Sudden Death

by Álvaro Enrigue

  Rombaud was neither beloved nor indispensable. Beautiful and immoral, he drifted coldly in the tight circle of very specialized workers who thrived in the Renaissance courts under the blind eye of ambassadors, ministers, and secretaries. His reserve, striking looks, and lack of scruples made him a natural for certain kinds of tasks known to all and spoken of by none, the dark operations that have always been unavoidable in the conduct of politics. He dressed with surprising good taste for someone with the job of killer angel: he wore expensive rings, breeches lavishly trimmed with brocade, and royal-blue velvet shirts unsuited to a bastard, which he was in every sense of the word. Cheap gemstones were braided with gypsy panache into his gold-streaked chestnut hair, the gems filched from mistresses conquered with the various weapons over which God had granted him mastery. There was no knowing whether he was silent because he was clever or because he was a fool: his deep blue eyes, which turned down a little at the corners, never expressed compassion, but they never expressed any kind of animosity either. Also, Rombaud was French: for him, killing a queen of England was less sin than duty. Cromwell had called him to London because he believed this last quality made him a particularly hygienic choice for the job.

  It wasn’t King Henry who had arranged for his wife’s death by Toledo sword rather than by the lowly blow of the ax that separated her brother’s head from his neck on the accusation he had slept with the queen, a sin that earned him the record sum of three death sentences: for lèse-majesté, for adultery, and for degeneracy. No one—not even the notorious Thomas Cromwell—could bear for such a neck as hers to be hacked by the coarse blade of an ax.

  On the morning of May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn attended mass and made her confession. Before she was turned over to the constable of the Tower so her body could be cleaved apart, she asked that her ladies-in-waiting alone be given the privilege of cropping her heavy red braids and shaving her head. Most of the surviving portraits, including the sole copy of the only one reportedly painted from life—now part of Hever Castle’s Tudor portrait collection—depict her as the owner of crimped and significant locks.

  It seems that the royal bedchamber had a dampening effect on King Henry’s libido, such a champion was he in extramarital affairs—and such an underperformer in his royal reproductive duties. No one knew this better than the marquess of Pembroke, who had managed to conceive by him after a single day in the country, while he was still married to his previous queen. They’d had a daughter as lovely as the marquess herself, for whom the monarch professed the thunderous affection associated with homicidal types. So Anne Boleyn approached the scaffold conscious of the statistical odds that her daughter, Elizabeth, would reach the throne, as indeed she ultimately did. Boleyn delivered herself into martyrdom with a show of calculated cheer. Among her last words, pronounced before the witnesses to her death, were: “I pray God save the King, and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never.”

  What is it about nudity, in theory the great equalizer, that excites us? In their naked state, only monsters should turn us on, and yet it’s the very sameness of our nakedness that we find arousing. The ladies who accompanied Boleyn in her trials had pulled back the collar of her gown to reveal her neck before escorting her to the scaffold. They had also removed her necklaces. They didn’t feel that the removal of her veil and tresses marred her beauty in the least: she was just as lovely with a shorn head as she was with hair.

  The bluish gleam of her neck quivering in anticipation of the blow triggered an emotional response in Rombaud. According to one witness, the mercenary was kind enough to make an effort to surprise the lady lying there bare from her shoulder blades to the crown of her head. With his sword raised high and ready to come down upon the queen’s neck, he asked carelessly: Has anyone seen my sword? The woman twitched her shoulders, perhaps relieved that some chance occurrence might spare her. She closed her eyes. Vertebrae, cartilage, the spongy tissue of trachea and pharynx: the sound of their parting was like the elegant pop of a cork liberated from a bottle of wine.

  Jean Rombaud refused the bag of silver coins that Thomas Cromwell offered him when the job was done. Addressing the whole gathering, but looking into the eyes of the man who had schemed until he unseated the queen, he said that he had agreed to do what he had done to spare a lady the vile fate of dying under an executioner’s blade. He made a sideways bow to the ministers and clergymen who had witnessed the beheading, and he returned straight to Dover at full gallop. Earlier that morning, the lord high constable had packed the categorical braids of the queen of England in his saddlebags.

