Free Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue Page A

weren’t bad, but one couldn’t lose oneself in them, shed one’s clothes deep in the wild, or play at spitting seeds and singing in Bantu with the slave daughters. The Guadalquivir wasn’t the kind of river where heiresses to large fortunes swam stark naked after getting high on chocolate in the kitchen.
    Once Juana Cortés had married the heir of the house of Alcalá, the conquistador’s widow bequeathed his gloomy castle in Castilleja de la Cuesta to the religious order of the Descalzas and moved with her daughter to the duke’s palace, which had an unbeatable name: Palacio de los Adelantados, or Palace of the Advance Men. The annual remittances that Martín Cortés was still sending her from New Spain were enough that she didn’t have to worry about trifles like a private fortress on the outskirts of Seville.
    In time, the Descalzas sold the conquistador’s house to an Irish order of nuns, which still owns it and has seemingly incorporated into its cloistered existence the considerable penance of enduring the nightly siege of the four thousand lost souls vanquished by sword, lance, and arquebus that Don Hernán’s dreams left plastered in the walls.
    Juana Cortés was a Frida Kahlo
avant la lettre
: she wore
huipiles
and multicolored skirts until the last day of her life, though she had left New Spain at fourteen and not a drop of Indian blood flowed in her veins. When she was required to attend functions of the Spanish nobility, she carried a coquettish little silver box of serrano peppers wrapped in a handkerchief, taking a bite of chili with each mouthful as if it were bread. She stressed the
s
sound of her
c
’s and
z
’s to signal her Atlantic origins. After all, she too was a product of the balls dubbed His Holiness and the King.
    She clung to her father’s weapons and coat of arms with the fierceness of a she-wolf, though the duke of Alcalá allowed her to hang them only in the garden room of the Palacio de los Adelantados, where the marks of Cortés’s glory, won at the cost of hair and teeth, wouldn’t overshadow the little prop weapons that encircled the Enríquez de Ribera coat of arms. She spent most of her life in that room, with her mother, both of them at work on their embroidery and striving to persuade the conquistador’s granddaughters that their grandfather’s virulent blood was the best part of them.
    And it was easy for her to be arrogant: each time one of Juana’s brothers—all of them named Martín Cortés, no matter what belly they came from—was hanged in New Spain for crimes of lèse-majesté, the chests of the house of Alcalá were filled to overflowing again.
    Not infrequently, Juana lectured her daughters on her curious interpretation of their family names. According to her, the dukes of Alcalá were actually a clan of clerks. It was a bloodline that had maintained its ascendancy at court essentially by marrying off a daughter to a lord of Tarifa, with the subsequentacquisition of the admiralty of Castile. She arched her eyebrows as if to say that it was plainly a decorative title, considering the oceans—she pronounced it “oseanos”—of Castile. What was this compared with the territories that Cortés had won in a flurry of
xingadazos
for Charles V?
    And frankly, for all of Cortés’s many flaws, he is to this day the patron saint of malcontents, of grudge-bearers, of those who had everything and squandered it all. He is also the guardian angel of underachievers and late bloomers. He was no one until he was almost thirty-eight. At thirty-nine it occurred to him, from his perch on the Gulf coast of the Aztec empire in Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, that his reconnaissance expedition should be a mission of conquest and settlement, and thus ruled by the king and the pope—his balls—and not by the idiot governor of Cuba, whose daughter incidentally was by then