Sudden Death Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in Spain in 2013 by Anagrama, as Muerte súbita

  Copyright © 2013 by Álvaro Enrigue

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Natasha Wimmer

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-17903-5

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For La Flaca Luiselli

  For the three Garcías: Maia, Miqui, Dy

  For Hernán Sánchez de Pinillos

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Set, First Game

  Rule

  Beheading

  On the Nobility of the Game of Tennis

  First Set, Second Game

  Soul

  The Boleyn Balls

  “In a New World and Land”

  First Set, Third Game

  Throat-slit

  The Ball on the Right Is the Holy Father

  Game to the Editor

  First Set, Fourth Game

  Tennis, Art, and Whoring

  Game to the Author

  The Testament of Hernán Cortés

  “La Vermine Hérétique”

  Cortés’s Coat of Arms

  Giant Heads

  Changeover

  Admiralships and Captaincies

  Paradise

  Flight to Flanders

  The Banker and the Cardinal

  Second Set, First Game

  Middle Class

  Weddings

  A Council Is Wagered and Won

  Ball Games and the Ancients

  Giustiniani’s Studiolo

  Second Set, Second Game

  Te Deum amid the Ruins

  No Catgut for Spain

  The Second Burning of Rome

  Miserliness

  On Names, and the Troubled History and Politics of How Things Are Named

  Judith Beheading Holofernes

  Second Set, Third Game

  Ball Game

  The Next World

  Art

  Regarding Most Popes’ Utter Lack of a Sense of Humor

  Light to the Living and Lessons from the Dead

  Fear

  The Calling of Saint Matthew

  The Chase

  Ball

  Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language

  The Garden Academies

  The Really Lousy Meeting of Two Worlds

  Basket of Fruit

  Iridescence

  Third Set, First Game

  Love That Doesn’t Speak Its Name

  Ex

  Theft

  Priests Who Were Swine

  Third Set, Second Game

  Counter-Reformation

  Exercitatio linguae latinae

  Third Set, Third Game

  Utopia

  On the Causes of Poverty Under the Reign of Henry VIII

  Third Set, Fourth Game

  Encounter of Civilizations

  The Emperor’s Mantle

  Third Set, Fifth Game

  On the Vestments of the Utopians

  The Pope’s Peasant

  Arte de la lengua de Mechuacán

  Third Set, Sixth Game

  Seven Miters

  Sudden Death

  Bibliographic Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The oldest written record of the word tennis makes no mention of athletic shoes; rather, it refers solely to the sport from which they take their name, a sport that—along with fencing, its near kin—was one of the first to require a special kind of footwear.

  In 1451, Edmund Lacey, Bishop of Exeter, defined the game with the same suppressed rage with which my mother referred to the falling-apart Converse I wore as a kid: ad ludum pile vulgariter nuncupatum Tenys. In Lacey’s edict, the word tenys—in the vernacular—is linked to phrases with the acid whiff of court cases: prophanis colloquiis et iuramentis, vanis et sepissime periuriis illicitis, sepius rixas.

  At the collegiate church of Ottery St. Mary, under Lacey’s rule, a group of novices had been using the roofed gallery of the cloister to play matches against townies. In those days, tennis was much rougher and noisier than it is today: some were attackers, others defenders; there were no nets or lines; and points were won tooth and nail, by slamming the ball into an opening called a dedans. Since it was a sport invented by Mediterranean monks, it had redemptive overtones: angels on one side, demons on the other. It was a matter of death and the afterlife, the ball as allegory of the soul flitting between good and evil, scheming to get into heaven, Lucifer’s messengers waylaying it. The soul rent asunder, just like my tennis shoes.

  The prickly Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, a great lover of the game, spent his last years in exile for having run an opponent through with his sword on a tennis court. Today, the Roman street where the crime was committed is called Via di Pallacorda—“street of the ball and net”—in memory of the incident. Caravaggio was sentenced to death by beheading in Rome and spent years living as a fugitive, from Naples to Sicily to the island of Malta. Between commissions, he painted terrifying scenes of beheadings in which he served as his own model for the severed heads. He sent the paintings to the pope or his agents as symbolic tribute, in the hope of being pardoned. At the age of thirty-eight, Caravaggio was at last granted a reprieve, and he was on his way back to Rome when he was stabbed on the Tuscan beach of Porto Ercole, by an assassin sent by the Knights of Malta. Though he was a master of the sword and dagger, just as he was of the brush and racket, syphilitic delirium and lead poisoning left him unable to defend himself. Sepius rixas.

  A few years ago I attended one of the three hundred thousand book fairs held every week across the Spanish-speaking world. A local literary critic found me so intolerable that he decided to launch a jeremiad against me. Since he didn’t have the time or energy to read a whole book and take it apart, he wrote on his blog: “How dare he appear in public wearing tennis shoes like that?” Vanis et sepissime periuriis illicitis!

