The Pawn

I think I must have slept about half an hour, in the shade of a mahogany tree, when the crack of a branch woke me. One of the children from the village had come up to the tower and stood there looking at me like a little soldier, dirty and undernourished, but self-possessed. He held out a box he was carrying under his arm and said shyly:

“Don Pablo, could you trade me this for another toy?”

It was a chess set, the only one among the dozens of presents we had handed out at the Christmas party the day before. The boy, with unruly hair and a sharp gaze, must have been about twelve. I had handed him the present myself the day before, thinking that, being one of the bigger ones, he would appreciate the game better than the smaller kids.

“Don’t you like your present?” I asked. “You know, I’d love it if someone gave me a chessboard…”

The boy looked at the colorful box again and shook it like a maraca. When he raised his eyes, I caught a hint of weariness in his face. I imagined that, after a day spent watching from a distance as the other children of the village played with their new balls and toy cars, he must have felt shortchanged with that board of little squares and those odd-shaped little pieces. I felt for him in that moment, but I refused to fall into the prejudice of thinking that a poor child from a remote village in a Third World country can’t appreciate the beauty of the chessboard.

“Do you at least know how it’s played?”

He shook his head, shyly, without looking at me. On the screen of my laptop, I saw the progress bar showing forty-five percent on the configuration of the microwave radio that Jorge and I had installed that morning. “At this rate,” I thought, “it’ll be at least another hour before it finishes configuring.” Knowing I had a good stretch of free time on my hands, I decided to make the world a better place by teaching that wormy little rascal the rules of the immortal game.

“Come here, I’ll teach you,” I said.

Like someone ordered to do his homework, he sat down listlessly across from me. I stretched a little, to finish waking up, and emptied the contents of the box onto the wooden table that Don Felipe, the elementary school teacher, had lent us the day before.

“What’s your name?” I asked him, as I sorted the pieces by color and kind.

“Manuel,” he answered curtly.

“And is that your little sister?” I inquired, pointing to a smaller girl, about seven or eight years old, who had arrived a second earlier, with a soccer ball in her hands and an air of having nothing to do.

“She’s my cousin. Her name is Maria del Carmen, but we call her Mari.”

“All right, both of you pay attention, because I’m going to teach you how to play chess.”

Maria let go of the ball and focused on the board. Manuel repeated his gesture of boredom and followed with his eyes the ball as it rolled lazily to the foot of the tower.

After a brief introduction, in which I mentioned the unknown and ancient origin of the game, I showed the two children how each piece moves: the king, the queen, the bishop, the knight, the rook, and finally the pawn.

“A ‘peón,’ like Papa,” Mari put in, licking off, from the sweat on her upper lip, a bit of snot and dust from the road.

“Yes, a ‘peón’ like your papa,” I answered, though I didn’t know the father. “Pawns are very important in chess,” I added, trying to give my young audience something to connect them to the game.

By the time it came to explaining check, checkmate, and draws, Manuel was already climbing the branches of the mahogany with his eyes, looking for some iguana hidden among the leaves. Mari, by contrast, stayed absorbed even through the dry explanation of capturing en passant and of castling long and short.

“Well… those are all the rules of the game, Manuel. Now you can go back to the village and teach them to some friend your age, so the two of you can play your first game. How about that?”

Manuel, hearing his name, took a few seconds to reconnect with the conversation at the table, and sat thinking in silence, stealing short glances at the soccer ball.

“Don’t you have another ball left?” he asked me, almost begging me to release him from that penance.

“Manue, take mine and I’ll keep the chest1…” Maria proposed, to my surprise.

The girl hadn’t finished speaking when Manuel had already grabbed the ball and taken off running back toward the village, saying goodbye with a long shout of “See you, Don Paaablooo…”

I looked at Maria del Carmen with some skepticism. Given that she had gotten a ball in the distribution, it wasn’t very likely that she would regret having made that trade. But deep down I thought that maybe we should have given the poor girl a doll in the first place. I was lost in those thoughts when Jorge appeared, with a bunch of green coconuts and a machete.

“I’ve got winner!2” he shouted, laughing.

“If you want, we can play a game right now,” I answered, “because my pupil ran off on me.”

