Free Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue Page B

his first wife: he fathered a Martín Cortés on her too.
    Three years after having defied the government of Cuba, he wasn’t just Europe’s greatest celebrity but the prince of all those who fuck things up without realizing it. He’s the lord of the fight pickers, the litigious, those who can never acknowledge their own success; the captain of all those who win an impossible battle only to believe that it’s the first of many and then sink in their own shit with sword raised. The conquistador wasn’t the great man that the duchess sold to her daughters, but he was an inarguably more entertaining model than the land-bound admirals on the other side of the family.
    Juana Cortés’s harangues always ended the same way: she pointed to her father’s arms and said in Nahuatl: There is the sword that cut off the seven heads of the seven princes on theCortés coat of arms; let it never be forgotten, girls. Then she would return to her embroidery hoop, her thread, and her canvas, her mother seconding her with a series of rather alarming nods from her rocking chair.
    This was more or less the atmosphere in which Catalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés, eldest daughter of Juana Cortés and the duke of Alcalá, and granddaughter of the conquistador, grew up. At sixteen she was married to Pedro Téllez Girón, Marquis of Peñafiel, future duke of Osuna, future defender of Ostend, future viceroy of Naples and the Two Sicilies, future pirate of the Adriatic, and future patron, comrade in revelry, and brothel mate of Francisco de Quevedo.

Paradise

    U nlike the king and the rest of his court, Philippe de Chabot was a devotee not of art, culture, or tennis, but of the glory of France.
    Ever since poor Rombaud had made an appearance in his rooms with a fourth ball made from the hair of the Boleyn woman, he had been thinking about the benefits that such an object might yield if placed in the right hands at the right time.
    A ball made from the hair of the decapitated queen was the perfect gift for softening the already pliant Giovanni Angelo Medici, then governor of the Papal States, and a key piece in the negotiations with His Holiness regarding the urgency of forcing the succession of the marquisate of Fosdinovo in Lunigiana, where one Pietro Torrigiani Malaspina, patron of mediocre artists and magnificent thugs, was blocking the loading of marble onto French ships in the port of Carrara.
    The ball couldn’t be sent to Rome as it was, so he had a little chest made from sheets of mother-of-pearl riveted with gold, which in addition to matching the regal sumptuousness of its contents had the advantage of being a lengthy job for thegoldsmith. This allowed the minister—who was a devotee of the glory of France but also (though always secondarily) of the delectable sexual practices of low-ranking and high-breasted courtesans—to embark on a bedroom game or two with the ball, beneath whose leather stays beat Anne Boleyn’s incendiary braids.

Flight to Flanders

    C atalina Enríquez de Ribera y Cortés and Pedro Téllez Girón had not just a marriage but a powerful business partnership in which each provided the other with what was needed to act on a grudge. He brought new visibility to the gray house of Alcalá with his political savvy and his proximity to the king; she contributed money and the memory of the wiles of her grandfather, who had gone away and won what he believed he deserved.
    When Osuna learned that a detail of bailiffs was being sent from Madrid to arrest him for abusing the generosity of the king with his trip to Italy, he set off for Ostend. He left for Flanders by night, accompanied by a single servant. There he joined the royal regiments like any other soldier until he was distinguished by his valor in combat.
    The house of Osuna had no precedent for this: fleeing the king by taking up arms to defend the king; fighting bitterly to reclaim a territory in