Sudden Death

by Álvaro Enrigue

  By the time the future emperor came for them, Malitzin had informed her lover that Cuauhtémoc had commanded his first battle at sixteen and since then he hadn’t lost a single one; that during the five years he’d spent at military college he hadn’t spoken once to anyone; that he didn’t eat game, fish, or fowl, but on feast days he ate the raw flesh of sacrifice victims. This enumeration of his virtues made her flush. A fucking gem, replied Cortés as he rummaged in his travel bag for something to wear that had no holes, or that had them only where they could be hidden under the breastplate and gauntlets of his armor.

  Even so, when Cuauhtémoc arrived, he liked him: he was almost a boy. He wasn’t exquisite like the dazzling priests who passed through the courtyards on their way to rites at the temples, or dressed up like an animal like the other soldiers of his rank. He was wearing a white shirt and bloomers, a discreet cloak. No trappings in his hair, which was gathered in a bunch on top of his head. He wasn’t carrying a dagger. Cortés felt more stifled than ever by the embrace of his armor, the weight of the grotesque Spanish broadsword on his belt, but he still believed that suiting up in iron made an impression on the Mexicans. They, of course, thought he must be an utter fool to walk out in the lethal altiplano sun with that massive contrivance on him.

  They walked straight for the quay, in the opposite direction of the snaking walls of the sacred city. The ball court is the other way, said Cortés nervously. Through Malitzin, Cuauhtémoc explained that they were going to a much smaller court, in Tlatelolco. Partly to make conversation and also to judge whether this was true, the captain confessed that the Tenochtitlan court had seemed too large ever since they had visited it early on, the walls too far apart and the ring too high. We don’t play there, said the Aztec, we stage performances of the first game; no one could lift the ball that high with his hip. It’s like a play, explained Malitzin. Cuauhtémoc himself pulled on the rope of the royal barge to bring it closer to her foot.

  The Calling of Saint Matthew

  On September 17, 1599, Caravaggio finished The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew. He brought the painting—a pure vortex of senseless violence and repentance—to the sacristy of San Luigi dei Francesi and then set a date for delivery of the second of the three paintings that would be hung in the chapel of the patron saint of accountants and tax collectors: the twenty-eighth of that same month. Since the delivery of the second painting would mean the possibility of finally dedicating the chapel—consecrating it, inviting the pope to the first service in affirmation of his impartiality in the eternal conflict between Spain and France—Caravaggio signed an addendum to the contract in blood, guaranteeing that this time he really would deliver promptly. In exchange for The Calling of Saint Matthew, he would be paid the second fifty scudi of the hundred and fifty—a fortune—that he would earn for the complete furnishing of the chapel when he had delivered the third painting, for which he would be allotted more time.

  According to legend, Caravaggio didn’t sleep for the eleven days it took him to finish the painting, which he certainly hadn’t begun before he signed the addendum. The models didn’t sleep either. The ones who have been identified are Silvano Vicenti, knife sharpener; Prospero Orsi, soldier; Onorio Bagnasco, beggar; Amerigo Sarzana, arse-fanner; and Ignazio Baldementi, tattooist. Though Caravaggio had the taste to use unknown men as the models for Jesus of Nazareth and Saint Peter, a serious fuss was made because the other actors in the sacred drama were petty criminals and loafers who spent their days loitering around the tennis courts of Piazza Navona. But nothing came of it, beyond the rumors that circulated about the ire of the French clergymen. The paintings were simply magnificent, the pope had already been summoned for the consecration of the chapel, and the artist was still under the ironclad protection of Cardinal del Monte and Giustiniani.

