Seventy-three days later, Jean Rombaud was received by King Francis I in the Salon Bleu, which was crammed with members of the court, petitioners, and financiers. The future fencing and tennis master was wearing a pompous fitted costume that he’d had made for the occasion. For once in his life he was rid of his intolerable three-day beard, and he had combed his bejeweled hair into a tail that he thought was elegant—and in its grave-digger way, it was, though possibly too Spanish for the salons of the king of France.
He didn’t have to wait long in courtyards or antechambers: the king sent for him shortly after he presented himself, and showed a scarcely regal impatience to see the Boleyn balls. Jean Rombaud wasn’t allowed to deliver the lengthy address that he had prepared for this day either. Queen Eleanor approached to witness the great moment, trailing a train of ermine among the filthy boots of her husband’s men. Francis I’s eyes nearly glowed when he opened the carved wooden box that the mercenary had spent a fortune to have made—on credit, of course—and which had seemed magnificent at the inn where he lived but in the palace now looked small and paltry.
The king took one of the balls, weighed it with the calculation of a seasoned tennis player, squeezed it, and turned it in his hand. He pretended to toss it in the air and hit a serve with an imaginary racket. He felt the ball again, then discomfited his wife by putting his nose to it and inhaling deeply, revealing the urge—however remote—to lose himself in the braids that had been the downfall of King Henry and whose spell had snatched England from the pope. Looking at Rombaud, he said at last: They say she was beautiful, yes? Even with a shorn head, Your Majesty, were the only words the poor man was able to speak to his king. Francis tossed the ball into the air and caught it gracefully. He looked out over the salon, cleared his throat as if to request the attention he always had, and said: The new fencing master is rather more handsome than I’d been told; he’ll teach tennis at the court, too, so watch your daughters. The breath of polite laughter moved like a wave through the Salon Bleu. We grant him his request, said the king. He looked Rombaud in the eye: With privileges for life; we have spoken.
“In a New World and Land”
The fourth of October, 1599, was a sunny day in Rome. There’s no evidence that Francisco de Quevedo was in the city on that particular day, but nor is there evidence that he was anywhere else. It is a fact that he did not occupy chair 58 in the solemn ceremony for the awarding of bachelor of arts degrees at the University of Alcalá de Henares, outside Madrid, where he certainly ought to have been.
The most often repeated theory regarding Quevedo’s absence from his own graduation assumes that he was fleeing after a never-resolved murder—probably committed in Madrid—in which he played a part, along with his friend and protector Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna and Marquis of Peñafiel.
Quevedo had met Girón many years earlier, when Francisco was a boy and Pedro a very young diplomat’s apprentice in the service of the duke of Feria. Both were members of the extravagant delegation headed by the infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, sent to the Estates-General of France to petition for the Crown of France. No crossing of the Pyrenees could have been more ridiculous, no convoy of high and low nobility more grotesque.
The man charged with presenting the infanta’s impossible candidacy was the duke of Feria. Pedro Téllez Girón—at the time only the marquis of Peñafiel, because his lackluster father was still alive—figured as his secretary. Francisco de Quevedo, aged eight, had come along because children traveled with their parents and he was the son of a lady-in-waiting to the infanta, present on the expedition. Quevedo’s sister was there too; she was a child attendant, something like a lapdog.
What a crossing: carts bulging with items of a luxury smothering enough to enable the infanta to feel at home in any inn; carriages crammed with ladies in towering coiffures trailing lineages so lengthy that they spilled out the windows; the men ahead and on horseback, in breastplates trimmed with American gold as if to remind Paris that the world belonged to them, though Philip hadn’t been as good as his father, Charles, at holding on to it; the children, and there must have been many, shoehorned in between chests and throwing clods and slabs of dirt at one another amid much hilarity. The purpose of this whole circus was to demand that the Estates-General crown Isabel Clara Eugenia, a thing that simply could not happen. France hadn’t been governed by a woman since Salic law was adopted in 1316. Not to mention that the infanta was Spanish, left-handed, fat, a bit slow, chewed her fingernails, and picked her nose and ate it.
The list of personages who made the trip is preserved in the archives of the National Library of Spain, and Quevedo and Girón’s names appear on it. There is also a travel log. In the diary of the secretary to the duke of Feria’s mother, an entry made in Gerona dated June 27 laments that the delegation’s delays and the inability of the poor infanta to command respect were turning the convoy into a carnival. The secretary writes: “Girón, never in earnest, goes about everywhere with a little maggot who calls Her Majesty ‘La Elefanta.’” Who else could it be?
Girón and Quevedo met again many years later in Alcalá de Henares. Pedro Téllez Girón—by now duke of Osuna, a grandee of Spain—was, like his friend, a man of ready tongue and insatiable urges; a drunk and a brawler from first to last. A man who knew how to get himself into trouble—and out of it.
