Sudden Death (21 page)

“In Paris do they play the way we play here?”

“With some variations: the Master of the Game gives the players shoes and caps.”

“What are they like?”

“The shoes are made of felt.”

“They would be of no use here.”

“Here, of course, the game is played on streets strewn with stones; in France and Flanders they play on tile floors, flat and even.”

“And what sort of balls do they play with?”

“Almost none are filled with air, as they are here; they are smaller than the balls you know, and harder, of white leather; they are stuffed with dog hair, not the hair of men done to death; and that is why the players hardly ever strike the ball with their palms.”

“How do they play, then? With their fists, as we do with our balls?”

“No indeed, but with a racket.”

“Strung with string?”

“With a thicker cord, like the strings of the
vihuela
. They also stretch a line across the court: it's an error or fault to hit the ball beneath the line.”

JUAN LUIS VIVES
, Practice of the Latin Language
, 1539

D
runks and children urinate with the same glorious urgency: when they have to go, they have to go with desperate seriousness. And they pee profusely and noisily, in a foamy, vast, and happy way.

15–love.

The poet felt a twinge of pleasure at the base of his skull at the liberation of his nether waters. His fuzzy head was bowed, because a last ray of light in his mind advised him to avoid splashing his boots. He raised his face and moaned like a lion, transfixed with delight. Only then did the stream regulate itself, allowing him to turn some of his attention to the dark figure of the Italian
capo
, who was spilling his own waters on the venerable cobblestones of the Via dell'Orso.

He felt as if he'd been pissing for hours when he finally pulled up his breeches and leaned against the wall to wait for his companion to finish. Only then did he notice that the cold air was poisoning him. He breathed deeply, straddling his legs to find solid footing. He clung—discreetly, he believed—to the ledge of the tavern wall so that the city would stop spinning.

The
capo
slouched at his side when he was done pissing. The
poet saw him as if from a distance, his contours smeared by a brain turned to wax. His new friend seemed untouched, though they'd been drinking at the same pace. He also seemed to be talking interminably. The poet couldn't understand a word he was saying.

He made an effort to follow, feigning a probity he no longer possessed, and he gathered that the
capo
was saying something about the night and the river. He tried to stand up straighter and couldn't: he lost his balance and caught himself by throwing an arm around his companion's shoulders. The
capo
whispered in his ear what he had been saying all along without being understood. That they should go to the river, that the river cured all.

There's a particular kind of suffering in the loneliness of the person who has already lost the battle against alcohol and surrendered in a waking state: pain, nausea, the fear that this all-consuming discomfort will be eternal. At the river, he thought, he might be able to vomit without disturbing the neighbors with his retching. The warm hand of the Italian holding him up around the ribs was like the last hope in a world where all possibility of pleasure had suddenly been voided. He let himself be detached from the ledge, arm slung over the shoulders of the
capo
, who neither lost his composure nor stopped whispering things for his own entertainment as he guided the poet slowly along the narrow street. It wasn't healing that he'd found on the shoulder on which he was drooling. It was something at once less effective and more comforting.

15–15.

The boil of the river didn't have the healing effect he had
hoped for. Instead, the swampy dampness of the air made him feel even worse. He leaned on the stone balustrade, the city spinning in the hollows of his eyes, and breathed as deeply as he could. Since the situation wasn't improving, he shoved his index finger against the back of his throat. His whole body began to convulse, hunched over.

First it was just a pain in his chest, a surge of shivers and tremors, coughs so deep that he thought they would shake his balls loose. He crouched down, and felt the grappa that was still slopping unprocessed in his stomach surge up with cyclone force. He managed to rise enough to vomit interminably over the retaining wall of the waterway.

He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and blew his nose, which was running profusely, with his handkerchief. He rubbed his neck and slumped to the ground, resting against the balustrade. He smiled: no longer did he feel the graze of death's teeth on his scalp, but he was still very drunk. Only now did he seek the
capo
with his gaze. The Italian seemed to have vanished after leaving him at the river. He fell asleep.

30–15.

