Álvaro Enrigue - Sudden Death

Cortés’s mood deflated too and he rolled back onto the pallet. Acknowledging that he had lost, he turned on his side. He pulled the cotton blanket up from the foot of the cot and covered himself with it, curling into a ball. Don’t be a coward, she said; he’s a killing machine, but only in combat; with us, he’ll be a prince. The Spaniard said nothing. He was listening with all his senses alert to the faintest hint of betrayal in her voice. And you’ll like the game, it’s fun, and all the lords of the city come with their wives. It was only now that Cortés realized that Malitzin, who had been a princess first and then a slave, and was now something in between, simply wanted to be seen in public in casual conversation with the emperor-to-be. All right, Your Highness, he said; I’ll go to the game with Guatémuz, but you can only come if you do what I taught you.

When the princess opened her eyes the next morning, her lover was no longer in bed. He had gone to wake a group of his men to follow them at a prudent distance. I think our next outing should be as a company, on horseback, hightailing it out of here for the Tacuba causeway, said one of his soldiers, who was also named Hernando, which meant that everyone called him by the name of the town he came from — Persona; I don’t think we’ll be able to leave on foot without being killed. As Hernando de Persona spoke, he watched Cortés nervously. No one will make trouble if they see that I’m with Guatémuz, answered the captain; he’s Moctezuma’s favorite. How do you know that? Everyone knows it. The men exchanged doubtful glances.

By the time the future emperor came for them, Malitzin had informed her lover that Cuauhtémoc had commanded his first battle at sixteen and since then he hadn’t lost a single one; that during the five years he’d spent at military college he hadn’t spoken once to anyone; that he didn’t eat game, fish, or fowl, but on feast days he ate the raw flesh of sacrifice victims. This enumeration of his virtues made her flush. A fucking gem, replied Cortés as he rummaged in his travel bag for something to wear that had no holes, or that had them only where they could be hidden under the breastplate and gauntlets of his armor.

Even so, when Cuauhtémoc arrived, he liked him: he was almost a boy. He wasn’t exquisite like the dazzling priests who passed through the courtyards on their way to rites at the temples, or dressed up like an animal like the other soldiers of his rank. He was wearing a white shirt and bloomers, a discreet cloak. No trappings in his hair, which was gathered in a bunch on top of his head. He wasn’t carrying a dagger. Cortés felt more stifled than ever by the embrace of his armor, the weight of the grotesque Spanish broadsword on his belt, but he still believed that suiting up in iron made an impression on the Mexicans. They, of course, thought he must be an utter fool to walk out in the lethal altiplano sun with that massive contrivance on him.

They walked straight for the quay, in the opposite direction of the snaking walls of the sacred city. The ball court is the other way, said Cortés nervously. Through Malitzin, Cuauhtémoc explained that they were going to a much smaller court, in Tlatelolco. Partly to make conversation and also to judge whether this was true, the captain confessed that the Tenochtitlan court had seemed too large ever since they had visited it early on, the walls too far apart and the ring too high. We don’t play there, said the Aztec, we stage performances of the first game; no one could lift the ball that high with his hip. It’s like a play, explained Malitzin. Cuauhtémoc himself pulled on the rope of the royal barge to bring it closer to her foot.

On September 17, 1599, Caravaggio finished The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew . He brought the painting — a pure vortex of senseless violence and repentance — to the sacristy of San Luigi dei Francesi and then set a date for delivery of the second of the three paintings that would be hung in the chapel of the patron saint of accountants and tax collectors: the twenty-eighth of that same month. Since the delivery of the second painting would mean the possibility of finally dedicating the chapel — consecrating it, inviting the pope to the first service in affirmation of his impartiality in the eternal conflict between Spain and France — Caravaggio signed an addendum to the contract in blood, guaranteeing that this time he really would deliver promptly. In exchange for The Calling of Saint Matthew , he would be paid the second fifty scudi of the hundred and fifty — a fortune — that he would earn for the complete furnishing of the chapel when he had delivered the third painting, for which he would be allotted more time.

According to legend, Caravaggio didn’t sleep for the eleven days it took him to finish the painting, which he certainly hadn’t begun before he signed the addendum. The models didn’t sleep either. The ones who have been identified are Silvano Vicenti, knife sharpener; Prospero Orsi, soldier; Onorio Bagnasco, beggar; Amerigo Sarzana, arse-fanner; and Ignazio Baldementi, tattooist. Though Caravaggio had the taste to use unknown men as the models for Jesus of Nazareth and Saint Peter, a serious fuss was made because the other actors in the sacred drama were petty criminals and loafers who spent their days loitering around the tennis courts of Piazza Navona. But nothing came of it, beyond the rumors that circulated about the ire of the French clergymen. The paintings were simply magnificent, the pope had already been summoned for the consecration of the chapel, and the artist was still under the ironclad protection of Cardinal del Monte and Giustiniani.

The third painting, which he delivered much later and which was called Saint Matthew and the Angel , would be judged intolerable by the clergymen: in it, the saint is presented as a befuddled beggar; an angel guides the hand with which he writes the Scripture. It was returned. This was the first of many rejections that Caravaggio would receive for painting whatever he felt like painting and not what was expected of him by his patrons and the city’s enlightened circles. He had to redo it and was spared further trouble only because Giustiniani bought the painting spurned by the French Congregation. His Saint Matthew and the Angel was the best painting in a triptych of masterpieces, and the crown jewel of Giustiniani’s collection. Today it can be seen only in photographic form: it was in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin when it was bombed by the Allies in 1945.

The Calling of Saint Matthew measures one hundred and twenty-seven inches by one hundred and thirty inches. It’s a nearly square painting that — like the Martyrdom and Saint Matthew and the Angel— should really have been a fresco, but since Caravaggio was an artist with a method and his method required a dark room, controlled sources of light, and models who acted the scene instead of just posing, he had his way.

The artist couldn’t have crossed the piazza carrying this painting himself, since the thing was essentially a wall, but because the delivery meant the onset of celebrations for the consecration of the chapel, it must have been a procession full of pomp and circumstance, befitting the artist’s irritating conception of courtesy — if his barely controlled cutthroat ways could be called courteous.

One has to imagine Caravaggio exiting his studio in the early-morning hours, after eleven sleepless nights cooped up with seven half-civilized men. The rings under his eyes, the stench, the clenched jaw of someone nearly out of his mind from exhaustion, the impatience with which he must have knocked at the door of the sacristy to ask what time he should deliver the painting.