  Rombaud was an avid tennis player, and this seemed sufficient payment: the hair of those executed on the scaffold had special properties that caused it to trade at stratospheric prices among ball makers in Paris. A woman’s hair was worth more, red hair more still, and a reigning queen’s would command an unimaginable price.

  Anne Boleyn’s braids produced a total of four balls, which were by far the most luxurious sporting equipment of the Renaissance.

  On the Nobility of the Game of Tennis

  First we shall see how the game of tennis has been ordered to excellent and rational ends, which is how all worthy and valuable art should be, in imitation of nature, which does nothing without great mastery. Note, for example, how the ancient and wise inventors of this game, considering that it inflames and impassions even the palest and weakest youth, contrived it in such a fashion that the player is never hurt. As will subsequently be explained, the ball is not hit while it is in the air, but rather after it has bounced on the ground, making it impossible for the receiving player to be injured. Similarly, the receiving player waits for the bounce to learn whether the point he intends to make is valid. If he wants the advantage, he is obliged to display the requisite decency and allow the other player equal time to recover.

  ANTONIO SCAINO, Treatise on the Game of the Ball, Venice, 1555

  First Set, Second Game

  Before the start of the second game, the Spaniard approached his linesman. He’s a strong player and he knows the court, said the duke; you won the first game because he didn’t expect anything of you. I’m younger, replied the poet; I can match him for strength. But you have a lame leg. The surprise factor, and I’ll play twice as hard; should I move in? He’ll break you with those drives of his. I’ll bring him short. Then you’d be putting everything in the hands of fate; better to wear him down, it’s clear he won’t last; take it point by point: backward, forward, play the corners. The poet snorted and wiped the sweat from his forehead, looking down with his hands on his hips, as if waiting for clearer instructions. If he hadn’t been in the grips of a hangover, the prospect of such a match might’ve seemed less insurmountable. It’ll be close, he said. Concession is the other option, said the duke, but the duel was your idea. The poet stared at the ground: We could turn to swords, finish up quick. The duke shook his head: Not another scandal, and he’s a wild man with the blade. The poet grunted: I haven’t lost yet. Precisely. Very well, I’ll take it point by point. Before he returned to the court, he said: Have you noticed they don’t speak to each other? Who? He and his second. The duke didn’t see that it mattered: What of it? Last night they didn’t speak either, they don’t even seem to be friends, look at them. His opponent hadn’t gone near the gallery. The mathematician languished, gazing at the specks of dust floating in the air.

  The scrutiny of both men turned naturally on the artist, the poet’s rival. The seriousness of his manner did nothing to lighten their mood. He was less cocksure than before, but even more determined. Now, rather than a matter of life or death, it was a matter of victory or defeat—a much more complex affair, and harder to bear because the loser of a duel by sword isn’t obliged to live with the consequences.

  The poet continued to study his opponent. He was a pallid man, with unruly jet-black hair sticking up all over his head. He had bushy eyebrows and a thick,
untidy beard circling a mouth dark red like a cunt. The poet squinted to see him better. He was strong, sturdy as a soldier despite his generally unwholesome air: a member of the Neapolitan corps returned from the dead to play a last game of tennis in order to prove who-knows-what to the living. Does he always look so unwell, or is it just the hangover, he asked the duke. Who? The painter. I don’t know, I was watching his linesman. The mathematician, sitting on his own in the gallery, was scanning the court, scrutinizing it with disturbing intensity. His lips moved. What is there to see? He’s a professor. So? He’s no fool, the whoreson is counting something. The poet hawked up phlegm and shrugged. He spat: Let’s go.

  He picked up the ball and called: Tenez? The monster stared at him, as if from the far bank of the river of the dead, and nodded, unsmiling. He blew at the hair falling over his left eye. His forehead was beaded not with sweat but with oil. From the line of service, the Spaniard noted that his opponent and the professor were in fact communicating: the linesman produced sequences of numbers with his fingers, sometimes pointing up, sometimes down, sometimes toward his own body. The poet indicated this to his linesman, pointing his racket at the Italians. The duke clenched his jaw, uneasy. The poet bounced the ball on the line, tossed it in the air: Tenez!