In the autumn of 1599 he was dogged by three trials. The first was a result of keeping company with the actress Jerónima de Salcedo, whom he had set up in his house in Alejos with her father and husband. Osuna got only a minor reprimand, but the actress and her family were sentenced to flogging, feathering, and parading, she for being a kept woman, her father for being a pimp, and her husband for being a cuckold.
Another trial, thornier this time, involved an uncle of Osuna’s—a bastard son but an influential man—who had been his tutor. Juan de Ribera, Viceroy of Valencia, had accused this uncle of murdering his own wife and replacing her in the nuptial bed with a young page, with whom he apparently did the nefarious deed with scandalous enthusiasm and frequency.
Osuna’s uncle and the page were garroted in the plaza and their bodies burned. Though it seemed that all Valencia could testify to their amours, Pedro Téllez Girón stood in his tutor’s defense until the end and escaped unscathed, though he was sentenced to house arrest—where he must not have had such a bad time, because the actress and her family were still awaiting the conclusion of their own trial.
The third trial must have been by far the worst, because not a single official record is left of the crime he committed with another scoundrel, who might have been Quevedo. During this trial Osuna was jailed in Arévalo Prison and then locked up in his house in Osuna under the strict watch of four bailiffs. Historians and assorted amateurs have put two and two together and surmised that the sin for which Girón ended up in Arévalo was the murder of one or more soldiers in a dispute over a racket game.
In his Account of Occurrences in the Court of Spain, the historian Luis Cabrera de Córdoba reports that on August 6, 1599, while under house arrest, Osuna asked for leave to go to Madrid to kiss the king’s hand, and, “having been granted it, he used it to go to Seville, and even—it is said—to Naples, to indulge his urges.” It’s more than likely that he brought along his comrade in revelry, who was also under house arrest at the time.
In Seville, Quevedo—his position vastly more precarious than Osuna’s—must have tried to convince him that they should go to New Spain, like the narrator of El Buscón, an autobiographical novel he wrote soon afterward (though he never acknowledged authorship). “Seeing that this matter was of long duration,” says his protagonist, “and that ill fortune pursued me ever more adamantly, I determined to remove myself to the Indies, not because I had learned my lesson—I am not so level-headed—but out of weariness, as an inveterate sinner, in hopes that in a new world and land, my luck would improve.”
It’s very likely that,
once in Seville, they did travel on to the south of Italy—which was within the comfortable embrace of empire yet not within easy reach of the bailiffs of Philip III. At the time, the viceroy of Naples and the Two Sicilies was the duke of Lerma, a close relative of Osuna’s and protector of Quevedo’s family. In the end—and this does show up in a number of documents—it was the wife of the viceroy of Naples, the duchess of Lerma, who obtained the royal pardon for the young Francisco, which allowed him eventually to receive his bachelor’s degree and return to the halls of the university for a doctorate in jurisprudence and grammar.
There was no need for a royal pardon for Osuna. In the countries where Spanish is spoken, nothing ever happens to the bearers of great names, unless they entangle themselves with bearers of even greater names—and the poor slain soldiers were not that.
Neither the duke nor the poet was the sort to stay put: under the protection of the viceroy of Naples, they must have ranged farther. The allure of Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century was irresistible. No matter the day—October 4, 1599, included—anyone would have been better off in Rome than at a graduation ceremony.
First Set, Third Game
When at last he could get up—his balls still throbbing like two melons with lungs—he walked over to the railing of the gallery and said in a faint voice to his second that he couldn’t play like this: You have to do something. He rubbed his crotch gingerly. The duke, his eyes still brimming with tears of laughter, put a hand on his shoulder: You have to keep playing; Spain turns out nothing but soldiers and artists and you can’t let anyone here know that you’ve never been to war. But it wasn’t fair. You won the game, it was fair. So how am I supposed to move with a pair of octopuses for balls? Go and serve.
Holding the railing, he tried a few squats. Give me my sword, he said to the duke when, if not capable of playing, he at least felt capable of living. No, he’s provoking you, the duke responded. Give it to me. I won’t; it’s Italian cunning, as if you don’t know what they’re like. I won’t even unsheathe it; Spanish bluster.
The poet did one more squat, and when he rose, the duke was holding his sword belt over the railing. The moment the poet reached for his sword, Saint Matthew lunged for the artist’s blade. The poet withdrew his hand and spat in disgust, stirring the spittle with the toe of his boot. He stared at the Italians as if they were creatures from another world, and then he returned to the line of service without giving them a second glance. All right then, said the duke, setting down the belt. With a half smile and a nod, the Lombard acknowledged that his opponent had recovered his dignity, and he moved to the rear of the court. The mathematician—who all this time had been counting the beams in the roof of the gallery—had fallen asleep. Tenez!
