Sudden Death (17 page)

A
s I've noted, Hernán Cortés was always in over his head, not least in the life he was fated to lead. He was swamped, too, by a cloak, among other juicier presents that he was given by Moctezuma's emissaries on the spot that a few days later he baptized as La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz and that today is the town of Antigua at the mouth of the Huitzilapan River.

A few years ago, on the occasion of the five-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, the Spanish government commissioned a replica of the
Santa María
, Columbus's caravel from which one of the Pinzón brothers first spied Hispaniola. I saw it in Veracruz, as it happens, and later I was able to visit it in the port of Baltimore, where it was on loan for years, for reasons unknown: it was at a tourist wharf between a World War II submarine and a sumptuous, triple-masted British galleon.

The caravel was a dinghy, a limping little ship that can scarcely be believed to have held a crew of explorers on a diet of infested water, rotten beer, and damp hardtack. It was a rowboat, a nut, a little plucked bird. The brigantines with which Cortés sailed the Mexican coast from Yucatán to Veracruz before deciding to annex Mexico to the Spanish empire were even
smaller. Agonizing little ships, in the holds of which the horses could barely stand upright; ships that could sail down a river, and that when tied to a tree stayed put.

The captain and his original conquistadors still looked rumpled and bleary-eyed when the emissaries of Moctezuma arrived, after following the Spaniards' ships by land from Tabasco. Cortés was absolutely not ready for a diplomatic conversation that first morning in Mexico. They've brought gold, said the soldier, whose name was Álvaro de Campos; lots of gold. Then I'm coming, said Cortés; wake Aguilar. When the captain got out of bed, setting his feet on the cabin's plank floor, there rose behind him—her hair in tangles and her skin a little bruised from the weight of his body—the face of the girl Malinalli Tenépatl, princess of Painala and courtesan of the cacique of Potonchán, skilled in arts no less valuable for being dirty. Time to use your tongue, Cortés ordered. She, whose polyglot brain was beginning to recognize simple orders in Spanish, asked in Chontal: On you or the gentleman? But seeing that Cortés was getting dressed and Álvaro de Campos wasn't getting undressed, she understood that it was her services as a translator that were required.

Cortés put on his full suit of armor and ordered that, in addition to Aguilar and Malinalli, his mouthpieces, he be joined by the fifteen horsemen distributed among the eleven brigantines that made up the expedition. The others should stay on board until further notice. He ordered that the horsemen dress as if they were riding to conquer Cempoala, with breastplates, chausses, and plumed helmets, even though this was the dry depths of spring and it was hellishly hot. From the drawer in his
cabin he took one of the pearl necklaces that he had brought from Cuba in the event of an exchange of gifts, weighing it in his fist, and also took a little bracelet of green glass beads from which hung a tiny, cheap copper crucifix. He put both objects in his pocket and went down to the cargo hold to untie his horse himself.

They had to wade ashore in water up to their balls, each leading his horse with one hand and holding the ship's mooring line with the other. If the ropes had been rotten, if Cortés's glove had been new, or if he had been distracted—slapping at a mosquito on his ear—the captain might have been swept away by the current, his body ending up in the Gulf of Mexico and Spain itself falling back to Santiago de Cuba. But that didn't happen. The explorers came out sopping and bloated from the water absorbed by cloth and leather, and greeted Moctezuma's emissaries with the obeisance that they had learned very badly during their childhoods as petty wasteland nobility. One of the lieutenants, called Ricardo de los Reyes—after a town in Extremadura and not because he had the slightest trace of noble blood in him—even sat on a rock to pour the water out of his boots, for which he was castigated with a growl that, if it had survived in the dictionaries, would today be considered a Cortesian adjective.

The captain mounted his horse, as his men did theirs, and they all proceeded to the meeting hosted by the local cacique, who was witness to the first exchange between the emissaries of the two bloodiest monarchs in the world at that time.

They met in the plaza of a town with the unpronounceable name of Chalchicueyecan, and there Cortés got off his horse—
he alone—and gave the imperial ambassador an embrace of sweat, leather, and steel. His men noted nervously that behind the Aztec and two other Mexica diplomats stood a considerable company of young men wearing nothing but loincloths and cloaks in eye-popping colors, all carrying rather terrifying weapons consisting of clubs studded with knives. No matter how many horses the Spaniards had, they were only eighteen—counting Malinalli, who was a child, and Aguilar, who was a priest and quite overweight, and Cortés, who was an old man.

Aguilar and then Malinalli translated that they came in peace, so long as the Aztecs converted to Christianity. The emissaries said yes of course, no problem. Then they set out their gifts. This is what Moctezuma's men delivered, no matter which chronicler is consulted:

1. A solid gold sun
   
2. A solid silver moon
   
3. More than one hundred gold and silver plates set with jade
   
4. Armbands, anklets, lip plugs
   
5. Miters and tiaras encrusted with blue gems like sapphires
   
6. All kinds of carved green stones
   
7. Harnesses, chain mail, doublets, shooting devices, shields
   
8. Plumes, fans, and capes made of feathers
   
9. Strange woven garments and bed hangings
   

Cortés thanked them for the gifts and gave them:

1. The bracelet of glass beads
   

Since there was a notable imbalance between the two mounds of intercontinental memorabilia, he asked a soldier by the name of Bernardo Suárez to toss him his helmet:

1. A helmet
   

When the swap was over—the Mexica ambassadors exchanging slightly disconcerted looks before proceeding, either because Cortés's gifts were rubbish or because they would have preferred a horse to sacrifice—Cortés made a small bow and turned his back on the imperial messengers. He was preparing to mount again when Aguilar informed him that the Aztecs had something else to add.

