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The year Manuel Álvarez Escudero learned to play chess, fascist bombs rained down on Guernica, echoing across Pablo Picasso’s enormous, monochrome canvas, the Hindenburg exploded in the sky over Lakehurst, and John Steinbeck published a short book called Of Mice and Men.
Nine decades later, Álvarez’s love of the game has only increased. A little after 10am on Saturday, the 104-year-old madrileño – believed to be the oldest active registered chess player in the world – stepped off a bus in the south of the city and pushed his homemade walker towards the door of the cultural centre where he comes for his weekly matches.
Time may have gone to work on his hearing but Don Manuel, as his friends at the Valdebernardo chess club affectionately call him, has lost neither his memory nor his sense of humour.
“I was about 16 when my big brother taught me to play chess,” he said as he sat down in front of the board in a room that doubles as a venue for fitness classes, with mats and exercise balls piled up in its corners.
“I thought he was a really good player but I didn’t know anything back then. Neither of us had a clue what we were doing.”
Álvarez only realised how little he knew about the game a few years later, when a colleague played him and told him he had much to learn. After some bruising educational encounters with that same colleague, including an introduction to the Muzio variation of the King’s Gambit, he began to improve.
Just as designing and building his own lightweight walker lets him put his engineering training to good use, so chess has allowed him to indulge his love of maths and problem-solving.
But although he credits the game with helping him to sharpen and maintain his mental acuity, Álvarez says its main benefits have been social.
“What I like most about it is all the friendships it’s brought me,” he said. “I’ve made so many good friends through chess – and they’re still my friends.”
Those he studied engineering with are all gone now. Like them, Álvarez – who thought he might make 80 at a pinch – did well to survive his teenage years, let alone get married and have three children, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
“I spent the civil war in Madrid and it was terrible,” he said. “There was so much hunger and so many bombs. It was awful and my father died in 1937 from oesophageal cancer.”
He thinks not smoking or drinking have also played a big part in his longevity. One of his brothers died at the age of 98. “He never smoked. But the other two did and they died younger.”
Álvarez’s indulgences are limited to chess, doing the football pools and playing cards – “but that’s a benign vice”. An attack of gout has also led him to try to cut out the jamón.
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Don Manuel is cherished by his friends at the club, whose 130 members are drawn from Spain but also from Syria, Lebanon, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Brazil and Venezuela. The esteem in which he is held by the wider chess community was evident in the rapid chess tournament held in a local sports centre to celebrate his 104th birthday earlier this month.
“He’s a very important person for us, mainly because of his values,” said José Luis Uceda Aragoneses, the club’s president.
“When he was a bit younger, he was always the first to come and lend a hand to set up. Now he can’t. But he would always be the first here – even when he was 100 – and he’d put out all the chess sets. He’s always got a friendly word for everyone and he’s the kind of person you love because he deserves to be loved.”
As he prepared for a game against Marcela Minguito Sánchez (a very youthful 97), Álvarez struggled to imagine what his life would have been like had his brother not introduced him to its pleasures, and frustrations, 88 years ago.
“Really boring,” he said. “It’s brought me so many friends and so much fun. My life would have been completely different without chess.”
The game has also yielded the odd tip that he is happy to share. “You need to learn how to lose,” he said. “You can learn a lot by losing.”
So is the ultimate lesson of a long life spent waging innumerable battles across a field of black and white squares that neither winning, nor losing, is really that important?
“No!” said Álvarez. “I like winning. But if I do lose, it doesn’t bother me too much.”
