Mayra Montero He met Bobby Fischer when the famous American chess player visited Havana to play in a tournament. She was 14 and he was 22, and they fell in love. That story, which the novelist and journalist living in Puerto Rico had kept to herself, is the germ of The afternoon Bobby didn’t come down to play, the work in which he digs into his memories before leaving Havana at the age of 17. With her we talked about this fascinating story, the life adventures of Bobby Fischer and she recommends books to recover our memory and the past.
Video: interview and recommended books by Mayra Montero
Mayra Montero: interview and recommended books
“I had saved Bobby in my memory, as someone said the other day, memory has many traps,” explains Mayra Montero. In order for her to tell it she had to pass time, and some conditions. Three, specifically: “The first, that I was already older. The second, that she was a widow, because with a husband she could not have told that love story that lasts over time. And the third, that she was an orphan, because it is a very hard novel about mother-child relationships and the relationship with my mother. I have written erotic novels, one was a finalist for The Vertical Smile, but when I wrote erotic novels no one felt very addressed, but this is a very self-referential, autobiographical novel,” she points out.
The afternoon that Bobby didn’t come down to play is written in two parts. The first, “in 1956, when Bobby Fischer traveled as a child, at the age of 12, to Havana, on the first trip he made outside the United States,” explains Montero. “He travels with his mother and with a series of very good, but very problematic chess players. One was a Nazi, another had been imprisoned… he traveled with that entire catastrophic tribe to Havana and that is the story that has a bit of fiction. Not entirely, because there are real characters: Bobby, the mother, the chess players, a watchmaker who falls in love with Fischer’s mother… The other part is in 1966, when the World Chess Olympiad is held in Havana. And what happens is totally real.”
The afternoon Bobby didn’t come down to play
Mayra Montero
Tusquets Editores SA
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That part is the one that tells of his meeting with the precocious chess player. “The watchmaker told a group of girls who knew we were asking artists for autographs: ‘If you get me a Fischer autograph for this board, I’ll give you a Beatles record,’ which was then prohibited in Cuba. We went crazy, but I was the weakest, a bit the most self-conscious of the group. And I’m the one they choose to get into that mess, because going to the hotel to look for an American could get me into serious trouble with the government. They tell me: ‘Go, you know English.’ There is a journalist who was really responsible, he was the one who took me to the room and told me ‘wait for him here’. Fischer had not come down to play because he was observing the Sabbath of his Jewish religion, which he later renounced.
Bobby Fischer’s Drift
Since that meeting, Montero establishes a relationship, then at a distance, with a Fischer who was just beginning his troubled experience. In fact, the novel begins with him in Iceland, in very poor health and ignored by almost everyone. “Nothing was known about Fischer after playing in Yugoslavia, because the American government had prohibited him from playing there,” Montero recalls. “He received a telegram about the Balkan war, but he tore it up and spat on it. He played and was banned from entering the United States. He was wandering the world. He went to Japan and, when he went to leave Japan with an expired American passport, he was detained and taken to jail. He is there for eight months. There is a great global movement to get it out. The president of the World Chess Federation in Japan marries him, I don’t know if it was a marriage of convenience to see if she could get him out. Nobody wanted to give him asylum. He’s not even in Cuba. Nobody answered him. Only Iceland.”
The Nordic country was his refuge in honor of his past. “In 1972 he had achieved his great triumph there. He really put Iceland on the map, because it was the first chess match broadcast worldwide,” notes the author. “It was a Cold War match, between a Russian and an American, and he won. Iceland then declares him an Icelandic citizen. But he is already very physically deteriorated. He didn’t want to take care of himself. He didn’t want to go to the dentist because he was totally paranoid. Nothing was heard from him after Yugoslavia until the attack on the Twin Towers, which was terrible because he celebrated it. That buried it not only for the government, but for the American people in general. He was forgotten, buried, reviled, hated. He was already very, very deteriorated physically and intellectually. He didn’t play chess, he just read. He read non-stop in Iceland. He would go into a bookstore and spend the day there. He had an apartment because he had a little money, he had some friends there, but he didn’t want to take care of himself. He had a terrible mouth, he didn’t want to go to the dentist because I know the Russians were going to put a microphone on him. “He didn’t want anyone to ever accompany him to his apartment so that no one would know where he lived.”
recover the past
Among her more than fifteen novels, The Afternoon that Bobby Didn’t Come Down to Play is the first work in which Mayra Montero remembers the Cuba she left at the age of 17. “I had never talked about Havana from my childhood and my adolescence, ever,” she confesses. “Rescuing that aspect was quite hard, quite painful. We had a very bad time, I had a very eventful childhood, an equally sad adolescence. I had never talked about that, about what happened to us in Cuba before leaving Cuba, about what my mother suffered within our entire bad relationship, what my father suffered, who was a comedian who was censored and punished. And this was the time to tell it.”
Happy childhoods and adolescences do not go at all with literature.
“I had a fairly hard, quite painful childhood, with family problems, and adolescence was also very painful,” he says. “I was telling some friends the other day that happy childhoods and adolescences are not at all related to literature. Maybe I do it to console myself, but there is nothing like complicated childhoods and adolescences to help with literature, because in the first place I took great refuge in reading. Also in Cuba, at that time, there were two television channels. You read and listened to Nocturno, that radio program that gives the title to an episode, which premiered in August 1966, which was an oasis for us. In that sense we had a very different upbringing, I now realize with my Puerto Rican friends, even my Spanish husband. They had a film and music culture that was diametrically opposed to ours. “They didn’t know the wonderful French cinematography of those years, the Italian one, even the Russian one.”
Books to recover memory and the past, recommended by Mayra Montero
A terrible greenery
Benjamin Labatut
Anagrama Editorial
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A writer that I have read with great pleasure is Benjamín Labatut, the Chilean, with A Terrible Greenness, The Stone of Madness, Maniac…
The naked Neanderthal
Ludovic Slimak
DEBATE
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It’s by a French anthropologist, and it’s a banquet. He writes it like a novel. I also have a personal interest: I took one of those DNA tests and they told me: among the fifteen people who have the highest Neanderthal content is you. I was proud but then I said, will that be good or bad? Since then I have been obsessed with Neanderthals. This book is more philosophy than anthropology, it is wonderful.
The boy
Fernando Aramburu and Fernando Aramburu
Tusquets Editores SA
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Aramburu is always a pleasure to read.
