“Battles of a Passion” gives title to a set of ten stories whose generating element is chess; game that appears, in one way or another, in each of these narratives.
But as Jorge Calvo, author of this interesting book, is responsible for warning the reader, these stories do not deal with chess theory and do not investigate matters related to the discipline itself. On the contrary, they are like shrapnel or fragments if you like, they venture into mythical spheres and glimpse hypothetical episodes that have a direct correspondence with literary fiction” (10).
Words found in the prologue, entitled “Chess as a pretext”. And, although Calvo from a very young age is an excellent chess player, it gives us the impression that “pretext” here means not so much a subterfuge to talk about other things, but rather a way of underlining that chess, above all, will be shown as a previous cultural textuality, composed of the real and legendary history of the so-called game of kings.
Cultural textuality that fragmentarily is shown in these stories, in the midst of human passions, individual at times, collective at others. Facts that sometimes come from the real world but, in advance, framed – already from the cover of the book – with the word “stories”; that is, in fiction. So in this book, although there are important pieces of the history and memory of chess, as well as the legendary that surrounds it from its origin, such can be seen in the story “A goddess bestows” (15-18), even if there are here chronicles of triumphs and defeats of famous chess players, including the political and social circumstances that occurred in the scenario in which they moved, in these stories of impeccable invoice predominates, irrevocably, the literary.
Needless to say, as a writer of fictions, Jorge Calvo is far from being a novice, he moves in this field with singular mastery. This can be seen both in the whole of his work and in the workshops where he trains new narrators. Calvo has written novels, such as The Game, in which chess also appears, and his recent Sin ti mi cama es ancha, as well as books of short stories, such as No queda tiempo and Fin de la inocencia, among others.
In this sense, it should be noted that not all narrators manage, as our author does, to dominate both genres with ease because the strategies of these two narrative expressions are different. Novels tend to use a greater digression and, on the contrary, in the story the plot is developed in a more synthetic way and with a more intense tone. The great Julio Cortázar, using a boxer metaphor, said that novels were won by points and stories, on the other hand, by knockout.
Jorge Calvo, in “Battles of a passion”, proves to be a great knockout, but in honor of chess – supposed entry into the e4 technicality of the title, which for most mortals is the pawn game 4 king – we are going to say that these stories our author wins by checkmate. It should be noted that it is never a shepherd mate, simply because Calvo wants his contender, that is, the reader, to enjoy the game enjoying until the end and he gets it because in none of the ten stories the plot and the way of raising it is contaminated with the obvious.
Also championing the surprising endings, more than one that could easily appear in an anthology on this resource; the one that closes “The Revenge of the Sardinians” (61-69), to give an example. The reader is given the pleasure of frustrated expectation in the face of the surprising, something that always carries a significant wealth.
Another aspect worth noting is that in each of these stories the principle that in a story we always find two stories is always fully and with complete naturalness, one that can be more evident and another more submerged than crossing with the first manages to be shown on the surface. Such crosses are what in this book allow these battles to be much more than memorable chess games and end up revealing passionate battles of the game of life in various variants.
The erotic passion and legendary donjuanismo of the only Spanish speaker crowned world chess champion will end up functioning as a trap that will mark the decline that will lead him to lose the crown, in “Without a scepter and with a white cape or, piece touched, piece played” (49-59).
Or the adventures of a famous Soviet chess player and finally deserter from the Régroan, where we are made aware of the causes of this desertion. From the depths of that, another story emerges: that of his childhood, during the war; we learned how he was hungry and cold, to the point of being forced to bury in the snow the corpses of his elders and to live in a sewer with no company other than that of a mouse. In the first story “passion” approaches appetite and vehement fondness for something: greater fame and greater freedom. In the second, “passion” approaches its etymological meaning: to suffer, to suffer, to tolerate. This tale is called “K, the man who jumped” (77-83).
Or the story of Paul Morphy, a child prodigy in the field of chess who, triumphant, at twenty years of age goes from his native country, the United States, to Europe and there, in a café in Paris, he finds a young and talented poet named Arthur Rimbaud, who, despite his arrogance, the first manifestations of an early decadence begin to be noticed. And as if he were infected, Morphy will soon abandon chess, in “Masks of Madness” (19-29).
Among the other successes of this book, it is interesting to highlight the skill with which Jorge Calvo reinforces the narrative pact in each of these stories. It should be remembered that narrative pact is understood as the fact that in fiction we take for granted everything that the narrator tells us.
This is necessary to enter the possible world of fiction and, in general, does not pose any effort, since we are accustomed, from our earliest childhood, to this kind of implicit stipulation. However, often this pact is reinforced in order to guarantee plausibility, using some resource, such as the manuscript found, some other type of documentation, a prestigious testimony, etc.
This reinforcement becomes essential in fictions in which characters and historical facts from the real world appear. Such is the case of “Battles of a passion”, where the imaginary is amalgamated with chess players, championships of this sport, conflagrations and other types of political and social events of different eras recorded by history, chronicle or collective memory.
Jorge Calvo handles this technique close to the way it was used by the master Jorge Luis Borges. Thus, Calvo contaminates with fiction the established truths, whether they come from historiography or implanted by tradition, subordinating them with great ease to the internal logic of his story, since he is aware that the symbolic truth of literature is of a different nature from those of the factual facts and, even, to those of a previous literature, stagnant by conventions.
Thus, in the story “The Jealousy of Odysseus” (31-33) we see Ulysses who is near some soldiers who practice chess, a game that he despises. However, upon hearing a comment on how the pieces move, he comes up with the horse ploy, which we know will give victory to the Achaeans against the Trojans. The story leaves an open ending without referring to this outcome. The last words of this narrative are those of “a modern oracle” and come to Ulysses as a melody. The reader interested in poetry will recognize in them a fragment of the poem Ithaca by Konstantino Kavafis. Magnificent resource; It also leads us to point out, even if in passing, that intertextual games have a letter of nature in many of these stories.
Finally, I would like to dwell on something that is typical of good storybooks, as is the case with the one we have been examining. I refer to the fact that after reading all his stories and getting an overview we discover that there is a powerful semantic axis that crosses them from the first to the last. The presence of a well-structured totality where none of these stories are missing or left over. And, no doubt, this significant axis sustains different manifestations of human passion, of the battles they imply. And from the core of that axis we are manifested the great passion for literature of the narrator Jorge Calvo. All of this, and more, happens in an entertaining, agile, varied, and profound book.
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