  The third painting, which he delivered much later and which was called Saint Matthew and the Angel, would be judged intolerable by the clergymen: in it, the saint is presented as a befuddled beggar; an angel guides the hand with which he writes the Scripture. It was returned. This was the first of many rejections that Caravaggio would receive for painting whatever he felt like painting and not what was expected of him by his patrons and the city’s enlightened circles. He had to redo it and was spared further trouble only because Giustiniani bought the painting spurned by the French Congregation. His Saint Matthew and the Angel was the best painting in a triptych of masterpieces, and the crown jewel of Giustiniani’s collection. Today it can be seen only in photographic form: it was in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin when it was bombed by the Allies in 1945.

  The Calling of Saint Matthew measures one hundred and twenty-seven inches by one hundred and thirty inches. It’s a nearly square painting that—like the Martyrdom and Saint Matthew and the Angel—should really have been a fresco, but since Caravaggio was an artist with a method and his method required a dark room, controlled sources of light, and models who acted the scene instead of just posing, he had his way.

  The artist couldn’t have crossed the piazza carrying this painting himself, since the thing was essentially a wall, but because the delivery meant the onset of celebrations for the consecration of the chapel, it must have been a procession full of pomp and circumstance, befitting the artist’s irritating conception of courtesy—if his barely controlled cutthroat ways could be called courteous.

  One has to imagine Caravaggio exiting his studio in the early-morning hours, after eleven sleepless nights cooped up with seven half-civilized men. The rings under his eyes, the stench, the clenched jaw of someone nearly out of his mind from exhaustion, the impatience with which he must have knocked at the door of the sacristy to ask what time he should deliver the painting.

  The Calling of Saint Matthew has all of what would become the artist’s signature elements, and it was by far the most revolutionary work of art seen in a Roman place of worship since the inauguration of the Sistine Chapel. Caravaggio paid eloquent testament to Michelangelo’s fresco, which he knew well: the hand with which Jesus of Nazareth points to the tax collector quotes the one with which God almost touches the Son of Man in the upper reaches of the Vatican.

  As in nearly all of Caravaggio’s subsequent sacred paintings, most of the surface of the Calling is empty, a dark room whose black walls—plainly those of his studio—are scarcely interrupted by a window with darkened panes. The single source of light isn’t visible in the painting: it’s a skylight, open just a crack above the actors’ heads. Peter and the Messiah, almost in shadow, point to the tax collector, who gazes at them in surprise in the company of four sumptuously dressed cronies busy counting coins with sinful concentration. The attire of Jesus and his fisherman is traditional: biblical robes. But the money changers look just like Giustiniani’s moneylenders and are sitting as they must have sat on the lower level of his palace, open to clients of the money-changing tables.

  Caravaggio, who was not a modest man, must have announced—still seized by the fierce exhilaration of someone who’s solved a riddle—that what he was about to deliver was his best painting to date, better than Saint Catherine of Alexandria, accosting a sacristan in breeches with flattened hair. It must have been agreed that he would bring the painting at midday, when the full flock of French clergymen—and not just the half-addled old man who said the early mass—would be present in their beribboned finest.

  Maybe it was the two youngest actors in the painting—Baldementi, the tattooist, and Sarzana, the arse-fanner—who hoisted up The Calling of Saint Matthew in the studio, crossed the courtyard, and, instead of going through the kitchen or scullery door as usual, carried it out by the main door, following the tyrannical instructions of a frenetic Caravaggio. Surely the rest of the actors in the painting were waiting outside, still dressed in character. The arse-fanner and the tattooist would have crossed the piazza, by now crammed with parishioners and tradesmen, to the cheers of those perhaps moved by the thought that what was happening was tr
uly important—which it was, though they couldn’t have known it, since the future has no place in memory. The artist must have gone before them, parting the waters, puffed up with pride. Prospero Orsi, the soldier, was the uninhibited type, ill-equipped to resist fatuity and borrowed glory. Surely at some point in the crossing of the piazza he would have ordered his fellow actors to stop, and demanded that they stage the scene again in front of the painting itself.

