Sudden Death (11 page)

The Romans played four kinds of ball games:
follis
,
trigonalis
,
paganica
, and
harpastum
.
Follis
was the game of large and small balls inflated with air; the large ball was hurled by naked players, their fists clad in metal up to the elbow, the whole body smeared with clay and oil—an unguent they called
ceroma
. Another was called
trigonalis
, whether because the room in the baths where it was played was triangular, or because the players were three. The third was called
paganica
, because it was played by the villagers, who in Latin were called
pagani
: now the ball was of cloth or leather, rather loosely filled with wool, feathers, or hair. The fourth and last game,
harpastum
, was played with a very small ball on a dusty floor. None of these ball games exist any longer. Instead, leather balls tightly packed with hair are played with sticks. There is a ball inflated with air that is used in Flanders and Florence and it is called
valone
, and there is the racket, very much employed in Rome.

Letter from
LICENCIADO FRANCISCO CASCALES
to
FATHER M. FR. FRANCISCO INFANTE
of the Carmelite Order,
1634

T
he vagaries of sixteenth-century Mediterranean politics made Vincenzo Giustiniani, heir to the all-powerful banking house of San Giorgio in Genoa, a poor boy. The Turks had invaded the island of Chios, property of his father and seat of the Giustinianis' financial empire, and, along with the land, his family had lost absolutely everything. Shattered and destitute, they had gone to Rome when the future banker was two years old.

The Giustinianis of Genoa had been the main financiers of the Spanish empire and had swung bloodily and without warning from extreme opulence to utter helplessness, the common state of immigrants in Rome. To make matters worse, they arrived stigmatized as
conversos
because working in finance was so reviled at the time. In the portrait that Nicolas Régnier painted of Vincenzo Giustiniani in the 1630s, a trace remains of that stigma: his face is endowed with a nose so extreme that it nearly covers his mouth.

In time, Vincenzo's father recovered his fortune and perhaps even increased it—his new clients, who were the Crown of France and the Vatican, were more reliable payers than the
Philips of Spain. But to do so he had to embark on a regimen of work and savings that shaped his sons' sense of professional discipline—Vincenzo's brother, a priest, was the pope's accountant—as well as political affiliation: they never forgave Philip II for failing to offer them asylum in their hour of need for fear of being called a
converso
phile.

This is why it's so disconcerting for historians that Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna, paid Vincenzo Giustiniani an unexpected visit at the end of September 1599. Likely Girón, weary of being hounded by King Philip, believed that he could spark some kind of alliance that would restore luster to his house—a luster long lost, to be frank, and for which the fortune that had come to him by marriage was a respite but not a safe haven. Maybe he had already decided by then that when he was back from Rome he would go to Flanders to fight, and he dreamed of mustering an army with a capital greater than Catalina's. Or maybe he was simply seized by nostalgia for the years when his father had visited Chios to negotiate the loans that allowed Philip II to build mines in New Spain and Peru.

It was at the Palazzo Giustiniani that Pedro Téllez Girón learned that the dazzling painting of the calling of Saint Matthew that he'd seen at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi had been done by an artist without a proper name, who was known as Caravaggio.

Osuna hadn't the slightest intellectual tendencies. His loyalty to Francisco de Quevedo is a mystery that can be explained only by the fact that the poet, so cerebral and unyielding, also had—when he wasn't translating Latin verse or writing treatises—a rakish and swaggering side as powerful as his monster brain.

With the years and the investment in bribes made with his wife's money, Pedro Téllez Girón became a politician graced with pen-pushers and pettifoggers who wrote his letters for him, but in the autumn of 1599, when he was received at the Roman offices of the bank of San Giorgio, he wasn't in correspondence with anyone, nor did he keep written records of anything. It's likely he was a functional illiterate and this was precisely why he dragged his personal poet along everywhere—though Quevedo didn't take notes either. There is no record of the meeting between Osuna and Giustiniani other than a note by an anonymous secretary, who on September 28 of that year wrote in the guest book of the palace on Piazza di San Luigi:
“Visita di P. Girone, nobile e fuggitivo spagnuolo.”
And then it is recorded that he was received in the trophy hall, which suggests that the banker had no intention of doing business with him.

