Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue

Giustinianis of Genoa had been the main financiers of the Spanish empire and had swung bloodily and without warning from extreme opulence to utter helplessness, the common state of immigrants in Rome. To make matters worse, they arrived stigmatized as
conversos
because working in finance was so reviled at the time. In the portrait that Nicolas Régnier painted of Vincenzo Giustiniani in the 1630s, a trace remains of that stigma: his face is endowed with a nose so extreme that it nearly covers his mouth.
    In time, Vincenzo’s father recovered his fortune and perhaps even increased it—his new clients, who were the Crown of France and the Vatican, were more reliable payers than thePhilips of Spain. But to do so he had to embark on a regimen of work and savings that shaped his sons’ sense of professional discipline—Vincenzo’s brother, a priest, was the pope’s accountant—as well as political affiliation: they never forgave Philip II for failing to offer them asylum in their hour of need for fear of being called a
converso
phile.
    This is why it’s so disconcerting for historians that Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna, paid Vincenzo Giustiniani an unexpected visit at the end of September 1599. Likely Girón, weary of being hounded by King Philip, believed that he could spark some kind of alliance that would restore luster to his house—a luster long lost, to be frank, and for which the fortune that had come to him by marriage was a respite but not a safe haven. Maybe he had already decided by then that when he was back from Rome he would go to Flanders to fight, and he dreamed of mustering an army with a capital greater than Catalina’s. Or maybe he was simply seized by nostalgia for the years when his father had visited Chios to negotiate the loans that allowed Philip II to build mines in New Spain and Peru.
    It was at the Palazzo Giustiniani that Pedro Téllez Girón learned that the dazzling painting of the calling of Saint Matthew that he’d seen at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi had been done by an artist without a proper name, who was known as Caravaggio.
    Osuna hadn’t the slightest intellectual tendencies. His loyalty to Francisco de Quevedo is a mystery that can be explained only by the fact that the poet, so cerebral and unyielding, also had—when he wasn’t translating Latin verse or writing treatises—a rakish and swaggering side as powerful as his monster brain.
    With the years and the investment in bribes made with his wife’s money, Pedro Téllez Girón became a politician graced with pen-pushers and pettifoggers who wrote his letters for him, but in the autumn of 1599, when he was received at the Roman offices of the bank of San Giorgio, he wasn’t in correspondence with anyone, nor did he keep written records of anything. It’s likely he was a functional illiterate and this was precisely why he dragged his personal poet along everywhere—though Quevedo didn’t take notes either. There is no record of the meeting between Osuna and Giustiniani other than a note by an anonymous secretary, who on September 28 of that year wrote in the guest book of the palace on Piazza di San Luigi:
“Visita di P. Girone, nobile e fuggitivo spagnuolo.”
And then it is recorded that he was received in the trophy hall, which suggests that the banker had no intention of doing business with him.
    The Palazzo Giustiniani was as sober as its owner. In any other residence of this type there might be tapestries and taffetas, but here there were only bookcases; where there might have been long rugs and cushioned chairs, the banker had terra-cotta and tile floors and uncomfortable Savonarola chairs. If at palaces like Cardinal del Monte’s there were endless galleries hung with paintings from floor to ceiling, in Giustiniani’s house the paintings were separated by blank stretches of whitewashed wall that must have given