Sudden Death (13 page)

O
n March 14, 1618, Quevedo wrote a letter to Pedro Téllez Girón in which he described in minute and cruel detail the greed with which the duke of Uceda, the king's favorite, had received a bribe. Quevedo says that the people at the Palace of Uceda were so miserly and so quick to snatch up any small dispensation that they didn't even return his packing materials: “Even the cotton was not scorned, being used for candlewicks.” A use was also found for the boxes in which the gifts came: “The wooden boxes in which everything was packed thought to escape notice, being flawed, but when it was discovered that they were made of poplar, with great celebration they were shared out to be used for tennis rackets.”

L
iving in Mexico had become a source of more anxiety than pleasure when I moved to New York. My reason for leaving is still hard to put into words, but it has something to do with a problem of nomenclature.

Back home we stopped calling things by their names long ago, and now, as the serpent heads of our plumed Hydra multiply endlessly, we're left without the spell to counter their poison.

Mexican Spanish, at times so disconcerting and easy to misinterpret, gets its warmth and courtesy from Nahuatl: the gentlest and most gracious of tongues; an airy, birdlike form of speech. When someone from Madrid or Montevideo walks into a room, he says,
“Permiso,”
and that's it. In contrast, a Mexican erects a syntactic edifice so complicated that it requires both a negative clause and a verb in the conditional: “If it's no trouble, might I come in?” If the game recounted in these pages had been played in sixteenth-century Mexico, and if Hernán Cortés had invited the emperor Moctezuma to have it out on the court as Charles V and Henry VIII used to do, they wouldn't have
rudely shouted
“Tenez!”
but would have said, “Excuse the service, please.”

According to Nahuatl etiquette, the polite way to address a person is with the diminutive
tzin
. The pre-Hispanic name of the Virgin of Guadalupe was Tonantli, or Our Mother, but no one ever called her that, then or now. She was—and still is—Tonantzin, Our Little Mother. In Spanish we refer to her as La Virgen, but when the faithful petition her for something and address her directly, they call her Virgencita. It's not that they're sappier or more sentimental than other Spanish speakers; it's just that Mexican Spanish is crisscrossed with the scars of Nahuatl. In our mental hard drives, the file of the mother tongue still opens at certain prompts, even though it's been two or three hundred years since we spoke it.

It's still hard to believe that during the sixteenth century, there was an enormous empire, governed by an extraordinarily bloodthirsty ruling class, whose prince was addressed as a child: Tizoctzin, Ahuizotzin, Moctezumoctzin. This practice is bizarre and seductive, and I think it's crucial to make note of it, because it's still alive today: the bandit and killer Joaquín Guzmán is called Chapo, or Shorty. No one calls the president by a diminutive anymore, but I'm not sure there has been an incumbent of that office who deserved it either. Maybe a diminutive is something one earns. The only twentieth-century president who was truly loved by the people, Lázaro Cárdenas, was called Tata, “Grandpa” in Nahuatl.

Full disclosure: If you are reading this page, you are reading a translation. In some languages, readers don't flinch as the emperor Cuauhtémoc becomes Cuauhtemoctzin, Guatémuz, or
Guatemotzin, depending on who is speaking to him and in what context. In other languages, the mutating names seem to throw readers into a state of confusion. I'm not sorry about that: a whole vision of the universe would be lost if Malinalli Tenépatl, the Mayan princess who was Hernán Cortés's translator, didn't refer to Cuauhtémoc as Cuauhtemoctzin. Something would also be lost if it weren't recorded that Hernán Cortés—who was either very arrogant or very deaf—called the emperor by the hideous name of Guatémuz, which was what he heard and then set down in his letters to Charles V. I don't know—and it's impossible to know, of course—whether Cortés ever called him Guatemotzin, as he does in this book when he's trying to be diplomatic, but the function of a novel is precisely that: to name what is lost, to replace the void with an imaginary archive.

And it works the other way round too: if Cuauhtémoc had ever spoken to Malinalli, he would have called her Malitzin, as if the political class to which he belonged had not given her up as a sex toy to a local leader just because he won a battle. This means something, and if it went unmentioned, this book would no longer be a machine for understanding the world, or the ways in which we name the world. We know that Malinche was the terrible word Cortés came up with for Malinalli. He could not say, or he didn't want to say, Malitzin. His pronunciation of Nahuatl was so atrocious that it confused people: the Indians who survived the conquest called
him
Malinche; they didn't understand that he was simply trying to address his mistress politely in Aztec terms.