He was woken by someone shaking him by the shoulders. It was the
capo
, eyeing him with a complicit smile. Are you all right, he asked gently. He lifted the poet's face by the chin, gave him a few kindly slaps, pulled him by the ears. Stirred back to life, he saw that the man was offering him a jug. If I drink another drop of wine I'll die, he said. It's water, the
capo
said; fresh, I went to the fountain. This struck the poet as funny and he proceeded to rid himself of the sour taste of his own filth, spitting mouthfuls of water over the balustrade into the river.
Finally he splashed his face and neck. The Italian took a branch of mint from his bag. Chew this, he said. The poet obeyed with the humility of the fallen who are on their way back to life. Though the effect of the leaves on his palate and tongue was too intense to be pleasant, he felt that the mint juices were opening blocked ducts.

He grew confident enough to stand again. They're waiting for me at the Tavern of the Bear, he said to the
capo
, slurring his words. He took two steps, slipped, and fell like a side of beef. He was barely sober enough to catch himself with his hands and protect his head. As he tried to get up again, he saw the Italian doubled over with laughter. The very red face of the man who a moment ago had feigned commiseration struck him as hilarious. The
capo
came over, took him by the hand, and then the two of them ended up in the mud. Each tried to get up on his own, but whenever one of them had nearly managed it, the other brought him down again with his efforts. At last they declared defeat and lay on the ground together, belly up.

The street is too muddy, said the
capo
; we can't go back to the tavern like this. They crawled back to the balustrade. There are stairs here, said the Lombard, pointing to one of the flights down the retaining wall toward the stream; let's sit. They advanced clumsily until they found what they believed to be solid ground.

30–30.

They sat there next to each other, the edges of their knees knocking as they rocked with laughter at whatever was said. At some point the
capo
leaned back and rested his elbows on the step above, shook his head, and pulled a wineskin from his
cloak. It's Spanish, he said to the poet. I can't believe you're going to keep drinking. The Italian uncorked the wineskin with a defiant look, crooning a silly little song. He raised it, opened his mouth, and let the stream of wine soak his mustache. Give me a swig, said the Spaniard, his boldness fueled by oblivion. The Italian let a second stream fall into his own mouth, full and still as a pool, and left his mouth open, pointing to indicate that it was the Spaniard's for the taking. The poet smiled before moving delicately to lap the wine with his tongue.

30–40. Break point, cried the duke.

He plunged his hand into the Lombard's hair and pressed against his mouth. The
capo
's response was muscular: he grabbed the back of the Spaniard's head. The poet felt that he was returning to some long-lost place, a place where he had a guide. He followed as if on that tongue he might find something he had always lacked. The musky scent of the
capo
's hair, the vigor of his embrace. The Lombard switched positions, rolling the poet underneath him and letting the full weight of his body fall on him. The Spaniard found an unexpected pleasure in yielding, as if the virtue of obedience had suddenly gained meaning. He felt the Lombard's erection growing. He was carried away by curiosity, the need to touch that wild and living thing that threatened and flattered him all at once. He was curious; he wanted to reach the place where everything that was happening would become happy torture. He touched the Lombard's cock. The
capo
pulled away from his mouth and began to run his tongue along his neck, his ears. He had to know; that was all he wanted: to know. He slid his hand under the Lombard's sash, buried it in his breeches and felt the
capo
's member against his
palm, squeezing it, exploring it, intrigued by its oils. He moved his hand a little lower to investigate the testicles, that source of pleasing heat. Then he heard the duke's unmistakable voice crying from the balustrade: What the fuck is going on here?

Cacce per il milanese.

N
o one has ever read Thomas More's
De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia
in such a delirious state of pragmatic fervor as Vasco de Quiroga. It had been scarcely two years since the lawyer arrived in tumultuous New Spain, and he was already establishing the Indian hospital-town of Santa Fe outside Mexico City, whose ordinances—or what remains of them, which isn't much—can conclusively be counted as the foundational text of the long and lavish history of plagiarism in Mexico.

Thomas More had written a political essay disguised as a book of fantasy about how a society might work if stripped of the constitutive vice of greed. The volume was a sardonic meditation on the miseries of life in the England of Henry VIII: a political cartoon. Such a cartoon, in fact, that it described a place called Nolandia (or
“No hay tal lugar,”
according to the still-unmatched Spanish translation by Quevedo); a Nolandia that was bathed by the river Anydrus—“Nowater”—and whose ruler was known as Ademus, or “Peopleless.” Utopia was an exercise, a Renaissance humanist game that was never intended to be put into practice. But Vasco de Quiroga saw something else in it.

