Sudden Death

by Álvaro Enrigue

  The fact that the first written account of a tennis game describes an eschatological battle recounted from the perspective of someone called Petrus I, pope of an alternative church of condemned men and killers, a church of ball and racket, is one of the little bones that history occasionally throws us.

  In the second part of Don Quixote, Altisidora has a vision, in which she sees devils playing with rackets of fire, using books “full of wind and stuffing” as balls. Unlike Don Quixote, these books are in no condition to survive a second round. After the first volley “there wasn’t one ball that could withstand another or was in any condition to be served again, and so books old and new came in quick succession.”

  In hell, souls are balls and bad books are balls. Demons play with them.

  Art

  It’s said that Caravaggio’s dagger had a Latin inscription carved on both sides of its blade. It read “Nec spe” on one side and “Nec metu” on the other: “Without hope. Without fear.”

  Regarding Most Popes’ Utter Lack of a Sense of Humor

  In the print collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art there is a lithograph by an anonymous Flemish artist dating from about 1550. On the front it reads “Palazzo Colonna,” and on the back “La Loggia dei colonnesi con la Torre Mesa edificate tra le rovine del Tempio di Serapide.” The Colonnas had long been an all-powerful family, and the museum in the Italian capital that still bears their name gives a clear idea of the power and wealth they accumulated.

  But Rome wasn’t always Rome. Or rather: The Rome of Pius IV wasn’t the grandiloquent city that Cardinal Montalto rebuilt when he became pope. The Rome of the sixteenth century, village-like and scattered, is best described by Montaigne, who found it so timid and empty that his disappointment became a cliché of Baroque disenchantment. The city was clotted with old and new ruins, among which animals strolled more freely than people. Said the French poet Joachim du Bellay about mid-sixteenth-century Rome:

  You seek Rome in Rome, o pilgrim!

  and in Rome itself you cannot find Rome.

  In the year 1565, when Borromeo, Montalto, and Pius IV might have been drinking a glass of wine as fire rained down on the navel of Catholicism, the Palazzo Colonna wasn’t the meringue-trimmed palace it later became. The loggia was a house of red brick, constructed from the remains of the Tempio di Serapide, of which a stretch of frontispiece still stood. It had two floors, five windows, two doors, and a tile-roofed terrace. Behind it, the ruins: the loggia literally leaned against the ancient temple, and around it shrubs, palms, and a group of gladelike trees grew up from the ground and also the walls.

  It would be on this cool, modest brick terrace that the cardinals would be sitting as if in a box at the theater.

  Watching the whole world go up in flames, Pius wouldn’t sing of the sack of Troy, as Nero did. He would be silent, listening with eyes shut to a snatch of music—the last bit of melody from a time before the universal conflagration that today we casually call “the Baroque”—rocking slightly from side to side, his eyes closed, the hand holding the almonds marking time for an orchestra.

  During a pause in the music, he would open his eyes and say to Cardinal Montalto: I have a gift for you. There are other things he could say—for example, what the Argentine writer Leónidas Lamborghini says about the era dawning before the arbiters of Trent: “We have bought Torture instead of Compassion. Fear instead of Mercy. Hate instead of Love. Death instead of Life.” Or he could say what he had confessed a few years earlier to his friend Tolomeo Gallio, in a letter in which he reported how troubled he was by the Curia’s harassment of Michelangelo and how it had paralyzed him for some time: “I’m terrified to admit it, but I love his Last Judgment. It’s a mortal sin, and I’m the Pope!”

  Pius IV had watered the little pot in which he planned for Borromeo to blossom, and instead of a plant, a wild boar had grown.

  This has to be seen as a film. The pope cuts another slice of sausage and closes his eyes. He opens them and eats.

  PIUS IV:

  (still chewing)

  I have a gift for you, Montalto. It’s a modest gift.

  The pope waves one hand in the air, the sleeves of the papal robes like a flag. His chamber attendant approaches with a little wooden box trimmed with silver.

  MONTALTO:

  (smiling)

  I’m not a man for jewels.

