Cervantes in play

I FIRST READ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Exemplary Novels (1613) in their original Spanish over three decades ago. Thanks to Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Treasure of the Castilian (or Spanish) Language (1611) my younger self was just about able to wrestle with Cervantes’s wordplay. His humour and cleverness —the amusing traps he sets for his characters even across the interwoven surfaces of these twelve short stories— made a strong impression.

But how very much I missed. (Or does one always read the finest books too soon? Before their best challenges can be joined?)

I scarcely registered how the twelve short stories were illuminations of wider worlds and traditions. The stories can seem so very Spanish. But they are, at the same time, intricate variations upon familiar plots and characters in the earlier Italian novellas of Giovanni Boccacio and Matteo Bandella.

Cervantes’s novelas are twists in other ways too. Upon an even deeper circum-Mediterranean tradition of short narrations descended from The Thousand and One Nights. And Cervantes’s stories just as surely riff upon Byzantine and chivalric romances, and the pastoral tradition, as upon tales of great voyages and shipwrecks. Most especially the Exemplary Novels warmly embrace and then re-mobilise his day's most popular form, the picaresque. Cervantes supped upon the same worldly hazards and the same corrupt and variegated human comedy that —over the course of a half-century between the publication of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Mateo Alemán’s still more definitive Guzmán de Alfarache (1599)— had fired the pícaro and seen a most nimble and potent literary form take flight.

Cervantes’s writings attest to an uncommon brilliance, and to an intellectual omnivorousness which saw him somehow acquire and devour a formidable range of writings.

Wide reading fed and cultivated his noticing skills. But so too did experience. Consider even the crudest snapshot of the predicaments and circumstances of Cervantes’s life.

BORN IN 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, the son of a barber-surgeon whose debts caught up with him, Miguel de Cervantes spent his childhood on the move. Stops included Seville, Córdoba, Madrid, and Valladolid, cities to which he would later return to live, and in his imagination.

His education appears to have been uneven at best, with the exception of an early stint in a Jesuit school in Córdoba and, when Cervantes was in his early twenties, a period of mentoring in Madrid by the humanist Juan López de Hoyos. He never attended university.

In 1569, after fighting a duel and wounding a man, and facing a warrant and banishment, he decamped for Italy, where he appears to have made the most of friendly connections. In Rome he turned up briefly as chamberlain in the home of an influential priest Giulio Acquaviva, Pope Pius V’s ambassador to the court of Philip II, and soon to be made cardinal. By 1570, Cervantes was in Naples, where he enlisted as a harquebusier in a Spanish regiment that included his brother Rodrigo. This company had just arrived in Italy, and —after licking its wounds and counting its losses from bitter fighting in the rebellion led by new converts to Christianity from Islam, Moriscos, in the Alpujarras mountains near Granada— would join the naval force of the Holy League that would go on to defeat the Ottoman Turkish fleet in the Bay of Lepanto, off the shores of Greece, on 7 October 1571. Cervantes saw combat. Having suffered a bout of malaria, and being so wounded by a musket shot in the left arm that he would lose the use of this hand, Cervantes might have expected his adventures to be at an end.

Yet, after what appears to have been a brief but happy return to Naples, where he found love, in 1575, he and his brother were off again. Cervantes embarked on a ship called Sol for Barcelona, only to find himself and Rodrigo (who would later be killed in battle in Flanders, yet another front of military hostilities for Catholic Spain) taken prisoner by Barbary pirates.

Aboard the ship of the famous Greek renegade Dalí (Arnaute) Mamí, they were transported to North Africa and sold as slaves in the port of Algiers, falling eventually into the hands of another notorious renegade, Hasan Pasha (sometimes called Hasa the Venetian). This turn of fate plunged the pair of brothers into a well-established system of circum-Mediterranean captivity, ransom, intermittent negotiations, attempted escapes, and terrible betrayals.

Because his papers suggested connections with important people, Miguel de Cervantes’s captors set his ransom high, at 500 gold escudos, and he endured five years in captivity. There is plenty of evidence, fictional and otherwise, to suggest that imprisonment in the interconnected bagnios of Algiers for Cervantes and so many other “Christians” included a vast range of experiences, from seeking unlikely allies and the means to acquire books and better meals, through yearning for and enjoying dangerous love affairs, to being extremely tempted to convert to Islam and witnessing and experiencing vast cruelties and punishments. Things grew desperate enough that Cervantes attempted to escape on at least four occasions. It took until 1580, when a Trinitarian friar named Juan Gil (who was among the specialist-intermediaries in the ransoming of Christian captives) and his extended family scraped together the 500 ducats. At the age of thirty-three, he was free from Hasan Pasha.

