The question here is the responsibility I bear in the face of the reasonable fear that what is being said won’t be understood. The risk is worth the weight of that responsibility. The sole duty of a writer is to minister to his readers: to liberate them from inexactitude out of respect for the mysterious and touching pact of loyalty that they make with books. But the problem is that I don’t always know why name changes are significant in Mexico, and my hunch is that there is a whole history and politics behind it. When something is clear to a writer, I think it’s fair to ask him not to obscure it, but when something is unclear I think it should be left that way. The honest thing is to relay my doubts, and let the conversation move one step forward: the readers may know better.
Judith Beheading Holofernes
Judith Beheading Holofernes measures about four and a half by six and a half feet. It’s a difficult painting to transport, but not unwieldy enough to warrant asking for help: gripping it by the lower upright edge and resting the central crosspiece on the shoulder, one should be able to carry it across the piazza of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. After Caravaggio had painted it, he did just that: hoisting the painting onto his shoulder in his studio, he crossed the courtyard that separated the service quarters from the kitchen and walked from one side of the piazza to the other to deliver it to the mansion of the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, who wanted it.
It was the last work Caravaggio painted before becoming Rome’s greatest art-world celebrity on the complicated cusp of the sixteenth century. He must have delivered it before the church of San Luigi dei Francesi opened its doors for the early mass; he was scandalously behind on the commission for the Calling and the Martyrdom, which would hang in the church’s Contarelli Chapel. The delivery date on the contract that he had signed with the congregation of San Luigi dei Francesi had twice been missed, and he was so late that Cardinal Matthieu Contarelli, who had planned the chapel in honor of his namesake apostle, had already died.
There were reasons for Caravaggio’s delay: the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel was his first commission for a place of worship and he wanted these two pieces of public art to be masterpieces—as they indisputably are. He also understood that the lucky star lighting his path was powered by the generosity of del Monte and Giustiniani, so he attended to the needs of his patrons before those of his clients.
The morning of August 14, 1599, when Caravaggio carried the painting from the Palazzo Madama to the banker’s palace, was surely hot, which means the artist probably wasn’t wearing the legendary black cloak in which he appears draped in absolutely all the descriptions—and there are many of them—of his arrests in the police precincts of Rome.
Merisi was a man of extremes, a desperate man. Between the summer and autumn of 1599 he had one of his most productive periods, which means he must have been nervously sober when he delivered the painting to the Palazzo Giustiniani—bruised circles under his eyes, dull skin, the glazed look of those who’ve worked for days on end without rest. Caravaggio didn’t draw: he painted directly in oil on canvas; and he didn’t trust the prodigious Mannerist capacity for imagination: he staged the scenes he painted in his studio, with real models. He did the work all at once, laboring by the millimeter for days on end, using sources of controlled light that he reproduced on the canvas just as they appeared to him.
The scene in which Judith cuts off the head of King Holofernes takes place at night, which means that the windows of the studio must have been covered and the models painted by candlelight. Chances are that Caravaggio delivered the piece the moment he decided it was finished. He was in desperate need of money to buy the materials to finally embark on the monumental oils for San Luigi dei Francesi.
He must have crossed the plaza quickly, furtively, without a word to the loiterers who had missed his company during the nights it took him to finish the painting. He must have carried it uncovered, because he couldn’t even drape it with a cloth—an oil painting takes years to dry—and neither could he rest the painted surface on his shoulder. Once at the door of the Palazzo Giustiniani he must have lowered it and, propping it on the toes of his boots so that it wasn’t soiled by the dirty ground, banged the doorknocker with one hand as he balanced the painting on his feet with the other.
Giustiniani kept huntsman’s hours, which means that when Caravaggio arrived he must have been in his office, reviewing the end-of-day accounts from the previous afternoon. Or in the courtyard itself, brushing the manes of his horses before the grooms fed them. He would already have drunk his cup of chocolate, the only luxury he allowed himself. Someone must have been sent to ask him what to do with the madman who was outside with a horrible painting. If Giustiniani was in the courtyard, it would likely have been one of the cooks who reached him with the news: A dreadful sight. The painting or the madman? Both, but especially the painting. Give him something to eat; let him leave the thing in the kitchen. And he must have hurried to the studiolo to retrieve from his writing desk the rest of the money he owed the painter. The entry is set down in his books in his own hand: “Ago 14 / 60 scudi / Pitt Meritzio.” Maybe it was then that he began to turn over the possibility of hanging the painting here, where he would be the only one to see it.
For years it was thought that this eccentric behavior—commissioning a painting in order to be its only viewer—was due to the brutal violence displayed on the canvas: the heroine yanking the tyrant’s tangled hair with one hand while with the other she slits his throat like a pig’s, his head already twisted and about to come off, the streams of blood, the engorged nipples, the grotesque excitement of the serving woman who holds a cloth to receive the remains when the last tendon is severed. But this doesn’t explain the painting’s trajectory: at some point Giustiniani gave it—curtains and all—to Ottavio Costa, another Genovese banker, partner in the most substantial of Giustiniani’s Vatican investments, and a hunting companion.
