Though the artist seemed wholly focused on chasing the ball, the poet never failed to respond with solvency and clarity. A slip by the Lombard on a low stroke brought victory to the poet. Game to Spain, cried the duke, with vehemence.
Wait, said the capo; I have to piss too.
Counter-Reformation
By 1530, when Vasco de Quiroga arrived in New Spain, Tenochtitlan had been pacified. It was a city whose official language was still Nahuatl and where no one stopped to wonder anymore whether this thing with the Spaniards would be a temporary occupation or they were here to stay: yet another tribe that would govern until expelled by the next one.
The rest of infinite America still had no inkling that over the next two hundred years, dozens of thousand-year-old cultures that had flourished in isolation, without contamination or means of defense, would inexorably be trashed. Not that it matters: nothing matters. Species are extinguished, children leave home, friends turn up with impossible girlfriends, cultures disappear, languages are one day no longer spoken; those who survive convince themselves that they were the most fit.
In the third decade of the sixteenth century, the capital of the Tenochcas was the tip of a triangle that spread its arms toward the Gulf of Mexico and reached all the way to Spain. Outside the Holy Roman Empire’s triangle of influence, the conquistadors must have been perceived by the majorities that surrounded them as a tribe with an inevitably superior technology of death, but also with less of a thirst for blood than the previous occupants of Mexico’s imperial capital. Not that the recent arrivals were humanists on a mission to improve anyone’s life, but at least they didn’t make sacrifices to frenzied and glamorous gods—lovers of spectacle and gore like none before or since. Their sacrifices were to a bland and pragmatic god called money, statistically more lethal than the four divine Tezcatlipocas put together, but also slower in its means of causing harm.
Vasco de Quiroga was a lawyer of noble birth, schooled in what the court of Charles V considered the Orient, since he had been a judge in Algeria. Because of this experience, he was sent along with other less cosmopolitan judges—oidores, they were called medievally—to bring order to the cynical, thieving, disobedient, and murderous administration of New Spain.
Quiroga had no immediate interest in the Purépecha territory of Mechuacán, west of Mexico City, recently acquired by the Spanish crown. But he must have read and heard many accounts of the destruction of the only empire that had always withstood Aztec onslaughts.
In his first year in New Spain, Quiroga was simply a learned and circumspect judge with an astonishing capacity for work, a notable curiosity about the affairs of the indigenous culture languishing in the city, and little or no interest in playing politics. Disenchanted with the class of landowners who thus far had shared among them the governance of New Spain, Quiroga made friends among the clergy. He was a frequent visitor of Bishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga, who one day—probably when they’d been discussing how to govern the vast territory they didn’t even understand—loaned him a little book written by an Englishman: Utopia.
It’s funny that it was Juan de Zumárraga, ever eager to torture Indians and burn them at the stake, who planted the idea in Judge Quiroga’s head that the indigenous peoples, self-governed in rational fashion, could turn the bone-crushing land that was New Spain into a productive and egalitarian paradise. It’s no exaggeration to say that Zumárraga was a war criminal, a bloodthirsty beast, a crazy drug-cartel boss. The zeal with which he persecuted the native Americans for heresy was so scandalous that Charles V himself had to sign a decree indicating that Indians couldn’t be heretics because they were new converts, and prohibiting them from being put on trial by the Inquisition.
If Carlo Borromeo was the very incarnation of the ideology of the Counter-Reformation, Fray Juan de Zumárraga was his sharpest instrument on the other side of the world. Both of them were bishops consecrated—perhaps irresponsibly—by Pope Pius IV, who, as the last Renaissance sybarite, slayed one world and founded another.
The future first archbishop of Mexico was a long-limbed native of Biscay. Someone should make a typology of the raging Counter-Reformers: all of them were gaunt and somewhat common-looking people, men who did their work with an excessive zeal that surely no one demanded of them, who took seriously things that had been proposed and set down only for appearance’s sake. Zumárraga may also have been the only incorruptible Spanish subject with whom Charles V—always surrounded by yes-men—ever managed to speak.
When Fray Julián Garcés, the first bishop of Mexico, retired at seventy-five—he was named to the seat so early that he established the diocese in Tlaxcala because Tenochtitlan still reeked of death—Zumárraga was named to the post. The emperor forced through his candidacy, popped a miter on his head, and shoved him off to America with the novel charge of “protector of Indians”—which he in fact was, so long as the Indians didn’t display behavior suggestive of heresy.
Despite being a provincial man without political experience, Zumárraga had great instincts. He had hardly arrived in New Spain when he realized that the archdiocese had to be moved to Tenochtitlan—it wasn’t yet clear at the time what the new kingdom’s capital would be—and he settled it in the Convento de San Francisco at Mexico City, where the Torre Latinoamericana stands today.
On this spot, he moved into the cell of a common friar, bestowed on the Mexican Church the structure it has today, signed death sentence after death sentence with his bony hand, and realized that for the Christian faith to catch on, faces of saints and virgins would have to be painted brown and Catholic temples erected where Mexican places of worship had once stood.
