For a moment it seemed as if the Spaniard would rally and take the set. He went on the attack, covering the court like a man with a longer reach. When he didn’t volley the return, he got to the ball after its bounce off the wall. The third time they came to a tie, the duke was happy to see that on the other side of the court a recent arrival had put his bet of four bits down on the service side. He noticed this when Matthew and his cronies, who until now had resisted the urge to bet, took up a collection of coins to put on the artist’s side.
Custom dictated that the visitor choose a racket—one of two—and the ball with which they were to play—one of three—so the duke had been surprised that there was only one ball in the artist’s kit. He took it. There was no substantial difference between the rackets, so he chose the one that seemed most used, thinking that it was probably the Lombard’s favorite and that depriving him of it would put them ahead.
The contenders took off their cloaks and handed their swords over to their seconds. They would play in boots, since the pavement was uneven. When the duke took a coin out of his bag to toss for the serve, the artist shook his head and said in mangled but serviceable Spanish that he conceded to his guest. He spoke disdainfully—slouching and with his eyes on the gallery—but charmingly. When the shadow of the cross that topped the Obelisk of Domitian touched twelve noon on the cobblestones, the mathematician said solemnly and almost under his breath: Partita.
The Spaniard felt the leather of the ball between his left thumb and index and middle fingers. Once, twice, three times he bounced it on the pavement, spinning the racket in the grip of his right hand. He swallowed and rolled the ball again in the fingers of his left, looking at the ground, scraping the chalk line that marked the end of the court. With a shout of Tenez! he tossed the ball in the air and felt the catgut tighten as he lit into it with all his soul.
The artist had taken a magnificent stance, far back at an angle, his feet firm on the ground. He smashed the ball down just inside the cord. The Spaniard served again and lost the point again.
Cacce per il milanese, cried the professor. On to a fourth game, added the duke with some discouragement, but deep down he was excited, because the match was heating up and the spectators had begun to put money on the line. The poet watched the scramble to gather up coins. Maybe now you’ll wager on me, he said to the duke.
Throat-slit
Rombaud’s trial was so short that by the time the wretch understood what was going on, he had been sentenced. He had been seized for high treason at the very doors of the Salon Bleu and found himself unable to explain how he, a Frenchman and a Catholic, had offered his services as executioner to the heretic King Henry of England. In the death warrant, which was drawn up in haste and signed in a courtyard of the Louvre by Philippe de Chabot, it was written that the fencing and tennis master possessed the nobleman’s right to have his throat slit without torture because the king had granted him privileges for life.
Lying on the ground, at the mercy of the soldier who was to perform the execution, the point of a sword pricking his neck, Rombaud wept. I understand, said Minister Chabot, that Anne Boleyn, a woman and a princess, didn’t shed a single tear the day you dispatched her as she lay helpless; if you give me the fourth ball, he added, I’ll let you go, and he motioned for the executioner to withdraw his sword.
The mercenary felt in his shirt and cloak and with shaking hand extracted a lumpy ball, the most dubious of those made with the remnants of the queen’s hair. Chabot put it in his pocket and said: Kill him.
The story must have traveled by word of mouth, since a bastardized version of it, based on elements of truth, lingered in the popular imagination. It’s very likely that the episode, turned upside down like everything that crosses the Channel, lit the lamp of inspiration in William Shakespeare’s head, since he chose to depict Henry V’s unexpected claim to all the territory of France in a lovely scene that reproduces the handing over of the ill-fated Boleyn balls.
In the play’s first act, King Henry receives a messenger from Louis of Valois, Dauphin of France, asking him to relinquish his claims to Normandy in exchange for the great treasure that he sends as a gift. The gift is a sealed barrel. The king asks the duke of Exeter to open it, and inside there are only tennis balls: a mockery of his political immaturity and lack of experience. Henry thinks it over and very coolly sends his thanks for the gift, saying: “When we have match’d our racquets to these balls, / We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set / Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.”
At the height of the Enlightenment, during an exchange of letters with Madame Geoffrin regarding the sale of his library to Catherine II of Russia, Denis Diderot describes how the preparations for his daughter’s wedding have left him in a state of financial strangulation: “At first, my wife and I thought that the match would go some way toward easing the pressure of our creditors, and now we consider ourselves lucky if it doesn’t kill us in the end. For me, Angelique’s engagement has been the story of Rombaud’s balls.”
That very night, at the back door of his workshop, the craftsman who had made the Boleyn balls received a bundle of the mercenary’s firebolt-chased chestnut hair.
The Ball on the Right Is the Holy Father
My balls are God and the King, and I play with them when I like. These words were part of Juana’s only memory of her father. It was a flowery, tropical memory, necessarily remote: the old man had returned to Europe to petition for posts and concessions when she was five, and his lobbying was so long and fruitless that he died in Seville before he could return to what he thought of as his land. He thought this not because he had been born there, but because he was convinced that the whole place belonged to him.