  It was a mediocre serve and the return was savage. The artist met the ball in the air and sent it with brute strength straight into the poet’s face. Though he tried to protect himself, he took the blow between neck and cheek. Quindici–amore, cried the professor clinically, in the harsh voice of a market vendor but without a hint of irony.

  The poet ducked his head, stung by the blow. He looked up carefully, for fear of swooning, and rubbed his jaw, seeking out his opponent in search of an explanation: he had never seen anything like this. The artist folded his hands over the handle of his racket, as if in prayer. It was a gesture of apology, an acknowledgment of a lack of sportsmanship. The duke raised the skin on his face that occupied the place where anyone else would have eyebrows. The poet pressed thumb and forefinger to his temples, then picked up the ball and, without further ado, returned to the line of service. The duke could tell his player was shaken by the way he readied himself for the new serve: he was taking deep breaths. He noticed, too, that he spat on the ball with perhaps less discretion than might be advised in a game like this. No one said anything.

  Tenez! He put the ball on the edge of the roof, nearly straight above the cord. The saliva made it bounce queerly. The Lombard didn’t give chase, though he plainly could have reached it. He waited for the ball to stop rolling, picked it up, and dried it on his breeches before returning it, signaling that the Spaniard had cheated, though not protesting. The gesture was effective: it was one thing to break the rules of chivalry in an outburst of manly rage, and another to cheat furtively, like a nun. The poet felt disgust at himself. The duke didn’t call the point. Do over, he cried.

  The poet bounced the ball on the line, tossed it in the air. Tenez! The artist waited for it to drop from the roof and with 360 degrees of force, he pounded it with his racket as if it were a nail in Christ’s wrist. The ball flew straight at the poet’s face again, but this time he took it in the crown, managing to duck a little. Trenta–amore, called the professor.

  The Spaniard got up with tears in his eyes, his head bent. When he picked up the ball he felt dizzy. He kneeled and rubbed his scalp. He couldn’t even glance at the other side of the court: a smile from any of the louts in his opponent’s entourage and he would go for his sword. What is this, he asked the duke in a tight voice as he got up. You’re winning the game, macho; onward. What do I do? Nothing. Keep serving and victory will be your revenge.

  The poet picked up the ball reluctantly; he was not at all convinced by his boss’s strategy. There were less painful ways of winning a game. Just keep serving, the duke insisted.

  Tenez! The ball dropped on the artist’s side like a gift: it had bounced twice on the roof of the gallery and fallen in the middle of the court, floating like a feather. The poet felt the return when it hammered like a stone straight into his balls. He never even saw it. He fell solidly to the ground like a quarry block. From a world in ruins, he heard the mathematician crying: Amore, amore, amore, amore; vittoria rabbiosa per lo spagnolo.

  Even the duke was doubled over, quaking with laughter, when the poet raised his head. Not to mention his opponent, Saint Matthew, the mathematician, and all the other wastrels, who were hugging their stomachs and wiping away tears of mirth.

  Soul

  In the year 1767, the French encyclopaedist François Alexandre de Garsault, author of various manuals for the fabrication of luxury goods such as wigs, underclothing, and sporting equipment—“trivial arts,” as he himself noted in the second edition of his Art du paumier-racquetier—still distinguished between two kinds of tennis balls: proper balls, made of batting and thread and covered with stitched white cloth, and éteufs, or skin balls—which in Spanish were called pellas well into the seventeenth century—made of lumps of lard, flour, and hair.

  The éteufs, covered with calfskin and cross-stitched, resembled our baseballs, with the suture exposed. While the cloth balls were used only on inside courts of hardwood or tile, and tended to come apart after three or four matches, the skin balls could be used for years without any loss of nimbleness or violence: they were intended to bounce on the tiles and roofs of cloisters and the uneven clay of town squares, where tennis was played for money.

  In the third decade of the twentieth century, the team that restored the roof of the main hall in the Palace of Westminster found two balls in the beams that date indisputably from the sixteenth century. They were intact. A genetic analysis of the hair from which they were made showed no evidence of a connection with any branch of the Boleyn family. No great surprise: many terrible things may be said about Henry VIII, but not that he had bad taste. Certainly, then, he never bought or accepted as a gift any of the balls of which he might—curiously enough—be called the widower.

