The Gringo Killer

We had already stumbled into the third bar of our day drunk tour through Buenos Aires before I realized that I didn't rightly know where we were. My companion and I had set out to the drifting strains of a milonga but the neighborhood our feet had found wasn't familiar. Spilling ourselves onto the street and buoyed by the immutable flow of Argentine enthusiasm, we chose a direction and chased it until it rounded a corner. We stopped in the middle of another nowhere, then swayed like worried fire into the nearest building that seemed to welcome the public.

The building was large and old, with the air of a former dignity. Climbing the staircase, I noticed portraits hanging on the walls with names beneath. The last one I recognized. It was a picture of a man with a scrunched brow and hunched back leaning over a chess board. The plate under it read "Bobby Fischer, 1971".

A woman burst into my view from the left. She was a vision of eclecticism: half sweater and glasses, half tattoo ink and cigarette stained fingertips. She blasted me with the roughshod rhythm of the Argentine accent until my blank stare and tangled Spanglish prompted an eye roll and a switch to English.

Her name was Gabriela, and despite the fact that she was likely older than our combined ages, she captivated us both. She introduced us to the Buenos Aires Chess Club, home to sets and positions immortalized by Bobby Fischer and Miguel Najdorf, the national chess hero. Despite her pretenses of annoyance, she delighted in slowly revealing that she knew everything in the entire world.

"That's Capablanca. He started as a star of his university chess team, but his scholarship was for baseball. These are the Polgar sisters, the greatest female players in history. They were actually raised as an experiment."

As she taught us the names of tactics and openings, I felt like I could lift out of my body. I had learned to play chess as a boy, shuffling pieces about the board trying to outwit my father, but this was new. Gabriela embodied a passion not just for the game, but for the mind that played it. She pulled us through the historic club and its stories, a charming flurry gesticulating wildly. We stayed hypnotized by her until the sun had gone down and the streets began to fill with the nocturnal porteños. In an afternoon, she made me a lifelong fan of the game and defined the spirit of her city in her classic Argentine ardor.

She left us stunned and mated. She played a brilliancy.