adze; chèvre (goat) for a hoist; and pied-de-biche (deer’s foot) for a crowbar. We wondered whether it was animals who taught humans how to labor. Inside the car we took turns sitting down. We also took turns pissing through the gaps between the floorboards onto the railbed below.
With a few others, I resolved to escape, but many comrades were afraid. They pointed out that there were soldiers watching us on either end of the car’s roof. The prisoners’ eyes were bright with their secret hope of surviving. I knew that hope could trump survival. I also realized that hope never abides by a majority view and that, and, just like freedom, it is independent.
So, despite the handicap of our small number, we decided to e
scape. There were some who sought to prevent this, trying to convince us of the hopelessness of our initiative. A scuffle ensued, and we had to fight to facilitate our escape. I don’t enjoy recounting this episode in the rail car, because it still pains me to say that I fought some of my own who were under the illusion of being alive.
It was hard to believe that the spirit of the enemy was manifesting itself in our car. The enemy was almost right there among us. Our comrades, without wishing to, had allied themselves with our captors. To attempt escape we now had to see them as enemies. Not completely, however. Those comrades were provisional enemies only: I realized that you have to know how to fight those who do not want to free themselves in order to make their liberation possible.
The railroad car had served to transport cattle. It stank of liquid manure and straw. I reflected that we were cattle also, but that what made us different from cattle was the basis of our hope. Not survival. Cattle no more want to die than most of the comrades in that car did. The difference between cattle and us was that even if we could not avoid each other, we could escape.
It is not our ability to speak or to string words together that makes us different from cattle but the fact that we ally those words with something that words know nothing of. So long as speech does not embody hope it is no more than bellowing.
We fought with our own and then I made a hole in the car’s door. One of us reached his arm outside and undid the bolt. A few minutes later, as the train slowed down on a bend, we all threw ourselves out and tumbled into a ravine. The soldiers on the car’s roof fired at us but we were already far away and under cover of rocks and trees.
Here for your consideration are a few lessons I learned that day:
First, the struggle to escape from a railroad car often begins among the passengers and not by engaging the soldiers guarding the transport, because a good number of those passengers are unaware of their degree of confinement.
Secondly, hope is a hole made in the side of a rail car.
Thirdly, any captive passenger in the car must invent a new, impossible way out of the car as opposed to the possible one.
Fourthly, those who remained in the car and did not wish to escape were, nevertheless, shot.
The White Library
IN A SHOP WINDOW I saw a red book with gold lettering. The History of the Universe was its title. I asked Mama to buy it for me, but she couldn’t, because she had no money and my dad had not yet come back from the other side of the mountain. So every night I said a prayer, as the neighbor lady had told me to do, and every morning I looked under my bed to see if the book had arrived. But no. Not under the wardrobe either, nor with the shoes. Finding nothing under the bed but an endless accumulation of white dust bunnies made me give up praying.
Maybe prayer failed to bring me the book because it was no longer in the shop window and more than likely already sold.
I had prayed scrupulously for that book. But praying clearly did not work miracles of that sort. It simply couldn’t cause a book to appear under my bed. God was not Santa Claus. Telling the rosary had no effect at all.
Everyone in the neighborhood said that there was a man living on the edge of the village who had a library.
One evening as he was leaving the café I managed to meet him. They said he was a professor or even a monk. I hesitated to call him Professor because he really seemed to walk like a monk. But then I called him Professor like everyone else. I went up to him just as he was coming out.
“Professor,” I said, “I’ve been told that you have a library. Please, sir, would you show it to me?”
The man began to laugh and asked me why. I replied that I had never seen a real library. I was afraid of being afraid but not of the man. Still laughing, he led me to his house.
He lived in one room. Part of his bed was under the dining table. The dishes in the sink were inches from his pillow. Despite the disorder, the room was all white. At first I wondered where the books were. I couldn’t see any. But soon enough I got the idea: I really was in a library but you could not immediately see the books lining the walls. They were all standing the wrong way round, and what you took for the color of the wall was in fact the whitish hue of their fore-edges.
The professor had arranged his books with their spines to the wall. It was rather like turning a painting or photograph over. No titles, no authors’ names, no series indications, just petrified white horses on a sea by an ancient spray-swept beach.
