Sudden Death

by Álvaro Enrigue

  The expedition to Las Hibueras had been a grand failure. There was the precipitous stretch of Guatemalan mountain on which, between those that were lamed or fled into the wild and those that plunged over the edge, sixty-eight horses were lost. There was hunger. There were ambushes. During one of them, an arrow struck Cortés in the head; no convincing explanation exists of how it was removed and how he was able to carry on. There were illnesses and no Tlaxcalan shaman girls to cure them, only cantankerous old Mayan women to make them worse.

  The lives of Cortés and eighty of his thousands of men were saved because at some point on the Honduran coast they found a well-provisioned Spanish ship. The conquistador bought it on credit—lock, stock, and barrel, including the crew—and continued the expedition by sea. Upon his return he even allowed himself the privilege of stopping by Cuba to see his friends, returning to Veracruz plumper and in clean clothes.

  He spent the first night of the trip back to Mexico City in Orizaba. There, La Malinche paid a polite visit to the conquistador at the house of the town elder, where he was staying. They sat at the table and talked: bitter enemies now, like all those who have slept together long and well but no longer share a bed. He lied about the success of his expedition and the importance of the three port cities he had founded and let die. She said—as all ex-wives say—that she was glad to be out from under the thumb of a man past his prime, that it was their son—named Martín, of course—whom she missed, though he hadn’t been to visit her despite all the messages and gifts she had sent him. Finally, she handed him the sparrow woven from the hair of the last Aztec emperor. What is it, asked Cortés. After his bouts of fever in the jungles of El Petén, he sometimes forgot things. The scapular you asked me for, said Marina. Cortés smelled it, then held it out before him. You haven’t worn it, he said. I’d have to be crazy. On the face of the pendant was not the silver medallion that the conquistador had sent to her on the day Cuauhtémoc died, but an image in featherwork of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Cortés kissed the image, tilted it until he found the point at which it glowed with refracted light, and smiled with a sincerity that he could come by only very infrequently now. Thank you, he said, clutching it in his fist. He put it on.

  When the bard Lope Rodríguez found him lying dead in his house in Castilleja de la Cuesta, outside Seville, he removed it from around his neck. He had never taken it off.

  Theft

  In 1620, the doctor and artists’ biographer Giulio Mancini devoted an entry in his book Considerazioni sulla pittura to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, whom he had once treated after a rather flamboyant accident involving knife slashes and horse kicks. The brief biography of the artist begins like this: “Our age owes much to the art of Merisi.”

  From Giulio Mancini we learn that Caravaggio had reached Rome in 1592, at the age of twenty-one. He went to live at the loggia of the Colonna family and was employed by Camilla Montalto, sister of Pope Sixtus V. The artist must have come to her on the recommendation of Princess Costanza Colonna, who had employed his father as a master stonemason in Milan. The Lombardy noblewoman had always shown a great weakness for Caravaggio: she had protected him as a boy during the terrible plague that took his father, and spent her life applying for work and clemency for him at his frequent request.

  It’s no surprise, either, that the Colonnas were interested in introducing a painter into the explosive city of Rome at the end of the sixteenth century. Lombardy had turned out great bankers, brilliant generals, and pedigreed priests, but its status wouldn’t be secure for all eternity if it didn’t also furnish a native of Milan capable of decorating the walls of a Roman church.

  Caravaggio was a painter of undistinguished images of saints during the period in which he lived in the Colonna loggia. Camilla Montalto put him to work for Pandolfo Pucci, the miserable bastard priest who made him paint in return for sustenance that scarcely deserved the name: in his household, the servants ate nothing but lettuce.

  Says Mancini: “Salad for the first course, the main dish, dessert, and even for toothpicks.” On Caravaggio’s already formidable drunken sprees, compensation for the rigors of trying to make a life as a young artist in a city to which all the young artists of Europe had already moved, he would call his patron “Monsignor Insalata.” The fact that Mancini knew this suggests that in his own youth he must have been something less than a paragon of good behavior.

