Sudden Death

Seven Miters

Descriptions of works of art, like descriptions of dreams, halt stories and sap their strength. A work of art can be part of the story only if it alters the line of history as it’s being drawn, and yet if a work of art, like a dream, is worth remembering, it’s precisely because it represents a blind spot for history. Art and dreams don’t stick with us because they have the capacity to move things along, but because they stop the world: they function as a parenthesis, a dyke, a moment of rest.

It might be worth taking a trip with seven stops to see the seven miters from the workshop of Don Diego Huanitzin in the museums where they’re on display. One is in Toledo Cathedral, another in Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology, another in El Escorial, another at Florence’s Silver Museum, and another — the one that Caravaggio saw — in the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano. The most battered are those at the Musée des Tissus in Lyon, France, and the Hispanic Society of America in New York. They are seven incredible, tall caps, decorated with scenes from the Crucifixion macerated in the mushroom-glutted brains of a group of Indians from Michoacán. One features the family tree of Saint Joseph, but on each of the other six is an emblem formed by the monograms IHS and MA, graphic representations of Jesus and Mary. The central space of each piece is occupied by the M, on which Christ is crucified as if on a tree, over which his limbs drape.

The miter that Paul III handed down to Pope Pius IV and that Pius IV then presented to San Carlo Borromeo at the loggia of the Colonnas — the very one that Federico, the saint’s cousin, brought with him to Rome for the Lenten masses he was to hold immediately after he took refuge at the Palazzo Giustiniani — is probably the best preserved of the seven. In addition to the traditional Easter motifs — the pillar, the steps, the lance, the Calvary, the crown of thorns — Carlo Borromeo’s miter is decorated with motifs that the saint must have imagined hailed from some other world, because they did. Birds, trees, clouds, near-angelic flying creatures, rays that at once weave and cradle the classic Catholic figures, presenting them as what they were in the Mexico of the time: politely accepted but superficial impositions; little bodies set in a neurological system that saw the story of the world in its own way, a world complete with its own viewing instructions. The son rising up on the monogram of the mother not as tortured flesh in human history but as a bird that soars sunward after dying in combat. Flowers, seeds, and feathered creatures not as decoration but as the syllables of a universe in which the earthly and the divine are separated by nothing but the diaphanous veil of a collapsible consciousness. Angels scattering stars like seed.

On Carlo Borromeo’s miter, the world is full of everything in the world, and its colors have an intensity simply unimaginable to the European eye of the time. One has to picture Caravaggio admiring its fine craftsmanship when he came to work at the cardinal of Milan’s studiolo in Rome, discovering with surprise that the images weren’t painted on cloth, as he’d thought at first, but were made of another material, organic and palpable, that changed in shade with the touch of a finger: a ray of light the tiny pathway along which the feathers had been stroked.

Vasco de Quiroga had already seen many pieces of featherwork art when Don Diego showed him the miters, but all the pieces he had seen before had been designed by friars; the Indians simply gave them color. In the workshop this time, the miters lit only by candlelight and splayed open on account of the mushrooms, Quiroga saw them as seven living flames, an outpouring of light undulating with the breath of the gods who, silent and indifferent, continued — still continue, perhaps — to weave the threads of the tapestry that cradles us.

By four in the afternoon, when the Roman sun came straight in the window, Caravaggio must have thought it was time to give up his work on the wall of Federico Borromeo’s studiolo in his fruit basket painting. He must have stepped back a little to get a better look at his day’s labor as he rolled his brushes in a cloth. Then he must have wiped his fingers on his trousers. Next, hypersensitive as he was to the refractions of light that he chased tirelessly back in his dark, closed studio, he must have noticed that the miter was changing color all by itself, as if it were alive.

With eyes like saucers from the effect of the mushrooms, Vasco de Quiroga cast his gaze over the surface of the seven miters. He felt the caress of the feathers on his eyelashes and he could see how the world they portrayed came to life like a hive in which everything was present and everything moved along a given path. The birds flew silently, the angels eternally scattered star-seed, the son rose up on the thrust of Earth’s sacred vagina. He chose the miter that Caravaggio later saw, picked it up, and said: This one I’ll present to Pope Paul myself.

Caravaggio raised his hands and took the miter from the shelf on which it sat. The gold of the pentagram with the letters IHSMA burst on his pupils, the figures attired in the blue of saints dragging his eyes in all directions, showing him how to see in a bigger way. He shook his head, as if to wrench himself from a dream. He moved the miter to a spot where the light fell directly on it and suddenly the whole thing was ablaze. The red, he thought, intent on unpicking the mystery of fire that doesn’t burn, iridescence that doesn’t blind. The red, said Vasco de Quiroga to Huanitzin; the colored figures are what move in God’s sight, but the red framework beneath is God himself, his instructions. That’s right, said the featherworker.

The poet opened his eyes. Everything was red. He touched his eyebrow where the ball had struck him. It was cut open. He felt a flurry of people around him. He raised his open hand to signal that he was all right.

Caravaggio tilted the miter, saw that the figures came to life. Their faces changed; Christ rose up in an exercise of celestial swimming that was his salvation and no one else’s, the salvation of those who die in combat, no matter what kind — this novel is the combat. He half closed his eyes, which was the only way he could bring into focus the background of red leaves and branches that twined around the rest of the images. Whoever made this, he thought, can read God’s design. When silence fell, the poet said: I’m still in. He had understood that this wasn’t a game of tennis, but a sacrifice. The Indian smiled, showing what looked to the priest like the teeth of a warrior. The red is the blood of the earth, the veins of the world, said the bishop; God’s design. The mushrooms help, said Don Diego. He continued: Take one with you for Don Zumárraga, so that he’ll send you to see His Holidays; it’s you who can best speak for us. The poet rose and picked up the ball and racket, the little figures retreating respectfully from the court that was swimming in a sea of red. It wasn’t a game. Someone had to die at the end and it would be the young man he had been that morning; reborn would be the recalcitrant Catholic, the anti-Semite, the homophobe, the Spanish nationalist, the dark side of his two selves. He rubbed the scapular. Everything red. Caravaggio fell into Federico Borromeo’s desk chair. Tracing the branches of the miter’s red background, he felt that he could hear the plea of an ancient soul, a soul from a dead world, the soul of all those who’ve been fucked by the pettiness and stupidity of those who believe that winning is all that matters, the soul of those who’ve been undeservedly obliterated, the lost names, the dust of bones — his own bones on a Tuscan beach, Huanitzin’s bones by Lake Pátzcuaro — the soul of the Nahuas and the Purépecha, but also of the Langobards, who a thousand years ago had been destroyed by Rome as Rome had just destroyed the Mexicas and would destroy the poet. He heard: It’s you who can best speak for us. Tenez!