  PIUS IV:

  I’m sixty-six years old, no one thought I’d make it to pope but I did; I met Michelangelo and Raphael, Charles V and Francis I were my friends; I invented Carlo Borromeo, here present.

  He indicates him with a nod and a raising of eyebrows, part ironic and part grateful.

  PIUS IV (CONT.):

  Do you think that at this final meeting, our last banquet, I’d give you a mere jewelry box?

  The servant brings the gift to the cardinal, who opens it.

  MONTALTO:

  (taking something out of the chest)

  A tennis ball.

  He looks at it, holds it up so Borromeo can see it.

  MONTALTO (CONT.):

  A bit unraveled.

  PIUS IV:

  That’s because it was made from the hair of Anne Boleyn.

  MONTALTO:

  Who?

  PIUS IV:

  One of the wives of Henry VIII of England. You missed that particular scandal.

  MONTALTO:

  Indeed.

  PIUS IV:

  Put it to good use.

  MONTALTO:

  The scandal?

  PIUS IV:

  The ball.

  MONTALTO:

  I don’t play pallacorda.

  PIUS IV:

  Play it. When King Charles and I die, there will be no one to curb France. If you stick your neck out, you’ll be stripped of your privileges or skinned alive and quartered, depending on who is left as inquisitor.

  The pope looks at Borromeo.

  PIUS IV (CONT.):

  Or am I mistaken, Carlo?

  BORROMEO:

  Your Holiness has never been mistaken in politics.

  Cardinal Montalto ignores him and looks the pope in the eye.

  MONTALTO:

  Are you giving me an order?

  PIUS IV:

  I’m giving you a piece of advice.

  There is a silence that both of them fill by turning to look at Borromeo. Though the bishop of Milan is almost twenty years younger than Montalto, the rigors of a life genuinely spent in imitation of Christ’s darkest hours have left traces of the rasp of hunger and sleeplessness, and also small tics that make him look like a piece of unedited footage. His cheek twitches, his head jerks, he squeezes the hands that he keeps clasped in his lap, as if to prevent them from escaping in search of something that might prove tasty.

  Borromeo gives the pope and the inquisitor-general an affected sidelong glance, his left eyelid blinking shut every so often.

  BORROMEO:

  (to Montalto)

  Let’s see, toss me the ball.

  He catches the ball thrown by Montalto, his eyes on the pope.

  BORROMEO (CONT.):

  It’s good advice.

  PIUS IV:

  Will you protect Montalto from the wolves?

  BORROMEO:

  I’ll protect him so long as he protects himself.

  He smells the ball.

  BORROMEO (CONT.):

  So long as he learns to wait while playing tennis at his palace.

  Cardinal Montalto spent nineteen years and two popes in retreat from public life, busily going through the fortune he had amassed by bleeding the enemies of the Counter-Reformation. In his spare time, as if somehow compelled by the passions unleashed in him by architecture, Montalto also spent those years planning how the city would look if it r
eally was the center of the world—a plan he executed with violence and perfectionism once he was named Pope Sixtus V. He invented urbanism, though his name wasn’t Urban. It goes without saying that he never played pallacorda. The fact that no subsequent pope was called Sixtus after Montalto, who was the fifth, is proof that the Catholic Church is an institution without a sense of humor. But this isn’t part of the film. Back to the script.

  Borromeo tosses back the ball. Montalto puts it away in its box and the pope beckons again.

  PIUS IV:

  I have a present for you too, Carlo.

  A servant approaches with a brightly colored headpiece.

  BORROMEO:

  A miter?

  PIUS IV:

  It’s Mexican.

  The cardinal furrows his brow.

  PIUS IV (CONT.):

  It was sent to me by a bishop there. It isn’t painted, it’s made of feathers: look, it’s a little masterpiece.

  The servant holds it out to the cardinal and he takes it, disdainfully.

  BORROMEO:

  (ironically)

  Such intricate handiwork, Your Holiness.

  He sets it on his knees.

  PIUS IV:

  May it help you to remember that France isn’t the whole world, that there are many lands and many souls.

