Sudden Death (15 page)

ACCOUNT NUMBER 168.

Once again, a dead man appeared to me, calling me by name, saying that he hadn't come to frighten me, but to ask me to commend him to God, that he was Don N, doing penance in Purgatory. In his hand he carried a ball of fire, and his dry tongue protruded from his mouth. I asked: Why are you there? He answered: For the sins of ball-playing and partaking of cold refreshment. He made a reverence to the cross and disappeared, saying: Jesus be with you.

JUAN DE PALAFOX Y MENDOZA
, Archbishop and Viceroy of New Spain, 1661

B
y the time Cortés and Cuauhtémoc met, the Spaniards were more than familiar with Tenochtitlan and had been thoroughly observed by half the city, out on walks that exposed their vulnerability. The Mexica people asked themselves, in ever more insistent tones, why Moctezuma didn't surround these interlopers and kill them once and for all. It would be interesting if history had taken a turn in that direction. From a contemporary perspective, Cortés and his company would be like those lesser martyrs who made the miscalculation of going to preach the gospel in Japan.

There would have been a Saint Hernán of Medellín and a Saint Bernal of Medina del Campo. Velázquez would have painted an altarpiece in which their heads appeared at the foot of the temple of Tezcatlipoca, and Caravaggio another called
The Martyrdom of Saint Jerome of Aguilar
: a canvas that captured Cortés's translator's terror just before his tongue was cut out. Beside him, covering her mouth, one of Merisi's tarts would have played an approximate green-eyed Malitzin. It would be a chiaroscuro set in small-town Rome, remote and squalid, as
Europe always was and would have continued to be if not for the flow of American ore.

Malitzin told Cortés that Cuauhtémoc had approached her. They had just been making love, as so many cheesy writers would have it, though for La Malinche and the captain—scarcely equipped for such a thing—it was more like the scuffling of two blind children.

The conquistador panted, lying on his belly on the cotton pallet as the Mayan princess turned translator, now lubricated with semen, dug about in her pubic hair in the hope of giving herself the satisfaction her man hadn't provided. I saw Cuauhtemoctzin in the market today, she said, kneading the clitoris that changed the world. By now, Doña Marina was the only one of Cortés's associates who could go out into the city without being escorted by an armed company. She was also, at least in Cortés's not inconsiderable experience, the only woman who could do politics and masturbate at the same time.

The captain moved next to her and sniffed her armpit. He squeezed the hand that she was touching herself with, without preventing its circular motion. Who is that, he asked. Moctezuma's favorite captain. And why does it make you so hot that this captain wants to talk to me? Still touching herself, she said: Because men who do it with men turn me on. She closed her eyes. Cortés let her continue. Before burrowing entirely into her own pleasure, she added: He said that he wanted to take you to the ball game tomorrow. Then, in order to come, she found her way to a world in which men weren't animals.

He waited for her to finish, tugging at his beard. When he sensed that she was back, he asked: Do you think it's to kill me?
Her breathing was still ragged when she answered no, that he was a decent sort. Though she had stopped feeling her sex, she protected it with her hand: she hadn't finished; she was resting. The emperor doesn't understand why we haven't left, and he thinks that if someone makes an effort to talk to you, maybe you'll explain. Cortés lifted her hand with what he imagined was delicacy and blew on her. She shivered. Should we believe him? Cuauhtemoctzin is to be believed—he has no flaws, he's a hero, a fanatic; everyone knows that sooner or later he'll be emperor, even he knows it. Cortés made a gesture of unease, indicating that he wasn't convinced by Malinche's confidence. He returned her hand to her sex. She scratched her pubic hair. She said: The truth is that I asked him to kill you; if Moctezuma can't bring himself to do it, sooner or later the people will rise up and
nos van a xingar a todos
, we'll all be fucked, not just you, the only one who thinks it's a good idea for us to stay here and do nothing. We're reconnoitering the plaza, Cortés explained in the bureaucratic tone he had used many times to tell his men why he was subjecting them to a risk they all found unnecessary, but he realized that Malitzin was already off again. With her head thrown back, the translator was imagining Cuauhtémoc—so smooth and hairless—sodomizing the conquistador. He smelled her neck, let her come, and when she had finished climbed on top of her. She asked him to bite her breasts. He loved them, so dark and erect. She came again. He didn't. Collapsed on Malinche, he asked: Should I go? You can't not go; it's Cuauhtemoctzin, he gives the orders; he said he would be there early because it will be crowded. We'll have to tell the troops. He wants us to come alone. He'll betray us. He's a man of his
word. I am too, said Cortés, and raising himself on his arms and the tips of his toes, he left a space for her to turn over to offer him her ass. Your people don't know what it means to give your word, she said, squeezing his cock between the hemispheres of her buttocks. When he felt that he had recovered his full erection he lifted her up by the hips and thrust into her without ceremony. She whimpered. A talk, captain to captain, he said as he drove down. She turned her face so that she could see his eyes when she said: You aren't a captain like him. The Spaniard thrust deeper, and pulled her violently by the hair, murmuring in her ear: I'm better.
Ay guapo,
she said between gasps; he isn't a peasant who got lucky.

Cortés's mood deflated too and he rolled back onto the pallet. Acknowledging that he had lost, he turned on his side. He pulled the cotton blanket up from the foot of the cot and covered himself with it, curling into a ball. Don't be a coward, she said; he's a killing machine, but only in combat; with us, he'll be a prince. The Spaniard said nothing. He was listening with all his senses alert to the faintest hint of betrayal in her voice. And you'll like the game, it's fun, and all the lords of the city come with their wives. It was only now that Cortés realized that Malitzin, who had been a princess first and then a slave, and was now something in between, simply wanted to be seen in public in casual conversation with the emperor-to-be. All right, Your Highness, he said; I'll go to the game with Guatémuz, but you can only come if you do what I taught you.

When the princess opened her eyes the next morning, her lover was no longer in bed. He had gone to wake a group of his men to follow them at a prudent distance. I think our next
outing should be as a company, on horseback, hightailing it out of here for the Tacuba causeway, said one of his soldiers, who was also named Hernando, which meant that everyone called him by the name of the town he came from—Persona; I don't think we'll be able to leave on foot without being killed. As Hernando de Persona spoke, he watched Cortés nervously. No one will make trouble if they see that I'm with Guatémuz, answered the captain; he's Moctezuma's favorite. How do you know that? Everyone knows it. The men exchanged doubtful glances.

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.

O
n 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 truly 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.