Juana had reimagined the scene over and over again in her mind. The old man sitting on a stone bench in the infinite gardens of his palace—gardens that began in the valley of Cuernavaca and ended at some indeterminate point on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In her memory, her father’s hair was already cropped and gray, but he still had the sinewy and arrogant spirit of those who’ve known power and have wielded it without qualms. He was a handsome and stubborn old man: eyebrows drawn together in an almost enlightened scowl of concentration, his beard a little dirty but tidy. He scratched his head as he listened to someone whom Juana could no longer bring into focus—his ragged nails burrowing in and out of the gray jungle of his sawed-off hair. He said to his aide: My balls are God and the King, and I play with them when I like. And he gave a tiny wave of his right hand, as if shooing away a fly. Then he turned to look at her where she must have been sitting, on another stone bench in the garden.
She remembered feeling something between adoration and fear at the seriousness of the forehead that had dictated countless death sentences with a movement of its eyebrows. The old man puffed out his cheeks, crossed his eyes. She laughed, maybe nervously. Then, with some effort, he got up and held out his hand to her. Let’s go to the orchard, he said. Next, there was a long walk down a path into the world of fruit trees that her father had collected and that only the two of them knew by name, then the radiant moment when he lifted her up onto his shoulders and asked her to identify each in Nahuatl, in Spanish, in Chontal.
Many years later, when she was an adult, the duchess of Alcalá, and so far away from Cuernavaca that the memory seemed like someone else’s, she asked her mother about the words she was sure she’d heard her father speak, whether they were really his or not. They had this conversation when she was pregnant with Catalina, her eldest daughter. The two women were sitting with their embroidery in the garden room of the villa of the Palacio de los Adelantados, their slaves and ladies in attendance, the orangish light from the north creeping in through the windows from which they’d had the latticework removed so that Seville would look a little like Cuernavaca.
The line about God and the King was indeed one of her husband’s favorite sayings, the widow said,
and he would utter it when one of his men or some priest dared to suggest that what he was doing might be improper for or unbecoming of a Christian. But the best part, her mother concluded, was the rest of it: The ball on the right is the Holy Father and the one on the left is the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Your father was an old bastard, she said in Nahuatl, to the delight of the ladies she had brought from Cuernavaca.
Juana didn’t remember this extra bit that her mother recited with a laugh. The old woman thought for a moment and then said that Juana must have added “I play with them when I like,” thinking that her father meant the balls for Basque pelota, which he played with other war veterans. And do you miss him, Juana asked, touching the belly in which Catalina was already splashing, the girl who in time would marry Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna. Who? Father. He was old and rich by the time I had him, the poor thing; he imagined that he was a real nobleman and tried to behave like a gentleman. She laughed again, a bit hysterically, and said: He was a wolf in a fine cap. But did you like him? The widow opened her eyes wide and dropped her embroidery on her lap to underscore the drama of her words: Who wouldn’t like him; he was Hernán Cortés, se los xingó a todos. Or, in Juana’s polite translation for the benefit of the ladies and maids who didn’t speak Mexican Spanish: He fucked everybody.
Game to the Editor
From: Teresa Astrain
June 12, 2013
To: Me
Subject: Second Pass
Álvaro, here are the files. One with corrections (just a few) and a couple of queries. The other is a clean version, for search purposes. For now it has the latest title, handwritten. Too bad the subtitle is just one syllable too long.
Now the ball is on your roof. Have at it.
Besos and onward,
Teresa
On 6/12/13 19:26, “Álvaro Enrigue”
Dear Teresa,
Can I use this e-mail you just sent me in the new novel? As is. And tell me: Do you know where “the ball is on your roof” comes from? The novel—which you’ll be seeing soon if Jorge decides he wants it—is all about balls and courts.
Besos,
Á.
On June 13, 2013 17:02, Teresa Astrain
Somehow I knew that ball on your roof thing wasn’t an actual expression. It means your turn.
Please, please, please send the proofs back soon.
Besos,
Teresa
On 6/13/13 17:18, “Álvaro Enrigue”
But you haven’t answered my question, cara Teresa: Do you know where it comes from?
The new subtitle should be “Dinero, letras y cursilería.” A little bit of tweaking and now it scans—a perfect hendecasyllable.
Besos,
Á.
On June 13, 2013 17:23, Teresa Astrain
So we finally have a subtitle. I stayed late yesterday playing with syllables, but I couldn’t get it down to eleven, not with all the accents in the right places. You win. Now send the damned proofs.
Teresa
First Set, Fourth Game
The Lombard was unstoppable at first, but then he got distracted. The score was love–30 when two women came by the court. They had just lunched and were dressed like what they were: whores. The Spaniard was so deep in the game that he didn’t register their arrival. But his linesman sat lost in contemplation of them for a moment, because there was something familiar about these women and because they were truly fantastic pieces of tail. Despite the sporting rivalry between Italy and Spain on the tennis court, Osuna was sitting nearly shoulder to shoulder with the Lombard’s linesman, so he could almost smell the women.
