Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue

spent his final years far from the noble circles of Seville, where he would have been adored if only he had cared to behave a little and play along at court. But he was the kind of man who had seen so much that it would never have occurred to him not to scratch his ass if it itched.
    He wasn’t a hermit. At his house in Castilleja de la Cuesta he met regularly with the barber, the parish priest, the baker, the musician from the chapel, and a local poet—Lope Rodríguez—whose name has survived because he served as regular witness to the affairs of the conquistador. It was Rodríguez, it seems, who guided Cortés in the reading of classical epics, of which theconquistador was a fan so long as he didn’t have to read them himself. He was probably already blind, but he was also a man who remained forever childish and somehow unformed. Like our children when they’re little, he preferred to have someone read to him.
    The conquistador was a one-horse man. When the horse upon which he entered Mexico City died at an advanced age in Seville, he buried it in his garden. From the day it could no longer bear him, he had refused any other mount. One gathers the beast was less a means of transport than the iron flail that increased a thousandfold the area of the Holy Roman Empire, but even so it’s hard to imagine that when Cortés went to the city for provisions, he traveled in the priest’s dusty cart or among the baker’s baskets.
    Lope Rodríguez, the bard, was with him on his last trip away from home, three months before death took him in his bed. We know the story because several letters survive, written from the poet to the widow left behind in Cuernavaca. Cortés went to see the Florentine banker Giacomo Botti so he could pawn the last batch of gems he had left in Spain, because he had no money to pay his doctor.
    When he died, his belongings were auctioned off on the steps of the cathedral in Seville. The text of the “Tender of the Marqués del Valle,” drawn up in September 1548 to certify the sale, included used clothing, a wool mattress, two stoves, two sheets, three bedcovers, a set of plates, a set of pitchers and copper pots, a chair, and two books. There isn’t even a table or bed frame on the list: at the age of sixty-two he was still eating and sleeping like a soldier, though it’s abundantly clear that hewasn’t poor—his daughter Juana’s dowry was more than enough to buy her the duke of Alcalá, who wasn’t a bad catch for the child of an insubordinate.
    The simplicity of Cortés’s Seville possessions indicates something other than poverty: a spirit of retreat and a general disinterestedness; the fact that he was a man who no longer registered the material world, whether distanced by the memory of his momentary step into myth or by the resentment he felt for not having occupied a position of real bureaucratic power since Charles V—his left ball—made him a marquis and removed him from the captaincy of Mexico. It was only after he had been granted the title and returned to New Spain that he realized that this was a kick upstairs, that now he counted only as a millionaire.
    Cortés’s widow did play along at court when she eventually returned to Seville, but with an insulting lack of enthusiasm, and mostly to assure the future of her daughter Juana. There is nothing to suggest, however, that she was unhappy. When she left her palace of warmer days (and nights) in Cuernavaca and returned with Juana to Spain, she believed that she had done her duty to the world and she became a luxury object: a person who was invited places and kissed simply because she was someone the conquistador had fucked. She spoke in Bantu to her slaves, in Nahuatl to her attendants, and in Spanish to no one but her daughter—she merely smiled at everyone else, as if they were characters in a dream that had already gone on too long. She