Cervantes had been away from Spain for a decade. Some of his teenage poems have surfaced, but at this point —well into what constituted middle age in his day— Miguel de Cervantes had not published a thing. He would change that, but not as quickly or directly as might be expected.

By 1584, aged thirty-seven, Cervantes had gained the reputation of a decent playwright in Madrid. But he was still struggling to make ends meet. And there were signs that he was tiring of the literary competitiveness and back-biting (he would later satirise so precisely in narrative). Romantic entanglements, partly his own device, further complicated his picture. He had met and begun an affair with a young tavern-keeper, a married woman named Ana Franca de Rojas, with whom he soon had a daughter, Isabel; and there was another “illegitimate” child with an Austrian innkeeper’s wife. Perhaps seeking some new kind of escape, and fearing stains upon his “honour” to the prying eyes of his Madrileño rivals, Cervantes met and decided to wed a young widow, Catalina de Salazar y Palacios Vozmediano. Within months, he had moved to her plot of land near the olive-rich and wine-making village of Esquivias, not far from Alcalá.

It wasn’t long before debts appeared, and life proved more isolated and harsher in the countryside than he was expecting. With hindsight, it is possible to quip that Cervantes was gaining invaluable insights for a writer, treasures that would presently allow him to compare purported pastoral idylls with all that capitoline and courtly life pretended to be, treasures that would make it deliciously difficult to decide just which of these fabled illusions were in greater need of skewering by pen. But, in practice, he continued to struggle. Even after the moderate success of his first novel, La Galatea (1585) —a play upon bucolic, pastoral romance that features multiple narrative threads, and something of a first step in his life’s piecemeal unveiling of early modern Spain’s lofty ideals, his gradual assault upon any “golden age” as illusory, ultimately ridiculous and bound for failure— he was far from set.

Just as England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth executed Scotland’s Catholic Queen Mary in February of 1586, giving King Philip II the perfect excuse to mobilise an armada and prepare for an invasion of the island, Cervantes took up a string of opportunities that suggest a hankering for something new, as well as gainful employment. Did he know that Francis Drake’s fast fleet had responded to rumours by sinking a brace of Spanish ships off Cádiz, amidst other unfavourable portents? Giving Catalina power of attorney, Cervantes first signed on as commissary agent for the royal galleons, in fact the fast-assembling and ill-fated invasion fleet, the “Invincible Armada.”

By 1590, Cervantes had made an application to the Council of Indies for a post in the New World, an attempt to seek a future in America which was denied, possibly because of suspicion surrounding his family’s converso status. He then took work as a tax collector. As he moved between the towns of Castile and Andalusia, stopping off in inns —cooling his heels and ambitions— it is impossible not to imagine him grumbling but also listening-in among storytellers he would come to immortalise. Before long, he was jailed for irregularities in his accounts. In his prologue to the first part of Don Quixote, he claims that the book began to form in his mind when he was in prison.

As others celebrated the heroic rise of imperial Spain, the bastion of Catholic Christianity and seeker of ethnic, religious and linguistic homogeneity, Cervantes accumulated disappointment and misfortune, thwarted potential. An inclination to parody the glory, like the critical edges of his perspective, do not come completely out of nowhere. But the puncturing of pretense and the need to confront, trouble, and disrupt become steadily more prominent in his later works. A Cervantean sonnet from 1598 features a soldier expressing his awe before the vast bier and platform for the coffin of the recently-deceased Philip II in the following way: “By God, all this grandeur frightens me!”¹ Cervantes sets out to explore empire's false promises and reckonings in store.

A NUMBER OF THE novelas ejemplares are set in Seville, the would-be entrêpot of the world. When they are not in Valladolid, or in Madrid, the capital, and seat of government and court under Philip II. The wealth and power, and the politico-religious symbols and structures of a Spanish Catholic Christian monarchy that converged in these urban spaces were magnets for all kinds of people and social predicaments. For Cervantes, the Spanish cities and their orbits presented an array of cases in point, individuals and incidents to illuminate, essential matters to be raised up for scrutiny, “self-revealing" ejemplos to be put in play.²

So in the Exemplary Novels, as in Don Quijote, the reader finds people from all stations of society. Many are rascal-pícaros and their like, getting by on their wits, struggling to keep up appearances, pretending to be who they are not, and trying it on, before reinventing themselves (in the next town) and doing it again.

But there are also people who possessed, and frequently misused, authority and power. Hypocritical priests, strutting members of the nobility and the many more who aspired to be so. Students galore (as we shall see).