  Naturally, Merisi soon left the service of Camilla Montalto and her Monsignor Insalata. Before he left, he took the Boleyn ball as recompense. He wasn’t interested only in its chest, which he surely sold off cheap to a cut-rate jeweler. Next to painting, pallacorda was the great passion of his life and a source of income.

  It was his dirty-nailed fingers that emerged from the field of ashes left by the blaze of the Counter-Reformation, only instead of opening to the sun like a butterfly of flesh, they snatched up the ball, hiding it away in a pocket.

  Priests Who Were Swine

  Vasco de Quiroga, the first bishop of Michoacán, received his invitation to the renewed sessions of the Council of Trent in cassock sleeves. If in 1521 the nose of Hernán Cortés’s horse marked the farthest reach of the Holy Roman Empire, by 1538 the Aztecs were already as lost and mythical a people as the Atlanteans or the Garamantes, and their genetic material lay at the bottom of Lake Texcoco, or had been circulated for the last time through the lungs of those who breathed in the smoke of the huge piles of bodies burned after the fall of Tenochtitlan. We Mexicans aren’t descendants of the Mexicas, but of the nations that joined with Cortés to overthrow them. We’re a country whose name is the product of nostalgia and guilt.

  In 1537—the year Bishop Quiroga received an invitation, signed and sealed by Pope Paul III, to the Council of Trent—the Purépecha, historic and never-defeated enemies of the Aztecs, had themselves been decapitated by the Spanish conquistadors. The war was extraordinarily neat, because there was only one contender: the conquistadors. The Purépecha, knowing that there was no way to withstand the attack of all the nations of Mesoamerica, who were unified for the first time under the cannon-fire command of the Europeans, had yielded without firing a single arrow at their new masters, and their emperor had been baptized. In exchange for this surrender, all they asked was to maintain the kingdom’s integrity. Their request was granted—the kingdom of Nueva Galicia, which stretched from the Balsas River to Sinaloa, was nominally independent from New Spain during the sixteenth century—but the emperor and the entirety of the governing and military classes were exterminated in dishonorable and savage fashion by the armies of the traitor Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, second governor of New Spain and a conquistador of Michoacán. By 1538, the year Vasco de Quiroga received the invitation to Trent, Guzmán was already in jail, serving a sentence—hopefully painful—for murder, theft, and cowardice.

  In those days, the leading edge of the Holy Roman Empire was no longer a weapon or a horse but rather the spine of Vasco de Quiroga’s copy of Utopia; Europe extended as far as he could point with his book. Let’s put a metalworks here, the bishop said to the Indians—who loved him so much they called him Tata, “Grandfather”—and pointed to a field with the spine of his tome. What sprang up—though the Indians didn’t realize it, and Vasco de Quiroga may not have, either—was a new branch of the sheltering tree that the Holy Roman Empire also aspired to be, and sometimes was. Build me a school here; a hospital. The spine of Utopia. Another branch.

  As I write, I don’t know what this book is about. It’s not exactly about a tennis match. Nor is it a book about the slow and mysterious integration of America into what we call “the Western world”—an outrageous misapprehension, since from the American perspective, Europe is the East. Maybe it’s just a book about how to write this book; maybe that’s what all books are about. A book with a lot of back-and-forth, like a game of tennis.

  It isn’t a book about Caravaggio or Quevedo, though Caravaggio and Quevedo are in the boo
k, as are Cortés and Cuauhtémoc, and Galileo and Pius IV. Gigantic individuals facing off. All fucking, getting drunk, gambling in the void. Novels demolish monuments because all novels, even the most chaste, are a tiny bit pornographic.

  Nor is it a book about the birth of tennis as a popular sport, though it definitely has its roots in extensive research that I conducted on the subject with a grant at the New York Public Library. I embarked on the research after mulling over the discovery of a fascinating bit of information: The first truly modern painter in history was also a great tennis player and a murderer. Our brother.

  Nor is it a book about the Counter-Reformation, but it takes place in a time that now goes by that name, which is why it’s a book that features twisted and bloodthirsty priests, sex-addict priests who fucked children for sport, thieving priests who obscenely swelled their coffers with the tithing and alms of the poor all over the world. Priests who were swine.