Jorge opened three coconuts, poured the water into our canteens and into a glass for the girl, and sat down in front of the board. Against my king’s pawn opening, Jorge chose a line of the Sicilian, the Hyper-Accelerated Dragon, which he had learned from a book and had been polishing for months. Jorge and I played chess regularly, and we knew each other’s tricks. On our field trips, installing microwave antennas to bring Internet to schools in remote corners of the country, we had time to spare for long and virulent games. We had hammered away at3 this opening line many times before, so the first moves were quick. But as we entered the battle, a slower rhythm took hold of the game.

To my disappointment, the first one ended in a draw by perpetual check somewhere around move thirty-something. I would have preferred a checkmate, so that Maria, who had gazed at the board in silence for the half hour the game lasted, might witness a bit of blood to stir up her interest.

We switched colors and started a new game. To my delight, I won this one convincingly: an Open Ruy López that flowed into an aggressive attack on Jorge’s kingside, with a very interesting endgame in which Jorge’s king couldn’t stop the advance of two of my pawns. Defeated, Jorge stood up and shook my hand:

“Good game,” he said. “I’m off to see a man about a horse4 and to split some more coconuts, to flush out the kidneys. Now it’s your turn to play, sweetie,” he added, giving Maria the seat. “Loser stands up, and whoever’s got winner sits down.”

Maria sat down across from me, with the black pieces, since as the winner I was entitled to White.

“Do you want to play?” I asked her. Maria shrugged and nodded modestly. “Let’s have you play your first game. I’ll refresh the rules for you if you don’t remember. And go at it without fear, for you learn to play by playing…”

I opened with the king’s pawn, and Maria answered with the Sicilian. “Very good,” I thought, “she’s imitating Jorge’s moves.” For the first ten turns, to my surprise, she kept repeating one by one the moves Jorge had made in the previous game, all in the main line of the Hyper-Accelerated Dragon. “The girl has a very good memory,” I told myself, “that’s good. But I want her to think for herself, so she learns to play.” So I decided to leave the line, and made a different move from the one I had used against Jorge, who had already come back from peeing and had brought a new round of coconut water.

“Are you analyzing the last game?” Jorge asked.

“No, it’s a new game,” I answered.

Jorge raised his eyebrows and came closer to the board.

“Going off-book5, are you?” he inquired.

“To force this little parrot to stop repeating your moves and play on her own.”

Indifferent to my caustic remark, Maria replied at once with an aggressive move.

“That’s not how you should play, Mari,” I told her, seizing the chance to give her a lesson about the game. “You have to think your moves through before you make them, because chess is a game of thought.”

“But look, it’s not a bad move,” Jorge pointed out, after analyzing it in silence.

To my reply, which took me about two minutes, Maria again answered quickly, and so on for several more moves, until my position began to look less promising than my young opponent’s. Jorge started to laugh:

“Careful there, this little kid’s no pushover6!” Jorge fired off, pulling out a notebook. “Let me write these moves down. How long ago did you teach her to play?”

Maria stood up suddenly.

“I’m going to see a man about a horse.”

In her absence, Jorge and I discussed the position and agreed that Maria was in a perfectly solid position, while my king was starting to get more attention than it should from the opposing pieces. The two of us discussed—not very ethically—what my best reply would be at that juncture.

When Maria came back, I played that move on the board. The girl riposted right away:

“Check.”

Indeed. A discovered check which, at first glance, seemed to carry no great venom. I replied.

“Check,” my opponent repeated, after moving quickly, in the same cold voice as the first time.

At this point Jorge and I leaned in closer to the board, and then looked at each other in silence. A king hunt was slowly taking shape. I moved. Maria checked me again, capturing my knight at the same time. From there on, a cascade of checks forced my king from its corner to the middle of the board, where a bishop and a rook of Maria del Carmen’s finished it off neatly.

“Checkmake,” said the girl.

Jorge threw himself on the ground in a fit of laughter. I got up from the board, covering my mouth with both hands.

“It’s checkmate, not checkmake,” Jorge corrected, nearly choking with laughter.

“Don’t laugh, it’s your turn now…” Maria del Carmen pronounced, pointing at Jorge with her small dirty finger, wet with coconut water.

---

The teacher, Don Felipe, brought us a tray with three glasses of guarapo7 and half a dozen corn rolls. He shook out his right hand, possibly to relax his wrist, after spending the whole morning taking notes on how to use the Internet connection on the little school’s new computer. We created email accounts for the teacher and for each of the students on the honor roll. In a small seminar, we taught them how to look up basic information on Google.

