Sudden Death (10 page)

T
he serve fell within easy reach of the Spaniard, who risked aiming straight for the dedans even though the Lombard was planted right in the middle of the court. The artist's backhand return was flat-out impossible not only to stop but even to see. The ball struck in the corner, inside.
Quindici–amore,
said the mathematician, but it sounded like a titter. Easy, that's not the way, shouted the duke. The poet understood that when he was on the receiving side it was impossible to surprise his opponent—that he needed to wait him out.

He took the artist's second serve off the roof, and quickly moved up to the center of the court. Here he was able to contain a drive from the left, but the next shot blazed from the right. Impossible to reach. The duke, whose eyes had been popping out of his head ever since he saw the buffeting the poet took on the last point, didn't even bother to try to call out the score.
Trenta–amore
, the professor almost whispered.

The Lombard had woken in a splendid mood that morning, even though his first glimpse of dawn came when his second dragged him off his cot by his foot. He had fallen flat on his ass on the clay floor, its cool contact with his buttocks faintly
pleasurable. Then he scratched his head with both hands. All right, he said, still a little drunk, and he rubbed his belly with his right hand and worked his still-swollen face with his left. Then he scratched his pubic hair, massaged his temples, and only then opened his right eye a crack—the left was sticky with sleep.

The professor, already dressed and washed, had glanced rather greedily at the artist's rock-hard erection, the result of his spell lazing in bed. He sat down next to him. We're late, he said, brushing bits of mattress straw from the painter. Rouse yourself; last night we agreed to a duel. A duel? The painter's mouth was pasty, with an acrid taste of grease from the fried tripe he'd eaten before turning his attention to the barrel of grappa the night before. The mathematician stroked his abdomen, still ridged as a grill, traced the trail of hair that began at his navel, then removed his hand. The artist wiped the sleep from his left eye with a finger. Don't you remember? No, but if I kill anyone just now my head will roll. It's a game of tennis, the professor explained; against a Spaniard. The artist closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows, worries gone. He rested his head on the bed, rocking it back and forth. He scratched his neck. Did we fuck last night, he asked the professor. You drank so much you'd never have got it up. But did you? Yes. Well, then, you owe me. He stretched his legs. The professor understood what this meant and obeyed the demands of the painter's member, stroking it slowly. So did I enjoy it, asked the artist, still with a half smile. Instead of laughing, the mathematician snorted, and the artist stretched his arms along the edge of the mattress, parting his legs a little and closing his eyes. He rubbed his buttocks on the cold floor so that the pleasure spread to his
spine. The professor put the point of his nose in his ear; when he felt the base of the artist's member swell he squeezed his testicles gently. The artist came, more tenderly than forcefully. As he did so, he clung to the professor's neck. Hold me. We have to go. A moment, no more.

The professor let his cock sleep in his hands, then he got up. Only then did the artist open his eyes and look at him. The mathematician felt that he was taking the measure of his skull. He ran his hands through the artist's hair to wipe the pollution from between his fingers. Are you going to let me paint you? Now the Lombard was stroking the professor's slack sex with the tip of his nose and his chin. The mathematician was in his formal robes, so it was more a gesture of gratitude than an invitation to keep playing. I'm not your whore. He let him go on a little longer and then said: I'll wait for you outside; we swore very solemnly last night that we would be there. The artist slapped his thigh as if to say that now he was really getting up.

For breakfast he had half a bottle of wine that he found at the foot of his cot—he imagined the mathematician must have left it there when he went off the night before to the sumptuous palace guest rooms, where he slept when he was visiting Rome.

Two more slams and the game was the artist's in a shutout. The Spaniard never found a spot where he could block the shots of such a versatile foe. The Lombard had risen like a hawk over the match, exercising graceful but firm control of the henhouse in which everyone else around the court flapped. He was playing so well that he didn't seem to even be trying, or particularly possessed by the spirit of victory, let alone hungover, sleep-deprived, and raped by a mathematician. He was
unimpeachable, nearly perfect. He's playing like a saint, the Spaniard said to his second at the break. Before he returned to the court, the duke said: Wait, and from around his neck and under his shirt he drew a scapular. He hung it around his companion's neck. It's very good luck, he said. What is it, asked the poet, eyeing the faded image. A Mexican virgin, I believe; incredibly good luck.