There’s no record of the transfer of the painting, but it ended up in the collection that Costa left when he died, along with another work originally bought by Giustiniani, painted by Caravaggio and featuring the same woman.
In 1601, the celebrated prostitute Fillide Melandroni, who had served as model for Judith and also for Mary Magdalene in the painting Martha and Mary Magdalene, was arrested one night at one of the entrances to the Palazzo Giustiniani; she was in the company of her pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni.
It’s likely that the whore was Giustiniani’s lover and that after the scandal of her being arrested at his very door—a tip-off, surely; the vengeance of a lesser moneylender hurt by the banker’s large-scale operations—he must have gotten rid of the two paintings in which she appeared.
The loss must also have been hard for Caravaggio: he didn’t paint Fillide Melandroni again after this arrest, and she was far and away his most spectacular model: not just a figure of exceptional beauty, but a collaborator with the gift of a unique dramatic sense—she is also Saint Catherine of Alexandria in the monumental work retained by del Monte, which today can be seen in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid.
Incidentally, Ranuccio Tomassoni was the man Caravaggio killed on the Campo Marzio tennis court a few years later. It was a murder long foreshadowed, with both men making frequent visits to the headquarters of the Roman police to report each other or to be arrested following those reports—all stemming from shouting matches and knife brandishings that grew gradually more severe. Surely the nights that Fillide spent at Merisi’s studio weren’t devoted solely to the glory of art, and their nearness wasn’t only professional, on either side: he didn’t just paint, and she didn’t just sleep with him for money.
At some level, Giustiniani and Caravaggio must have been conscious that they were sharing the same woman—who belonged to Tomassoni. In addition, the banker was a political ally and comrade in intellectual dissidence of Cardinal del Monte, known by all to occasionally offer his monumental cardinal’s ass to be buggered by Ca
ravaggio with all the elemental hunger of the painter’s years of want. Never were the connections among politics, money, art, and semen so tight or so murky. Or so unashamedly happy, tolerant, and fluid. Giustiniani dispatched his Lombardy boars, Caravaggio dispatched his Venetian cardinal, Fillide dispatched both men. Everyone was happy.
These were also the years when Merisi discovered the chiaroscuro that forever changed the way a canvas can be inhabited: he did away with the foul Mannerist landscapes—the saints, virgins, and great men posing with intelligent gaze on a backdrop of fields, cities, sheep. He shifted the sacred scenes indoors to focus the spectators of his paintings on the humanity of the characters. Fillide was his vehicle for moving the machinery of art a step forward. Not a saint playing a saint, but a woman stripped of superior attributes, and in action; she was a poor woman, as she had to be for the Counter-Reformation credo to make sense. Before Caravaggio, biblical figures were portrayed as millionaires: the richness of their garments was the reflection of spiritual bounty.
An affluent saint in a landscape stands for a world touched by God. A saint in a room stands for humanity in the dark: a humanity distinguished by its ability to continue to believe, in a world in which faith is already impossible; a material humanity smelling of blood and saliva; a humanity that no longer watches from the sidelines, that does things.
Second Set, Third Game
Game. The poet flung his racket on the ground, betraying his desperation for the first time. The artist sprawled on the pavement, his arms outstretched, his smile beatific. Set to the Lombard, cried the mathematician, one–one; tiebreak for the court. Osuna approached the poet. He said into his ear that he had to stop acting like a child and get ready to kick and bite if necessary: If you’re not on the service side, you’re fucked; when you were on the receiving side you couldn’t even get it near the motherfucking dedans.
Ball Game
He took the palm-leaf cone. What are they, asked Cortés through Malinche. By now she had learned enough Spanish to interpret directly. Pumpkin seeds roasted in honey, said Cuauhtémoc to Malitzin. The conquistador waited for the Spanish version, took a handful of seeds, and ate them one by one, his eyes on the ball game. They were sitting in the front row, with their legs dangling over the wall, while beneath them the athletes were breaking their backs trying to keep the ball from hitting the ground without touching it with their hands or feet.
During the break before a serve, Cortés showed signs of curiosity—something he did possess, despite his reputation. Which ones represent the underworld and which ones the heavens, he asked Malitzin to inquire. When Cuauhtémoc heard the question—deposited perhaps too close to his ear by the translator—he spat the pumpkin seed shells so that they landed at the very edge of the court. It’s Apan against Tepeaca, he said, shrugging his shoulders slightly. Then he got up and went to bet a few cacao beans on Tepeaca.
Hernán Cortés and Cuauhtémoc had met in the infamous year of 1519, when the visit of the fearsome ambassadors of the king of Spain to the imperial city of the Mexicas was still a courtesy call. Emperor Moctezuma had tried to dissuade his visitors from coming to the city of Tenochtitlan by all the means at his disposal—especially bribery—and they had resisted every temptation, held in check by their captain’s promise that the imperial gold would be theirs as soon as they had conquered the trumpeted Aztec capital. Moctezuma’s grand fuckup—the mistake that changed the world—was not having killed them when they first disembarked, before they were of any consequence.
