The only son of a German lumberjack, Kreutzer was long considered to be the village's idiot . He was unable to read or do simple additions at the age of 15 despite streneous efforts from his teacher. But the boy was full of goodwill. He would conscientiously execute all his assigned chores and would sit quietly after in the barn staring at some fixed point on the horizon all day long.
One day, while waiting for his father in the barber's shop, he beat at his first try the old man who wanted to kill some time by teaching him how to play chess. Naturally, everybody in the shop was amazed. By what miracle had that ludicrous young boy had suddenly enough gray cells to understand the most intellectual game ever devised by a human mind? Thinking that it was a fluke, some of the best players in town challenged the oaf and lost one after another. In less than a week, words spread out all over the country about the young phenomenon and Kreutzer became 10 years later, a famous world champion.
Although his fame was widely recognized, everybody knew that the champion could not write a single correct sentence. They knew that under his gaudy expensive suit adorned with a fake pearl, he was just a simpleton incapable of talking about the most trivial subject once he left the chessboard.
He eluded journalists like the plague for fear of being ridiculed, but had, nonetheless, a very high opinion of himself.
For, how could you stop a narrow mind like Kreutzer's from thinking that he was the most important person in the world when he had always won against players considered to be the elites among the literates and won at the same time hundreds of thousand of dollars? How could you prevent a man, who had never known that a Mozart or a Beethoven had ever existed and who had not lost a single game in the last 4 years from thinking that he was the most brilliant species of humankind?
Kreutzer was definitely a strange case. After these recollections, I told my companion that I had always wanted to meet geniuses, that I was interested in the way their brains function and that I would try to make the most of the 15 days ahead to approach the phenomenon. He stared at me and smiled,
- "I wish you good luck then... Nobody has ever been able to get more than five words out of him."