  The people at the doors of the church—the sacristan, the acolytes, the priests—must have watched the painting go by in as much of a fright as those seeing a movie projected on a wall for the first time, or with the slack-jawed fascination with which my son and I witnessed the early rollout of a high-definition television in an electronics store. The painting must have been propped against the altar as the carpenters prepared to mount it on the wall. The priests must have been uneasy—before they began to be vexed—at the presence of the boy they had so often seen wipe the shit from his little nose in the latrines of the house of the French Congregation, who was now inside the parish twice over, in the painting and in the flesh, and in banker’s attire. But this is only conjecture: specialists in the material culture of the seventeenth century continue to debate what exactly an asciugaculi did. Pay the gentleman so that they’ll leave, the cardinal of Sancy must have said nervously to the sacristan.

  The Chase

  The duke put the ball on the chalk mark that the professor had made, in the first game, on the paving stones of the court after the ball’s first bounce off the post. The mathematician certified that it was the right spot and together they proceeded to ceremoniously take down the cord that divided the serving from the receiving court. They bundled it up and gave it to Mary Magdalene, who had requested it from the gallery. Then they took their places opposite where they had set the ball, outside the bounds of the court on either side. The mathematician stood there almost absentmindedly, his hands clasped behind his back. He was so calm that it was a miracle he didn’t whistle a Paduan ditty. The duke crouched opposite him, staring seriously at the ball and stroking his beard with his left hand. He exchanged looks with Barral, who put a frankly irresponsible quantity of coins on the line where bets were placed. The other gamblers found seats in the gallery after setting their money on the side of the player they thought would win the race for the serve. Opinions were divided for the first time in the match. Both seconds turned toward the players, who were standing together on the far side of the baseline and jostling shoulders, trying to knock each other off balance even before the start of the race. The duke deferred to the professor. Eccola! he shouted, and almost immediately: Gioco!

  The start of the race might have been disastrous for the artist: his rival used his short leg to hook him by the ankle at the first stride. The trick worked, but the Italian managed to grab the Spaniard by the shirt and pull him down too. They tangled. Blows with the hands were forbidden by the rules, but they kneed each other as many times as they could in the process of freeing themselves.

  The artist tried to roll over to make room to get up, but the poet was coiled like a spring, and from where he lay he hurled himself onto the Lombard’s back, squeezing his buttocks between his thighs and succeeding in holding him down. From this dominant position he rose, one knee planted in his opponent’s back at the height of the kidneys. He levered himself up with a hand flat on the artist’s head. Mary Magdalene covered her eyes when she saw how her lover’s skull bounced on the pavement. If not for the shouting, the crack would have been audible.

  Alone on his feet, the poet rushed for the ball and managed to seize it. But he didn’t have time to run and put it in the dedans. The artist, one of his cheeks cut and bleeding, hurled himself full-force at the base of the poet’s spine, and both of them fell to the ground again. The Spaniard didn’t let go of the ball, but when he tried to get up, he felt the artist’s claw on his ankle, pulling him down. He went down again. The painter was on top of him, kneeling on his chest and trying to take the ball away.

  Bites, elbow jabs, and clutches followed as both men rolled on the stones like children. At some point the poet ended up on his knees in front of the artist, the ball still firmly in his hand. The Lombard thrust his pelvis into his opponent’s face to block his view of the dedans and the Spaniard threw for it with all his soul. The ball went in. The duke cried: Service side.

  The spectators returned to the gallery. The mathematician gathered up the coins that the Italians had set on the line. He counted them and crossed the field of battle to hand them over to Barral, who divided them among those who had bet on the Spaniard. He had to leap over the sprawled bodies of both contestants to reach the gallery.

  The two players lay side by side, gauging the damage, unable to muster the strength to rise. They were on their backs. More scandalous than the quantity of bruises and scrapes on both was the fact that jutting from their codpieces were such generous erections that they seemed to lift them up. Delightful, said Mary Magdalene, imagining a luscious threesome with pinches, scrapes, and scabs.

