Sudden Death

Weddings

Juana Cortés didn’t attend her daughter Catalina’s wedding to the duke of Osuna: she found it irritating that the king was among the guests. Her gift to her daughter was a jade necklace inscribed in Latin that had been the conquistador’s wedding present to Catalina’s grandmother. The necklace is lost, like most Cortesiana.

She summoned the duke the day before the start of the festivities. She told him that when she died, the conquistador’s arms would go to him because none of the Martín Cortéses were foolish enough to return to Spain. Then she reached out her madwoman’s hand, for a moment the nest of all past and future misfortunes of the vast Americas, and in her palm was a little matte-black sparrow, framing an image so worn it was unrecognizable. It’s Cortés’s scapular, she said; my gift to you. The duke opened his palms to receive it like the Communion host. It wasn’t as if he believed the tales about his betrothed’s infinite grandfather, but he understood that the woman was bequeathing him a soul. The scapular was made with hair cut from the head of the emperor Cuauhtémoc after Cortés had him killed, she said; may it protect you — my father never took it off, and he died of old age with more lives on his hands than anyone before him. Osuna looked at it, feeling something between fear and disgust. Put it on, said the old woman.

The duke never said much about the afternoon he spent with Juana Cortés on the eve of his wedding, but he came out of the garden room in a different frame of mind: more serious, and somehow liberated. He had learned that there’s no point worrying about one’s fate, because all paths lead to defeat: nothing is ever enough for anyone.

That night he took the scapular out from his shirt to show Catalina. They were bidding each other farewell after dining with the family members who had arrived at the Palacio de los Adelantados to attend the festivities. She looked at it with surprise. Odd that she gave it to you, she said. The duke shrugged his shoulders. It’s a horrible thing, really, he replied. It was a rectangle woven of very fine, strong black thread. Worked into it was a figure that could no longer be identified. What is it, he asked his betrothed. A virgin of Extremadura, the Virgin of Guadalupe; the Indians made it for him; if you put it up to a candle it shines with a light of its own. Osuna approached a candelabra and couldn’t see anything. He tilted the scapular until the slant of the light made it glow: immediately he recognized the figure of a virgin in a blue robe, surrounded by stars. So brilliantly iridescent was the thing that the image seemed to move. He let it fall, frightened. Will it burn me? Don’t be an idiot, his future wife said. She took it and made it shine again. It looks like this because it’s made of feathers, she explained. Feathers? Bird feathers; that was how they made the images, so they would shine.

He tucked the scapular back into his shirt. He had to go and rest before the banquets began. He bowed. Before he could retire, Catalina asked again what he had spent so long talking to her mother about that afternoon. Your grandfather, a huge garden, Cuernalavaca. The future duchess corrected him: Cuernavaca. I’ll walk with you to the hall, she added. They went down the stairs arm in arm. As they were approaching the door where they would part for the last time before they were married, Osuna asked with sincere and perhaps slightly alarmed curiosity: So what does it mean to xingar, would you say?