  Vasco de Quiroga was a good priest. A man of the world who became a man of God when his circumstances demanded it; not exactly the God in whose name everyone stole and murdered in Rome, Spain, and America, but a better one, who unfortunately doesn’t exist either.

  Carlo Borromeo annihilated the Renaissance by turning torture into the only way to practice Christianity. He was declared a saint the instant he died. Vasco de Quiroga saved a whole world single-handedly and died in 1565, and the process of his canonization has yet to begin. I don’t know what this book is about. I know that as I wrote it I was angry because the bad guys always win. Maybe all books are written simply because in every game the bad guys have the advantage and that is too much to bear.

  Third Set, Second Game

  The Spaniards gathered their winnings for the second time, and the Romans whistled for the artist to return to the match. Crush him and get it over with, said Saint Matthew; we’re thirsty.

  Upon the merging of the two tables at the Tavern of the Bear the night before, the poet had tried to make conversation with the man with the venerable beard, who seemed clearly to be of his own social class. The poet had no success, in part because this conversation partner was clearly the timid sort, and in part because the dominance of the capotavola over the group was absolute and permitted no diversions: he decided who would be mocked and he decreed who would get the drinks. He wasn’t a petty tyrant, just the man who was paying. Under other circumstances, none of the recent arrivals would have been comfortable with this system, but by now the alcohol had done its work and it had been a while since they had crossed the threshold beyond which everything seems bearable so long as the possibility remains of downing another drink.

  The poet shouted Tenez! He tossed the ball into the air and put all his newly recovered self-esteem into the serve. The artist returned to the game lacking the lethal focus of the previous set, but with enough energy to maintain a tight back-and-forth on the court, obliging the Spaniard to run time and again after the ball. The perfection of the exchange was broken by the Lombard, who at some point felt that he had a better read of the shifting forces on the court and risked a merciless drive aimed at the dedans. He missed, leaving the Spaniard to wait for the rebound. The Italian had all the time in the world to rush back, bide his time, and knock the ball just inside the cord. Amore–quindici, cried the mathematician, even before the Spaniard wore himself out trying to reach it.

  Not only did the young man dressed as a professor—for reasons unknown at that late hour and in a tavern—not talk, but the poet soon noticed that he didn’t touch his cup, full to the brim since they’d all sat down at the table. Though he had an absent and taciturn look about him, every once in a while he would exchange glances with the capotavola that seemed to pass judgment on something just said. At this point the poet had opted to tackle the more complicated task of making conversation with the capo himself. It wasn’t easy, since he was already engaged in preaching vulgarities to his acolytes.

  After the Spaniard’s second serve, the Lombard stopped trying to make the game fun. The poet lost heart when the artist brilliantly blocked a return, smiling from ear to ear, raising his racket with disdain, and letting the ball simply bounce off it and drop. The poet didn’t even try to go after it, chastened by the cackles with which the beggars and tarts had crowned his effort at the end of the last point. The artist grabbed his testicles with his left hand and blew the poet a kiss.

  The night before, after three boring cups of grappa, and the professor and the capotavola both resisting conversation, the poet had made as if to rise. Then he’d felt a steely hand on his thigh: the captain of the drunkards smiled at him with genuine innocence, blew his hair out of his eyes, and said in Italian: Excuse me, but someone has to control these savages or they’ll end up wrecking the place. The poet offered his hand and the artist took it between his, giving it a manly squeeze. They’re my friends, he said; awful, every one of them, but you won’t find better; what are you doing in Rome? Not much, the poet answered in his rather academic Italian; visiting the holy places, letting things cool off at home. Ah, the capo replied with a sinister and irresistible gleam in his eye; you’re fleeing because you’ve committed some atrocity against King Philip. More or less.