And there are his society’s soldiers. So many soldiers. Some of them are on leave, others are deserters, still others are hanging around

on the make, trading on war stories, some dubious military pasts. How could the greatest story-teller of his era—like not a few of the leading painters of this moment and its aftermath— resist?

Cervantes’s contemporaries confirm the alertness of his eye. One of them warned provincial and foreign visitors to the Spanish capital of the great and various perils.

Vice lurked around every corner.

So did the evils that might be visited upon the unsuspecting, especially by the aforementioned soldierly types.

The “soldiers” cruised the urban thoroughfares, especially Madrid’s calle mayor, dressed in black but with extravagant splashes of colour, “feathers in their hats, swords at their sides, with vigorous whiskers and fearsome visages, as if they were setting out on a campaign to the roll of drums.”³

Francisco Zurburán, Portrait of Don Juan Bazo de Moreda. 1655. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit, MI., USA. Photograph by the author.

Not that Cervantes’s gaze stopped with these peacocks.

He is interested, too, in the still burgeoning class of insufferable officials and petty magistrates of every stripe. They circled the court in Madrid, their special home.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, A Man. 1624-1626. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit, MI., USA

But not at the expense of gregarious innkeepers, and long-suffering domestic servants. People who were one turn of fate away from the streets, from begging and thieving and selling their souls.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. ca. 1617-1618. Oil on Canvas. National Gallery of Ireland. Dublin, Ireland. Photograph by the author.

One can get lost in the piquancies and granular figurations of the novelas, even as the naturalness of each tale’s norms can simultaneously leave the modern reader frustrated, impatient before the tropes and presumptions, the inequities and racisms, to which Cervantes was hardly immune.

And yet, the fact that Cervantes was so intent on identifying and exposing cold realities is no small thing.⁴ Like the characters who self-confess, his narrated social-worlds-in-miniature reveal themselves, consistently luring and troubling readers in something like equal measure. Conservative orders, pretensions and impostures are entertained. And disturbed.⁵ Mistreatments, melancholies and mendacities are on display. Interwoven through the plots of the novelas, through the illumination of different individuals’ perspectives, are an entire society’s illusions and mythologies.

José de Ribera (Jusepe de Ribera), Portrait of Musician. Naples, Italy. 1638. Oil on canvas. Toledo Museum Of Art. Toledo, Ohio, USA. Detail, photograph by the author

No sooner have they elicited laughter, than they are arresting the reader before an uncomfortable mirror of recognition.

THE YOUNGER ME wasn’t ready for the ways in which Cervantes —with his nose for the inseparability of delight and disruption— was daring his readers to be frustrated and impatient. For the ways he is challenging all of us to stop and think for ourselves.

Reading the “new” English translation (2016) of the Exemplary Novels by Edith Grossman gave me another chance.

This chance came in May of 2020. The global pandemic was raging with the first vaccines still but a hope. My mind was mush after months of teaching and meeting remotely. Delivered at last from my Detroit apartment by an automobile, some audiobooks, and a succession of masks, I took up daily residence on a green lawn chair on Heidi's back porch in Northampton, Massachusetts. And there, fuelled by love and good cheer, surrounded by birdsong, I delved into Cervantes’s stories anew.

I have found the stories “exemplary” in so many ways, and I incorporate them in my teaching. Yet it has taken me until the present moment, late in 2022, to finish some paintings and build this dispatch in their honour.

I’m not at all thorough.

Rather, I dip into a selection of the novelas ejemplares, choosing some quotations I adore and sharing a few of the watercolours they’ve inspired in me.

Because Cervantes’s language is so richly part of his power (that it evades even Grossman’s translations,) and because some of my gentle readers will appreciate the convenience, I include the original Spanish in my notes.

SET IN AND around the Plaza del Salvador in the Alfalfa quarter of Sevilla —a most exquisite place for watching the world go by— the “Novel of Rinconete and Cortadillo” may be my favourite. The reader is dropped along with the eponymous co-protagonists straight into a den of thieves, presided over by the fast-talking, unforgettable master of malapropism, Monipodio.

Life runs smoothly, with careful rules of etiquette, and partly because rules are meant to be broken, and only the lame and those without talent would give in to misfortune! Adjustments are constant, and this hard-drinking, fun-loving “brotherhood” from one corner of early modern Spain’s underbelly, prospers by its own measures. As in “The Novel of The Illustrious Scullery Maid,” Cervantes casts the spell of the picaresque to present a glorious inversion of a contemporary society obsessed with notions of just what constituted a moral code, and therefore with predispositions about criminality, and honour, not to mention insiders and outsiders, and purity of blood.