The escorts lost the coins they had bet. Their master gave them more, eyes on the player done in by the sun and the shock, his shoulders down around his hips in pure defeat. Bet on points, not games, the duke said to Otero; maybe then it'll be less of a bloodbath. With all due respect, the mercenary replied, I don't think how we bet will make any difference.

POSTS OF PEDRO GÓMEZ, QUEVEDO'S FATHER

Scribe to Maria of Austria, Holy Roman Empress

Chamber Scribe to Anne of Austria

Chamber Scribe to His Serene Highness Prince Charles

Chamber Scribe to His Highness

POSTS OF JUAN GÓMEZ DE SANTIBÁÑEZ, QUEVEDO'S PATERNAL GRANDFATHER

Chamber Scribe to Their Highnesses

Gentleman-in-Waiting to Anne of Austria

Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Our Lady Queen

POSTS OF FELIPA DE ESPINOZA, QUEVEDO'S MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER

Lady of the Queen's Wardrobe to Her Majesty

Lady of the Queen's Toilet to the Infanta Isabel

J
uana Cortés didn't attend her daughter Catalina's wedding to the duke of Osuna: she found it irritating that the king was among the guests. Her gift to her daughter was a jade necklace inscribed in Latin that had been the conquistador's wedding present to Catalina's grandmother. The necklace is lost, like most Cortesiana.

She summoned the duke the day before the start of the festivities. She told him that when she died, the conquistador's arms would go to him because none of the Martín Cortéses were foolish enough to return to Spain. Then she reached out her madwoman's hand, for a moment the nest of all past and future misfortunes of the vast Americas, and in her palm was a little matte-black sparrow, framing an image so worn it was unrecognizable. It's Cortés's scapular, she said; my gift to you. The duke opened his palms to receive it like the Communion host. It wasn't as if he believed the tales about his betrothed's infinite grandfather, but he understood that the woman was bequeathing him a soul. The scapular was made with hair cut from the head of the emperor Cuauhtémoc after Cortés had him killed, she said; may it protect you—my father never took it off, and he
died of old age with more lives on his hands than anyone before him. Osuna looked at it, feeling something between fear and disgust. Put it on, said the old woman.

The duke never said much about the afternoon he spent with Juana Cortés on the eve of his wedding, but he came out of the garden room in a different frame of mind: more serious, and somehow liberated. He had learned that there's no point worrying about one's fate, because all paths lead to defeat: nothing is ever enough for anyone.

That night he took the scapular out from his shirt to show Catalina. They were bidding each other farewell after dining with the family members who had arrived at the Palacio de los Adelantados to attend the festivities. She looked at it with surprise. Odd that she gave it to you, she said. The duke shrugged his shoulders. It's a horrible thing, really, he replied. It was a rectangle woven of very fine, strong black thread. Worked into it was a figure that could no longer be identified. What is it, he asked his betrothed. A virgin of Extremadura, the Virgin of Guadalupe; the Indians made it for him; if you put it up to a candle it shines with a light of its own. Osuna approached a candelabra and couldn't see anything. He tilted the scapular until the slant of the light made it glow: immediately he recognized the figure of a virgin in a blue robe, surrounded by stars. So brilliantly iridescent was the thing that the image seemed to move. He let it fall, frightened. Will it burn me? Don't be an idiot, his future wife said. She took it and made it shine again. It looks like this because it's made of feathers, she explained. Feathers? Bird feathers; that was how they made the images, so they would shine.

He tucked the scapular back into his shirt. He had to go and rest before the banquets began. He bowed. Before he could retire, Catalina asked again what he had spent so long talking to her mother about that afternoon. Your grandfather, a huge garden, Cuernalavaca. The future duchess corrected him: Cuernavaca. I'll walk with you to the hall, she added. They went down the stairs arm in arm. As they were approaching the door where they would part for the last time before they were married, Osuna asked with sincere and perhaps slightly alarmed curiosity: So what does it mean to
xingar
, would you say?

G
iovanni Angelo Medici was a practical man. The son of a notary from the north of the Italian peninsula with no ties whatsoever to the family of the grand duchy of Florence, he governed the Papal States with diplomacy, restraint, and a low profile: qualities valued in the Renaissance era, which it was his lot to bring to a close. He greatly appreciated the gift that he was sent by his friend and counterpart, Philippe de Chabot, minister plenipotentiary for Francis I of France. He kept the fourth Boleyn ball in his desk, tossing it from hand to hand when he received someone with whom he had complicated business, as if to suggest that they should wrap things up quickly.