The Palazzo Giustiniani was as sober as its owner. In any other residence of this type there might be tapestries and taffetas, but here there were only bookcases; where there might have been long rugs and cushioned chairs, the banker had terra-cotta and tile floors and uncomfortable Savonarola chairs. If at palaces like Cardinal del Monte's there were endless galleries hung with paintings from floor to ceiling, in Giustiniani's house the paintings were separated by blank stretches of whitewashed wall that must have given his visitors agoraphobia.

Of all the works that made up his legendary collection of art, the only one allotted its own room—the
studiolo
, separate from the bank's office—was Caravaggio's
Judith Beheading Holofernes
. He had it behind a curtain, which he opened before sitting down to eat or work and closed when he left, as if the gaze of
the servants who cleared the plates or swept the floor might wear it out. If Osuna and his poet were very lucky, they might have seen it, since before it came to rest on the secular altar where he hid it away, Giustiniani kept it in the trophy hall, another space off-limits to the women and children of the household.

T
o say that in the second game the artist crushed the Spaniard is an understatement. The poet could hardly carve out a point despite the superhuman effort with which he chased the ball, trying desperately to take the sizzle off his opponent. The Lombard floated on the service side with the implacable grace of a clock made of flesh. During the changeover an aura of precision and strength had settled about the painter, leaving the poet certain of being a simpleton, a laggard, a newcomer to every fight. He felt dull, aged, unctuous, more Spanish than ever, and so conscious of his lameness that it seemed the whole universe: his right leg was short a third of a span and that third was where the painter was putting the ball over and over again. It wasn't that he was doing anything wrong: the artist had simply been seized by one of his spells of perfection.
Quaranta–quindici,
the mathematician cried again. The duke had forgotten by now that he too had the right to call points and even dispute them: his mouth was good for nothing but swallowing saliva.

The mathematician wasn't a creature of tennis courts or street fights. Nor was he in the habit of sleeping with men. At the palace of the sodomite cardinal in whose rooms he stayed
when his work brought him to the papal city, he scratched an itch. That was all. That and the fact that the artist who lived and worked in the depths of the palace had shifted something in his center of gravity ever since he was introduced to him as the cardinal's most recent acquisition. He found him at once brutal and vulnerable, fragile behind his armor of grease, grappa, and cussedness. He loved that the artist was an unfinished man; a contradictory creature who might just as easily call for another drink after exchanging blows with a stranger in a brothel as—when they returned to the palace late at night—prostrate himself on the floor to remove the mathematician's boots and run his tongue devotedly along the curve of his foot. He had never met nor would he ever meet anyone so extreme, even though in the difficult years when he was persecuted by the Inquisition he would be questioned a thousand times by the world's most perverted priests. Nor was the professor especially particular in the exercise of his sexuality: he believed that in terms of texture and pressure there was little difference between the cunt of a sheep and the ass of the greatest artist of all time, so he might as well fuck him in the name of scientific experimentation.

And there were the paintings. He had never seen anything like those paintings, whether in Pisa, where he was born, or in Florence, where he completed his studies, or in Padua, where he taught and kept a wife who differed little from a sheep or a great artist except that she gave him children.

It was as if the full spirit of the age had its home in the artist's fist: the darkness, the aridity, the bleak dignity of empty spaces. When he had come to Rome the year before to sit an examination for La Sapienza, the mathematician had confessed to the
cardinal that he would rather stay at the University of Padua: Rome is a gap-toothed city, he said; full of vacant plots, half empty like the canvases of your painter.

The professor came from a family of the Tuscan petty nobility. His father was a mathematician, too, but refined by the abstractions of music rather than the coarseness of materials and their movements: he was a lutenist. He and del Monte had become friends at seminary, where both of them played in a papal orchestra—the future minister to breach the halls of the Curia and the future mathematician to earn a few coins and live more comfortably.