  The cardinal sits watching him, making a show of patience.

  PIUS IV (CONT.):

  Look at it! If you hold it up to the light in just the right way, it glows.

  Borromeo tilts his head, turns the thing.

  PIUS IV (CONT.):

  Lift it a little.

  When it’s just above his head, the colored feathers of the miter blaze as if struck by a bolt of lightning. Borromeo drops it, and it falls into his lap. The pope laughs.

  PIUS IV (CONT.):

  What did I tell you?

  BORROMEO:

  Mexico: the Devil’s haunt.

  PIUS IV:

  It’s the work of Christian Indians.

  BORROMEO:

  What am I supposed to do with it?

  PIUS IV:

  Say Easter mass in it.

  BORROMEO:

  Why?

  PIUS IV:

  Because after the dark always comes the light.

  BORROMEO:

  I know that.

  PIUS IV:

  No one would guess it.

  The pope cut another slice of sausage and closed his eyes as he chewed, thinking that even when Nero burned Rome the fuel ran out eventually, and the two-thirds of the city left waste was rebuilt magnificently. He could almost smell the blanket of ashes that Trent would leave at his feet. He could see how, in the end, once everything was over, a new tree would spring up from the field of ashes, embryonic and amber-hued; a tree of sinew and muscle, its first limb reaching up through the earth; a tree that—once the smoke from the blaze had cleared—would spread its fingers in the sun like a butterfly of flesh. The butterfly’s fingernails would be dirty.

  Light to the Living and Lessons from the Dead

  ACCOUNT NUMBER 168.

  Once again, a dead man appeared to me, calling me by name, saying that he hadn’t come to frighten me, but to ask me to commend him to God, that he was Don N, doing penance in Purgatory. In his hand he carried a ball of fire, and his dry tongue protruded from his mouth. I asked: Why are you there? He answered: For the sins of ball-playing and partaking of cold refreshment. He made a reverence to the cross and disappeared, saying: Jesus be with you.

  JUAN DE PALAFOX Y MENDOZA, Archbishop and Viceroy of New Spain, 1661

  Fear

  By the time Cortés and Cuauhtémoc met, the Spaniards were more than familiar with Tenochtitlan and had been thoroughly observed by half the city, out on walks that exposed their vulnerability. The Mexica people asked themselves, in ever more insistent tones, why Moctezuma didn’t surround these interlopers and kill them once and for all. It would be interesting if history had taken a turn in that direction. From a contemporary perspective, Cortés and his company would be like those lesser martyrs who made the miscalculation of going to preach the gospel in Japan.

  There would have been a Saint Hernán of Medellín and a Saint Bernal of Medina del Campo. Velázquez would have painted an altarpiece in which their heads appeared at the foot of the temple of Tezcatlipoca, and Caravaggio another called The Martyrdom of Saint Jerome of Aguilar: a canvas that captured Cortés’s translator’s terror just before his tongue was cut out. Beside him, covering her mouth, one of Merisi’s tarts would have played an approximate green-eyed Malitzin. It would be a chiaroscuro set in small-town Rome, remote and squalid, as Europe always was and would have continued to be if not for the flow of American ore.

  Malitzin told Cortés that Cuauhtémoc had approached her. They had just been making love, as so many cheesy writers would have it, though for La Malinche and the captain—scarcely equipped for such a thing—it was more like the scuffling of two blind children.

  The conquistador panted, lying on his belly on the cotton pallet as the Mayan princess turned translator, now lubricated with semen, dug about in her pubic hair in the hope of giving herself the satisfaction her man hadn’t provided. I saw Cuauhtemoctzin in the market today, she said, kneading the clitoris that changed the world. By now, Doña Marina was the only one of Cortés’s associates who could go out into the city without being escorted by an armed company. She was also, at least in Cortés’s not inconsiderable experience, the only woman who could do politics and masturbate at the same time.

