Sudden Death (9 page)

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either the conquistador's widow nor his daughter Juana ever returned to Mexico, but they never developed much of an interest in the peninsular surroundings where they spent the rest of their lives either. Like all of Cortés's descendants, they found it inexplicable that infinite New Spain was dependent on this dim-witted country where men wore tights and screamed at each other even when they were in good humor. More languages were spoken in my father's garden than in all Old Spain, Juana would say by way of ungracious explanation of the little interest she took in Europe, where she had in fact been splendidly received. She didn't become a wallflower like her mother, who accepted every invitation and then was silent at the soirées, but nor was she notable for her devotion to the class to which she belonged by fortune and by marriage.

The decorous madness of the conquistador's widow made sense, in a way: she was already a grown woman when she left a kingdom of exceptional riches, where her orders were obeyed even before they occurred to her, but she had left it behind so that her daughter could be where one had to be if one was a
woman. Her cool and at times even graceful distaste for her peninsular confinement was understandable.

Juana Cortés, on the other hand, lived in a fever of longing for America, because—having left Cuernavaca at fourteen—she never understood the body of war crimes that had made it possible for her to live her childhood like a native princess. The Andalusian orchards weren't bad, but one couldn't lose oneself in them, shed one's clothes deep in the wild, or play at spitting seeds and singing in Bantu with the slave daughters. The Guadalquivir wasn't the kind of river where heiresses to large fortunes swam stark naked after getting high on chocolate in the kitchen.

Once Juana Cortés had married the heir of the house of Alcalá, the conquistador's widow bequeathed his gloomy castle in Castilleja de la Cuesta to the religious order of the Descalzas and moved with her daughter to the duke's palace, which had an unbeatable name: Palacio de los Adelantados, or Palace of the Advance Men. The annual remittances that Martín Cortés was still sending her from New Spain were enough that she didn't have to worry about trifles like a private fortress on the outskirts of Seville.

In time, the Descalzas sold the conquistador's house to an Irish order of nuns, which still owns it and has seemingly incorporated into its cloistered existence the considerable penance of enduring the nightly siege of the four thousand lost souls vanquished by sword, lance, and arquebus that Don Hernán's dreams left plastered in the walls.

Juana Cortés was a Frida Kahlo
avant la lettre
: she wore
huipiles
and multicolored skirts until the last day of her life, though she had left New Spain at fourteen and not a drop of Indian blood flowed in her veins. When she was required to attend functions of the Spanish nobility, she carried a coquettish little silver box of serrano peppers wrapped in a handkerchief, taking a bite of chili with each mouthful as if it were bread. She stressed the
s
sound of her
c
's and
z
's to signal her Atlantic origins. After all, she too was a product of the balls dubbed His Holiness and the King.

She clung to her father's weapons and coat of arms with the fierceness of a she-wolf, though the duke of Alcalá allowed her to hang them only in the garden room of the Palacio de los Adelantados, where the marks of Cortés's glory, won at the cost of hair and teeth, wouldn't overshadow the little prop weapons that encircled the Enríquez de Ribera coat of arms. She spent most of her life in that room, with her mother, both of them at work on their embroidery and striving to persuade the conquistador's granddaughters that their grandfather's virulent blood was the best part of them.

And it was easy for her to be arrogant: each time one of Juana's brothers—all of them named Martín Cortés, no matter what belly they came from—was hanged in New Spain for crimes of lèse-majesté, the chests of the house of Alcalá were filled to overflowing again.

Not infrequently, Juana lectured her daughters on her curious interpretation of their family names. According to her, the dukes of Alcalá were actually a clan of clerks. It was a bloodline that had maintained its ascendancy at court essentially by marrying off a daughter to a lord of Tarifa, with the subsequent
acquisition of the admiralty of Castile. She arched her eyebrows as if to say that it was plainly a decorative title, considering the oceans—she pronounced it “oseanos”—of Castile. What was this compared with the territories that Cortés had won in a flurry of
xingadazos
for Charles V?