  François Alexandre de Garsault’s Enlightenment manual contains no instructions for making balls out of human hair. Perhaps he was unaware that during the Renaissance and Baroque periods the material was common currency in the outdoor courts where tennis was a betting sport. Nor does it seem that Garsault, practical man and earnest educator, was a great reader of literature: in Much Ado About Nothing, the inveterate bachelor Benedick has so much facial hair that, according to Shakespeare, his beard has filled many a tennis ball.

  From the study of the balls found in the rafters of Westminster Hall, as well as certain clues that come to light when one combs through Antonio Scaino’s rambling Trattato del giuoco della palla (1555), it may be deduced that the core of the pella was identical to that of the proper salon balls: a base of batting kneaded with paste. The base of the salon ball was then wrapped in strips of linen and thread and tapped into shape with a putty knife. Once calibrated, the ball was tied with a string that divided it into nine sections through its upper pole. Then the ball was spun 45 degrees and another nine sections were traced through a second pole. And again, until there were nine poles with nine equators. Each ball a world, a planet dotted with eighty-one ribbons of thread. Finally, the little orb—believed by the ancients to represent the human soul—was covered in cloth and whitewashed.

  The pella was fabricated according to a similar procedure, but in more sordid and often clandestine settings: there was something grisly about making balls with human hair, and not everyone was willing to produce an object that took its life from the only part of a dead body that doesn’t rot. In place of the strips of linen, locks of hair were bound around the core and stuck down with lard and flour. It was a lighter ball, less smooth; it bounced like a thing possessed.

  Probably because of its soul of human matter, during the Renaissance and Baroque periods the pella was associated in Catholic Europe and Conquest-era America with satanic pursuits.

  The Boleyn Ball
s

  Scarcely had Jean Rombaud disembarked at Franciscopolis—such was the ridiculous name of the port of Le Havre until the death of King Francis I—before he began to spread the rumor that he was in possession of the darksome braids of Anne Boleyn and that he would make tennis balls with them that would at last gain him entry to the closed courts, where the nobility sweated through one shirt per game, five per set, and fifteen per match. He had always felt that his fresh-washed lion’s mane gave him the right to hardwood and tile: to play for sport rather than money.

  By the time the ball maker delivered the four most bewitching balls in the history of Europe, a multitude of buyers had approached Rombaud, offering prices out of all proportion to the size of his treasure: one hundred cows, a villa in Provence, two African slaves, six horses. He declined all invitations to discuss, except that of Philippe de Chabot, minister to the king.

  To this negotiation he brought only the fourth ball, a bit smaller and more tightly wound than the others, which from the start he had decided to keep for himself as an amulet. He brought it wrapped in a silk cloth, deep in his purse, which for greater security he had sewn into the lining of his cloak.

  Chabot received him in his bedchamber as he was being dressed. It wasn’t the first time they had met. Jean Rombaud had prepared a brief discourse that didn’t skimp on the honeyed rhetoric of a sloe-eyed villain, and which progressed from pleading to blackmail. The minister didn’t ask him to sit, nor did he allow him to make his case. He didn’t even turn to look at him, focused as he was on his servants swaddling him in linens and velvets. What do you want for the balls of the heretic pig, he asked, staring intently at the point of his shoe. I’ve brought one with me as a sample, replied Rombaud, drawing it clumsily from his cloak. The minister brushed a wisp of cloth from his knee, ignoring the object that the executioner held out to him reverently from across the room. We are assured, said Chabot without turning to look at the ball, that they are authentic, because the ambassador of the king of Spain tried to secure the braids for his own conjurations and flew into a rage when he learned that the trophy was on its way to France. I want neither money nor possessions, said Rombaud. The minister lifted his palms in a gesture conveying both interrogation and exasperation. I want a modest title and a position in the royal court as master of fencing and tennis. It can be arranged, but first bring me the balls. I want the king himself to grant me both things; I want it to be in the presence of witnesses and I want him to look me in the eye. The minister glanced at him for the first time, raising his eyebrows in ironic puzzlement. The king is a little busy taking back Savoy, he said, but we’ll call for you when he comes through Paris; the balls will make a nice treat for him; bring them with you the day my messenger commands you to appear at the Louvre.