Sudden Death (20 page)

T
he Spaniards gathered their winnings for the second time, and the Romans whistled for the artist to return to the match. Crush him and get it over with, said Saint Matthew; we're thirsty.

Upon the merging of the two tables at the Tavern of the Bear the night before, the poet had tried to make conversation with the man with the venerable beard, who seemed clearly to be of his own social class. The poet had no success, in part because this conversation partner was clearly the timid sort, and in part because the dominance of the
capotavola
over the group was absolute and permitted no diversions: he decided who would be mocked and he decreed who would get the drinks. He wasn't a petty tyrant, just the man who was paying. Under other circumstances, none of the recent arrivals would have been comfortable with this system, but by now the alcohol had done its work and it had been a while since they had crossed the threshold beyond which everything seems bearable so long as the possibility remains of downing another drink.

The poet shouted
Tenez!
He tossed the ball into the air and put all his newly recovered self-esteem into the serve. The artist
returned to the game lacking the lethal focus of the previous set, but with enough energy to maintain a tight back-and-forth on the court, obliging the Spaniard to run time and again after the ball. The perfection of the exchange was broken by the Lombard, who at some point felt that he had a better read of the shifting forces on the court and risked a merciless drive aimed at the dedans. He missed, leaving the Spaniard to wait for the rebound. The Italian had all the time in the world to rush back, bide his time, and knock the ball just inside the cord.
Amore–quindici,
cried the mathematician, even before the Spaniard wore himself out trying to reach it.

Not only did the young man dressed as a professor—for reasons unknown at that late hour and in a tavern—not talk, but the poet soon noticed that he didn't touch his cup, full to the brim since they'd all sat down at the table. Though he had an absent and taciturn look about him, every once in a while he would exchange glances with the
capotavola
that seemed to pass judgment on something just said. At this point the poet had opted to tackle the more complicated task of making conversation with the
capo
himself. It wasn't easy, since he was already engaged in preaching vulgarities to his acolytes.

After the Spaniard's second serve, the Lombard stopped trying to make the game fun. The poet lost heart when the artist brilliantly blocked a return, smiling from ear to ear, raising his racket with disdain, and letting the ball simply bounce off it and drop. The poet didn't even try to go after it, chastened by the cackles with which the beggars and tarts had crowned his effort at the end of the last point. The artist grabbed his testicles with his left hand and blew the poet a kiss.

The night before, after three boring cups of grappa, and the professor and the
capotavola
both resisting conversation, the poet had made as if to rise. Then he'd felt a steely hand on his thigh: the captain of the drunkards smiled at him with genuine innocence, blew his hair out of his eyes, and said in Italian: Excuse me, but someone has to control these savages or they'll end up wrecking the place. The poet offered his hand and the artist took it between his, giving it a manly squeeze. They're my friends, he said; awful, every one of them, but you won't find better; what are you doing in Rome? Not much, the poet answered in his rather academic Italian; visiting the holy places, letting things cool off at home. Ah, the
capo
replied with a sinister and irresistible gleam in his eye; you're fleeing because you've committed some atrocity against King Philip. More or less.

In the gallery there was a volcanic rumble: upset by the artist's crotch-grabbing and kiss, the duke's mercenaries all drew their swords and would have stormed the court and put an end to the painter's career forever if their master hadn't halted them with a sign. The Italians in the stands pulled their daggers from their breeches and crowded behind the mathematician, who spread his arms to hold them back without taking his eyes off the duke. The Spaniards didn't resume their charge, but nor did they sheathe their swords. The poet dropped his racket, and the artist had time to wonder whether he was simply stunned by the sudden outbreak of violence or whether he wanted his right hand free to run to the gallery for his sword. He calculated that he could defend himself with his racket until he reached his own weapon, which the professor didn't dare pick up from the
ground but was nudging with the toe of his boot. For an instant, not a bird flew over Rome.

Under other circumstances the poet would have explained to the
capotavola
that being fugitives from justice didn't necessarily make them allies of the king of France, but with his tongue thickened by grappa, he could never have articulated it in Italian, nor was he capable by that point of rational thought. And there was something fascinating about the man who filled his cup again without letting go of his leg, in a gesture that spoke more of generosity than courtesy, because he was as rough as a brick.

The duke cried: Love–thirty, and returned to his seat. The poet took this to mean that he should keep playing, and he picked up his racket from the ground, going to retrieve the ball amid the deadly silence of the men in the gallery, who were watching him with hilts in their hands. He headed to the baseline.

Tenez!
he shouted, but he waited to toss the ball into the air, giving the artist time to return to his position. He served. They knocked the ball back and forth until blades were returned to sheaths and the spectators were in their seats again. The poet felt as if his side had won this hand and they had the moral advantage after the way the duke had quieted his men. When he saw that everyone was absorbed in the match again, he attacked a high ball with abandon and drove it into the very corner of the baseline. Even the artist acknowledged with a nod that it had been a perfect stroke.
Quindici
–
trenta,
cried the professor in a display of courtesy to match the duke's peacemaking spirit.

Past a certain point, the occurrences of the previous night were not entirely clear in the poet's mind, though he was still too young to forget them entirely—alcohol-induced amnesia is a blessing decanted gradually with age. He had probably been embroiled in some foolish conversation with the
capo
that both found utterly gripping. He hadn't the faintest idea what they had talked about, but they had laughed, each gripping the other's shoulder every so often to explain something crucial, forehead to forehead, weeping tears of mirth.

The game is yours, the duke said when the poet went to retrieve the ball to serve again. He was taking his place behind the line, spinning the ball in his hand, when he saw his linesman order Barral to go up and place a bet, to bring things entirely back to normal. He lowered his racket, wiped his forehead. New bets.
Tenez!
The artist put up a serious fight, but he lost the point. Tie, shouted the duke.

The Spaniard was a clever and rapid-fire talker when sober; drunk, his biting commentary took on a brilliant histrionic spin: he imitated voices, pulled faces, could draw out barbs of unimaginable cruelty in a joke. The
capo
wasn't as loquacious, he was almost serious, but his way of railing against anything he didn't like, which was almost everything, was unexpectedly charming. He threw his hands up, flung back his head, and flicked the hair from his face with the arrogance of a master of Rome. There was something hypnotic about his voice, though it issued from lips too sharply drawn.

The betting went up. The poet served forcefully, then returned the artist's volley so hard that the strings of his racket
almost broke. The ball was unreachable where it bounced.
Punto di cacce,
cried the professor.

He remembered laughing so hard it hurt, arms around the shoulders of his new best friend, as Italians and Spaniards tried to sing songs in unison that should definitely have been sung on their own. He remembered himself listening as intently as a child to stories that the Lombard whispered in his ear: his hot breath, the tickle of his patchy beard on his cheeks. There was always plenty of grappa.

Then he had felt the urge to piss, and stood up. Having lost the ability to get words out, he clapped the
capo
on the back to indicate that he would return. The
capo
turned to look at him. Come back soon, he said. The poet bent down and kissed him on the crown of the head. A brotherly kiss between drunks who've been having a wonderful time together. The smell of the Lombard's mass of oily hair transported him to a world in which it was perfectly possible to live without fear of persecution by King Philip's bailiffs; a world of men who risked everything and waited for death with teeth bared; a whole world in which each thing had a corresponding other.

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.

B
y 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.