  It’s no surprise that anyone possessing a modicum of authority should agitate against tennis, or tennis shoes. I myself often issue complaints, like bad checks, about my teenage son’s Adidas. We cling to our tennis shoes until wearing them on a rainy day is agony. Anyone in a position of power hates them, impervious as they are to their agendas.

  When this book first appeared, in Spanish, a Canadian writer and very dear friend of mine told his father, who was wildly excited because he felt that fiction writing had yet to pay real tennis its due in the form of a novel. He doesn’t speak Spanish, but he is perfectly fluent in French and Italian, which makes him capable enough of
reading a book written in my mother tongue, so he had a copy sent to him from Spain and read it with the help of a dictionary. I can’t imagine a greater honor for a writer, though I’m not sure my friend’s father liked the book. In an attempt to save me from my own imagination, he wrote me a six-page letter pointing out all the physical impossibilities and imaginary rules I had come up with to be able to say whatever this book says. The letter proves that the true art is reading, not writing, and it is a beautiful testament of loyalty: a friend of his son is a friend of his. Commenting on some sexual incidents described in the novel, he noted: “Now I know why you and my son are friends.” This is a statement of complicity. It tells me that if we knew each other, he would forgive my defects just as he does his son’s. And his letter is full of authority. Not the kind that comes with age or rank, since I’m well past forty and a father myself, but the kind that comes with firsthand knowledge. My characters are playing pallacorda, a game whose rules are unknown, but physical memory, a sense of how the real tennis racket feels in the hand and how a real tennis ball bounces, made my friend’s father file a claim in the name of all realism. But the only real things in a novel are the sequences of letters, words, and sentences that make it up, and the paper on which they’re printed. What they produce in a reader’s head are private and unique landscapes of objects in motion that have only one thing in common: they don’t exist. A game that is played in a novel has everything to do with that novel and nothing to do with reality. And even so, we tend to claim—as my friend’s father did—that certain things are to be believed and others not in this or that book. As if a ball dropped by a character could roll out of a book onto the floor, run up against our tennis shoes, and stop.

  In the opening scene of the British Renaissance comedy Eastward Ho, an apprentice called Quicksilver makes his appearance wrapped in a cloak and wearing pumps—slippers with thick woolen soles that are the earliest forerunners of our tennis shoes. His master, troubled by what he sees as a sign that the young man is about to fall into the company of ruffians, gamblers, and assassins, lifts the apprentice’s cloak. From his belt hang a sword and a tennis racket. Another in a line of authority figures—mothers, fathers, critics, bishops, bosses—alerted to someone’s essential flaws by his athletic shoes.

  When leather footwear begins to look shabby, we take it to the cobbler to give it the sad newness of faces worked over by a plastic surgeon. Tennis shoes are one of a kind: there is no fixing them. What value they have derives from the scars left by our missteps. My first pair of Converse met a sudden death. One day I came home from school and my mother had thrown them away.

  It’s no coincidence that when speaking of someone’s death in Mexico we say he “hung up his tennis shoes,” that he “went out tennis shoes first.” We are who we are, unfixable, fucked. We wear tennis shoes. We fly from good to evil, from happiness to responsibility, from jealousy to sex. Souls batted back and forth across the court. This is the serve.

  First Set, First Game

  He felt the leather of the ball between the thumb, index, and middle fingers of his left hand. Once, twice, three times he bounced the ball on the pavement, spinning the racket handle in the grip of his right hand. For a moment he gauged the space of the court; his hangover made the midday sun seem unbearably bright. He took a deep breath: the tennis match that was about to begin was a contest of life and death.

  Wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead, he rolled the ball again in the fingers of his left hand. It was a strange ball: very worn and much handled, a little smaller than usual, solid in a way that was recognizably French; it had a more hectic bounce than the balls filled with air that he was used to playing with in Spain. He glanced down and with his toe scraped the stripe of lime that marked the end of his side of the court. He would come down on his short leg just behind the line: this was the surprise factor that made him invincible with a sword, and perhaps—why not?—with a racket too.

  He heard laughter from his opponent, who was waiting for the serve on the other side of the cord strung between them. One of the degenerates accompanying him had muttered something in Italian. At least one of them was familiar: a man with a jutting nose, red beard, and sad eyes—the model for the tax-collector saint in The Calling of Saint Matthew, proud recent acquisition of the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Tossing the ball in the air, he shouted Tenez! and felt the catgut strings tighten as he lit into it with all his soul.

  His opponent’s eyes followed the ball as it flew toward the gallery roof. It struck at one of the corners. The Spaniard smiled: his first serve was lethal, untouchable. The Lombard had rested too easy, so sure was he that a lame man could be no match for him. In the quick, shrill voice with which Castilians pierce walls and minds, the poet remarked: Better a cripple than a bugger. On the other side of the court, no one laughed at his joke. But from his spot in the roofed gallery, the duke watched with the sly smile of a great rake.