  The captain moved next to her and sniffed her armpit. He squeezed the hand that she was touching herself with, without preventing its circular motion. Who is that, he asked. Moctezuma’s favorite captain. And why does it make you so hot that this captain wants to talk to me? Still touching herself, she said: Because men who do it with men turn me on. She closed her eyes. Cortés let her continue. Before burrowing entirely into her own pleasure, she added: He said that he wanted to take you to the ball game tomorrow. Then, in order to come, she found her way to a world in which men weren’t animals.

  He waited for her to finish, tugging at his beard. When he sensed that she was back, he asked: Do you think it’s to kill me? Her breathing was still ragged when she answered no, that he was a decent sort. Though she had stopped feeling her sex, she protected it with her hand: she hadn’t finished; she was resting. The emperor doesn’t understand why we haven’t left, and he thinks that if someone makes an effort to talk to you, maybe you’ll explain. Cortés lifted her hand with what he imagined was delicacy and blew on her. She shivered. Should we believe him? Cuauhtemoctzin is to be believed—he has no flaws, he’s a hero, a fanatic; everyone knows that sooner or later he’ll be emperor, even he knows it. Cortés made a gesture of unease, indicating that he wasn’t convinced by Malinche’s confidence. He returned her hand to her sex. She scratched her pubic hair. She said: The truth is that I asked him to kill you; if Moctezuma can’t bring himself to do it, sooner or later the people will rise up and nos van a xingar a todos, we’ll all be fucked, not just you, the only one who thinks it’s a good idea for us to stay here and do nothing. We’re reconnoitering the plaza, Cortés explained in the bureaucratic tone he had used many times to tell his men why he was subjecting them to a risk they all found unnecessary, but he realized that Malitzin was already off again. With her head thrown back, the translator was imagining Cuauhtémoc—so smooth and hairless—sodomizing the conquistador. He smelled her neck, let her come, and when she had finished climbed on top of her. She asked him to bite her breasts. He loved them, so dark and erect. She came again. He didn’t. Collapsed on Malinche, he asked: Should I go? You can’t not go; it’s Cuauhtemoctzin, he gives the orders; he said he would be there early because it will be crowded. We’ll have to tell the troops. He wants us to come alone. He’ll betray us. He’s a man o
f his word. I am too, said Cortés, and raising himself on his arms and the tips of his toes, he left a space for her to turn over to offer him her ass. Your people don’t know what it means to give your word, she said, squeezing his cock between the hemispheres of her buttocks. When he felt that he had recovered his full erection he lifted her up by the hips and thrust into her without ceremony. She whimpered. A talk, captain to captain, he said as he drove down. She turned her face so that she could see his eyes when she said: You aren’t a captain like him. The Spaniard thrust deeper, and pulled her violently by the hair, murmuring in her ear: I’m better. Ay guapo, she said between gasps; he isn’t a peasant who got lucky.

  Cortés’s mood deflated too and he rolled back onto the pallet. Acknowledging that he had lost, he turned on his side. He pulled the cotton blanket up from the foot of the cot and covered himself with it, curling into a ball. Don’t be a coward, she said; he’s a killing machine, but only in combat; with us, he’ll be a prince. The Spaniard said nothing. He was listening with all his senses alert to the faintest hint of betrayal in her voice. And you’ll like the game, it’s fun, and all the lords of the city come with their wives. It was only now that Cortés realized that Malitzin, who had been a princess first and then a slave, and was now something in between, simply wanted to be seen in public in casual conversation with the emperor-to-be. All right, Your Highness, he said; I’ll go to the game with Guatémuz, but you can only come if you do what I taught you.

  When the princess opened her eyes the next morning, her lover was no longer in bed. He had gone to wake a group of his men to follow them at a prudent distance. I think our next outing should be as a company, on horseback, hightailing it out of here for the Tacuba causeway, said one of his soldiers, who was also named Hernando, which meant that everyone called him by the name of the town he came from—Persona; I don’t think we’ll be able to leave on foot without being killed. As Hernando de Persona spoke, he watched Cortés nervously. No one will make trouble if they see that I’m with Guatémuz, answered the captain; he’s Moctezuma’s favorite. How do you know that? Everyone knows it. The men exchanged doubtful glances.