Sudden Death

Travel Guide

Mexico and Rome

The pivotal link between these two places is a tennis match taking place between the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and arch-maverick painter Caravaggio (and they’re playing with tennis balls stuffed with the hair of the executed Anne Boleyn).

“it’s no coincidence that when speaking of someone’s death in mexico we say he “hung up his tennis shoes,” that he “went out tennis shoes first.”

The other thread takes place in Mexico and illustrates the life and time of Cortes and the conquest of Mexico.

The Aztecs

Most curiously, the Aztec language had a character almost opposite to its speakers’ terrifying reputation: Mexican Spanish, at times so disconcerting and easy to misinterpret, gets its warmth and courtesy from Nahuatl: the gentlest and most gracious of tongues; an airy, bird-like form of speech. When someone from Madrid or Montevideo walks into a room, he says, ‘Permiso,’ and that’s it. In contrast, a Mexican erects a syntactic edifice so complicated that it requires both a negative clause and a verb in the conditional: ‘If it’s no trouble, might I come in?’ …

It’s not that they’re sappier or more sentimental than other Spanish speakers; it’s just that Mexican Spanish is crisscrossed with the scars of Nahuatl. In our mental hard drives, the file of the mother tongue still opens at certain prompts, even though it’s been two or three hundred years since we spoke it.