  In time, the duke, the poet’s linesman, would become the Spanish statesman his title gave him the right to be, but by the autumn of 1599 he had done nothing but punish his body, sully the family name, worry his wife sick, and drive the king’s counselors to distraction. He was a stout, brash man. He had a round face, an almost comically pointy nose, grapefruit-seed eyes that gave him a mocking aspect even when he was in earnest, short curly hair, and an unconvincing beard that made him look more of a fool than he was. He was watching the match in the same scornful, sardonic way he did everything, sitting in the arcade under the wooden roof on which the ball had to bounce for a serve to be considered good.

  The Lombard took the center of the court behind the baseline. He waited in a crouch for the bounce of the Spaniard’s serve. The gang of layabouts with him preserved a respectful silence this time. The poet served again, and again he won the point. He had put the ball almost on his own side of the roof, so that it fell nearly dead for his opponent. The duke called out the score: Thirty–love, though what he said was “lof.” The Italians understood perfectly.

  Gaining confidence, the Spaniard dried the palm of his right hand on his breeches. He turned the ball in his left. He was sweating enough to give it backspin without needing to spit on it. It wasn’t the heat but the fever that afflicts those who have yet to recover from too much drink, landing them in a purgatory of shivers. He rolled his head from side to side, closed his eyes, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He squeezed the ball. It wasn’t a normal ball; there was something irregular about it, as if it were more talisman than ball. This, it occurred to him, was why his serves were unstoppable. When he took his turn on the receiving side and the ball returned to the hands of its owner, he would have to take heed.

  He gripped the racket and tossed the ball into the air. Tenez! He hit it so hard that for the fraction of a second before his lame leg came down again, the earth seemed to turn more slowly. The ball bounced capriciously on the roof of the gallery. The Lombard stretched for it. The Spaniard tried to kill the return dead but didn’t manage it. The point continued: luckily for him, the ball struck one of the posts, and he was able to snag it on the bounce, driving it to the back of the court. It was a good save, but the maneuver took too long, and surprise was the only option he had for countering his opponent’s experience on the court. The Lombard found it simple to fling himself backward and hit a drive that the poet had no chance of returning.

  Thirty–fifteen, cried the duke. The only responsible member of the Lombard’s entourage was his linesman—a silent and prematurely aged professor of mathematics. He walked onto the court to mark a chalk cross on the spot where the ball had bounced. Before he made the mark he turned to look at the Spaniard’s second. The duke shrugged in a show of indifference, agreeing that the cross was well-placed.

  The poet didn’t return immediately to position. While the professor took his time with the marking, he went over to the gallery. He’s good, the duke said when the poet was near; you couldn’t hit a b
all like that on your best day. The poet filled his cheeks with air and blew it out with a snort. I can’t lose, he said. You can’t lose, confirmed the duke.

  The next point was long and hard-fought. The Spaniard had his back to the wall, returning balls as if besieged by an army. Move in, move in, the duke cried every so often, but each time the poet managed to advance a little, his attacker pushed him back. At a desperate moment, he had to curb a drive by turning his back on his opponent—a showy play, but not very practical. The Lombard got to the ball close in and drilled the wall again. The ball struck very near the dedans—if it had gone in, the artist would automatically have won the game. Thirty all, cried the duke. Parità, the professor confirmed. The poet hit a serve that struck the edge of the gallery. Inside and unreachable. Forty–thirty, cried the duke. The mathematician nodded serenely.

  The next point was contested with more cunning than strength: the poet didn’t let himself be trapped, and he was finally able to force the artist to play a corner. On the first short ball he eliminated him. Game, called the duke. Caccia per Spagna, called the professor.

  Rule

  Tennis. Game of a likeness to handball. One player defends and the other attacks, then vice versa. If there is a tie, a chase will decide the defender and the attacker in the third round, which is called sudden death. On the serve, the ball must strike a slant roof along one side of the court, from which it drops and is returned. Tennis is also called pala, after the racket with which the game is played, which is made entirely of wood with a little net of tight-strung gut in the center. It is gripped by the handle and with it the ball is struck with violence and force. Tennis is scored by points, but he who hits the dedans wins a round and he who wins three straight rounds or four rounds divided wins the match.

  Diccionario de autoridades, Madrid, 1726

  Beheading

  Jean Rombaud had the worst of all possible tasks on the morning of May 19, 1536: severing with a single blow the head of Anne Boleyn, Marquess of Pembroke and Queen of England, a young woman so beautiful she had turned the Strait of Dover into a veritable Atlantic. The notorious Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, had brought Rombaud over from France for this express purpose. In a curt missive, Cromwell asked that he bring his sword—a piece of miraculously fine craftsmanship, forged of Toledo steel—because he would be performing a delicate execution.