In one delicious passage, Rinconete, who is learning the ropes, has grown curious about two quite dignified, greying gentlemen. Just what functions did they perform in the gang, he wonders, and for what rewards?

“In their slang and manner of speaking, they were called hornets [explained Monipodio to young Rinconete],

and they spent the days walking through the city, deciding which houses they could sting at night . . . . In short, he said, they were among the most valuable people in his band

and [thus they] received a fifth of what was stolen as a result of their skill, just as His Majesty received his share of treasures . . . .”⁶

LARGE NUMBERS OF people from the peninsular kingdom of Extremadura in westernmost Spain migrated to the New World. Not a few of them nursed dreams of acquiring great wealth in “The Indies” and returning home, risen in status, to live off the spoils as “Indianos.”

That Cervantes himself had hankered after passage to America and failed is surely part of what fuels his “Novel of The Jealous Extremaduran.”

But what fires the story even more is the marvellous opportunity to shine a light on the gulf that separates vast riches from true happiness, and on one of Cervantes’s dearest themes, the pestilence of jealousy. (See also below!)

Felipo de Carrizales, is almost certainly an allusion to the seemingly tireless King Philip II, while Carrizales —from carrizo (reed)— may evoke fragility, a swayable nature amidst life’s winds.

Cervantes’s story turns upon the schemes of one Loayza to thwart the old miser and enjoy the charms of the Extremaduran’s beautiful wife. Thanks to his ingenuity and the timely collaborations of a battery of maids and a eunuch named Luis who guards the door, Loayza passes into the fortress and the arms of Leonora, the woman from whom he is forbidden.

The sad spectre of Carrizales is what draws me in. One enters this aging, rich man’s mind and home-fortress, sips at his enormous insecurity, shrinks from the lengths to which he is driven, not only to keep his vast treasures secure, but also to possess and control a young woman in the only way this creature knows how: locked away from prying eyes.

“… If, when he [Carrizales from Extremadura'] went to the Indies poor and in need, he had many worrisome thoughts

that did not give him a moment’s rest in the middle of the ocean,

now they troubled him on solid ground, although for a different reason;

if he had not slept earlier because he was poor, now he could not rest because he was rich . . . .

Gold occasions cares, as does the lack of it.”⁷

JEALOUSY WOULD INDEED steal the show of the novelas. Except for the fact that Miguel de Cervantes adores fictionalising “students” almost as much. Would-be scholars and posing know-it-alls are everywhere.

How he savours conjuring their comeuppance,

skewerings their empty brands of bookishness,

their misuse of privileges he as a younger man would have died for;

their inclination to pontificate to assuage rampant self-doubt.

He creates numerous collisions for these figures with all that might be learned in the real world, in spaces both near and far from Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares.

Things start well enough for one of these students. He’s bright and a hard-working legal scholar who has climbed up the hard way as a servant to (you guessed it) a string of unspeakable students.

Tomás Rodaja is an unforgettably curious Cervantean creation.

Just as he has finally gained a coveted post of his own in the fraught world of learning, a spurned lover takes her revenge, subjecting Tomás to an unusual poison, a kind of curse. He comes to believe he is made of glass.

The poor devil, who clings to what he can remember of the joys of travelling, sets to wandering. Carefully. Where and how do you go if, at every juncture, you fear you’ll shatter?!

Tormented by every step and the subject of incessant public ridicule, he goes mad, before finding an astonishingly simple way to survive. Drawing on all that he has learned about the world —both before, but especially in the wake of his perceived vitreous vulnerability—he begins speaking the truth, the unadorned truth.

The Glass Lawyer says what he thinks. What he knows to be true about all manner of people and things. He takes any and all questions put to him, and he coins increasingly sharp sayings in response.

It works. “In order to hear him scold and respond to everyone, [the] many boys [who] always followed him thought and considered it better sport to hear him than to throw things at him.”⁸

The Licenciado Vidriera becomes a perambulating sensation: “news of his madness and his replies and sayings spread throughout Castilla…”

Even those gentlemen for whom his “advice and consolation” proves the harshest clamber over one another to become his patrons and protectors. People come to need his wake up calls, the more shocking and abrasive the better.