During the conquest, some contest played out between the Mayan princess subjected to the indignity of sexual servitude
and Cuauhtémoc, the young emperor witnessing the annihilation of his realm. And this duel, I'm convinced, is visible in the succession of names adopted by the woman whose resentment shifted the balance of the world: Malinalli, princess-whore; Malitzin, mouthpiece of the soldiers and politicians who held history in their fists perhaps without realizing it; Doña Marina (her Catholic name), mother of the conquistador's children and owner of a Spanish palace on the outskirts of Mexico City; Malinche, the bitch who vanished from history after having delivered America to the Europeans. Over the course of her life, Malinalli Tenépatl was many people, like all of us, but she had the privilege of possessing a different name for each incarnation. In today's Spanish, her name is the root of an adjective:
malinchista
means someone who prefers the foreign and disdains his own culture.

Caravaggio's name or lack of a name is so important that Peter Robb, one of his most painstaking biographers, doesn't dare to name him in the book he wrote about him. It is titled
M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio
, because no document exists to prove that as a child he bore the name he claimed as an adult: Michelangelo Merisi. It's a fact that his father's last name was the Milanese Merixio, and that he changed it to the Roman Merisi when he began to sell paintings; it's likely that his name was Michele and when he got to Rome he added the “angelo” to emulate the most famous artist of the day. Later he decided to erase it all and adopt the generic and enigmatic “Caravaggio,” the name of his undistinguished and insignificant hometown. It's as if Andy Warhol had signed his serigraphs “Pittsburgh.”

Certainly Cuauhtémoc could be simply Cuauhtémoc in this
book, but to dispense with the enigma of the name changes, or to list them at the end of the book and thus create an illusion of clarity where there is none, would be to banish the reader to the stands, to bounce him off the court. A novel isn't a Cartesian diagram. Pope Pius IV's surname was Medici, though he wasn't related to the grand duke of Florence; there were two Borromeos who were bishops of Milan; all of Hernán Cortés's male offspring were called Martín and all of the important women in his life were called Juana. These facts were confusing in their own time, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be confusing in a novel that doesn't aspire to accurately represent that time, but does want to present it as a theory about the world we live in today.

The question here is the responsibility I bear in the face of the reasonable fear that what is being said won't be understood. The risk is worth the weight of that responsibility. The sole duty of a writer is to minister to his readers: to liberate them from inexactitude out of respect for the mysterious and touching pact of loyalty that they make with books. But the problem is that I don't always know why name changes are significant in Mexico, and my hunch is that there is a whole history and politics behind it. When something is clear to a writer, I think it's fair to ask him not to obscure it, but when something is unclear I think it should be left that way. The honest thing is to relay my doubts, and let the conversation move one step forward: the readers may know better.

J
udith Beheading Holofernes
measures about four and a half by six and a half feet. It's a difficult painting to transport, but not unwieldy enough to warrant asking for help: gripping it by the lower upright edge and resting the central crosspiece on the shoulder, one should be able to carry it across the piazza of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. After Caravaggio had painted it, he did just that: hoisting the painting onto his shoulder in his studio, he crossed the courtyard that separated the service quarters from the kitchen and walked from one side of the piazza to the other to deliver it to the mansion of the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, who wanted it.

It was the last work Caravaggio painted before becoming Rome's greatest art-world celebrity on the complicated cusp of the sixteenth century. He must have delivered it before the church of San Luigi dei Francesi opened its doors for the early mass; he was scandalously behind on the commission for the
Calling
and the
Martyrdom
, which would hang in the church's Contarelli Chapel. The delivery date on the contract that he had signed with the congregation of San Luigi dei Francesi had twice been missed, and he was so late that Cardinal Matthieu
Contarelli, who had planned the chapel in honor of his namesake apostle, had already died.

There were reasons for Caravaggio's delay: the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel was his first commission for a place of worship and he wanted these two pieces of public art to be masterpieces—as they indisputably are. He also understood that the lucky star lighting his path was powered by the generosity of del Monte and Giustiniani, so he attended to the needs of his patrons before those of his clients.

The morning of August 14, 1599, when Caravaggio carried the painting from the Palazzo Madama to the banker's palace, was surely hot, which means the artist probably wasn't wearing the legendary black cloak in which he appears draped in absolutely all the descriptions—and there are many of them—of his arrests in the police precincts of Rome.

Merisi was a man of extremes, a desperate man. Between the summer and autumn of 1599 he had one of his most productive periods, which means he must have been nervously sober when he delivered the painting to the Palazzo Giustiniani—bruised circles under his eyes, dull skin, the glazed look of those who've worked for days on end without rest. Caravaggio didn't draw: he painted directly in oil on canvas; and he didn't trust the prodigious Mannerist capacity for imagination: he staged the scenes he painted in his studio, with real models. He did the work all at once, laboring by the millimeter for days on end, using sources of controlled light that he reproduced on the canvas just as they appeared to him.

The scene in which Judith cuts off the head of King Holofernes takes place at night, which means that the windows of
the studio must have been covered and the models painted by candlelight. Chances are that Caravaggio delivered the piece the moment he decided it was finished. He was in desperate need of money to buy the materials to finally embark on the monumental oils for San Luigi dei Francesi.