Fray Juan didn’t only have a thirst for fire. It was he who wrote the letter to the king of Spain describing the outrages of the Primera Audiencia government against the Indians, and it was he who came up with the plan of embedding the letter in a cake of wax and sending it hidden in a barrel of oil. With this wise and valiant act, he kept his promise of protecting the Indians—or at least the Indians he didn’t think deserved to burn at the stake.
It’s true that he burned all the indigenous codices that fell into his hands, considering them “things of the Devil.” His fervor even took an investigative turn in matters of traditional medicine and the herbal arts: he did away with as many healers as he could, and silenced their apprentices. It was because of him that in a single generation the medical knowledge accumulated over thousands of years in central Mexico was lost. On the other hand, he had a passion for the books of learned men of the sort that he may have wished to be. When he left the Convento de San Francisco to move to the brand-new archdiocese built from the very stones of Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor, he found the money to ensure that his primitive office and cell were jammed with books that he’d had sent from Spain: he was the founder of the first library in continental America. It was he who designed and shepherded the creation of the Universidad Pontificia de México, and he who bought and installed the first American printing press in the archdiocese.
All this happened once his battles were won and the lawyer Vasco de Quiroga was the unexpected bishop of Michoacán. Before this, when Quiroga and Zumárraga surely met at the office of the archdiocese in the Convento de San Francisco, both men (one of letters, the other aspiring to the name) were overwhelmed by a royal mandate that simply didn’t seem feasible: transforming supine Mexico into something functional and resembling Europe. It was during one of these conversations that Zumárraga gave Quiroga the little book by Thomas More—evidence of this is the tome itself, which contains the notes of both men and can still be consulted in the rare books collection of the library at the University of Texas at Austin.
Exercitatio linguae latinae
“In Paris do they play the way we play here?”
“With some variations: the Master of the Game gives the players shoes and caps.”
“What are they like?”
> “The shoes are made of felt.”
“They would be of no use here.”
“Here, of course, the game is played on streets strewn with stones; in France and Flanders they play on tile floors, flat and even.”
“And what sort of balls do they play with?”
“Almost none are filled with air, as they are here; they are smaller than the balls you know, and harder, of white leather; they are stuffed with dog hair, not the hair of men done to death; and that is why the players hardly ever strike the ball with their palms.”
“How do they play, then? With their fists, as we do with our balls?”
“No indeed, but with a racket.”
“Strung with string?”
“With a thicker cord, like the strings of the vihuela. They also stretch a line across the court: it’s an error or fault to hit the ball beneath the line.”
JUAN LUIS VIVES, Practice of the Latin Language, 1539
Third Set, Third Game
Drunks and children urinate with the same glorious urgency: when they have to go, they have to go with desperate seriousness. And they pee profusely and noisily, in a foamy, vast, and happy way.
15–love.
The poet felt a twinge of pleasure at the base of his skull at the liberation of his nether waters. His fuzzy head was bowed, because a last ray of light in his mind advised him to avoid splashing his boots. He raised his face and moaned like a lion, transfixed with delight. Only then did the stream regulate itself, allowing him to turn some of his attention to the dark figure of the Italian capo, who was spilling his own waters on the venerable cobblestones of the Via dell’Orso.
He felt as if he’d been pissing for hours when he finally pulled up his breeches and leaned against the wall to wait for his companion to finish. Only then did he notice that the cold air was poisoning him. He breathed deeply, straddling his legs to find solid footing. He clung—discreetly, he believed—to the ledge of the tavern wall so that the city would stop spinning.
The capo slouched at his side when he was done pissing. The poet saw him as if from a distance, his contours smeared by a brain turned to wax. His new friend seemed untouched, though they’d been drinking at the same pace. He also seemed to be talking interminably. The poet couldn’t understand a word he was saying.
He made an effort to follow, feigning a probity he no longer possessed, and he gathered that the capo was saying something about the night and the river. He tried to stand up straighter and couldn’t: he lost his balance and caught himself by throwing an arm around his companion’s shoulders. The capo whispered in his ear what he had been saying all along without being understood. That they should go to the river, that the river cured all.
There’s a particular kind of suffering in the loneliness of the person who has already lost the battle against alcohol and surrendered in a waking state: pain, nausea, the fear that this all-consuming discomfort will be eternal. At the river, he thought, he might be able to vomit without disturbing the neighbors with his retching. The warm hand of the Italian holding him up around the ribs was like the last hope in a world where all possibility of pleasure had suddenly been voided. He let himself be detached from the ledge, arm slung over the shoulders of the capo, who neither lost his composure nor stopped whispering things for his own entertainment as he guided the poet slowly along the narrow street. It wasn’t healing that he’d found on the shoulder on which he was drooling. It was something at once less effective and more comforting.
15–15.
The boil of the river didn’t have the healing effect he had hoped for. Instead, the swampy dampness of the air made him feel even worse. He leaned on the stone balustrade, the city spinning in the hollows of his eyes, and breathed as deeply as he could. Since the situation wasn’t improving, he shoved his index finger against the back of his throat. His whole body began to convulse, hunched over.