They “enjoyed his madness . . . and at each step, each street, and any corner, he would answer all the questions asked of him.”⁹

The Glass Lawyer’s sympathies, it has to be said, lie with working people, with the downtrodden and easily marginalised. When asked “what he thought of procuresses [middlewomen who procure prostitutes], he replied that they weren’t strangers but neighbors.” As for "the ladies called courtesans [themselves]," he observed ". . . that all or most of them were more courteous than sanitary.”¹⁰

He skewers, on the other hand, his world’s many braggarts and gossips and phonies at every opportunity. And “for men who dyed their beards, [well,] he felt a particular enmity.”¹¹

Talentless writers and false poets? They come off most poorly of all, “the bad ones [poets], the prattlers,” those manipulative fakes who succeed and grow rich while true artists struggle on, poor and scarcely recognised.¹²

Compare those barbs with what the Glass Lawyer has to say about “soldiers and sailors and carters and muleteers.”

He can’t get enough of these noble itinerants. They “have an extraordinary way of life meant only for them . . . .

Muleteers [in particular] are people who have been divorced from sheets and married to packsaddle blankets.

They are so diligent and in so much of a hurry that in exchange for not losing a day’s travel, they will lose their souls.

Their music is the sound of mortars; their sauce, hunger, their matins, getting up to feed the mules, their Masses, not having any.”¹³

There are so many jokes to be made on the road, and there is some joy to be had as the Glass Lawyer.

And yet truth-telling isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Just as money can make one poor, Cervantes’s Glass Lawyer finds that he has acquired the kind of fame that dooms its recipient.

The greatness of this novela ejemplar lies partly in the fact that the reader is appalled to find themself at one with the rabble (in this or that Castilian town), as if hounding the Glass Lawyer, yearning for his nimble mind, the balm of his rare and precious truths in a world gone wrong.

“Because of these and other things he said about every occupation, everyone followed him without doing him harm (it was true. But also] without letting him rest. . . .”¹⁴

Madrid’s centro. On the steps from the Plaza Mayor, looking down the Calle de Toledo

THE SUBJECTS ANIMATING “The Novel of The Two Maidens” move across a set of Cervantean specialities. Deception and mistaken identity and the human inclination to imposture meet gender disorder and transgression. The novela becomes several things at once, not least a clever exposure of contemporary moral dilemmas, and a teetering Spanish imperial project.

The reader meets the maiden Teodosia as she sets off in cross-dressed flight from a small town in Andalusia in search of redress from the “despicable Marco Antonio,” a seducer who, upon making wild promises for their future, has abandoned her for military glories in Italy. Increasingly disconsolate, without much hope of success, and running out of money, she is the “he” emitting sobs and sighs in the dark, upon a bed in an inn (in the village of Castilblanco, some five leagues from Seville), when another guest enters the room the two are meant to share for the night.

Unbeknownst to her, the second guest is none other than her brother Rafael, whose kind concern elicits her life’s tale. Rafael, once revealed come morning, neither disowns his sister nor leaps to salvage the family’s honour through some hasty act of violence. Instead, he joins his sister's quest to find and confront Marc Antonio before he leaves for Italy. Suffice it to say that a complex plot unfolds, very much including the travelling siblings’ discovery of the cross-dressing Leocadia near Barcelona, who has also been seduced and left by Marco Antonio.

The disorder that underpins this novela’s apparently happy ending (Marco Antonio, having been saved in a brutal port battle by the wronged maidens’ swordly prowess, makes good on his obligation to Teodosia, while Leocadia falls in love with and marries Rafael!) reveals significant impotencies and internal strife within Spain’s imperial project, as Barbara Fuchs has neatly shown.¹⁵

But what has captured my imagination is that early morning revelation in the inn back in Andalusia. The moment when Teodosia, having made her long confession,

realises she has been telling her story to her brother, and he recognises her too.¹⁶

IN “THE NOVEL of the Power of Blood,” Cervantes confronted his readers —and still confronts an audience today— with reigning notions of religious purity and ancestral lineage in early modern Spain, and also the inequality of women and men. At the centre of the latter lies the extent to which honour mattered, and just how it might be taken apart, justified, and —above all— protected.

The innocent but wronged Leocadia (yes, this name again) receives this dose of contemporary prudence from her father:

“. . . an ounce of public dishonor wounds more than a bushel of secret disgrace. And since you can live honorably with God in public, do not grieve over being dishonored with yourself in secret.

True dishonor is in sin, and true honor is in virtue; one offends God with one’s words, with desire, and with the act;

and since neither in words or thought or action have you offended Him, consider yourself honorable . . . .”¹⁷

IF MONOPODIO’S GANG of thieves and scoundrels immerses the reader in an upside-down world (that makes naughtily perfect sense), the “Novel of the Little Gypsy Girl” takes the tack of inversion up a notch. The author’s social research reaps a rich harvest.

