Sudden Death

by Álvaro Enrigue

  After setting him up in his new shop and providing him with satin, glue, paints, brushes, tools, and the assistance of the royal cooks, Cortés asked Huanitzin what else he needed in order to pay tribute to the emperor. Shoes, he replied. What kind, asked the conquistador, imagining that he must be cold and want woolen slippers. Like yours, said Huanitzin—who, being an Aztec noble and a featherworker, considered a provincial squire turned soldier to be of a class beneath his. With cockles. Cockles? asked Cortés. The Indian pointed to the captain’s instep, festooned with a golden buckle and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Buckles, said the conquistador; shoes with buckles. That’s it.

  Naturally, Cortés didn’t buy Huanitzin a pair of shoes stitched with silver thread like his—not only were they monstrously expensive, walking in them was like squeezing one’s toes into a pair of flatirons—but he did buy him good high-heeled boots with tin buckles, and along with them a pair of stockings, a few white shirts, and a pair of black breeches intended for some nobleman’s son that fit the featherworker like a dream.

  The Indian accepted the garments as if they were his due—without paying them much attention or thanking him for them—and made one last request of the conquistador before getting to work: Could you also find me some mushrooms? Mushrooms? To see mellifluous things while I’m worrying the king’s drape. It’s called a royal cape, a capón real. I thought that a capon was a bird with its burls cut off. Balls. Not balls, it’s mushrooms I want. Here they would burn us both if they discovered you drunk on mushrooms. I’d hardly be dunked in them, it’s not as if they’re a pond. There are none in Spain. Well then, the royal capón won’t be as mellifluous.

  Huanitzin liked his new clothes, though he didn’t think them fitting for a master featherworker who was once again on the grounds of an emperor’s palace, so he used his first Spanish goose feathers to embroider one of the shirts—the one he wore on special occasions—with pineapples that he imagined were the equivalent of the Flanders lions he’d seen worked in gold on Charles V’s cloak. The breeches were sewn down the side seams with bands of white feathers, turning him into a first wild glimpse of mariachi singers to come. The cooks spoiled this tiny man, who inspected their birds’ scrawny necks and armpits in a getup like a saint on parade. When he decided that a fowl was worthy of being plucked, he kneeled over it, took a pair of tiny tweezers from his sash, blew the hair out of his eyes, and with maddening care defeathered the part of the bird that interested him—the cooks knew by now that once he chose a specimen it would have to be moved to the dinner menu because there was no way he’d be done with it before lunch. Hours later, he would return happily to his shop, generally with a harvest of feathers so modest that it hardly filled a soup plate. Sometimes he looked over the birds and found none to be of interest—there was no way to predict which he would judge worthy material for the king’s cape. Other times it happened that there would be no birds cooked that day. When this was the case he still lingered in the kitchen, leaning on the wall so as not to be in the way. He admired the size of the chunks of animal moving on and off the hearth. What is that, he asked every so often. Calf’s liver. He would return to his shop to tell his son that the king was to eat castle adder that night. But what is it? Must be a fat snake that lives in ruined towers, he explained in Nahuatl.

  By the time the letter from Pope Paul reached the last outpost of Christianity, which just then was the Purépecha village half rising from the ruins of what had once been the imperial city of Tzintzuntzan, everyone was already calling Huanitzin “Don Diego,” and he was still wearing the cotton shirts embroidered with pineapples that he believed were the height of European fashion, as well as his Toledo boots. By now he also read and spoke Latin, utterly garbled by his artilleryman’s ear. Look, said Vasco de Quiroga, handing him the letter on which he had just broken the papal seal of Paul III. The featherworker read it, running his finger under the lines. I’ll go with you, he said at last, so I can pay my regards to Charles.