In keeping with his tradition, Jorge—who is as brazen as they come—gave the village teacher a separate session, to teach him how to find interesting photographs of scantily clad belles, “when the computer was idle.” With the utmost seriousness on his face, Jorge assured me that this gave the teachers a personal incentive to keep the Internet connection working well, “which benefits the project in the long run.”

Be that as it may, the connection to the network was an important event, because for the first time the Francisco Gutiérrez Elementary School would have a cyber-window onto the world around it. The project for the microwave antenna and the computer had been financed with an aid package from a foreign government. But the Christmas party, held at the same time as the installation of the equipment, and its respective presents had come courtesy of the sitting legislator, who with that selfless gesture was slyly looking to attach his name to the occasion, trusting that the voters of Llanos de Mensabé would remember him in the following year’s elections.

Before we left, I had wanted to talk with Don Felipe about the events of the day before. I told him about the incident under the mahogany, about how Maria del Carmen, his second-grade student, had learned to play chess in a matter of minutes, and had beaten us at will in a dozen games in a row. The teacher, who understood only partly what this meant, was trying to find an explanation for the phenomenon.

“Couldn’t it be that this rascal,” he said, pointing at Jorge, “was feeding her the moves8?”

“No way! Jorge doesn’t play as well as that girl. I had never seen anything like it,” I answered.

“And I suppose twelve games won one after the other can’t be a coincidence…”

“Never,” Jorge put in. “It would be like winning all three prizes of the special lottery drawing9 twelve times in a row, with a single ticket in each drawing. It’s impossible!”

The teacher fell silent. He sipped the guarapo from the aluminum glass and looked out through the open door. In the village square, in front of the faded church, the children were playing with Manuel’s ball, Maria del Carmen among them, in a dirty, sweaty pink dress.

“Well, Mari is a very quiet student. She hasn’t shown in class an intelligence superior, let’s say, to the other children her age. She’s average in many ways.”

“It could be a specific talent for chess. There have been such cases,” Jorge answered. “There’s Capablanca, Reshevsky, Fischer, Carlsen…”

“But I don’t think any of them was that good at such an early age,” I noted. “Seven years old? Good Lord.”

“And the girl plays very well, you say?” the teacher asked, still incredulous.

“It’s not that she plays well, Don Felipe, it’s that she plays perfectly. Look, Jorge and I took turns writing down the moves of every one of the games. Jorge has a program that analyzes chess moves, and last night he set the computer to studying Maria’s moves. The program shows that the girl didn’t make a single mistake in twelve games. Three hundred perfect moves, one after another. Not even Capablanca, the most talented player in the history of the game, was this good at this age. Maria could be a case without precedent.”

The teacher kept silent. The magnitude of our message had only begun to settle into his brain.

“I know nothing about chess,” he said at last. “I don’t know what value or what future an ability like this can have. What do you think we should do about it?”

Jorge and I kept silent. The question caught us off guard, since we were in Llanos de Mensabé as government contractors for the antenna project, not as representatives of the Ministry of Education. But it was easy to understand what the teacher meant: we were revealing to him that one of his pupils had a special gift, and he was overwhelmed by the thought of not helping the girl make the best possible use of it.

“Well,” said Jorge, “I was thinking a lot last night. I could hardly sleep. I’d never seen anything like this. I thought of the National Tournament, which is next month, but I don’t know if registration is still open. If not, there are international open tournaments, where the prizes run to thousands of dollars, but I don’t know if kids that small can take part. I’d have to find out…”

“What Jorge means,” I told the teacher, interrupting Jorge, “is that this can change Maria’s life, and her family’s. It goes far beyond a national or international tournament. It’s a chance for Maria to get ahead, to make a name for herself in the world, to help her brothers and sisters get an education… Apart from the prizes, she could receive scholarships to attend a good school, and then a good university abroad. If what happened yesterday wasn’t an anomaly but the result of her talent, there’s no limit to what Maria can achieve with the board.”

---

The line rang five or six times before anyone answered. On the other end, the rough, deep voice told me that Fulgencio had surely been sleeping off a hangover10 when the phone woke him.

“Master Fulgenciov,” I said, distorting his name in the manner typical of our greetings. “I have a surprise for you that’s going to knock your socks off.”

“Who is this? Master Pablov11?”

The master was just affection, because I was barely a Class A player. Fulgencio, however, did hold the title of International Master of chess, one of the few in Panama who had managed to reach that level, a step above National Master.