And frankly, for all of Cortés's many flaws, he is to this day the patron saint of malcontents, of grudge-bearers, of those who had everything and squandered it all. He is also the guardian angel of underachievers and late bloomers. He was no one until he was almost thirty-eight. At thirty-nine it occurred to him, from his perch on the Gulf coast of the Aztec empire in Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, that his reconnaissance expedition should be a mission of conquest and settlement, and thus ruled by the king and the pope—his balls—and not by the idiot governor of Cuba, whose daughter incidentally was by then his first wife: he fathered a Martín Cortés on her too.

Three years after having defied the government of Cuba, he wasn't just Europe's greatest celebrity but the prince of all those who fuck things up without realizing it. He's the lord of the fight pickers, the litigious, those who can never acknowledge their own success; the captain of all those who win an impossible battle only to believe that it's the first of many and then sink in their own shit with sword raised. The conquistador wasn't the great man that the duchess sold to her daughters, but he was an inarguably more entertaining model than the land-bound admirals on the other side of the family.

Juana Cortés's harangues always ended the same way: she pointed to her father's arms and said in Nahuatl: There is the sword that cut off the seven heads of the seven princes on the
Cortés coat of arms; let it never be forgotten, girls. Then she would return to her embroidery hoop, her thread, and her canvas, her mother seconding her with a series of rather alarming nods from her rocking chair.

This was more or less the atmosphere in which Catalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés, eldest daughter of Juana Cortés and the duke of Alcalá, and granddaughter of the conquistador, grew up. At sixteen she was married to Pedro Téllez Girón, Marquis of Peñafiel, future duke of Osuna, future defender of Ostend, future viceroy of Naples and the Two Sicilies, future pirate of the Adriatic, and future patron, comrade in revelry, and brothel mate of Francisco de Quevedo.

U
nlike the king and the rest of his court, Philippe de Chabot was a devotee not of art, culture, or tennis, but of the glory of France.

Ever since poor Rombaud had made an appearance in his rooms with a fourth ball made from the hair of the Boleyn woman, he had been thinking about the benefits that such an object might yield if placed in the right hands at the right time.

A ball made from the hair of the decapitated queen was the perfect gift for softening the already pliant Giovanni Angelo Medici, then governor of the Papal States, and a key piece in the negotiations with His Holiness regarding the urgency of forcing the succession of the marquisate of Fosdinovo in Lunigiana, where one Pietro Torrigiani Malaspina, patron of mediocre artists and magnificent thugs, was blocking the loading of marble onto French ships in the port of Carrara.

The ball couldn't be sent to Rome as it was, so he had a little chest made from sheets of mother-of-pearl riveted with gold, which in addition to matching the regal sumptuousness of its contents had the advantage of being a lengthy job for the
goldsmith. This allowed the minister—who was a devotee of the glory of France but also (though always secondarily) of the delectable sexual practices of low-ranking and high-breasted courtesans—to embark on a bedroom game or two with the ball, beneath whose leather stays beat Anne Boleyn's incendiary braids.

C
atalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés and Pedro Téllez Girón had not just a marriage but a powerful business partnership in which each provided the other with what was needed to act on a grudge. He brought new visibility to the gray house of Alcalá with his political savvy and his proximity to the king; she contributed money and the memory of the wiles of her grandfather, who had gone away and won what he believed he deserved.

When Osuna learned that a detail of bailiffs was being sent from Madrid to arrest him for abusing the generosity of the king with his trip to Italy, he set off for Ostend. He left for Flanders by night, accompanied by a single servant. There he joined the royal regiments like any other soldier until he was distinguished by his valor in combat.

The house of Osuna had no precedent for this: fleeing the king by taking up arms to defend the king; fighting bitterly to reclaim a territory in order to win a royal pardon; forcing the monarch and all his judges and bailiffs to pay obeisance. The only thing he carried with him on the jaunt was Cortés's sword, which Catalina took down from the wall of the garden room and gave to him before he set off on the road like a bandit.

There were likely few husbands in Spain at the end of the sixteenth century who were as unfaithful as Osuna, and it's interesting to note that each time the young duke was put under house arrest for reasons to do with his capacity for drink and the ubiquity of his member, Catalina had to embrace the sentence and serve it with him.