The only thing Cervantes seems to enjoy more than having a “Gypsy” voice and act out his disillusionment with contemporary Spanish society is having a young female character do so.¹⁸ The invitation into Gypsydom issued by the sharp and beautiful Preciosa to her “enamoured gentleman” is akin to admission into a “novitiate,” the committing and swearing vows in a novice's first stage of belonging to a religious order.¹⁹ He is enthralled by Preciosa, who has been raised among them. But also by the accumulated wisdom, order, and "statutes" in the Gypsy encampment (that seems to him like a classical city-state). The man embarks on a rigorous training, a kind of "spiritual exercises," and takes a new, a Gypsy name (as a contemporary religious would do in making their vows), Andrés Caballero.

Preciosa utters seemingly countless zingers in exchange with others, to the embarrassment even of her sharp-tongued elders. Here might be a couple of my favourites:

“Everything exists in the world and the fact of hunger perhaps forces intellects to venture into areas not found on the map. . .”

‘Who taught you that, girl?’ said one of the gentlemen.

‘Who has to teach it to me?’ replied Preciosa. “Don’t I have a soul in my body? Aren’t I fifteen years old? I’m not maimed, or crippled, or a fool.

The wits of Gypsies follow a polestar different from that of other people. . . .

There’s no girl of twelve who doesn’t know what you know at twenty-five, because she has had the devil and experience for her teachers and mentors, and they teach in an hour what you may learn in a year.”²⁰

IF LOVE IS the subject around which Cervantes most often orbits in his novelas ejemplares, jealousy becomes its near and terrible twin. I have already featured “The Jealous Extremaduran,” who is only the beginning of its investigation.

When it’s not an “infernal disease,” jealousy is likened to a “hard sword”" that penetrates the soul in the “Novel of the Little Gypsy Girl,” a most "bitter, hard presumption." And even more searingly, just as Andrés begins to confront the possibility that the Corregidor has fallen for his beloved Preciosa, to “an almost immaterial body that enters other bodies without breaking, separating, or dividing them . . . .”²¹

“I imagine . . . [Preciosa continues] that jealousy never leaves the mind free to judge things as they are; jealousy always looks through spectacles that enlarge,

“the ravening pestilence of jealousy” [might look like this] (consult Teodosia in the “Novel of the Two Maidens,” 305)

making small things big; dwarves turn into giants, and suspicions into truths.”²²

“THE NOVEL OF The Deceitful Marriage” tells the tale of a soldier —yes one of those again— who marries a woman for gain and under false pretenses, only to meet his match (and then some) in Doña Estefanía de Caicedo.

“. . . although I am telling you the truth” [explains Doña Estafanía de Caicedo to a Ensign Campuzano], these are not the truths of the confessional, which must be said.”²³

A slanting commentary on the institution of marriage notwithstanding, this novela serves as a bridge to Cervantes’s final story. The “Novel of The Colloquy of the Dogs” (which some critics reasonably argue may have been a novel-in-genesis) is told by the aforementioned Ensign Campuzano. While convalescing from a case of syphilis in the Hospital of the Resurrection in Valladolid, Campuzano grows delirious. Just what is fact and what the product of his state? He swears he overheard an elaborate conversation between two dogs just beneath his window.

Berganza, the first of the dogs to gain the power of speech, launches into the story of his life, a wending pícaro’s tale of abuse and misfortune, but with plenty of room for philosophical asides, for views on the nature of truth and what witchcraft really means, and no small amount of disdain for human cruelty, greed, and other foibles.

Cipión (or, often, Scipio), for his part, serves as an opinionated interrupter-in-chief, though he claims to want to help along Berganza’s story-telling, particularly his tendency to digress. And then digress again. But the truth of the matter is that neither of the canine conversationalists, least of all self-important Cipión, can help themselves; neither of these glorious dogs can shut up!

Which brings me to the passage I most want to share from their dialogue. We tune in to find Cervantes once again letting Cipión reveal his own vice, while almost certainly also poking fun at the lengthy, moralising discourses in the picaresque masterpiece Guzmán de Alfarache, with which his readers would have been familiar.²⁴

“. . . there is no greater or more subtle thief than a servant [opined Cipión to the ever-patient Berganza]; and so, many more of the trustful die than the suspicious;

but the bad thing is that it’s impossible for people to get along in the world if they don’t trust

and have confidence in one another.

But let’s leave this for now, I don’t want us to seem like preachers.”²⁵

---

Watercolours and photographs by Kenneth Mills.