Without removing his gaze from their enticing skirts, the duke ran through the images he retained of the previous night. These two hadn’t been at the brothel or the tavern. It took him a while to pinpoint where he’d seen them: in a painting that he’d had the leisure to examine as he and the poet waited endlessly for an audience with a banker. The whores appeared in it as models for Martha and her cousin Mary Magdalene.
The matter was resolved when he recognized a seductive flaw—a big mark like a continent on Martha’s chin—which the painter had copied just as it was. They had even discussed it: Who would put a saint infected with some contagion in a painting? The poet had pointed out that Mary Magdalene, played by a strikingly lovely and spirited model, was holding the mirror of vanity in a hand with a crooked finger. The world turned upside down, he said.
Martha sat down next to Saint Matthew—an old cock among falcons—as if to calm the flurry that she and her friend had roused in the gallery. Meanwhile, Mary Magdalene, as defiant in the piazza as in her painted role of saint brought low by life, remained standing by the railing: her ass cocked, her cleavage a declaration of war. When she leaned forward, the duke noticed that the middle finger of her left hand was crooked. The artist who painted her hand hadn’t twisted reality to suit the biblical tale, he had done the opposite: he had twisted the biblical tale by painting reality. The duke raised his eyes a little and fixed them on Mary Magdalene’s breasts. He recognized them: they were, of course, the most defiant pair of tits in the history of art.
When the Spaniards had been received in the trophy hall of the banker’s palace, they’d had a look at another eye-catching painting, in which the same woman—he hadn’t realized it until just now, seeing her in person—appeared in a biblical scene, more jarring than the first, of a beheading in a bedchamber. The work was still propped on a chair: a place hadn’t been found for it yet, lacking as it was in decorum.
It was an oil painting depicting the moment when Judith, having seduced the Assyrian general Holofernes, beheads him as he sleeps. The painting is bloody, but it also stirs up other things: in it, the model and courtesan looks more sensuous than vengeful as she slits the throat of the enemy of the people of Israel. She’s seriously hot: her nipples are so hard that they show through her blouse, almost bursting out of it. The painting isn’t a heroic portrayal of a Jewish nationalist committing the patriotic act of killing the oppressor of her people but the portrait of a killer who finds carnal pleasure in spilling the blood of the man whose semen still runs down the inside of her thighs. The odd look on her face isn’t an expression of revulsion at the evildoer overcome or disgust at having to behead him; it’s an expression of pleasure: an orgasm.
Unlike the poet, who was still deep in the game, the artist let himself be distracted, and more: when the match permitted—and even when it didn’t—he added his own shouts to the jests of the audience, making ridiculous flourishes to return the ball, blowing kisses to Mary Magdalene.
Cacce per lo spagnolo, cried the mathematician after the poet’s last point, his fourth in a row since the arrival of the whores. The duke hurried onto the court to gather up his dividends from the line where the coins were stacked. It was a generous handful, the poet noted, because the professional gamblers were still mostly favoring the painter, even though the poet had a comfortable lead.
He didn’t remark upon it to the duke, who put the coins in his pocket and then handed him a handkerchief to dry his sweat. He took his time fanning himself with the rag before beginning to wipe his torso. He even moved into the shadow of the gallery to put on the second shirt of the match, as gentlemen did. The Lombard was still wearing the same black shirt he’d had on since the night before, and very likely since the day he’d bought it. He was standing on the court, hands resting on the rail, just in front of Mary Magdalene, who was in the gallery; he had rested his head on her chest, as if accepting that his own body was defeating him.
Then, a long way off down the piazza, the duke’s escort appeared. They approached the gallery with the clumsy, evasive humility of those who haven’t been earning their pay. How goes it, one of them asked Osuna. We’re winning; why don�
��t you put a little money on our man, said the duke, because this is serious business. The men dug in their pockets without protest. The soldier of highest rank, Otero Barral by name, presented a pitiful fistful of coins. He was the smallest of the four, but possibly as a result, the scrappiest. Knobby and ruddy, he was the duke’s favorite, because he could keep calm in any circumstance—the model of a certain type of Spaniard, specialized in persevering no matter what. Yesterday we spent like sultans, he whispered in excuse from behind his wolf-man beard. The duke shook his head, led him away from the court, and, when he was sure that no one could see them, gave him all the coins he had just won. He ordered him to hurry and put something on the line before the second set began. Otero looked at the money cradled in his hands and smacked his lips with undisguised greed. Put the thought from your mind, said his boss; we need the moral advantage. They returned to the gallery.
When he was back in his seat again, the duke noticed that the artist was watching Otero as he went to bet. He didn’t remove his face entirely from Mary Magdalene’s cleavage, but he was staring at the captain. He blew the hair out of his eyes, lowered his brows, sharpened one eye in a squint. It was a sticky look, which pierced Otero as he went about the insignificant business of bringing over the money, setting it on the line, returning to his seat. See how he watches Barral, the duke said to the poet; what can it mean—does he like his looks or does he want to start last night’s brawl again? The poet shook his head. I don’t think he even remembers what happened last night, he said.
Sudden Death Page 4