Sudden Death

The Ball on the Right Is the Holy Father

My balls are God and the King, and I play with them when I like. These words were part of Juana’s only memory of her father. It was a flowery, tropical memory, necessarily remote: the old man had returned to Europe to petition for posts and concessions when she was five, and his lobbying was so long and fruitless that he died in Seville before he could return to what he thought of as his land. He thought this not because he had been born there, but because he was convinced that the whole place belonged to him.

Juana had reimagined the scene over and over again in her mind. The old man sitting on a stone bench in the infinite gardens of his palace — gardens that began in the valley of Cuernavaca and ended at some indeterminate point on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In her memory, her father’s hair was already cropped and gray, but he still had the sinewy and arrogant spirit of those who’ve known power and have wielded it without qualms. He was a handsome and stubborn old man: eyebrows drawn together in an almost enlightened scowl of concentration, his beard a little dirty but tidy. He scratched his head as he listened to someone whom Juana could no longer bring into focus — his ragged nails burrowing in and out of the gray jungle of his sawed-off hair. He said to his aide: My balls are God and the King, and I play with them when I like. And he gave a tiny wave of his right hand, as if shooing away a fly. Then he turned to look at her where she must have been sitting, on another stone bench in the garden.

She remembered feeling something between adoration and fear at the seriousness of the forehead that had dictated countless death sentences with a movement of its eyebrows. The old man puffed out his cheeks, crossed his eyes. She laughed, maybe nervously. Then, with some effort, he got up and held out his hand to her. Let’s go to the orchard, he said. Next, there was a long walk down a path into the world of fruit trees that her father had collected and that only the two of them knew by name, then the radiant moment when he lifted her up onto his shoulders and asked her to identify each in Nahuatl, in Spanish, in Chontal.

Many years later, when she was an adult, the duchess of Alcalá, and so far away from Cuernavaca that the memory seemed like someone else’s, she asked her mother about the words she was sure she’d heard her father speak, whether they were really his or not. They had this conversation when she was pregnant with Catalina, her eldest daughter. The two women were sitting with their embroidery in the garden room of the villa of the Palacio de los Adelantados, their slaves and ladies in attendance, the orangish light from the north creeping in through the windows from which they’d had the latticework removed so that Seville would look a little like Cuernavaca.

The line about God and the King was indeed one of her husband’s favorite sayings, the widow said, and he would utter it when one of his men or some priest dared to suggest that what he was doing might be improper for or unbecoming of a Christian. But the best part, her mother concluded, was the rest of it: The ball on the right is the Holy Father and the one on the left is the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Your father was an old bastard, she said in Nahuatl, to the delight of the ladies she had brought from Cuernavaca.

Juana didn’t remember this extra bit that her mother recited with a laugh. The old woman thought for a moment and then said that Juana must have added “I play with them when I like,” thinking that her father meant the balls for Basque pelota, which he played with other war veterans. And do you miss him, Juana asked, touching the belly in which Catalina was already splashing, the girl who in time would marry Pedro Téllez Girón, Duke of Osuna. Who? Father. He was old and rich by the time I had him, the poor thing; he imagined that he was a real nobleman and tried to behave like a gentleman. She laughed again, a bit hysterically, and said: He was a wolf in a fine cap. But did you like him? The widow opened her eyes wide and dropped her embroidery on her lap to underscore the drama of her words: Who wouldn’t like him; he was Hernán Cortés, se los xingó a todos. Or, in Juana’s polite translation for the benefit of the ladies and maids who didn’t speak Mexican Spanish: He fucked everybody.