“Bro, I found you the first Panamanian grandmaster. It’s a girl. I’m going to bring her to you at the club. When are you going to be around?”

“The first what? What do you mean you found one? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Pablo, but if you want to come to the birria12, this afternoon the kids and I are going to be training for the National. You can come by the club if you want.”

The “kids” were the National Chess Team, who—just as I expected—were training for the National Championship, with Fulgencio as coach. At the same time as the open section—made up almost exclusively of adult men—championships would be held in the children’s and junior sections.

We got to the club early, half an hour before the official practice time. I wanted to talk with Fulgencio before the other members of the team arrived. Besides, I wanted Maria del Carmen and her mother to get used to the place, and to the noisy, disorderly atmosphere of the club. For mother and daughter, it was the first time they had visited the capital, and in fact the first time they had left Llanos de Mensabé.

Doña Alicia, Maria del Carmen’s mother, sat in silence on a chair in a corner, with her handbag on her lap. She was a thin, quiet woman, not very tall, aged prematurely by the hard work of country life. Maria del Carmen went around with a bag of cheese puffs, her fingers stained yellow, walking through the club, looking at everything.

“I’ve brought you someone for you to register in the open section of the National Championship,” I told Fulgencio.

“Who? The girl? But Master Pablov, that’s what the girls’ section is for. There she can compete with other girls. She’s very little… does she know how to play yet?”

Fulgencio looked at Maria del Carmen, who was grudgingly letting her fingers be wiped with a damp towel her mother had brought. Then he looked at me and said:

“Better next year. I’ll let you know in time so that…”

“Fulgencio,” I interrupted him, “I want to make you a proposal. Play a game with the girl. If you beat her, I’ll give you a thousand dollars.”

“Ha! Master Pablov feels like losing money today,” Fulgencio replied, laughing boisterously, his face flushed.

Fulgencio was always short of money. Several times in the past I’d had to lend him some in a pinch to pay child support for some of the children he had scattered around the world. The last count I knew of was six children by three different women. His salary as a physical education teacher wasn’t enough even for the three he had at home. So I knew that tempting him with money was a sure way to get him to accept the absurd challenge I was proposing.

“But if the girl beats you, I want you yourself to register her in the open section of the National Championship. Agreed?”

“Look, practice starts in twenty minutes, so I’ll play along, but it has to be a quick one, ten minutes a side.”

I called Maria del Carmen over and sat her in front of a board. I had to convince the mother to let the girl stand on the seat, to see better.

“These pieces are bigger,” Maria remarked. Then, looking at Fulgencio, she asked him, “Do you play chest too?”

Fulgencio, who was setting up the pieces on the board and adjusting the clock to ten minutes for each player, just smiled. He gave Maria the white pieces, to give her the advantage of the first move.

“The gentleman is a chess master, Maria,” I answered her.

I turned the board around to give White to Fulgencio, who looked at me with a “suit yourself” expression, and opened by moving his king’s bishop’s pawn one square. Maria, who had never seen this opening, since neither Jorge nor I play it, considering it inferior, responded with aplomb and in her characteristic quick style.

“When you move, you have to press the button on the clock, Maria,” I told her.

With her little hand, still stained with yellow cheese, Maria gave a tap to the black button, which sank down and set her opponent’s time running. Fulgencio, partly from being used to playing fast at the club, and partly to impress the girl, also replied quickly, without thinking. He kept jiggling his right thigh insistently, one hand on his cheek. So went the first ten moves, Fulgencio stealing short glances at the girl, and Maria completely focused on the board.

Around move fifteen, Fulgencio tried a premature attack on the queenside, which the girl punished by capturing a pawn. Fulgencio, vexed, sucked his lip and looked at me.

“Let’s see, Pablo, where’s the trick? Are you feeding her the moves? What have you got there in your hand, a computer?”

I showed Fulgencio what I had in my hand: an innocent paper notebook, in which I was writing down the game.

“Play,” I snapped at him.

Fulgencio went back to the game, and thought for a long while. After a pause, he tried a combination to win back the pawn. But Maria refuted it quickly, winning a piece a few moves later. Fulgencio’s clock at this point showed he had only two minutes left, while Maria del Carmen’s still had nine of the ten available minutes.

“Where did you get this girl?” Fulgencio asked me.

“From a little village you’ve never heard of in your life, compadre.”

