Álvaro Enrigue - Sudden Death

Inside, laid out on the table, blazed the most astonishingly delicate and powerful group of luminescent pieces the bishop had seen in his life. What are they? he asked the Indian. The peasant for the pope. A peasant is a common campesino, said the bishop, a bit exasperated at being suddenly returned to the vulgarity of language and politics. The Indian shrugged: If you want we’ll get him an Otomi, but I think this peasant is nicer.

The bishop came up and took one of the pieces in his hands. Careful, the glue isn’t dry yet, said the Indian. Are they miters? Easter miters, explained the featherworker, for His Holidays to wear during Holy Week, a reminder that we are his warriors. Holiness, said the bishop, though his intention wasn’t to correct the featherworker’s Spanish, but to point out that if ever a human entity could be described with such an adjective, this was it. What a load we have to bear, Huanitzin, he said; you’re the man of God. The mushrooms help, even if you don’t like them; will you have some? There are a few left, I think. Are they derrumbes or pajaritos? Derrumbes and also pajaritos . A little handful of pajaritos , then, but that’s all, I have a meeting soon.

They went out to watch the fading of the last light of day. They were silent until Quiroga noticed that the meadow had begun to breathe and the surface of the lake had become a window onto the world of the old gods. They were playing ball, indifferent to their extinction. Aren’t the light-sheep mellifluous, Huanitzin said to the bishop, giving him a nudge to shake him from his stupor. The trees, my dear Don Diego, the trees; how lovely to see them grow fat with sap. Now you are truly ready to appreciate His Holidays’ miters, said the Indian, seized with laughter.

GAME PLAYED WITH ROSES AS IF WITH BALLS — Tsitsiqui apantzequa chanaqua

GAME PLAYED BY TOSSING TWO OR THREE BALLS UP IN THE AIR AND CATCHING THEM — Tziman notero tanimu apantzen mayocxquareni

BALL GAME PLAYED WITH THE HANDS — Apantzrqua chanaqua

BALL GAME PLAYED WITH THE KNEES — Taranduqua hurincxtaqua

BALL GAME PLAYED WITH THE BUTTOCKS — Taranduqua chanaqua

FRAY MATURINO GILBERTI, Art of the Language of Mechuacán , 1558

Your only chance, then, is to get the serve to bounce on the roof’s edge, said the duke; they’ve been toying with us, but he might still slip up, and on the return you kill him. The poet bit his lower lip without saying anything, then shook his head: Thoughts, Otero? The escort shrugged his shoulders: Block the dedans with your body. That’s obstruction, noted the poet. It’s street rules: if the ball is heading straight for the dedans, you can stop it however you like and the game is yours. The poet raised his eyebrows. Mine? Only madmen play the dedans. If I obstruct that ball it’ll break my arm. Block it with your back. The dedans is too high for that. Exasperated, the duke said: Just win, no matter how you do it.

Tenez! He got the serve right: strong and at the corner. Impossibly, the artist reached it and hit another drive that was clearly going into the dedans. Hopeless and out of options, the poet blocked it. Or rather, his forehead did.

As he lost consciousness, he heard a murmur of appreciation rising even from the Italian side of the stands. He also heard the relentless mathematician’s voice: Tre a tre.

The duke turned his head to Barral, still unsure about the call. He’s right, the soldier confirmed: street rules. So now it’s sudden death, said the nobleman, in genuine admiration of his protégé’s courage. If your poet isn’t dead already, added the mercenary.

Descriptions of works of art, like descriptions of dreams, halt stories and sap their strength. A work of art can be part of the story only if it alters the line of history as it’s being drawn, and yet if a work of art, like a dream, is worth remembering, it’s precisely because it represents a blind spot for history. Art and dreams don’t stick with us because they have the capacity to move things along, but because they stop the world: they function as a parenthesis, a dyke, a moment of rest.

It might be worth taking a trip with seven stops to see the seven miters from the workshop of Don Diego Huanitzin in the museums where they’re on display. One is in Toledo Cathedral, another in Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology, another in El Escorial, another at Florence’s Silver Museum, and another — the one that Caravaggio saw — in the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano. The most battered are those at the Musée des Tissus in Lyon, France, and the Hispanic Society of America in New York. They are seven incredible, tall caps, decorated with scenes from the Crucifixion macerated in the mushroom-glutted brains of a group of Indians from Michoacán. One features the family tree of Saint Joseph, but on each of the other six is an emblem formed by the monograms IHS and MA , graphic representations of Jesus and Mary. The central space of each piece is occupied by the M , on which Christ is crucified as if on a tree, over which his limbs drape.

The miter that Paul III handed down to Pope Pius IV and that Pius IV then presented to San Carlo Borromeo at the loggia of the Colonnas — the very one that Federico, the saint’s cousin, brought with him to Rome for the Lenten masses he was to hold immediately after he took refuge at the Palazzo Giustiniani — is probably the best preserved of the seven. In addition to the traditional Easter motifs — the pillar, the steps, the lance, the Calvary, the crown of thorns — Carlo Borromeo’s miter is decorated with motifs that the saint must have imagined hailed from some other world, because they did. Birds, trees, clouds, near-angelic flying creatures, rays that at once weave and cradle the classic Catholic figures, presenting them as what they were in the Mexico of the time: politely accepted but superficial impositions; little bodies set in a neurological system that saw the story of the world in its own way, a world complete with its own viewing instructions. The son rising up on the monogram of the mother not as tortured flesh in human history but as a bird that soars sunward after dying in combat. Flowers, seeds, and feathered creatures not as decoration but as the syllables of a universe in which the earthly and the divine are separated by nothing but the diaphanous veil of a collapsible consciousness. Angels scattering stars like seed.

On Carlo Borromeo’s miter, the world is full of everything in the world, and its colors have an intensity simply unimaginable to the European eye of the time. One has to picture Caravaggio admiring its fine craftsmanship when he came to work at the cardinal of Milan’s studiolo in Rome, discovering with surprise that the images weren’t painted on cloth, as he’d thought at first, but were made of another material, organic and palpable, that changed in shade with the touch of a finger: a ray of light the tiny pathway along which the feathers had been stroked.

Vasco de Quiroga had already seen many pieces of featherwork art when Don Diego showed him the miters, but all the pieces he had seen before had been designed by friars; the Indians simply gave them color. In the workshop this time, the miters lit only by candlelight and splayed open on account of the mushrooms, Quiroga saw them as seven living flames, an outpouring of light undulating with the breath of the gods who, silent and indifferent, continued — still continue, perhaps — to weave the threads of the tapestry that cradles us.