Just a few years after Giovanni Angelo Medici received the ball, his elder sister married a brother of Pope Paul III, and now nothing could slow his rise up the ecclesiastical ladder: he was the only member of the Curia who maintained equally smooth relations with the king of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain.

In 1545 he was named archbishop of Ragusa and in 1549 he became a cardinal. All this despite the three conspicuous illegitimate sons who accompanied him everywhere. Ten years later,
he was elected Pope Pius IV. He was appointed as a compromise, certain to last only a short time in the Vatican seat—here, too, he failed to heed expectations.

In addition to being a great manager, a politician untouched by defeat, and a bulldog for the election of his allies, Giovanni Angelo Medici was a lover of tennis. Even when he was pope he played senile doubles matches with his sons, and before that, when he was head of the Papal States and bishop of Ragusa, he was often seen at street games of
pallacorda
, red with enthusiasm and betting heavily on his three young bucks.

Relaxed to the point of corruption with his friends, implacable in the pursuit of his enemies, charming even when issuing death sentences, Giovanni Angelo Medici was the key figure in the transition to the Counter-Reformation and its splendid Baroque art.

In 1560 he named Carlo Borromeo bishop of Milan, making him the new model for the high clergy: he was curt and lean like a Franciscan but possessed a sophisticated education and was capable of navigating the turbulent waters of court receptions unscathed. Borromeo was an insufferable fanatic, but he was also very charismatic and never demanded anything of anyone that he wouldn't do himself, which meant that he was the most persuasive of the agents of the new morality and the new aesthetic, dripping with the asceticism and glassy-eyed stare demanded by an age of great ecclesiastical revolution.

Pius IV named Carlo Borromeo bishop of Milan because of the great shrewdness he had shown in his first assignment as papal secretary. It was an undertaking that until his appearance was deemed hopeless: restarting talks at the Council of Trent.

In the ten years during which Trent was on hold, the disagreements between the Spanish and French cardinals had become so extreme that the only way of bringing them back together was to promise that the Council would begin again from zero. It was no wonder: this was the decade when Charles V quit his position as the most powerful monarch of all time, leaving the Holy Roman Empire split in two and the throne of Spain under the buttocks of his son Philip II, who never understood that the whole business of the defense of Catholicism was a charade. The king of France was a Protestant boy who had converted to Catholicism solely for political reasons. England and the northern principalities of Germany, whose cardinals had attended the first session of the Council even though they had already broken with Rome, had simply lost interest; they were perfectly happy being simply Christians, and even turning a profit from it. There were no cardinals who could mediate between the envoys of the new kings of Spain and France.

Carlo Borromeo convinced both parties that Pius IV would wipe the slate clean once they sat down around the table at Trent. At the first session His Holiness began, “As we were saying yesterday . . . ,” and the discussion grew so heated so quickly that on the second day, when the pope insisted that they start from scratch, the cardinals rebelled and demanded that they follow the order of the day as they had left it the previous afternoon.

The council's final act was no less politically deft. When Borromeo and Pope Pius judged that the cardinals were simply going around in circles, the office of His Holiness—without informing anyone beforehand—released a bull,
Benedictus Deus
,
which listed the council's conclusions and urged bishops everywhere to submit to its dictates.

There were, of course, mutinous cardinals who wanted to go on with the talks. There were even some who refused to accept that sensitive questions should remain open, to be codified later in a new catechism. Pius wore them down with pastries, wine, meaningful smiles, and, to be frank, barely veiled threats: never since the Rome of the Caesars had so many ditherers been executed. I believe, said Pius IV to those who refused to sign his acts—this after feting them marvelously—that you should speak to our dear friend Cardinal Montalto.

Montalto was the most bloody-minded of his inquisitors, the most bitter opponent of seeking everyone's agreement—Utter hogwash! Is there not a captain aboard the ship?—and the most fervent defender of the idea of finally writing a catechism that would allow him to burn all Europe at the stake.

Borromeo wouldn't have been opposed to the idea. Pope Pius IV couldn't have cared less, so long as he could watch the conflagration from the comfortable vantage point he enjoyed as last pope of the Renaissance: listening to music, eating well, enjoying the company of friends.