He must have crossed the plaza quickly, furtively, without a word to the loiterers who had missed his company during the nights it took him to finish the painting. He must have carried it uncovered, because he couldn't even drape it with a cloth—an oil painting takes years to dry—and neither could he rest the painted surface on his shoulder. Once at the door of the Palazzo Giustiniani he must have lowered it and, propping it on the toes of his boots so that it wasn't soiled by the dirty ground, banged the doorknocker with one hand as he balanced the painting on his feet with the other.

Giustiniani kept huntsman's hours, which means that when Caravaggio arrived he must have been in his office, reviewing the end-of-day accounts from the previous afternoon. Or in the courtyard itself, brushing the manes of his horses before the grooms fed them. He would already have drunk his cup of chocolate, the only luxury he allowed himself. Someone must have been sent to ask him what to do with the madman who was outside with a horrible painting. If Giustiniani was in the courtyard, it would likely have been one of the cooks who reached him with the news: A dreadful sight. The painting or the madman? Both, but especially the painting. Give him something to eat; let him leave the thing in the kitchen. And he must have hurried to the
studiolo
to retrieve from his writing desk the
rest of the money he owed the painter. The entry is set down in his books in his own hand:
“Ago 14 / 60 scudi / Pitt Meritzio.”
Maybe it was then that he began to turn over the possibility of hanging the painting here, where he would be the only one to see it.

For years it was thought that this eccentric behavior—commissioning a painting in order to be its only viewer—was due to the brutal violence displayed on the canvas: the heroine yanking the tyrant's tangled hair with one hand while with the other she slits his throat like a pig's, his head already twisted and about to come off, the streams of blood, the engorged nipples, the grotesque excitement of the serving woman who holds a cloth to receive the remains when the last tendon is severed. But this doesn't explain the painting's trajectory: at some point Giustiniani gave it—curtains and all—to Ottavio Costa, another Genovese banker, partner in the most substantial of Giustiniani's Vatican investments, and a hunting companion.

There's no record of the transfer of the painting, but it ended up in the collection that Costa left when he died, along with another work originally bought by Giustiniani, painted by Caravaggio and featuring the same woman.

In 1601, the celebrated prostitute Fillide Melandroni, who had served as model for Judith and also for Mary Magdalene in the painting
Martha and Mary Magdalene
, was arrested one night at one of the entrances to the Palazzo Giustiniani; she was in the company of her pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni.

It's likely that the whore was Giustiniani's lover and that after the scandal of her being arrested at his very door—a
tip-off, surely; the vengeance of a lesser moneylender hurt by the banker's large-scale operations—he must have gotten rid of the two paintings in which she appeared.

The loss must also have been hard for Caravaggio: he didn't paint Fillide Melandroni again after this arrest, and she was far and away his most spectacular model: not just a figure of exceptional beauty, but a collaborator with the gift of a unique dramatic sense—she is also Saint Catherine of Alexandria in the monumental work retained by del Monte, which today can be seen in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid.

Incidentally, Ranuccio Tomassoni was the man Caravaggio killed on the Campo Marzio tennis court a few years later. It was a murder long foreshadowed, with both men making frequent visits to the headquarters of the Roman police to report each other or to be arrested following those reports—all stemming from shouting matches and knife brandishings that grew gradually more severe. Surely the nights that Fillide spent at Merisi's studio weren't devoted solely to the glory of art, and their nearness wasn't only professional, on either side: he didn't just paint, and she didn't just sleep with him for money.

At some level, Giustiniani and Caravaggio must have been conscious that they were sharing the same woman—who belonged to Tomassoni. In addition, the banker was a political ally and comrade in intellectual dissidence of Cardinal del Monte, known by all to occasionally offer his monumental cardinal's ass to be buggered by Caravaggio with all the elemental hunger of the painter's years of want. Never were the connections among politics, money, art, and semen so tight or so murky. Or so unashamedly happy, tolerant, and fluid. Giustiniani dispatched
his Lombardy boars, Caravaggio dispatched his Venetian cardinal, Fillide dispatched both men. Everyone was happy.

These were also the years when Merisi discovered the chiaroscuro that forever changed the way a canvas can be inhabited: he did away with the foul Mannerist landscapes—the saints, virgins, and great men posing with intelligent gaze on a backdrop of fields, cities, sheep. He shifted the sacred scenes indoors to focus the spectators of his paintings on the humanity of the characters. Fillide was his vehicle for moving the machinery of art a step forward. Not a saint playing a saint, but a woman stripped of superior attributes, and in action; she was a poor woman, as she had to be for the Counter-Reformation credo to make sense. Before Caravaggio, biblical figures were portrayed as millionaires: the richness of their garments was the reflection of spiritual bounty.

An affluent saint in a landscape stands for a world touched by God. A saint in a room stands for humanity in the dark: a humanity distinguished by its ability to continue to believe, in a world in which faith is already impossible; a material humanity smelling of blood and saliva; a humanity that no longer watches from the sidelines, that does things.