*I am grateful to the students in the latest edition of my “Conversions and Christianities” seminar (Fall 2022); they read the novelas with me, teaching me anew, and they have composed not a few of their own miniatures: Anya Dengerink-Van Til, Cora Frankhouse, Madeline Fox, Andrea Kennedy, Maya Levy, Kassandra Moak, Elaina Ryan, and Hannah Tweet; warm thanks also to Enrique García-Santo Tomás, for sharing his rich Cervantean syllabus for “Don Quixote and the Politics of Reading,” a graduate seminar I would dearly have liked to attend; I am indebted, once again, to James Amelang —keen readers of Dispatches (!) may recall that Jim’s generosity has been noted before— for firing my imagination with a visit to the final resting place of Cervantes’s bones, a convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians in Madrid. Not far from an exquisite Basque restaurant to which we retired for (of course) fish and wine; and I thank Heidi Victoria Scott for her porch space at just the right moment.

1. Quoted in Anthony Cascardi, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. “¡Voto a Dios que me espanta esta grandeza!”

2. William H. Clamurro, Beneath the Fiction: The Contrary Worlds of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 2.

3. Antonio Liñán y Verdugo, Guía y avisos de forasteros que vienen a la Corte: Historia de mucha diversión, gusto, y apacable entretenimiento done verán lo que sucedió á unos recién-venidos: se les enseña á huir de los peligros que hay en la corte, y debajo de novelas moralesy ejemplares escarmientos se les avisa y advierte de cómo acudierán á sus negocios cuerdamente (Barcelona: Daniel Corteza y Ca. [ca. 1620], 1885), 166.

4. Howard Mancing, “Spanish Fiction in the Seventeenth Century,” in A History of the Spanish Novel, ed. J. A. Garrido Ardila (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 142-72.

5. Clamurro insists on Cervantes’s marshalling of an “inherent contrariness.” Beneath the Fiction, 2, passim.

6. Miguel de Cervantes, “Novel of Rinconete and Cortadillo,” Exemplary Novels, trans. Edith Grossman (New Haven: Yale University Press [[Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1613], 2016, 127; 107-137. “A lo cual respondió Monipodio que aquéllos, en su germanía y manera de hablar, se llamaban avispones, y que servían de andar de día por toda la ciudad, avispando en qué casas se podia dar tiento de noche . . . . En resolución, dijo que era la gente de más o de tanto provecho que había en su hermandad, y que de todo aquello que por su industria se hurtaba llevaban el quinto, como su Majestad de los tesoros… .”Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “Novela de Rinconete y Cortadillo,” Novelas ejemplares, ed. Jorge García López (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, [Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1613] 2001), 200; 161-215.

7. Cervantes, “Novel of the Jealous Extremaduran,” 214; 213-242. “Y si cuando iba a Indias pobre y menesteroso, le iban combatiendo muchos pensamientos, sin dejarle sosegar un punto en mitad de las ondas del mar, no menos ahora en el sosiego de la tierra le combatían, aunque por diferente causa, que si entonces no dormía por pobre, ahora no podia sosegar de rico . . . . Cuidados acarrea el oro, y cuidados la falta dél… .” Cervantes, “Novela del celoso extremeño,” 329; 325-369.

8. Cervantes, “Novel of the Glass Lawyer,” 181; 173-196. “Por oírle reñir y responder a todos, le seguían siempre muchos, y los muchachos tomaron, y tuvieron por mejor partido, antes oílle que tíralle.” Cervantes, “Novela del Licienciado Vidriera,” 279; 265-301.

9. Cervantes, “Novel of the Glass Lawyer,” 182; 181; 183. “Las nuevas de so locura y de sus respuestas y dichos se entendió por todo Castilla…”; “consejo o consuelo”; “… gustó de su locura … y a cada paso, en cada calle y en cualquiera esquina respondía a todas las preguntas que le hacían.” Cervantes, “Novela del Licenciado Vidriera,” 281; 280; 282.

10. Cervantes, “Novel of the Glass Lawyer,” 182; 193. “Otro le preguntó que qué le parecía de las alcahuetas. Respondió que no lo eran las apartadas, sino las vecinas”; “De las damas que llaman cortesanas decía que todas, o las más, tenían más de corteses que de sanas.” “Novela del Licenciado Vidriera,” 281; 297. I recommend the significant studies of the sexual agency of just such neighbours and their contexts in Spanish American settings by J. Nicole von Germeten, Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018), and Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, and Honor in Colonial Cartagena (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

11. Cervantes, “Novel of the Glass Lawyer,” 191. “Con los que se teñían las barbas [coloradas] tenía particular enemistad.” Cervantes, “Novela del Licenciado Vidriera,” 291; see also 294.