Fulgencio fought on for about fifteen more moves, standing up to see the board better. In the end, a rook up, Maria del Carmen was threatening a quick back-rank mate against the white king. At this point, Fulgencio knocked it over, signaling that he resigned. There was almost no time left on his clock, and in any case the mate was imminent. Maria del Carmen stood up and held out her hand:

“Good game,” she said.

Fulgencio carefully shook the delicate little hand, with an expression of astonishment on his face, as if he had witnessed the raising of Lazarus. Around the table were some fifteen people who had come for practice and stood spellbound by the spectacle of the third-best player in the country being beaten by a seven-year-old girl with cheese-puff-stained fingers and snot in her nostrils.

“Master Pablov, I think you’re pulling my leg,” Fulgencio told me. “Somehow you were telling the girl what to play. I don’t know how you did it, but it’s the only explanation.”

“I swear to you I wasn’t.”

“But it’s just… well. We’ll see,” he said, laughing.

“Remember what you promised me,” I insisted.

“Yes, but that was before I knew you were going to cheat,” he said, with a note of doubt, looking at the girl out of the corner of his eye.

“Fulgencio, this is real. The girl played on her own…”

Without a word, the master set up sixteen boards, four on each of as many tables in the club’s main hall. Then he instructed the eight best members of the open section and the eight best players of the adult women’s section, who had already arrived for practice, to sit on the white side of each board.

“Illustrious young people,” Fulgencio announced, “this gentleman here is my friend, the engineer Pablo Escudero. I’m convinced Pablo is trying to play me for a fool. He’s brought a little girl from the back of beyond and says he taught her to play chess. You saw the thrashing they just gave me, and I’m going to find out how he’s doing it. So we’re going to hold a simul: the open team on this side, the women’s team on this other one. You take White. Set your clocks to one hour and the opposing clock to ten minutes.”

Fulgencio stared at me. Such adverse conditions are unheard of in a simul. The idea of a simul is for a master to play against multiple weaker players at once. Traditionally, the master gets White, and the clocks show at least equal time for both sides. But Fulgencio was doing everything backwards: national masters would play against a girl who had learned the moves less than two weeks earlier, where the side considered weaker got the black pieces and barely a sixth of the time on the clock.

Quelling the protests of some players who saw the conditions as an injustice, and of others who thought the whole business was a waste of time, Fulgencio started all the clocks and ordered:

“Play. If Pablo and the girl are cheating with a computer, the trick is going to fail them in a simul. And you,” he added, looking at me, “you stand next to me, with your hands behind your back.”

I realized that Fulgencio was, at one and the same time, affronted by the defeat and amazed by what he thought was a trick, and he didn’t want to let me “get away with it.”

“And if the girl wins again?” I asked.

A flutter of laughter ran through the hall. Knowing Fulgencio, he must have thought: “If the girl wins, I’ll cut my balls off.” But he answered me:

“If she wins every game, I’ll pay for her plane ticket to the Zonal in Guatemala myself,” he replied. “The clock is running…”

I looked at Maria del Carmen, who was polishing off a third bag of cheese puffs.

“What does simul mean?” she asked me.

“It means you’re going to play against all of them at the same time. You have to remember to press the clock when you move, because the clock is running.”

Maria walked up to the first of the boards. The white side had already made its first move: queen’s pawn. Maria moved and pressed the clock button. The black plastic circle was left smudged with little yellow crumbs. She took three steps to the right, glanced at the second board, which showed an English Opening, moved and pressed the clock. And so, in circles, she kept walking and moving on the instant, in a dazzling display of veni, vidi, vici for several hours, under Fulgencio’s voracious, fascinated gaze.

---

I finished tightening the last nut on the microwave dish, and put the wrench in my belt. I gave the dish a gentle shake, to check that it was firmly attached to the tower. As I was about to climb down, the cell phone rang.

“Pablo Escudero?”

“Speaking,” I answered.

“This is Jacinto Solís, Minister of the Presidency.”

After a few seconds of silence, I answered:

“Tell me, Minister, what can I do for you?”

“Do you know Mr. Fulgencio Correa?”

“Yes, I’ve known him for a long time.”

“Do you know Maria del Carmen Ochoa?”

“Yes, I met her a year ago. Is something wrong, Minister?”

“You tell me. Is it true that you taught Maria del Carmen to play chess?”

“Well…” I answered, “I taught her how to move the pieces.”

An uncomfortable silence took over the next few seconds.

“Do you have anything to tell me about the girl’s style of play?” the minister asked.

