Mayra Montero, writer: “My night with Bobby Fischer was lucky, not a rape” | Culture

Mayra Montero is a master of quality erotic novels that have earned her important awards. But this time he has put on the table a personal story that delves into the intimacy he shared with Bobby Fischer in 1966, when he went to the hotel where the chess player was staying in Havana in search of an autograph and ended up in his arms. She was 14 years old. He, 23. The author, born in Cuba 72 years ago, narrates it in The afternoon Bobby Fischer didn’t come down to play (Tusquets), a story of love and pain that does not judge, but borders and challenges the scaffolding that today delimits consent. And a portrait of a turbulent country surrendered to chess.

Ask. It has taken him more than fifty years to tell this story. Because right now?

Answer. Although I was not aware, today I see that I had to expect certain conditions in my life: that I was old, widowed and orphaned. These are very hard pages because my mother went crazy and until she died I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have been able to do it with my husband alive either, but he died 11 years ago. It is one thing to write erotic novels that for him were invented and fun, even if you take episodes from real life, and another to write about a man you loved, even if it was a platonic love after a one-night relationship. It has been a very painful novel on the family side because I had a very sad adolescence, my mother was not doing well. But the happy part of the novel was remembering that time.

Q. What was Bobby Fischer like? Rude, crazy, charming?

R. It was a boy who looked my age, although he was 22 or 23 years old. He was like a child. The 15- and 16-year-olds I hung out with were more mature than him. He was strange, very strange, but affectionate at the same time, lacking in affection. I remember it with great tenderness. I know they will criticize me a lot because it is a novel against the grain of current demands. It is a pleasant and positive story of that type of relationship that occurred between a girl and an adult.

Q. This today is called pedophilia.

R. He would have gone to prison! And me too because it was a crime to go into a gringo’s room during the chess Olympics. Everything went very fast.

Q. And how would you define what happened? Seduction, infatuation, rape?

R. Yes, seduction, I saw what happened very naturally. I never felt violence. That’s why I say it’s a novel against the grain. It was very natural. “Do you want an ice cream?”, he told me she. “Yes, pineapple glaze…” I asked, because it seemed to me that I was more interesting that way. And he kissed me and I thought, how cute he is. It didn’t seem to me like a case of abuse, of rape, in which the guy always seems disgusting to you and is forcing himself on you. No. I was dazzled by that beautiful boy, he was beautiful, and so different from all the little Cubans I knew. It was like God had fallen on me from the sky. And this is how I remember: How lucky I am!

Q. You define it as consented. But to what extent does a 14-year-old girl consent?

R. Perhaps today it is thought that I could not consent because he was older.

Q. And an authority. You were a fan.

R. But it was not a position of power because I was not a chess player, I did not see it that way. I saw him, that beautiful blond boy, I said to myself: I want to see him, I want to know him. I do not know what to tell you. My cousin got married at 15. My grandmother’s sister got married at 13. I was happy, really. Did I consent, did I not consent? In that context of those years one did not consider that. For me it was having been with a boy, not with an old, slimy abuser who gropes you, who traps you.

Q. He also fell in love. But he never contacted.

R. He didn’t have my name or my address. We met the next day, but they locked me in after spending the night outside and I couldn’t see him. It was a great shame and then he left.

Q. How did your career continue and also its drift, its imbalance?

R. At first I did follow it, then not so much. Later I found out that he was in bad shape, so upset, he didn’t even want his teeth fixed because he thought they were going to put a microphone on him, he had a very sad life.

Q. Did you try to get in touch afterwards?

R. I didn’t even have a place. He was imprisoned in Japan, they took him out and Iceland took him in, they went to look for him on a private plane. He came like a baby, already old, finished. He was not old, but prison had killed him. And he came singing We are the people.

Q. The first thing he said to you was: Do the Russians send you?

R. He had that obsession. We were in the middle of the Cold War and his main opponents were Russians. He later became obsessed with Jews, despite being Jewish on both his father’s and mother’s sides. It was part of his severe mental disorder.

Q. He was anti-Semitic.

R. It was very anti-Semitic. The climax of his delirium is that he celebrated the attack on the Twin Towers and there they completely closed his possibility of returning to the United States. He gave a lot of glory to his country, but he could not even go to the funerals of his mother or his sister.

Q. What is chess for you?

R. My father taught me, but I was never consistent. It is a very great process of abstraction and imagination and requires being very, very creative. Fischer was a genius, definitely. He told me that he watched the plays here (points to his head). And he was very good.

Q. Is your most personal book, the most difficult?

R. I don’t know how difficult it is, but it is the most personal, the most painful. It has cost me a lot. It is autobiographical and self-referential. All the books have something of mine, but this one has the most.

Q. You left Cuba many years ago. He’s back?

R. For some time now I have not wanted to return. The situation is chaotic, but since the world is so in turmoil, Cuba has taken a backseat. The exhaust valve is terrible, that’s leaving. And, if everyone leaves, things cannot be fixed.