Unlike the cardinal, who was always indifferent to religion—he understood that his role in the Church was political, so he never even said mass—the professor's father had left the priesthood in a crisis of faith and raised his children as far as possible from the Catholic hierarchy, in the city of Pisa, where the tolerant breezes of the Most Serene Republic of Venice blew. The cardinal and the mathematician-lutenist kept up the mysterious bond of friendship all their lives, thanks to their habit of playing music together when they met.

When the professor was orphaned, the cardinal took him under his wing, though from afar. By now he was infatuated with the colossal, audacious intelligence of his friend's eldest son, and he supported him beyond the call of friendship during his rise up the steep staircase of academia.

During his stays at the Palazzo Madama, the mathematician did his best to avoid the parade of celebrities who daily visited the salons, the interminable banquets, the musical evenings that began with an appreciation of lutes and ended in lecherous
dances; saggy bishops paired with taut-bellied seminarists—boys who, after all, had been wearing skirts since they arrived. Usually he slipped out early and, before returning to his room, went down to the servants' quarters to see whether he might find the painter working or about to go out and set the night on fire with his entourage of outlaws and tarts. The barbarity of these revelries was more pleasing to him.

If the artist was working on a painting, he wouldn't go out, so the mathematician would watch him, intent on copying a single toe of one of his models, who were made to sit for hours by candlelight. These were the professor's favorite Roman nights and the only moments when he could talk to the Lombard in a state of sobriety. When the painter was idle and without commissions, the mathematician also enjoyed his lowlife indulgences. There was a furious sincerity about his nighttime exploits; a rage that later impressed itself on his paintings.

It was at one of the banquets upstairs, when he couldn't escape early, that the professor came upon the most beautiful piece of ecclesiastical attire he would ever see in his life: a miter in iridescent shades that an overseas bishop had sent to one of the popes to be worn at the sessions of the Council of Trent. The miter had been exhibited at the dinner not as a work of art, or as a memento of a moment of schism in the history of the Church of Rome, but as an object of such extreme luxury that it was almost obscene: garb fit for the brothel of an archbishop. Even in this setting, the mathematician found it dazzlingly beautiful because of the way it reflected the candlelight.

The next day he went to examine it at the office of Federico
Borromeo, the cardinal who had brought it. When it was in his hands he realized that the renderings of the divine word and the Crucifixion that adorned it weren't painted on satin, as he had imagined, but were made of feathers; it looked more like a scene stitched in the finest filigree than an oil painting. Where did this come from, he asked the cardinal. From a place called Mechuacán, in the New World, he was told. What artist made it? Some Indians there. He gave it a few turns; he remembered it being shinier. Though the craftsmanship of the thing was astonishing in itself, the night before he'd had the sense that it gave off light, so he was rather disappointed to discover that it had only been a kind of hallucination. Why doesn't it glow as it did last night, he asked, after weighing and smelling it. It's a secret of the Indians; it only shines by candlelight. Despite the cardinal's reluctance, the mathematician managed to borrow it for a few hours to study it with the increasingly powerful lenses that he was developing. He returned it the next day, admitting that he was very impressed.

The professor never wrote a theory of light like the one he completed on the trajectories of bullets—a theory that proved very handy for the artist when it came to making money on the tennis courts of the piazza. He always wished he had written it. In a letter to Piero Dini in 1615 he told him about the iridescent feathers of the New World and a phosphorescent stone that he had acquired at great cost in Padua. After his years in cells, he confessed in another letter, he would be content to live a whole second life of bread, water, and prison bars if he could better develop his scattered ideas on the flow of light.

It's the fucking mathematician, said the duke to the poet when the slaughter of the second game was over. Did you see how he spent the whole first set doing sums? Who knows what he said to him during the changeover; he found the one spot you can't reach. The poet raised his eyebrows: I hadn't noticed, he said.