  In the gallery there was a volcanic rumble: upset by the artist’s crotch-grabbing and kiss, the duke’s mercenaries all drew their swords and would have stormed the court and put an end to the painter’s career forever if their master hadn’t halted them with a sign. The Italians in the stands pulled their daggers from their breeches and crowded behind the mathematician, who spread his arms to hold them back without taking his eyes off the duke. The Spaniards didn’t resume their charge, but nor did they sheathe their swords. The poet dropped his racket, and the artist had time to wonder whether he was simply stunned by the sudden outbreak of violence or whether he wanted his right hand free to run to the gallery for his sword. He calculated that he could defend himself with his racket until he reached his own weapon, which the professor didn’t dare pick up from the ground but was nudging with the toe of his boot. For an instant, not a bird flew over Rome.

  Under other circumstances the poet would have explained to the capotavola that being fugitives from justice didn’t necessarily make them allies of the king of France, but with his tongue thickened by grappa, he could never have articulated it in Italian, nor was he capable by that point of rational thought. And there was something fascinating about the man who filled his cup again without letting go of his leg, in a gesture that spoke more of generosity than courtesy, because he was as rough as a brick.

  The duke cried: Love–thirty, and returned to his seat. The poet took this to mean that he should keep playing, and he picked up his racket from the ground, going to retrieve the ball amid the deadly silence of the men in the gallery, who were watching him with hilts in their hands. He headed to the baseline.

  Tenez! he shouted, but he waited to toss the ball into the air, giving the artist time to return to his position. He served. They knocked the ball back and forth until blades were returned to sheaths and the spectators were in their seats again. The poet felt as if his side had won this hand and they had the moral advantage after the way the duke had quieted his men. When he saw that everyone was absorbed in the match again, he attacked a high ball with abandon and drove it into the very corner of the baseline. Even the artist acknowledged with a nod that it had been a perfect stroke. Quindici–trenta, cried the professor in a display of courtesy to match the duke’s peacemaking spirit.

  Past a certain point, the occurrences of the previous night were not entirely clear in the poet’s mind, though he was still too young to forget them entirely—alcohol-induced amnesia is a blessing decanted gradually with age. He had probably been embroiled in some foolish conversation with the capo that both found utterly gripping. He hadn’t the faintest idea what they had talked about, but they had laughed, each gripping the other’s shoulder every so often to explain something crucial, forehead to forehead,
weeping tears of mirth.

  The game is yours, the duke said when the poet went to retrieve the ball to serve again. He was taking his place behind the line, spinning the ball in his hand, when he saw his linesman order Barral to go up and place a bet, to bring things entirely back to normal. He lowered his racket, wiped his forehead. New bets. Tenez! The artist put up a serious fight, but he lost the point. Tie, shouted the duke.

  The Spaniard was a clever and rapid-fire talker when sober; drunk, his biting commentary took on a brilliant histrionic spin: he imitated voices, pulled faces, could draw out barbs of unimaginable cruelty in a joke. The capo wasn’t as loquacious, he was almost serious, but his way of railing against anything he didn’t like, which was almost everything, was unexpectedly charming. He threw his hands up, flung back his head, and flicked the hair from his face with the arrogance of a master of Rome. There was something hypnotic about his voice, though it issued from lips too sharply drawn.

  The betting went up. The poet served forcefully, then returned the artist’s volley so hard that the strings of his racket almost broke. The ball was unreachable where it bounced. Punto di cacce, cried the professor.

  He remembered laughing so hard it hurt, arms around the shoulders of his new best friend, as Italians and Spaniards tried to sing songs in unison that should definitely have been sung on their own. He remembered himself listening as intently as a child to stories that the Lombard whispered in his ear: his hot breath, the tickle of his patchy beard on his cheeks. There was always plenty of grappa.

  Then he had felt the urge to piss, and stood up. Having lost the ability to get words out, he clapped the capo on the back to indicate that he would return. The capo turned to look at him. Come back soon, he said. The poet bent down and kissed him on the crown of the head. A brotherly kiss between drunks who’ve been having a wonderful time together. The smell of the Lombard’s mass of oily hair transported him to a world in which it was perfectly possible to live without fear of persecution by King Philip’s bailiffs; a world of men who risked everything and waited for death with teeth bared; a whole world in which each thing had a corresponding other.