  Ball

  The ball court, painted with lime on the turf, was divided in half, and each half was divided into four smaller parts. A player was assigned to each quadrant and couldn’t leave it. Points were scored by passing the rubber ball through a big wooden ring fixed to the wall. If the ball touched the ground, the team that hadn’t made the error won the serve and could shoot for the ring on the first throw. The players rotated and changed court whenever one of the teams had lost the serve thirteen times.

  The match was exciting. Apan won. Cortés collected a sum—a dizzying sum, even—from the other gamblers. The Spaniards who had followed him, convinced that they were passing unnoticed as they shrank in their glaring, noisy suits of armor, had watched the match from the opposite side of the trench with no one paying them the slightest attention: if their boss was with Captain Cuauhtémoc, they could do as they pleased. They thought that at last they had been accepted, even commenting among themselves that they should come to see matches more often.

  Walking back to the quay, Cortés felt secure enough to ask the prince why he wasn’t taking the opportunity to kill him. My men are far behind, he said; and there are so few of them that the people could easily subdue them. It was the emperor’s request, the prince replied, whispering into Malitzin’s ear. Not to kill me? To talk, make friends; to see whether you would explain why you haven’t left. To the Indian, Malitzin said: I’ve already explained why you spare him, but he doesn’t believe me, and she translated for the Spaniard. Then she asked the future emperor motu proprio: Would you have killed him? So fast that he’d be picking up his own head. You don’t have a dagger. That’s never stopped me, he said, and he explained how a hasty sacrifice to the gods was made on the battlefield: You put the fingers of both hands into the enemy’s mouth, you pull on his teeth in both directions until his jaw snaps, then you break his spine with your knee and yank off his head. She felt a tingling between her legs and the urge to have her breasts touched. He was still staring at her impassively; what he had described was exactly what he would have done. What’s happening, asked Cortés. She told him. He wasn’t amused.

  When they reached the outer courtyard of the palace, crammed with bureaucrats hearing the rather vociferous complaints of the inhabitants of the realm, Cortés returned the cacao beans that Cuauhtémoc had loaned him to bet with. Thank him, he said to Malitzin; not for these, but for having kept his word. The Indian looked at him indifferently and answered: Tell him that sooner or later we will face each other in battle, and then I won’t let him go. And yet I will spare his life, answered Cortés, but Malinche didn’t translate.

  Six years later, on Shrove Tuesday, 1525, when Cortés gave the Indian Cristóbal the order to garrote the emperor in chains, everything had gone so wrong and everyone had changed court so many times that Malitzin was called Marina and it was Cortés who was called Malinche. By now everyone spoke everyone else�
�s languages, and without realizing it they had established a third nation, blind to its own beauty, that no one has ever been able to understand. May your God never forgive you, Malinche, said Cuauhtémoc—now in Spanish—to the conquistador by way of farewell. Don’t curse me, replied the captain in Nahuatl; I let you live when your empire was reduced to a barge. I don’t curse you for my death, said the emperor, but for all the other deaths; in this land no one will speak your name without shame. Very likely the four thousand masses that Cortés ordered to be said for the repose of his soul were conceived at that instant.

  When I myself visited the convent of the Irish sisters in Castilleja de la Cuesta, I asked the mother superior about the ghost of the conquistador. We’ve never seen him, she said in all seriousness; though there were mothers in the past whom he tried to engage in fornication. And she continued: What he did leave us is a lot of dead people we can’t understand, because they speak a language from somewhere else. There’s a very handsome one, she said, who can’t walk; he has a funny ponytail, on top of his head instead of at the back. Does he make trouble, I asked. He’s sitting in that chair, she said.

  Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language

  Ball, or Pelota. Familiar object, with which one plays. There are many different balls; but the most common is stuffed with hair, pelo, from which it gets its name. It is round in shape and divided into quarters. One plays with it in the trinque, a kind of court, and that is why the small ball struck with a stringed racket is called a trigonal.