Sudden Death (14 page)

G
ame. The poet flung his racket on the ground, betraying his desperation for the first time. The artist sprawled on the pavement, his arms outstretched, his smile beatific. Set to the Lombard, cried the mathematician, one–one; tiebreak for the court. Osuna approached the poet. He said into his ear that he had to stop acting like a child and get ready to kick and bite if necessary: If you're not on the service side, you're fucked; when you were on the receiving side you couldn't even get it near the motherfucking dedans.

H
e took the palm-leaf cone. What are they, asked Cortés through Malinche. By now she had learned enough Spanish to interpret directly. Pumpkin seeds roasted in honey, said Cuauhtémoc to Malitzin. The conquistador waited for the Spanish version, took a handful of seeds, and ate them one by one, his eyes on the ball game. They were sitting in the front row, with their legs dangling over the wall, while beneath them the athletes were breaking their backs trying to keep the ball from hitting the ground without touching it with their hands or feet.

During the break before a serve, Cortés showed signs of curiosity—something he did possess, despite his reputation. Which ones represent the underworld and which ones the heavens, he asked Malitzin to inquire. When Cuauhtémoc heard the question—deposited perhaps too close to his ear by the translator—he spat the pumpkin seed shells so that they landed at the very edge of the court. It's Apan against Tepeaca, he said, shrugging his shoulders slightly. Then he got up and went to bet a few cacao beans on Tepeaca.

Hernán Cortés and Cuauhtémoc had met in the infamous
year of 1519, when the visit of the fearsome ambassadors of the king of Spain to the imperial city of the Mexicas was still a courtesy call. Emperor Moctezuma had tried to dissuade his visitors from coming to the city of Tenochtitlan by all the means at his disposal—especially bribery—and they had resisted every temptation, held in check by their captain's promise that the imperial gold would be theirs as soon as they had conquered the trumpeted Aztec capital. Moctezuma's grand fuckup—the mistake that changed the world—was not having killed them when they first disembarked, before they were of any consequence.

When he had no choice but to welcome the recent arrivals to his palace, he waited on them with reluctance and fear. It wasn't superstition that made him afraid of them, as legend has it. He was terrified because they had arrived at the city gates at the head of a troop of rebellious nations from all over the empire. Never in the two hundred years that the Aztecs reigned supreme in Mexico had anyone put together an army like the one that Cortés mustered from the entire east of the realm. None of the cities loyal to Moctezuma had been able to halt them, and though the survival instincts of Spaniards and Aztecs—the two minority groups in the contest—made it necessary for one side to say that they hadn't come to conquer anything and for the other side to believe them, everyone knew—regardless of how hard they tried to pretend otherwise—that sooner or later the ground beneath their feet would become a mire watered with the thick broth of slaughter.

Cortés and Moctezuma met at the end of the Tacuba causeway, where the church of Jesús Nazareno stands today, at the intersection of República del Salvador and Pino Suárez. The
tlatoani
gave the captain a necklace of jade beads and received a pearl necklace in exchange—probably strung by Malitzin. The two of them walked to the royal palace, whose foundations today lie under the Palacio Nacional. The visit, though ominous, wasn't directly catastrophic: Cortés had presented himself in Tenochtitlan with his Spanish company alone, to avoid the awkwardness of being seen surrounded by sworn enemies of the Aztecs. The emperor was accompanied by the kings of the Triple Alliance, the caciques of all the lakeside estates and their captains, among whom was Cuauhtemoctzin, a cousin of Moctezuma on his wife's side.

Once they had reached the palace, the full imperial court settled around a courtyard to witness the conversation between Moctezuma and Cortés. It was a conversation in which no one would have understood anything, not only because there could not have been two people in the world more utterly remote from each other, but because what was said in Nahuatl had to be translated first into Chontal and then into Spanish and what was said in Spanish had to be translated first into Chontal and then Nahuatl, since the conquistador didn't trust any tongue but that of Malitzin, who spoke Chontal and Nahuatl, and that of the priest Jerónimo de Aguilar, who spoke Chontal and Spanish.

They exchanged more gifts and messages of goodwill. When they were done, the emperor returned to his sacred routine, removing himself from view of his guests and subjects—no one would see him again until the day of his death—to concentrate on ruling an empire that by this point had shrunk by nearly half.

Over the next eighteen months this empire, already slim,
would grow even slimmer, until it occupied only the Valley of Mexico, and then only Lake Texcoco, and at last only the island city of Tenochtitlan. On August 13, 1521, the empire was nothing but the royal barge, on which Cuauhtémoc was seized trying to escape by water from the wrecked Aztec capital. For once, history was just: a particularly bloody realm reduced to a single barge. Though that didn't mean the good guys had won. The good guys never win.

Several months after his meeting with the Spanish captain, Moctezuma sent word to Cuauhtemoctzin: now that the Spaniards had recovered from the shock of seeing the biggest and most hectic city in the world, he should take Cortés for a stroll, show him something, anything. Get close to him, the blind eunuch messenger whispered to the emperor's cousin; listen to him, let him feel that you're interested in him. Why me, asked Cuauhtémoc. Because you speak Chontal, said the messenger.

The young man had so far been an invincible captain and an intelligent ally of the throne. He was discreet, solitary, trustworthy. Noted for his discipline in a world where discipline was paramount. Tell the emperor I'll take him to the ball game, he replied.

He waited a few days to approach Malitzin, Cortés's Chontal tongue; he waited for the end of the first harvest, which was celebrated with games that were anticipated all year and that were definitely a sight for a foreigner to see.

T
he German historian and cultural critic Heiner Gillmeister believes he has discovered the oldest play-by-play account of tennis as we know it. An ur–ball game that predates everything: Italian
calcio
, English cricket, what in French is called
jeu de paume
and in Spanish
pelota
.

The first recorded tennis match in human history took place in hell and was a doubles match. It was played by four demons, using the soul of a French seminarist by the name of Pierre. In time, Pierre became abbot of the monastery of Marienstatt as Petrus I, and found fame. His story was preserved because Caesarius of Heisterbach recorded it in a volume called
Dialogus miraculorum
.

As the story tells it, Pierre the Idiot—as the first tennis player of all time seems to have been known in his youth—made a Faustian stumble. He had a terrible memory and was incapable of concentrating on anything, so to pass his exams at seminary he accepted a gift from Satan. It was a stone that contained all the knowledge of man, and all one had to do to possess that knowledge was squeeze it in one's fist.

Brother Pierre did what any of us might have done in his
place, and he got top marks in his exams without having to study. But one day he fell into something that we would now identify as a comatose state—which in his time was simply death. As he told it later, a foursome of demons extracted his soul from his body, feeling free to play tennis with it since the Idiot had unwittingly accepted the deal when he squeezed the stone.

The four demons, like four ordinary friends, made their way back to hell with the object they had borrowed from the world of the living and played a tennis match with their metaphysical ball. Pierre remained conscious and felt the satanic serves and returns in his flesh. According to his testimony, the match was particularly torturous because—as everyone knows—demons have steel fingernails and never trim them.

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.

I
t'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.”

I
n 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 really 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.