a small player on the big geopolitical chessboard

“Le Pion” (El peon), by Paco Cerda, translated from Spanish by Marielle Leroy, La Contre Allée, 360 p., €23.50, digital €17.

In Spain, he was nicknamed the “Mozart of chess”. He was a child prodigy capable, very early on, of defeating the greatest. Born into a modest family in Majorca (Balearic Islands), Arturo Pomar (1931-2016), known as “Arturito”, caused a sensation at the age of 12, standing up to the Russian world champion Alexandre Alekhine. In 1962, he became the first Spaniard to achieve the title of international grandmaster before diving into the rankings and devoting himself to his work as a postman. But he was above all, during his youth, and reluctantly, one of the best ambassadors of the Franco dictatorship, which brandished him like a standard.

In The pawnhis second book translated after The Quixote (La Contre Allée, 2021), journalist and writer Paco Cerda works to rehabilitate the forgotten figure of this exceptional player, but without opting for a simple biography. Indeed, he shares with the filmmaker François Truffaut the conviction that such an exercise “is an oxymoron: there is nothing further from life than the symbolic and theoretical depths that one reaches on a chessboard”. Moreover, the fascination exercised by chess players is often commensurate with the disappointment engendered by the banality of their lives. This is why Cerda retraces that of “Arturito” by approaching it as a pawn of history, “the icon of a country without sporting icons, the hero of the propagandist epic of a society installed in mediocre and tasteless prose”. A being who, as soon as his glory faded, saw Franco’s power abandon him to his fate.

In this fascinating non-fiction novel, Paco Cerda gets as close as possible to his protagonist. He tactfully underlines his fragility as a former adored child, his loneliness, his depression… But his find consists in staging him in front of the one he considers to be another pawn: the legendary Bobby Fisher (1943-2008)who was also exhibited as a symbol of power by the United States, when, against the backdrop of the Cold War, in 1972, he stole the title of world champion from the Russian Boris Spassky.

The year of all dangers

Recalling in passing the route, much more bumpy, of the hero of Brooklyn – who sank into conspiratorial and anti-Semitic frenzies –, Cerda retraces the game which opposed Pomar to Fischer, in Stockholm, in 1962 (and which the second won). If this meeting was not as mediatised as the famous “game of the century” American-Russian, the writer makes it breathless and symbolic in more ways than one. Firstly because it opposes two men with opposite personalities: one, discreet and almost at the height of his career, the other, flamboyant and on the rise. Then, because it took place during the peak year of the Cold War, when the cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

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