Who's Who on the Chessboard, Part Three- The Knight

Sometimes he dreams it is the war again, and he is being chased by soldiers through the streets of Paris. He ducks into an doorway, pulls off his rough coat with the paper star and turns it inside out. He is surprised to discover that the lining is smooth and elegant, and he walks out past the baffled soldiers with the swagger of a true aristocrat.

His best songs are sustained puns, two things at once. There is the earthbound song that you can touch, and there is one that travels scornfully in the air above it, and neither of them will let on that the other one exists. When he sings, you can sense his glee at finding the words to unite this unlikely couple, along with his contempt for a universe that lets him get away with it.

His singing career has not yet caught fire. There is the problem of his face, for a start. But there is also something elusive about his talent. He won’t settle into any particular genre but drifts from chanson to chamber jazz to calypso. Also, he is too productive for his own good. He hands out songs to younger women, and they burn down in their hands like cigarettes.

Alain looks at the sheaf of songs. “You’re not singing these yourself,” he says.
“Why not?” he says.
“With your voice? You'd suck the life out of them.”
"Maybe that's what they deserve," he says.
"You're betraying your own gift," Alain says.
“That’s what I do for a living,” he says. “A pun is a betrayal. A rhyme is a betrayal. A tune is a betrayal. Everything I touch I defile.”
“These are pop songs. Confections. They need a lighter touch. Give them to France Gall.”
“Whose touch is lighter than a traitor’s? I’ve even betrayed my name. Did you know this? I was born Lucien Ginsburg. What does Lucien sound like? Lucien sounds like a women’s hairdresser.”
“What does Ginsburg sound like?” Alain says.
Serge says: “I despair of a world where such wholesale treachery is permissible.”

Secretly, he knows Alain is right. He has written a song stacked on top of another, about a girl who enjoys candies, and a girl who enjoys fellatio. But when he attempts to sing it, his voice sounds heavy and laboured, like a man carrying too many parcels. So he calls up France Gall instead. In the rehearsal room, he pushes her voice up through its register until it cracks. He wants to use the edge of her voice to cut his song in two, but the double meanings fly away from her and all that remains is her own guilelessness. She makes it a sweet song about a lonely child who is perhaps a little frightened of the world. Something inside him crumples, and he decides that it's time to get a drink.

At the café, he takes out the chessboard and teaches her to play.
“The knight,” he tells her, “is the secret hero of the game. It’s dressed like a fine horse-rider, but between ourselves, it’s actually a spy. It’s the only piece allowed to leave the board. This means it can vault any obstacles, outflank enemies, act as if none of this battle was its business. But really, the knight just likes the experience of flight. When it’s up there, looking down, it can see what none of the other pieces can: how everything rubs against everything else.”
France yawns.
“Of course, it pays for the privilege,” he says. “It can’t go directly where it wants, like the regular pieces, but it is always forced to shear off to one side. So if the knight sees a pretty girl he wants to talk to, he has to jump all the way around the board to approach her. That way she doesn’t have to look up and see his horsey face.”
“You don’t have a horsey face,” she says.
“I have the face of a jackass,” he says. “But, see, this is the saddest thing about the knight. You notice how he moves? Two steps up, one to the side. You might think he is free, but it is an illusion. He is condemned to trace forever on the board the outline of his own silhouette.”
He picks up a piece to demonstrate, moving it from a white square to a black square and then on to her forehead, to her cheek, to her collar-bone.
“Poor creature,” she says, pushing his hand away. “So which piece am I then?”
“Obviously, you’re a queen,” he tells her.
“Are all these little ones the queens?” she asks.
“Exactly,” he says, but he has stopped listening to her, he thinks of the knight still moving through the world, now reaching the keyboard of the cafe piano, leaping from d to f-sharp and back again, trying to shock its grubby pathos into unaffected song.

He goes with France to the fashionable boutiques to select his outfit for that night’s show, an austere arts programme on the second channel. He buys jackets with the widest lapels, polka dot shirts, crushed satin pants. He tells the assistants that he wants to look supremely fraudulent, a man of 37 dressed as a teenager.

By the time he’s due on stage, he has downed half a bottle of bourbon. The presenter attacks him for abandoning the French songwriting tradition for Anglo-American pop. Some would call you a turncoat, she says.
“That’s right,” he says. “I have turned my coat. And I have found that it is lined with fur.”
Then it is time for his performance. He faces the cameras like he would a firing squad. A last cigarette burns down between his fingers. He frowns at the army of aesthetes and delivers his ridiculous pop song. When he sees their faces cloud, he feels a sort of elation, as if he has just cleared an obstacle. He knows now that this will be the mode of his success, a series of sideways leaps over the tastemakers, and into the unsighted space beyond, going on and on until he exhausts himself or loses sight of his audience, or somewhere in the endgame falls apart, becomes two personalities, one trailing across the hard ground, the other floating scornfully in the air above it, neither of them acknowledging the other one exists.