Free Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue

him seriously because of the lunatic ferocity with which he fought and because of his close ties to the cardinal, who protected him—he never had to spend more than a few hours in jail—but they didn’t consider him trustworthy.
    Saint Matthew scratched his ribs. Finally he said: Why don’t we just give him a good beating? The artist sighed and sank his nose between Mary Magdalene’s breasts again. They’re Spaniards, she said; imagine the scandal. She said it in a dreamy way, her smile almost gentle, as if this imagined world weren’t a feastof stabbings and throat-slittings, toward which it made no sense to hurl oneself. There would be war in the streets, she concluded, running her crooked finger across the artist’s neck. If they’re playing tennis with us they can’t be very important, grunted the beggar. I tell you they’re noblemen, it’s risky enough to be playing tennis with them, Mary insisted. Win the match and put an end to it,
capo
, said Matthew. The artist shook himself a little, exhaled the rather stale air from his lungs into the tart’s cleavage, and lifted his face. Shouting
Eccola!
as harshly as he might have called for a tavern to be opened at dawn, he went to get his racket and the ball he’d left lying on the pavement. Onlookers, gamblers, and friends found new seats in the gallery as the players changed sides.
    Heavily and lazily, the Lombard went through the motions of crossing the court: dragging his feet, his eyes on the ground. Before he had settled himself on the defender’s side, his second rose from his seat under the gallery roof, where everyone thought he had been sleeping, shook out his academic robes, and came to whisper something in his ear. The artist listened, his eyes cast down. For the first time that afternoon, his linesman appeared almost animated: he gestured as he talked. Finally, both of them kneeled on the ground and the mathematician drew lines, crossing some over others; he clapped once. The artist shrugged and the professor returned to his place in the stands to count beams.
    The Lombard stopped behind the line, scraped the ground a little, and raised his face, in which a new demonic spirit shone. He half closed his eyes before crying
Eccola!
once again, this time from the depths where all the rage and violence of which he was capable was accumulated.

Admiralships and Captaincies

    N either the conquistador’s widow nor his daughter Juana ever returned to Mexico, but they never developed much of an interest in the peninsular surroundings where they spent the rest of their lives either. Like all of Cortés’s descendants, they found it inexplicable that infinite New Spain was dependent on this dim-witted country where men wore tights and screamed at each other even when they were in good humor. More languages were spoken in my father’s garden than in all Old Spain, Juana would say by way of ungracious explanation of the little interest she took in Europe, where she had in fact been splendidly received. She didn’t become a wallflower like her mother, who accepted every invitation and then was silent at the soirées, but nor was she notable for her devotion to the class to which she belonged by fortune and by marriage.
    The decorous madness of the conquistador’s widow made sense, in a way: she was already a grown woman when she left a kingdom of exceptional riches, where her orders were obeyed even before they occurred to her, but she had left it behind so that her daughter could be where one had to be if one was awoman. Her cool and at times even graceful distaste for her peninsular confinement was understandable.
    Juana Cortés, on the other hand, lived in a fever of longing for America, because—having left Cuernavaca at fourteen—she never understood the body of war crimes that had made it possible for her to live her childhood like a native princess. The Andalusian orchards