On the shelves, themselves painted off-white, all that could be seen was an endless procession of white streaks undulating like a dirty snow field. The professor did not want anyone to know what he was reading. Perhaps authors’ names and titles distracted him from writing his own books. Perhaps that was why he turned the volumes around. But how could you find a particular book on the shelves? The professor clearly possessed thousands of books. I asked him how he managed to distinguish them.
“I know them all,” he replied, running his fingers over a rank of back-facing tomes as if it was a piano keyboard. “You will get to know them too. I’m going to teach you. Before you read a book you have to be acquainted with it. Only after that do you read. Come back tomorrow. I’ll teach you.”
Tomorrow came. Following his instructions, I turned a shelf’s worth of books around. The titles meant nothing to me, but I liked them. The professor had not arranged his books by author’s name but by title. He had a notebook, likewise all white, in which he had listed all the authors and titles. For example:
Zhuanzi, The Inner Chapters
Simone Weil, Awaiting God
Alain, Twenty Lessons on the Fine Arts
Husserl, The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy
Kant, Treatise on Education
Althusser, The Solitude of Machiavelli
d’Alembert, Conversation between Descartes and Christina of Sweden
Anaximander, Fragments
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The professor had me learn the titles by heart. Every day I learned a new title and a new author. Every evening, when I went back to his house, I would recite them to him. And at the end of each week he would get me to recite all the titles and authors of the past seven days. When I went by after school he would have replaced all the books, back to front, on his shelves.
Although at the outset he had me recite authors and titles in this way, little by little he began to call them out himself, and I was expected to find specific books in their places against the wall solely from their fore-edges.
I was a quick study. The professor was very pleased. He told me that I too would become a philosopher. One morning he directed me to the tenth shelf:
“Get me Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.”
I scrutinized the white fore-edges of the books on the tenth shelf and gently removed the work from the middle of the rank without making a mistake. The author was Fontenelle. But the professor was already on to his next command, as if playing a game:
“Fourier, The Straying of Reason, as Exemplified by the Absurdities of the Inexact Sciences.”
The book was on the third shelf. I knew this. Its fore-edge was yellower than that of its neighbors. It was not cheating to have noted the fact. I took the work out and brought it to the professor. Sometimes I thought he was insane.
Two years passed. I now had the entire library in my head. I could reel off its contents and was well acquainted with its topology. The whites of the books’ pages were not all of the same shade. For instance, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, by Friedrich Engels, had a bright white fore-edge and pages as thick as blotting paper. Nearby was Epictetus’s celebrated Manual for Living, its pages yellow, thin and tight. As for Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, it had pages of a white well-nigh gray.
When it came to the white, creamy, or yellowed shading of the pages, I was
like an Eskimo. To me no two whites were the same. I have read that the Inuit have forty or so different words for snow.
The professor made me create sentences out of book titles. Then poems, by linking these sentences together. I came to look on each book’s fore-edge as a line in a poem.
I noticed that between every fourteenth and fifteenth volume on his shelves the professor had slipped a sheet of paper. He told me that fourteen was the number of lines in a sonnet. So I learnt what a sonnet was, and soon I was reciting Gérard de Nerval’s “El Desdichado” every day. By this time I no longer needed to pull books out to know their titles, and I was able to recite titles as poems without hesitation.
Reading blind from the fore-edges aligned on the first shelf produced the following poem:
On the Unity of the Divine Trinity (Abelard)
Is a Book on The Licit and the Illicit (Al Ghazali)
And the Allegory of Poets (d’Alembert)
Is always an Unpublished Text (Alain de Lille)
Like the Book of Flowers (Sakurazawa-Ohsawa)
On the Way to Language (Heidegger)
Is a Science of Logic (Hegel)
Or An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Fichte)
On the Spirit of Humanity (Von Humboldt)
Is The Art of Social Life (Lalo)
It is also a Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (La Boétie)
The Instrumental Nightingale (Ledu)
Proclaims a Reform of Dynamics (Leibniz)
With reference to The Question of Truth (Aquinas)
Now I knew the whole list of the books in the library – in order and according to shelf. Before school each morning the professor trained me like an athlete. He would call out the title of a work for me to find and immediately I would climb the stepladder and find it straight away. I had become as good at this as the professor himself.
