Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue Page A

his visitors agoraphobia.
    Of all the works that made up his legendary collection of art, the only one allotted its own room—the
studiolo
, separate from the bank’s office—was Caravaggio’s
Judith Beheading Holofernes
. He had it behind a curtain, which he opened before sitting down to eat or work and closed when he left, as if the gaze ofthe servants who cleared the plates or swept the floor might wear it out. If Osuna and his poet were very lucky, they might have seen it, since before it came to rest on the secular altar where he hid it away, Giustiniani kept it in the trophy hall, another space off-limits to the women and children of the household.

Second Set, Second Game

    T o say that in the second game the artist crushed the Spaniard is an understatement. The poet could hardly carve out a point despite the superhuman effort with which he chased the ball, trying desperately to take the sizzle off his opponent. The Lombard floated on the service side with the implacable grace of a clock made of flesh. During the changeover an aura of precision and strength had settled about the painter, leaving the poet certain of being a simpleton, a laggard, a newcomer to every fight. He felt dull, aged, unctuous, more Spanish than ever, and so conscious of his lameness that it seemed the whole universe: his right leg was short a third of a span and that third was where the painter was putting the ball over and over again. It wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong: the artist had simply been seized by one of his spells of perfection.
Quaranta–quindici,
the mathematician cried again. The duke had forgotten by now that he too had the right to call points and even dispute them: his mouth was good for nothing but swallowing saliva.
    The mathematician wasn’t a creature of tennis courts or street fights. Nor was he in the habit of sleeping with men. At the palace of the sodomite cardinal in whose rooms he stayedwhen his work brought him to the papal city, he scratched an itch. That was all. That and the fact that the artist who lived and worked in the depths of the palace had shifted something in his center of gravity ever since he was introduced to him as the cardinal’s most recent acquisition. He found him at once brutal and vulnerable, fragile behind his armor of grease, grappa, and cussedness. He loved that the artist was an unfinished man; a contradictory creature who might just as easily call for another drink after exchanging blows with a stranger in a brothel as—when they returned to the palace late at night—prostrate himself on the floor to remove the mathematician’s boots and run his tongue devotedly along the curve of his foot. He had never met nor would he ever meet anyone so extreme, even though in the difficult years when he was persecuted by the Inquisition he would be questioned a thousand times by the world’s most perverted priests. Nor was the professor especially particular in the exercise of his sexuality: he believed that in terms of texture and pressure there was little difference between the cunt of a sheep and the ass of the greatest artist of all time, so he might as well fuck him in the name of scientific experimentation.
    And there were the paintings. He had never seen anything like those paintings, whether in Pisa, where he was born, or in Florence, where he completed his studies, or in Padua, where he taught and kept a wife who differed little from a sheep or a great artist except that she gave him children.
    It was as if the full spirit of the age had its home in the artist’s fist: the darkness, the aridity, the bleak dignity of empty spaces. When he had come to Rome the year before to sit an examination for La Sapienza, the mathematician had confessed to thecardinal that he would rather stay at the University of Padua: Rome is a gap-toothed city, he said; full of vacant plots, half empty like the canvases of your painter.
    The professor came from a