  Don Diego didn’t miss the old gods. His mostly symbolic relationship with the succession of religious beliefs that life had visited upon him was based on rituals that felt just as empty when he offered up his work to the four Tezcatlipocas of the four corners of the earth as when he offered it to the three archangels and the Nazarene. Must we call him the Nazarene, asked Tata Vasco—who greatly enjoyed their conversations—every so often. That’s what he was, Don Quiroga, a Nazarene, and you know that I’d prefer you to call me Don Diego; I wasn’t baptized just to be your latchkey. Lackey, Don Diego, lackey. He liked it that the incense and blessings came only on Sundays and lasted barely an hour—I’ll be back in a splash, he would say at the shop to announce that he was going to mass—and that praying didn’t involve piercing the member with a maguey spine, and that the culmination of the Communion ceremony was just a little piece of unleavened bread and not the corpse stew eaten at the palace under Moctezuma—human flesh was a little gummy and the dish in which it was served was overspiced. He didn’t miss the blood spurting from the sacrificial heart, the hurling of heads at crowds dazed on hallucinogens, the rolling of decapitated bodies down steps.

  He did miss the order and hygiene of the Aztec government; the police who did their jobs, the sense of belonging to a tight circle of friends who ruled a world that didn’t stretch very far; the security of knowing that he only had to speak Nahuatl to be understood by everyone. And he was still grieving. No matter how pleasant his situation, he would have preferred that the Spanish invasion had never happened, that his parents had died of old age and not of thirst during the siege; he would have preferred that his wife hadn’t been raped to death by the Tlaxcaltecas and that the Spaniards’ dogs hadn’t eaten his twin daughters. He would have liked to bury his brothers and cousins, killed in combat, and he would have preferred that his brothers’ wives hadn’t been taken as slaves, hadn’t had to choose to throw their babies into the lake rather than see them endure the life that awaited them.

  Huanitzin had hidden in the totocalli with his eldest son when the sack of Tenochtitlan began, and the two of them had been saved because Cortés had a weakness for the art of featherwork. With everything lost, Huanitzin had started over, and he felt that he had exchanged one set of privileges for another. His son would never wear the proud calmecac topknot, but he wouldn’t go to war either; he wouldn’t learn the poems that had made the empire great, nor would he enjoy the privilege of being considered an almost sacred artist at the palace, but he had gained the wonderful, liberating joy of horseback riding, and all the things new to Indians that he liked about this world: the shoes, the beef, the elegant shirts with pineapples that were by now the trademark of his house and that in the times of Moctezuma would have been considered an effrontery punishable by death.

  No, said Vasco de Quiroga, I think I’ll go alone; it’s a meeting of bishops to save the Church, not the gypsy caravan Cortés brought along to entertain the king. The featherworker shrugged his shoulders: If you need anything, let me know. What could I possibly need? I don’t know—a handsome peasant to take to the pope? A peasant? To flail him, as a sign of our devotion. No one touches His Holiness. Of course, that’s why he’s pope, but I’m sure his bishops flail him. Hail him. That’s right, flail him. Not a handsome peasant, the padre continued to provoke him. Why? He’s a man of God, Huanitzin; he must be eighty years old. It’s a matter of coming up with the right peasant, Huanitzin concluded, wrinkling his brow and fingering the scanty beard he might better have shaved. How can you think of a peasant for the pope? A nice one, answered the Indian. Then, unperturbed, he bid the bishop goodbye: I’m off, it’s raining now.

  Though Huanitzin was part of the Tzintzuntzan hospital-town, he decided to build the aviary and his featherworking shop some distance away. Quiroga had decreed that his hospital be built on top of what was once the palace of the Purépecha emperor, and the Indian was of the opinion that it couldn’t be a good place. I’m not going to build a totocalli
on that crossload of souls, he’d said, it’ll be the death of my little birds; and then we work at night, there’s no knowing what we’ll see when we have to clot ourselves with mushrooms so we can do mellifluous work. Quiroga accepted his reasoning; it was true that to calibrate the luminescent effect of the precious feathers, the artists worked mostly at night and in environments of controlled light: windowless sheds in which the only sources of light were beeswax tapers. I’ve already chosen the little plot where I’ll build the shop, Huanitzin said to Quiroga; or better yet, why don’t you come and deed me it, since you’re a lawyer.