“Well, that it’s perfect, I’d say. As far as I know, she has never lost a single game.”

“Not a single game, indeed,” the minister interrupted. “The girl came through the Continental Championship undefeated, and qualified first in the Candidates Tournament, without losing a single game. Now she’s considered the favorite for the World Championship.”

I knew all this, since it was in every newspaper in the country. I didn’t know what to answer.

“Don’t you find anything odd in this?” the minister inquired.

“Well, it’s something unique, Minister, something without precedent.”

“Tell that to Veselin Topalov’s agent. The Bulgarian Chess Federation has lodged an official protest against the Panamanian Federation, arguing that Maria del Carmen was assisted by a remote computer during her game against the Bulgarian champion.”

“But that’s ridiculous. Besides, Maria del Carmen plays better than any computer.”

“Yesterday afternoon, the girl was subjected to a rigorous MRI examination, looking for electrodes, earpieces, or other foreign objects that might have been installed in her body to assist her with the game.”

“Of course they found nothing,” I said, getting ahead of him.

“Nothing. She’s clean. And very healthy, it seems.”

After saying that, the voice on the other end of the phone fell silent.

“Are you calling me about something in particular, Minister?”

“The president is making preparations. Maria del Carmen hasn’t lost a single game so far, even against the strongest players in the world. I know nothing about chess, but I’ve read expert reports saying that, if she keeps up that level of play, the World Championship will be hers. Do you know what that means?”

“I think so.”

“It means the first Panamanian world chess champion. It means the first woman to win the open World Championship. It means the first player to be crowned world champion without even finishing fucking elementary school. That’s what it means! Do you understand me?”

“I understand you perfectly. It’s something very big for the country.”

“And the president is going to be there, in the front row, next to the girl. There’ll be events, there’ll be speeches, there’ll be cameras. If the girl is cheating, tell me now, Mr. Escudero, before the president makes a fool of himself.”

“I assure you… more than that, I swear on my sainted mother’s life, that Maria del Carmen has never been assisted by anything or anyone, and that every game she wins, she wins by herself.”

I heard a sigh of relief in the earpiece.

“That’s what I wanted to hear.”

Another long pause followed his remark.

“Well, Mr. Escudero, I won’t take up any more of your time.”

“Always at your service, Minister.”

“One more thing…” he added. “Thank you for finding Maria del Carmen.”

“Thank you all for supporting her.”

After a brief click, the line went silent. I put the cell phone in my belt and, gripping the tower hard with both hands, as if embracing the iron structure, I breathed deeply and reflected for a long while. Then I raised my eyes and looked toward the horizon. The tower stood on a hill, at a high spot called Los Búhos. To the south, the Pacific opened out, infinite and hazy, a sad, undecided blue. To the north, the virgin forest, a deep green, dense as far as the eye could see. At the foot of the tower, Jorge was taking a nap on a camp cot, covering his eyes with a pillow.

Half a kilometer below, at the foot of the hill, I made out the figures of three men. I had seen them go by that morning, in their heavy cotton work pants and their coarse cotton shirts, with their sharpened machetes and their totuma13 full of cool water from the creek. Shouting their salomas14, fierce with the garabato15 and the machete, the three peons were dispatching the weeds of a pasture under the merciless midday sun.

I thought about Maria del Carmen, and about how her life would soon change forever. She would have the world at her feet. And yet, there would be accusations against her, which only time could clear away, vindicating her name. I thought about her innocence and her talent, both without limit. And I had my doubts. Had Jorge and I done the right thing by talking to the schoolteacher and revealing Maria del Carmen’s talent to him? Wouldn’t it have been better to leave her in peace, a dove lost in the wilds, living her life as a girl, and later as a country wife and mother in Llanos de Mensabé?

I thought about her father, a rustic, humble peon, getting up at dawn to go to the pasture to clear brush, keeping his energy up with chunks of panela and long swigs of cool water. I thought about her mother, Alicia, aged by the labor of the poor, washing clothes in the creek, cooking sweet corn tortillas on the flat clay over the fire, with the children clinging to her dry breasts, her gaze lost in the mud-and-cane house. I thought about myself, at the top of that tower, working from sunup to sundown, every day, Sundays and holidays, earning my living.

“We are all pawns in this game,” was the phrase that came to my mind. Maria del Carmen was one too. “This is our fate.” Contemplating the trio of peons out in the brush, I took comfort in thinking that Mari might at least now get to be the queen on the board of her life.