GG Sousa

Maria Sousa walks the Foz do Douro seafront before she plays and allows herself one glass of port at the board on Sundays. She lets an opponent overreach and waits, and she says almost nothing while the match is running. At the end there is always a line, typed out and unattributed, usually Pessoa and occasionally not, and never the same one twice in nine years. Winners and losers get one alike. A member once collected forty of them and asked whether they were chosen for the game; she said some were, and declined to say which. Her students had the same treatment for thirty years, on returned essays, and several of them still send her lines back.