Álvaro Enrigue - Sudden Death

The contenders took off their cloaks and handed their swords over to their seconds. They would play in boots, since the pavement was uneven. When the duke took a coin out of his bag to toss for the serve, the artist shook his head and said in mangled but serviceable Spanish that he conceded to his guest. He spoke disdainfully — slouching and with his eyes on the gallery — but charmingly. When the shadow of the cross that topped the Obelisk of Domitian touched twelve noon on the cobblestones, the mathematician said solemnly and almost under his breath: Partita.

The Spaniard felt the leather of the ball between his left thumb and index and middle fingers. Once, twice, three times he bounced it on the pavement, spinning the racket in the grip of his right hand. He swallowed and rolled the ball again in the fingers of his left, looking at the ground, scraping the chalk line that marked the end of the court. With a shout of Tenez! he tossed the ball in the air and felt the catgut tighten as he lit into it with all his soul.

The artist had taken a magnificent stance, far back at an angle, his feet firm on the ground. He smashed the ball down just inside the cord. The Spaniard served again and lost the point again.

Cacce per il milanese, cried the professor. On to a fourth game, added the duke with some discouragement, but deep down he was excited, because the match was heating up and the spectators had begun to put money on the line. The poet watched the scramble to gather up coins. Maybe now you’ll wager on me, he said to the duke.

Rombaud’s trial was so short that by the time the wretch understood what was going on, he had been sentenced. He had been seized for high treason at the very doors of the Salon Bleu and found himself unable to explain how he, a Frenchman and a Catholic, had offered his services as executioner to the heretic King Henry of England. In the death warrant, which was drawn up in haste and signed in a courtyard of the Louvre by Philippe de Chabot, it was written that the fencing and tennis master possessed the nobleman’s right to have his throat slit without torture because the king had granted him privileges for life.

Lying on the ground, at the mercy of the soldier who was to perform the execution, the point of a sword pricking his neck, Rombaud wept. I understand, said Minister Chabot, that Anne Boleyn, a woman and a princess, didn’t shed a single tear the day you dispatched her as she lay helpless; if you give me the fourth ball, he added, I’ll let you go, and he motioned for the executioner to withdraw his sword.

The mercenary felt in his shirt and cloak and with shaking hand extracted a lumpy ball, the most dubious of those made with the remnants of the queen’s hair. Chabot put it in his pocket and said: Kill him.

The story must have traveled by word of mouth, since a bastardized version of it, based on elements of truth, lingered in the popular imagination. It’s very likely that the episode, turned upside down like everything that crosses the Channel, lit the lamp of inspiration in William Shakespeare’s head, since he chose to depict Henry V’s unexpected claim to all the territory of France in a lovely scene that reproduces the handing over of the ill-fated Boleyn balls.

In the play’s first act, King Henry receives a messenger from Louis of Valois, Dauphin of France, asking him to relinquish his claims to Normandy in exchange for the great treasure that he sends as a gift. The gift is a sealed barrel. The king asks the duke of Exeter to open it, and inside there are only tennis balls: a mockery of his political immaturity and lack of experience. Henry thinks it over and very coolly sends his thanks for the gift, saying: “When we have match’d our racquets to these balls, / We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set / Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.”

At the height of the Enlightenment, during an exchange of letters with Madame Geoffrin regarding the sale of his library to Catherine II of Russia, Denis Diderot describes how the preparations for his daughter’s wedding have left him in a state of financial strangulation: “At first, my wife and I thought that the match would go some way toward easing the pressure of our creditors, and now we consider ourselves lucky if it doesn’t kill us in the end. For me, Angelique’s engagement has been the story of Rombaud’s balls.”

That very night, at the back door of his workshop, the craftsman who had made the Boleyn balls received a bundle of the mercenary’s firebolt-chased chestnut hair.

M y balls are God and the King, and I play with them when I like. These words were part of Juana’s only memory of her father. It was a flowery, tropical memory, necessarily remote: the old man had returned to Europe to petition for posts and concessions when she was five, and his lobbying was so long and fruitless that he died in Seville before he could return to what he thought of as his land. He thought this not because he had been born there, but because he was convinced that the whole place belonged to him.

Juana had reimagined the scene over and over again in her mind. The old man sitting on a stone bench in the infinite gardens of his palace — gardens that began in the valley of Cuernavaca and ended at some indeterminate point on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In her memory, her father’s hair was already cropped and gray, but he still had the sinewy and arrogant spirit of those who’ve known power and have wielded it without qualms. He was a handsome and stubborn old man: eyebrows drawn together in an almost enlightened scowl of concentration, his beard a little dirty but tidy. He scratched his head as he listened to someone whom Juana could no longer bring into focus — his ragged nails burrowing in and out of the gray jungle of his sawed-off hair. He said to his aide: My balls are God and the King, and I play with them when I like. And he gave a tiny wave of his right hand, as if shooing away a fly. Then he turned to look at her where she must have been sitting, on another stone bench in the garden.

She remembered feeling something between adoration and fear at the seriousness of the forehead that had dictated countless death sentences with a movement of its eyebrows. The old man puffed out his cheeks, crossed his eyes. She laughed, maybe nervously. Then, with some effort, he got up and held out his hand to her. Let’s go to the orchard, he said. Next, there was a long walk down a path into the world of fruit trees that her father had collected and that only the two of them knew by name, then the radiant moment when he lifted her up onto his shoulders and asked her to identify each in Nahuatl, in Spanish, in Chontal.

Many years later, when she was an adult, the duchess of Alcalá, and so far away from Cuernavaca that the memory seemed like someone else’s, she asked her mother about the words she was sure she’d heard her father speak, whether they were really his or not. They had this conversation when she was pregnant with Catalina, her eldest daughter. The two women were sitting with their embroidery in the garden room of the villa of the Palacio de los Adelantados, their slaves and ladies in attendance, the orangish light from the north creeping in through the windows from which they’d had the latticework removed so that Seville would look a little like Cuernavaca.