New Spain and Nueva Galicia were places, but places that were more like no-man's-lands, because Hernán Cortés and Nuño de Guzmán had more experience kicking down what they found than putting the pieces back together. They were never statesmen, because they had come to Mexico to become millionaires. Most of the members of the conquistador generation started businesses; others, some of the best of them, built churches. Zumárraga built pyres and a library. Vasco de Quiroga judged it the natural thing to build a utopia.

In the hospital-town of Santa Fe, built around a home for the elderly and sick, the highest authority, Vasco de Quiroga, decreed that no money would circulate. As closely as it could within the bounds of reality, the town followed the non-instructions set forth by the London humanist for the functioning of Utopia: it was divided along two axes that intersected at the hospital and the church, and in each quadrant there were multifamily houses belonging to four different clans. These clans were administered by a council of elders, and each had its own representatives; they all reported to the director of the hospital, which was the only post that was required to be occupied by a Spaniard. To support itself, Santa Fe was founded with artisan families specializing in different practices: potters, carpenters, and featherworkers in one quadrant; bricklayers, pipefitters, and cacao merchants in another; and so on. All were organized into a system of masters and apprentices from the same family. The inhabitants of the village spent part of their time working in their specialty and another part sowing and harvesting on the village's communal land. Anything produced on the land or in the workshops that wasn't consumed locally
was collected at the rectory, to be sent for sale in the markets of the capital.

Vasco de Quiroga must have thought that he was an economic genius and Thomas More a visionary, because Santa Fe was a dazzling success and soon became a production center supplying the capital not only with useful objects—tools, musical instruments, construction rods, and luxury goods such as polychrome statues of saints and virgins, or feather ornaments made according to the ancestral techniques of the Nahua featherworkers—but also with basic agricultural products: corn, squash, legumes, honey, flowers. It didn't occur to Quiroga, of course, that the model worked because the society that More proposed and he had orchestrated was a production system similar to the one that the Indians in the Valley of Mexico already had in place before the arrival of the Spaniards; it was the same scheme that the Indians had periodically tried to revive, for which Zumárraga would burn them at the stake.

In 1536, between burning indigenous books that today would be exceedingly valuable and printing treatises in Latin that are still available and that no one bothers to consult, Bishop Zumárraga pulled strings at the Spanish court to get the Vatican to recognize Mexico as a new region so that he could be promoted to Archbishop of New Spain. His maneuverings were successful—the king could deny him nothing—and in 1537 his conversation partner and lawyer friend, Vasco de Quiroga, was hurriedly ordained priest and became the first bishop of Mechuacán.

There, in the old Purépecha capital of Tzintzuntzan, Quiroga founded a second Indian hospital-town; and while he was at it, the next year he founded a full Indian utopian republic on
the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, in which each town specialized in the manufacture of some useful product and all the land was communal.

If there was a Wimbledon of dead humanists, Vasco de Quiroga would play in the final against Erasmus of Rotterdam and he would win by a landslide. Never was a man so comfortable in the role of designing a whole world to his own specifications. And if ever there was, no one did it so well. The utopian communities of Lake Pátzcuaro were the orchard of New Spain for three hundred years; the descendants of the Indians who founded them almost five hundred years ago still speak Purépecha, still govern themselves to a certain degree through councils of elders (I witnessed one in Santa Clara and another in Paracho), still live in enchantingly lovely towns protected by more or less untouched ecosystems, and still make the products that Tata Vasco thought would sell well enough to ensure the community's survival. I am not exaggerating. Yesterday, at my corner deli in New York City, I bought a couple of perfect avocados grown in the orchards of Mechuacán by the descendants of Quiroga's Indians. Two letters are all that have changed. Today we call the place Michoacán.

The letter from Pope Paul III inviting the bishop of Mechuacán to the meetings of the Council of Trent arrived in Pátzcuaro, so it was an Indian who brought it to Tzintzuntzan, where Quiroga was handling hospital business and trying to resolve a dispute between the families of local Purépecha cloth producers and Mexica featherworkers. Tata Vasco was in a meeting with Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin when the letter from the pope arrived.