The main ambassador said: We bring you these valuable gifts so that you will give them to your emperor as a token of our friendship and respect; we hope that they please you and that you return to deliver them with all your men and all the terrible beasts you have brought with you; we hope that you never again set foot in our lands. Malinalli, who by now had her own agenda and preferred to be the wife of an absentminded old man than to go back to being the sex slave of a cacique and all his friends, translated this as: We bring you these very valuable gifts but in truth they are as nothing compared with what lies ahead; we hope you like them; we give them to you so that you won't even think about advancing farther with your terrible beasts because we know that the people are so unhappy with the emperor that they would surely join your cause and not ours. Aguilar, seeing
the young warriors and their clubs bristling with knives, said: They give you a warm welcome; they say that they bring you these gifts from the emperor of this land, who is troubled because his people are unhappy; they say that it's best if you don't help him, that in order to get anywhere you'd have to beat all the boys over there, and they are terrible. Cortés said that he'd think about it, and everyone seemed satisfied with his response.

The conversation between the Aztecs and Spaniards continued in more or less the same vein throughout the first stage of the conquest of Mexico, which ended with the previously described stay of Cortés and his men in Tenochtitlan. There are few better illustrations of how a whole host of people can manage to understand absolutely nothing, act in an impulsive and idiotic way, and still drastically change the course of history.

C
aravaggio had a third patron in his meteoric years: Federico Borromeo, cousin of Saint Carlo and at that point the youngest cardinal Milan had ever had. He was elected at age twenty-three because, with the ideologue of the Counter-Reformation dead, it was unimaginable that Milan's cardinal seat could be occupied by a priest from another family.

Before Carlo Borromeo died—an ascetic and twisted spike, a terror, the fucking thought police
avant la lettre
—Federico had hoped to be a theology professor. His cousin's almost instant canonization came as he was editing the Acts of the Council of Trent, which meant that choosing him was a logical as well as doctrinal decision: he was the only person who really understood what the hell the Counter-Reformation was about, now that it had Europe gushing blood. Also, Federico Borromeo was a key pawn in the pope's chess game: he was on the side of the French in Milan, a city that Philip III had just seized back by force of arms for the Spanish empire.

It's not surprising, then, that in the autumn of 1599, Federico Borromeo was living in exile at the Palazzo Giustiniani in the
Piazza di San Luigi dei Francesi: he was present at the consecration of the Contarelli Chapel.

Cardinal Borromeo the Second wasn't a sanctimonious or virtuous type—unlike the banker whose guest he was, he was a regular at his neighbor's men-only masked balls—but he had a sainted last name to preserve.

Borromeo had his own collection of art, tasteful and well chosen, which was deposited in the Ambrosian Library upon his death. Unlike his cousin the saint, who left a trail of misery across Europe, Federico spent his time and money buying books and manuscripts his agents sent him from Greece and Syria for the library on antiquity he founded, which exists to this day. It's to him that we owe much of our knowledge of the Hellenes.

When Borromeo the Second arrived in Rome, in small part to represent the interests of Milan at the Vatican and in large part because he definitely was not welcome by the Spanish government in his native city, Caravaggio had yet to turn to painting only what and as he liked: he was about to abandon the background noise of bucolic Mannerism that still suffused his sacred scenes before the absolute triumph of his
Calling of Saint Matthew
. Borromeo was his first private client: he bought a lesser painting,
Basket of Fruit
, before Caravaggio set the history of art on fire with the reds of
Judith Beheading Holofernes
.

Basket of Fruit
was painted not as fruit appears in nature, but rather as it looks reflected from a certain distance in a concave mirror. In its time, the painting was considered a virtuosic work more in the manner of the Flemish artists than the Italians. Rather than represent a window with foreshortening toward the
outside, as Renaissance optical realism tended to do, it occupied an interior three-dimensional space: to look at it was to see a basket on a shelf. To heighten the effect, Caravaggio painted the background the same color as the wall in Borromeo's study at the Palazzo Giustiniani and even followed the small cracks and bulgings in the wall on which it hung. The background must have been painted in situ.

Painting the fruit, which was on the verge of rotting, couldn't have taken Caravaggio more than two days of work in his studio. The piece measures twelve by nineteen inches, which means that it crossed the Piazza di San Luigi dangling from the artist's fingertips by the upper inside stretcher of the mounted canvas, as the main figure was already drying. Merisi must have carried his paintbrushes and palette in the other hand, his mind fixed on how to reproduce the quality of light on the texture of a real wall.

The painting, likely transported with his usual air of provocation, was a revolutionary object in a way that those of us living afterward can't imagine, because it's always been present and we've seen it reproduced a thousand times without even realizing it. Not only does the perspective extend out into the room in which it's hung, but no Italian artist had ever painted a still life before—that's why the painting is called
Basket of Fruit
: the idea of a “still life” had yet to be conceived.

The artist must have entered the Palazzo Giustiniani by the entrance to the servant's courtyard after midday—the light reflected on the wall isn't white, but orangish, like Roman light on autumn afternoons. He must have passed the stable doors and come in through the kitchen. Surely he blew away the hair
falling over his face before beginning the climb up the servants' stairs. Then he must have arranged his cloak before going through the false wall that connected the lower realms with the
piano nobile
, pushing the door open with his hip. The office must have been made ready for him to do his work while Borromeo attended to business at the government offices of the Vatican.

It was there in Borromeo's study that Caravaggio saw the object that changed his sense of color: one of the miters that a strange bishop by the name of Vasco de Quiroga, radical and possibly brilliant, had brought as a gift for Pope Paul III when he was called to the Council of Trent.