  The plot was a sloping valley that began on a mountainside covered in the black fringe of a pine forest, and it ran down to the shores of a lake. It was completely isolated from the other settlements, the emerald meadow cropped by a flock of sheep, the mountains watchful in the distance. It was by far the most beautiful spot Quiroga had seen in the basin of Lake Pátzcuaro, which was itself, in his opinion—and mine—the most beautiful place in the world. Where are you going to put the shop, the bishop asked the featherworker. The Indian pointed to the top of the valley: Will you deed me the whole valley or just the shop? In Mechuacán there are no deeds, replied the padre; everything belongs to everyone. I ask because it belongs to some Purépecha, said Huanitzin, but they only want it to plant squash and keep sheep. The bishop thought for a moment: You can put the shop here, but only if you start a town of featherworkers. How will I flounder a town, when I have only one son? Bring in the Purépecha. Do you mean I should teach them featherwork? The bishop nodded. And you’ll give me my deeds? Quiroga harrumphed and shook his head: I can give you a declaration of origination. And some deeds for my little shop. No.

  For months, another Indian, who called himself a notary and said that he represented the interests of Don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin and the newly founded village of Nearby, waited from sunup to sundown in the antechambers of the archdiocese without being received by Quiroga. Finally, the bishop made up some deeds just to get rid of him. Only then did he learn that in the perfect valley he had visited with the featherworker, a workshop had already been built, as had houses for five families and a communal dining hall.

  Third Set, Fifth Game

  The duke lost the composure that he’d been careful to maintain all through the match when he saw how the Lombard drilled the ball into the dedans. Motherfucker, he said. Barral whispered in his ear: We’re in fine shape, boss. Neither of them had ever seen a drive like that, so fast it was almost invisible, so precise it was as if—instead of going into the hole—the ball had been swallowed up by the wall.

  The duke asked for a time-out and beckoned to his protégé. The poet could still feel victory in his fingertips and he was convinced that his opponent’s smash had been chance. We’ve been watching him try for it the whole match, he said to the duke, and this is the first time he’s done it; it must have been luck. The duke shook his head. Barral raised a finger, requesting permission to have his say. What is it, asked his master. Or he’s been stringing us along so that we’d bet the rest. A shadow of doubt crossed the poet’s face. The man is crippled by his hangover, he said; I don’t think he’d put himself through this just to win a few coins. Faugh, said the duke: For now, forget about backspin on your serve; aim for the end of the gallery so that he isn’t so close to the dedans and he has to lob it.

  The poet returned to his side of the court. Tenez! He served a slow ball with no backspin that floated like a balloon onto the far corner of the roof. He watched it go up and noted, from the moment it began its descent, that he’d put it just where he wanted it. It would bounce oddly, drop in an awkward spot, and the Italian would have to lunge for it, hopefully with his backhand.

  The duke managed to cry, Cover the dedans, catching the gleam in the artist’s eye as he waited. The artist retreated behind the baseline, smiling, and crossed his arm over his body, preparing for a backhand strike. The Spaniard ran back. When he saw the bullet coming at him he ducked his head. The ball went into the dedans. Caccia automatica per il milanese, said the mathematician. Tre–due.

  On the Vestments of the Utopians

  All the people appear in the temple in white garments. The priests’ vestments are parti-colored, more wonderful for their craft and form than for their materials. They are neither embroidered with gold thread nor set with precious stones, but are composed of the plumes of several birds, laid together with so much art and so neatly that they are greater in value than the richest cloth. In the ordering and placing of these plumes some dark mysteries are represented.

  THOMAS MORE, Utopia, 1516

  The Pope’s Peasant

  Huanitzin’s mountainside establishment was devoted exclusively to the art of featherwork, though sheep were tolerated because they cropped the grass, driving away the snakes and field rats. Anyone who chose to persist in fishing or planting squash was invited to leave by Don Diego’s apprentices during terrifying nighttime visits with sticks and stones.

  The settlement, because of its proximity to Tzintzuntzan and its tininess, never had a name, or had one only in the minds of Huanitzin and Tata Vasco, even though it was formally baptized as Cercanías, or “Nearby,” in the sham deeds granted by the bishop, in honor of the stagecoach that ran between Toledo’s main square, Talavera de la Reina, and Aranjuez when the featherworker was a visitor at the royal court: Huanitzin thought that Nearby was a place.