First it was just a pain in his chest, a surge of shivers and tremors, coughs so deep that he thought they would shake his balls loose. He crouched down, and felt the grappa that was still slopping unprocessed in his stomach surge up with cyclone force. He managed to rise enough to vomit interminably over the retaining wall of the waterway.
He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and blew his nose, which was running profusely, with his handkerchief. He rubbed his neck and slumped to the ground, resting against the balustrade. He smiled: no longer did he feel the graze of death’s teeth on his scalp, but he was still very drunk. Only now did he seek the capo with his gaze. The Italian seemed to have vanished after leaving him at the river. He fell asleep.
30–15.
He was woken by someone shaking him by the shoulders. It was the capo, eyeing him with a complicit smile. Are you all right, he asked gently. He lifted the poet’s face by the chin, gave him a few kindly slaps, pulled him by the ears. Stirred back to life, he saw that the man was offering him a jug. If I drink another drop of wine I’ll die, he said. It’s water, the capo said; fresh, I went to the fountain. This struck the poet as funny and he proceeded to rid himself of the sour taste of his own filth, spitting mouthfuls of water over the balustrade into the river. Finally he splashed his face and neck. The Italian took a branch of mint from his bag. Chew this, he said. The poet obeyed with the humility of the fallen who are on their way back to life. Though the effect of the leaves on his palate and tongue was too intense to be pleasant, he felt that the mint juices were opening blocked ducts.
He grew confident enough to stand again. They’re waiting for me at the Tavern of the Bear, he said to the capo, slurring his words. He took two steps, slipped, and fell like a side of beef. He was barely sober enough to catch himself with his hands and protect his head. As he tried to get up again, he saw the Italian doubled over with laughter. The very red face of the man who a moment ago had feigned commiseration struck him as hilarious. The capo came over, took him by the hand, and then the two of them ended up in the mud. Each tried to get up on his own, but whenever one of them had nearly managed it, the other brought him down again with his efforts. At last they declared defeat and lay on the ground together, belly up.
The street is too muddy, said the capo; we can’t go back to the tavern like this. They crawled back to the balustrade. There are stairs here, said the Lombard, pointing to one of the flights down the retaining wall toward the stream; let’s sit. They advanced clumsily until they found what they believed to be solid ground.
30–30.
They sat there next to each other, the edges of their knees knocking as they rocked with laughter at whatever was said. At some point the capo leaned back and rested his elbows on the step above, shook his head, and pulled a wineskin from his cloak. It’s Spanish, he said to the poet. I can’t believe you’re going to keep drinking. The Italian uncorked the wineskin with a defiant look, crooning a silly little song. He raised it, opened his mouth, and let the stream of wine soak his mustache. Give me a swig, said the Spaniard, his boldness fueled by oblivion. The Italian let a second stream fall into his own mouth, full and still as a pool, and left his mouth open, pointing to indicate that it was the Spaniard’s for the taking. The poet smiled before moving delicately to lap the wine with his tongue.
30–40. Break point, cried the duke.
He plunged his hand into the Lombard’s hair and pressed against his mouth. The capo’s response was muscular: he grabbed the back of the Spaniard’s head. The poet felt that he was returning to some long-lost place, a place where he had a guide. He followed as if on that tongue he might find something he had always lacked. The musky scent of the capo’s hair, the vigor of his embrace. The Lombard switched positions, rolling the poet underneath him and letting the full weight of his body fall on him. The Spaniard found an unexpected pleasure in yielding, as if the virtue of obedience had suddenly gained meaning. He felt the Lombard’s erection growing. He was carried away by curiosity, the need to touch that wild and livi
ng thing that threatened and flattered him all at once. He was curious; he wanted to reach the place where everything that was happening would become happy torture. He touched the Lombard’s cock. The capo pulled away from his mouth and began to run his tongue along his neck, his ears. He had to know; that was all he wanted: to know. He slid his hand under the Lombard’s sash, buried it in his breeches and felt the capo’s member against his palm, squeezing it, exploring it, intrigued by its oils. He moved his hand a little lower to investigate the testicles, that source of pleasing heat. Then he heard the duke’s unmistakable voice crying from the balustrade: What the fuck is going on here?
Cacce per il milanese.
Utopia
No one has ever read Thomas More’s De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia in such a delirious state of pragmatic fervor as Vasco de Quiroga. It had been scarcely two years since the lawyer arrived in tumultuous New Spain, and he was already establishing the Indian hospital-town of Santa Fe outside Mexico City, whose ordinances—or what remains of them, which isn’t much—can conclusively be counted as the foundational text of the long and lavish history of plagiarism in Mexico.
Thomas More had written a political essay disguised as a book of fantasy about how a society might work if stripped of the constitutive vice of greed. The volume was a sardonic meditation on the miseries of life in the England of Henry VIII: a political cartoon. Such a cartoon, in fact, that it described a place called Nolandia (or “No hay tal lugar,” according to the still-unmatched Spanish translation by Quevedo); a Nolandia that was bathed by the river Anydrus—“Nowater”—and whose ruler was known as Ademus, or “Peopleless.” Utopia was an exercise, a Renaissance humanist game that was never intended to be put into practice. But Vasco de Quiroga saw something else in it.
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