When he had no choice but to welcome the recent arrivals to his palace, he waited on them with reluctance and fear. It wasn’t superstition that made him afraid of them, as legend has it. He was terrified because they had arrived at the city gates at the head of a troop of rebellious nations from all over the empire. Never in the two hundred years that the Aztecs reigned supreme in Mexico had anyone put together an army like the one that Cortés mustered from the entire east of the realm. None of the cities loyal to Moctezuma had been able to halt them, and though the survival instincts of Spaniards and Aztecs—the two minority groups in the contest—made it necessary for one side to say that they hadn’t come to conquer anything and for the other side to believe them, everyone knew—regardless of how hard they tried to pretend otherwise—that sooner or later the ground beneath their feet would become a mire watered with the thick broth of slaughter.
Cortés and Moctezuma met at the end of the Tacuba causeway, where the church of Jesús Nazareno stands today, at the intersection of República del Salvador and Pino Suárez. The tlatoani gave the captain a necklace of jade beads and received a pearl necklace in exchange—probably strung by Malitzin. The two of them walked to the royal palace, whose foundations today lie under the Palacio Nacional. The visit, though ominous, wasn’t directly catastrophic: Cortés had presented himself in Tenochtitlan with his Spanish company alone, to avoid the awkwardness of being seen surrounded by sworn enemies of the Aztecs. The emperor was accompanied by the kings of the Triple Alliance, the caciques of all the lakeside estates and their captains, among whom was Cuauhtemoctzin, a cousin of Moctezuma on his wife’s side.
Once they had reached the palace, the full imperial court settled around a courtyard to witness the conversation between Moctezuma and Cortés. It was a conversation in which no one would have understood anything, not only because there could not have been two people in the world more utterly remote from each other, but because what was said in Nahuatl had to be translated first into Chontal and then into Spanish and what was said in Spanish had to be translated first into Chontal and then Nahuatl, since the conquistador didn’t trust any tongue but that of Malitzin, who spoke Chontal and Nahuatl, and that of the priest Jerónimo de Aguilar, who spoke Chontal and Spanish.
They exchanged more gifts and messages of goodwill. When they were done, the emperor returned to his sacred routine, removing himself from view of his guests and subjects—no one would see him again until the day of his death—to concentrate on ruling an empire that by this point had shrunk by nearly half.
Over the next eighteen months this empire, already slim, would grow even slimmer, until it occupied only the Valley of Mexico, and then only Lake Texcoco, and at last only the island city of Tenochtitlan. On August 13, 1521, the empire was nothing but the royal barge, on which Cuauhtémoc was seized trying to escape by water from the wrecked Aztec capital. For once, history was just: a particularly bloody realm reduced to a single barge. Though that didn’t mean the good guys had won. The good guys never win.
Several months after his meeting with the Spanish captain, Moctezuma sent word to Cuauhtemoctzin: now that the Spaniards had recovered from the shock of seeing the biggest and most hectic city in the world, he should take Cortés for a stroll, show him something, anything. Get close to him, the blind eunuch messenger whispered to the emperor’s cousin; listen to him, let him feel that you’re interested in him. Why me, asked Cuauhtémoc. Because you speak Chontal, said the messenger.
The young man had so far been an invincible captain and an intelligent ally of the throne. He was discreet, solitary, trustworthy. Noted for his discipline in a world where discipline was paramount. Tell the emperor I’ll take him to the ball game, he replied.
He waited a few days to approach Malitzin, Cortés’s Chontal tongue; he waited for the end of the first harvest, which was celebrated with games that were anticipated all year and that were definitely a sight for a foreigner to see.
The Next World
The German historian and cultural critic Heiner Gillmeister believes he has discovered the oldest play-by-play account of tennis as we know it. An ur–ball game that predates everything: Italian calcio, English cricket, what in French is called jeu de paume and in Spanish pelota.
The first recorded tennis match in human history took place in hell and was a doubles match. It was played by four demons, using the soul of a French seminarist by the name of Pierre. In t
ime, Pierre became abbot of the monastery of Marienstatt as Petrus I, and found fame. His story was preserved because Caesarius of Heisterbach recorded it in a volume called Dialogus miraculorum.
As the story tells it, Pierre the Idiot—as the first tennis player of all time seems to have been known in his youth—made a Faustian stumble. He had a terrible memory and was incapable of concentrating on anything, so to pass his exams at seminary he accepted a gift from Satan. It was a stone that contained all the knowledge of man, and all one had to do to possess that knowledge was squeeze it in one’s fist.
Brother Pierre did what any of us might have done in his place, and he got top marks in his exams without having to study. But one day he fell into something that we would now identify as a comatose state—which in his time was simply death. As he told it later, a foursome of demons extracted his soul from his body, feeling free to play tennis with it since the Idiot had unwittingly accepted the deal when he squeezed the stone.
The four demons, like four ordinary friends, made their way back to hell with the object they had borrowed from the world of the living and played a tennis match with their metaphysical ball. Pierre remained conscious and felt the satanic serves and returns in his flesh. According to his testimony, the match was particularly torturous because—as everyone knows—demons have steel fingernails and never trim them.
Sudden Death Page 10