The first couple of points were played with force and fury (15–15). The artist was finally focused, and the poet had forgotten the encumbrance of his hangover and was intent solely on winning. The third point began with an extraordinarily vicious serve from the Spaniard, and the slice with which it was returned brought a moment of light to the court. Against the odds and perhaps the laws of gravity, the poet reached the ball as it bounced just inside the cord. His stroke was sound, but not forceful enough to win the point. He ran back, imagining that the artist would aim for the dedans; his guess was right. Then he covered the corners as if it were no work at all, his opponent peppering him with bullets, each harder, straighter, and deadlier than the last. At the end of the point the artist did something to the ball that killed it just as it cleared the cord. The linesmen exchanged glances: this might be a decent game after all. There was applause from Saint Matthew and the hangers-on, the two seconds, and the four or five people who had come to sit in the stands. Quindici–trenta, cried the mathematician; primo vantaggio per il milanese.
The poet noticed that the people still standing—maybe other tennis players who would size one another up and take their measure against the poet’s challenger when the professional gamblers began to arrive—were now finding seats in the gallery. The rapt interest with which the recent arrivals watched the movement of the ball gave him a tiny taste of glory, which, beleaguered as he was, he felt he definitely deserved.
It had been a difficult morning. He’d woken early with a parched throat and a headache hard and hot as a flatiron, and he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep, confused, guilt-ridden, and mortified as he was.
What in Christ’s name happened last night, he’d asked when the duke finally came down for breakfast at the Tavern of the Bear, where they were staying. The poet had been punishing himself for a while, sitting without a bite to eat on the plank floor of the courtyard, waiting for someone to come down and accompany him to Piazza Navona.
The duke’s face was puffy and marked with pillow creases, but he was impeccably dressed in black: belt, cloak, and hat hung from his arm. Upon being asked what had happened, the grandee shrugged and called for a beer and some bread spread with lard. Tiepida o calda, asked the innkeeper’s wife. Hot lard, warm beer—and put an egg in it. After his first swallow he opened his eyes a little more. His friend was still full of gloom. Nothing happened, he said, but we have to go and defend your honor, and mine too—the usual. The poet was conscious of his generosity in not even touching on the events of the night before. And Spain’s, Duke, and Spain’s. The other man smiled: Spain’s indeed, when she’s proved herself worthy. He finished the bread, gulped down the beer, and, rising, put on his gloves; he fastened his sword belt around his waist and wrapped himself in his cloak. Let’s go, he said, we can’t be late.
Since it was nearly midday, the back gate to the courtyard was open and only the double doors separated them from the street. The duke put on his hat, opened one door, and looked to see who was passing before he set foot on the cobblestones—the hilt of his sword at hand, his fingers hovering nervously over it. He stepped out. Once on the pavement, he checked the street corners again and said: Clean and clear. But as he waited for the poet—who scarcely had the presence of mind to strap on his own belt—he kept his hand on his sword.
Tenez! Despite the complications of a serve set to rolling on the roof, the Lombard lifted the ball high enough to clear the cord, though with no sting. A survival stroke, one that left him off balance. The Spaniard hammered it back. Thirty–thirty. The next two points were long and exciting: many onlookers gathered. Deuce, cried the mathematician when they tied at forty.
A close, hard-fought game would be to the poet’s advantage. To wear down the artist, he had to keep the score even. A tortuous and symmetrical match for an inclement day on which everything came in pairs. That morning the poet and the duke had walked to the piazza like Siamese-twin bailiffs. The two of them in cloaks and hats, shoulder to shoulder, right arms crossed over their chests. Spanish self-defense: fists visibly gripping hilts of swords. The people out to run a last errand before lunch had given them a wide berth. The inn wasn’t far at all from the courts, and they made the walk without incident.
When the circus of Piazza Navona appeared before their nervous eyes, Saint Matthew and a few other louts were already in conversation by one of the L-shaped wooden galleries that bounded the courts the city had built so that the plebs could fortify their bodies and temper their souls—if they happened to have souls—by playing the fashionable game of the day. They moved toward the court, still on guard and with no sense at all of ridiculousness. Once arrived, they separated. The duke glanced at the Obelisk of Domitian, which in those days still functioned as a sundial. It’s almost noon, he said.
The Italians, perfectly at ease, removed their hats when they saw them take their places in the gallery. Though the Spaniards were wearing swords—the pope had forbidden the citizens of Rome to bear arms—they were all cordial to one another, even warm, as strangers can be when they’ve spent a night drinking together. There were embraces, the duke’s the most vigorous of all—the better to count daggers under capes.
The poet’
s opponent and his second appeared on the far side of the piazza a little later. The mathematician was dressed formally, like the poet and the duke, but in the blue robes and cap of a professor. He carried a leather case containing the implements of the duel. The artist, victim of a perhaps overly personal fashion sense, had on long, close-fitting black breeches of stiff, heavy cotton instead of hose. They fell to the heels of his boots. He was wearing a collarless shirt, also black, cinched by a leather vest of the same color. His cloak, cut in the Spanish style, was black and very worn. On his head was a narrow-brimmed hat, adorned with neither feather nor brooch. He carried a sword: his employment in the service of a bishop meant that this was permitted, even though he was a local.
Sudden Death Page 3
