Sudden Death

Admiralships and Captaincies

Neither the conquistador’s widow nor his daughter Juana ever returned to Mexico, but they never developed much of an interest in the peninsular surroundings where they spent the rest of their lives either. Like all of Cortés’s descendants, they found it inexplicable that infinite New Spain was dependent on this dim-witted country where men wore tights and screamed at each other even when they were in good humor. More languages were spoken in my father’s garden than in all Old Spain, Juana would say by way of ungracious explanation of the little interest she took in Europe, where she had in fact been splendidly received. She didn’t become a wallflower like her mother, who accepted every invitation and then was silent at the soirées, but nor was she notable for her devotion to the class to which she belonged by fortune and by marriage.

The decorous madness of the conquistador’s widow made sense, in a way: she was already a grown woman when she left a kingdom of exceptional riches, where her orders were obeyed even before they occurred to her, but she had left it behind so that her daughter could be where one had to be if one was a woman. Her cool and at times even graceful distaste for her peninsular confinement was understandable.

Juana Cortés, on the other hand, lived in a fever of longing for America, because — having left Cuernavaca at fourteen — she never understood the body of war crimes that had made it possible for her to live her childhood like a native princess. The Andalusian orchards 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 subsequent acquisition 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 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 the Cortés 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.