Álvaro Enrigue: Sudden Death

Then, a long way off down the piazza, the duke’s escort appeared. They approached the gallery with the clumsy, evasive humility of those who haven’t been earning their pay. How goes it, one of them asked Osuna. We’re winning; why don’t you put a little money on our man, said the duke, because this is serious business. The men dug in their pockets without protest. The soldier of highest rank, Otero Barral by name, presented a pitiful fistful of coins. He was the smallest of the four, but possibly as a result, the scrappiest. Knobby and ruddy, he was the duke’s favorite, because he could keep calm in any circumstance — the model of a certain type of Spaniard, specialized in persevering no matter what. Yesterday we spent like sultans, he whispered in excuse from behind his wolf-man beard. The duke shook his head, led him away from the court, and, when he was sure that no one could see them, gave him all the coins he had just won. He ordered him to hurry and put something on the line before the second set began. Otero looked at the money cradled in his hands and smacked his lips with undisguised greed. Put the thought from your mind, said his boss; we need the moral advantage. They returned to the gallery.

When he was back in his seat again, the duke noticed that the artist was watching Otero as he went to bet. He didn’t remove his face entirely from Mary Magdalene’s cleavage, but he was staring at the captain. He blew the hair out of his eyes, lowered his brows, sharpened one eye in a squint. It was a sticky look, which pierced Otero as he went about the insignificant business of bringing over the money, setting it on the line, returning to his seat. See how he watches Barral, the duke said to the poet; what can it mean — does he like his looks or does he want to start last night’s brawl again? The poet shook his head. I don’t think he even remembers what happened last night, he said.

In the thirteenth-century work The Book of Apollonius , written in an early form of Castilian, the king of Tyre is blown off course by a storm and ends up in the city of Mytilene, where his daughter, Tarsiana, has been sold into slavery at a brothel and waits for someone to rescue her; like Scheherazade, she sings riddles that delay her surrender to the patrons.

When Apollonius and Tarsiana meet, they don’t know that they’re father and daughter, and she challenges him with riddles because he comes preceded by his reputation as a clever man, able to untangle any enigma. One of her rhymes, probably the oldest reference to tennis balls in Spanish, goes like this:

Hairy within and hairless without,

Tresses hidden deep in my breast;

I pass from hand to hand, always beaten about,

When the time comes to sup I sit bereft.

The tennis ball in The Book of Apollonius is described in a way reminiscent of the work that Tarsiana manages to stave off. The ball is like a shaved woman—“hairless without”—that is hit—“always beaten about”—and that isn’t invited to eat—“when the time comes to sup I sit bereft” because once it’s been passed “from hand to hand” it’s good for only one thing: to bounce around the piazza, making money for others.

On June 13, 2013 17:02, Teresa Astrain wrote:

Álvaro,

Please remember the book has to be ready before summer vacation. Are you making any progress?

About the roof thing. What kind of question is that? What kind of answer do you want? That it comes from Latin? It must be based in real life: kids lose balls all the time, balls end up on roofs, neighbors have to throw them back. I don’t know.

Return the proofs,

Teresa

On 6/13/13 17:19, “Álvaro Enrigue” wrote:

No, Teresa: it comes from Renaissance tennis. The game was played on a court with a wooden-shingled roof over the spectators’ seats. The serve had to hit it to be good.

Can I include our e-mails in the new novel if I send you the proofs by this weekend?

On June 13, 2013 17:22, Teresa Astrain wrote:

Great. I didn’t know that. And I would prefer not to broadcast my ignorance, so please don’t use my e-mails, and send the proofs by Friday regardless.

The conquistador must have been a nice man, despite his unwieldy role as the protagonist in the greatest and most revolutionary epic of his century and possibly of all history. Something in his fate weighed heavily on him, bewildered him, set him apart from the world, and, possibly for that reason, he was very clear about everything else, to the last day of his life. Despite his bitterness, he was practically minded and funny. He hid his torments, which were many, behind clouded eyes that were not softened by old age.

He spent his final years far from the noble circles of Seville, where he would have been adored if only he had cared to behave a little and play along at court. But he was the kind of man who had seen so much that it would never have occurred to him not to scratch his ass if it itched.

He wasn’t a hermit. At his house in Castilleja de la Cuesta he met regularly with the barber, the parish priest, the baker, the musician from the chapel, and a local poet — Lope Rodríguez — whose name has survived because he served as regular witness to the affairs of the conquistador. It was Rodríguez, it seems, who guided Cortés in the reading of classical epics, of which the conquistador was a fan so long as he didn’t have to read them himself. He was probably already blind, but he was also a man who remained forever childish and somehow unformed. Like our children when they’re little, he preferred to have someone read to him.

The conquistador was a one-horse man. When the horse upon which he entered Mexico City died at an advanced age in Seville, he buried it in his garden. From the day it could no longer bear him, he had refused any other mount. One gathers the beast was less a means of transport than the iron flail that increased a thousandfold the area of the Holy Roman Empire, but even so it’s hard to imagine that when Cortés went to the city for provisions, he traveled in the priest’s dusty cart or among the baker’s baskets.

Lope Rodríguez, the bard, was with him on his last trip away from home, three months before death took him in his bed. We know the story because several letters survive, written from the poet to the widow left behind in Cuernavaca. Cortés went to see the Florentine banker Giacomo Botti so he could pawn the last batch of gems he had left in Spain, because he had no money to pay his doctor.

When he died, his belongings were auctioned off on the steps of the cathedral in Seville. The text of the “Tender of the Marqués del Valle,” drawn up in September 1548 to certify the sale, included used clothing, a wool mattress, two stoves, two sheets, three bedcovers, a set of plates, a set of pitchers and copper pots, a chair, and two books. There isn’t even a table or bed frame on the list: at the age of sixty-two he was still eating and sleeping like a soldier, though it’s abundantly clear that he wasn’t poor — his daughter Juana’s dowry was more than enough to buy her the duke of Alcalá, who wasn’t a bad catch for the child of an insubordinate.