Page 29 of Niccolo

I only beat him once all year…

But after I turned 15, I beat him five times. Out of 600 games, butstill.

By the time I was 17, I beat him at least 50% of the time.

When I was admitted to the World Chess Federation as the youngest female Italian grandmaster of all time, I thought Papa might be proud of me. That maybe my being a grandmaster, too, would take the sting out of when I won.

But he just got angrier and more distant. As if my success were somehow his failure.

But he still forced me to play him.

He was an exuberant, sneering prick when he won…

And a cold, silent asshole when he lost.

I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just love me…

But he never did.

And it only got worse with time.

14

You might be asking,Where was your mother in all this?

She was around. She was a graphic designer and did a lot of short-term contract work from her home office.

I don’t think she liked it that much. She never tried to get a full-time job or start her own business. She seemed content to make just enough to supplement Papa’s modest earnings and spend the rest on things she wanted.

She also drank a lot. Mostly white wine. There was always a wine glass and a half-empty bottle near her computer.

As I mentioned, she hated chess, so she never sat in on any of our games at home. If she ever went with us to a tournament – which was rare – it was so she could go shopping in another city. She never went to the awards ceremonies after to see me get medals or trophies. The most I ever got from her was, “That’s nice.”

I never questioned my mother’s aloofness. I just assumed that was the way it was for everybody and that everything between my parents was fairly normal. And since I didn’t have any friends, I never saw what other mothers acted like.

Plus, I often heard married couples squabbling loudly in our apartment building. TheywereItalian, after all. Loud arguing was a given.

By contrast, Mama and Papa’s distant but placid relationship seemed fairly good.

I got a rude wake-up call when I was 18.

Before I was born, my mother had been one of my father’s students.

Not a chess student, mind you. She’d taken one of his Game Theory classes as an elective at university.

When I was younger, my mother told the story as though it were some sort of fairy tale – that my father was so handsome and intelligent, she couldn’t help but fall in love with him.

She neglected to tell me how frowned upon it was for a 34-year-old professor to have an affair with a 21-year-old student –

Especially one who wastaking his class.

She also left out some other things.

I ended up going to the University of Turin by the skin of my teeth.

During high school, I’d neglected almost all of my studies in favor of chess. The only class I was good at was English – and that was out of necessity.

Most of my father’s books on chess were written in English, so I’d had to get good at the language to understand what I was reading.

---