Many years later, at the fateful hour of the final and most serious of the duke's confinements—the one that spelled his end because this time he was accused of lèse-majesté and his enemies at court were infinite—Catalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés didn't hesitate to write a spectacular letter to Philip IV in defense of her husband. Addressing the king with the familiar
tú
, the duchess reminded him that his Holy Roman Emperor great-grandfather, Charles V, had treated her grandfather Hernán Cortés as wretchedly as he was now treating Osuna. She reminded him that Ostend would have fallen and Spain given way to the Low Countries entirely had it not been for her husband's defense of the city—which was true, to a certain extent. She pointed out that because her man had fought in the mud to defend the king, Spain had been able to sign a treaty rather than concede defeat.

The letter didn't sway Philip: the duke died under strict house arrest on September 20, 1624.

The night of November 26, 1599, when Osuna had fled to Flanders, his wife had accompanied him to the door of the Palacio de los Adelantados—where both had hid while the king's bailiffs called for him at his own palaces. Stay alive, she said before giving him a kiss. She touched his chest. Are you wearing the scapular? He felt it under his shirt. Don't take it off.

T
hough Cardinal del Monte was Caravaggio's official patron in the years when he burst onto the scene of Mannerist painting in order to annihilate it, del Monte wasn't the primary collector of his paintings. He had the discernment to discover him, but not to understand what he would be capable of once he set about painting with absolute freedom and support, as he did once he had a studio at the Palazzo Madama and enough commissions to unleash his visual experiments. Back then, his brilliantly colored paintings must have looked very strange, with characters from sacred history portrayed as the lowly beings who crowded Rome at the end of the sixteenth century.

The banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, head of the Repostaria Romana and principal financier of the French crown, must have seen Caravaggio's paintings in the Palazzo Madama's music salon—he was a neighbor and good friend of Cardinal del Monte—and without ever encroaching on the cardinal's patronage, he bought up all the works by the artist that were perhaps too scandalous to hang in the house of a prelate. These works—possibly too extreme for del Monte not only to display but even to understand—turned out to be plentiful. At the end
of Merisi's life, the cardinal had eight of his paintings and the banker fifteen.

Caravaggio's work was just one of the realms in which del Monte and Giustiniani competed for objects that skirted the acceptable in Counter-Reformation Rome. If del Monte bought the second telescope produced for commercial purposes by his protégé Galileo Galilei, it was because Giustiniani had bought the first. At the cardinal's grand parties, just as at the banker's more spartan gatherings, the high point was always the moment when someone opened the door to the terrace and invited the guests to see the moon from as close up as the Selenites must have seen it.

Del Monte and Giustiniani couldn't have been more different. The banker was a married man, terribly bored by the worldly obligations of his work as financier to the pope. When he could, he escaped to the scrubland of Liguria to hunt deer and wild boar. He was long and gaunt, with the kind of sharp face that betrays the true predator. He spoke little and read a great deal. Nothing could have been more unlike the cardinal's gelatinous exuberance. The two men's friendship—in addition to being genuine—was a fire-tested bond that made it possible for them to operate comfortably, though because of their French connection they were always in the minority at the Vatican.

Both were lovers of mathematics and sponsors of treatises on the mechanical sciences. Both invested time and money in a novel form of alchemy that didn't seek the transmutation of metals or the elixir of youth but rather a knowledge of the essential elements of the earth—what we now call inorganic chemistry.

Anyone who believes that earthly objects are all composed of the same group of substances, and that transformations are accomplished only by mechanical means, will naturally perceive the voice of God in the filthy fingernails—nails that are of this world, a part of history—of Caravaggio's saints and virgins. The voice of a god more brilliant than capricious; a god unlike God, remote and uninterested in revealing himself in miracles beyond combustion or the balance of forces; a true god for everyone: the poor, the wicked, the politicians, the rent boys, and the millionaires.

Caravaggio was to painting what Galilei was to physics: someone who took a second look and said what he was seeing; someone who discovered that forms in space aren't allegories of anything but themselves, and that's enough; someone who understood that the true mystery of the forces that control how we inhabit the earth is not how lofty they are, but how elemental. Del Monte and Giustiniani surrendered to Caravaggio. For the banker, it was the paintings; for the cardinal, the man. The two of them lived in palaces that faced each other across the piazza, at the end of which was the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, where Merisi's first public works of art hang.

At the time of his leap to fame, the artist never had to walk more than three hundred yards to deliver the painting he had just finished.