12. Cervantes, “Novel of the Glass Lawyer,” 184. “los malos, los churrulleros,” Cervantes, “Novela del Licenciado Vidriera,” 283. 

13. Cervantes, “Novel of the Glass Lawyer,” 186. “… los marineros y carreteros y arrieros, tienen un modo de vivir extraordinario y solo para ellos . . .  Los arrieros son gente que ha hecho divorcio con las sábanas, y se ha casado con las enjalmas. Son tan diligentes y presurosos que a trueco de no perder la jornada, perderán el alma. Su música es la del mortero; su salsa, la hambre, sus maitines levantarse a dar sus piensos, y sus misas no oír ninguna.” Cervantes, “Novela del Licenciado Vidriera,” 287.

14. Cervantes, “Novel of the Glass Lawyer,” 188. “Por estas y otras cosas que decía de todos los oficios, se andaban tras él, sin hacerse mal y sin dejarle sosegar.” Cervantes, “Novela del Licenciado Vidriera,” 289.

15. “Empire Unmanned: Gender Trouble and Genoese Gold in Cervantes's ‘The Two Damsels,’” Publications of the Modern Language Association 116: 2 (2001), 285-299.

16. Cervantes, “Novel of the Two Maidens,” 294-297; 291-321; Cervantes, “Novela de los dos doncellas,” 446-450; 441-480.

17. Cervantes, “Novel of the Power of Blood,” 202, 210. “Y advierte, hija, que más lastima una onza de deshonra pública que una arroba de infamía secreta. Y pues puedes vivir honrada con Dios en público, no te pene de star deshonrada contigo en secreto. La verdadera deshonra está en el pecado, y la verdadera honra en el virtud; con el dicho, con el deseo y con la obra se ofende a Dios; y pues tú, ni en dicho, ni en pensamiento, ni en hecho le has ofendido, tente por honrada… .” Cervantes, “Novela de la fuerza de sangre,” 311;

18. I paraphrase Hannah Tweet, personal conversation, with thanks.

19. Cervantes, “Novel of the Little Gypsy Girl,” 28.

20. Cervantes, “Novel of the Little Gypsy Girl,” 12, 21; 11-68. “De todo hay en el mundo, y esto de la hambre tal vez hace arrojar los ingenios a cosas que no están en el mapa. . . .‘ ¿Quién te enseña eso, rapaz?’ —dijo uno. ‘¿Quién me la de enseñar?—respondió Preciosa— ¿No tengo yo mi alma en mi cuerpo? ¿No tengo ya quince años? Y no soy manca, ni renca, no estropeada del entendimiento. Los ingenios de la gitanas van por otro norte que los de las demás gentes . . . . No hay muchacha de doce que no sepa lo que de veinte y cinco, porque tienen por maestros y preceptores al diablo y al uso, que les enseña en una hora lo que habían de aprender en un año.’” Cervantes, “Novela de la gitanilla,” 30, 44; 27-108.

21. Cervantes, “Novel of the Little Gypsy Girl,” 47; 64. “la dura espada de los celos”; “la amarga y dura presunción de los celos; … celos son de cuerpos sutiles y se entran por otros cuerpos, sin romperlos, apartarlos ni dividirlos.” Cervantes, “Novela de la gitanilla,” 81-82; 103.

22. Cervantes, “Novel of the Little Gypsy Girl,” 47-48. “nunca los celos a lo que imagino —dijo Preciosa— dejen el entendimiento libre para juzgar las cosas como ellas son; siempre miran los celosos con antojos de allende, que hacen las cosa pequeñas, grandes; los enanos, gigantes, y las sospechas, verdades.” Cervantes, “Novela de la gitanilla,” 82.

23. Cervantes, “Novel of the Deceitful Marriage,” Exemplary Novels, 358; 355-365; “…aunque estoy diciendo verdades, no son verdades de confesión que no pueden dejar de decir.” Cervantes, “Novela del casamiento engañoso,” Novelas ejemplares, 527; 521-537.

24. Claudio Guillén, El primer Siglo de Oro. Estudio sobre géneros y modelos (Barcelona: Crítica, 1988), 197-211.

25. Cervantes, “Novel of the Colloquy of the Dogs,” Exemplary Novels, 375; 367-416. “… no hay mayor ni más sotil ladrón que el doméstico; y así mueren muchos más de los confiados que de los recaudos; pero el daño está en que es imposible que puedan pasar bien las gentes en el mundo, si no se fia y se confia. Mas quédese aquī esto, que no quiero que parezcamos predicadores.” Cervantes, “Novela y coloquio que pasó entre Cipión y Berganza,” Novelas ejemplares, 557; 539-623.