  Of all the communities that made up the diocese, which was in reality Vasco de Quiroga’s personal fiefdom, the bishop’s favorite was Tupátaro, because it lay among the richest fields of New Spain; like all dictators for life, he was by nature better equipped to understand productive units than artist communities. Even so, when afternoons spent visiting the Tzintzuntzan hospital grew long, he would make a detour to Nearby to while away the time: the sun spilling behind the blue mountains, the lethal minute when the water of the lake lay still to let the souls of the dead pass, the emerald slide of the sheep-sheared meadow, the sudden arrival of the children. If he could have, he would have established the archdiocese in Tupátaro, instead of Pátzcuaro, so he could live there, but he couldn’t help thinking that if he continued to be good, when he died he would go to Nearby.

  From a distance, Quiroga noted that the houses, once built of sticks and palm fronds, were now adobe, and that the workshop was already an imposing structure, whitewashed and with a tile roof, and that the totocalli was perfectly organized. He moved on to greet the women, who were hard at work in the communal kitchen. Are the men in the shop? he asked. One of the women, who didn’t speak Castilian but did speak Nahuatl, answered that for eleven days Diego had kept the men working behind closed doors, and wouldn’t let the women see them even when they brought food. If things go on like this, continued another in Castilian, the children will run wild. But what are they doing? asked Quiroga. You know Don Diego and his mysteries, said one of the Purépecha in Castilian; he’s still a Mexica through and through. The Nahuas are cryptic folk, concluded the bishop. Exactly right, answered the Indian woman; always crippling things. The priest thought to himself that in addition to the featherworking shop, Huanitzin had established another workshop, of imaginary Spanish.

  The ladies set him a place at the table: Go on, Tata, eat something before the children come back. He couldn’t resist a perhaps overly large helping of Mechuacán tamales even though that night he had to dine with Zumárraga’s envoys, who would be coming late to the hospital to discuss the positions that the bishops of New Spain should take at Trent.

  The situation was complicated: Charles V was in favor of including the dissident bishops of Germany and England in the sessions—the former because they were his subjects and the latter because Henry VIII was his great friend and he couldn’t countenance not playing tennis with him again. In this regard, the presence of the novo-Hispanic bishops was essential, and especially that of Vasco de Quiroga: he had built a successful community on the very
fringes of empire based on the ideas of a British humanist who also happened to be Henry VIII’s laureled adviser. No one knew yet in New Spain that the English king had already ordered More’s beheading and that this made Charles’s position at Trent absolutely untenable: Rome now had the first martyr of what would soon be the Counter-Reformation, and it canonized him so fast that the novo-Hispanic bishops, like the Spaniards, never made it to Trent in the end.

  But all this is what we know, we who live in a world in which past and present are simultaneous because history is written to make us believe that A leads to B and therefore progresses logically. A world without gods is a world in history, and in stories like this one: history and stories alike offer the consolation of order. Back then, the world—the world that Quiroga had invented—was a dizzying and directionless one, growing in the palm of one acknowledged God and other clandestine gods, all battling one another for the meaning of things; the basin of Lake Pátzcuaro was a drop of divine saliva in which, as in a dream, all mysteries were revealed.

  He finished his last tamal and went to the door to watch the sun set behind the water and the hills. The children were on their way back from the lake; children who spoke a mix of Purépecha, Nahuatl, and Castilian; children of Quiroga whom Quiroga believed to be children of God. He thanked the ladies and went walking along the emerald bank of the hill, slapping the mosquitoes on his neck. At the end of the path, the wild light of the candles that Huanitzin required for his work swelled along the bottom of the barred door.

  The bishop had no memory of a recent featherwork commission. Not one so big that it would require the artist to shut himself away for eleven days with all his apprentices. He clapped a few times to scatter the sheep that had already settled with their young on the path, and to let the featherworkers know that he was coming. He caught his breath, and knocked at the door. He cried: It’s me, Don Diego; Tata Vasco. The featherworker opened the door to him with the dazed look and clenched jaw of those who aren’t entirely with us; he had obviously been working without pause for eleven days as the ladies had claimed, sleeping as little as possible and scarcely eating. Can I come in, asked the bishop. Huanitzin—the creases under his eyes reddened—smiled with a pride that the priest always found a little frightening, as if a sudden awareness of his artist’s mastery could abruptly turn into action and erase in a single sweep the passage from these lands of the Christian God, who might in the end not be needed after all. Come in, he said, blowing at his hair with a half smile; all the candles lighting the workshop flickered.